Eurocollege
University of Tartu
Estonia

Prepared for delivery to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom
Washington, D.C.
February 7, 2005

By what they have done and what they have left undone, the Russian authorities from President Vladimir Putin on down have been responsible for a dramatic increase in anti-Islamic attitudes among the Russian people and for significant increases in the violation of the legal, constitutional and human rights of the Muslim citizens of that country.

That development is distressing enough on its own, but it entails two others that make this situation even more serious. On the one hand, the Russian authorities are producing the very Islamic “extremism” that they routinely invoke to explain their behavior. And on the other, by promoting or allowing attacks on Muslims, they are opening the door to attacks on members of other religious and ethnic groups there and thus undermining any chance that the Russian Federation may become a liberal, law-governed democracy anytime soon.

Because of these trends, the nearly universal failure of Western governments, publics and even many human rights organizations to monitor the rise of Islamophobia among Russian officials and the Russian public and to denounce this form of bigotry in the clearest possible way is particularly indefensible.

Consequently, I would like to commend this commission for organizing this session and to thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss an issue that unfortunately gets far less attention than I believe it deserves.

In my remarks, I would like to consider three interrelated sets of questions: First, who are the Muslims of the Russian Federation and why do so many ethnic Russians and the Russian state feel so threatened by them? Second, what have the Russian authorities both in Moscow and in the regions been doing with regard to that community and why is it so dangerous not only to Muslims but to the entire country? And third, what has the West’s response been up to now and what should we be doing both to defend the rights of this community and our own national interests.

Who are Russia’s Muslims?
For most countries around the world, we have relatively good census and survey data about the religious affiliations of the population. That is not the case with the Russian Federation. There has not been a question about religion on a census there since the end of the 19th century, the Soviet system because of its commitment to atheism actively discouraged people from identifying themselves in religious terms, and there have not been any reliable surveys of religious identification in the post-Soviet

Russian Federation as a whole.
As a result, the number of Muslims in the Russian Federation is very much a matter of dispute. President Putin has famously said that there are some 20 million Muslims in the Russian Federation. Some Muslim leaders have suggested that there may be as many as 30-35 million. Most sociologists and anthropologists argue that there are not more than 14 million – the number of people in the nationalities in that country which were historically Islamic. Some Russian specialists on religion have suggested that there are probably no more than seven million Muslim believers. And perhaps Moscow’s leading specialist on religious behavior has said that only about 800,000 Russian citizens are in fact active Muslims – a relatively small number but one equal to the number of active Russian Orthodox and active religious sectarians.

Within this plethora of numbers, there is a basic divide between those who treat Islam in terms of actual belief and structures and those who treat it as a characteristic of certain ethnic communities and talk about what they call “ethnic Muslims.” That is the division I will follow here, first looking at the status of the religious community in the post-Soviet period and then at the demographic situation with regard to the historically Islamic nationalities.
Like other religious faiths, Islam in the post-Soviet period continues to suffer from the legacy of the Soviet past. In their efforts to stamp out religious belief, to control those who refused to give up their faith, and to exploit religion for its own foreign policy purposes, the Soviet government destroyed most of the mosques that had existed in Russia prior to 1917, killed or drove into the underground nearly all the imams and mullahs, and used the security organs to control the limited official Muslim presence in the country.

That presence, in the form of Muslim Spiritual Directorates and the miniscule number of mosques subordinate to them, deserves special comment. Based on a tsarist model, these directorates – and there were ultimately four for the USSR as a whole – were and are a completely unnatural phenomenon in Islam. Islam has no clergy and hence no need for a clerical hierarchy. Instead, it is a radically decentralized faith in which anyone who can read the Koran in Arabic can serve as a mullah. The Soviet system of spiritual directorates thus not only violated the nature of Islam but led to a fundamental divide within the faith.

On the one hand, there was a tiny set of officially recognized Muslim “clergy” who were forced to sacrifice many of the basic aspects of Islam in order to demonstrate their loyalty and/or to preserve what they could in the face of the demands of the atheistic state. This form of Islam, referred to by all involved as “official” Islam, was viewed with skepticism by most Muslim believers and had little or no real authority beyond that which the Soviet state was prepared to grant it.

And on the other hand, there was a much larger “popular” or traditional Islam, seldom with access to trained mullahs and hence increasingly affected by local pre- or even extra-Islamic traditions. People who could remember Muslim prayers or even a few sura of the Koran served as mullahs, but the faith itself was inevitably degraded and reduced to the status of ritual. (There were exceptions to this pattern, most notably among the Sufi orders of the North Caucasus, but they need not detain us here.) Such believers had no legally recognized rights to function; consequently, those who participated in such displays of faith were engaged in a deeply d political act, something that in and of itself helps to explain what happened after Soviet power collapsed.

