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much more harshly than secular power could have done within the secular Russian laws. This explains why the legal status of the North Caucasian Muslims was determined mainly by military instructions and regulations of indefinite duration.
In fact, the rights and duties of the Muslim clergy and Russian Muslims were determined by two mechanisms:
(1) the Russian secular laws that took into account the norms of the adat and the norms of Muslim law (the Shari‘a) and
(2) temporary instructions and rules.
The legal status of the Russian Muslim population was determined by civil laws, however Muslim laws remained applicable in issues relating to marriage and family relations, as well as to inheritance.
It took the Russian secular legislation that regulated the legal status of the Muslims of Russia a long time to develop from scattered legal documents reflecting the decisions made in individual cases (that created precedents) to general legal foundations relating to all the Muslims of the Russian Empire (the Northern Caucasus included). On the whole the process remained incomplete: until 1917 the local Muslims were still subordinated to the local military authorities while Muslims elsewhere lived under their own spiritual administrations that served as a link between the Russian (mainly civilian) government and the Islamic communities.
Israpil SAMPIEV
Ph.D. (Philos.), associate professor, head of the Department of Political Science and Sociology,
State University of Ingushetia (Nazran, Russia)
RUSSIA’S ISLAMIC POLICIES IN THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS: HISTORICAL PARALLELS
Abstract
The author tries to reveal the meaning of Russia’s Islamic policies in the Northern Caucasus by looking back at imperial and Soviet times. His diachronic comparative analysis brought to light clear parallels created by the inner continuity of the aims and close ideological kinship of
the twists and turns in its political line. This suggests that the religious-political radicalism in the region is a manifestation of the worldwide anti-colonial trends and a response to outside pressure at a time of sharp social and cultural crises amid the Muslim communities.
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I n t r o d u c t i o n
An analysis of the current North Caucasian political realities leaves everyone more or less familiar with the period when the Northern Caucasus became part of the Russian Empire and its existence within the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation with the vague impression that history is repeating itself. This impression comes into bolder relief by means of closer scrutiny of Russia’s Islamic policies at different times. Here I have attempted a diachronic comparative analysis of Russia’s Islamic policies to answer the question: Were the outward similarities between the religious and political situations of different epochs the products of certain regularities or coincidental? If the former is true, we would like to know: Is there a deeply rooted reason why the implicit doctrinal approaches to Islam and the Muslims in the Northern Caucasus repeated themselves? Perhaps this explains the fact that the highly varied political regimes—absolute monarchy, communist, and “sovereign democracy” of today—pursued similar policies in the Northern Caucasus.
Before answering these questions I shall outline several reservations to clarify what is being discussed. First, at all times the state’s Islamic policy in the Northern Caucasus has been following, and is following, the changing realities, which makes it inconsistent, therefore I shall limit myself to the mainstream trends. Second, I shall limit my diachronic analysis to the Russian state’s Islamic policies without touching upon the internal sociopolitical and other factors behind the flare-ups of religious-political sentiments among the North Caucasian mountain dwellers. Any attempt to identify the ideological parallels and the similarity of aims and methods would have made my discussion too difficult to follow—this subject should be treated separately.
Muslims in the Russian Empire: the Beginning
A Russian anthology on the sociology of religion says that the Volga Bulgars were the first to embrace Islam within Russia’s borders, which happened in the 9th century.1 Whether deliberate or not, this is an error: Islam appeared in contemporary Russia in the 7th century among the North Caucasian peoples. In 685-686, Arabs captured Derbent to be used as a toehold to press further into Daghestan. Documents confirm that the first jumah mosque was built in 779 in Kumukh; by the15th century the inner regions of Daghestan had become completely Islamic.2 In the early and mid-18th century Chechnia became Muslim; Ingushetia followed suit in the latter half of the 18th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries the larger part of the Adighes, Kabardins and, later, a small part of the Ossets embraced Islam.
