By Paul Goble
Tartu, Estonia, Feb. 2 (UPI) -- Moscow's bureaucratic approach to Russia's 20 million Muslims, an approach inherited from Soviet times, has reduced the Russian government's influence on this community and is opening the way to its further radicalization -- the very thing the authorities say they want to prevent.
This harsh judgment was delivered by Russian ethnographer Akhmet Yarlykapov in an interview published at the end of last week.(islam.ru/pressclub/gost/ahmed/) A Daghestani trained Moscow's Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Yarlykapov said that Moscow's reliance on state-created hierarchies for Islam is increasingly counterproductive.
His argument becomes clearer if one recalls something about the nature of Islam as a religion and also something about how various Russian governments have sought to deal with it.
By its very nature, Islam is very different from many religions. It is a non-clerical faith -- any Muslim who can read the Koran can function as a mullah -- without any religious hierarchy. That feature of Islam not only increases the importance for Muslims of the Koran and its various learned interpreters but also makes it difficult for any secular government to control it.
When the Russian Empire expanded into Muslim areas, it set up a government-funded and controlled institution called a spiritual directorate in order to regulate the affairs of its Muslim subjects. Even as it sought to wipe out religious belief, the Soviet government maintained that approach and ultimately set up four Muslim spiritual directorates for various regions of the Soviet Union.
In Soviet times, this small official establishment, one totally penetrated by the KGB and the police, not surprisingly often worked to limit the impact of Islam rather than to defend and expand the faith. As a result, it came to be opposed by what was known as "unofficial" or "underground" Islam, a term that included all Muslims who did not accept the limits imposed by the state.
Until the 1980s, this underground Islam, although remarkably vigorous, had few opportunities for public action. But under the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, and even more after the end of the Soviet Union, it resurfaced with a vengeance. Many Muslims in Russia hoped that they would be able to practice their faith without much official interference.
But that has not in fact happened. Instead, the Soviet-era Muslim spiritual directorates not only have continued to exist but multiplied, quite often fighting with one another to gain government support at either the central or regional level rather than working to advance the cause of Islam.
The government for its part, especially under President Vladimir Putin, increasingly views these institutions as the only genuine representatives of Islam and as potentially valuable allies in Moscow's efforts to block the radicalization of Islam and to combat Islamist terrorism.
Unfortunately, Yarlykapov pointed out, this bureaucratic approach is costing Moscow dearly: "Any mufti who is assigned or imposed with the help of the government will be illegitimate in the eyes of believers," he said, and that in turn opens "a quite large place for oppositionist tendencies."
Moreover, the frequent inability or unwillingness of the official Islamic structures to defend the rights of Muslims against the state further reduces their authority among believers, thus opening yet another door for radicals to enter and gain influence over an increasing number of Russia's Muslims.
At the same time, Yarlykapov continued, such structures are totally incapable of responding to two real divisions within Russia's Muslims -- the generational one between those who want to do everything "to conserve the Soviet-era approach" and those who want to renew Islam in one way or another, and the ideological one between more traditional and more radical Muslims
Indeed, Yarlykapov added, about the only things these spiritual directorates appear capable of doing are promoting the personal interests of those who head them, an obvious offense against the religion and reifying the divisions among the various legal schools of Sunni Islam, divisions which have little or no meaning for the overwhelming majority of Russia's Muslims.
Both of those trends, too, he said, are driving ever more ordinary Muslims away from these state-supported "official" Muslim leaders and into the hands of their opponents, thus eliminating the utility of those leaders for the government even as Moscow seems ever more inclined to rely on them for its own purposes.
Overcoming this Soviet-era legacy will not be easy, Yarlykpov concluded. In fact, he said, there is only really one way out: The Muslims of Russia must be given the opportunity to generate their own "authoritative and informal spiritual leaders," and the government must pay attention to them rather than to what are in the end its own creatures.
But at present, neither the Kremlin nor the Muslim leaders appear willing to do so. And as a result, the informal leaders who are emerging now may not be able or willing to engage in a dialogue with the government and may be more open to the ideas of those who argue that Muslims must struggle against it -- or at least support those who do.
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(Paul Goble teaches at the Euro-college of the University of Tartu in Estonia.)