‘Traditional’ Islam in Russia Increasingly Means Islam with No Foreign Roots or Ties

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 4 – Most Muslims see the basic division in Islam as being between the Sunnis who form approximately 90 percent of the umma and the Shiia who form much of the remaining 10 percent. But in Russia, for reasons rooted in both the Soviet experience and Moscow’s current policies, Muslims divide the faithful in a very different way.

 

            Lacking much knowledge about the tenets of their faith because of Soviet anti-religious efforts and conforming to Moscow’s view that Islam is one of the four “traditional” faiths in Russia, a large share of Muslims within the borders of Russia divide the umma in national rather than theological terms, although the two can in some cases correspond.

 

            Thus, many Muslims identify particular approaches not as Sunni or Shiia but as either foreign – Turkish, Saudi or Iranian depending on where particular Muslim leaders were trained or have received financial help – or “Russian” and thus “traditional” if they were trained inside the Russian Federation and have all their funds from domestic sources.

 

            (The identification of Muslim parishes or leaders with particular foreign countries is not unique to Russia. In Azerbaijan, for example, many people have long spoken of “Turkish” or “Iranian” mosques depending on who paid to build them or where the mullahs and imams were trained.)

 

            That has two significant consequences. On the one hand, it means that the defense of “traditional” Islam often means the defense of non-Islamic accretions such as ancestor worship that arose largely in Soviet times. And on the other, it gives the Russian government and its allies in the Muslim establishment a useful lever to control Muslim parishes.

 

            All of these things are highlighted by events that have been working out in a village in Mordvinia over the last month and that are underscored in an article which appeared yesterday in “Vecherny Saransk” entitled “The Muslims of Mordvinia Choose Traditional Islam” (vsar.ru/11460_Musulmane_Mordovii_vybirayut_tradicionnyj_islam).

 

            According to the paper, the Muslims in village of Cheremishevo in the Lyambirsk district have long been upset by what they see as “the Saudi version” of Islam being pushed by the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of Mordvinia and have voted for “traditional Islam” by transferring to an alternative republic MSD subordinate to the Central MSD of Talgat Tajuddin.

 

            Apparently what triggered their action, the paper says, was the position the MSD of Mordvinia’s leader, who was trained in Saudi Arabia, regarding ancestor worship.  Such practices had been the norm in “traditional” Islam in Mordvinia for decades, the paper says, and his challenge of them was thus “Wahhabist” in its insistence on religious purity.

 

            The pro-Saudi mufti apparently has his supporters as well. Some of them threatened those who wanted to break away from the first MSD. But their influence was undercut, the paper says, by the fact that some of them had provided financial assistance to or even gone to fight for ISIS in the Middle East and were convicted of crimes on their return.