By the time it started moving into the Caucasus the Russian Empire had gained rich experience in governing Muslim regions: the Muslim population of the newly conquered Kazan and Astrakhan khanates had been forced to embrace Christianity in great numbers. Islam, their former religion, was subjected to discrimination. Later, under Peter the Great, those noble Tartar families who had rejected Christianity were registered as tax-paying commoners. It was only under the decree of Catherine the Great of 22 February, 1784 “On Permission for the Tartar Princes and Murzas to Enjoy the Privileges of Russian Nobles” that those who could prove their noble origins had their rights restored.
1 See: Religia i obshchestvo. Khrestomatia po sotsiologii religii, Aspekt Press, Moscow, 1996, p. 769.
2 See: Istoria Daghestana, Vol. 1, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1967.
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In 1788, the Orenburg Muftiat was set up to pursue the official religious policies and keep the empire’s Muslim subjects under strict control. With the Crimean Khanate incorporated into Russia, part of the Northwestern Caucasus was also united with the Russian Empire; the Taurida Muftiat was set up very soon after that. In the 1783 Manifesto on the unification of the Crimean Khanate Catherine the Great promised “to protect and defend [all its newly acquired Muslim subjects], their temples and their native faith” and vowed that “the right to freely follow it and perform all lawful rites will be defended forever, and all the relevant rights will be freely practiced.”3 The document obviously included those Northwest Caucasian Muslims who lived on the territory of the former Crimean Khanate.
In 1859, in his Manifesto on the End of the Caucasian War, Prince Alexander Bariatinskiy made a similar promise, in the name of the emperor, to the Muslims of the Northern Caucasus: “The Russian government allows you to freely follow the faith of your forefathers forever.”4
The famous address of the Council of People’s Commissars to the Toiling Muslims of the East and Russia of 20 November, 1917 said: “Muslims of Russia, Tartars of the Volga Area and the Crimea, Kirghiz and Sarts of Siberia and Turkestan, Turks and Tartars of the Transcaucasus, and Chechens and mountain dwellers of the Caucasus, whose mosques and prayer houses were ruined and the faiths and customs of whom were trampled upon by the czars and oppressors of Russia! From this time on your faith and customs, your national and cultural institutions, are declared free and immune. You are free to organize your national life without hindrance.”5
Every time the state was either too weak or apprehensive of riots in the recently conquered Muslim areas it brandished its tolerance. On the whole, the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and new Russia at all times practiced and practice two main approaches: either Suo quisque riti scrificium fa-ciat (each should offer sacrifice according to his own rite), but under strict control and in the interests of the colonial administration, or openly hostile treatment of Islam as a “militant and fanatical religion.” The latter predominated throughout the history of relations between the Caucasus and Russia even though it was never pushed to the extreme, being alternated with promises of religious tolerance easily forgotten once the crisis was over.
Islamic Clergy Created: Integration into the System
From the very first days of Russia’s domination in the Northern Caucasus there was no shortage of those determined to organize the life of the local Muslims as they saw it fit.6 In 1830, General Vel’iaminov came out with a project for a three-level vertical of Muslim clergy, all of them appointed by the state and drawing a state salary. Ill-timed—the war was still going on—the project remained on paper. Later, the Caucasian Department of the Imperial Chancellery, the Caucasian Committee, the Department of Spiritual Affairs of Alien Faiths at the Ministry of the Interior, and other structures deemed it necessary to supply their own projects. However, they proved unrealizable during and after the war waged under slogans ofjihad, since they were potentially conducive to new riots. The administrative experience in the form of the Orenburg and Taurida muftiats proved useless in the Northern Caucasus.
3 Islam v Rossiiskoy imperii (zakonodatel'nye akty, opisania, statistika), Compiled by D.Iu. Arapov, Moscow,
2001, p. 47.
4 A. Avtorkhanov, Ubiystvo checheno-ingushskogo naroda, Moscow, 1991, p. 81.
5 Dekrety Sovetskoy vlasti, Vol. 1, Moscow, 1957, pp. 113-114.
6 For more detail, see: D.Iu. Arapov, Imperskaia politika v oblasti gosudarstvennogo regulirovania islama na Sev-ernom Kavkaze v XlX-nachale XX vv.,available at [http://www.libfl.ru/win/law/islamic/book2004-1_04.htm].
