Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 17 – Zaur Smedlyayev,
a Crimean Tatar activist, and Said Ismagilov, the mufti of the Umma Muslim
Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Ukraine, say that Moscow is likely to step up
its persecution of Muslim Crimean Tatars not just because they are Crimean
Tatars but because they are Muslims.
This reflects, the two of them tell
Kseniya Kirillova, a US-based Russian journalist, Moscow’s fear that Islamic
organizations it does not control can be a powerful anti-colonial force that
could be directed against the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea (ru.krymr.com/a/28738195.html).
Pointing to the recent rise in
special operations against Muslims in Crimea, Smedlyayev argues that three
groups of people there are now at greatest risk: observant Muslims especially
among the young, Crimean Tatar political leaders, and ordinary residents that
the FSB hopes to compel to be witnesses in cases against members of the first
and second.
Given Russian Islamophobia, he
continues, FSB officers realize that attacking Muslims as such will be popular
and be a royal road to further promotions.
And they also recognize, he adds, that arresting or harassing family
members may be a good way to gain control over other Muslims in the region.
Mufti Ismagilov agrees, but he
stresses that these attacks are not simply a means for FSB officers to gain
promotion. They reflect an attempt to
suppress all “Islamic organizations uncontrolled” by Moscow. Russian fears of such groups are reflected in
the enormous list of banned books and the deportation of foreign mullahs from
Russia itself.
These fears are a product of an
appreciation by the Russian leadership that Islam can be “a very powerful
consolidating religion which has experience of bringing people together and
giving them definite ideas. [It] played a great role in the era of the liberation
from colonialism,” and Russia is concerned that it could be again directed
against it.
These longstanding fears were
reinforced by the Arab Spring “when Muslim movements inspired the masses to the
overthrow of longtime dictators,” the Ukrainian mufti says.
On the one hand, he continues, “the
Kremlin is afraid to the point of panic of the potential within Islam; and on
the other, it would like to put this force in the service of the dissemination
of Russian ideology, on the very same principle that has helped this to occur with
the Russian Orthodox Church.”
The Russian rulers, the mufti
suggests, “would like to reduce Islam to the level of everyday religiosity and subordinate
the entire religious hierarchy, structure, and preaching to the goals of the
state.” There is little chance they will
succeed with Muslims in occupied Crimea; but they are unfortunately likely to
try.
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