Islam in Russia: Religion, Politics, and Society 9781955055604

Table of contents :
Contents
1 Islam in Russian Politics and Society
2 Muslims With and Without Islam
3 Islamic Political Ideologies in Post-Soviet Russia
4 Reporting on “Islam” and “Terror” in Russian vs. US Media
5 Perceptions of the Hajj
6 Between Russia and Islam
7 The Role of Islam in Russia’s Middle East Policy
8 The Impact of Islam on Russia-Iran Relations
9 Conclusion: What Have We Learned?
References
The Contributors
Index
About the Book

Citation preview

ISLAM IN

RUSSIA

ISLAM IN

RUSSIA Religion, Politics, and Society edited by

Gregory Simons, Marat Shterin, and Eric Shiraev

.

Published in the United States of America in 2023 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB www.eurospanbookstore.com/rienner © 2023 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Simons, Gregory, editor. | Shterin, Marat, editor. | Shiraev,   Eric, 1960– editor. Title: Islam in Russia : religion, politics, and society / editors, Greg   Simons, Marat Shterin, and Eric Shiraev. Description: Boulder : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2023. | Includes   bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores the nature of   Muslim identity and the impact of Islam in contemporary Russian politics   and society”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022028484 | ISBN 9781955055376 (hardcover) | ISBN   9781955055604 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Islam and politics—Russia (Federation) | Islam—Russia   (Federation)—21st century. | Middle East—Foreign relations—Russia   (Federation) | Russia (Federation)—Foreign relations—Middle East. |   Muslims—Russia (Federation)—Social conditions. | Muslims—Russia   (Federation)—Politics and government. Classification: LCC BP65.R8 I853 2023 | DDC   297.2/720947086—dc23/eng/20220825 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028484 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

1

Islam in Russian Politics and Society Greg Simons, Marat Shterin, and Eric Shiraev

2

Muslims With and Without Islam Marat Shterin

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3

Islamic Political Ideologies in Post-Soviet Russia Marlene Laruelle

31

4

Reporting on “Islam” and “Terror” in Russian vs. US Media Sergei A. Samoilenko, Olga Logunova, Sergey G. Davydov, and Eric Shiraev

49

5

Perceptions of the Hajj Zilya Khabibullina

69

6

Between Russia and Islam Rahim Rahimov

83

7

The Role of Islam in Russia’s Middle East Policy Nicolas Dreyer

109

8

The Impact of Islam on Russia-Iran Relations Hamidreza Azizi

131

9

Conclusion: What Have We Learned? Greg Simons, Marat Shterin, and Eric Shiraev

149

References The Contributors Index About the Book

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159 187 189 205 v

1 Islam in Russian Politics and Society Greg Simons, Marat Shterin, and Eric Shiraev

Russia’s Muslims have enjoyed quite limited attention in the growing body of English-language literature on Islam and its multifaceted manifestations in global, regional, and local contexts. This is somewhat surprising, considering the size and diversity of the country’s Muslim population, the vibrancy of their engagements with the changing society, and the scale and variety of issues associated with various expressions of the religion in Russia. In this book, the authors aim to make a contribution to the existing literature by offering frank and open discussions based on academic research and focused on (1) how the image of Islam in Russia is constructed by various actors in a variety of local contexts, and (2) what implications this has for Russian politics and society. The book’s focus inevitably implies a multidisciplinary perspective that could illuminate the different aspects of Islam’s diversity in Russia, both historical and contemporary. This includes the academic disciplines of history, political science, sociology, religious studies, and media studies. Many scholars have observed that in the last three decades or so religion has played an increasing role in the global rise of identity politics (Brubaker 2017b). With respect to Russia, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its system of “developed socialism” imparted additional complexity and even dramatic turns to this process. While creating an overarching and overriding Soviet identity was already part and parcel of the Soviet project of “constructing communism” in the 1920s, it became gradually complemented and at certain points even superseded by the policy of “nationbuilding,” which historian Yuri Slezkin (1994, 414) describes as a “spectacularly successful attempt at a state-sponsored conflation of language, ‘culture,’ territory and

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quota-fed bureaucracy.” As state-enforced atheism was another pillar of the Soviet project, the official “nationality policy” did not allow religion to remain part of ethnic self-identification, let alone become a basis for national self-determination. With respect to ethnic Muslims, Soviet authorities, in particular under Stalin, imposed the creation of their homelands, either in the form of Soviet socialist republics, such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, or of “autonomous republics” and oblasti (regions), such as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Kabardino-Balkaria, Checheno-Ingushetia, and Adygeia. In other words, Muslims were supposed to enjoy their homelands and celebrate their “distinctive” cultures—but without referring to their religious identity or practicing their religion and while remaining within the confines of the official communist ideology. Despite this, academic research (Ro’i 2000; Fowkes and Gökay 2009; Rubin 2018; Di Puppo 2019) has produced ample evidence that Islam remained engrained in the ways Tatars, Bashkirs, Chechens, and other Muslim ethnicities saw their identity without contrasting it with their Soviet identity: the notion of the “Muslim communist” (musul’manskie kommunisty) was not necessarily seen as a contradiction in terms (Pelkmans 2009). The demise of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet nationbuilding has brought the significance of Muslim identity in the Sovietcreated homelands to the fore (Ro’i 2000; Malashenko 2007; Emelianova 2010). There are now nine republics with Muslim majorities in the Russian Federation: Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Dagestan, Adygeya, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Northern Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and KarachayevoCherkessia (Kerimov 1996, 183). According to an authoritative study conducted by the research center Arena in 2012, the total number of Muslims in Russia was 9.4 million, or 6.5 percent of the population (Arena 2012). We have to note that the security situation in Chechnya and Ingushetia precluded inclusion of their populations (around two million) in the survey, and, in addition, there are some other unaccounted-for groups of Muslims, such as unregistered migrants in large Russian cities; thus some scholars estimate the total number of Muslim at fourteen million (Filatov 2006, 34; Warhola 2007, 937; Le Torrivellec 2013). However, there is little sense in seeing Russian Muslims as a monolithic block of people defined by their shared religious identity; nor do we have any evidence to suggest that they tend to form and mobilize coherent political alliances across Russia or within the borders of their own homelands (Malashenko 2007a; Giuliano 2005, 215). As elsewhere, Russia’s Muslims have historically been and remain religiously divided by boundaries that run within Islam, such as between Sunnis (around 88 percent) and Shia (10 percent), between different Islamic legal schools of Hanafi’ and Shafi’ (Le Torrivellec 2013, 10), and between different Islamic orders

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and movements (Rubin 2018). No generally recognized centralized authority exists within Russian Islam, despite ardent attempts and at times fierce competition among some clergy to create it (Hunter 2004; Malashenko 2007a; Bekkin 2020). As the contributions to this book show, Muslim identities and their perceptions by non-Muslims in Russia are complex, fluid, and shaped by ever-changing interactions of historical legacies of pre-Soviet and Soviet developments (Malashenko 2007a); by local cultures, in particular languages (Rubin 2018); by external influences, such as international Islamic organizations and transnational Islamic movements (Yemelianova 2010; Shterin and Yarlykapov 2013; Rubin 2018); by demography, in particular as far as the post-Soviet generations of Muslims are concerned (Shterin and Spalek 2011); by urban and rural environments (Kisriev 2004); by new trends in gender relations (Kerimova 2013; Di Puppo 2019; Di Puppo and Schmoller 2020); and by political conflicts and government interventions (Hunter 2004; Malashenko 2007b; Shterin and Spalek 2011; Sagramoso and Yarlykapov 2013; Rubin 2018). As one of the most significant large-scale factors, many scholars have pointed out the different environments in which Muslims engage with and construe their multifaceted relationships with Islam in its different forms (Pilkington and Yemelianova 2003). In one of the Muslim-majority republics, Tatarstan, Muslims have for centuries been living side by side with ethnic Russians who make up over 40 percent of the republic’s population (Musina 2010; Benussi 2018). The capital, Kazan, has long been one of the prime centers of both Russian and Tatar secular education and culture; many ethnic Tatars have for generations been living in major Russian cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, and some have entered into the Russian political and cultural elite. In our times, oil-rich and industrial Tatarstan is among the more prosperous regions of the Russian Federation. This legacy and the contemporary situation have given rise to the idea of a distinctive Tatar brand, or “model,” of Islam, apparently characterized by a close affinity with secular culture and both Russian and Western modernity (Khakimov 1998b). In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, Tatarstan’s Islamic clergy generally supported the efforts of the local political elites to achieve more independence from Moscow, one result of which was the establishment of the Muslim Spiritual Board of the Republic of Tatarstan in the 1990s (Bilz-Leonhardt 2007, 239–240). In their turn, as part of their claim for more independence, republican authorities sought to promote the idea of “Tatar Islam” as the basis of a distinctive Tatar identity (Yemelianova 1999; Benussi 2018). Quite different legacies and contemporary dynamics have shaped Islam and Muslim communities in the Northern Caucasus.1 Immensely ethnically