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It was believed that, by taking a firm grip on the Caucasian Muslims’ spiritual life, the imperial authorities were seeking the following political aims:
(1) to provide the government with means for monitoring and controlling those who due to their religious convictions could ignite “a fire of enmity and disobedience;”
(2) to oppose “excessive corporate feelings” among the “Muslim clergy” detrimental to Russian interests;
(3) to prevent the infiltration of “alien clergy, especially of anti-Russian convictions” from Iran and Turkey;
(4) to limit, to every extent possible, the range of the clergy’s authority among the Muslims “without encroaching on the people’s religious convictions;”
(5) to make the influential part of the “Muslim clergy” directly dependent on the government by causing their material interests to relate to their service to the government;
(6) to put Muslim religious schools under more or less effective control;
(7) to take measures to tighten the government’s control over all sorts of revenue created by “religious property” that might be used to support “Muslim circles abroad.”7
An analysis of the above suggests that even though these aims were not publicized the Soviet authorities in the past and the Russian authorities today implicitly agreed with practically all of them.
The fierce Caucasian war and the local post-war conflicts never allowed the Russian state to move to the next stage, viz., administration of the spiritual affairs of the North Caucasian Muslims. In fact, the government and prominent politicians could not agree on adequate approaches. It can be said that centralization and unification of the spiritual administration patterned on the Orenburg and Taurida muftiats might have helped to establish control and administration, but the government did not want the local Muslims to unite even under its own structure. As late as 1872 Alexander II endorsed the Regulations of the state-supported Trans-Caucasian Muslim administrations of the Sunni and Shi‘a clergy. Despite the numerous projects, a centralized structure in the Northern Caucasus was never set up, even after the stormy events of 1905-1907 when the czarist government was forced to issue the Decree on Religious Tolerance that presupposed, among other things, a Muslim administration in the Northern Caucasus.8
The Bolsheviks likewise failed to set up a centralized spiritual administration of the Muslims of the Northern Caucasus. It was only in 1944, when the Karachais, Ingushes, Chechens, and Balkars had been deported, that the project of the North Caucasian Spiritual Administration was finally realized. The structure survived until 1989. In December 1945 there were plans to restore the all-Union Central Spiritual Administration of the Muslims headed by the Great Mufti of the U.S.S.R. In his memorandum to Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Viacheslav Molotov, Chairman of the Council for Religious Cults at the C.P.C. of the U.S.S.R. I. Polianskiy wrote: “Besides the obvious importance of this center for much better organization of religious life and coordination of activities of the territorial spiritual administrations it would have served as an effective political tool.”9 The suggestion was buried for the same reason: united the Muslims might gain more influence countrywide.
7 S.G. Rybakov, “Ustroystvo i nuzhdy upravlenia dukhovnymi delami musul’man v Rossii,” in: Islam v Rossiiskoy imperii..., p. 273.
! See: Islam v Rossiiskoy imperii..., pp. 181-182.
