CC BY
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2. "Sebat" warns about alarming tendencies in solution of the land problems. -http://sebat.org.ua/?p=955.
3. The Crimea: popular solution of the land problem. - ttp:// sebat.org.ua/?p=912
"Islam v multikulturnom mire: Musulmanskiye dvizheniya i mekhanizmy vosproizvodstva ideologii Islama v sovremennom informatsionnom prostranstve," Kazan, 2014, pp. 121-127
N. Rakityansky, M. Zinchenko,
Political analysts
POLITICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DYNAMICS OF RE-ISLAMIZATION OF THE NORTH CAUCASUS
The North Caucasus is a strategically important region of Russia, and the national security and territorial integrity of our country largely depend on its stability and development. Due to its special geopolitical situation at the crossroads of Eurasian civilizations it has always experienced a strong influence of different cultures, religions and political systems. The Roman Empire, Persia and Iran, Arabia, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Mongolian Empire, Russia - this is a far from complete list of states which had had this politically unstable region as part of their territory. Nevertheless, the most prolonged heritage in the region was the result of the military and mental expansion of the Muslim Arab caliphate against the Khazar kaganat. It was at that time, in the 7th century A.D., that the first seeds of Islam were brought there, which were sown and actively cultivated by missionaries of the Golden Horde and emissaries of the Ottoman Porte.
The present activity of Islam in the North Caucasus is determined not only by its cultural-historical, mental and political specificities, but also by reasons of an international origin connected with the growing importance of Muslim religion.1 Due to all these reasons the North
Caucasus has become one of the most problematic and vulnerable regions. It is an object of prolonged expansionist strivings of various western and eastern states, including Muslim ones.
Various Islamic centers, numerous foundations and special services of Turkey, Jordan, Pakistan, the Wahhabi oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf, etc. demonstrate great activity in the North Caucasus, sponsoring and supporting politicized movements of a radical and extremist character. One of the specific features of our time is the emergence of Muslim states with unstable political regimes along and close to our southern borders.
Another generation of external and internal (North Caucasian) migrants has been growing inside Russia, which have not been integrated in its socio-cultural medium. In some five to ten years they will enter in the political area of Russia and put forward their demands for "human rights" to the Russian authorities. These migrants have become noticeably more active among Islamic fundamentalists.
The Islamic factor has been an instrument of subversive activity against Russia for quite some time. In this connection a study of the political aspects of Islamic mentality in the context of North Caucasian problems is an important task of our politically-minded community, all the more so since the struggle of active radical Islamists and ethnic separatists against state power has been going on for more than twenty-five years.
The difficulties and timeliness of the problem are conditioned by the absence of a clear-cut state strategy of the struggle with political Islam, or Islamism, ethno-political separatism and terrorism in the North Caucasus. The range of the problems, which cannot be resolved by minor solutions and forcible methods, includes inefficiency of political and social institutions, ethnocracy, a low level of political
culture, religious extremism, intolerance, poverty, overpopulation, mass unemployment, corruption, and glaring social inequality.2
It should be taken into account that the indices of the economic development of the North Caucasian region are the lowest in Russia. The basis of existence in the region is formed by a black-market economy combined with sizable financial donations from the Federal center. The ethnic clans controlling the local authorities present a great problem. They are blamed for embezzlement of the funds earmarked by Moscow and suppression of any opposition or discontent on the part of the local population. All this forces people to search for justice, which often leads them to looking for other means of self-identification or turning to the mythologized historical past. In these conditions many North Caucasian communities attempt to find self-identification in ethnicity, clanness, and archaic forms of identity. Quite frequently, this leads to cultural setbacks, and emergence of aggressive ideological sentiments of nationalistic and religious nature in the conditions of Russia's loss of its role as a moral arbiter.
Specific Features of Mental Dynamics in the North Caucasus
The traditional form of Muslim faith has certain differences on this territory compared to canonic Islamic dogmatic theology. Among them is the close intertwining with autochthonous traditions, customs and habits of different ethnic groups which belong to the Sunna majority and Shi'ite minority. The most widespread legal-religious school in Sunna Islam is the Hanafite Madh'hab. There are also various Sufi tariqahs.
