Special Reports

Russia and Its Muslims: The Politics of Identity at the International-Domestic Frontier
Dmitri Glinski

The presence of Islam on the territory of today's Russia goes back to the age of Muhammad: the remains of some 40 of his companions are believed to be buried in Derbent-a sunny and poverty-stricken Caspian city in southern Dagestan. Meanwhile, until quite recently, the issue of Russia's relationship to Islam was largely peripheral to the West's Russian studies. In pre-Soviet and Soviet Russia, the attention to domestic Islam was understandably more sustained (although focused primarily on Central Asia), but, from 1917 on, the few valuable pieces of scholarship were typically buried under the heap of official propaganda. While the explosion of interest over the past decade has swelled the amount of literature, the latter is overwhelmingly driven by current events and agendas. It is early to say whether our understanding of the subject suffers more from previous decades of inattention than from the current wave of hyperactivity.

The guiding perspective of the present article is that of Russian politics and political culture, not religious studies. From this standpoint, the central question is whether Russia's Muslim community represents, or could potentially evolve into, a cohesive and influential actor at home and in foreign policy, and, if so, what role it is likely to play. In addition, the status of Russia's largest minority is an important indicator of the country's democratic development. However, addressing these issues requires some understanding of the basic historical and confessional characteristics of Russian Muslims, as well as some simple facts about them-and, even at this level, fundamental disagreements and uncertainty emerge.

Perhaps the only point on which everyone concurs is that the followers of Islam constitute the largest minority in post-Soviet Russia. But exactly how many are there, and how many of these are legal citizens? This depends, of course, on the method of counting. How does one identify a Muslim, given the absence in Islam of a public ritual of conversion similar to the Christian baptism? Is it legitimate to speak of a single nationwide Islamic community-a Russian umma-given the cultural differences among believers and, occasionally, even deeper organizational rifts among Muslim spiritual authorities? When speaking of Islam in the Volga region, in the northwest Caucasus, and among ethnic Russian converts on the border with Finland (see below), do we mean one and the same thing?

Religious affiliation in Russia is not conveniently identified and recorded. Russia's history of minority (and, indeed, majority) abuse serves to reinforce a culture of religious privacy. In Russia, where the dominant Russian Orthodox Church has been anchored to the dominant ethnic group even by its present name (Russkaya), demographers-and politicians-routinely use ethnicity as the closest substitute for religion. Hence the peculiar notion of "ethnic Muslims": about 40 ethnic groups in Russia are classified as "traditionally Islamic." The last Soviet census (1989) set their total representatives within the Russian Federation at 12 million, or approximately 8 percent of the population.

Since 1989, a series of upheavals have significantly altered this figure. First, Russia experienced a mass influx of migrants from the "Muslim" republics of the former Soviet Union, particularly Azeris and Tajiks, as well as the repatriation of several North Caucasian ethnic groups that had been displaced by Stalin to Central Asia. There was also a reverse movement out of Russia, by Chechen refugees in particular, but clearly on a much smaller scale.
More fundamentally, the notion of an "ethnic Islam" is becoming increasingly questionable.¹ For one thing, many "ethnic Muslims," especially Tatars, were profoundly secularized by their atheist Soviet upbringing. On the other hand, a sizable number of ethnic Russians and others have converted to Islam over the past decade.

In 2001, Russia's leading expert on the subject, Aleksei Malashenko, gave a population estimate of 20 million.² This figure-amounting to roughly 14 percent of the total population of the country-has become a temporary "consensus figure," which is also confirmed by the Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of European Russia3and a leading Muslim legislator in the Duma, Abdul Wahed Niyazov.³ This, however, is more a political than a statistical consensus, and then only within that part of the expert-cum-political community that is known to be favorable to Muslims. It lumps Muslim citizens of the country together with migrants (most of whom are increasingly less likely to obtain legal status, especially under the recently adopted law on citizenship). And it remains to be seen whether this figure will withstand the long-delayed census that is to take place in the fall of 2002.⁴

Indeed, there is much at stake in resolving this statistical issue-so much, it seems, that some of the political players in Russia will always find ingenious ways to dispute the data. Thus, in the wake of President Vladimir Putin's decision to join the antiterrorist coalition, Nezavisimaya Gazeta (which, for quite some time, had assumed a conservative and manipulative posture toward minorities in general) gauged the number of "ethnic Muslims" to be 13.17 million (9 percent of the population); it further claimed, without bothering with evidence, that "only 0.5 million of them pray five times a day, as required," and therefore can be seen as "true Muslims."⁵ While many would smile at such reasoning, it exemplifies the ubiquitous logic of the denial of one's legitimacy-the logic that serves as a major tool of identity politics in today's Russia.⁶

How "Muslim" is Islam in Russia? The sociocultural underpinnings of a religious identity

Although the attempt to define "true" Islam in such an exclusionary and sectarian way is clearly self-serving, it touches on issues of identity that are paramount to minority politics. Some of these issues were raised at the beginning of this paper (which does not mean the author has the ambition to resolve them). To what extent are the Russian Muslims a unified group, and, in point of fact, how important is religion as a determinant of their cohesion? This is particularly problematic given that most adult Muslims in today's Russia were raised and socialized in a profoundly secular Soviet culture.

True, Soviet secularism did not prevail everywhere-Dagestan and isolated mountainous parts of Chechnya were an important exception. But then there have been questions about the nature of Islam in even these most heavily Islamized territories.

