CC BY
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Akushali SHAFI JALAL
Member of the Expert Council at the Caucasian Civilization Regional Public Organization (Makhachkala, Republic of Daghestan, the Russian Federation).
Rajab SHAKHABASOV
Chairman of the Caucasian Civilization Regional Public Organization (Makhachkala, Republic of Daghestan, the Russian Federation).
ISLAM AND THE SOCIOPOLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF NORTH CAUCASIAN SOCIETY (A DAGHESTAN CASE STUDY)
Abstract
The authors analyze how the religious factor affects the ethnodifferentiating and ethnointegrating processes in Daghestan; they are convinced that the socio-
political development of the North Caucasian region (and Daghestan as its part) is largely determined by the specifics of religion and its development as a social institution.
KEYWORDS: the Northern Caucasus, development of Islam, maddhabs, the region's sociopolitical development.
Introduction
Islam as a concept occupies an important place in the minds of most Russian citizens (particularly in the Northern Caucasus) and is believed to constitute a threat to the individual and to society
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as a whole. This delusion is caused mainly by the media that describe radical extremist groups, terrorism, armed conflicts, etc. as a fundamental part of Islamic philosophy.
Many specialists assert that Daghestan is Russia's most Islamized region. Statistics show that the region is becoming Islamized at a fast pace: in recent years, the republic has acquired more mosques, prayer houses, Islamic educational establishments, etc. than elsewhere in Russia. Since the mid-1990s, hajj and umrah (minor pilgrimage) have become common annual events for thousands of Daghestanis. This, however, failed to change the people's frame of mind; Islamic science and literature, likewise, killed by years of persecution under Soviet power, have not yet been revived.
Islamic Development in Daghestan: The Main Trends
The unprecedentedly fast developments in the Northern Caucasus launched some twenty years ago have changed the political landscape beyond recognition; the result—hybrid political forms instead of expert-predicted liberal democracy—has confirmed the old truth that ambiguous, unpredictable, and even volatile historical processes rarely, if ever, produce what is expected of them.
This makes studies of the political thought of the Muslim countries (Islamism, in particularly, which directly affects the trajectory of social developments in the Northern Caucasus) doubly important.
Today Islam in Daghestan demonstrates two mutually exclusive development trends. There is radical Islam, which insists that society should live according to legalized religious norms; this makes an open conflict with the secular form of government inevitable and may even produce armed clashes. In Daghestan, this approach is supported, among other trends, by officially banned Wahhabism.
Another trend, which never clashes with reality, looks at the Islamic values as a moral (individual) attitude toward the world and society. This is typical of the supporters of Tareqat, the Caucasian variant of Sufism, who are ready, when necessary, to communicate with the authorities. Today, this is the most popular Islamic trend in Daghestan.
Supporters of other Islamic trends are less numerous and, therefore, less noticeable on the social scene than the members of the first two variants of Islam.
Despite the prolonged Caucasian War, Sufism (highly popular in the Northern Caucasus) is not a conflicting trend; its supporters seek deeper knowledge of true, that is, divine, reality. Jihad as an armed struggle against the "infidels" is neither rejected nor accepted as the only possible form of communication with other confessions.
Confrontation between the Islamic ideology and the secular form of government is inevitable: Islam, like any other religion for that matter, claims a monopoly on the truth; it is very strict about moral values and the meaning of life and is very clear about the public norms of communication among people, etc. Pluralism and tolerance as abstract concepts contradict the religious ideals rooted in the black-and-white picture of the world with all the ensuing logical implications. Religious injunctions cannot be revised to fit objective social reality: society should develop according to immutable religious principles.
All the concepts of an Islamic state agree that it should rest on the Shari'a stemming from the Koran and the Sunna; those who side with this idea look at Muslim society as it existed at the time of the Prophet Muhammad as the point of departure. As distinct from the ultra-conservative groups that want to shape contemporary society according to the 7th-century molds (this is true of the followers of Juhayman al-Otaybi from Saudi Arabia who in 1979 seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca; partly of the Taliban, etc.), Maududi, Qutb, and Nabhani believed that an "Islamic state" should not be dogmatic with respect to applying Islamic norms in contemporary reality.
