View that Sufism Represents a Stabilizing Factor Across Former Soviet Space Wins Support in Moscow

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 4 – Sufism, the mystical trend in Islam, can be an ally of Muslim mullahs and imams and even the Russian state, by attracting young Russians to it and thus protecting them from the baleful influence of radical “pseudo-religious extremism,” Ildar Safargaleyev has long argued.

            The head of the Islamic research department of the Moscow Institute for CIS Countries says that some Muslim leaders in the North Caucasus and many elsewhere as for example in the Middle Volga do not accept this idea because they see Sufism as undermining the legal principles of the faith (materik.ru/analitika/sufizm-v-rossii-kak-deystvennaya-alte/).

            But in fact, for centuries, Muslims have accepted Sufism as a trend that creates spiritual leaders capable of winning over the young and even have insisted that those trained in regular Islamic medrassahs or universities study with a Sufi sheikh after completing their formal Islamic educations.

            In Russia, however, because of the propensity of the authorities to model other faiths on the basis of Orthodox Christianity, both Soviet and later Russian Federation authorities bought into the idea that a regular formal Islamic education was enough and that Sufism was something threatening rather than supportive of the faith.

            In 2016, things began to change when an international Islamic conference in Grozny, Chechnya, adopted a resolution stressing that Sufism was an integral part of Sunni Islam and that those who studied to be imams, mullahs and alims should acquire direct knowledge about Sufism.

            Now, Safargaleyev’s position has received another endorsement from a group of people one might least expect it from, Russian government officials and analysts who had continued the Soviet tradition of viewing Sufism as an underground movement that threatened the tsars in the North Caucasus in the 19^th century and the USSR in the 20^th.

            A week ago, the Islamic specialist at the Institute for CIS Countries in Moscow jointly with the Rasulev Club organized a roundtable on “Sufism in the Eurasian Space as a Factor of Stabilization and Harmony” (i-sng.ru/novosti/rol-sufizma-v-garmonii-i-stabilnost/ and materik.ru/analitika/sufizm-na-evraziyskom-prostranstve-k/).

            At the meeting, which took place in the wake of the violence in Kazakhstan, Safargaliyev expanded on his earlier arguments in favor of the promotion of Sufism as a supplement to official Islam and one that can keep societies calm by immunizing young people against Islamist radicalism to apparent acclaim by Russian officials.

            He argued that the two republics in the Russian Federation where Sufism is the most widespread, Daghestan and Chechnya, are also the places where stability and social harmony is the greatest. Had Kazakhstan and other Muslim areas adopted their welcoming attitude to Sufism, they would not have suffered as they have.

            How far Moscow is prepared to go in the direction of promoting a trend in Islam that has long been anathema in the Russian capital, of course, ,remains to be seen; but the fact of this meeting suggests that there is a groundswell of support for doing just that, something completely unimaginable until recently.