In comparison with its classical and most accomplished-Arabic and Persian-forms, North Caucasian Islam, except in its medieval centers like Derbent, is thoroughly syncretic-permeated with older, polytheistic beliefs and still very much in the making. It represents the process of "extended and continuing Islamicization" that was going on for centuries and was interrupted by the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.⁷ In fact, the structure of Sufi brotherhoods-the dominant form of religious organization in the northeastern Caucasus, which is often referred to as "traditional Islam" by government authorities who have increasingly relied on Sufis to contain the so-called radicals-is widely seen as an adaptation (and subordination) of Islam to the preexisting institutional networks of a clan-based society. And in the western part of the North Caucasus, many are reverting from Soviet secular culture directly to pre-Islamic, animistic beliefs and rituals.

The peaks of Islamization in the North Caucasus have coincided with major wars and rebellions against Russian supremacy. In these struggles, it was ethnic and cultural rather than religious factors that proved the driving forces. Typically, it was mass mobilization for war that fueled the spread of Islam-and its imposition by political and military leaders, from Sheikh Mansur in the late eighteenth century⁸ to Djohar Dudaev-not vice versa. In this sense, the expansion of Islam (and its imported, purportedly pure forms) was primarily instrumental and geared to more secular priorities, being not so different from explosions of religious sentiment in most other countries at war (as Anatol Lieven noted, in this regard, "we all pray under fire"). Indeed, Dudaev's secessionist government in Chechnya emerged on a purely ethnic and secular base and drifted toward Islam as the military pressure from Moscow intensified.⁹ It can be argued that the Kremlin's invasion of Chechnya in December 1994 triggered the latest round of Islamization in the North Caucasus, leading eventually to the spread of the radical Salafi strain and the arrival of its militant representatives from other Muslim countries. This argument is relevant to the current dynamics of Islam in Russia and its future projections, as we cannot be quite sure of the staying power of its present form and intensity; there is, therefore, some question about how the picture might evolve if there were a relaxation of Kremlin policies.

The widely different extent of Islamization across the Muslim territories of Russia and its volatile character are central to the cohesion of Muslims and their actual and potential role in Russian society and politics. It is a moving target for any researcher interested in long-term developments, and the broader context is always important. In the language of Muslims themselves, it is a question of their belonging to a nationwide Islamic community, the Russian umma-which, in itself, is a notion from the inventory of highly developed forms of Islam in the world of nation-states. For its part, Russia is an unfinished nation-state, whose citizenry-and nonethnic Russians in particular-will be experiencing "phantom pains" from the unexpected and arbitrary breakup of the Soviet nationhood for the foreseeable future. And the North Caucasus's Islamization-in-progress, with its reactive and defensive character driven by an overt or hidden antagonism toward Moscow, implies that the most devout Muslims in the region either live in an autarkic local world, disconnected from national politics, or explicitly deny their allegiance to Russia and recognition of its borders, and hence their belonging to a Russia-wide Muslim community.

Islamophobia as a force for Islamization

With all of the dissimilarities among the different types of Islam in Russia in mind, there is an important context in which the idea of a Russia-wide Muslim community becomes very real. It is the context of cultural, ethnic, and racial intolerance in the ethnically Russian heartland-intolerance that has been trickling down from the post-Soviet elites to the lower strata of society.¹⁰ In the era of reforms, the Moscow establishment, with its at times fanatical desire to Europeanize and Americanize Russia at whatever cost, did virtually everything possible to antagonize and radicalize those ethnic and cultural groups that did not fit into the new standards. Characteristically, as the Russian elite felt that it was slipping to the periphery of the global system-in economic, military, and, most painfully, cultural terms-it adopted a form of psychological denial by claiming a fundamental, civilizational superiority with regard to other peripheral actors, including its own internal periphery. The "market Bolsheviks" saw themselves as a spiritual frontier of the West, endowed with a divine right of membership in Western councils, no matter how low most ordinary Russian citizens (these perennial "marginals") would descend. Some of these Westernizers implicitly counted on Western "civilizational" solidarity and, thus, military support (for example, through Russia's affiliation with NATO) in potential conflicts along Russia's southern borders.

Parts of the Moscow elite opted for Samuel Huntington instead of Karl Marx and often paraded their cultural intolerance, equating "modern" with Euro-American, and the latter with "Christian." Accordingly, the Russian Orthodox Church has been given a semiofficial privileged status with the government (thus, the clock of the church-state relationship was turned all the way back to the age of the Romanov empire). In foreign policy, Moscow often appeared to take sides against actual or perceived "Islamists" (or just Muslims) in such widely dissimilar conflicts as Tajikistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Cyprus, Nagorno-Karabakh, and, more recently, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and in Russia's fraught relationship with OPEC. Although some of these positions made sense in terms of the national interest or international justice, others did not, and, cumulatively, they resulted in a Christian Orthodox twist in Russia's allegedly pragmatic foreign policy.

Simultaneously, the reformers were waging a cultural crusade against traditionalism and everything that seemed Asiatic. It is the irony of history-and of Russians' distinct response to the Kremlin's "Asiaphobia"-that the Asian part of Russia suffered from a drastic population decline and became very vulnerable to demographic and economic expansion by its neighbors.