After the Soviet Union fell apart, the situation for Russia’s Muslims changed dramatically. The number of Muslim spiritual directorates increased from two for the Russian Federation to more than 60, often competing with one another for the favor of the state and for control over mosques. The number of mosques in Russia rose from approximately 150 to more than 8,000, with many of these being built with money from Middle Eastern governments; the number of Russian Muslims making the haj from 40 to more than 9600; and the number of Russian Muslim leaders studying abroad from 20 to approximately 400 a year. To cope with this explosive growth and reflecting the opening of the Russian Federation’s southern borders, the number of Muslim missionaries rose from only a handful in 1991 to more than 1,000 a year in the mid-1990s with somewhat fewer now.

Many of these missionaries from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Indonesia and many of the young Russian Muslims trained abroad over the last decade brought into Russia ideas about Islam that were very different than those held by most of the Muslims of the Russian Federation. Some of them brought back in the ideas of fundamentalist salafiya Islam, others, Wahhabism, and still a third group, modernist views on Islam. Many were funded by foreign groups – indeed, the fundamentalist trend in Islam in parts of the North Caucasus was called “dollar Islam” by locals because of the money these new Muslim leaders had.

The actions of this new group of Muslim leaders combined with the dramatic increase in the number of people attending prayers at mosques transformed the ideological situation among the Muslims of Russia. Where before there were basically two groups, the traditionalist Muslim spiritual directorates and popular, even syncretic faith on the part of the majority of Muslims, now there emerged a much greater range of ideas and institutions: the traditionalist spiritual directorates, the fundamentalist, even radical views of those trained abroad, a revivalist trend within popular Islam, and a small modernist, EuroIslamic group as well.
Among these groups, the spiritual directorates and the radical minority attract the most attention, but even taken together, they are not as important as the traditionalist majority that is undergoing a revival. But that revival in and of itself means that Muslims in the Russian Federation are ever more often asking questions about their faith and often being radicalized by popular and official mistreatment.

The demographic growth of Russia’s traditionally Muslim communities has been even more dramatic. The traditionally Islamic communities are growing far more rapidly than the ethnic Russians and will outnumber the latter within 20 to 25 years: they will form a majority of the draft-age population by 2015. Some of this is the result of differences in birthrates: At present, the average ethnic Russian woman in the Russian capital will have only slightly more than one child in her lifetime – far below the replacement level of 2.2 -- while the average woman from a traditionally Muslim nationality living there will have on average six to eight. And some reflects the influx of Muslim migrants from Azerbaijan, Central Asia and elsewhere. Moscow is already the largest Muslim city in Europe, but more significantly, there are now major Muslim nationality populations in all major Russian cities and regions, something that had never been true before: Today there are even mosques in Arkhangelsk and on Sakhalin Island!

This spread has brought Muslim groups who in the past lived apart into far closer contact with each other and with Russians. North Caucasian groups now compete with Tatars and Bashkirs for dominance in the Muslim communities of many Russian cities – a situation that has tended to enhance religious identification relative to ethnic ties. At the same time, ethnic Russians find themselves confronted by a population that because it is at least as indigenous as the Russians themselves demands the kind of respect for its cultural heritage that immigrant communities are seldom in a position to demand. In this way as in so many others, the situation of Muslims in Russia is very different than that of Muslims in Western European countries.

As a result, there are in the Russian Federation today more ethnic Muslims in more places than at any point in history, something that frightens many ethnic Russians. Even more disturbing to many of them is the fact that ever more ethnic Russians themselves are turning to Islam, a visible manifestation of the weakening of the Russian nation’s traditional assimilating role. Surveys suggest that many of those doing so – and the overall numbers are probably not more than a few tens of thousands – are women who choose to marry Muslim men because the latter are less likely to drink and to mistreat their families than are ethnic Russian men.

This combination of religion and demography has had one especially important consequence for what we are considering here. Polls show and Russian officials insist that both ethnic Russians and Russian officials are far more likely to be prejudiced against and hostile towards ethnic groups that have traditionally practiced Islam than they are toward Muslims as such. That has allowed Russian officials to dismiss charges that Islamophobia exists. But there is a problem with such claims. Surveys also show that many Russians confuse religion and ethnicity, especially in the last few years, and Muslims who are victims of violence probably do not care very much whether they are mistreated because they are Muslim believers or because they are members of a traditionally Muslim community.
Actions and Reactions of the Russian Community and the Russian State

During the first post-Soviet decade, three developments came together to promote the spread of anti-Muslim attitudes and behavior among the Russian population and government officials. First, the rise of Islam sketched above frightened many ethnic Russians, especially since Muslims as a group proved far more capable of adapting to the rules of capitalist life than did the Russians. As many people have pointed out, Russians have to change their entire set of cultural values about wealth and poverty, but Muslims need only remember that Mohammad’s father was a merchant.

