Window on Eurasia

Russian Officials, Muslim Leaders to Boost Ties in North Caucasus

Paul Goble

Vienna, July 24, 2006 – The Coordinating Center of Muslims of the North Caucasus – the only Muslim body in the Russian Federation explicitly created to fight extremism – has announced plans to expand the level and intensity of its cooperation with Russian officials in the Southern Federal District.

But although Russian officials, including Dmitriy Kozak, the
Presidential plenopotentiary head of the SFD, welcomed this step, it
remains uncertain whether the steps outlined last week will be fully
realized or will in fact serve the interests of both -- as opposed to
only one -- of these two uneasy partners.

Last week, Mufti Ismail Berdiyev* said that his
group plans to move its main office from Moscow to one of the cities of
the North Caucasus and to open one or two universities to train
mullahs, steps he said Kozak had indicated Moscow would support
[http://portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=monitor&id=8076].

By relocating its bureaucracy to the region whose Muslim communities it
attempts to oversee, the Coordinating Center will be in a better
position to ensure that traditional Islam is promoted there, Berdiyev*
said. And by opening two universities, one for Shafei and the other for
Hannafi Muslims, it will further promote that goal.

But even if Russian officials are pleased by the prospect of such
support for “traditional” against radical Islamic groups, they may
be less than pleased by what Berdiyev and his colleagues in the Center
in fact plan to do as they make use of the power of the Russian state
to promote their religious causes.

On the one hand, as Berdiyev himself made clear, he and other Muslim
leaders are very unhappy with the fact that in many Russian regions,
officials are openly promoting Orthodox Christianity by erecting
crosses on roadsides and by helping the Patriarchate build churches while
blocking the contruction of mosques.

Berdiyev said that he plans to speak out even more forcefully against
such practices, since “population points do not have a religious
definition.” Building churches is fine, he said, because “a
sincerely believing good Christian is better than a poor Muslim.”

“But one ought not to forget that we live in a region with a
religiously mixed population.” And in such a location, any tilt by
the authorities toward one faith against another not only has religious but
political consequences that may prove dangerous for the state.

And on the other hand, the fact that Berdiyev and his Council want to
create two universities to reflect the two trends of Sunni Islam that
dominate the Northern Caucasus is also likely to present Moscow’s
official representatives in the region with some new challenges.

Muslims in the Northern Caucasus and especially the Shafei of Daghestan
have always been more insistent in defending their faith than have
those in Tatarstan and elsewhere. Indeed, even in Soviet times, the Muslim
Spiritual Directorate (MSD) for the Northern Caucasus regularly
condemned the other MSDs of the USSR for shortcomings.

Creating a university just for this legal school of Sunni Islam could
exacerbate the situation. While some Russian officials may calculate
that its operation would immunize the Muslims of the region against
more radical trends, much as the injection of dead viruses does to protect
people from physical disease, these officials may find that Shafei
Islam is anything but dead and that such an institution may have different
consequences.

Since the Coordinating Council was created in the late 1990s to bring
some order to the seven MSDs that emerged across the North Caucasus in
the wake of the collapse of the Soviet MSD for the Northern Caucasus
that had been based in Makhachkala, it has presented continuing
problems for Moscow.

But now, at least some officials in the SFD appear to have decided that
they have no choice but to place their bets on this Council and its
leader, Berdiyev, a 52-year-old Muslim trained in Tashkent and at Al
Azhar in Cairo, lest the Muslim population of this region move ever
further out from under Moscow’s control than it already has.

*The head of the Coordinating Council of Muslims of the North Caucasus is Magomed-Khadzhi Albogachiyev and not Mufti Berdiyev. Berdiyev was misidentified by the Russian sources.

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