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diverse, this region has been marked by a history of anticolonial struggle against Russian imperial expansion in the nineteenth century, of resistance to the imposition of Bolshevism well into the 1930s and even 1940s (Gammer 2005; Zelkina 2000; Ware 2013), and of mass deportations on Stalin’s orders during World War II. In different parts of Dagestan, Chechnya, and other regions, Muslims have developed distinctive Islamic brotherhoods, deeply entwined with communal life and involving strong internal ties and commitment to the leader, or sheikh (Kisriev 2004). It is not surprising that the unraveling and then demise of the Soviet layer of local identities in the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to the “Islamic revival” (Malashenko 1998), which revealed the religion’s role in almost every aspect of individual and communal life as well as in wider politics. Islam has become part and parcel of local political elites’ claim on authority in various parts of the Northern Caucasus and in some cases, most conspicuously in Chechnya, their separatist agendas (Yemelianova 1999; Malashenko 1999; Kisriev 2004). Some prominent leaders of Sufi brotherhoods, such as Said Afandi al-Chirkawi (1937–2012), were to differing degrees involved in these politics (Kisriev 2004; Shterin and Yarlykapov 2013). Islam has also become a significant factor in shaping and legitimizing opposition to both local and Russian federal authorities. Salafi Islam (often derogatorily referred to as “Wahhabism” in Russia) found appeal among some younger Muslims (Dannreuther 2010; Shterin and Yarlykapov 2011, 2013), shaping their radical protest against pervasive corruption, joblessness, and political turmoil, in some cases leading to their involvement in violent jihad. Undoubtedly, this “tumult in Russia’s Deep South” (Dunlop 2006, 97), which had multiple causes, has had profound impact on shaping the image of Islam and Muslims in Russia, in particular when it spilled outside the Northern Caucasus. Russian mass media and politicians have contributed to the worldwide trend toward securitization of Islam (Croft 2012; Dannreuther 2010; Ragozina 2020), which was compounded by the growing resonance of chauvinistic and anti-Muslim groups and ideologies in Russia (Dannreuther 2010; Ragozina 2020). When seen as committed by “Muslims,” acts of terrorism create an environment where hate speech emerges and suspicion grows (Verkhovsky 2010). Some poor practices in Russian journalism of reporting on Islam and Muslims have contributed to the formation and entrenchment of negative images of Islam and Muslims (KouznetsovaMorenko, [2003] 2004, 54; Ragozina 2020). The post-Soviet migration into big metropolitan areas is another cause of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiments. Having moved from the economically deprived areas of Central Asia such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and from the Northern Caucasus, Muslim migrants have been indispensable to the post-Soviet construction and maintenance of urban infrastructures and housing, and yet their increasing numerical growth and visibility are

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often entangled with fear and suspicion (Turaeva 2018). Elena Lisovskaya (2010) has located some of these tensions in her study of the introduction of religious education in Russian schools in the 2000s. She argues that dominated by alliances between political and ecclesiastical elites and focused on the comprehensive pro-Orthodox curriculum (“The Foundations of the Russian Orthodox Culture”), this policy fueled Orthodox-Muslim tensions among younger generations. However, some scholars have also noted the efforts of Muslims to exercise their agency in opposing discrimination and Islamophobic representations in the public domain (KuznetsovaMorenko 2009). Thus, summarizing the factors causing Islamophobia in Russia in the 2000s, Alexey Malashenko (2006a, 41) identifies “conflicts in the North Caucasus,” the rise of nationalism in Russia’s “Muslim republics,” migration, and international and domestic terrorism. The main sources of fear are largely personified in the “evil Chechen” and the “evil Arab.” These various tensions, together with the emphasis on the overarching Russian national identity and security concerns, have stimulated some level of official engagement with Muslim communities in terms of promoting a “moderate” vision and practice of Islam. It has been noted that “a striking feature of state-Muslim relations in Russia is the historical continuity of Muslim administrative structures and their close ties with government” (Braginskaia 2012, 599; see also Aitamurto 2016). Historically, the state approach to the issue has been a top-down initiative aimed at assimilation (Warhola 2008). Braginskaia (2012, 601) has noted three broad and at times conflicting approaches used by the Russian state in managing Muslim communities. The first approach focuses on the assimilation of indigenous and migrant Muslim communities. The second tendency is to recognize the differences among Muslim communities and to attempt to liberalize Islamic institutions. The final approach involves suppressing or “hollowing-out” Muslim institutions to ensure that they align with state security concerns and ideological priorities. It has also been noted that while influenced by state and religious institutions, individual perceptions and constructions of Muslim identities are much more complex and nuanced (Pilkington and Yemelianova 2003). Among other things, religious self-identification and cultural religiosity have an important bearing on members of a specific community. Someone who says she or he belongs to a particular religious tradition may not necessarily subscribe to, or even be aware of, its doctrines, participate in its rituals or sacraments, or be a member of one of its communities. Even if an individual recognizes links with a historical faith, this does not automatically entail any feelings of religious obligation. Islamic self-identification among the traditionally Muslim peoples in Russia varies widely. Nevertheless, the very fact that a person claims this identity can point to something

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important about his or her moral, cultural, and political outlook (Filatov 2006, 35; Rubin 2018).

The Foci of This Book This book attempts to pay due attention to these multifaceted manifestations of Islam in Russia and the diverse ways of being a Muslim. This includes constructions of individual identity, engagement with politics, the role of the “Islamic factor” in Russia’s foreign policy, and representation of Islam and Muslims in the Russian media. It is about the image of Islam as created by Muslims themselves and by those who portray them. In engaging this diversity of themes and images, the book raises three broad questions. The first question concerns Islam as seen by the Russian state and regional authorities. To what extent do their concerns and interests play a role in shaping Islam in Russia? This question is evoked by the complex and at times turbulent history of the Russian state’s relationship with Islam and Muslims. At its most basic, it is a history of suppression, resistance, and accommodation. The recent decades have seen Islam as a feared source of radicalism (Dannreuther and March 2010) but also as one of the country’s “traditional religions,” recognized as such in the preamble to the 1997 Law on the Freedom of Religion and Religious Associations (Shterin 2016). “Foreign Islam” is seen as both a potential groundswell of threats to national security and a potential ally in gaining geopolitical advantages (Curanović 2012, 191–213; Sagramoso 2020). The second question the book asks concerns mediated Islam: How is the image of Islam constructed by the Russian mass media and with what consequences for its perception by the wider public, by Muslims themselves, and for Russian domestic and international politics? As in any country, mass media are a center of cultural production, with their ability to use timing and content to convey particular images of people and events to large publics. This question is particularly pertinent in a context in which journalists and other mass media professionals gradually gravitate away from the notion of a civic duty to inform the public with facts and, as much as possible, unbiased analysis toward an interpretive form of journalism geared toward persuading and influencing target audiences (Simons and Strovsky 2006). This was the role Russian mass media played during the Second Chechen War, creating the impression that the insurgents were of foreign origin and a threat to Russian citizens. Yet Muslims’ increasing presence, visibility, and contributions to society and their footprint on culture and politics present a challenge to this view. Our third question focuses more closely on foreign policy: What specific factors shape Russia’s Islamic vector in international relations? Russia has

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had a long history of interaction with Islam and Muslim-majority countries, including both alliances and conflicts, for example with the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Afghanistan. The twenty-first century brings new needs and opportunities in the country’s relationships and ties with the Muslim world, as Russian participation in international organizations, such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, testifies. Russia has attempted to leverage its own Islamic credentials and its long-standing historical interaction with Islam and Muslims as a means to gain further influence in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at the expense of its foreign policy rivals.

Overview of the Chapters This book consists of nine chapters, which cover a wide range of perspectives and aspects concerning the image of and relationships with Islam in Russia. Chapter 2, “Muslims With and Without Islam,” by Marat Shterin deploys the concept of “ambient Islam” as an effective lens to explore the ways in which Muslims engage with their religion in the post-Soviet situation when ethnicity and religion have become increasingly important in forming individual and group identities. Rather than assuming that Muslims necessarily embrace Islam as an identifiable system of beliefs and practices, Shterin shows how they learn about and make sense of the religion in different cultural environments and depending on their moral, social, and political concerns. As a result, they construct their own cultural, social, and political visions of Islam, which they see as meaningful at certain intersections of their biographies and the histories of their communities, their country, and the wider world. The chapter explores the implications of conceptualizing Islam as ambient religion for our understanding of religiously inflected radicalism and the state’s policies toward it. Marlene Laruelle in Chapter 3, “Islamic Political Ideologies in PostSoviet Russia,” argues that the interaction and relationship between Russia and Islam have been studied through the prism of conflict, such as the two Chechen wars. She puts her focus on the largely understudied aspects of the construction of post-Soviet Muslim identity when being a Russian “patriot” and being Muslim merge and even become part of an Islamic agenda— something that can be easily overlooked if seen through the lens of conflict. Laruelle argues that these two aspects should be seen not as contradictory but rather as complementary in the evolving political and ideological landscape in the wake of the Soviet collapse in 1991. In Chapter 4, “Reporting on ‘Islam’ and ‘Terror’ in Russian vs. US Media,” Sergei A. Samoilenko, Olga Logunova, Sergey G. Davydov, and Eric

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Shiraev present a comparative study of newspaper coverage of the Islamic State and the idea of Islamic-based terrorism in the United States and Russia. It reveals a number of similarities in the mass-mediated coverage in both countries, which tends to create a binary opposition and dualistic categories of “us” vs. “them.” Carefully constructed yet easy-to-understand narratives are intended to guide the audience’s conclusions, perceptions, and opinions regarding the relationship between Islam and terrorism. One of the main differences in this coverage is that US media portrayed the Islamic State as a largely external and foreign problem, whereas Russian media tended to see it as both an external and an internal threat. In Chapter 5, “Perceptions of the Hajj,” Zilya Khabibullina’s analysis focuses on the regional practices of Islamic pilgrimage present in the Southern Urals. As the restrictions on participation in the Hajj and travel to Mecca were eased after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been an increase in the number of pilgrims making this spiritual journey, amounting to some 20,500 each year since the early 1990s. Khabibullina offers valuable insight into the social and political impact of this individual experience. In Chapter 6, “Between Russia and Islam,” Rahim Rahimov raises the question of why Chechnya’s reputation and “brand” have become so notoriously different from those of the other Muslim-majority areas of the Russian Federation and former Soviet republics. He argues that while the other regions and countries have tended to represent secular Muslim entities with the separation of religion and state, these characteristics only formally exist in Chechnya, while violent ideological radicalism and extremism are seen as flourishing under the conditions of a long history of armed conflict and nationalism. In Chapter 7, “The Role of Islam in Russia’s Middle East Policy,” Nicolas Dreyer suggests that Russian foreign policy has become gradually more informed and influenced by Islamic factors in the MENA region, which has gained greater significance for Russia in the wake of regime changes, in particular those associated with the Arab Spring. For a variety of reasons, Russia seems to view the operationalization of an Islamic identity in its foreign policy as a pragmatic opportunity to increase the prospects of its increasing influence in that geopolitical environment. Chapter 8, “The Impact of Islam on Russia-Iran Relations,” by Hamidreza Azizi considers the many centuries of interactions and relations between Iran and the Russian Federation, which ebbed and flowed between positive and negative dynamics. Taking the end of the Cold War as his point of departure, Azizi examines the contemporary relationship that exists between Tehran and Moscow, with a special emphasis on the role of Islam in these relational dynamics.