For a long time the mentalization processes combined Islam with family and ethnic specificities of local communities, and pre-Islamic faiths of these peoples with elements of other faiths in the multicultural
medium of the North Caucasus. Each local ethnos believes in its own version of Islam, which largely determines its mentality. The sum total of ethnic mentalities has formed original polymentality3
North Caucasian polymentality, which has formed over several centuries, has objectively prevented integration and cohesion of the peoples inhabiting this region. It blocked the emergence and development of an aggregate North Caucasian subjectness. Instead of it ephemeralpolysubjectness devoid of fundamental subject foundations -integral self-consciousness, political self-determination and strategic project conceptions has emerged.4
If we turn to the universal foundation of polymentality of the North Caucasian peoples, we see that the priority place there is taken by the ethnic component. Islam in its local diversity comes out as the mobilizing force of the self-preservation of ethnic groups in the conditions of outside civilizational pressure on original North Caucasian communities. Due to the unique combination of ancient community-family relations, customs and habits of everyday life, religious traditions, and identification of morality, law and religious dogmas, Islam has become an adaptational-protective system in the region. It contributed to survival in the years of the Caucasian war in the 19th century, in the conditions of life in the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union.
Islam has been a source of special identity myths, values, norms, original thinking and faith, a system of original social and political ideas, psychological standards, and stable stereotypes. All this forms the elements of Islamic mentality which help to study it and carry on comparative mental analyses. Islamic identity as the major component of the mentality of North Caucasian ethnic groups has always been based on community-family relations, then the ethnic foundation, and only after that - religious foundation. The family basis was invariably
the major link in the hierarchy of the self-identification factors. Islam plays the role of not so much the foundation of the mentality of the North Caucasian peoples, as its form, thus fulfilling the "ethno-protective function."
This is largely due to the fact that Islam has established itself in the North Caucasus comparatively recently - in the 17th - 18th century, although it began to penetrate the region much earlier. In view of this the mountain peoples of the region have not formed a well-established and prolonged experience of life in an Islamic theocratic state. Apart from that, the North Caucasian people lived in the conditions of a considerable influence of the Russian and then Soviet mental expansion.
They had witnessed the processes of growing secularization in all spheres of Russian public life. The most active of them had joined in social life, education and culture, and imbibed, to a certain extent, the national type of Russian subjectness. They became office employees, teachers, engineers, writers and journalists, scientists, army officers, and public and political figures. Representatives of the religious elite have gradually joined local state power bodies.
One of the most important consequences of almost 250-year-long history of the North Caucasus as part of Russia had been its multilingual territory having become dominated by bilingualism, that is, Russian became the language of interethnic contacts. In the use and impact it has surpassed all languages, which has largely predetermined the fact that the North Caucasus has mentally become a unique part of Russia.
It should be borne in mind that the introduction process of the North Caucasian ummah in the public, political and legal media of the Russian Empire essentially differed from that of the Islamic community in other part of the country having entered these media. For
example, relations with the Tatar and Bashkir Muslims were about the same as those between the Russian Orthodox Church and the state. Taking into consideration the fact that there is no concept and institution of the church as such in Islam, a special organization was created for the Muslim community of Russia, similar to that of the Russian Orthodox church organization.. Empress Catherine the Great decreed in 1788 to set up the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Russia - an administrative body which appointed mullahs and followed observance of Russian laws. This was the first representative official body of the kind, giving the Russian Muslims the possibility of political existence. S. Rybakov, a Russian scholar of Islam in the early 20th century, noted that the Russian law created the Muslim clergy as a social category of mullahs with instructions, rights and duties, which were alien to the Muslim world and were not envisaged by Muslim law - the Sharia.6
The main duty of the Spiritual Board was to maintain the moral level of the Islamic clergy and observance of guarantees of its loyalty to the Sovereign. The uncertainty of the authorities in its loyalty was the main reason why such boards were not organized in the North Caucasus for a long time. The Islamic tint of the Caucasian war of 1817-1864 and the considerable prestige of the clergy gained during the fight against Russia caused mistrust in the Muslim elite on the part of the tsarist administration. Along with it, local communities had negative ideas and stereotypes with regard to Russia at the level of their collective subconscious. All this led to consequences going beyond the bounds of expectations of the Russian government. The Muslim clergy became an active ethnopolitical force, which was not always loyal to the Russian tsarist administration.