The fueling of intolerance on the part of the elite and its media also served a more instrumental purpose: to prevent a social explosion in the country by channeling grassroots discontent along ethnic and cultural lines-away from the oligarchy and against the minorities that lacked strong patrons. While suppressing and marginalizing all forms of a Third World-style national sentiment that could be harmful to the rulers and their foreign interests, the authorities tolerated and occasionally encouraged ethnic and racial antiminority animus and its organizational expressions (for example, the Russian National Unity organization of Alexander Barkashov or the Congress of Russian Communities under the leadership of Dmitri Rogozin, currently head of the international-affairs committee in the pro-Putin Duma). The idea was to gain the support of nationalist voters by pitting destitute Russians against minorities. The Kremlin also supported, though with little success, the reestablishment of the czarist-era paramilitary institutions of the Cossacks (with their inglorious legacy of merciless crackdowns on minorities, as well as on the intelligentsia and labor).¹¹

The pursuit of these policies has been simplified by socioeconomic cleavages at the grassroots level, predicated on the markedly different responses of ethnic Russians and "ethnic Muslims" to economic "shocks without therapy." Extreme atomization and polarization among ethnic Russians, particularly in big cities, with the breakdown of families and social networks under the influence of poverty and wealth, contrasted with the sustainability of Muslim ethnic communities. Put in adverse conditions, minorities were able to minimize socioeconomic disparity and misery among themselves and maintain a system of mutual help and protection. This inevitably looked like a conspiracy to some ethnic Russians who were in the majority but clearly failing to organize themselves in defense of their interests. And Russia's power elite played on this paranoia in times of dire crisis, diverting popular bitterness and rage toward easy targets-most notably in fall of 1993, when parts of the lower strata were made to believe that the struggle between Boris Yeltsin and the parliament presided over by the Chechen-born Ruslan Khasbulatov, was really about saving Holy Russia from Caucasians (and Jews). This tried-and-tested approach was to be used again in similar circumstances, in the fall of 1999, to engineer a smooth succession within the Yeltsin political dynasty.

As a result, in the course of the 1990s, millions of people from the South-Muslims and non-Muslims alike-were relegated, without much distinction, to the newly discovered racial category of Russia's "Blacks"-literally, chornye. The category was further expanded to encompass Arab, African, and Afro-American expatriates in Russia. Chornye, without regard to religion or nationality, are subject to increasingly violent expressions of hatred and are often beaten to death by Russian skinheads, with a striking helplessness on the part of the authorities, who are always tough on the minorities themselves. (In fact, given the tight control exercised by "power agencies" and the virtual absence of spontaneous street politics in today's Russia, it is legitimate to ask whether gang attacks against southerners are not sanctioned from above.) And "ethnic Muslims" from regions farther to the north-Tatars and others-while not subject to the same kind of contempt or hostility, have been feeling marginalized by the heavily Eurocentric and Atlanticist hegemonic discourse of the late Gorbachev and most of the Yeltsin era (further intensified under Putin) that often grates on their ears with its crusading and colonial overtones. This "cultural warfare" has been different only in form from direct military confrontations in the Caucasus. And the end product has been similar: the spread of Islam and the intensification of religious sentiment. Its genesis has largely shaped the very notion of Russia's umma-a reactive and defensive sense of belonging to a victimized community, a feeling, however, that does not have much staying power and dissipates once the confrontation has peaked.

Problems of political representation and socioeconomic opportunity

The political status of Muslims in Russia has a fundamentally different historical basis than in most European countries or the United States: in Russia, Muslims have inhabited the country for many centuries. Yet with all its considerable tradition of confessional tolerance, until 1917 Russia was identified, by its rulers and subjects alike, as a Christian Orthodox empire. Under this mantle, it waged dozens of wars against the so-called infidels: first, against the Volga Tatars, then Turkey, Iran, Tatar Crimea, Central Asian khanates (Khiva, Bukhara, Qoqand), and, finally, the nineteenth-century Caucasian war against a multitude of ethnic groups-the longest of all, and the one that, in fact, was never brought to conclusion.

Just like every other imperial power, Russia played both a destructive and developmental role with its Muslim subjects and neighbors. Since the age of Catherine II (1762-96) and until very late, just before the 1917 revolution, the czars did not display religious intolerance or try to impose Christianity from above. In most cases, Muslim-populated areas were left to their ways of life and, in Central Asia, were governed by their traditional rulers. Saint Petersburg's shift toward ethnic Russian nationalism and clericalism in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century coincided with the Islamic cultural renaissance in the Volga region, which enabled some Muslims to play a significant role in the ensuing Russian revolutions. Soviet rule, along with the suppression of faith and forced mass migration, also fostered modern education, social mobility, and the preservation and development (and, occasionally, creation) of written culture among even the smallest ethnic groups of Russia's Muslims. Finally, Soviet rulers established regional and republican institutions of autonomy that were later used by local elites as vehicles for nation- and state-building on the ruins of the Soviet Union.

Ordinary "ethnic Muslims," while having no reasons for excessive devotion to the Russian and Soviet empires, were brutally hit by the collateral damage of the Soviet collapse. The "parade of sovereignties" of the early 1990s, while increasing the autonomy of local elites in the ethnically non-Russian units of the federation, at the same time deprived minorities of important channels of political representation and social mobility at the national level. This tectonic shift (typically obscured by incessant talk about the alleged religious causes of conflict) appears to be the main source of their grievances and a major factor of potential instability in the country.

In the USSR, ethnic representation was built into the institutional design of the "collegial leadership": leaders of key ethnic groups and strategically important federation units had reserved seats in the Central Committee and the Politburo of the Communist Party, and these were not merely pro forma positions. The dismantling of the collegial leadership and the transition to a presidential regime (with a parliament that was unable to exercise its powers and was soon deprived of most of them) implied that, from the minorities' standpoint, a system that had guaranteed the acknowledgement of their interests, even if in a nondemocratic way, was now replaced by an unrepresentative "tyranny of the majority." Since, under the Yeltsin Constitution, parliamentary representation has no bearing upon the formation of the government, the struggle for Duma seats does not make much sense for an ethnic and religious minority-except as a step toward infiltrating the "party of power," which can be done in more straightforward ways. In addition, the government itself is largely a management agency, as the bulk of the political power is vested in the presidential administration.