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In the concluding chapter, “What Have We Learned,” we return to the research questions posed in this introductory chapter, identifying patterns and trends that emerge in the book and proposing an agenda for further research.

Notes 1. On broader social and political differences between the republics of Chechnya and Tatarstan, see an excellent paper by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (2000).

2 Muslims With and Without Islam Marat Shterin

Like many of those whose formative and adult years fell in the Soviet period, I could observe how in the 1990s, or even earlier, my friends who used to be “simply” Gulnaz, Timur, Guzel, Rashid, or indeed Marat and who had “Tatar,” “Bashkir,” “Kazakh,” or “Avar” in their passports were becoming “Muslims.” In fact, it was not dissimilar to my ethnic Russian or Jewish friends increasingly identifying themselves through their religions. Not that we were previously unaware of our association with the religions of our communities or ethnic groups; rather, this association was now coming to the fore and having increasing bearing on our sense of belonging and our perceptions of and by others. We could hardly appreciate the gamut of implications this would have for our lives at this new turn of history. For me personally, this new juncture of biography and history meant that on several occasions I was a Muslim. In November 2001, in the wake of 9/11, I was asked to leave my flight for extra security checks just minutes before its scheduled takeoff from the Salt Lake City airport. Responding to my visible bewilderment, a surprisingly candid airport officer explained that it probably happened because my passport was randomly marked for extra security checks, but, she added, it could have to do with my name too. This quandary could not possibly have been envisioned by my parents, who gave me my name as a creative solution to the problem of not being able to follow the Jewish tradition of naming the first-born son after a deceased grandfather. The virulent post–World War II campaign against the “rootless cosmopolitans” was still a living memory, and choosing a name with the first two letters of my granddad’s looked like a wise

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move. Being internationalists, my parents did not even notice the Muslimsounding connotations of their chosen name. Now, in the post-9/11 world, their attempt to safeguard me against anti-Semitism had taken an unexpected twist, with my name being caught up in the growing suspicion of anything Muslim or Islamic. Charles Wright Mills’s (1959, 6) definition of the sociological imagination as enabling us to “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society” conveys the thrust of my attempt in this chapter to explore some ways in which “being Muslim” and engaging with “Islam” have acquired particular meanings in the social experiences of those who lived through the post-Soviet decades. Wright Mills’s conceptualization was made all the more poignant for me by another story, this time from my academic life. In 1999, at a conference in Moscow, I met a well-educated young man called Anzor Astemirov, who was raised in the Ukrainian city of Kremenchug but later returned to his ancestors’ native Kabardino-Balkaria in the Northern Caucasus. He and his friend Musa Mukozhev had formed a group of local young Muslims who sought to embrace “pure” Islamic practices as a way of changing their lives and transforming the “Soviet routines” of their parents and the wider community. I had not seen him after that encounter until 2004, when I was shocked to learn about the conflict between his group and the local authorities, which led to violent clashes with security services. Even more frustrating was his subsequent life trajectory, when he allied with militant jihadis in the Northern Caucasus: in 2007 Anzor Astemirov became Amir Seyfullah (sword of God) of the Caucasian Emirate—the virtual predecessor of the Islamic State on a smaller scale. In March 2010 he was killed in a battle with Russian security services (see Shterin and Yarlykapov 2011, 2013). Charles Wright Mills (1959, 8) clarifies that the sociological imagination involves the ability to distinguish between personal troubles and public issues and to see the relationship between them. Being unemployed, suffering from poor health, facing discrimination, or indeed being a perpetrator or victim of violence or terrorism are all troubles that we are “directly and personally aware of” as part of our immediate social experience and environment. Public issues, on the other hand, are “matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of their inner life”; they have their origins in the organization of society and the values we associate with them. In the last three decades or so, the public image of Islam has been increasingly shaped by the perception of troubles associated with the religion, and to a large extent academic research has contributed to this focus rather than escaping it (for critical overviews of this trend, see, e.g., Cesari 2013; Salvatore 2016; on Russia, Dudoignon 2015). Ideas of “Islamic extremism,” “radicalization,” terrorism, violence,

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and civilizational threat loom large in both academic research and public imagination, with the associated images spilling over from television screens, political platforms, and even academic meetings. To the extent that the modest size of this chapter permits, I endeavor to argue that contrary to the common view, and perhaps counterintuitively for some, the contemporary “trouble with Islam” has as much to do with the deeper issues that Muslims share with non-Muslims as with the attempts of some of them to articulate and act upon their distinctiveness. Russia is a particularly telling case to appreciate this. This becomes particularly clear if we shift our analysis from assumptions about substantive links between the notions of “Muslim” and “Islam” to the lived realities of these links. I suggest that for better understanding of how and with what implications Muslims as individuals and groups engage with Islam, we should go beyond simply recognizing the variety of institutional and noninstitutional strands and expressions within the tradition. For my purposes here, it would be useful to approach Islam as “ambient religion” (Engelke 2012; Wanner 2014; Kaell 2017). This concept refers to a variety of ideas, symbols, tropes, practices, and other forms associated with a religious tradition, which are maintained both within and beyond religious organizations and groupings through social institutions and cultural customs and whose meaning is acquired within specific sociohistorical contexts. From this angle, ambient religion provides a wealth of meaningful cultural resources that can be combined with those not associated with dominant religious traditions in a variety of individual and social pursuits.1 The notion of Islam as ambient religion, or “ambient Islam,” can be useful for our understanding of how Muslims engage with the tradition, including our approach to the “trouble” of so-called Islamic radicalism.

Muslims in Post-Soviet Russia: Ambient Islam as a Social and Cultural Resource Both in the public discourse and in academic debate, the post-Soviet resurgence of religion tends to be seen as the return of religious traditions after the decades of suppression and attempts at state-imposed atheism and secularism (see, e.g., Steinberg and Wanner 2008). However, there has been an abundance of competing claims on legitimate representation of these traditions in the form of established institutions or new movements in Russia (Mandelstam Balzer 2011; Shterin 2016); it is within this competition that Muslim leaders and activists have shown particular vibrancy (Malashenko 2007a; Dudoignon 2015). Yet, the contestation among the recognized and aspiring leaders aside, the available data give a much less cheerful picture

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of the situation among “ordinary believers,” who show much less enthusiasm about engagement with religious practices. This is a trend apparent across religious traditions, including among Muslims (Malashenko 2007a, 10–14; Sreda 2012; Shterin 2013). And yet, these aggregate statistics on the social significance of religious practice should not mislead us into thinking of Russia’s religious resurgence as merely a myth. The salience of religion in post-Soviet politics, cultural life, and public discourse in the mass media is apparent and, in many cases, quite consequential (Simons and Westerlund 2015; Shterin 2016), as the changes in Russian laws following the Pussy Riot case (Sperling 2014) and the prominence of religiously inflected rhetoric in the Russian-Ukrainian crisis (Wanner 2014) clearly indicate. The significance of issues related to Muslims and Islam in post-Soviet politics and public discourses hardly needs any elaboration (Dannreuther and March 2010). This paradox of the apparently religiously indifferent and yet religiously mobilizable society is both fascinating for the observer to watch and notoriously difficult for the social scientist to conceptualize. Furthermore, the ubiquitous and pervasive evocations of religious imagery, symbols, and tropes in post-Soviet society and politics have only tangential relationship to institutionally maintained orthodoxies of particular religious traditions. These evocations also come in quite different political packages and serve apparently divergent ideological purposes. President Vladimir Putin refers to Crimea as the birthplace of Russian Christian Orthodoxy and its “sacral land” (Bacon 2015), Communist Party leader Gennady Zuganov rejects “the West” as anti-Christian and condemns it as the embodiment of the Antichrist, and the ultranationalist Alexander Prokhanov anticipates Stalin’s return as a martyr saint to rescue Russia from the existential abyss (Marsh 2007, 457). Among these ideological evocations of religion, Alexander Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism stands out as the most salient and at times influential package of ideas, myths, symbols, and tropes woven together in an attempt to sacralize Russia as the heartland of the uniquely spiritual and virile civilization standing against the decadent yet aggressive West (Laruelle 2012; Bassin 2016). Neo-Eurasianism is important here, as it has spawned a variety of different, intersecting, and often competing ideological strands, and its influence tends to veer into different ambient religions, including Russian Orthodoxy and Islam. The current reincarnation of Eurasianism partly owes its popularity to the ideas of the Soviet writer Lev Gumilev (1912–1992), who elaborated a “theory of ethnogenesis,” according to which all ethnic formations (“ethnie”) pass through identifiable stages, culminating at a time when they and their leaders exhibit “passionarity,” or an irresistibly vigorous drive for expansion. In his vision, Russians were the super-ethnos des-

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tined for successful expansion in alliance with their neighbors—steppe ethnies. Described as a mystified version of Russian expansionism (Bassin 2016), Gumilev’s “theory” has been further cross-fertilized with ideas that circulated within the Soviet “cultic milieu” with its fluid circulation of ideas—from neopaganism and gnosticism to Western fascism and integralism (Laruelle 2008). This milieu has evolved alongside and intersected with Russia’s ambient faiths—Orthodoxy and Islam — throughout and beyond the Soviet period and provided a wide repertoire of concepts and imagery for cultural and ideological innovation (Glatzer Rosenthal 1997; Menzel 2012).2 It has been observed that in their attempts to engage Islam in their causes, Muslim leaders and activists have offered a variety of ideological packages that carry the hallmarks of these diverse cultural influences, albeit adjusted to diverse political and cultural orientations. In an attempt to offer a progressive version of Eurasianism in the spirit of the 1990s, Tatarstan’s presidential advisor Rafael Khakimov promoted “Euro-Islam” as the integral manifestation of the republic’s liberalism and valorization of democracy, combined with enlightened Russian patriotism (e.g., Khakimov 2004). For his part, Damir Mukhitdinov, an activist and the first deputy chairman of the Russian Council of Muftis, offers what can be equally described as Islamic Eurasianism or Eurasian Islam (Kemper 2019). He entwines claims to Islam’s unique moral authenticity, its enlightened adoption of modernity, and its integrity with the Russian civilization shaped by Christian Orthodoxy. Finally, in his yearning for a spiritually reinvigorating and socially transformative ideology, Geydar Dzhemal (1947–2016) forges his distinctive version of Islam, cross-fertilizing it with Marxism and a variety of esoteric ideas, recognizably drawn from the Russian “cultic milieu” and molded through his engagement with NeoEurasianism (see, e.g., Dzhemal 2014). I shall return to Dzhemal in more detail in the next section. We thus observe ways in which “religious traditions” regain their symbolic appeal not so much through involving practitioners in institutions that represent them but through activities of ideological entrepreneurs who furnish various forms of religious and ideological innovation that they claim are associated with these traditions. This is not dissimilar to the trends in “advanced industrial societies,” described by sociologist James Beckford (1989, 170) nearly three decades ago: Religion has come adrift from its former points of anchorage but is no less potentially powerful as a result. It remains a potent cultural resource [emphasis added] or form which may act as the vehicle of change, challenge or conservation. Consequently, religion has become less predictable. The capacity to mobilise people and material resources remains strong, but it is likely to be mobilised in unexpected places and

