Tartu, February 25 – The Muslim Spiritual Directorates in the republics of the Russian Federation’s Northern Caucasus are rapidly losing ground to Islamist extremists there both because of their incompetence as religious leaders and because of their ever closer ties to government officials, according to an article posted on a Moscow website yesterday.
In it, political commentator Sergei Markedonov argues that as many as 95 percent of Muslims in that region no longer trust or follow the dictates of their local MSDs and that this mistrust is rapidly spreading to the nominally secular republic governments to which the MSDs are so closely linked.

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But so far, he says, this trend has not prompted either to ask serious questions about their relationship or about the role of this institutional legacy of the past for the situation in the North Caucasus now. Instead, it has prompted each to increase its dependency on the other, thereby creating a vicious and potentially very destructive circle.

Because Islam does not have a clergy or clerical hierachy, the MSDs created by the tsars and maintained by the Soviets to control believers have no theological basis. And many expected them to disappear with the collapse of communism. Instead, they have multiplied, with most Muslim areas in the Russian Federation currently having one or more.
And now, Russian officials from President Vladimir Putin on down look to the MSDs to control the mullahs and believers in their regions and thus prevent the spread of radical Islam. The MSDs in turn not only seek and sometimes obtain state subsidies but also use the power of state security agencies to fight their own intraconfessional battles.

In short, the MSDs are again becoming what they were in tsarist and Soviet times: an intrinsically illegitimate branch of the bureaucratic state rather than the genuine leadership of a religious community.
Because of that, Markedonov suggests that the MSDs in the North Caucasus today are not up to the task of fighting extremism. Indeed, he argues, by what they have done and what they have left undone, the MSDs there have made the spread of Wahhabism and other forms of extremism significantly „easier.”

Most of the Muslim ”clergy” in the MSDs lack the religious training they would need to counter the message of the extremists. As a result, MSD officials are generally unwilling to engage in open arguments with the radicals and thus defend either traditional Muslim values or open the way to a more modernist version of Islam.

But at the same time, the MSDs have not been shy about denouncing as radicals younger Muslims either from abroad or trained there less because of what the latter actually believe – something that often is not all that different from what the MSD officials themselves do – than because the younger mullahs represent a threat to MSD power.
Both of these things have undermined the authority of the MSDs in the eyes of believers. But an even greater factor behind that trend, Markedonov suggests, is the propensity of the MSDs to exploit the government’s „struggle” against extremism for their own narrowly egoistic purposes.

The MSD leaders know that the government’s security forces will act quickly and forcefully against anyone the MSD leaders describe as an extremist. Consequently, as Markedonov points out, „it is no secret” that the MSDs routinely denounce as extremists or terrorists not only the genuine articles but anyone who opposes the power of the MSDs.
Quite often, he adds, the MSDs set the security agencies on traditional Muslims who object to the MSD system as a whole or even on those Muslims who are seeking to modernize their faith, something that discredits in the eyes of some the MSDs and in the eyes of others the modernist project within Islam.

Still worse for the future development of Islam and political authority in the North Caucasus, Markedonov adds, is the sad reality that the MSDs are just as lacking in „transparency” as regional elites, something that he suggests also contributes to the decline in the authority of both.
If the MSDs or the republic governments were to change their approach to each other and to the Muslim community at large, he argues, fewer of the Russian Federation’s ever increasing number of Muslims would be shifting their allegiance to the radicals and more would be looking toward modernist trends in Islam.

That outcome, he suggests, would be better for each, but he implies that there is little likelihood of that. Instead, he concludes, as have others (seeIgor Dobayev’s article in the January’s „Russkiy vestnik” posted on line at http://www.rusk.ru/st.php?idar=32311) that both will expand their ties and thus create a vicious circle from which there may be no escape.

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