Paul Goble
Staunton,
Oct. 21 – Since the end of Soviet times, the increasingly large Muslim
community in the Russian capital has sought to increase the number of mosques
but without success. They have long argued that the failure to open more than
the four “working” mosques there leads to the formation of underground prayer
rooms and radicalization.
Russian
commentators have used that argument against the Muslims, arguing that this
shows that if the Russian authorities allowed more mosques to be built, then
there would be even more radicalization because more Muslims would get
religious instruction and that by itself would promote the dissemination of
incendiary ideas.
But
now Muslim leaders in the Russian capital are advancing an additional argument,
one that the authorities are likely to find more persuasive. Rushan Abbyasov,
the deputy head of the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR), says the underground
mosques often follow ethnic lines and thus lead to conflicts between various
groups of Muslim nationalities.
The
official mosques, he says, attract followers of Islam from all nations and thus
promote inter-ethnic concord, but the underground mosques don’t. They are
divided among Tajiks, Uzbeks, Tatars, and others and thus produce ethnic
radicalism as well as the religious kind (moslenta.ru/city/moskve-nuzhny-mecheti-ignorirovat-eto-ne-poluchitsya-zampred-soveta-muftiev-rossii-o-problemakh-musulman-v-stolice.htm).
Because
Moscow has recently suffered an upsurge of clashes among representatives of
Muslim nationalities (sovsekretno.ru/news/v-gosdume-predlozhili-povysit-shtrafy-za-draki-/, nazaccent.ru/content/36555-v-federacii-migrantov-obyasnili-uchastivshiesya-draki.html and nazaccent.ru/content/36531-oni-byli-vsegda-v-kremle-ne.html),
Abbyasov’s argument may find greater support among officials.
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