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The concept of ambient religion helps explore further how religious traditions can work “adrift” from established religious institutions. In his original conceptualization of “ambient faith,” focusing on a group of British Evangelicals’ promotion of the “proper” celebration of Christmas, Matthew Engelke (2012) explored the processes whereby extant associations with, feelings about, and images of Christianity could be brought forth from the background of British culture to express contemporary concerns in a largely secular society. Catherine Wanner (2014) has demonstrated the explanatory value of this concept with regard to Orthodox Christianity’s workings beyond the confines of religious institutions in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine, providing the example of its political actualization in the 2014 political uprising (the “Euromaidan”) in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Wanner points out that ambient faith is thus not reducible to the doctrines, practices, and politics of religious institutions and can be identified in everyday human interactions, language, artifacts, and symbols and in a gamut of other cultural expressions and social relationships. She argues that precisely because ambient faith is emplaced in particular localities, entwined with historical memory, and embedded in people’s everyday lives, it can be a powerful mobilizing resource for social activists and political leaders. As uncontrollable by religious institutions, it readily lends itself to mixing and matching with other ideas, myths, and tropes regarded as set apart and “sacred,” such as those from the Soviet past. In this chapter, I draw on Wanner’s conceptualization, though with a linguistic tweak, as I find the expression “ambient religion” more suitable for conveying its application to culture rather than personal devotion. In that vein, I would like to suggest that what Christel Lane (1981) called “Soviet political religion” functioned in ways that are similar to ambient faith, as its symbols, images, and tropes became deeply embedded in people’s sense of kinship and belonging to a place. This Russian Orthodox and Soviet repertoire of images, symbols, tropes, and emotional attachments, often mixed with those from the “cultic milieu,” still reverberates in the examples of Zuganov’s allegiance to both communism and Orthodoxy; Dugin’s exaltation of Russia’s “passionaric” virtues; Prokhanov’s glorification of the national church and Stalin’s charisma; and, indeed, President Putin’s evocations as “sacred” of both the Soviet and the Russian Orthodox heritages. While these examples represent ideological constructions furnished by highly politicized entrepreneurs, ambient faith also provides a wealth of cultural resources for constructions of personal or group identities, centered on issues of ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.

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From this perspective, the concept of ambient faith—or, for my purposes here, ambient Islam—is also useful for understanding Russia’s Muslims’ engagement with the religion. Among other things, it could help transcend the dichotomous and unhelpful debates about Soviet Muslims’ relationship with Islam as either “forgotten Muslims,” to use Alexander Bennigsen and Enders Wimbush’s (1985) (in)famous expression, or as faithful practitioners who preserved Islam in the most adverse circumstances. The concept of ambient Islam allows us to make sense of the growing evidence that while the experiences of Tatars, Bashkirs, Avars, Kumyks, and Chechens and their engagement with Islamic practices varied considerably, their sense of identity and belonging was pervasively shaped by ambient Islam as well as by the adoption of the attributes of the Soviet “political religion” (Bobrovnikov 2007; see also Pelkmans 2009). Deploying the concept of ambient Islam can also be useful for challenging the assumption that those turning to the religion in search of alternatives to Soviet officialdom and stagnant society were “radicalized” by foreign influences. Rather, evidence points to the emergence of new and radical forms of Islam from the local “religious field,” to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s concept, similar to some Russian dissidents’ appeal to Orthodox symbols, imageries, and philosophies as a transformative alternative to state-imposed atheism and communism. In the late 1980s and 1990s, ambient Islam was mobilized by Muslim political activists when, inter alia, Ahmet Khalitov and Nadirshakh Khachilaev were forming the Union of Muslims of Russia (1995) or by Abdul-Vakhid Niiazov with his Muslim Union (Malashenko 2007a, 20–30; Hunter 2004, chap. 2). These short-lived and politically vague initiatives were marked by very general references to Islam and its democratic credentials rather than offering any theologically inspired Islamic programs of social and political reform. Irrespective of the intentions of these activists, at a time of social and political flux and the increasing valorization of religion, engagement with ambient Islam could be readily associated with social and political advantages (Malashenko 2007a, 23). The republic of Dagestan—where, according to the common view, Islamic practices persisted most during the Soviet period—is a remarkable example of Muslims’ divergent and conflicting engagements with ambient Islam. In the first round of the 1996 presidential election, amid what most observers saw as an Islamic revival in the republic, the Dagestani population voted overwhelmingly (63.2 percent) for communist and pro-Orthodox candidate Gennady Zuganov. At the same time, Dagestan was a place of fierce competition between different leaders, activists, and groups who furnished their distinctive versions of ambient Islam, intertwined with different social networks, entrepreneurial pursuits, and political connections, in particular within the realms of the “Salafi” and “Sufi” orientations (Makarov 2007; Kisriev 2004, 2011).

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The example of Dagestan points to ways in which ambient Islam, like ambient Orthodoxy and other post-Soviet resurgent ambient religions, has become subject to competition for institutional control, in which claims to represent “the tradition” are inextricably linked to calls for other, nonreligious allegiances (Shterin 2016). Thus, dozens of institutional bodies, or muftiats, were created that derive their representational claims both from Muslims’ association with ambient Islam and from their sense of emplacement in particular localities or feelings of ethnic kinship. Alongside this, competing claims also have been made to represent Muslims’ allegiance to both their faith and the Russian nation, most notably by Ravil Gaintudin and Talgat Tadjuddin in their battle for the title of the country’s grand mufti. While Talgat Tadjuddin’s initiative to rename his organization as the Islamic Central Muslim Board of Holy Rus’ has been largely seen as idiosyncratic, it is in fact the clearest example of an amalgam of ambient Islam and the tropes associated with Russian patriotism and Orthodoxy as Russia’s national ambient religion. In his insightful analysis, Michael Kemper (2019) describes how Damir Mukhitdinov’s agonistic efforts to engage a variety of Islamic and non-Islamic sources to elaborate a coherent version of patriotic yet modern Russian Islam draws on his engagement with the legacy of the Russian Slavophilic tradition and Fyodor Dostoyevsky no less than on Islamic sources. In a different vein, in the efforts to underpin his authoritarian political regime (Russell 2010), Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov deploys both a radical version of ambient Islam and a most extreme, even militant, version of Russian patriotism, reinforced with the assurances of allegiance to the Russian Orthodox Church. Approaching Islam as ambient religion rather than as an institutionally defined and controlled set of beliefs and practices allows us to avoid assumptions about social implications of Muslim identity. Instead, we can observe how individuals furnish their identities and lifestyles through engagement with ambient Islam alongside other beliefs, moral codes, and imageries that make sense for them within their particular contexts and situations. An excellent example of this is Guzel Sabirova’s (2011) research on young Muslim women in Tatarstan’s capital, Kazan. For these women, ambient Islam provides possibilities for shaping and expressing their distinctive identities, which embrace both selective Islamic attributes, such as headscarves, and symbols of belonging to contemporary youth culture. Revealingly, this often puts them in a precarious relationship with the generation of their parents, for whom being Muslim is still entangled with the symbols and values of their Soviet formative years. In another illuminating ethnographic piece, Erik Vlaeminck (2019) shows how post-Soviet masculinity can be portrayed through “Islamic” images

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in the Russian mass media. This direction of research tallies well with the growing stream of ethnographic research outside Russia, such as Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera’s Being Young and Muslim (2010), which offers an excellent selection of case studies showing how young people engage with ambient Islam to embrace, challenge, and resist the conventions and lifestyles of their communities. In the next section I discuss how ambient Islam is evoked to express aspirations and grievances that the wider community and the state can see as incongruent with the accepted conventions and as a challenge to social and political authorities.

Ambient Islam and Nonconformity: Russia’s Muslims and Their Social Grievances Islamic radicalism has come to dominate public perception of Muslims in Russia and elsewhere, and this “trouble with Islam” continues to define academic research agendas. Titles such as Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West (2017) by Giles Kepel or Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State by Oliver Roy (2017) catch much more public attention than, say, the above mentioned Being Young and Muslim by Bayat and Herrera. Equally, amid the dearth of research on Russia’s “ordinary Islam,” Gordon Hahn’s Russia’s Islamic Threat (2007) is more likely to influence knowledge about the religion in academia and beyond.3 We seem to have entered a vicious circle whereby academics respond to the public demand for addressing the “trouble with Islam” but, in so doing, sometimes inadvertently feed the popular perception of the trouble coming from Islam. In their recent highly publicized and heated debate in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in France, the two influential academics Giles Kepel and Oliver Roy were at loggerheads over the relationship between Islam and these acts of violence. The highly publicized and mediated nature of the debate forced them to formulate their contested arguments in competing catchphrases: “radicalization of Islam” (Kepel) vs. “Islamization of radicalism” (Roy). The thrust of Kepel’s thesis was that Islam did have certain distinctive features amenable to its instrumentalization by the latter-day jihadis in the current social and geopolitical climate. On his part, Roy pointed to the current complex domestic and global transformations that contribute to the radicalization of many young people, Muslims and nonMuslims alike, across contemporary societies, with Islam increasingly coming to be perceived as an efficacious channel for expressing aspirations and discontents. He argues this is particularly the case when alternative ideologies, from Marxism to neoliberalism, have failed.