The perils of presidentialism that had been debated in the early 1990s in Western academia are nowhere more evident than in multiethnic and multiconfessional societies, where the winner-take-all institutional design systematically deprives sizable minorities of a stake in the political system. In Russia, this effect was reinforced by the lack of sensitivity, at best, on the part of both presidents Yeltsin and Putin. The last vestiges of institutionalized minority representation in the federal "executive branch" (which warrants quotation marks because it never accepted in practice the Western idea of the separation of powers) were discarded by Boris Yeltsin's decree, issued in December 1993 in the wake of the dissolution of parliament. The decree eliminated the provision according to which government heads of Russia's constituent republics counted ex officio as members of the federal cabinet. And it is a telling fact that over the last ten years (1992-2002), out of 154 ministers who were appointed by Yeltsin and Putin to seven successive cabinets, only three were drawn from among Muslims.

These latter repaid Moscow in kind at the polling stations, whenever it was safe or permissible to do so. This inclination toward protest voting is apparent even with results that are widely believed to have been doctored. (At times, the improbably high levels of progovernment vote in the most disloyal territories serve as the prime reason to suspect that the actual level of support might have been abysmally low.)

The overall picture is one of ethnic and political divisions reinforcing each other: Russia's "ethnic Muslims," in addition to being an ethnoconfessional and cultural minority, have also joined (together with some ethnically Russian regions) a quasi-permanent political minority, whose voting patterns in nationwide elections are persistently at odds with their political outcomes. However, the place of "ethnic Muslims" within this minority is also problematic: their support for opposition parties is not matched by an equivalent representation in their electoral slates. Thus, out of 33 "ethnic Muslim" members of the present Duma, only two got there on the Communist Party list, and not one was elected as a Yabloko candidate.¹² The likely reasons for such a disconnect, in each case, are the ethnic Russian and even Christian Orthodox slant in Gennady Zyuganov's pronouncements and the Eurocentric outlook of the Yabloko party. It is also easier to lobby on behalf of regional interests-the only useful activity in the constitutionally castrated parliament-by being a member of a progovernment faction. This gives a perverse incentive for the candidates from those regions, who always vote against these parties, to seek positions on their electoral lists or join them once elected to the Duma.

There is the point to be made-that political participation and representation for the Muslims may be just as important at the subnational level. Indeed, some of the "Muslim" republics, such as Bashkortostan, represent the worst examples of power abuse and political exclusion in Russia, while, in others, especially in the North Caucasus the democratic gains of the early '90s have been reversed. Yet, at the very least, from the present perspective the federal level should be given priority because the current asymmetry of power renders almost any lower-level democratic authority virtually impotent vis-à-vis Moscow, and because the "center" has so many opportunities to thwart democratization or destroy the democratic process at the lower level. The April 2002 presidential election in Ingushetia, where federal authorities weighed in heavily on the side of one candidate-an FSB officer-is the latest evidence of this power; parliamentary elections inDagestan, scheduled for June 2002, are likely to be the next.

On a larger scale, not only have Russia's minorities been denied a stake in federal politics but they have also been faced with the dismantling of Soviet-era institutional engines of social mobility that-not altogether unlike the US affirmative action-guaranteed them legal opportunities for advancement. The abrupt commercialization of higher education swept away, overnight, entrance quotas for the natsmeny (the Soviet oligarchy's pejorative abbreviation for "national minorities"), while socioeconomic and educational development at the regional level was deprived of sustained federal funding and in most cases was rolled back from the relatively high standards of the Soviet era. No wonder that, with most legal avenues of social mobility blocked, "ethnic Muslims" have been increasingly forced to rely upon their clans, shadow-economy networks, and the so-called ethnic mafias in major urban centers dominated by the Slavic majority.

Thus, Russia's "ethnic Muslims" are increasingly alienated by the persistent denial of political representation and social recognition at the nationwide level-that is, in the Moscow establishment and social circles. The existing asymmetry between the proportion of Russia's Muslims and their representation in the national elite breeds trouble by encouraging radicalism and the use of undemocratic means of political struggle. Their expressions of protest often have little to do with their religious identity-which for most of them is still very much in the making. It is, rather, vice versa: religious identity is discovered as a weapon and as an ideology of protest against exclusion, and for these purposes it occasionally has to be created from scratch. This applies even more to converts from "ethnically" non-Muslim populations, including ethnic Russians themselves.

Islamic conversion as a channel of protest

In recent years, the mainstream Russian media have carried more and more reports about the spread of Islam among ethnic Russians and other Slavs in particular, which seems paradoxical in light of recurrent bouts of semiofficial anti-Muslim propaganda. Newspapers note that the number of converts has been swelling, in particular among young people. A sizable number of converts live in Muslim-populated territories such as Tatarstan, and thus are directly exposed to the Islamic way of life. More remarkable, however, is the case of Karelia-the mostly Russian republic bordering on Finland-with no Tatars or Chechens to speak of.

ccording to reports in Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Obshchaya Gazeta, the Muslim community in Karelia was founded (in 1990) by an ethnic Russian and by 2001 allegedly comprised around 20,000 of Karelia's 772,000 residents, with 6,000 believers in the capital city of Petrozavodsk.¹⁴ It acquired its own imam-an Arab student appointed by the Islamic spiritual authorities of the European part of Russia-and campaigned for permission to build a mosque, in spite of threats from local Russian nationalists.¹⁵

Let us outline a few hypotheses about the key reasons for conversion. One is Russia's successive defeats in military ventures in Afghanistan and in Chechnya, which even in the mainstream Russian media were often carelessly (and quite improbably, for a thoroughly secularized country) portrayed as instances of a "clash of civilizations" between Christian Orthodoxy and Islam. In this context, the mobilizational capacity of Islamic culture has been widely discussed in the Russian media over the past decade. Yet another factor is the already mentioned example of Muslim communities inside Russia being able to survive and protect their members against harassment and the economic adversities caused by market reforms. Several media reports highlighted instances of Islamic conversion by Russians, hit by economic adversity or personal disaster, who found the local Muslim community as the last resort in the search for material and psychological assistance. Lastly, for some of the discontented strata of Russian society, siding with a threatened or oppressed minority is an essential manifestation of "Russian-ness." Some of these groups also saw behind the anti-Muslim campaigns the looming threat of future repression against minority cultural groups among ethnic Russians themselves.

