Russia’s Islamic Backbone

The Chairman of the Committee of Trustees at the Religious Board of Muslims of Russia’s European Region Farit Farisov spoke to Russia Profile about the difficult relationship between the regime and Islam in Russia.

R.P.: Many Russians often see Islam as connected with radicalism – with the urges to go to war against the “infidels,” with zealotry and bigotry, and sometimes even with acts of terror. This connection is, to a large extent, invoked by the “pictures” the Russian television has been readily showing for many years. A report about the Chechen separatists, for example, would inevitably be accompanied by images of militant fighters, apparently praying, with green ribbons on their heads, or of armed men performing the religious circle dance, dhikr. As a result, the closely tied pair “Islam-war” was imposed on the mass consciousness. Meanwhile, when interviewed, many leaders of the Chechen militant fighters express utter hostility toward the Muslim clergy and defy the schools of Islam that traditionally exist on the territory of the Russian Federation. How can you explain this?

F.F.: It is not accidental that you have noticed the conflicting, to say the least, attitude of many extremists not only toward the Islamic clergy, but also toward Islam in general. Right now, for example, the so-called “fatwas” distributed by the extremists say that you can’t serve Russia because it is a non-Muslim state. This is not true, because historically, Muslims often lived and still thrive in countries where Islam is not a dominant religion. And almost always Muslims were patriots and law-abiding citizens of these countries. This does not in any way contradict the Koran, and the authors of these “fatwas” most probably know that they are lying. Perhaps this is exactly why these same “fatwas” prescribe, that the Muslims who don’t agree with them should be killed as apostates. Why do the authors of these extremist leaflets have so much hatred toward Muslims in particular? Because we can expose their lies (or their ignorance, which almost always goes hand in hand with lies). The aggressive “Islam” they describe never existed in Russia. Perhaps, it was characteristic for some part of the adepts of Salafi Mazhab (an interpretation of Islam), but this mazhab was never popular in Russia.

As for the war in Chechnya – for me, this war can be clearly broken into two periods. There is the first period – from the invasion of the federal forces into Chechnya in December 1994 to the year 1998. That was a tragic period, initiated by the extremely unreasonable and poorly thought-out decision to move the federal armed forces into Chechnya. I simply could not support that decision – along with the majority of people whose hearts ached for Russia during those years. At that time I was already working in the Committee of Trustees; we sent medicine and humanitarian aid to Chechnya. Many people in Russia shared my views then – both Muslims and non-Muslims. For example, the President of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiyev, was able to ensure that servicemen drafted into the Army from Tatarstan would not be deployed to Chechnya.

The second period of the Chechen war, which started in the late 1990s, is a completely different story. It is often called “the second Chechen war,” thus implying the second bringing of Russian troops into Chechnya in the fall of 1999. In reality, the first to rise and fight against the extremists in Chechnya who used Islam as their cover were Akhmat Kadyrov (a mufti of Chechnya who later became the republic’s president) and his followers. And the federal troops simply came to their aid. Thus, as it turns out, it was Muslims who freed Chechnya. And I know this for a fact because I had to work alongside Akhmat and Ramzan Kadyrov when there was still fire and battlefield action in Chechnya. Seventy percent of the people who were next to Akhmat Kadyrov in combat are either dead or crippled today.

R.P.: It is a known fact that after the invasion of the federal troops in 1994, Akhmat Kadyrov supported resistance to the forces sent by Moscow. He is partly to be credited for the armistice signed in 1996 on the terms dictated by the Chechen side. How did so much animosity ever arise between him and the regime – the regime he participated in establishing and put so much effort into fighting for – that they went to war against each other?