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The ideologists of Islamism relied on the concept of itjtihad, which permitted new, direct interpretations of the Koran and the Sunna based on their contexts in an effort to bring together the objective need for radical changes and the archaic social ideal viewed as a model.1
Itjtihad proceeds from the scarcity and relative vagueness of the Koranic and Sunnic prescriptions related to politics. Prominent expert in Muslim law Leonid Syukiyaynen has offered the following comment: "These sources do not contain specific prescriptions to be used to regulate the organization and activities of a Muslim state or identifying its essence. They say nothing, in particular, either about the form of governance or a political regime. They even do not use the term 'state.' They operate with the terms 'imamate' (the original meaning 'guidance by prayer') and 'caliphate' ('succession') which only later were used to describe Muslim states."2
Wahhabism appeared in the mid-18th century in the territory that is now Saudi Arabia as a movement preaching a return to the earliest fundamental Islamic sources. Its founder Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (after whom the movement was named) traveled far and wide in Muslim areas to finally conclude that the faithful had abandoned the idea of a single God, the cornerstone of Islam; they started worshiping saints and introducing all sorts of novelties. His teaching, as a whole, was an extreme interpretation of the Hanbali principles and was based on the books of Hanbali imams Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyah.
Those who followed in the steps of al-Wahhab opposed all novelties and were extremely critical of the attempts to bring certain elements of rational philosophy of the cult of saints and the practice of pilgrimages to the burial site of the Prophet into Islam. Later they rejected even dhikr and seclusion, two key elements of Sufi practices.
It was missionaries who brought Wahhabism to the Northern Caucasus where it clashed with Sufism, the traditional teaching that changed a lot before it became adjusted to the North Caucasian context. At the earliest stages, Sufism was geared at the folk pre-Islamic beliefs, in which veneration of the burials of ancestors, orolatria (cult of the mountains) and other ideas held the central place. Sufism was inevitably affected by the local mentality, way of life, and mindset.
The faithful absorbed the Sufi theory and became consistent followers of its theory and practice, albeit adjusted to local specifics; this type of Islam is practiced in Chechnia, Ingushetia, and Daghestan. Any attempts to interfere in the theory and practice of Sufism by those who preach a return to original Islam are seen as encroachments on and deliberate distortion of traditional religion.
Wahhabism emerged in the mid-18th century as an attempt to rally the peoples of Saudi Arabia together. Later the aim was to drive away the British colonialists. The fact that they succeeded in the past does not mean that they will succeed elsewhere, in Daghestan in particular. The Hanbali maddhab presupposes that the folk traditions of the country in question should be replaced with the traditions of the Hanbali adats. This means that Wahhabism, which rests on Hanbali maddhab, is opposed to three (Shafiya, Malakit, and Hanafi) maddhabs.
In Daghestan, the faithful mainly follow the Shafiya maddhab, which teaches that Islam in an alien country should not only respect its traditions and adats, but should also adjust its adats to the traditions of the host country. Contrary to the widely share opinion, Imam Shamil was not fighting against the adats of the Daghestanis: he was determined to weed out the signs of degradation of Da-ghestani society. This means that Islam is not only a religion, but also a philosophy and culture.
1 See, for example: Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, Concepts of Hizb ut-Tahrir (1953), available at [http://www.hizb-ut-tahrir. org/PDF/EN/en_books_pdf/Concepts.pdf]; O. Carré, Mysticism and Politic: A Critical Reading of F zilal Al-Qur'an by Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), Transl. from the French by C. Artigues and revised by W. Shepard, Brill, Leiden-Boston, 2003, p. 185; S.A.A. Maududi, The Islamic Law and Constitution, Islamic publications (Pvt.) Ltd., Lahore, s.d., p. 76.
2 L.R. Syukiyaynen, "Kontseptsia khalifata i sovremennoe gosudarstvenno-pravovoe razvitie zarubezhnogo Vostoka," in: Islam: problemy ideologii, prava, politiki i ekonomiki, Collection of articles, Nauka Publishers, Main Editorial Office of Oriental Literature, Moscow, 1985, pp. 139-140.
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Islam in Daghestan: Development Specifics
The Muslim culture has been present in Daghestan since the 8th century; even in the mid- 1950s there were people who used Arabic in everyday life. The philosophical ideas of Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali, teacher of philosophy in the Nizamiyya madrasa founded by Nizam al-Mulk in Baghdad, dominated in Daghestan between the 11th and 18th centuries. Al-Ghazali belonged to the Shafi mad-dhab and vehemently opposed all attempts to develop Muslim philosophy. He himself had numerous philosophical works to his name, the central of them being Ihya' Ulum al-Din or Ihya 'u Ulumiddin (The Revival of Religious Sciences).
Between the 11th and 18th centuries, Al-Ghazali or, rather, his works and his religious philosophical school dominated the religious scene in Daghestan, even though there was no shortage of famous and highly respected philosophers in the Muslim East. His teaching and the Shafi maddhab are the most orthodox among all the other Islamic trends and maddhabs. Early in the 1990s, it was absolutely clear that his teaching produced the strongest impact on public life and consciousness in Daghestan: practically all the religious figures in the republic pointed to Ihya' Ulum al-Din or Ihya 'u Ulumiddin as the main source of their knowledge.