Whatever the case, the expansion of Islam is clearly an unsettling phenomenon for most Russian observers and practitioners of cultural politics, for whom an undeniable link between ethnicity and religion has been a normative standard, an analytical framework, and a guide for political engineering. This deep unease is leading some of them to view the relationship between Christian Orthodoxy and Islam as akin to a zero-sum game. This impression is reinforced by such instances as the recent conversion of a onetime Christian Orthodox priest and public figure, Vyacheslav (nowadays Ali Vyacheslav) Polosin, who has himself turned into a missionary of Islam and its social teachings. Indeed, a sizable share of converts appears to be not just ethnic Slavs but spiritually disenchanted Orthodox Christians.¹⁶

Russian Orthodoxy enjoys special favors in Moscow not only as the majority faith (in fact, it is unclear whether Russian Orthodox believers actually constitute a majority of the country's population) but also because of the convenient character of its prevailing social message. This is a message of resignation and retreat from the world into a contemplative life of the soul. Suffering and martyrdom, while highly valued in Orthodoxy, are not geared toward explicit social purposes. In contrast, since its inception (which was tied inextricably to the state building led by Muhammad and his heirs, the caliphs), Islam has been a thoroughly social and political creed, orienting its followers toward worldly goals.

For the sake of fairness, it must be noted that the Christian Orthodox clergy does not seem worried by conversions, having a much more benign view of Islam than that of the Catholic Church (which is seen by the Moscow Patriarchate as its chief competitor) or of Judaism (viewed negatively by parts of the lower-ranking clergy). The spread of Islam creates more anxiety among some of the thoroughly secular Moscow elites who-justifiably- view conversions to a minority faith as a large-scale manifestation of ideological and political disloyalty to the system and the perceived excesses of Westernization. But the size of the Muslim community in Russia and the historical legitimacy of its presence (as well as the inherent privacy of the conversion procedure itself) preclude attempts to impose prohibitive legislation.

Russian Muslims in the wake of 9/11

The reaction of Russian Muslims to the terrorist strikes in the US, Western military actions in Afghanistan, and Russia's role in these events has been substantially differentiated. In some respects, such as the unanimous criticism of the 9/11 attacks, it was in tune with the general sentiment in Russia and in Western countries. Otherwise, especially as regards the denial of an alleged Muslim role in these events and the condemnation of the US-led war in Afghanistan, their response was akin to that of coreligionists in the Islamic world-and markedly at odds with the official Kremlin position.¹⁷ And the deceptive lack of Muslim political activities to follow up on their views was distinctly Russian: keeping one's rancor, however bitter, to oneself in the face of a clear asymmetry of power.

All Muslim organizations and individuals commenting on the events on September 11 condemned the attacks. Thus, Mufti Ravil Gainutdin, imam of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque and chief of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of European Russia-one of a handful of the most-prominent Muslims in Russia and close to the Moscow City authorities-viewed the strikes as an "inhuman, horrible crime before God and the people. . . . Even if the terrorists wanted to punish America for something, this was not permitted. If someone committed a sin toward you, find mercy and pardon him."¹⁸ He also explained that in Islam the notion of jihad could be applied only to the defense of one's own territory, not to an attack against others.¹⁹

The Council of Alims of Dagestan was the only known Islamic body in Russia to pass an official judgment-a fatwa-on bin Laden (October 9, 2001). The fatwa said that bin Laden's calls for a jihad were illegitimate, as jihad could be announced only by established theologians, from the Egyptian university al-Azhar, for example, or by an international body such as the Islamic World League. Bin Laden was not a properly recognized spiritual authority, therefore his appeals must be considered "a provocation." It should be noted that Dagestani Muslims mostly belong to Sufi orders that are strongly hostile to bin Laden's Salafi version of Islam and most vehemently resisted the Chechen Salafis' incursion into Dagestan in 1999.

As underscored by Sheikh Talgat Tajuddin, chairman of the Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Russia and European CIS Countries, based in Ufa-the longest-serving, Soviet-era Muslim official and a rival of Gainutdin-disbelief about Muslim participation in the attacks has been widespread. Some speculated that the attacks may have involved a conspiracy among non-Muslims within the US (a view also espoused by some Western observers from left to right, and by overwhelming majorities in all Muslim countries). Thus, Matem al-Janabi, an established theologian and professor at the Russian University of People's Friendship (formerly, Patrice Lumumba Institute), said that the theory about a potential relationship between the US "military-industrial complex" and "advocates of the nuclear missile defense" and terrorist attacks was "worth attention"; whatever the value of this theory, in his opinion, "the cause of the tragedy should be looked for inside the US."

It should be noted that Western evidence linking bin Laden to the terrorist strikes was never publicized nor subjected to detailed analysis in the Russian media. The resulting skepticism may have been reinforced by President Putin's statement saying that Russia did not need any US proof of bin Laden's involvement, since it was "obvious" to Russia's intelligence agencies.

