Window on Eurasia

Russia’s Muslims Urged to Unite to Block Orthodox Offensive

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 30, 2006 – Russia’s Muslims must come together in a single institution in order to be in a position to block Orthodox Church’s unconstitutional and potentially extremely dangerous efforts to dominate the country’s public schools, its military and security services, and its penal institutions, according to the mufti in Krasnoyarsk kray.

In an interview on the website of the Nizhniy Novgorod Muslim Spiritual
Directorate (MSD) this week, Gayaz-Khazarat Fatkullin argued that
unless Muslims overcome their internal divisions and passivity, the Orthodox
Church will put the country on the path toward “the fusion of Church
and State.”

Not only would that return to the tsarist past be “extremely
undesirable,” Fatkullin said, but “any wise individual must
recognize the dangers” inherent in the introduction of religious
training in the schools and the domination by a single faith of the
military and prisons
[http://www.islamnn.ru/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1230].

A graduate of a medressah in Nizhniy Novgorod and Islamic universities
in Kazan and Moscow, Fatkullin oversees the 150,000-strong Muslim
community in Krasnoyarsk. Managing that group is no easy task because
it consists of more tha 30 different ethnic groups and because not all the
parishes there defer to his MSD.

As a result, Fatkullin is one of the most enthusiastic backers of the
idea that Muslims in Russia must form a single MSD with a single mufti
at its head. And he repeats the now standard arguments in favor of such
steps: They would contribute to the unity of the umma, and they would
allow it to have a greater voice in the state.

As a first step in that process, Fatkullin backs the creation of
Federation-wide Council of the Ulema that the Nizhniy Novgorod MSD has
been pushing. The Krasnoyarsk mufti has close ties to that MSD: his
wife, Liliya Arifulina, used to head its department of information and
propaganda.

But that alone will not be enough to stop the Orthodox offensive,
Fatkullin argued. So far, the Orthodox Church in his region has not
been able to introduce its special religious course in the schools in
Krasnoyarsk, although the Patriarch announced today it would do so in
15 regions this fall, but it has assumed a predominant position in the
armed forces and in the region’s prison system.

“When the leadership of military units or jails is inclined so to
speak toward ‘a unipolar direction,’ it pursues a
‘mono-religious’ policy” that is already producing “the most
negative fruit.” Indeed, he added, these actions by the Orthodox and
their allies in these institutions are generating conflicts.

And when that happens, he continued, these officials then but only then
call in representatives of the Muslim community in order to calm things
down. If the Muslim community were more organized and active, he said,
it would be consulting with these groups before problems arise rather
than only after they do so.

But Fatkullin is concerned not only about the absence of unity among
Russia’s Muslims. He suggested many problems arise from the fact that the country’s “ethnic Muslims” suffer from the same kind of
“passivity” that affects much of the Russian Federation populatin
and represents “a disease” that they have not been able to
overcome.

“Many people” in Russia, he said, “remember too sharply the
former times, are afraid to speak out, and actively support their positions.
And that means that social organizations are needed” to defend the
interests of Russian citizens in general and Muslims in particular.

One reason that this issue is now especially topical in Krasnoyarsk,
Fatkullin argued, is the large number of immigrants. There are now more
immigrants in that kray than there are in Nizhniy Novgorod, he said,
but in both places, “up to now there is no completely adequate
mechanisms” for dealing with them.

And what is worse, he concluded, is that in the absence of organization
and in the face of public passivity, Russian citizens and Muslims among
them have not “even recognized it” as a real problem. That reality,
he suggested, is something that makes this issue “even more
dangerous.”

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