Second, the dislocations of life after the collapse of communism, the fall in the standard of living for most people in Russia, and a rising tide of hopelessness there almost inevitably led in the Russian context to a search for someone to blame. Given the rise of Islam within that country, widespread but false assumptions about links between Islamic groups and organized crime, and a complete misreading of what the Chechen war was about, many Russians singled out Muslims as the group responsible for their own misfortunes and as the new enemy. And angry Russians could do so knowing that going after Muslims would entail far fewer risks of condemnation than engaging in anti-Semitism. Muslims understood this and many said bluntly that in post-Soviet Russia, “we are the new Jews.”

And third, during the 1990s, there was an almost total collapse of state authority. On the one hand, that meant that Moscow seldom had much control over what regional officials and even some of its own subordinates in the Russian capital did. That meant that these officials could act independently and often in ways that the central authorities publicly decried whether they meant anything by these statements or not. And on the other, it meant that various groups, including extremist ones, could act with impunity, either because officials could not move against them or did not even want to. As a result, there was a rising tide of anti-Muslim attitudes and actions across the country.

These trends received relatively little attention in the Russian or Western media, often because the most egregious cases of Islamophobia in Russia took place outside of Moscow and hence beyond the view of either. Still worse, many in the Russian media – including its most “liberal” outlets -- were themselves often anti-Islamic, or at least were willing to accept the idea that ethnic Muslims were linked to crime and terrorism. (Curiously, the section of the media that was most “pro-Muslim” was the red-brown press whose editors supported Islam because of their own anti-Semitism. And that pattern of coverage reinforced the attitudes of the mainstream media.)

While appalling, this situation has become even worse thanks to the rise of Vladimir Putin after 1999. On the one hand, Putin explicitly used hostility toward the Chechens and other outsiders to power his own rise to power. He and his supporters almost certainly were behind the blowing up of the apartment blocks in Moscow and elsewhere that he used to justify a new war against Chechnya, a sest of actions that Elena Bonner characterized as Russia’s version of the Reichstag fire. And as a result, that war has become far more racist and Islamophobic than was its Yeltsin-era predecessor, something that has poisoned much of Russian society.

And on the other, Putin has moved to recentralize power, a move that in principle might have been used to crackdown on abuses in the regions but in fact has had just the opposite effect so far. Not only has it emboldened ethnic Russian officials to move against Islamic “enemies,” but it has bred more extremism among Muslim groups, something that officials have used to justify their own actions against Islam. Indeed, Putin has created a climate of opinion where searching for enemies is far more widespread than any effort to defend human rights or protect religious minorities.

That pattern was further exacerbated after September 11th. Putin famously was the first foreign leader to call U.S. President George W. Bush to express his sympathies. Many Americans, including the president, have given him extraordinary credit for this, but they have generally forgotten that Putin did it for his own reasons. He saw the emerging anti-terrorist international as a cover for his own actions against Chechnya and as a useful tool for rebuilding the power of the Russian state even at the expense of human rights there. The results of this have not been long in coming.

In the last five years, the percentage of Russians expressing anti-Muslim views has soared, with ever more Russians calling for expelling non-Russian and especially Muslim groups from Russian cities and for making Russia a state for Russians only. Harassment, beatings and even killings of Muslims in Russia have increased, with officials doing little or nothing to stop it and even taking decisions that open the way to more. Exploiting these attitudes, the Russian authorities, again from Putin on down and notwithstanding their occasional statements to the contrary, have themselves taken actions that should be condemned but rarely are.

Of the hundreds of incidents I have tracked over the last five years, I would like to single out three, not so much because they are the worst but rather because they can be described in a brief way. The first of these is the horrific Beslan hostage taking incident of August-September 2004. Listening to Russian officials or reading the Russian press one would conclude that this was the work of Islamist extremists alone, that their victims were exclusively non-Muslims, and that the authorities were entirely on the side of law and order. All three of these claims are wrong, even though all of them have been echoed in the Western media and by Western governments.

Not only is there a growing body of evidence that officials were involved in the raid both directly and indirectly, but 70 percent of the victims were Muslims, a fact the Russian media seldom bothered to report. And in the wake of this tragedy, Russian officials have take a variety of steps not only to distort what happened but to prevent the families of victims from finding out what occurred with their loved ones, something the mainstream press has seldom bothered to keep track of.

But what was especially troubling in the wake of Beslan events were three things. First, the Russian media whipped up what can only be called anti-Islamic hysteria. The writings of Father Andrei Kurayev were only the most notorious of this veritable campaign. Second, Russian officials and ordinary Russian citizens felt that as a result of this tragedy, they could attack Muslims with impunity. Many did just that. And third, President Putin instead of working to calm the situation further exacerbated it by exploiting the tragedy to enhance his own political power, often at the expense of the Russian constitution and the rights of non-Russian ethnic groups in the regions.