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The scope and focus of this chapter do not permit a detailed analysis of the arguments in this debate, well elaborated by both scholars in the books mentioned above, although the reader will certainly detect a degree of affinity between my approach and Roy’s. That said, I would argue that being locked up in the exchange of catchy generalizations, both Kepel and Roy allowed a degree of reification of Islamic concepts and imagery at the expense of seeing them as operating in much more fluid, elastic, and interactive forms, or as ambient Islam, within specific local contexts. In my view, from this angle we can better see why and how Islam can appeal to some Muslims, both born into and converted to the religion, as a channel for expressing discontent and opposition. This socially constructed affinity between Islam and radicalism seems particularly evident in the Russian examples of “Islamist radicals” that I shall discuss briefly now. Rather than being “radicalized” by foreign Islamists, these activists have more of an affinity, both cultural and political, with their non-Muslim Russian contemporaries than is commonly assumed, with the causes of their discontent, as well as the sources of their inspiration, found closer to home. Geydar Dzhemal is often referred to as a radical Islamist who, in his rejection of the “West,” went as far as to declare 9/11 a Zionist-CIA plot designed by the world “Super-Elite.” However, rather than being triggered by Islamic scholarship or imagery, Dzhemal’s ever-evolving thinking was recognizably steeped in Marxist tropes of the Soviet variety (Laruelle 2008; Sibgatullina and Kemper 2017). From that repertoire of ideas, he attempted to shape an ideological platform for a revolutionary overthrow of the “Super-Elite”—the contemporary reincarnation of imperialism. To that end he was in constant search of ideological affinities and allies with socially and politically transformative energies, capable of challenging the supposedly pervasive cynicism and materialism. This led him to become bedfellows with Russian nationalists such as Dugin and Prokhanov before arriving, with the flow of the time, at an appreciation for the radical force of Islam. Yet Dzhemal, who had both Azeri and Russian ethnic roots, disregarded the prevalent forms of Islam, such as Sufism, as too ossified and conformist, placing his hopes in what he saw as the radical zeal of Salafism and Iranian Shiism. Remarkably though, Dzhemal saw these “revolutionary forces” more through the prism of Russian Neo-Eurasianist constructions than that of Islamic theologians (Sibgatullina and Kemper 2017). Like Soviet Marxists and Neo-Eurasianists, he was focused on Russia’s messianic and salvationist role. His conditional alliance with both Putin’s regime and Russian Orthodoxy was based on what he saw as the common anti-Western qua reinvigorating cause, and his disappointment with both stemmed from his perception that they did not rise to the task. Like Neo-

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Eurasianism, his ideas have their roots in multiple philosophical and religious sources, mostly of non-Russian origins, from Marxism and Islam through gnosticism and occultism to Gurdjiev and traditionalism. Furthermore, both Dzhemal and Dugin come from the same Yuzhinski Circle (Yuzhinski krug)—the epitome of the Soviet “cultic milieu” of the 1980s and the alma mater of many ideologists of Russia’s mysterious superiority (Sedgwick 2004, 221–262). Sibgatullina and Kemper (2017) also make a very important point that it was Dzhemal’s intellectual versatility and, I would add, his appeal to both ambient Islam and the Soviet cultural legacy, including its “cultic milieu,” that contributed to his popularity as a Russian radical public intellectual. Both his social and political discontent and the tropes he deployed to express them resonated with his audience. The ideological and public activist trajectory of Said Buryatsky (1982– 2010) is an even more striking example of the ways in which radical social and political stances found expression in both association with Islam and engagement with a broader repertoire of ideas from Russian intellectual circles. Said Buryatsky was the adopted name of Alexander Tikhomirov, who had mixed ethnic roots: a Russian mother and a half-Buryat, half-Kazakh father. A convert to Islam at the age of seventeen, within his tragically short life he became one of the most popular propagandists of his distinctive version of Islamism on social media. He was credited with authorship of the idea of the Caucasian Emirate, joined it, and was killed by Russian security services in March 2010. Buryatsky is commonly portrayed as an example par excellence of the dire radicalizing effects of foreign Islamist ideas spreading among Russian Muslims. However, Danis Garaev’s (2017b) insightful and wellinformed analysis shows that rather than being well versed in Islamic sources, Buryatsky expressed his radicalism through a repertoire of ideas drawn from the Russian cultural, including “cultic,” milieu of the 1990s and early 2000s. Only patchily familiar with Salafi sources, he was particularly attracted to the ideas of Lev Gumilev, thus partaking in the same intellectual source as his Eurasianist and other Russian nationalist contemporaries. Like those from the Eurasianist stock, including Dzhemal, Buryatsky embarked on a search for “authentic” and world-transforming ideas, though he took a distinctive ideological and personal trajectory. Like them, he was inspired by Gumilev’s ideas about the “passionarity” of ethnic groups but saw this as a reinvigorating force working within “pure Islam” rather than Russian Orthodoxy or the Russian nation. Seeing affinity with Gumilev’s idea of passionarity as requiring personal heroism and sacrifice, he criticized the writer for his blindness to Islam’s transformative qualities and for his disparaging view of the religion (Garaev 2017b, 211).

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Garaev shows that while sharing with his radical—Islamic and nonIslamic—contemporaries the desire for authentic and meaningful lives amid the pervasive anomie, despair, and frustration of the 1990s, Buryatsky went further than most. Eventually, around 2008, he came to equate heinous violence in the name of jihad with the ultimate expression of heroism and to see the terrorism of the Caucasian Emirate as an ultimate expression of the idea of the passionaric state. In this sense, he decisively parted ways with those Russian radicals, such as Dugin, who saw Eurasianism as the intellectual basis for building a new “civilizational” imperial state rather than as a means to defy the existing state. Buryatsky is an example of how the concept of Islam has become associated with radicalism—a trend that, according to Oliver Roy (2017), has become global. Like any global trend, it is also refracted in different fashions in specific contexts, according to local concerns, and becomes cross-fertilized with local cultural repertoires. Like Buryatsky and Dzhemal, some Russian converts to Islam, who in 2004 created the National Organization of Russian Muslims led by Harun al-Rusi (aka Vadim Sidorov), were stimulated by the ideas of civilizational reinvigoration. Attracted to ambient Islam, they grafted it onto their experiences in the Russian “cultic milieu,” thus creating their own version of the religion, expressed in the name of their organization. In doing so, they entered the market of ideas designed to reinvigorate the “Eurasian civilization” and defend it against the Western corruption and direct threat (Sedgwick 2004, 222–224). In other cases, Muslims engage with ambient Islam seeking to transform the community and individual lives. As the example of the New Muslims Movement in Kabardino-Balkaria shows, ideological and political radicalism may be not the original intention of these groups but the result of escalating tensions within the movement and between it and the wider community. This example also shows that these movements can be expressions of generational differences in ways Muslims engage with and practice ambient Islam, in particular at times of social and political change, such as in the 1990s in the Northern Caucasus. Rather than being “radicalized” by “foreign” Islamists, the New Muslims rejected the Soviet-style Islamic practices that were entwined with what they saw as backward and corrupt social conventions and relations. These ideas about “authentic,” sincere, and transformative Islam had been circulating in the Northern Caucasus, in particular in Dagestan, at least from the 1980s (Kisriev 2004), while the early post-Soviet contacts with the wider Muslim world gave them an additional aura of legitimacy and inspiration. It is not coincidental, though, that this version of “pure Islam” had an unmistaken resemblance to what is often referred to as Salafism. As contemporary scholarship suggests (e.g., Meijer 2009), the Salafi call for a return to the

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authentic Islamic roots, with their conservatism and apparent antimodernism, often involving attempts at modern critique of social injustice and justification for social action. To contextualize more broadly, Muslims can appeal to ambient Islam as a resource for justifying and pressing for social change. This is particularly evident when we look at how some Muslims attempt to transform Islamic practices of their communities in times of social change or at how different generations of Muslims engage with the religion. Beyond Russia, among the growing ethnographies of contemporary Muslims in different contexts, Anabel Inge’s (2016) unique ethnographic study of Salafi women in London shows that even these women, completely veiled and supposedly entirely separated socially, seek to solve problems that they share with many other young women, Muslim and non-Muslim, of their generation. These women are deeply engaged in contemporary public discourses, well versed in British culture, and aware of the youth subcultures around them. Similarly, Bayat and Herrera (2010) explore this trend across societies and cultures in their aforementioned Being Young and Muslim. What emerges from these studies is that young Muslims share radicalism and individualized engagement with religion with their contemporaries insomuch as the quest for distinctiveness, authenticity, and autonomy has become part and parcel of modern culture and is expressed in contemporary subcultures. As Garaev’s analysis of the rather extreme case of Said Buryatsky suggests, this observation also applies to Muslims’ radical engagements with ambient Islam.

Ambient Islam, Radicalism, and the State The state has been an elephant in the room in this discussion of how Muslims engage with ambient Islam. The state and its agencies are instrumental in this engagement in a variety of ways, from formalizing Muslim identity through national censuses, birth certificates, and educational arrangements to granting citizenship and legally guaranteeing and providing facilities for practicing Islam. But the ways in which the state and its agencies shape Muslims’ relationship with Islam extend even further and often include conceptualization and legislation of the acceptable forms of Islamic belief and practice. In doing so, implicitly or explicitly, the state and its agencies also create different categories of Muslims. Among the most obvious examples of this is state agencies’ deployment of distinctions between “radical” and “moderate” Muslims or between “official” and “nonofficial” Islam. One very revealing but still muchneglected research field in this respect is legal proceedings and decisions involving Muslims, including those accused of extremism (Kovalskaya

