Window on Eurasia

Russia’s Muslims Shift from Building Mosques to Training Mullahs

Paul Goble

Vienna, June 16, 2006 – Russia’s Muslims have built more than 7,000
mosques over the last 15 years, but many of them lack either a
congregation capable of supporting them or well-trained mullahs who can lead these communities. As a result, the country’s Muslim leaders are shifting their attention away from the construction of mosques to the training of mullahs.

In an interview posted online this week, Arslan Sadriyev, who works
with parishes for the Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) of European Russia outlined both the problems Russia’s Muslims now face and what his MSD and the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) plan to do about them
[https://ec.ut.ee/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.islam-info.ru/index.php?action=show%26req=news%26nid=1506].

According to Sadriyev, there are now more than 7,000 mosques in the
Russian Federation, but „the majority of them are empty” or even
„closed.” Sometimes, he continues, that is because they have been
built in the wrong place – wealthy Muslims sometimes put them up in
the place of their birth even if there is now Muslim community there.

Sometimes it is because „the majority of people who call themselves
Muslims today are far from Islam and its cultural traditions, moral
requirements, and obligations” which include not only attending a
mosque on a regular basis but also participating in the support of its
operations.

And sometimes, Sadriyev said, it is because the local mullah is
insufficiently well-trained and professional or because there is no
mullah at all especially in places with small communities who lack
either the resources or the will to provide the funding needed to
support a mullah.

Sadriyev reported that his MSD and the SMR have now developed a set of reforms intended to rectify the current situation. The first of these
focuses on ensuring that mullahs will be well-trained and well-paid,
something that he said unfortunately cannot be said about many of them.

„Everything depends on the professionalism of the imam,” he
continued. That depends on his training and support. And consequently,
„if you want to have a mosque and a literate imam in it, then you
have to pay for this.”

One way that Russia’s Muslim leaders hope to achieve this happy
outcome is to introduce a new system to pay for the training of mullahs
and imams. First of all, there will be some people who will be able to
pay their own way at the Moscow Islamic Institute or other schools.

Second, there will be those whose way will be paid by local communities
who will then expect the graduate mullah to return and serve them in
the future. And third, there will be a contract system under which the SMR will pay for a student’s education with the understanding that he
will then serve for three years in the mosque to which it will send him.

To make that last option attractive and to ensure that more graduates
will serve as mullahs, Sadriyev said, the SMR plans to commit itself to
ensuring that the newly-minted mullahs will make no less than 300 U.S.
dollars a month (approximately 7800 rubles), a far higher salary than
most mullahs in that country outside the major cities now receive.

As a first step toward that end, Sadriyev said, the SMR has taken a
decision to begin the obligatory re-qualification of all imams and
mullahs beginning in September of this year, a process that is expected
to weed out not only radicals but incompetent or even corrupt mullahs.

Moreover, the MSD has concluded that „each mosque must have at a
miniimum two religious leaders who half secondary professional
religious instruction and what would be better one with a higher religious education,” an arrangement that will require both more mullahs and more money.

„Prior to 1917,” Sadriyev noted, „a Muslim community was not
registered and did not have the right to build a mosque until it
formally provided guarantees that it had the ability to support both
the mullah and the religious facility itself.” Such an arrangement, he
suggested, was one to which Russia should return.

In addition to working to improve the training and support of mullahs,
the MSD and SMR are also working on a system that will require those
who hope to establish a mosque to commitment themselves not only to paying for construction and the salaries of mullahs but also to provide funds for more senior Muslim structures like themselves.

Sadriyev’s MSD and the SMR have concluded that „from now one local
religious organizations will have to pay every year five percent of
their annual budgets to those religious organizations which stand above
them,” such as the MSD and the SMR.

This last step is particularly critical in the immediate future,
Sadriyiev said. Muslim organizations in the Russian Federation must be
supported in the first instance by the Muslims of the Russian
Federation rather than from abroad. By ensuring domestic funding, he suggeested, Russia’s Muslims will be able to avoid charges that they reflect foreign interests.

Asked at the end of this interview when he expected the Muslim
community of the Russian Federation to be operating at the qualitatively high level he suggested he hoped for, Sadriyev answered with what many will view as extreme pessimism: „I fear,” he said, that this will not
happen anytime before 2024.”