Tartu, February 28 – The leading Muslim intellectuals of the Russian Federation are currently engaged in four interrelated debates, and the outcome of their discussions is likely to have an even greater impact on the future of their community and country than will any of the actions taken by extremist groups.

In a 7500-word, extensively footnoted article posted online last week, Sergei Gradirovskiy, who writes frequently about religious and cultural issues in the Russian Federation, outlined the contours of these four debates and suggested some of the possible outcomes (http://www.archipelag.ru/ru_mir/religio/beginning/conflict/).
The first debate concerns whether the gates of interpretation of basic Islamic texts („ijtihad”) can and should be reopened and Russia’s Muslims seek to recover from the Soviet past. Kazan University historian Rafael Khakimov argues that these gates must be open if Muslims in the Russian Federation are prosper in the modern world and not simply survive.

But Khakimov’s position is opposed by the First Deputy Mufti of Tatarstan Valiulla Yakupov. Denouncing what Khakimov calls EuroIslam as „drunken Islam,” Yakupov argues that the defense of tradition is paramount in Islam not only because the faith is true for all times and places but because any effort to reinterpret it opens the way for extremism.

The second debate Gradirovskiy describes is over how much attention Russia’s Muslims should devote to missionary activity beyond the confines of those communities which have been traditionally Islamic.

Tatarstan Mufti Gusman Itskhakov has taken the strongest stand against missionary efforts especially among ethnic Russians. Gradirovskiy quotes Itskhakov’s much-quoted remark that „as a mufti, I am not pleased when Russians adopt Islam…let the Russians remain Orthodox and the Tatars remain Muslims.”
That position pleases both many mullahs trained in Soviet times and the Russian Orthodox Church which opposes what it sees as any such poaching on its canonical territory. But it is strongly objected to by younger Muslims who believe that they have an obligation to spread their faith not only to „ethnic Muslims” but to all.

The third debate concerns the relationship between innovation of any kind within Islam („bidgat”) and the maintenance of traditional customs („adat”). Not surprisingly, Yakupov argues that traditions must be maintained, while many of the younger and more radical Muslims call for innovation on a wide variety of issues affecting Islam.

But as Gradirovskiy makes clear, in the post-Soviet Russian context, this third debate is especially muddled. On the one hand, the supporters of traditional Islam are not simply engaged in defending something that is but rather in reintroducing something that was taken from them, a situation that puts them in a position not too far removed from the radicals.

And on the other, the supporters of „pure” Islam, many of them either trained abroad or from there, argue that Muslims have to innovate by going back to the ideas and practices of the time of the Prophet. As a result, Gradirovskiy says, „adat is bigdat” for some and „the struggle against adat is bigdat” for others.

And finally the fourth debate which centers on the proper relationship between Islam and the state. Many of the more traditional-minded Muslims of the Russian Federation as well as the advocates of EuroIslam see the Muslim community naturally coexisting with other religions there in a state which allows for all faiths to flourish.

But other Muslims argue that Islam must have a much greater political role. Moscow’s Geidar Dzhemal, for example, believes that Islam must not only serve as the foundation of a movement for social justice but must become the basis for political thought more generally.

Thus, says Gradirovskiy, „for Geidar Zhemal and those who agree with him, Islam is less a religion than a political project …less one civilization among others than a global civilization … and less a cult than a fire” which threatens both secular states and the cultures surrounding it.

Such apparently abstract intellectual debates inevitably attract less attention in the Russian and Western media than do the actions of Islamist extremists both because they are less immediately dramatic and because in many cases, they take place in venues outside of Moscow.

But precisely because the Muslims of the Russian Federation are feeling their way toward an acceptable definitions of who they are and of how they should live, these debates are critical, Gradirovskiy suggests. If those who support an open, reformist and tolerant Islam win the day, then Russia’s Muslims and the Russian Federation will go in one direction.

But if those who support the the opposite sides of these argues come out on top either because they are successful in making their own arguments or because attacks on Islam from outside forces allow them to build up a fortress mentality among the faithful, then the future for both will be very different and much, much more disturbing.

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