Window on Eurasia

Russia’s Muslims Need to Open ‘Gates of Interpretation’ on Organizational Issues

 

Paul Goble

Vienna, August 31, 2006 – Like their fellow believers elsewhere, Russia’s Muslims have no need to open “the gates of interpretation” (“ijtihad”) on fundamental questions of faith, according to a leading Islamic commentator. But if they are to be true to their beliefs, they must reopen those gates on organizational and communications questions.

In an introduction to what is billed as a major study of how Russia’s
umma should develop, Ruslan Kurakhvi, a writer at the Moscow Center of
Humanitarian Research, argues that Russia’s Muslims were “not
prepared” organizationally for the post-communist world
[http://www.ansar.ru/arhives/06.08.29left.html].

As a result, he argues, the growth of Islam in the Russian Federation
since 1991 has been not only “chaotic” and “inconsistent” but
has often “served the interests of a great multitude of
narrowly-thinking groups and in no way the interests of the effective
development of the Islamic project in Russia.”

There have been three reasons for this, he suggests. First, most
Muslims are reluctant to engage in any form of ijtihad, whose “gates” were
said to have been closed with the formation of the four Sunni legal
schools a millenium ago, even on questions far removed from the basic
doctrine of Islam where it would be appropriate.

That reluctance to change anything not only has discouraged those who
believe that Islam can and must develop organizationally to meet new
conditions but has been cleverly exploited by those in charge of
existing Muslim organizations in order to maintain their personal
power, even at the expense of Islam.

Second, the Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs) that have multiplied
like mushrooms since 1991 are in fact a survival of tsarist and Soviet
times that have no theological basis. But more seriously, they are
bureaucratic and incapable of the rapid response to change needed if
Islam is to regain the initiative.

And third, the Islamic world and the international community in which
it finds itself have fundamentally changed: Islam is rapidly gaining
adherents. Its advocates in many places are exploiting the
information-technological revolution, and Islam now finds itself locked
in many conflicts with other centers of power.

On the territory of the Russian Federation, however, the adherents of
the MSD system and traditional Islam have been slow to take any of this
into account. Their opponents, followers of the radical Salafi trend,
however, have relied on new technologies and on a cell-like
organizational structure that have helped them to expand.

But instead of learning from these organizational innovations being
used by its opponents, the traditional Islamic leadership in Russia has
simply continued to denounce these groups for their very real
ideological errors – and thus acted “in the spirit of Soviet party
bodies” rather than Muslims interested in the spread of their faith.

To overcome this situation, Kurakhvi argues, Russia’s Muslims must
engage in what Joseph Schumpeter called a certain “creative
destruction.” They need to see that learning from the West on
organizational and communications questions does not necessarily entail
the opening of “the gates of interpretation” on key matters of
faith.

In addition to suggesting that the Muslim community of the Russian
Federation should be open to change on these issues and that it should
ask why the organizational approaches of the Salafi trend have been so
successful, Kurakhvi suggests that the umma should study the ideas of
Harvard’s Joseph Nye on “soft power.”

If they do, he argues, they will be better able to overcome the
opposition of their enemies outside the faith and the ignorance of many
within it -- and thereby put themselves in a position to advance Islam
without engaging in the kind of destructive and self-destructive
conflicts they sometimes find themselves in now.

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