Islam: Divide and Conquer
by Geraldine Fagan
28 August 2008 	

A religious dispute fuels oppression in Russia’s Kabardino-Balkaria region. From Forum 18.

Ignorance about religion is at the root of the conflict between Muslims in Kabardino-Balkaria,
representatives of both sides say. But they disagree sharply over whose interpretation of Islam
is correct.

The authorities in the North Caucasus republic have backed Kabardino-Balkaria's Muslim
Spiritual Directorate in the dispute. From 2003 to 2005, they instigated a brutal crackdown on
young Muslims forming an independent jamaat (an assembly or congregation). Organized Islamic
activity outside the Spiritual Directorate is now prohibited.

"Revival [of Islam] should be healthy and pure, without bidah [innovation]," local Muslim Ali
Pshigotyzhev told Forum 18 in Kabardino-Balkaria's capital, Nalchik. In the culture of the
Adyghe, an ethnic group including Kabardin, however, deviations from Islamic precepts persist,
he explained. "We never have an event – weddings, birthdays – without alcohol. People say, 'How
can you raise a toast without a glass of alcohol?' But Islam rejects that. And if there is
something sinful – forbidden in Islam – in Adyghe culture, then we won't do it."

A practicing Muslim, local lawyer Larisa Dorogova pointed to similar discrepancies. "An imam
might attend a wedding where there'll be alcohol on the table, although he won't drink. Some of
the older imams drink a lot, even," she said. "Weddings and funerals are also very elaborate,
although this has no place in Islam." Muslims at odds with Kabardino-Balkaria's Muslim
Spiritual Directorate resolutely oppose such practices, she told Forum 18.

The division affects the republic's law enforcement agencies – staffed by Kabardin and Balkars
rather than Russians – local lawyer Magomed Abubakarov, an ethnic Chechen, said. "Police might
sit and drink vodka, turning into I-don't-know-what while insisting they’re believers," he
explained. "They say they have a positive attitude toward Islam, but they divide it into
'traditional' and 'untraditional,' which they call 'Wahhabism.' 'Traditional' speaks for itself
– Islam plus national traditions, as in Chechnya, where we have many ancestral customs that
aren't part of Islam."

"Wahhabism" is a loose term for Islamic extremism commonly used in Russia and Central Asia.

Contempt for stricter Islam, Abubakarov added, lies partly behind the brutal treatment of those
accused of the failed 2005 Nalchik uprising by people from almost identical backgrounds.
"They're some kind of different caste. There were even police who were silent when their
relatives were detained. They didn't help their own relatives, who were being tortured in the
next office."

Arsen Mokayev, the brother of one of the accused and himself detained many times, described how
a police officer might laugh that Allah was "probably on his way but run out of petrol" if a
detainee cried out for divine aid while being beaten in custody. "But in an accident, he'll be
the first to cry out, 'Help me, Allah!' "

Local officials dealing with religious affairs and a senior detention center administrator have
denied reports of abuse to Forum 18.

While Kabardino-Balkaria is viewed as a traditionally Muslim republic – Islam had gained a
foothold there by at least the 16th century – the population has never been deeply observant.
Even by the 1830s, when British traveler Edmund Spencer spent several months living incognito
among Adyghe tribes, he noted that they drank alcohol and venerated gods of the wind,
livestock, and bees while adorning their homes with wooden tablets bearing Koranic verses.

THEN CAME STALIN

The Stalinist purges of a century later only increased such practices, according to
Pshigotyzhev. "Muslims here were completely destroyed. There was no one left to teach people –
no one who had studied in Turkey or Egypt. The older people just did what they knew."

By the 1990s, "we didn't know what Islam was," according to Boris Pashtov, who heads
Kabardino-Balkaria's Committee for Youth Affairs and Social Organizations, responsible for
religious affairs. Not understanding their content, some village elders even used to read
journals in Arabic in place of prayers, he said.

As younger Muslims began to challenge accepted practice in the post-Soviet period, a conflict
broke out, Pshigotyzhev said. In the Adyghe culture, for example, a man always wears a hat,
"but the young people got to know that you could pray without a hat, and some did." Older
Muslims then began to insist that no one should enter a mosque without a hat. "In some villages
you would be chased out of mosques for that." While this might sound trivial, "you only need to
strike a match to light a fire," Pshigotyzhev said.

