Tartu, March 9 – Senior Muslim leaders of the Russian Federation have warned President Vladimir Putin of „unpredictable consequences” should Moscow decide to permit clergymen to conduct religious instruction in the country’s public schools – especially in ethnically and religiously mixed regions of the country.

In an appeal to Putin adopted at the end of a two-day meeting in Moscow last week, Muslim leaders subordinate to Sheikh Ravil Gainutdin and the Union of Muftis of Russia (SMR) also called for the development of a single set of textbooks on religious life rather than the production of different ones following confessional lines.

And, while approving the government’s program for theological education in state universities, the mullahs insisted that each religion should have the right to define the educational requirements for preparing its own leadership. To that end, they said they were creating a Council on Islamic Education to enforce Russia-wide standards in that area. This appeal
(http://www.muslim.ru/razde.cgi?id=1001&rid==178&rid=1001&rid2) is and especially its implicit threat of trouble ahead if its recommendations are ignored appears likely to have at least three significant consequences.

First, this appeal is likely to cause Putin and the Russian government, whose representatives took part in the meeting, to slow down the Russian Patriarchate’s drive to put its textbooks and its priests into ever more Russian schools as soon as this fall. At the very least, this move seems certain to force the authorities to take another look at the situation.

As Gainutdin and others who oppose the Patriarch’s plans have noted in recent months, most Russian cities are both multi-ethnic and poly-confessional, and any plan to introduce a single religious course would almost certainly offend some students and especially their parents.

Supporters of the Patriarch’s plan have countered that it is entirely proper for the dominant faith to promote its ideas in the schools, pointing to France as an example where that is done and even claiming that such instruction will immunize the country against terrorism.

But now one group of Muslim leaders has put the Russian government on notice that the introduction of such a Patriarchate-backed church could do far more than offend, possibly triggering demonstrations or worse, something the Kremlin almost certainly would like to avoid after its experiences with the January protests over monetarization of benefits.

Second, it puts the SMR on a collision course with the Russian Orthodox Church on an issue the latter cares about a great deal. That could help to shatter understandings among the leaderships of the country’s four traditional confessions – Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism – that have promoted cooperation and limited missionary activities.

Moreover, by insisting that each religious community must have the right to set educational standards for its religious leaders, the SMR appeal challenges the increasing deference to state educational standards on the part of many religious leaders, including many Muslim ones.

And third, it highlights a fundamental division within the Muslim community of the Russian Federation between the Moscow-based Gainutdin who increasingly has adopted an independent line with regard to the Kremlin and the more loyalist Tadzhuddin whose base is in the Middle Volga city of Ufa.
In recent months, it has appeared that Tadzhuddin, despite the problems he earlier created by calling for a jihad against the Americans at the start of the Iraq war, appeared on his way to becoming in fact what he has long styled himself „the supreme mufti of Russia” with a status analogous to the Patriarch in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Because Islam lacks a clergy and any theological backing for the structures known as Muslim spiritual directorates that the Russian state has long supported and because Islam allows mullahs and theologians to speak out independently on issues of concern, Tadzhuddin has always faced an uphill struggle – even under the centralizing Vladimir Putin.

Gainutdin may now have made Tadzhuddin’s task even more difficult because by speaking out now, the SMR chief has implicitly called into question the latter’s ability to exercise effective control over the country’s Muslim community and hence Tadzhuddin’s attractiveness as a candidate for the head of a „power vertical” within it.

Consequently, an appeal and a warning that attracted relatively little media attention when they were made may prove to be a turning point not only for Muslims within the Russian Federation but also for relations among all the faiths of that country and between them and the government as well.

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