Second, in the last 18 months, Russian officials have taken ever more actions against Muslims and Muslim communities without any legal justification. Members of the faithful have been arrested, fingerprinted, harassed, beaten and even killed while under arrest. Mosques and medressas have been disrupted and even closed by officials who do not have the expertise to know the difference between a sufi and a sura. And court cases have been launched that make a mockery of law itself.

One aspect of this campaign is especially disturbing. A year ago, the Russian Supreme Court banned 15 Muslim groups because of their ties to international terrorism. It took the decision in secret session and never published its findings, but prosecutors and courts throughout the Russian Federation have now used that finding to arrest and imprison Muslims without much ceremony. Several cases in Moscow and the Middle Volga region have been especially ugly with officials planting evidence, suborning witnesses, and issuing statements that had to be retracted almost immediately when it became obvious that they were simple inventions. In the words of one victim of such judicial malfeasance, her only crime was to be a Muslim in Russia.

And third, Russian officials and the media following them have done everything they can to excuse those who attack Muslims even as they find ever more reasons to blame Muslims for the country’s problems. Two weeks ago, for example, a Muslim cemetery in Moscow was vandalized. Had it been the cemetery of another faith, many in both Russia and the West might have been outraged, but in Russia today, officials rushed to explain that this was an act of vandalism not xenophobia and that the youngsters involved were simply acting out of “boredom.” This is the fifth such attack on a Muslim cemetery in Moscow in the last two years, and one of dozens that have taken place across the country over the same period.

One of the few people who responded well was the chief rabbi of Russia, Berl Lazar. He denounced the attack on the Muslim cemetery because he fully understands that allowing such attacks on one faith opens the way to attacks on others. Unfortunately, few Russian officials and few human rights groups or foreign governments took an equally principled position.

A Failed Western Response

That pattern brings me to the last issue I want to address: the general failure of Western governments and human rights organizations to speak out clearly against such abuses and outrages against the Muslims of the Russian Federation. Sometimes this failure is justified by reference to larger political considerations, and sometimes by the absence of reliable information. But whatever the case, the failure of the West to speak out on this issue means that many in Moscow believe they have a green light to behave as they want toward Muslim groups.

Allow me to give three examples of that sad reality. In October 1993, the West refused to condemn the Moscow decree expelling from the Russian capital “persons of Caucasus nationality,” a noxious term redolent of the anti-Semitism of the late Stalin period. Western governments did not want to do anything to undermine Boris Yeltsin, but the consequence of their inaction is that such decrees have now spread to other cities, increased official harassment of Muslim ethnic groups by the police, and appeared to suggest that Islamophobia is acceptable.

Second, the West has almost unanimously accepted Putin’s characterization of his war in Chechnya as part of the international anti-terrorist effort and avoided criticism of what Russian forces have done there. The Chechen drive toward independence did not start with terrorism, but Russian policies against the Chechens have largely transformed that national movement into a terrorist one. Nothing can justify terrorism, but that plague will not be overcome if we ignore the policies that gave rise to it. And the very viciousness of Putin’s campaign there has produced what he claims he is fighting.

And third, our failure to criticize Putin and his regime for anti-Muslim attitudes and actions has opened the way for Russian attacks on Christians and Jews as well. As was reported last month, nearly half of all the skinheads in the world now live in Russia. Most of them are anti-Semitic, but their rise reflects official tolerance there for their attacks on indigenous Muslims and immigrants. And consequently, we may look back on our failure to condemn and the Russian government’s failure to suppress this phenomenon as the start of something even worse than what we now see. In that event, we will remember but perhaps too late Nadezhda Mandelstam’s classic observation that “happy is that country where the despicable will at least be despised.”

What should we be doing? I think there are five things we must NOT do and five things that we MUST do if we want to avoid such a tragedy.

The five things we must not do include:

· First, we must not lie. We must stop giving the Russian authorities more credit than they deserve out of a misplaced concern that we must not offend them.

· Second, we must stop ignoring the problem. We must not look away out of a sense that it does not involve us.

· Third, we must not accept that this is the way things have to be because Russians are somehow incapable of making progress toward democracy.

· Fourth, we must not excuse the inexcuseable.

· Fifth, we must not follow Putin in adopting a reductionist approach, blaming immoral actions on something else.

And the five things we must do are:

· First, we must carefully monitor what is going on not only in Moscow but around the Russian Federation.

· Second, we must shine the bright light of publicity on this evil.

· Third, we must educate both Russians and others as to why this kind of action is unacceptable.

· Fourth, we must take the initiative in explaining what is going on there to the widest possible audience.

· And fifth, we must condemn evil actions. Sometimes that is all we can do, but never let it be said that we did not do at least that.

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