If Stalin Couldn’t Unite Russia's Muslims Administratively, No One Will Ever Will, Suleymanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 3 – Many Muslims and perhaps even more Russian officials would like to have a single administrative structure supervising all the Islamic groups in the country, but the Russian umma was not unified under either the tsars or the Soviets and won’t be at any point in the future, Rays Suleymanov says.

            The divisions within the Muslim community are too deep and the ambitions of various muftis and civil authorities too strong to allow that, according to the specialist on Islam notorious for both his criticism of Muslim leaders and close ties to the Orthodox Church and Russian state  (ruskline.ru/news_rl/2020/12/03/islam_na_postsovetskom_prostranstve_noveishaya_istoriya_i_sovremennoe_polozhenie).

            Indeed, speaking to an All-Russian conference in Kazan last week, Suleymanov said that if Stalin with all his power couldn’t form a single Muslim organization to supervise all Islamic groups, no one now should expect to be able to do so. Instead, both Muslims and Russians must accept that the Islamic community will remain divided.

            This represents a major departure for Suleymanov who at various points has pushed Talgat Tajuddin, head of the Ufa-based Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) as the natural leader of Russia’s Muslims, and may signal a shift away from earlier Kremlin preferences for some single structure and leader.

            In support of his new argument, Suleymanov presents an updated version of the history of Islamic organizations in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation, a history that he says shows that “Russia’s Muslims in an organizational sense were never united in a single muftiate.”

            Only six years after St. Petersburg established the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly in 1788 to which Tajuddin traces his Central MSD’s origins, the Russian authorities established the Tauride Mohammedan Spiritual Administration in Crimea. Almost a century later, in 1872, they set up one for the Trans-Caucasus.

            According to the specialist, the tsarist authorities were working on a plan to create a similar structure in Central Asia, but “the revolution and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks put off that project.”

            Despite the anti-religious position of the Soviet regime, the Orenburg Mohammedan Spiritual Assembly survived for a time, after being renamed in 1920 the Central MSD. The analogous structure in Crimea also was renamed and lasted until 1927. The Bashkirs created their own MSD, which lasted until 1936.

            During World War II, Stalin allowed the creation of the MSD for Central Asia in 1943, the MSD for the North Caucasus and the MSD for the Trans-Caucasus in 1944. Then in 1948, he renamed the Central MSD the MSD for the European Portion of the USSR and Siberia, Suleymanov continues.

            That arrangement continued almost to the end of Soviet times. In 1990, Kazakhstan formed its own MSD having withdrawn from the Central Asian one, and then the process of division and the formation of competing MSDs took off. Republics and regions set up their own, even when the number of parishes was small.

            But efforts to reverse this process have foundered, Suleymanov argues, because the various muftis cannot agree on who should have primacy and because officials benefit from having a local MSD they can control rather than a larger, all-Russian one, that might be used against them.

            It must simply be accepted that this “organizational split is the natural state of the Muslim umma of Russia.” It is not “something temporary” but rather is and will remain “the norm.”

            Two other speakers at the meeting, Olga Brusina and Erik Seitov of the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology presented reports Suleymanov judged important enough to discuss in this report on the Kazan meeting.

            Brusina reported about the fate of the 17,000 Turkmen Muslims in Stavropol Kray, a group historically less Islamic than others but now infected by radicalism among the young; and Seitov talked about the Shiite community in Moscow, a group that rarely has attracted much attention.

            The Shiites in the Russian capital, the scholar said, consist “primarily of Azerbaijanis, Talysh, Khazarites and a small number of converts from among ethnic Russians and Tatars.” Until 2016, they worshiped at the Inam Mosque but now are forced to move from place to place for services.