Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 11 – The post-Soviet
states are currently supplying 7,000 of the 30,000 foreigners who have gone to
Syria to fight for ISIS, according to Yevgeny Sysoyev, the deputy director of
the FSB; with a large share of these coming from Muslim regions in the Russian
Federation itself (ng.ru/politics/2015-11-11/100_fsbter.html).
On the one hand,
he told a Sochi security meeting yesterday, that is one reason that terrorist
activity inside Russia has declined over the last several years. But on the
other, these numbers show that ISIS is now successfully targeting Muslims in
the post-Soviet space for recruitment and thus creating a serious threat for
the future.
Sysoyev did not address the reasons
why ISIS has been so successful, but there are at least three that many
commentators have pointed to in the past: First, Soviet anti-religious efforts
left many in Russia and the post-Soviet states knowing that they were Muslims
but not what that meant, opening the way for outsiders to provide content.
Second, the collapse of the iron
curtain to the south of the former Soviet space has meant that radical Muslim
missionaries have come to the post-Soviet space and Muslims from these
countries have travelled abroad for training and in some cases radicalization
in medrassahs andI Islamic universities.
And third, both repressive actions
by governments – including Moscow’s “anti-terrorist” campaigns in Chechnya –
and authoritarian but corrupt and weak officials in them have behaved in ways
that have convinced many Muslims in these countries that the radicals are right
when they denounce the regimes there.
Yesterday, however, one of Russia’s
leading specialists on Islam, Aleksey Grishin, the president of the Religion
and Society Analytic and Information Center, pointed to other failures by
Russian officials that in his words are “in fact helping the Islamists” to
recruit Muslims (mk.ru/politics/2015/11/10/kak-goschinovniki-vrf-fakticheski-potvorstvuyut-islamistam.html).
In an interview published in “Moskovsky
komsomolets,” Grishin said that unfortunately, many of the Russian officials in
Moscow and in the regions responsible for relations with Islam know so little
about the religion that extremists are able to twist them around their fingers
and in fact get the Russian state to finance and otherwise support what are
extremist activities.
Islamist radicals understand this
perfectly, and they routinely come to these officials and propose cooperation.
The officials out of ignorance or in some cases out of corrupt considerations
agree, the expert says, and as a result, the extremists are integrated into and
supported by the state.
As a result, “Islamist organizations
of the most doubtful kind conduct on [Russian] territory at [state] expense
forums, print extremist literature and conduct under subversive activity
against the foundations of the state,” Gishin says.
The Islamists are further assisted
in their work by two other features of the Islamic community in Russia – the great
age of the majority of rural mullahs and imams and the multiplicity of and
competition among the Muslim spiritual directorates (MSDs).
“Almost three quarters of rural
imams in Muslim regions of Russia are elderly, older than 70 or 75. The
extremists use this. They appear in the villages, gain the trust of the elderly
imams, offer to help them, read prayers, and provide regular assistance” to the
indigenous Muslim community.
That allows them to disseminate
their extremist materials via the mosques. And “when the imam dies, who
replaces him? Of course, these people. The local authorities don’t try to stop
it, after all, this individual has been helping for a long time and is well
known … As a result, a direct path for extremist ideas is opened to the hearts
of Russians.”
The multiplicity of MSDs is another
avenue that the extremists can and do exploit, Grishin says. There are 81 MSDs in Russia, even though in
the majority of Arab countries, there is only one mufti per country. The excessive number in Russia “means that
there is no unity” of views on any question, and that allows the extremists to
claim the right to push their positions.
In some cases, the extremists have
taken over particular MSDs, something allowing them to print various books and
pamphlets, “various translations of the Koran, including Wahhabi versions,” and
then use them to convince ordinary Muslims that what they are promoting is pure
Islam.
Although religion is separate from
the state in Russia, the authorities “nevertheless want to keep their hand on
the pulse” of the faithful, not to control the faith but to prevent the
penetration “into the religious milieu of unhealthy ideas and attitudes from the
outside,” Grishin said.
To that end, in 2006, the Kremlin
established a Foundation for the Support of Islamic Culture, Science and
Education. But that group, Grishin says, especially under its current head, Mikhail
Belousov, has done more harm than good. Indeed, “his activity has acquired extremely
dangerous forms,” the expert continued.
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Grishin gives as an
example of this harm the adoption by the Foundation earlier this year of “a
completely insane document, ‘The Social Doctrine of Russian Muslims.’” Instead of reiterating and reaffirming
traditional Islamic values, it promotes radical notions foreign to Russian
Islam. That should not have surprised anyone given who wrote this document: Vyacheslav Ali Polosin, a former Russian Orthodox priest who converted to Islam and has adopted the radical views often found among recent converts. He inserted ideas from works that have been prohibited in Russia – and thus got an official imprimatur for them by the back stairs. In some cases, the doctrine pushed ideas so radical that ISIS looks moderate by comparison, and that may have been Polosin’s intent. After all, if a young Russian Muslim reads this document and then compares its provisions with those of ISIS, he might well choose the latter. The Foundation has subverted the interests of the Russian state in other ways. It has promoted the introduction of radical Islamist texts into Russian prison libraries after supposedly vetting them. The jailors don’t know enough about Islam to say no and as a result, radicalism spreads. And the blessing of the Foundation of certain Islamic educational institutions in Russia has meant that government money has flowed to them even though they have no students or researchers. One can only imagine, Grishin says, where such funds actually end up. |
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