There is no shortage of thinkers and philosophical trends in the Arab world who left their imprint on the Arabic (Syrian, among others) religious and social attitudes. This explains why their variants of Islam are less extreme than that practiced in Daghestan. Today, we cannot live according to the rules Al-Ghazali formulated for different times and social contexts. Life is changing and philosophy and public consciousness are changing along with it. Later other philosophers said "Yes, we are Muslims and Islam is the main religion of Allah"; they believed that while Muslims should strictly follow the injunctions of their religion, they should not neglect the rational elements of other philosophical trends and other social ideas. They argued that they could point to an error if they detect it in other trends and ideas. As distinct from Al-Ghazali, they preferred a dialectical approach.
In this sense we can say that Al-Ghazali is partly responsible for the fact that the Daghestanis knew nothing about other authors. He did a lot to develop Islam and the Shari'a, yet he never accepted even the slightest deviation from what he wrote and promoted. This explains why, for centuries, the Daghestanis copied and studied the works he had approved of.
Today, Islam has acquired a lot of political weight; its impacts are obvious in all sorts of political and national movements. There were and still are no political organizations, movements, or parties, the members of which invariably gather together five times a day at appointed hours to perform certain rites. This is an unrivaled factor. Early in the 21st century, however, when humankind has already made immense progress, we should identify the role of religion in political life and assess what religious organizations and the clergy have done so far.
Today, there are no democratic societies in the world dominated by a single ideology and where all the people support the same ideological, theoretical, social, and political ideas.
After emerging onto the political arena, Marxism started to actively promote atheism; the seventy years of Soviet power, however, show that Islam has survived and become more vigorous. History has taught us that one dominating ideology, either religious or political, invariably ends in totalitarianism and spiritual dictatorship. The Islamic states serve as a pertinent example: all deviations from the dominant ideology, all attempts at democracy and freedom of consciousness are suppressed by their dictatorial regimes, many of them monarchies.
One can say that the Gulf countries are the richest in the world. This is true, but it is nothing more than the lacquered surface of a well-fed society with no future within the pinching limits of Islamic monarchism. Oil made them very rich; they acquired a lot of clout, and they impose energy
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prices on the rest of the world. Domination of Islam as the only ideology suppresses the people's social vigor, fortifies the position of the powers that be, and slows down social, economic, scientific, and technological progress.
Religion should not be part of politics, even though it may affect it to a certain extent. Religion, and Islam for that matter, should be limited to the spiritual sphere of human activities.
In Soviet Daghestan, there were attempts to develop and promote a culture of a new type—national in form and socialist in content. This was a positive factor, however we should never forget that the economy plays an important role in the revival and development of religious consciousness. If all the economic problems had been resolved on time; if religious policies had been free of excesses and violations, Christians, Jews, and Muslims might have lived in peace and harmony. This is confirmed by the fact that in practically all the Muslim countries they have lived and are living side-by-side. In Syria, Muslims have excellent relations with Christians, who comprise 12% of the total population. Even at the early stages, the Muslims, followers of Islam, a new religion, assured the Christians and people of other faiths that they had no intention of drawing them into a jihad because they would probably be forced to fight their co-religionists; this meant that Christians should not pay with their lives for their service in the army. This makes the fact that anti-Russian and anti-Christian sentiments are fanned in some of the Muslim regions of the post-Soviet space very strange and hard to explain— they contradict the Koran and Islam.
Today, the absolute majority of the Daghestani Muslims profess a moderate form of religion and demonstrate no hostility toward secular values. In all likelihood, this fact is bred by the discrepancy between religious self-identity and practical priorities on the strength of which people align their relationships with the world.
This is not immutable; in the absence of reliable data, it is hard to say how many people are drawn into extremist activities every year. Indirect evidence, however, shows that their number increased in the last year. Terrorism destabilizes the situation in the republic, but it cannot determine its development course. Its dynamics are hard to predict, mainly because mass consciousness is responsive to a huge number of negative and positive impacts. It seems that we should look closer at the situation in Daghestan to grasp the meaning and identify the course of the extremely contradictory processes unfolding in the republic.
Conclusion
Today, amid the religious revival in Daghestan, it is important to avoid monopolization of Islam and its interpretations; we should point to what is common in all its trends. Many of the new terms (Wahhabism, fundamentalism, etc.) remain enigmatic for most of the local religious community and merely drive its members apart. To downplay disagreements, or avoid them altogether, we should educate the faithful, explain to them the meaning of the main Islamic dogmas and rites, and stress what the various trends have in common. The Islamic spiritual leaders should recognize the simple fact that all Muslims, irrespective of their maddhabs or whether they belong to the Sufi teaching or the movement for pure Islam, should close ranks around the Koran and the Sunna of the Prophet and their profound understanding. This is the only road to revived spirituality and social stability.