After the establishment of Soviet power the people of the North Caucasian region of the Russian Empire have become isolated from the Muslim world for the first time in their history. As a result, their
evolution within the framework of the world ummah was disrupted. The spiritual sphere was marked by setbacks, and a considerable part of the religious heritage continued to be recognized as part of the cultural and spiritual asset of the peoples of the Soviet Union.
A stepped-up stage of re-Islamization has begun after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. The mass of those calling themselves Muslims had very general, if vague and wrong, ideas about their religion. This situation still exists in Russia. Despite the growing number of mosques, madrasahs and other Muslim educational institutions, the level of Islamic literacy of the population is still low. Practically complete religious illiteracy of the population, absence of ideas about various interpretations and trends of Islam, and idealized and mythologized notions about it contributed to the emergence and popularization of reformist Muslim leaders calling for coming back to "pure Islam"1 A considerable number of its adepts has appeared in this country at the time of the purposeful activity of Wahhabi elements from abroad.8
In 1989 adherents and supporters of "pure Islam" were able to overthrow the muftis of Central Asia and the North Caucasus. After the resumption of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia in 1991 and the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. that very year the Wahhabi expansion in the post-Soviet area has assumed an avalanche-like character.
Along with the re-Islamization process internal differences intensified within Muslim communities of the region. In these conditions a correlation between the ethnic essence and Islam as such began to change. Numerous leaders began to assert various ideological postulates in their activity and put forward political aims. Each of these rivaling groups began to claim its interpretation of Islam to be the essence of religious and political ideology.
As we see, the formation of the political-psychological identity of the North Caucasian peoples has been developing for quite a long time on the basis of their own laws. It was subjected to the influence of different factors and the impact of ethno-conflict situations against the backdrop of the absence of the uniform interpretation and understanding of Islam. The following factors could become the ground for the identity crisis of the North Caucasian Muslims. First, it was the adaptive and subjectless process of spontaneous self-identification not only in isolation from religious and cultural-historical traditions of the world ummah, but also non-admission of civil Russian identity. Secondly, it was mosaic ethnicity with an emphasis on the self-isolation of the North Caucasian peoples which was the antagonist of positive political identity. Thirdly, it was the narrowing down of social, cultural and mental areas of local ethnic groups to the size of individual communities.
Lastly, we should note that traditional Islam with its spiritual and cultural potential in the conditions of post-Soviet Russia was unable to play a consolidating role for the indigenous people of the North Caucasus. Neither did it become a source of positive political subjectness and systemic integrator of constructive socio-political processes in the region. Derussification in practically all republics of the region has become real as a manifestation of negative identity.
In the 1990s these processes were characterized by the striving for ethnocultural and ethno-territorial polarization with subsequent independence of ethno-national statehood, whereas in the 2000th they began to degenerate into a principally new phenomenon - Islamism. At present it is not so much religious-theological phenomenon as a political one in modern Russia and is, in essence, a protesting, organizing, mobilizing and ideologically anti-state and systemic anti-Russian project. Its strategic aim is the transformation of the traditional
North Caucasian polymentality into monomentality of a totalitarian type by creating a new anti-Russian supranational religious identity.
The ideology of Islamism as the foundation of a specific form of re-Islamization has begun to spread in North Caucasian republics and beyond their borders rapidly and aggressively, and claim the establishment of its own rules and way of life even in places where the Islamic population was in minority. We mean Stavropol territory, which is situated in the very center of the North Caucasian region.
Stages of Re-Islamization in Stavropol
Territory: Political and Psychological Aspects
Common borders with six North Caucasian republics have made Stavropol territory a zone of ethnopolitical and religious-political instability. Its exacerbation took place in 2010, and by the beginning of 2013 Stavropol territory became the most conflictogenic region of Russia. The problems of interethnic and inter-confessional relations, Islamic expansionism and Islamophobia have come to the fore as never before.