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2017). Law courts are particularly interesting sites, as the state and its agencies have to essentially declare their underlying assumptions about the relationship between legitimate citizenship and Islamic practices—and, in some cases, even beliefs. In doing so, the state and its agencies tend to regulate Muslims’ relationship with ambient Islam. Discussions of this relationship tend to focus on “Muslims” or “Islam” as bounded entities—for instance, on the extent to which “Muslims” are “good citizens,” on “Islam’s” compatibility with liberal democracy, a secular state, or on “Muslims’” relationship with the “Christian majority.” Rogers Brubaker (2017a, 1191) points to the increasing emphasis on the “threat of Islam” within the “North Atlantic and pan-European populist cluster,” the trend that involves some national governments increasingly referring to their “civilizational” mission of defending both “Christian identity” and liberal values such as human rights and freedom of speech. As we have seen, the prevailing identitarian rhetoric in Russia is somewhat different, emphasizing the civilizational unity of Christian Orthodoxy and domestic Islam against the West and its liberalism (Bacon 2015; Simons and Westerlund 2015; Shterin 2016). However, in both Russia and elsewhere, Islamic “radicalism” is the key reference point in these identitarian politics. I would like to focus on two assumptions that are implicit in this rhetoric and these trends. First, Muslims are assumed to have to adhere to a bounded and uniform religion that can be molded according to particular sociopolitical concerns—if their presence is seen as legitimate at all. Second, the state is assumed to be the ultimate arbiter in deciding on the issues of Muslim identity and their engagement with Islamic practices. By implication, radicalism is defined as nonconformity with these state-imposed assumptions. While most critiques of this approach (e.g., Dannreuther and March 2010; Cesari 2013; Salvatore 2016) have emphasized the diversity of Islamic beliefs and practices, I would like to focus on the conceptualization of the state implicit in it and on the need to see “Islamic” radicalism’s entanglement with broader cultural trends. Joe Migdal (2001) argues that it is useful to conceptualize the state not as something “above society” but as “in society”—that is, as a group of people who claim the monopoly of power to provide certain functions (protection, distribution, regulation, etc.), over which they compete with other potential providers who make alternative claims. This approach also allows us to avoid the assumption that radicalism is necessarily an illegitimate attempt at destroying society and instead to take a more discerning look at its diverse forms and manifestations. As the recent research clearly indicates, radicalism presents a spectrum of challenges to social conventions and institutions, including creative attempts to offer social improvements or alternative ways of doing things, and should not be seen as necessarily

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fraught with violence (Sageman 2016). From this angle, the state and its agencies become a significant and at times crucial party in the relationships between radicals, either groups or individuals, and the wider society. Thus, the reactions and actions of the state agencies must be included in the analysis of the causes, dynamics, and outcomes of radicalism, allowing for a wide range of scenarios, from engagement to disengagement and from accommodation to violence. The new forms of authority and community sought by some Muslims through engagement with ambient Islam can thus be seen as attempts to address social grievances and accommodate aspirations that, in their view, cannot be accommodated within the available social and political structures. Alexey Malashenko, the sharp observer of the developments among contemporary Russia’s Muslims, offers a panoramic picture of such attempts in his book tellingly titled The Islamic Project and Islamic Alternative (2006b). The movement of New Muslims in Kabardino-Balkaria, described earlier, is an example of this. Enver Kisriev (2004, 2010) and Dmitry Makarov (2007) have explored the new jama’ats of predominately young Dagestani Muslims who placed their hopes in “pure Islam” to challenge the corruption and economic backwardness of their local communities, particularly in the Kadar Zone of the republic. Il’nur Minnullin (2013) presents an ethnographic study of the conflict in the Tatar village of Belozerye in Mordovia, where in the 1990s younger Muslims formed a de facto alternative community and attempted to change the local economic practices and lifestyles, according to what they saw as sharia law. In their search for proper Islamic guidance, they established contacts with another community of radically nonconformist Muslims in the southern city of Astrakhan (approximately 600 miles away from the village), led by Ayyub Astrakhanski (aka Anguta Omarov). As Arbakhan Magomedov (2007, 175) concludes, the movement Mukhmin Jama’at (Muslim Innovators) should not be seen as comprising intentional political dissidents; rather, Mukhmin Jama’at reflects “a way to adapt in the situation of the collapse of the economic system, political institutions, and the previous patterns of social and civic interaction.” To put this within the discourse of this chapter, in a situation of institutional flux and uncertainty, with its various manifestations in different parts of Russia, Muslims appealed to ambient Islam—its concepts, imagery, symbols, and practices—to create new visions of community and ways of living. As the authors mentioned above point out, these religious and social innovations predictably led to social tensions and, eventually, conflicts. While these tensions and conflicts were to be expected, their trajectories and outcomes were by no means inevitable. Recent academic research provides further insight into the role of the state in the dynamics of the relationships between radical groups and the

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wider society. In particular, Mark Sageman, whose monographs Understanding Terror Networks (2004) and Leaderless Jihad (2008) influenced a generation of scholars focused on “radicalization” and “terrorism,” has recently reconsidered some of his key assumptions about the meaning and application of these concepts, in particular as applied to state agencies. In Misunderstanding Terrorism (2016), Sageman admits that his involvement in government-run counterradicalization programs made him particularly aware of state agencies’ propensity to misunderstand the provenance of political radicalism, including that associated with “jihadism,” and to overpredict the likelihood of these radical ideas leading to violence. Presenting thorough statistical analysis, he observes that while radical ideas can be widespread, the incidence of radical actions, particularly of a violent nature, tends to be low. Thus, while radicalization of worldviews can be consequential and should be taken seriously by society and policymakers, it should not be equated with radicalization of behavior and engagement in terrorism. Sageman thus joins other scholars, such as Sophie Moskalenko and Clark McCauley (2011) and Daniela Della Porta (2013), in pointing out that the origins and trajectories of violence can only be understood as arising from tensions and conflicts between the state and those who challenge it. In this conflict, both parties see themselves as defenders of their “in-group”— with the state representing the “righteous citizens” and its challengers claiming their right to follow “ultimate truths” (Sageman 2016, 159). This is not to put the radicals and the state on an equal level of legitimacy. Rather, it points out that the ways the state agencies understand the mindsets of their challengers and react to their behavior can be a crucial factor in the escalation or de-escalation of radical behavior. This analysis points to the possible implications of the current trend of portraying Muslims as constituting an out-group bounded by “Islamic” values and customs that are inimical to those of “Christianity” and liberalism (Brubaker 2017a). Paradoxically perhaps, this trend is conducive to appropriation by those activists who see Islam as a channel for their radicalism and seek to form oppositional in-groups bounded by this vision. In relation to this, Sageman observes that the tendency to portray acts of violence committed by Muslims as manifestations of the bounded global “Salafi jihad” is not supported by evidence and is misleading. There is no doubt that transnational groups and loose networks of militants in the name of Islam do exist and that they appeal to jihadi tropes and symbols to express their militant outrage and justify violent actions. However, we do not have evidence to suggest that they are driven by a bounded and uniform ideology of “Salafism.” Rather, we observe what Sageman (2016, 5) calls a “global neo-jihad”—that is, various selective appropriations of jihadi rhetoric and imagery by various

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contemporary militants, both groups and loners, with different intents and interpretations, operating in different contexts. Predictably, the continuing portrayal of these activities as a bounded “global jihad” by the mass media, governments, and some counterradicalization agencies can contribute to legitimization of violent behavior by militant radicals themselves. Thus, Sageman’s analysis is a call for discernment and reflexivity among state agencies and society at large regarding their own actions in response to various expressions of radicalism. Russia provides many examples of the challenges and implications of the state agencies’ involvement in conflicts on the assumption that they necessarily deal with local expressions of the global Islamic jihad as a bounded threat to Russia’s security. Thus, as Ahmet Yarlykpapov and I have argued, the New Muslims’ appeal to “pure Islam” as a basis for new life and morality contributed to a split within the existing local community along a tangle of generational, social, and political lines. This split was gravely exacerbated by the fears that the local events were spillovers of the militant jihadism (“Wahhabism”) in the neighboring Chechnya. This claim by the local authorities that the New Muslims were “radicalized” by and part of the global militant “Wahhabism” was used to justify the repressive actions of the state agencies, including police arrests and vandalism in and closure of mosques, which contributed to the escalating spiral of violence perpetrated by both sides. Other scholars have observed similar dynamics in the cases of new Muslim communities in the Kadar Zone of Dagestan (Kisriev 2004; Makarov 2007; Malashenko 2007a, 110–121) and in relation to Mukhmin Jama’at in Astrakhan (Magomedov 2007).

Conclusion Individuals can be born into Muslim families and communities and raised in Muslim-majority societies, but, sociologically speaking, they are not born with Islam, its beliefs, practices, and ways of living. Furthermore, individual socialization into the faith is entangled in a myriad of ways with how particular communities and societies see and organize their social world (economic practices, governance, gender relations, etc.). To put this differently, while individuals tend to see their Muslim identity as a given, the way they engage with Islam evolves over time, varies by social context, and ultimately reflects what Wright Mills referred to as the intersections between personal biography and history within particular societies. This simple sociological wisdom seems often lost in the public discussions and even academic research, when certain events, trends, and social expressions associated with Muslims are routinely attributed solely

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to their religion. I suggest that in order to see the ways Muslims engage with Islam in their various social pursuits—their individual distinctiveness, sense of belonging, or radical rejection of social conventions—it is useful to approach Islam as an ambient religion rather than as a specific set of beliefs and practices. Focusing on ambient Islam, I argue, allows us to see how, in their engagement with the religion, Muslims express social concerns and individual aspirations, as well as deploy cultural repertoires that have a broader purchase within their societies and across different societies. The concept of ambient Islam seems particularly useful for recognizing the perils of the state agencies’ propensity to attribute causes of opposition solely to the radicalizing ideological influence of specific versions of Islam. While taking account of these influences is important, in particular when they are embodied in social structures and networks, it is crucial to recognize that, like any other individuals and groups, Muslims appeal to their ambient faith in ways that tend to resonate with, and be expressed in, broader social and cultural trends. To assume that radical Muslims are radical due to “Islam” is to contribute to the social construction of Islam as a radicalizing religion. I felt the effects of this when I was a “Muslim” taken off the plane in Salt Lake City. In a variety of ways, looking at Russia’s Muslims’ engagement with Islam seems a particularly telling argument for deploying the concept of ambient Islam. During the Soviet-enforced secularization of entire communities and regions, Islamic beliefs and practices endured in the language, social practices, historical memories, extant artifacts, and so forth (i.e., within the cultural ambience) of ethnic Muslim communities and families. In the social experiences of Muslims, this ambient Islam became entangled with the symbols, imagery, and tropes found in the Soviet culture, but it also provided cultural and social resources for resistance to oppression and subjugation. In the new Russia, Muslims continue to engage with ambient Islam in a variety of different and sometimes conflicting ways, transforming it through their new cultural exposures, social experiences, and global trends.