The US relationship with bin Laden, dating back to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s was used as an argument to justify doubts about the truthfulness of the US government and media. Thus, Mahmut Vilitov, mufti of the Moscow City and Oblast, opined that "the US doesn't need bin Laden alive, lest he speak of the role of US intelligence agencies in supporting terrorist organizations in many countries and . . . of the funneling of his oil money through US banks."²⁰

In stark relief to the Kremlin's position, Western military actions in Afghanistan were viewed with apprehension by all the Muslims who had reacted negatively to the terrorist strikes, as well as by those who had remained silent. However, the arguments and intensity of the criticism varied. Moderate Dagestani mufti Ahmad Abdullaev said: "Terrorists deserve the highest punishment, but all Dagestani Muslims have been shocked by US actions in Afghanistan." The more radically minded Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of the Volga Region expressed "condemnation and outrage" over both the terrorist strikes and the bombings of Afghanistan, emphasizing the "deaths of civilians and children." The autonomous Supreme Spiritual Council of Bashkortostan, and the special conference of all "traditional" confessions in this republic organized by this Muslim authority, having condemned the Taliban, concluded that "nobody can justify terrorist strikes in the US nor the bombings of Afghanistan."2121 Mufti Talgat Tadjuddin said: "I condemn the bombings not just as a Muslim and a mufti but also as a human being."2222 Elsewhere, he also expressed concerns similar to those that were widespread in Russia during the NATO operation against Yugoslavia: "What if bin Laden and other terrorists get into Chechnya? Would the US bomb Chechnya or position its army to encircle the Russian South?"²³

Fear of US motives was shared by other Muslim authorities. The Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of the Volga Region, based in Saratov, saw behind US military action its "imperial claims, with a pretense to represent the opinion of the global community." It was committing "aggression against the whole people" of Afghanistan: "a group of states, under the cover of global justice, wants to use the right of force and subjugate the entire world." The statement concluded that US policy deserved "decisive condemnation by the international community." Said the chief of this body, young Mufti Mukaddas Bibarsov (formerly known in the region as one of the most active democrats in the early 1990s): "Under the smokescreen of the antiterrorist struggle the gendarme of the world and its Western allies are conducting the destruction of the peaceful population and the repartition of the globe."

The war's implications for Russia and Putin's policies

Despite the rhetoric, the responses of these organizations and individuals were driven less by concerns about unfolding events in the US or in Afghanistan than by worry about the domestic implications of the war and the effects on the position of the Muslim minority. Said Sheikh Nafigulla Ashirov, head of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of the Asian Part of Russia, based in Tobolsk: "Attacks in the US were immediately echoed in Russia by personal and apartment searches, raids on cultural and publishing centers. . . . We are always under suspicion."²⁴ He deplored the "Islamophobia" widespread in the Russian media and cited the fears of "mass persecutions."²⁵ Tadjuddin quoted instances of harassment against Turks in cities such as Astrakhan, Rostov, Yekaterinburg.²⁶"The Moscow police are humiliating people who look like Muslims . . . they are searching their pockets," said Mufti Vilitov of Moscow City and Oblast.²⁷ Niyazov complained that "an unprecedented campaign against the Muslims" started in Russia "from the very first minutes after the [US] tragedy."²⁸ Polosin observed that "even after the Moscow blasts [of 1999] there was no such anti-Islamic hysteria."²⁹ It is worth noting that a number of non-Muslim politicians from the right and left-from Sergei Kovalyov to Gennady Zyuganov-concurred in warning about the growing anti-Muslim trends in Russia.

Some of the anti-Muslim pronouncements were indeed rabid. Interestingly, their sources could often be traced to the mouthpieces of export oil companies, some of which had a strong animus toward OPEC countries. One example of systematic anti-Muslim propaganda was the website www.rusenergy.com (for example, the article by Ilya Gribanov, "Islamic Factor in the Formation of Oil Markets"³⁰).

It is worth noting that these trends were not endorsed or aggravated by senior figures of the Orthodox Church. Indeed, some Orthodox clerics took a rather sophisticated position on these issues. Thus, Cyrill, the metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, objected to the idea of a religious conflict on the grounds that "contemporary Western civilization can be considered Christian only by a big stretch," as it is dominated by "power, money, and the search for comfort. . . . There is actually a conflict between the religious and the secular." In his opinion, there is a need to "reconstruct the world order on the basis of equal distribution of power among all parts of the population of the globe, the bearers of different worldviews and cultures. This system should provide an appropriate place for Western liberalism, Christianity, Islam, other traditions, even if some of them are viewed by somebody as being outside of the 'world civilization.'"³¹ Patriarch Alexis II himself urged the public not to confound terrorism with Islam.

The beginning of Western military actions heightened tensions even further. An anti-Western rally was held in Kazan on October 15, with about 1,500 participants, where calls for independence from Russia were also heard, and a number of Tatars expressed their desire to fight the US in Afghanistan. Kazan is, of course, de facto capital of Russia's minorities and the nexus of its multiethnic and multiconfessional dimensions. But also, in a largely secular city, this event was arguably an expression of ethnocultural rather than religious sentiment and a response to racist trends in the country rather than a display of Islamic solidarity per se. Given the tight political control exercised by Tatarstan president Mintimer Shaimiev, it is hardly believable that such a gathering could take place without his knowledge. The Berezovsky-controlled Nezavisimaya Gazeta, which had for a long time been hostile to Shaimiev, sounded the alarm about the existence of "several tens of thousands of Wahhabis in Russia" who "could attempt to seize power in such a republic as Tatarstan" unless the authorities "intervene in the Muslim affairs."³² (TV-6, another Berezovsky outlet, as well as the Berezovsky-influenced national channel ORT also aired a number of broadcasts that were viewed as highly provocative by Russia's Muslims.) About the same time, a Duma deputy from Chubais's Union of Right Forces called upon law enforcement agencies to investigate all Russian Muslims for potential contacts with bin Laden.