According to the data of the All-Russia population census of 2010, the population in Stavropol territory includes seven percent of representatives of traditional Islam, who are called ethnic Muslims. And their number is constantly growing.
Stavropol Muslims are mainly Sunnites. The number of Shi'ites is comparatively small, and they are mainly representatives of a small Azerbaijani diaspora.
There is no official clergy in Sunna Islam, any believer can become an imam, if he proves his loyalty to faith and demonstrates his knowledge of sacred texts. Hence, there are numerous conflicts and the problem of impersonation, when an imam may proclaim himself mufti. Sunnites belong to different theological-legal schools, which sometimes
causes an acute ethnocultural and religious-political polemics, including with representatives of new versions of Islam.
There is the Spiritual Board of ethnic Muslims of Stavropol territory which supervises the functioning of mosques and prayer-houses, and also Islamic educational institutions. One of the aims of the Board's activity is the revival of the Islamic religious tradition which has deep historical roots in Stavropol territory.
During the past two decades Islam has adapted to the new sociopolitical conditions and met ideological and spiritual challenges.
A study of the specific features of this process in Stavropol territory makes it possible to single out several stages whose examination gives an opportunity to see and understand the character and evolution of its political-psychological essence, on the one hand, and on the other, to determine the main aspects and points of the growth of Islamic presence in regional socio-political life at the present stage and in the foreseeable future.9
Initial stage (1988-1991) passed against the backdrop of radical changes in the country's political and ideological spheres. It was marked by spontaneous public and religious activity. The liberalization course contributed to the rapid formation of numerous and various religious organizations.
Under the Law of the RSFSR "On Freedom of Religion" adopted in October 1990 religious organizations received an opportunity to influence mass consciousness through their participation in public life. They began to organize educational institutions, publishing houses, mass media, and establish direct international contacts without mediation of the state. The simpler order of registration of religious associations, and the absence of state control have led to chaos in the system of state-confessional relations, and created prerequisites for the emergence of destructive forms of religious activity.
Assessing the course of this process in Stavropol territory, it should be noted that there has been not only "revival" of the Islamic religious tradition, but rather its original and qualitatively new "second birth." All this was taking place when there was an acute shortage of the competent clergy and the absence of official religious organizations and corresponding literature. This was accompanied by bitter rivalry among new religious leaders which resulted in the creation of numerous ethnically oriented religious organizations of Muslims. Traditional Russian Islam, including that in the North Caucasus, was weak at the time, and was not ready to oppose foreign influence in the re-Islamization process.
At the same time "pure Islam" as a project for the North Caucasus has become not only a result of interference of the outside forces (mainly Saudi and Pakistani). It was a product of the internal forces' activity. The radical-Islamist project appealed to world religion, which was "cleansed" from local "distortions" and traditions, to "universal values" - not connected with ethnic groups, clans, etc. It emphasized egalitarianism, and opposition to corruption and social injustice. Ideologists of "pure Islam" ably used psychological methods of influence, addressing themselves, first and foremost, to young people. Its success was largely due to the absence of a clear-cut and effective policy of the Russian authorities toward the North Caucasus.
Young people looked for opportunities to receive religious education abroad, at Islamic educational centers in the Middle East and North Africa. Islamic missionaries arriving in great numbers in the North Caucasus from abroad actively propagated Wahhabi ideology of "pure Islam." Re-Islamization was regarded at the time as a spiritual-cultural phenomenon far from timely political problems of the country and the region.
The second stage (1991-1994) was marked by the intensive penetration of the ideology of political Islam - Islamism - in Stavropol territory and the neighboring regions. Its first active agents - Salafite cells - began to emerge in Stavropol territory. Their propaganda activity was aimed at criticizing and undermining secular power. Massive corruption and abuse of power by local officials, social differentiation, high level of unemployment, alienation of the local authorities and their negligence of the needs of the population have prepared the ground for the success of Salafite propaganda among local inhabitants. Salafite Islamists were striving for total Islamization of all spheres of public life. The Islamist movement comes out with the ideas of creating an "Islamic state," the "Caucasian Emirate" and global jihad against "all enemies of Islam," including not only Russia, but also the United States, the European Union and Israel.10
Representing foreign special services and relying on financial support of foreign non-governmental religious and political organizations, foreign missionaries have carried on active work on propagating the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. In doing this they broadly used psychological means of influence and recruitment of ethnic Muslims. Arab and Central Asian instructors worked at underground "madrasahs" in several districts. At this stage fundamentalists did not put forward open anti-Russian ideas and slogans.