Notes 1. The notion of ambient religion is not designed to substitute for that of religion from a sociological and/or theological perspective. It is designed to see more clearly how religious attributes—images, symbols, concepts, rituals, and so forth—are maintained in association with other culturally significant attributes within various social contexts as meaningful ontologies and practices. Matthew Engelke originally proposed the concept in his study focusing on Christian Evangelicals in Swindon, UK, to explore “the processes through which faith . . . goes public or stays private” (Engelke 2012, 155). For my current purposes, however,

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I use ambient religion to emphasize cultural usage rather than personal belief, similar to Hillary Kaell’s (2017) adjustment of the concept in her study of Catholics in Quebec. 2. The concept of cultic milieu was elaborated by British sociologist Colin Campbell (1972) to refer to the nonconventional beliefs and practices that are spread and maintained through various groups and communication structures. 3. This is, of course, not to discount the necessary and useful research and publications on the relationships between Islam and radicalism. With respect to Russia, see, e.g., Dannreuther and March 2010.

3 Islamic Political Ideologies in Post-Soviet Russia Marlene Laruelle

Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of state of the small Chechen Republic, is probably one of the most caricatured figures in Russia today. Known for his eccentric, radical statements and his repressive politics, Kadyrov embodies a merging of two distinct trends: vocal support for President Vladimir Putin and promotion of a puritan, conservative Islam. The desecularization of Russian society, along with a conservative turn (Kivinen et al. 2021), has contributed to an Islamic revival and politicization of Islamic society (Alaverdov 2020). In this chapter, I argue that the two trends are not contradictory but complementary and have in fact been present in Russia’s political and ideological landscape since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Kadyrov’s brand of what I call “Islamic Putinism” is nothing new or original, though he does represent an extreme case. Behind moments of tension and repression lie a centuries-long history of integration of Muslim elites into the Russian aristocratic class (Dudoignon, Is’haqov, and Mohämmätshin 1997) and a decades-long history of mutual co-optation between the Soviet regime and Islamic institutions on which contemporary Muslim leaders and post-Soviet authorities can build. More importantly, the face of Islam in modern Russia is changing dramatically. For centuries, Islam was confined to ethnic minorities in the North Caucasus and the Volga-Urals. But contemporary Russia’s Islam is rapidly becoming increasingly Russian. The Russian language is becoming the lingua franca of the country’s multinational mosques, diminishing the ethnic character of places of worship (Bustanov and Kemper 2018). Millions of migrants coming from Central Asia and Azerbaijan integrate into Russian society through Russian rather than minority languages. The trend of ethnic Russians converting to Islam,

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though understudied, seems to be quite considerable (APN 2012). To prevent the politicization of Islam, the Russian authorities have developed Russian-speaking Islamic theological schools and higher education institutions that promote an Islam “compatible” with Russian patriotism. Runet, the Russian segment of the internet, contains a dense, vibrant Islamic web that is very well connected to the rest of the Muslim world (Garaev 2017a). The interaction between “Russia” and “Islam” has primarily been studied through the prism of conflict, a lens driven by the two wars in Chechnya, the Kremlin’s hawkish discourse on the fight against Islamic terrorism, and Russia’s military intervention in Syria to rescue Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Yet the peaceful articulation of both being a patriot of Russia and having an Islamic agenda remains largely understudied, despite being the prevalent discourse in the country (see Aitamurto 2016). This chapter bridges the gap by briefly discussing the main ideological combinations of loyalty to Russia and promotion of Islam that have been displayed in postSoviet Russia.

(Failed) Attempts at Mobilizing a Muslim Electorate While parties based on religions are forbidden in Russia—as they are in the majority of European countries—there have been several attempts to capture the country’s Muslim electorate and incorporate it into specific political structures, mostly pro-regime ones. The earliest such attempt was made by the Islamic Party of Rebirth (Islamskaia partiia vozrozhdeniia), created in June 1990 in Astrakhan. Made up primarily of Tajiks and Dagestanis, it organized its first and only congress in 1992 in Saratov with the help of the local mufti, Mukaddas Bibarsov, who is now cochairman of Russia’s Council of Muftis. The Islamic Party of Rebirth saw itself as a pan-Soviet movement: it sought to preserve the unity of the Soviet Union, one-fifth of the population of which was Muslim, in the hopes that the USSR would one day become a single Islamic state (Dzhemal 2000, 28–32; Sadur 2000, 32–35; Salakheddin 2000, 35–38). It called for an anti-Western alliance between Russia and the Muslim world, explaining, “Orthodoxy and Islam feel an equal need to oppose Americanism and the ‘new world order’ it is imposing upon countries with traditional ways of life” (Aktaev 1992, 12). Yet the movement was profoundly divided into different ideological trends promoting Saudi Wahhabism, Muslim Brotherhood (Sunni Islamist teachings), Khomeini’s Revolutionary Shia Islam, and Turkish Islam. As early as 1991–1992, faced with the disintegration of the USSR, the party collapsed; its Tajik branch broke off to become the Islamic Rebirth Party of Tajikistan. New organizations emerged, such as the Islamic Congress of Russia (Islamskii Kongress

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Rossii), led by Vali Sadur, an Oriental studies scholar of Tatar origin (Malashenko 1998, 121). After the disappearance of the founding structure of the Islamic Rebirth Party, three small parties each came to claim to represent Russia’s Muslims politically: the Union of Muslims of Russia (Soiuz musul’man Rossii), the Nur (meaning “light” in Arabic and Turkic languages) movement, and the Islamic Committee of Russia (Islamskii Komitet Rossii). The latter quickly merged with other parties with broader aims and disappeared from the electoral scene. Nur, directed by Khalit Yakhin and later by Vafa Yarullin and Maksud Sadikov, was the only Muslim party registered for the legislative elections of 1995. Though it received less than 1 percent of the vote overall, it achieved relatively good results in several regions: over 5 percent in Tatarstan, where it was supported by the Tatar nationalist movement Ittifak; 23 percent in Ingushetia; and 12 percent in Chechnya (Malashenko 1998, 141). Nevertheless, it, too, quickly disappeared from the political scene. This did not mean that the issue of a politicized Islamic identity was no longer on the agenda. On the contrary, Nur’s demise led to several new attempts to institute a more stable organization that would be able to garner the support of Muslims as an electoral bloc. In the summer of 1999, a new coalition, Medzhlis (meaning “council”), brought together several Islamic organizations, including Nur, the Islamic Congress, the Muslims of Russia, and the Refakh movement (see below). But this coalition fell apart due to leaders’ personal rivalries and competing political affiliations: Bibarsov supported Grigori Yavlinsky’s liberal Yabloko partly on account of its opposition to the Second Chechen War, whereas another leader, Geydar Dzhemal (1947–2016; see below), was closer to the Communist Party and the Russian nationalist opposition and adhered to the Movement in Support of the Army headed by Albert Makashov, leader of the so-called Red (read: pro-communist) Generals. The creation, in 1998, of the Refakh-Blagodenstvie (welfare) movement, led by Abdul-Vakhid Niiazov, was probably the most successful attempt to create a Muslim electoral bloc. It supported the pro-presidential party Edinstvo in the 1999 legislative election and succeeded, for the first time since 1906, in getting politicians who campaigned on an Islamic platform elected to the Duma. As Niiazov explained, “We can count on at least five seats. This goes to show that the Unity movement really reflects the unity of the peoples of Russia. But apart from us, there will also be Muslim single-mandate deputies and Muslims who are members of other parliamentary groups. By our count there will be approximately 35 Muslims in all” (Nezavisimaia gazeta 1999, 3). However, concerned about the prospect that a distinctive Islamic party structure might emerge, Unity denied Niiazov the right to create a Muslim parliamentary group. Refakh

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tried to avoid being seen as exclusively Muslim by presenting itself as the party of all national minorities, Muslim as well as Buddhist and Jewish, and by collaborating with Ramazan Abdulatipov, chairman of the Assembly of the Peoples of Russia. In 2001, the leaders of Refakh decided to secede from the presidential party, by then renamed United Russia. In part, this was because Niiazov’s radical pro-Palestinian statements put him in conflict with the Kremlin, but also because he hoped to go it alone and cross the 5 percent threshold in the 2003 legislative elections. The movement transformed itself into a fullfledged political party, the Eurasianist Party of Russia (EPR; Evraziiskaia partiia Rossii), and decided to play the integrationist card to woo those nostalgic for the Soviet Union. No longer counting on Russia’s Muslims alone, it tried to attract all those who were in favor of creating post-Soviet supranational bodies, bringing together several organizations with diverging identities but a shared ideological agenda: Refakh, which became the Union of Muslims of Russia; Orthodox Unity (Pravoslavnoe edinstvo); Chechen Solidarity (Chechenskaia solidarnost’); the Congress of Buddhist Peoples (Kongress buddistskikh narodov); the St. Petersburg Patriots (Patrioty Sankt-Peterburga), Young Moscow (Molodaia Moskva); and the Party of Justice and Order (Partiia spravedlivosti i poriadka). Yet the EPR’s social base remained essentially Muslim, with members mostly from the North Caucasus, Tatarstan, and Bashkortostan. The party received substantial funding from some Muslim entrepreneurs and was joined by several muftis—Usman Iskhakov, Ahmet Shamaev, and Shafig Pshikhachev, the heads of the Spiritual Boards of the Muslims of Tatarstan, Ichkeria (Chechnya), and Kabardino-Balkaria, respectively—as well as the plenipotentiary representative of the Coordination Centre of Northern Caucasus Muslims, Kharun Bacharov, and the Duma deputy for Chechnya, Aslambek Aslakhanov. At its founding congress, the EPR even received support from two famous Soviet writers from Central Asia who embodied a “Eurasian” identity: the Kazakh Olzhas Suleimenov (who agreed to chair the party’s supervisory board) and the Kyrgyz Chingiz Aitmatov. The leadership of the EPR was relatively young (around thirty), and with the exception of a few journalists and entrepreneurs, all its members held positions in regional administrations. The EPR’s chairman, Niiazov, was no newcomer to politics; indeed, he had had a rather dazzling career. As of 1990, he served as the head of the Islamic Cultural Center in Moscow. In 1992, he became the director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Russia. In 1995, he was made cochairman of the Union of Muslims of Russia. In 1997, he took on the role of head of the Spiritual Board of the Muslims of the Asian Part of Russia, and the following year he founded Refakh. Niiazov embodies a new trend in Russian Islam: that of ethnic Russians who convert to Islam (his real name is Vadim Medvedev). To imbue himself with