1 M.I. Odintsov, Vlast’ i religia v gody voyny otechestvennoy voyny 1941-1945 gg., ROIR, Moscow, 2005, p. 485
8 f
9 M.I. Odintsov, Vlast’ i religia v gody voyny. Gosudarstvo i religioznye organizatsii v SSSR v gody Velikoy
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Struggle against Muridism: No Frontline
Instead of keeping the Muslims disunited some political figures suggested that the role of Islam should be diminished. Witness the words of R. Fadeev, one of the “hawks” of the Russian Empire: “In the Muslim regions it is advisable to support the adat (the customary court) as opposed to the Shari‘a (the religious court) that puts fanatical clerics to the fore. If forced to follow the Christian civil laws, the local people will feel that their faith is being subjected to violence at every step down to and including the smallest details of everyday life.”10 The authors of the Regulations on the Mountain Village (Aul) Communities endorsed on 30 December, 1870 pointed out: “The adats and the related village administrations will serve as a firm foundation in the coming struggle (which for a long time will remain latent) for influence on the people against the local Muslim clergy that will not passively accept its waning influence on the flock.”11
There were other tools designed to undermine the position of the Muslim community: the clergy was used as an instrument of the state’s Islamic policies. From the very first days of its presence in the Caucasus the Russian administration was engaged in a tug of war by luring at least some of the mullahs to its side. In 1836, Chief of the Corps of Gendarmes Alexander Benkendorf reported to the czar: “In the Caucasus great advantages, if not greater then at least comparable to those gained by the force of arms, can be achieved by luring the class of the effendis to our side.”12 Bribes were merely one of the methods. In his report to Minister of War Chernyshev Baron Rozen wrote: “Seid, the Qadi of Arakan, is working hard to incite the people against the Qadi mullah; he added vigor to his efforts when informed about the pension granted by His Imperial Majesty.”13
In its struggle against Muridism the Russian government relied on the spiritual leaders of the Russian Muslims. In 1834, Mullah of Kazan Tajedin Effendi came to the Caucasus to become the mufti of the Transcaucasian Sunnis with the mission of persuading the mountain dwellers to abandon Shamil. His failure was followed by the similarly unsuccessful missions of Kazakh Qadi Osman Effendi and Orenburg Mullah Khaliulin. Crimean Qadi Khalil went even further and was awarded the Order of St. Anna. Azerbaijanian Mujtahid Aga-Mir Fettag, who proved useful in preventing the Transcaucasian Shi‘a from siding with Gazi-Magomed and Shamil, received nobility along with a landed possession in the Shirvani province.14
After the war the clergy appointed by the military administration received certain privileges— they did not pay taxes or duties and were relieved from billeting. The “official” clergy “was part and parcel of the colonial administration system in the Caucasian area; it gradually grew accustomed to its position and started serving czarism.”15 The administration, however, did not control the situation: members of so-called non-mosque Islam represented by the Miurid brotherhoods and unofficial clergy remained very active, which forced the authorities to recur to repressive measures.
The administration, which was military-police in nature, took into account the degree to which the Islamic elements were represented in the North Caucasian peoples’ ethnic and cultural identity. By the time the Russian Empire came to the Northern Caucasus, the Islamic influence among the local peoples varied: being much stronger in the east it gradually weakened as it moved westward. Islam, as
10 R.A. Fadeev, “Zapiski ob upravlenii aziatskimi okrainami,” in: Kavkazskaia voyna, Eksmo Publishers, Moscow, 2003, p. 277.
11 Quoted from: M.M. Gasanov, Daghestan v sostave Rossii (vtoraia polovina XIX v.), Makhachkala, 1999, pp. 205-206.
12 Quoted from: A.V. Avksent’ev, Islam na Severnom Kavkaze, Stavropol, 1984, p. 59.
13 A.A. Alov, N.G. Vladimirov, F.G. Ovsienko, Mirovye religii, PRIOR Publishers, Moscow, 1998, p. 313.
14 See: N.A. Smirnov, Miuridism na Kavkaze, Moscow, 1963, p. 16.
15 I.P. Dobaev, “Traditsionalizm i radikalizm v sovremennom islame na Severnom Kavkaze,” in: Islam i politika na Severnom Kavkaze. Sbornik nauchnykh statey, Rostov-on-Don, 2001, p. 11.