The third stage (1995-1997) was distinguished by intensive politicization and radicalization of Islam in the North Caucasus. On the one hand, it was connected with the first Chechen war, and on the other, with propaganda of the ideas of returning to "pure Islam." All this was accompanied with a drop in the population's living standards and the return home of graduates from Arab religious educational institutions who began to compete with the traditional Islamic elite. Having received theological education, they not only actively joined the re-
Islamization process, but also replaced their foreign tutors in the training camps of fighters in Chechnya. Young Islamists from Stavropol territory studied the Koran in its Wahhabi interpretation, learned lessons on ideological, psychological, recruiting and military subversion technique, and applied the newly-acquired knowledge in practical work.
Representatives of foreign religious-political organizations worked as supervisors, instructors and preachers in Stavropol territory. In their sermons they openly called for implacable armed struggle for "purity of Islam" and the need to physically annihilate the "infidels." Their main audience was inhabitants of eastern settlements of Stavropol territory where most ethnic Muslims lived.
Extremist literature published in Stavropol territory was widely used for undermining the foundations of Russian nationhood and inciting intolerance and religious hatred. The Islamists did everything possible to increase their influence on the local power bodies. Islam was widely used by them for ideological substantiation of their activity and as a means of uniting, organizing and mobilizing the extremists.
Traditional Muslims in Stavropol territory found themselves in a difficult situation. Due to their low prestige and also because of insufficient knowledge and inadequate material position some of traditionalists tried to establish a dialogue with representatives of "new Islam," and fell under their influence.
Meanwhile, the central and local authorities began to realize, little by little, the destructive nature of Islamism. In order to improve the regimentation of state-confessional relations the Law of the Russian Federation "On freedom of conscience and religious organizations" was adopted in 1997. It tightened the registration rules for new religious organizations and banned religious missionary activity of foreign nationals. Work of the law-enforcement agencies in Stavropol territory during that period was more closely connected with opposing the
extremist and terrorist activity of armed gangs, which made it possible to weaken the positions of fighters for "pure Islam."
The fourth stage (1998-2001) was marked by the exacerbation of relations between the authorities and the traditional clergy, on the one hand, and the representatives of radical Islamic groupings, on the other. In this confrontation the leaders of traditional Islamic communities received a new powerful impetus for unity. They began to engage in work with the Muslim population of the territory to oppose the sectarian activity of the Islamists. In turn, the latter started a virtual psychological and subversive-terrorist war. During a period of four years they committed more than ten acts of terror in different parts of Stavropol territory.
The situation has seriously deteriorated in the region of the North Caucasian spa Mineralniye vody. In answer to the flare-up of extremist activity the local law-enforcement agencies have undertaken preventive measures, including the arrest of the most active Islamists. However, numerous shortcomings of the legislative basis and reliance exclusively on operative and forcible methods of fighting such crimes did not allow us to exclude terrorism and extremism from the list of threats to the region.
The fifth stage (2001-2007) was connected with the planned and continuous onslaught against the destructive forms of Islamic religiousness. Using a wide range of means - ideological, psychological, economic, political and forcible - the authorities continued to deal blow after blow at Islamism and its bearers. These efforts have resulted in the defeat of the military structure of the North-Caucasian Salafites, having driven it deep underground and contributed to forming its negative image among the broad sections of the population. The term "Wahhabism" became to be associated with terrorism and religious fanaticism.
Nevertheless, the underground Islamists have not abandoned their goals. In the new conditions they renovated their programs of ideological substantiation of terrorist activity connected with refusal from the nationally-oriented character of Islamic "resistance." Thus, any ethnic or nationalist aim, like the struggle for independence of, say, Ichkeria, was declared fallacious.
