Author: Susan B. Glasser
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: December 23, 2002
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27146-2002Dec22.html
Fear, Insecurity Rise Since Theater
Siege; 'We Are the New Jews,' Imam Says
The echo of Moscow's theater siege
reverberated loudly in the unheated, unfinished mosque where Zvenigorod's
500 Muslims come to pray. Two Central Asian men, sitting here wrapped in
coats against the winter chill, heard it in the hatred of the town drunks
and the scorn of the militia, which confiscated their passports and vowed
to kick them out of the country.
It didn't matter that they had nothing
to do with the Chechen guerrillas who stormed the theater in October, that
they barely know how to stumble through their own prayers to Allah, much
less embrace the brand of militant Islam adopted by terrorist groups waging
war on the West. They, too, were the enemy.
"When we say we are Muslim, they
humiliate us," said Rustam, a 45-year-old laborer from Tajikistan, who
is afraid to give his last name because the local police detained him after
the theater incident and demanded that he pay 500 rubles or leave the country.
Yakub Valiullin, the imam who has
struggled to build this tiny outpost of Islam on the outskirts of the Moscow
region, nodded in sad agreement. After the theater siege, he found himself
answering questions from the Federal Security Service (FSB) about the Muslims
in his congregation. Even now, he is guarding these two Central Asian men,
hoping to stop their deportation. "They say, 'You Muslims kill people,'
" he said.
"They equate all Muslims with terrorists."
Such "Islamophobia," as it has become
known here in Russia, has divided and overwhelmed what by the numbers should
be the country's most influential minority. Muslims are the largest religious
group in Russia after the Russian Orthodox and have a centuries-long tradition
here. Technically, they are more numerous and more free than ever in their
history in Russia, and after 70 years of state- sponsored atheism there
has been a Muslim renaissance in the last decade, with a major program
of mosque-building and thousands rediscovering the rituals of their grandparents'
generation.
But along with revival has come
insecurity for Zvenigorod's Muslims -- and many others among Russia's estimated
20 million followers of Islam -- who say they are experiencing a rebirth
of the fear they hoped they had left behind with the Soviet past. This
fear has flared repeatedly in the post-Soviet decade, ebbing and flowing
with Russia's war against the predominantly Muslim breakaway republic of
Chechnya, and returning, stronger than ever, after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks against the United States and the Moscow theater siege.
"These events have only strengthened
the hand of the large group in Russian society who were already hostile
to Islam and considered Islam to be the ideology of terrorism," said Robert
Landa, a professor at Moscow's Institute of Oriental Studies.
Sometimes, the fear comes as a tangible
threat, such as the imminent expulsion faced by the two Central Asian construction
workers in retaliation for a terrorist act they are linked to only by their
religion. Just as often, it is an abstract anxiety, the feeling that at
any moment the authorities can close down the mosque.
"It's very hard for Muslims to live
here now," said Valiullin. "In Russia we have this problem -- we are always
looking for an enemy. It used to be the Jews, now they have all gone to
Israel. So the politicians see the Muslims -- we are poor, we have no power.
Instead of Jews, they attack Muslims. They incite the crowd. 'Beat the
Muslims!' We are the new Jews."
Russia's Islamophobia has taken
on many forms, from violence, like the skinhead rampage in a crowded Moscow
market last year allegedly aimed at "persons of Muslim nationality," to
newspapers that run pictures of local Muslim leaders next to photographs
of Osama bin Laden. Human rights groups have reported an upsurge in hate
crimes throughout Russia, some related to ethnicity, others connected more
directly with the presumed Islamic heritage of the victim.
President Vladimir Putin has tried
to speak judiciously, often repeating that Islam is a peaceful religion
not synonymous with terrorism. But at times he has used inflammatory rhetoric,
suggesting that the conflict in Chechnya is part of a broader war between
Islam and Christianity. "If you are a Christian, you are in danger," he
told a French reporter last month, before suggesting to the reporter that
he be circumcised.
More than anything else, a single
word -- much invoked, much misunderstood -- has come to symbolize what
Muslim leaders say is the demonization of their religion here.
It is "Wahhabism," which technically
refers to the austere form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. In Russia,
where a moderate brand of Sunni Islam has been the traditional faith, the
alleged importation of Wahhabism has come to mean something akin to "terrorism,"
and is the most damaging charge one can hurl against a religious Muslim
here short of accusing him of treason.
The Chechen rebels are regularly
accused of Wahhabism, and Russian news media routinely raise the alarm,
as the news agency Interfax did the other day with a story headlined: "Russia
sees rise of Wahhabism." The FSB often confiscates Islamic religious material
-- even copies of the Koran -- as seditious "Wahhabite" literature, according
to interviews with a half-dozen Muslim clerics who separately said they
had witnessed such incidents.
