Tartu, February 28 – The Kremlin appears to be moving toward the selection of a single chief mufti of the Russian Federation and the imposition of a single „power vertical”on the religious life of Russia’s rapidly growing and extraordinarily diverse Muslim population.

At the very least, Russian officials have concluded that the current system in which multiple Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs) compete with one another is counterproductive. And they have decided to use the security agencies to enforce the subordination of Muslim communities to a single center at least within particular regions.

For much of the last decade, Russian officials have viewed the lack of a single MSD for the country as a whole and regularly indicated that they would like to see a single Muslim mufti analogous to the Orthodox patriarch, but until recently, they have been constrained by three things: First, the two most obvious candidates for the job on more than one occasion have each angered the Kremlin. Talgat Tadzhuddin, a Soviet holdover who heads the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate and is usually loyal to Moscow’s line, infuriated Putin by calling for a jihad against the Americans at the start of the Iraq war.

And Ravil’ Gainutdin, who heads the rival and generally more populist Union of the Muslims of Russia, has angered Moscow not only because of his indiscipline and unpredictability but also because of his close relations with more activist and even oppositionist Muslim groups Second, many around the Kremlin have found the divisions among the Russian Federation’s MSDs useful in order to „divide and rule” that country’s Muslims. Because Moscow is able to shift sides quickly and unexpected, Muslims there are kept off balance and have less influence than might otherwise be the case.

And third, at least some in the upper reaches of the Russian government understand that any further officialization of the MSDs, a legacy of the Soviet past with no basis in Islamic theology -- may reduce the influence of the latter on believers in that country and thus further open the way for the spread of radical Islamist ideas among them.

But in the last few weeks, there have been signs that the Kremlin has decided to move ahead with the imposition of a single „vertical of power in the Islamic community of Russia” as a government official in the North Caucasus described such an approach („Kabardino-Balkarskaya pravda,” February 18, available online at http://www.religare.ru/print14903.htm).

The clearest indication of this intention yet came last week when Igor Zhuravlev, the federal inspector for Ulyanovsk Oblast, told the leaders of one Muslim congregation there that the government would intervene quickly and harshly if they continued to try to move out from under the authority of Tadzhuddin’s Central MSD.
„If you try to leave the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate (and its local branch, the Central MSD for Ulyanovsk oblast), that means that you have your own religion and that you are identifying yourself as a sect,” Zhuravlev said. And he warned that „we, that is, the government, will treat you as we treat sectarians.” (http://islam.ru/press/rus/2005-02-24/)
Additinally, the federal inspector said in comments to leaders of Ulyanovsk’s Central Mosque that it is now the view of both „the Kremlin and Nizhniy Novgorod” that the only significant Muslim leader in the Russian Federation is Talgat Tadzhuddin and [that] Ravil’ Gainutdin can only be his deputy.”

The leader of the Ulyanovsk mosque undoubtedly was pleased to hear that because as he was imposed on the community there by Tadzhuddin rather than elected by the congregation as Muslim law requires. Indeed, that highhandedness by Tadzhuddin was the primary reason Muslims there were trying to get out from under his organization.

But in the current political climate, Tadzhuddin’s very authoritarianism, however, his obvious care in following the Kremlin’s line since his gaffe over Iraq, and his willingness to use the government’s security services against his opponents, whom he invariably calls „extremists” and „terrorists” would appear to have put him in good stead with the Kremlin.

It is of course possible that Zhuravlev was simply speaking for himself or that he was being used by Moscow to see how the Muslims of the Russian Federation might react to the creation of a single MSD with Tadzhuddin as its head. But it seems nuch more likely that what this federal inspector said last week points to just such changes
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And in that event, Tadzhuddin, 56, who was trained at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, became the head of one of the four Soviet-MSDs in 1980, and has served has chairman of the Central MSD of Russia since 1992, will soon get government support for the position he has always wanted and state-backed content for the title he has long employed -- Supreme Mufti of Russia.

But whether such a move will in fact have the happy outcome that both he and his government supporters hope for remains very much an open question. Both because Islam is by nature a non-clerical faith and because many Muslims in the Russian Federation detest him, neither Tadzhuddin nor his government backers are likely to have the last word on that.

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