Since 1991, Islam has Returned to Russian Cities as a Powerful Russian-Speaking Faith, Bustanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 14 – One of the most dramatic developments the religious life of post-Soviet Russia has been the return of Islam to Russian cities and the rise of a powerful Russian-speaking faith there, developments that have led to “the triumph of urban Islam” over its rural counterparts, Alfrid Bustanov says. 

            The Tatar historian, who currently teaches at the University of Amsterdam, says that Soviet policy sought to ghettoize Islam in rural areas and among those who used non-Russian languages and Tatar in particular so as to set it on a course to lose out to modernizing forces (business-gazeta.ru/article/477944).

But over the last 30 years, Islam has returned to the cities where it had serious beachheads until the 1920s and become predominantly a Russian-speaking religion, undercutting efforts to isolate it and opening the way for its spread to groups in the population who might earlier have looked on Islam as something fading into the past.

Before 1917, “many Russian cities had Muslim neighborhoods, but until recently, there did not exist such a developed infrastructure and significant presence of Islam in the cities” or one that was Russian-speaking and thus part of the broader community for that reason if no other.

The impact of urbanization of Islam was intensified by the collapse of the single muftiate for the Russian Federation. (Bustanov does not address in this article the continuing role of the Shiite muftiate in Baku in the North Caucasus.) As cities became more important, muftiates based in them began to undercut the authority of those based in rural areas.

This shift, Bustanov says, was somewhat obscured by the dynamic growth of Muslim communities in rural areas as well. But because business and the more influential medrassahs were in cities, urban, Russian-speaking Islam became predominant in most if not all of the Russian Federation.

This “contemporary urban context has left its mark on the daily practice of Muslims, and the anonymity of the megalopolises has given a chance for the acquisition of new statues and independent personal searches.” Among the consequences of this have been increased tensions between religion and nationality.

And these trends, the result of urbanization in the 1990s, overshadow the divisions between “traditional” and radical Islam that often shape discussions of Islam in the Russian Federation. The most striking aspect of this, Bustanov says, is that “Russian drove out national religious traditions” and opened the way for “a new Russian-language Islamic culture.”

Russian translations of the Koran and hadith are being republished and new translations are appearing.  And that means that Russia’s Islamic parishes and broader communities are increasingly multi-ethnic and thus religious more than religio-national, as was the case in Soviet times.

Some assumed that all these changes would lead to the demise of the muftiate system and its possible replacement by an entirely different form of organization. But despite all the other changes, that hasn’t happened because the muftiates remain the only “legitimate form for the public articulation of an agenda for Muslims.”

The plethora of muftiates in Russia today, he says, obscures their relative position. Those in a few rural areas like Daghestan are truly powerful, but those in many smaller cities and regions are not. Instead, larger ones based in the major cities are the future – and that too is part of the rise of a new urban, Russian-speaking Islam.