And the term has become a convenient
rubric applied to Muslims whose work offends authorities. Farid Nugumanov,
for one, found himself under investigation by the FSB for his alleged Wahhabite
sympathies. Nugumanov, a journalist in the Orenburg region, had published
an article criticizing the decision to build an Orthodox church next to
the Muslim cemetery in his majority-Muslim village. He not only lost the
job he had held for 16 years, but also found himself publicly labeled "the
Wahhabi."
"That's the way it goes in our region
-- whoever does not support the authorities is a Wahhabi," he said. "Just
like in Stalin's times, we are all considered 'suspicious' now just for
going to the mosque."
For Russia's Muslim leaders, such
incidents offer proof of religiously motivated bias. "Why must we use religious
terminology like Wahhabism? If someone is a terrorist, call it terrorism.
But why call him a Wahhabite? We don't call Irish terrorists Christians.
They're just terrorists," said Nafigulla Ashirov, the chief mufti for the
Asian part of Russia.
Ashirov has a fat file of his press
clippings. One shows his picture next to bin Laden's. Another, in the prominent
newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, calls him "an accomplice of terrorism."
Ashirov courted controversy by criticizing last year's U.S.-led war to
overturn the strict Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but he insisted he is
no Wahhabi.
"This is a specific policy in Russia
working here to discredit Islam," Ashirov said. "Today there is no uniting
ideology like communism, so they have painted a new enemy, Islam. It is
not safe for Muslims to be in Russia today."
But it is not just unbelievers wielding
the term "Wahhabite" as a weapon against religious Muslims.
A long-running feud between the
two top Muslim spiritual leaders in the country has contributed as much
as anything to the public concern about Wahhabism. Talgat Tadzhuddin is
a veteran of the Soviet-era religious bureaucracy, presiding over the Central
Spiritual Directorate of Muslims from his headquarters in the Muslim region
of Bashkortostan. Ravil Gainutdin leads the rival, Moscow-based Council
of Muftis, a post-Soviet group now claiming the adherence of a majority
of Muslim congregations.
Each uses the charge of "Wahhabism"
to undermine the other.
"Some people are trying to represent
this as a standoff between clerics and a struggle for power and property
and funds," Tadzhuddin said. "But we can't accept this other group's support
of spreading Wahhabism in our country. They are spreading religious extremism,
fanaticism, blood and tears."
Just days ago, Tadzhuddin gathered
dozens of his adherents for a conference where they warned darkly that
there are already more than 100,000 Wahhabites in Russia, a "heretical"
group aided by his rival, Gainutdin. The claim, entirely unsubstantiated,
made national news.
For his part, Gainutdin is perhaps
best known for holding a news conference after Sept. 11, 2001, where he
brandished a picture of Tadzhuddin standing next to bin Laden's brother.
He failed to mention that the meeting had taken place a dozen years ago
as part of an official Saudi delegation to Russia.
"I know for a fact he has received
thousands of dollars from those he now calls Wahhabites," Gainutdin said.
"When he calls me a Wahhabite, he knows well this is not true. It's his
defense to keep himself at the top of Islam in Russia."
Either way, the feud has served
as a convenient method of ensuring that Russia's Muslims do not secure
the political clout that their numbers would seem to warrant. Both sides
suggest that a very familiar Soviet-era tactic has been employed to fuel
the rivalry.
"This division is in the interests
of the state," Gainutdin said. "There are people in the government who
are not interested in Muslim unification, because 20 million people is
a whole country and a very serious force. So of course they are afraid
of a united Muslim community. It's useful to divide and rule."
Here in tiny Zvenigorod, where Muslims
have coexisted with their Russian Orthodox neighbors since 1497, the power
plays of leaders might not mean much in a mosque without heat, but the
strong hand of the government routinely reaches inside the modest red-brick
building.
Valiullin, the imam, said the FSB
often comes to demand information, asking questions that themselves are
revealing about the prevailing attitude toward Islam.
"They want to know if I am hiding
guns here," he said, gesturing to the two spartan rooms that constitute
the mosque he has been building since 1999. "They ask me, 'Are you teaching
terrorism in the mosque?' "
Often, Valiullin said, the Muslims
here compare today's problems to the different sort of fear that governed
them in Soviet times. Valiullin's 87-year-old mother, Zainab, is a living
connection to the old kind of fear, the kind that destroyed mosques and
drove prayers underground.
As a child, she witnessed the Communists
torching the mosque where her forefathers had prayed. "They threw the religious
books into the river. My father picked them up out of the water -- a whole
cart full of them," she recalled. He hid them in their attic.
Today's problems are less extreme.
But, said Valiullin, "We are still afraid. It can take only five minutes
to shut down this congregation. They can plant drugs here, or 'terrorist'
literature. They can call us Wahhabites, and solve the problem of Islam
in Russia in this very simple way."