In the view of Doku Umarov, the then leader of the gangster underground in the North Caucasus, Muslims had to abandon nationalism and switch over to religious-political positions of "pure Islam." The North Caucasian terrorists created the organization "Imarat Kavkaz" in 2007, which included the eastern part of Stavropol territory and committed several acts of terror with human casualties.
The sixth stage (2007-2010) was marked with relentless struggle of the authorities against Islamic radicals, which stabilized the situation at the "Islamist front." Having felt this, traditional Muslims became more tolerant toward moderate Salafites. Thus, two main principally different types of Islamic activity began to take shape.11
The first type was represented by the traditional Islamic clergy who satisfied the religious requirements of people and were regarded as an important social institution.
The second type, while rejecting the authority of the first, was oriented to the need to assert the Islamic political-legal and moral order in Muslim society. Thus, Islam became a propaganda and political instrument, and acquired a destructive character. All this was accompanied with growing confessional rivalry between the leaders of traditional Muslims, which led to another change in the structure of the regional Spiritual Board of Muslims in 2010.
The seventh stage (2010 up to now) coincided with the creation of the new federal okrug (region) - North Caucasian, which included Stavropol territory. This stage is connected with the formation of
a territorially and religiously unified Islamic community in Stavropol territory. With this aim in view the new Spiritual Board of Muslims of the North Caucasus was set up on May 5, 2010.
Today the Board includes 52 officially registered Muslim communities, each having its own mosque or prayer-house. Mufti Muhammad Haji Rakhimov is the head of the Board. His activity contributes to an improvement of relations between Muslim communities of Stavropol territory.
Despite the fact that Sunnism acknowledges equal importance of all leading religious theological schools for Islam, it seems that this is rather connected with an attempt of the Spiritual Board of Muslims of the North Caucasus to find a compromise in answer to a dangerous challenge thrown by "new Islam" - a moderately radical version of Islamism.12 In contrast to the actively operating terrorist underground in the region, this form of Islamic religious-political activity is quite popular among North Caucasian young people.
This is shown by the fact that about 80 percent of ethnic Islamic young people from 15 to 22 years of age are aware of Wahhabi ideas. This is also true of about 25 percent of ethnic Russian boys and girls living in the region.
The problem of the politicization and radicalization of Islamic young people in Stavropol territory and in the entire North Caucasian region, for that matter, remains quite acute. In this connection an anonymous poll has been carried out among 1st to 3rd-year students of the Karachayevo-Circassian State University and the North Caucasian State Humanitarian-technological Academy with a view to ascertaining the supposed motives of involvement of young people in terrorist groupings. First of all, these motives were prompted by alienation, frustration, feeling of offence and loneliness (46.0 percent of respondents). Second place was taken by motives of self-assertion,
feeling of personal significance, belonging to an important cause, atmosphere of adventure, etc. (32.0 percent of respondents). Third place was determined by sum total of different psychological reasons, thirst for power, pathological thirst for destruction, etc. (10.0 percent of respondents). Then there are selfish (lucrative) motives and striving for greater prestige among coevals.
The overwhelming number of students (62 percent) named "psychological considerations" as the main reason for joining terrorist organizations. The most widespread psychological causes are susceptibility to outside influence (22 percent) and unbalanced psychology (18 percent). Twenty percent of students named social factors, six percent - economic reasons, four percent - religious reasons, and eight percent found it difficult to answer this question.
The results of the poll speak for themselves. They give a thorough characteristic to two basic personal qualities of young extremists - these are the high level of infantilism and a very low level of subjectness.
Conclusion
The conflict combination of the processes of self-determination and self-isolation against the background of uncertainty of the future, disappointments, unfulfilled desires, low level of subjectness, etc. - all this determines the state of frustrated identity of North Caucasian society, which increases its political and psychological instability. There are also other specific features of local mental dynamics. First, an increase has been registered in the number of the Islamic population in the region as against the non-Islamic one. This makes its general psychological and emotional well-being better and lends it greater self-confidence. Secondly, it is freed from the "younger brother" complex characteristic of the Soviet period with regard to the non-Russian
population which is in a state of mental depression. Thirdly, there are fewer national-political manifestations of the Russian state and more signs of Muslim religious-political values, namely Islamic civilization.