F.F.: Contrary to the popular belief in the West, the split did not happen along the “Chechen patriots vs. pro-Russian collaborationists” line. The split happened along the “traditional Muslims vs. extremists” line. I was present during a difficult conversation between the leaders of Chechnya that took place in 1998 and became one of the starting points for this conflict. On one side of the conversation were Ruslan Yamadayev, Akhmat Kadyrov and Ruslan Gelayev. On the other – radical militants Barayev, Khottab and the other “uncompromising fighters.” I’m not a Chechen, I’m a Tatar, and so I was an onlooker rather than a participant in this situation. At that time, Kadyrov protested against imposing completely foreign customs on Chechnya. By the way, Kadyrov never called the people who tried to forbid men from shaving and to force women to cover their faces “Muslims.” He called them “Shaitans.” I can testify that the confrontation between the traditional Muslims and the so-called Salafis (they were also called Wahhabis in the Caucasus) was very harsh on the eve of the second time the Russian troops were brought in. In 1998 the Salafis made an attempt to pronounce the second largest city in Chechnya – the city of Gudermes – a zone of Sharia rule. And Kadyrov’s companions-in-arms were particularly influential in Gudermes. Kadyrov then said to Khottab, the Arabic field commander and Basayev’s closest associate: “We know exactly how we want to live. If you want to establish your own rule and order, conquer some other land and do whatever you want there. And here – we’re in charge here.”

It is not surprising that in this situation, during that period, Kadyrov became one of the main targets of the extremists. Attempts were made even on the life of his teenage son – the current president of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov; he was contused twice. I’m talking about two known attempts, and nobody knows how many more attempts had been made. Made against a young man that most people have never even heard of. While no less than 13 attempts to take Akhmat Kadyrov’s life were made in the period of 1997 to 1999. And this is during a formally “peaceful” time when there seemed to be no military occupancy or revolutions in Chechnya.

R.P.: I had to travel throughout the Northern Caucasus during that period of time in the company of a renowned Caucasus expert, Yoav Karny, the author of Highlanders, a book that later caused quite a sensation in the United States. Yoav once said that the sponsors of the Chechen “Salafis” saw Chechnya only as a bridgehead for the war against the Western civilization, which they consider Russia to be a part of.

F.F.: To a considerable extent, this is exactly why the Salafis had better financial support than Kadyrov’s men. They had much richer sponsors abroad. These sponsors gave money not for Chechnya, not for its restoration, but for the continuation of war. The formal ruler of Chechnya at that time, Aslan Maskhadov, who was later killed during a confrontation with the federal troops, once said: “While the war lasted – we received money. Once the war was over – no more money.” By the way, certain income for the Salafis was also generated by slave trade and other types of dirty business that real Muslims do not participate in. Unfortunately, all of these methods of raising money prospered during the brief period of Maskhadov’s rule.

Maskhadov himself, by the way, never stroke me as a villain. But the issue was that he was less determined and resolute than Kadyrov in the war against the “shaitans.” By the late 1990s, Kadyrov had developed a clear formula: “either they get us, or we get them.” Maskhadov was afraid of the Afghanistan scenario, when Chechens would go to war against other Chechens. But Hajji Akhmat was not afraid of anything. One time he and I were caught under fire together. When I asked him why he had not bended down to avoid bullets, he replied: “this won’t help.”

R.P.: Let us go back to the topic of Islam in Russia in general. No matter how much the current regime tries to present the situation of inter-confessional relations in Russia in a conflict-free light, the fact still remains: as contemporary historian Vitaly Sheremet sadly states, “The multi-million-large television audiences in Russia are already accustomed to the thought of an organic connection between the Muslim spiritual tradition and the ideology of modern terrorism.” At the same time, the same historian notes that “personal experience very rarely supplies stereotypes.” In everyday life, Russians most often see hard-working Muslims, fathers of large families, reliable friends. But then they turn on their TVs, and hear terrorists being called “Shaheeds” or Mujahideen, that is, described by the same words used to denote religious martyrs in Islam. Our mass media could not even come up with a better term than “a Shaheed’s belt” to describe the device used by terrorists to carry explosives on their bodies. Where does this suspicion and mistrust toward Islam come from? Can it be explained by aggression or by simple ignorance?

F.F.: You are correct in determining the root of such attitudes – it is ignorance. An average Russian receives more information about the beliefs and spiritual interests that guide the lives of people in the far-away United States and France than about what his neighbor, a Tatar, really believes in. And this is very bad. Not only because there are as many Tatars living in Moscow and in the Moscow region as there are in Tatarstan – our “title” autonomous republic (and that means millions of people). I will tell you without exaggeration: Islam is a religion that is as much a “backbone” in Russia as Orthodoxy is. Without Islam there would be no Russia, because there is not one significant area of life in our country that Muslims don’t participate in.

Not many people remember, for example, that Islam appeared on the territory of modern Russia a hundred years before the Kiev prince, Vladimir the Saint, made the decision for his subjects to adopt the Orthodox religion. Islam is very deeply rooted in Russian land and soil.

