Paul Goble
Staunton, Oct. 24 – It is uncertain how many Muslims have been impressed into military service as a result of the recent spate of police raids on mosques undertaken in the name of that goal, but one thing is clear: the number of Muslims attending services has dropped and their trust in the authorities reduced, the Muslim Spiritual Directorate of Moscow says.
The Moscow MSD says that it is also concerned that these raids are reducing the differences Russians in general have between Russian citizens who are Muslims and Muslim immigrants and thus promoting the notion that all Muslims are second-class citizens in Putin’s Russia (t.me/rtvimain/86400 and newizv.ru/news/2023-10-24/luchshe-molitsya-na-rabote-migranty-izbegayut-mechetey-iz-za-oblav-voenkomatov-422173).
If what the MSD is saying is true, the police raids on mosques are already backfiring, leading Muslims not to attend mosques and prayer rooms registered with the authorities and thus monitored closely but to go to underground mosques where the messages are far more radical and anti-Kremlin than in the official ones.
And this in turn will radicalize many Muslims in the Russian Federation who weren’t radicalized before, a development that the Kremlin cannot possibly want but that it has no one to blame but itself.
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