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an integrating civilizational factor, was an important element of the mountain peoples’ identity, civil law, and, most important, their regional identity and integration. From the very beginning this bred conflicts in the empire in which Christian Orthodoxy was the official and privileged religion. Until its end the czarist regime relied on it in its political practice. More than that: “In Russia the Orthodox Church was recognized by law as the main one with a monopoly on missionary activities within the state. There were laws that established the order of embracing the dominant religion, a system of privileges for the newly converted, and measures designed to prevent secession from Orthodoxy. Christianization and conversion to Christianity were functions of state governance.”16
According to General R. Fadeev, Prince Bariatinskiy dreamt of Christianization of the top Muslim estate; he even set up the St. Nina Society for this purpose.17 According to another pre-revolutionary author, “the teaching of Muridism assumed an extreme form as a protest against the system of repressions against the Muslims created by Ermolov.”18 The government camouflaged and partly justified its policies by the religious fanaticism of the “savages” that should be quenched by its “civ-ilizatory mission.” It brainwashed the Russian public with its allegations about the mountain peoples’ inborn aggressiveness and fanaticism. “They succumbed to Islamism precisely because it justified their cruelty and ennobled it... Muridism served as an outlet for their main passion and the main feature of Islamism: hatred of the unfaithful who occupied the country.”19 “The slightest manifestations of displeasure with the class and national policies of czarism were presented as religious riots and hostility against Christianity,” wrote N. Smirnov.20
Much later, during the years of official atheism that persecuted all confessions, the Muslims were even less trusted than the others and were subjected to stricter control. Islam was held responsible for the fact that the Muslim nations preserved, longer than the others, the “reactionary vestiges of the past.” As soon as the communists gained enough strength, they moved against Islam. The following is one of the most graphic illustrations of communist anti-Islamic aggressiveness. The first step of the newly appointed Secretary of the Ingush Regional Committee of the AUCP (B) Chernoglaz was to set up the Union of Militant Atheists and tell the people of Galashki village that he would build a pig farm in their village and force them to look after the pigs. The amazed villagers cut off the secretary’s head and took it away. When asked to return it the elder of the village said to the Cheka men: “He had no head—if he had had one, he would never have intended to build a pigsty in our village.”
Stalin regarded the North Caucasian Muslims as an anti-Soviet (anti-Russian) hostile element— the region responded with the rejection of godless power and the regime. The deported Ingushes and Chechens referred to the “Father of All Peoples” as Dajal—Antichrist. R. Kurakhvi has pointed out that “the spiritual and ideological Sovietization of the local population served as a powerful factor of ideological consolidation and the emergence of a new generation of people aware of their Soviet nature and kinship irrespective of ethnic, cultural, historical, social, or psychological specifics. This policy, however, failed among the ethnically consolidated peoples, tightly knit together by their social organization and their belonging to Islam as a universal ideology alternative to the Soviet one. This specific ‘non-freedom’ and the deep social roots of the Caucasian peoples inside their communities allowed some of the mountain population to remain free for a long time from the myths of the Soviet mass consciousness and from complete identification with the system.”21
16 L.A. Iamaeva, Musul’manskiy liberalizm nachala XX veka kak obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie, Gilem, Ufa, 2002, p. 92.
17 See: R.A. Fadeev, Sochinenia, Vol. 1, St. Petersburg, 1889, p. 141.
18 S. Esadze, Istoricheskie zapiski ob upravlenii Kavkazom, Tiflis, 1907, p. 40.
19 R.A. Fadeev, “Shestdesiat let Kavkazskoy voyny,” in: Kavkazskaia voyna, pp. 48-49.
20 N.A. Smirnov, op. cit.
21 R. Kurakhvi, “Musul’mane Kavkaza v poiskakh utrachennoy identichnosty,” available at [http//:www.ansar.ru], August 2006.
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The Caucasian Gambit: Can the Wheel of History Be Stopped?
