A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Russia and Islam:
Byzantium Lives!

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Russia and Islam
Russia itself has lived intimately with Islam for nearly a thousand years; it
contains the largest population of Muslims of any Western country—some
twenty million, between 12 and 15 percent of the overall population.
Furthermore, these Muslims are not immigrants as they are in Western Europe,
but part of the indigenous population who became part of the Russian Empire
through Russian conquest. Muslims represent the largest religious minority in
the new Russian Federation, and Islam remains the second-biggest religion in
Russia after Orthodoxy. The city of Moscow now has the biggest Muslim
population of any city in the entire West. By dint of its large Muslim population,
Russia now seeks to be an observer within the Mecca-based pan-Islamic Islamic
Conference Organization.
Perhaps the most significant reality is that in Russia virtually all Muslims are
ethnically non-Russian, that is, they belong to other ethnic—primarily Turkic—
groups. Some of these same Turko-Tatar-Mongol peoples had invaded Russia in
the thirteenth century and are remembered for their harsh rule when they
controlled Muscovy for several hundred years. Thus, in Russia a religious
difference nearly invariably signifies an ethnic difference as well—a powerful
factor in reinforcing distinctiveness. That they are largely Turkic may ultimately
be more important than the fact that they are Muslim.
Since it was Muslim Turks and Arabs who brought down the Byzantine
Empire, it would be reasonable to assume that Russians would be strongly
hostile to Islam and Muslims. But it is hard to blame the fall of Constantinople
on Islam. Can we really believe that if the Ottoman Turks had not been Muslim,
they would have opted not to invade and conquer Greek Byzantium, a rich and
weakened state, regardless of whatever religion Byzantium practiced?
The harsh atheist policies of the Soviet period were designed to destroy all
religion on Soviet soil, but while the Soviets severely weakened the practice of
Islam, they could not destroy it. And predictably, Islam reemerged as a major
issue for Moscow immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Six
Muslim republics gained their independence and ceased to be part of Russia—
the Central Asian “Stans” and Azerbaijan. Russia has alternately viewed its own
Muslim populations first as enemies, then as pillars of the Tsarist state, or as
loyal members of the Russian Empire, or as potential leaders of communist anti-
imperialism in the East, or as ideological partners against Western imperialism,
or as unreliable nationalists, dangerous secessionists or terrorists, or, once again,
as potential allies against US imperial power. The Russian case also shows how

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Muslims, in differing ways, have adapted to life within a Christian country under
violently shifting Russian realities. They may still be discovering some new
geopolitical commonalities today.
With the end of official atheist campaigns and greater freedoms and cultural
autonomy after the fall of communism, the profile of Islam rose substantially in
the Russian Federation. Muslim activists from outside the former USSR entered
Russia to propagate Islamist ideas, with clear political intent—mostly
nonviolent, but some highly violent. Russian Muslim populations actually
needed such religious missions, since most of them, under Soviet repression for
over three generations, had lost much knowledge of religious rituals and their
meaning—even knowledge as basic as how to pray properly. A huge spiritual
vacuum all across Russia was revealed, with all populations hungry for new
spiritual content and meaning in their lives.
Contact with Islamists from outside the country intensified Russian Muslim
consciousness of their religion as well as their historical ties with the outside
Muslim world. Muslims began once again to make the pilgrimage to Mecca
(hajj) and, more important, to reacquaint themselves with contemporary Islamic
thinking across the spectrum and to reintegrate themselves into the Muslim
world, which was now much more politicized than Muslims of Russia had ever
previously experienced. While some of these new Islamic trends were radical,
most were nonviolent. But the North Caucasus remains a major exception, where
various ethnic microgroups, especially the Chechens, resumed their long-term
armed struggle of 150 years for political independence and once again invoked
Islam in the cause. Their brutal fate at the hands of Russian troops in the 1990s
became a lesson for all other peoples in Russia who might entertain secession—
the destruction of their capital city, Grozny, and other towns, with tens of
thousands dead. The city has been subsequently rebuilt, and Moscow this time
wisely granted a considerable degree of autonomy to Chechnya within Russia;
nonetheless, great quantities of Chechen blood have been spilled, while Chechen
frustration and fury have led a number of its warriors to embrace more radical
versions of Islam, including al-Qa’ida.
While it seems that the Chechens’ long quest for independence is likely never
to end, this struggle may not be fully representative of all other Muslims in
Russia. But this time there was an important difference in the character of the
armed struggle. In the past, it was Sufi brotherhoods who spearheaded the efforts
for independence—mystical movements that could, when necessary, resort to
armed resistance when their culture was threatened from outside. This time,
many international Muslim jihadis, often veterans of other armed struggles such
as in Bosnia, Kashmir, or Afghanistan, went to Chechnya to lend support and to

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propagate more radical jihadi doctrines.
Sometimes struggles broke out between the more traditional Sufi warriors
and the new Islamist militants, who were often indiscriminately referred to as
“Wahhabis.” Some terrorist operations were carried to the heart of Russia itself
in retaliation for Russian brutality in Chechnya. Chechen terrorism against
Russians has been perhaps the biggest source of current Islamophobia in Russia.
Following 9/11 and Washington’s declared Global War on Terror, Moscow
and Beijing were quick to join ranks to proclaim their own local separatists and
Islamists as terrorists; the “war on terror” provided legitimacy for implementing
much harsher policies that under different circumstances would have been
perceived as human-rights violations. In Uzbekistan in May 2005, the Uzbek
government indiscriminately fired on unruly crowds of Islamist protestors,
killing hundreds—all of whom were described as “Wahhabis”; the Uzbek state
press linked them all to international terrorists, even as the evidence suggested
that they were largely homegrown Islamist dissidents, protesting the harshly
authoritarian character of the Uzbek regime.
As of today, the Muslims of the former USSR and today’s Russia have now
become intellectually integrated into the flow of global Muslim thinking. Islamic
identity is on the rise, yet is evolving almost completely within the confines of
the Russian federation and its multicultural character.
Under conditions of oppression, Islam provides an important element of
common identity that helps to unite diverse Russian Muslims, but it would be a
mistake to assume that Islam can bridge all ethnic and language lines among
Muslims. Even the ethnically Turkic peoples have rivalries among themselves
and have not yet shown strong Turkic political solidarity, much less notable
Islamic solidarity. Thus, Islam is only periodically a uniting factor—as strong as
Russian policies make it. But it is abundantly clear that even if the Turkic
peoples of Russia had never been Muslim, they would have retained a powerful
independent identity and would likely still foster secessionist impulses in an age
of nationalism and Russian misrule.
HOW DID ISLAM BECOME SUBJECT TO RUSSIAN RULE? Islam reached