Radical Islam in Tatarstan?

Originally published in the Atlantic Sentinel — Even if youngsters in Tatarstan are becoming Islamic, the authorities in this Russian republic have little reason to fear a surge in religious extremism. Persecution of pious Muslims would in fact only spur violence, not prevent it. I recently came across an article that argues that Tatarstan is facing an Islamization scenario akin to what has already occurred in Ingushetia and Dagestan. It reports on a talk given at a conference on ethnic and religious tolerance recently held in Kazan. Rais Suleimanov, the deputy director of the Center for Eurasian and International Studies at the Kazan Financial University, points out that youth comprise 40 percent of people who regularly attend mosque in the region. Yana Amelina, the head of the Caucasus department at the center and another conference participant, notes that radical Islam has over the last few years replaced ethnic separatism as the dominant antistate ideology in the Caucasus and is now spreading into the Volga region. When I was last in Kazan two years ago, I was struck by the sheer number of young women wearing “Islamic” clothing and young men with those beards that act as markers of Islamic identity in the former Soviet Union. This was in stark contrast to previous visits, when everyone (and especially young people) wore European style clothing and hair styles. The number of people with such Islamic markers was also much higher in Kazan two years ago than in my visit to Baku last week. Of course, wearing traditional clothing or a beard is not a sign that one is a Wahhabi extremist (though it might be interpreted as such a sign by the local authorities). But I think there is no doubt that young people are more religious now than they were five to ten years ago and that the religion they are following is not the “traditional (Hanafi) Islam” of the area but less moderate imports from the Middle East. But this does not mean that they are all ready to take up arms against the government or support some kind of Islamic Caliphate. The authorities would take that interpretation at their own peril—if they start repressing religious Tatars, they may end up promoting more violence than if the people were left alone to worship as they please. The proposal in the article that the government should reject any attempts at dialog with the “Wahhabi lobby” in Russia and instead ban all “Wahhabi activity” seems to be particularly counterproductive in this regard. This is the kind of thing that was tried in places like Kabardino-Balkaria five, six years ago and only led to more people taking up arms against the authorities, because of a desire for revenge against the very people who humiliated them or repressed their relatives. Those who follow this topic may well remember the story about Russian Interior Ministry operatives going into mosques and forcibly shaving people or carving crosses into their hair. The net result of these actions was a rapid increase in antigovernment attitudes, followed by Islamic radicalism, then a spike in violence in the region. The regional authorities could shoot themselves in the foot by taking excessively harsh measures against nonviolent but pious Muslims who reject the traditional Islamic leadership in the region in favor of strands of Islam imported from the Middle East. In that case, one could see the formation of violent bands whose goal is revenge against those who humiliated or hurt them. If, on the other hand, followers of Salafi Islam in Tatarstan are monitored but not persecuted, the chances for a significant surge of religiously based violence in the region is pretty remote. Violence in the Caucasus is due to a combination of religious extremism, a hopeless economic situation, and a perception that the local authorities are all crooks. Tatarstan may have more religious extremists than it used to, but its economic situation is pretty good by Russian standards and its authorities are less blatantly corrupt than those in the North Caucasus. Unless we start seeing massive unemployment among young Muslim men in the Volga region, I don’t think we should worry about the kind of violence and instability that we see in Dagestan or Ingushetia spreading to Tatarstan. There will be occasional disenchanted Tatar extremists who want to fight, but they will continue to do what they have been doing for the last decade—they’ll go off to the Caucasus, or to Afghanistan, and fight there. Tatarstan itself, as well as the entire Volga region, will become more religious, to be sure, but will nonetheless remain fairly stable and non-violent for the foreseeable future.