Have the authorities learned anything at all from the Caucasian War or at least recent history? This is an important question: in the Northern Caucasus Islam remains an inalienable part of the ethnic identity manifested not so much in rigorous religiosity as in specific social and personal behavior and self-identity. For this reason “Islam turns out to be the consolidating element of ethnicity in the face of the Russian majority (even though the Russian Muslims have their own ethnic disagreements). The personal feelings of man as member of a religious minority are further confirmed by the rising xenophobia and Islamophobia (which is a part of it) among the Russians. The Muslim peoples are increasingly aware of their separateness; they are becoming more convinced of their religious specifics and are resorting to additional efforts to confirm them.”22
No matter how much the historical context changed, Russia invariably remained aware of the North Caucasian Muslims’ special identity. Any attempts to impose an alien identity invited fierce responses from the mountain Muslims, which accounts for their conservatism and the absence of a wide reformist follow-up in a form similar to Jadidism, which is rightly discussed in the context of the Muslim reformist movements in India, Egypt, and Iran.23 However, the efforts of Russian power, especially during the period of Soviet atheism, were not in vain. This makes the contemporary religious and political extremism in the Northern Caucasus not merely a product of imported ideologies and resources (a process that is undoubtedly taking place and is encouraged by globalization), but also as an inadequate response to the ethnocultural identity crisis at the personal and group levels.24
The czarist government and local authorities diligently fanned ethnic enmities among the Muslims and contradictions and conflicts among the top Muslim figures. This and the subjective specifics of Muslim society did not allow the Muslims to move together to defend their rights, even though disjointed attempts were made before the 1917 revolution. The 1st Muslim Congress of August 1905 set up a social-political organization called Ittifaq al-muslimin. This was an important event. The new organization endorsed its Statute at the 2nd Congress in January 1906; in August of the same year the 3rd Congress transformed it into a political party, the All-Russia Alliance of Muslims. The Muslim factions present in all convocations of the State Duma also played an important role.
V.-G. Jabagiev, an active member of the Muslim movement, had to admit however: “It seems that common origins, shared religion, common languages, and the same lifestyles should have brought the Muslims, living in an atmosphere of lawlessness, together into a strong political group— very much like the Jews or Armenians. This, however, has never happened. The Muslim community, which because of its size and volume can be described as huge, is nevertheless a split, inert, and passive block.”25 This fully applies to the current state of the Muslim community of the Russian Federation.
Fifty years after the end of the Caucasian War, after the February Revolution, the Islamic religious and political movement stirred into action once more. The anti-Denikin movement of the moun-
22 A.V. Malashenko, “Islam i politika sovremennoy Rossii,” in: Musul’mane izmeniaiushcheysia Rossii, Moscow,
2002, p.8.
23 See: G. Gubaidullin, “On the Ideology of Gasprinskiy (Preliminary Materials),” Gasyrlar avazy (The Echo of Centuries), Kazan, No. 3/4, 1998, p. 101 (in Tatar).
24 See: I.M. Sampiev, “Etnopoliticheskie aspekty religiozno-politicheskogo ekstremizma na Severnom Kavkaze: k postanovke problemy,” in: Aktual’nye problemy protivodeystvia religiozno-politicheskomu ekstremizmu: Materialy Vse-rossiiskoy nauchno-practicheskoy konferentsii, Lotos, Makhachkala, 2007, p. 184.
25 V.-G.E. Jabagiev, “Musul’mane Rossii,” Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, No. 181, 29 July, 1905.
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tain peoples, in which at some point Bolsheviks and Islamists were fighting side by side (the N. Gika-lo unit in the army of Emir Uzun-hajji as Salti may serve an example), was unfolding in some places under the slogan “Long Live Soviet Power and the Shari‘a!”26 In the first years of Soviet power Shari‘a courts were functioning in the Mountain Republic and Daghestan while some of the religious leaders even sat on revolutionary committees. The period of flirting with the Muslims was shortlived: very soon mosques were consistently destroyed together with the “kulak and mullah elements.” Nevertheless, hundreds of clandestine religious organizations and primary schools that taught the Quran and the fundamentals of Islam were functioning under Soviet power and even in the cruel conditions of deportation.27 After 70 years of intensified atheist efforts an ideological bureaucrat complained: “Unfortunately, in the Northern Caucasus religion still holds in its embrace a large part of the autochthonous population. In the Chechen-Ingush A.S.S.R. for example, over half of the marriages are entered according to the Shari‘a. Rituals with newborns and burials are performed according to the Muslim rules. The Muslim clerics’ insistent activities among the children cause special con-
cern.”28
Immediately after the death of the Soviet Union the state proved unable to maintain law and order, social and national justice, and adequate living standards, which led to an acute identity crisis. This had happened before—in the mid-19th and especially early 20th century. In the more or less similar post-Soviet conditions of an ideological vacuum, social demands took on religious forms and nostalgic feelings about the “imaginary past” of regional history. Alexey Malashenko has rightly pointed out: “The interest in religion, especially in Islam as a profoundly socialized religion, is explained by the deep cutting systemic crisis of the region with no end in sight, along with unemployment and crime. Frustrated society is seeking an alternative, which means that the Islamic revival is inevitably acquiring political overtones and a great deal of radicalism. The experience of other Muslim countries has already demonstrated that the hope for a better future might transform into faith in the golden age of the past.”29
The religious transformations in the region, which began simultaneously with Russia’s imperial expansion to the Caucasus, inevitably radicalized Islam, which existed in the Northeastern Caucasus in the form of the Sufi Naqshbandi Tariqah that moved first to the inner regions of Daghestan and later to the other areas of the Northeastern Caucasus. The Russian Empire’s colonial conquests led to the prolonged Caucasian War and gave rise to Muridism, a new religious-political doctrine rooted in the Naqshbandi Tariqah. It was expected that Muridism would bring together the ethnic patchwork of Daghestan and Chechnia into a single Islamic state and supply the liberation struggle with an ideology that, in the historical context of the time, could be nothing other than religious.