If the Spiritual Directorate had chosen "a course toward pure Islam from the beginning, the
young people would have supported it," Pshigotyzhev, who is 56, said. "But they sided with the
old people."

The Spiritual Directorate, state media, and local officials maintain that there is no
contradiction between Adyghe culture and Islam, he said.

While there are local customs incompatible with Islam, "these are of secondary importance, and
it takes time to root them out." Mufti Anas Pshikhachev of the Spiritual Directorate said.
Agreeing that consumption of alcohol was one such discrepancy, he said, "We explain that
everywhere in lectures and sermons."

Pshikhachev noted, however, that the Koran was revealed to Mohammed over 23 years at a time
when alcohol consumption was also widespread: "It wasn't banned all at once – three ayat
[Koranic verses] were needed. It should happen gradually. One of the mistakes of the extremists
is to demand that everything must end straightaway – but they don't know Islam."

Members of Kabardino-Balkaria's jamaat, in turn, did not recognize or trust the Spiritual
Directorate, local Muslims told Forum 18. Not believing the business funds that supported its
construction to be halal [permissible in Islam], for example, they refused to attend Nalchik's
central mosque – opened in 2004 and also home to the Spiritual Directorate – the mother of two
young Muslims killed in the failed 2005 uprising said.

Pshikhachev said Kabardino-Balkaria's president, Arsen Kanokov, had supported construction of
the central mosque as a "rich businessman."

FEAR OF EXTREMISM

Young Muslims at odds with the Spiritual Directorate chose to study abroad and, later, with the
unregistered Islamic Research Institute in Nalchik. Their zeal baffled Kabardino-Balkaria's
late president, Valeri Kokov, Pshigotyzhev said. "He didn't understand why young people went to
mosque and not the disco. He thought they were paid to go from abroad, that they were preparing
a second Chechnya in Kabardino-Balkaria."

The republic's religious affairs officials view study by up to 200 local young Muslims in
Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt in the late 1990s as the source of extremism. "Very
often, unfortunately, they received a radical interpretation of Islam," Pashtov said.

In a typical scenario, according to Pashtov's colleague Dzhambulat Gergokov, "Four might go to
Syria or Saudi Arabia, say. One gets into a normal, classical Muslim university, but the others
don't and look elsewhere. Then a group of people go up to them and say, 'Come with us, we'll
teach you.' " A young Muslim who traveled from Kabardino-Balkaria in this way would know
nothing about Islam due to the absence of religion in the Soviet period, he pointed out. "But
he's told he's chosen, on a mission, and, after a certain processing, he returns.”

Pashtov said, "I heard one of those who went say he came back to do jihad. That's exactly the
word he used."

Pshikhachev, who himself studied in Libya and Syria during the 1990s, saw a further problem in
what his young rivals encountered abroad. While most Muslims in Russia, including those in
Kabardino-Balkaria, are traditionally of the Hanafi madhhab, or school, of Sunni Islam, those
in Saudi Arabia follow the Hanbali school. While the differences are slight and most scholars
agree that it is irrelevant which madhhab is followed, he said, "Literature coming from Saudi
Arabia – including in Russian – doesn't say it is Hanbali; it just says it's the Koran and
Sunnah." As younger Muslims were unaware of this, he explained, "They accused the older people
of not praying right."

Pshikhachev likened what he saw as their extremist stance to the seventh-century Kharijite sect
of Islam: "Their mindset is, 'Whoever isn't with us is against us.' They believe that if people
aren't Muslim, it is all right to oppress and kill them."

Pshigotyzhev, however, insisted that the Kabardino-Balkaria authorities' opposition to those
branded extremist is in fact directed against nonviolent Islam. "Obviously you can't struggle
against Islam openly, but if you call Muslims 'Wahhabis,' you can conduct searches, arrest, and
even destroy them physically."

Young mosque-goers in Kabardino-Balkaria reported being blacklisted as "Wahhabis" by police and
subjected to beatings and more severe torture.

Pshigotyzhev thought the crackdown inevitable. "If the state produces alcohol, takes bribes,
encourages fornication -- everything forbidden by Allah -- and people who live in accordance
with Islam tell politicians they can't do that, they see a threat to their positions," he said.
"Their predisposition is not to allow the spread of Islam – because how they live is the
complete opposite."




Geraldine Fagan writes for Forum 18 News Service in Oslo. A partner post from Forum 18.

http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=284&NrSection=4&NrArticle=19905