All this enables us to speak of the stepped-up processes of the re-Islamization of the North Caucasus during the past twenty-five years. The growing ethnic self-identification of a greater part of North Caucasian society experiences a strong influence of aggressive Islamist propaganda, which is using the ideas of social justice and slogans of supra-national values of "new Islam." The Russian North Caucasus risks to experience the national-political destruction of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. At the same time the polymentality of traditional society prevents the development of Muslim fundamentalism. Historical rootedness of traditional Islam in Russia and the value of the Russian Orthodox-Muslim consensus, so evident for many people have definite prospects of conflict-free interaction with the world of Islam.
Nevertheless, at present the global operators of the Islamist political project are stubbornly implementing a strategy on restructuring identification ideas and rules of North Caucasian inhabitants, and first and foremost, young people. The organized Islamist groupings of both ultra and moderately radical character are actively implementing technologies of mental and political transformations. Their activity is aimed at transforming the polymental matrix of traditional Islamic society and laying the foundations of religious-dogmatic monomentality of a totalitarian type, with subsequent realization of the project of "new Islam" of the North Caucasus outside Russia.
Notes
1. N. Rakityansky. Islamsky mentalitet v geopoliticheskom prostranstve XXI veka [Islamic Mentality in the Geopolitical Area of the 21st Century] // "Vlast," 2013, No 1, pp. 123-128.
2. D. Kuraishi. Islamsky factor v politicheskom protsesse sovremennoi Rossii (na primere respublik Severnogo Kavkaza) [Islamic Factor in Political Process of Modern Russia (on example of North Caucasian republics)]. Doctoral thesis, Moscow, 2009.
3. N. Rakityansky. Ponyatiya soznaniya i mentliteta v kontekste politicheskoi psikhologii [Notions of Consciousness and Mentality in the Context of Political Psychology] // Vesti Moskovskogo Universiteta, series 12. Political Sciences, 2011, No 6, pp. 89-103.
4. N. Rakityansky. Islamsky mentalitet v kontekste printsipa politicheskoi sub'ektnosti [Islamic Mentality in Context of the Principle of Political Subjectness] Teoditseya: Anthology. No 3, Pyatigorsk, 2012, pp. 83-92.
5. S. Samedov. Islam v sovremennykh etnopoliticheskikh protsessakh na Severnom Kavkaze [Islam in Modern Ethnopolitical Processes in the North Caucasus]. URL.: http://religio.rags.ru/journal/ anthology4/a4 17.pdf
6. S. Rybakov. Ustroistvo i nuzhdy upravleniya dukhovnymi delami musulman v Rossii [System and Needs of Managing Spiritual Matters of Muslims in Russia]. Pg., 1917, p. 55.
7. E. Suslova. Religiya i problemy natsionalnoi bezopasnosti na Severnom Kavkaze [Religion and Problems of National Security in the North Caucasus]. Ph. D. thesis. Moscow, 2004.
8. Wahhabism" is understood in Russia as a sum total of aggressive trends of Islam, which are non-traditional for Russia. This brief definition is rather political than theological, but in this case it is the political aspect that is especially important from the point of view of motivation of its adepts, as well as from the view of its threat to Russia. For more details see: Map of ethnoreligious threats. North Caucasus and Volga Area.
9. S. Berezhnoi, I. Dobayev, P. Krainyuchenko. Istoriya Islama v Stavropolskom kraye [History of Islam in Stavropol Territory] Eurasia portal. URL.: http://evrazia.org/ articele/1978
10. Map of ethno-religious threats. North Caucasus and Volga Area. - P. 31.
11. I. Kosikov. Islamskiye dvizheniya noveishego vremeni na Severnom Kavkaze // Respubliki Severnogo Kavkaza: ethnopoliticheskya situatsiya i otnosheniya s federalnym Tsentrom [Islamic Movements of Our Day in the North Caucasus // North Caucasian Republics: Ethnopolitical Situation and Relations with the Federal Center]. Moscow, 2012. - pp. 94-100.
12. I. Kosikov. Op. cit.. - pp. 94-100.
"Vestnik Moskovskogo Universiteta," Series 12, "Politology, " Moscow, 2014, No 2, pp. 51-71.