It is equally important to note that Muridism as a response to aggression and colonization stemmed from traditional (the term is used here for want of a better one) Islam: being different in many meaningful respects, Muridism never rejected Islam and even legitimized itself through the Naqshbandi Tariqah. (Most of the Tariqah sheikhs, however, were hardly its supporters.) The religious transformations underway in the Northern Caucasus differ radically from the 19th-century context: the Caucasian variant of Wahhabism was obviously imported and is trying to legalize itself by rejecting so-called traditional Islam and fighting against it.
The genesis and development of both phenomena, though, have something in common: first, in the 19th century and the late 20th century they moved to the fore as a response to outside pressure while the Muslim communities were living through sharp sociocultural crises. Second, both times the religious and political radicalism manifested in the region was an outcrop of the worldwide trends.
26 Islam i politika na Severnom Kavkaze, p. 176.
27 For more detail, see: A.A. Alov, N.G. Vladimirov, F.G. Ovsienko, op. cit., pp. 318-238.
28 Kh.Kh. Bokov, U nas u vsekh odna sud’ba, Politizdat Publishers, Moscow, 1988, p. 155.
29 A. Malashenko, “O predskazuemosti kavkazskogo islama,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 15 April, 2002.
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It has been pointed out more than once that the national-liberation movements that unfolded at almost the same time as the movement of the Caucasian mountain peoples also relied on Sufism for their organizational forms and ideologies. Such were the movements of the Sudanese dervishes (late 19th-early 20th centuries); the war of the Acehs for independence against the Dutch (late third of the 19th-early 20th centuries), and the war of the Algerians against the French (1830-1840).30 The North Caucasian peoples, the Indonesians, the Wahhabis, and the Sudanese Mahdists and their ideas were obviously interconnected. “Islam in Indonesia maintained close contacts with the religious centers of Arabia where the Aceh pilgrims were exposed to the anti-colonialist ideas of the Wahhabites, Sudanese Mahdism, and the North Caucasian Tariqah.”31
At approximately the same time another large Islamic region of the Russian Empire (between the Volga and the Urals) and its Islamic spiritual governance, which for many years remained part of the Russian political and sociocultural context, suddenly developed an active movement for the purity of Islam. In 1862, the Veysi movement appeared, which was named after Vaise al-Qurani, a Naqshbandi sheikh of the old times. Bagautdin Vaisov, who headed the movement, set up the Vaise Divine Host of Muslim Old Believers that left the jurisdiction of the Orenburg religious assembly. The movement set itself the aim of “driving the Giaurs away;” its members refused to pay taxes, serve in the army, or carry passports. In 1884 the police had routed the movement that came back to life later, in 1905, with a following of 15 thousand who pursued political aims. After the death of its founder, Bagautdin Vaisov, the united structure fell apart; Cheka destroyed its small fragments in 1920-1921.32
In the early and mid-20th century, religious political sentiments returned to the scene in the form of mass movements that enveloped the Muslim world. V.-G. Jabagiev had the following to say on this score: “Today Muslim liberation movements have engulfed the Zond Archipelago (contemporary Indonesia), British India, Hither Asia ... and South Africa ... dissatisfaction with life and the foreign influence has been spreading among the Muslim nations in all corners of the world. This is not ... ‘pan-Islamism’ .but merely a popular movement free from religious fanaticism of all sorts. The Muslim peoples are pooling their forces (mainly for moral rather than political reasons) only because their enemy is also united. The nationalism of certain Muslim peoples refutes the Tale of Islamic pan-Is-lamism. At the same time, we should not deny that there is spiritual brotherhood and unity of the Islamic world based on the shared religion, culture, and traditions born by the long history of living side by side in the caliphates of the Omeyyads, Abbasids, and Ottomans.”33