Some Muslim authorities apparently saw an opportunity to advance their causes in the long-standing rivalries within the Russian umma. Thus, the mufti of the Regional Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Yekaterinburg and the Sverdlovsk Oblast, who had been fighting over followers with the Tobolsk-based Sheikh Nafigulla Ashirov, accused the latter of fostering Islamic radicalism and claimed that up to 2,000 Muslims in the region, who were Ashirov's followers, were ready to go to war in Afghanistan against the Americans. (In line with the general spirit of argument these days in Russia, he cited as supposed evidence of their radicalism the fact that they had received funding from "international Islamic centers"-even though it is widely accepted that most Muslim organizations in Russia, at least until recently, greatly depended on foreign subsidies.)

The Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of the Volga Region was the only official Islamic authority directly to link interconfessional tensions in Russia with the policies of the Bush administration. In its statement of November 3, 2001, it accused "puppeteers from overseas" of trying to foster conflict among religions in Russia and asserted that "only a strong Slavo-Turkic, Islamic-Christian Russia can become a barrier to the Western expansion against the entire world." The organization also was the only one to point at what many "ethnic Muslims" see as the root cause of their predicament: "The fact that the Muslims cannot speak out today in defense of their interests is a consequence of ruinous events of ten years ago in the space of the present-day CIS" (in other words, the dismantling of the Union).
By late fall, however, passions had abated. A clear sign was the decision of Russia's Council of Muftis (led by Gainutdin) to cancel an antiwar rally planned in Moscow for November 17 as a response to earlier skinhead riots. Yet the diffusion of tensions was due not to developments in Afghanistan or some change of heart among Russia's Muslims but, more likely, to shifts in high-level politics.

The most important of these for Russian Muslims were some behind-the-scenes bargains struck during the formation of the pro-Putin megaparty, United Russia. Shaimiev and his close ally Luzhkov played a key if subordinate role in the creation of this party. Shaimiev is, of course, the most senior, influential, and cautious politician associated with Islam and the Turkic minorities. In 1997, he defied Moscow's hard-line course and the federal law on religions (which he often criticizes in the press³³). At the same time, he has been encouraging the revival of Jadidism-the reformist tradition that he also calls "Euro-Islam"-and he hopes to reconcile it with the prevailing Westernizing and Atlanticist current of Putin's policies.

It appears that certain promises, including greater cultural tolerance at the official level, were built into this alliance of recent electoral rivals. Some of these promises may have involved the authorities' obligation to differentiate between domestic minorities-including religions that are considered "traditional" to Russia-and foreigners. Indirect evidence of this was the peculiar character of skinhead gang violence in Moscow on October 30: gangs attacked Afghan émigrés and killed citizens of several southern countries but conspicuously did not hit at Moscow's "ethnic Muslims"; some observers believe that they were not given license "from above" to do so.

Whether under the impact of this realignment, or for other reasons, the highest federal-level politicians, including Putin, Kirienko, and others, recently praised, in Kirienko's words, the "peaceful coexistence" of religions and cultures in Russia.³⁴ "Peaceful coexistence" is, of course, a Soviet term used under Nikita Khrushchev to describe a temporary, transitional solution to the ultimately antagonistic relationship between the capitalist and the socialist "camps." But the cognitive ambiguity associated with this historical image and phrase-potentially projecting a Cold War, bipolar logic onto the highly asymmetric relations with a domestic minority-seems to escape Moscow officials who still conceive of their job in terms of the classical Bolshevik question: Kto kogo (who prevails over whom)?

Preliminary conclusions

Russia's Muslim community has a higher capacity to act cohesively when provoked by circumstances than almost all other comparable segments and units of Russian society. It has shown its distinctive political position in the country by the consistency of its voting patterns and by considerable solidarity in its response to the post-9/11 developments. The reverse side of the coin is that the community presents the handiest target for those searching about for an image of the enemy inside the country (strikingly similar to the role often played by Jews in prerevolutionary and, to an extent, Soviet Russia). And in this context, paradoxically, the Muslim community is even weaker-in the sense of being more vulnerable to repression-than the rest of society, given the highly asymmetrical relationship between the Kremlin and everybody else. Which means that passive support or mere acquiescence on the part of Russian society in general is enough for a hard-line government to marginalize politically disloyal Muslims and their leaders, especially in light of their current isolation from international-in other words, mostly Western-public opinion.

Both sides understand this fairly well, which explains the consistently low profile of Muslim organizations and leaders with regard to all political issues and debates that are not vitally important to them. It also helps to account for the lack of sustained campaigning against the Chechnya war; most Russian Muslims (and other Russians as well) have accepted that, given the abyss of alienation that separates government from society and incapacitates government initiatives, some purported "internal" enemy is a must if the authorities are to show themselves as "strong" and "effective" in the exercise of their power. And once this was understood, the Chechens were quietly delivered to Moscow hard-liners on the shaky assumption that everybody else will be spared from the worst, at least for the foreseeable future.

It is equally clear, however, that this solution is very costly for Russian society as a whole, in moral and material terms, and that over the long run it cannot be sustained. Yury Lotman, Russia's leading structuralist thinker, once described it as a "culture of explosion." This image fits Russia in political terms as well, with its proclivity to release deeply hidden or suppressed social forces and grievances. Russian Muslims, positioned as they are in the country's strategically vulnerable and pivotal territories, if systematically excluded from government, the social elite, and from decision-making processes, may eventually become a destructive force in one such future explosion. A constructive alternative would be to foster, by means of constitutional and legal reforms, democratic channels of political representation and social mobility for Russia's Muslims. They should also be given their legitimate voice in Russia's debate over its national identity and foreign policy orientation. The Western public's attention to and support for this development would help to forestall Russia's transformation into a zone of engineered conflict between Islam and the West. That the West could be inadvertently drawn into such a conflict by self-styled agents of a top-down Westernization, acting on the West's behalf but in their own interests, is a dangerous prospect, and one that suggests the need for greater attention to these issues both within Russia and beyond.