It would only be just to add that ignorance, a lack of information about the foundations of their own religious beliefs, is something that can be attributed to the Russian Muslims as well. In order to educate them, we need officially functioning mosques, Islamic scientific research centers, opportunities to appear in the mass media. What would this lead to? The spiritual life of Muslims of the Moscow region will not stop. People will meet in apartments, on the streets, in unequipped rooms and buildings. They will hear chance preachers, and they might turn out to be extremists. This is your nutrient medium for radicals.

R.P.: New mosques are not being built in Moscow suburbs, but the old ones continue to operate. Those same governors, without a moment’s doubt, take on the task of teaching the West about our experience of “a millennium of peaceful coexistence between Christianity and Islam,” which is supposedly a unique know-how of Russia. Does it mean that Islamophobia is a relatively recent phenomenon? Where did it arise from, then, if our past is so cloudless?

F.F.: There were no Crusades in Russia, thank God, but it does not follow that the situation was completely cloudless. Nevertheless, all attempts by the tsar’s government to convert Muslims to the Russian Orthodox faith failed. As you know, the bloodiest of such attempts was made in 1552 after Ivan the Terrible’s takeover of Kazan – now the capital of the republic of Tatarstan, and in the sixteenth century the center of the State of the Golden Horde, repeatedly defamed by Soviet and Western historians. Less bloody than that of Ivan, attempts to christen the Muslims of the Volga, the Northern Caucasus and in Crimea have been undertaken by almost all the Russian tsars. Those who refused to be christened were pressured economically, and Muslims in state service were limited in climbing career ladders. Such attempts only brought suffering to both the “missionaries” and the Muslims. The imperial power’s struggle with Islam became one of the factors in its demise, contributing to the revolution of 1917. The king’s officials were misusing both their time and efforts.

Only at the beginning of the 20th century did the imperial administration realize that the real danger for Russia lay in the revolutionary atheistic “armed groups” and other extremist organizations, rather than in Muslim communities. Then the pressure eased on the Muslims, but it was too late. This lesson rings very true even today. I can’t avoid mentioning a statement made by Kamyshansky, the governor of Vyatka Region, which I quote in my multi-volume composition “Secrets of the Tatar people.” Speaking at the Special Meeting of January 14, 1910, Kamyshansky noted that the task of the government is to maintain the purity of Islam, since the blurring of this faith in the minds of the people can only contribute to the growth of the revolutionary movement. In my opinion, this is true today. The state is being weakened by extremists, and not by the Muslim communities.

R.P.: How do you explain the fact that in the Muslim regions of Russia, the people largely elect the same leaders for many years, and some Muslims even vote for the Communist Party, revealing nostalgia for the godless Soviet times?

F.F.: With regard to the repeated election of Mintimer Shaimiyev, the president of Tatarstan, this can be explained by the undoubted talent of this politician. In 1992-1994 it seemed that Tatarstan was heading for a clash with Moscow that was to be no less serious than that of Chechnya. However, Shaimiyev managed to both negotiate with federal authorities and to adopt the Constitution of the Republic of Tatarstan. Incidentally, this constitution in many ways became a model for the new constitution in Chechnya under Akhmat Kadyrov.

By the way, the radicals among the Tatar nationalists pushed Shaimiyev toward confrontation with Moscow. Objecting to them, I said: “I heard the same speeches in Chechnya, and then when it became dangerous, the authors of these speeches fled to the West, and abandoned the people.” Shaimiyev, incidentally, beat these people very skillfully. He gave them positions in his administration. And very soon it became clear that the main supporters of an independent Tatarstan did not make good administrators. Leadership is an art form that you cannot learn from books.

As for nostalgia for the Soviet Union, I will say this: in the religious sphere there is nothing to be nostalgic about with regard to the Soviet times, especially if you consider the Stalinist period of Soviet history. At that time, the intellectual elite of Russian Islam was destroyed. The Bolshevik leader Sergey Kirov once said that if the Muslim autonomy was used by the counterrevolutionaries, then this is a “Sharia we do not need.” The Bolsheviks tried to use Islam for their own purposes, and when it was not suited for such aims, it was suppressed and broken with even more force than any other religious movement. We remember this.

Posted February 09, 2009, Russian Profile