Extrapolated to the present day, the processes have revived the old anti-Islamic slogans in a new wrapping. M. Iandieva has pointed out that the awakening of the Islamic world observed today is directly associated with the Islamic threat or the political Islam doctrine revived in the 1990s as a direct outcome of the fall of communism. In the early 21st century the formula of the clash of civilizations (in fact, a clash with Islam), at first vague and later (after 09/11) realized in practice in the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, determined the future of all mankind. Today, the world (the state territories of the so-called New Middle East) is re-divided. The process hypocritically described as the “clash of civilizations” has nothing to do with ideology but rather with the area’s rich natural resources. Russia, with interests and preferences of its own, undoubtedly belongs to the new “Grand Chessboard.” Here I shall limit myself to identifying the current worldwide process in relation to Islam in Russia’s policies.34
30 See: A.D. Iandarov, Sufizm i ideologia natsional’no-osvoboditel’nogo dvizhenia, Alma Ata, 1975, p.5.
31 Zarozhdenie ideologii natsional’no-osvoboditel’nogo dvizhenia, Moscow, 1973, p. 290.
32 E.V. Molostova, “Vaisov Bozhiy polk,” Azia i Afrika segodnia, No. 9, 1992.
33 V.-G. Jabagiev, “Probuzhdaiushchiysia islam,” Islamskoe obozrenie (Warsaw), No. 5, 1936, pp. 1-3.
34 See: M.D. Iandieva, “Islam segodnia, ili perechityvaia Djabagieva,” available at [http://www.ethnonet.ru/ru/pub/ yand.html].
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
The Tale of Pan-Islamism has put on the garbs of “Islamic terrorism.” Today, in the early 21st century, as in the past (in the mid-19th, early and mid-20th centuries), the state’s essentially colonialist policies provoke responses from Islamic society. The first Chechen war started religious extremism in the Northern Caucasus. The recent Great Power course of the Kremlin ignited openly extremist and nationalist movements among the Russians, who not infrequently rely on Orthodoxy as their ideology. The response was immediate. Prof. D. Malysheva, who has studied the situation, concluded: “. while criticizing religious extremism in the Northern Caucasus and forecasting its spread we should not detach it from the countrywide context. It is an outcrop of a wide and alarming trend: society living in the clutches of a structural crisis tends to hail extremism, national-socialist ideas bordering on fascism or even undistinguishable from it.”35
C o n c l u s i o n
The above analysis of state Islamic policies in the Northern Caucasus has clearly revealed the parallels between the imperial, Soviet, and “new” Russian policies determined by the continuity of the state’s essence and close ideological kinship. V.-G. Jabagiev wrote 100 years ago: “There is no pan-Islamism in Russia so far., until it is created by the state itself, that might limit the Muslims’ political, civilian and religious rights.”36 Today the state itself is responsible for the religious and national contradictions. In the past, both the empire and Soviet Russia camouflaged their hostility toward the Muslims and Islam with fine talk about their “civilizatory missions” and the “fight against the vestiges of the past.” New Russia “wants the best” in its Islamic policies, but alas “gets the usual.”
D. Malysheva, “Problemy bezopasnosti Iuga Rossii: regional’ny i global’ny aspekty,” ME i MO, No. 4, 1995.
35
36 V.-G. Jabagiev, “Musul’mane Rossii