Dmitri Glinski is a senior associate at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. The original version of this article was presented at a seminar of the Project on Eurasian Security at the Russian and Eurasian Department of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. The author is grateful to Bruce Parrott, Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, and the seminar's participants, as well as to Georgi Derluguian, for their comments, some of which are reflected in this article.

NOTES

1. It certainly is a contradictio in adiecto from the point of view of Islam itself, which (like Catholicism and the original Eastern Orthodoxy, but unlike the Russian Orthodox Church today) was never bounded by nationality or ethnicity.
2. Aleksei Malashenko, Islamskie orientiry Severnogo Kavkaza (Moscow: Carnegie Moscow Center, 2001), p. 16.
3. Ravil Gainutdin, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, April 22, 1994.
4. It will not change, however, Muslims' position as by far the largest minority in the country. Of other world religions, the Roman Catholic Church and Judaism each claim less than a million followers in Russia.
5. Mikhail Tulsky, "Islam v neislamskom mire," Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 29, 2001.
6. A similar observation about Russian politics was made in an entirely different context by Michael Urban.
7. Malashenko, Islamskie orientiry, p. 8.
8. Alexandre Bennigsen, "Un mouvement populaire au Caucase à XVIIIe siècle," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique (April-June 1964); M.M. Bliev and V.V. Degoev, Kavkazskaya voina (Moscow: Roset, 1994).
9. The idea of an Islamic state was embraced by Dudaev only in November 1994, when the military conflict with Moscow was already unfolding. See John B. Dunlop, Russia Confronts Chechnya: Roots of a Separatist Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 148-49. This is reinforced by observations of Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 355-64.
10. Polling data on interethnic and interconfessional relations are unsystematic (both in terms of regularity and the phrasing of questions) and not entirely reliable. In particular, there are few bodies of data on the period before 1993-94 that, in the author's view, were critical years in terms of the "trickle down" process. Published VTsIOM data indicate negative attitudes to key North Caucasian ethnicities (Azeris and Chechens) to be consistently higher than for any other group except the Roma. Yet they cross the 50 percent threshold only in the case of Chechens and precisely between 1993 and 1995. Obshchestvennoe mnenie-2000: po materialism issledovanii (Moscow, 2000, p. 90.
11. On this, see Peter Reddaway and Dimitri Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (Washington, DC:USIPPress, 2001), esp. pp 168-69, 361-63, and 471-72.
12. The semiopposition Fatherland-All Russia, which brought the largest number of "ethnic Muslims" into the present Duma (six, all told), has since been forced to join the pro-Putin coalition.
13. See Yevgenia Borisova, "Baby Boom or Dead Souls?" and other articles, Moscow Times, September 9, 2000. One should keep in mind, however, these territories' limited share of the nationwide pool of voters-8.66 million, or 7.9 percent of the total, as of 2000. Their voting power is further weakened by the continuing economic migration, primarily to Moscow, where ethnic minorities are less likely to vote than in their home territories. Thus, Moscow's own share of Russia's electorate is constantly swelling at the expense of the rest of the country. As of 2000, Moscow City and oblast taken together comprised 12.3 million, or 11.3 percent of Russia's electorate.
14. See, for example, Bakhtiyar Akhmedzhanov, "Namaz po russki," Obshchaya Gazeta, February 8, 2001, at www.og.ru/archive/2001/06/mat/rep1.shtml.
15. The website of the community (Islami Karjalassa) is located at www.sampo.ru/~islam.
16. A remarkable firsthand story of such a conversion (from the quintessentially Eurocentric city of Saint Petersburg) places emphasis on the disaffection with the Orthodox clergy as the self-anointed intermediary between humans and God. However, the regained sense of a grassroots community appears to be no less important:"I finally . . . felt something that had been missing so much: a feeling of brotherhood, participation in my life, and, most importantly, sincerity in human relations. After this, I had no more doubts. . . ." Islam Yablokov, "Moi put v Islam," at muslim.by.ru/new.ru_muslim.htm.
17. However, unlike most of the Muslim countries, the Russian Muslim authorities' attitude toward bin Laden and al-Qaeda have also been sharply negative.
18. Profil, October 8, 2001.This also helps explain the reference to jihad by moderates in Chechnya, including Aslan Maskhadov, and elsewhere. The term itself has a much broader spiritual meaning than its usual non-Muslim interpretations and is not necessarily related to military activities or the use of force.
19. Komsomolskaia Pravda, September 19, 2001.
20. Vremya Novostei, October 12, 2001.
21. Islam.ru, October 16, 2001.
22. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, October 11, 2001.
23. Profil, October 8, 2001.
24. Argumenty i Fakty, September 26, 2001.
25. Agence France Presse, September 22, 2001.
26. Nezavisimaya Gazeta, October 10, 2001.
27. Vremya Novostei, October 12, 2001.
28. Agence France Presse, September 29, 2001.
29. Agence France Presse, September 22, 2001.
30. www.rusenergy.com/politics/a27092001.htm.
31. See Komsomolskaya Pravda, September 19, 2001.
32. Mikhail Tulsky, quoted in "Schism Opens Door To Islamic Extremists," Agence France Presse, October 16, 2001.
33. See, for example, Izvestiya, October 17, 2001.
34. Islam.ru, December 21, 2001.