Shortage of Mosques in Moscow Leading to Ethnic Clashes among Muslims, Mufti Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 21 – Since the end of Soviet times, the increasingly large Muslim community in the Russian capital has sought to increase the number of mosques but without success. They have long argued that the failure to open more than the four “working” mosques there leads to the formation of underground prayer rooms and radicalization.

            Russian commentators have used that argument against the Muslims, arguing that this shows that if the Russian authorities allowed more mosques to be built, then there would be even more radicalization because more Muslims would get religious instruction and that by itself would promote the dissemination of incendiary ideas.

            But now Muslim leaders in the Russian capital are advancing an additional argument, one that the authorities are likely to find more persuasive. Rushan Abbyasov, the deputy head of the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR), says the underground mosques often follow ethnic lines and thus lead to conflicts between various groups of Muslim nationalities.

            The official mosques, he says, attract followers of Islam from all nations and thus promote inter-ethnic concord, but the underground mosques don’t. They are divided among Tajiks, Uzbeks, Tatars, and others and thus produce ethnic radicalism as well as the religious kind (moslenta.ru/city/moskve-nuzhny-mecheti-ignorirovat-eto-ne-poluchitsya-zampred-soveta-muftiev-rossii-o-problemakh-musulman-v-stolice.htm).

            Because Moscow has recently suffered an upsurge of clashes among representatives of Muslim nationalities (sovsekretno.ru/news/v-gosdume-predlozhili-povysit-shtrafy-za-draki-/, nazaccent.ru/content/36555-v-federacii-migrantov-obyasnili-uchastivshiesya-draki.html and nazaccent.ru/content/36531-oni-byli-vsegda-v-kremle-ne.html), Abbyasov’s argument may find greater support among officials.