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Islamic legitimacy, he claims that he was born in Omsk, a region with a considerable proportion of ethnic Kazakhs, as a descendant of the Siberian khan Kuchum1 and that his great-grandfather, Rashid Qadi Ibrahim, was a famous Muslim theologian who cofounded the first Union of Muslims of Russia in 1905. His personality and biography have been subjected to detailed scrutiny: some bad-mouthers have highlighted his late conversion to Islam, suggesting that it had self-interested motives (Nezametdinov 2010); others have noted his attempted “coup” against mufti Ravil Gainutdin at the Islamic Cultural Center in 1991 and recalled that then minister for emergency situations Sergei Shoigu, speaking at a Unity congress in 2000, publicly accused Niiazov of supporting “Turkish Wahhabites” and using his position to enrich himself (Tropkina 2000). The EPR suffered a crushing defeat in the 2003 legislative elections, coming in sixteenth with only 0.28 percent of the vote. After this setback, it vanished from the political scene. A competitor structure, Alexander Dugin’s small Evraziia Party, followed the same trajectory: despite working closely with the future Rodina electoral bloc of Dmitri Rogozin and Sergei Glazev, it did not survive long. Evraziia was replaced by the Eurasianist International Movement (EIM), which aimed to rally Russia’s ethnic and religious minorities around Eurasianist slogans, as well as to bring together foreign countries in support of Russia, with Kazakhstan and Turkey being the main targets (Laruelle 2003). Although the EIM hosted two important Islamic figures—Talgat Tadjuddin, chief mufti of the Ufa-based Central Muslim Spiritual Board, and esoteric philosopher Geydar Dzhemal—it primarily promoted a Russia-centric Eurasianism rather than concentrating on Russia’s Muslims. Since the disappearance of the EPR, no Islamic party per se has developed, due to two parallel phenomena. First, the narrowing of the political landscape under Putin forced Muslim leaders who wanted to engage in politics to rally behind the presidential party, United Russia. The two main Islamic institutions, the Spiritual Board of Muslims of Russia and the Council of Muftis, now advance their agendas— namely, defending the interests of Russia’s Muslim communities—in close partnership with state institutions and officials from the presidential administration. Taking an oppositionist stance would negatively impact their ability to influence political decisions, as evidenced by the example of the contentious Spiritual Board of the Muslims of the Asian Part of Russia, led by Nafigulla Ashirov: its authority was progressively dismantled, forcing it to integrate into the Council of Muftis. Co-optation is therefore the only path to success. The lack of distinct interests that would set Russia’s Muslim electorate apart has accentuated this trend. Indeed, Muslim citizens do not constitute a concrete segment of public opinion: the (limited) available data confirm that, in many respects, they are “average” Russian citizens, showing the

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same level of support for Putin, the same distrust of other institutions, and, with some nuances, the same vision of Russia domestically and internationally (Gerber and Zavisca 2017). They are distinct only on a few specific questions: Muslims are typically more supportive of religious tolerance and immigration; they also have a more positive view of relations between Muslims and ethnic Russians than do non-Muslims (Gerber and Zavisca 2017). Second, some Islamic figures have shifted their attention from politics to religion, withdrawing from federal-level public activities to emphasize theology and work within Muslim communities. In contemporary Russia, with the possible exception of Ramzan Kadyrov, no federal-level public figures present themselves as primarily Muslim. Many of those who previously sought to capture the Muslim vote have now turned their attention to issues within the Islamic world. Though Niiazov, for instance, remains part of the Council of Muslims, he is now based in Istanbul and has launched Salamworld, an Islamic alternative to Facebook that claims to respect “core Islamic values” and is supposed to offer a clean slate for Islamic social media (Bohn 2012).

Tatarstan at the Forefront of a Russian “Euro-Islam” Despite the disappearance of explicitly Muslim parties, there have been many other attempts to formulate the “Russian-ness” of Russia’s Islam. In the 1990s and early 2000s, under the name of “Euro-Islam” (evro-islam), Tatarstan took the lead on formulating a Russian Islam that would integrate harmoniously with the pro-Western and especially pro-European stance of Boris Yeltsin–era elites and stress the uniqueness of the Volga-Urals within the Russian federal construction (Matsuzato 2006, 2007). In the 1990s, the Tatar presidential administration sought to uphold an affirmative Tatar national identity compatible with Russian political realities and to preserve the republic’s ethnic and religious diversity.2 Part of that strategy was to promote an “enlightened” version of Islam as a central element of Tatar identity, while at the same time presenting Islam as a modern faith, respecting the secularism of state institutions and avoiding any drift toward a more literal and radical reading of religion. This provided the framework that, to this day, has shaped proposals for reconceptualizing Islam under the “Euro-Islam” label. This movement was spearheaded by Rafael Khakimov, who served as political advisor to Mintimer Shaimiev, president of Tatarstan, between 1991 and 2008. Deputy director of the ideological section of the local Communist Party during perestroika, Khakimov later headed the ideological section of the Tatarstan–New Century Party (the Tatarstan branch of United Russia). Since 2011, Khakimov has been deputy president of the Academy of Sciences of Tatarstan and director

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of its History Department. Yet this strong institutional position does not secure him a monopoly over public statements on Islam; he merely voices the Tatarstani administration’s official position on Islam and the articulation of this position with loyalty to Russia. Khakimov refutes the idea of a universal unity of Islam, thereby positioning himself in absolute opposition to Salafism and any doctrine too insistent on a universal Ummah. In a famous pamphlet titled “Where Is Our Mecca? (A Manifesto of Euro-Islam),” he insists on dissociating Islam from Arab culture: one can be Muslim, he argues, without having any cultural links with the classical Middle East (Khakimov 2003a). He argues that Islam exists only in specific cultural contexts and thus has always been rooted in national cultures, which the Quran itself recognizes as legitimate. This results in Islam being not monolithic but fundamentally pluralistic and harmonized with the nation-state. To nationalize Islam, Khakimov draws on what he sees as the legacy of Jadidism, the reformist movement that emerged among more educated Crimean Tatar Muslims at the end of the nineteenth century and spread to the Volga area and Russian Turkestan, today’s Central Asia (Khalid 1998). According to him, “Jadidism is the source of all contemporary Tatar culture” (Khakimov 2005, 28–35). Khakimov assumes that the ideas of Jadidism’s founder, Ismail Gaspraly (1851–1914)—Russified as Gasprinsky—can easily be adapted to contemporary Euro-Islam: the profoundly Russified Jadid Muslim elite sought to reconcile Islam with Western liberal, progressive thought and give Turkic Muslims an active role in Russia. Khakimov considers Jadidism to have been a direct precursor of the EuroIslam he is advancing and sees an intrinsic link between the national and the religious question (Khakimov 2002b). However, although the Jadids believed in the future political unity of the Turkic world, in contemporary Tatarstan they are presented mostly as Tatar national heroes, while their pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic stances are discreetly sidelined; though these are not denied, they are perceived as disruptive to the contemporary political realities of the nation-state. As a faithful heir of Jadidism, Tatarstan’s Euro-Islam advances a modernist agenda. According to Khakimov, the Tatars understand the need for a secular state, a democratic and liberal political system, and mastery of advanced technologies. Islam must serve to modernize society, not to (re)traditionalize it: since the late nineteenth century, the arrival of capitalism in Russia has “fundamentally changed the functions of Islam: from being an institution of ethnic preservation, it had to become a factor of development” (Khakimov 2004). Islam, being the religion of free human beings, must result from free choice. There can be no intermediary between God and man; there can be no Islamic justice without equality between men (and women). Khakimov therefore advocates a flexible approach to dogma;

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he seeks to reopen the so-called gates of ijtihad: the exercise of critical thinking and independent judgment that allows for the reinterpretation of the Quran and hadiths in a more modern way (Khakimov n.d.). According to him, ijtihad is the only way to introduce liberal thought to Islam, enabling it to avoid a “clash of civilizations” and respond to the growth of Islamophobia in Russia. Revamping the Jadid tradition also contributes to rehabilitating another important intellectual and political legacy: that of national-communism— the different attempts to co-opt national minorities’ elites into the Bolshevik ideology in order to gain popular support. (The movement was later liquidated by Stalin.) Many Jadids and national-communists tried to elaborate an “Islamic socialism” that could be squared with the atheist context of communism. This Turkic national-communism, a forerunner of Third-Worldism, was embodied by the Tatar Sultan Galiev (1880– 1941) (Bennigsen and Wimbush 1979). His theories, named SultanGalievism after him, have allowed the Tatar authorities to combine a Turkic and Muslim national identity with European-style modernity and strong loyalty to the Russian state. Yet they have to face the sensitive issue of memory and commemoration, as the national-communists were among the first victims of Stalin’s repressions, even before the infamous 1937–1938 purges. Khakimov’s theories are not detached from a postcolonial narrative of denouncing Russian domination of the Tatar nation, but this criticism is made in the name of a Eurasianist interpretation of Russia that allows him to also display patriotism. For instance, in several of his publications, Khakimov condemns Russian historiography and its discriminatory view of the Tatars as barbarous sons of the Mongol Empire; to him, they are “descendants of the Turkic genius” (Khakimov 2002b, 3). He claims the Tatars played a key role in the constitution of the Russian Empire, since it was born of the seizures of Kazan and Astrakhan in 1552 and 1556, respectively. As the first Russified Muslims, he argues, the Tatars joined the Muscovite aristocracy, fought to expand the empire, “opened up” Siberia and Central Asia, and remained Russia’s key mediator in relations with the Islamic world. The Tatars have thus contributed to Russia’s Eurasian identity for five centuries and should, as “natural allies” of the Slavs, be allowed to take the lead on a Turkic unification strategy that will, in the long term, strengthen Russia (Khakimov 2004). Khakimov thus accuses the Russian authorities (both tsarist and Soviet) of having falsely divided the Tatars into several ethnic groups by distinguishing the Tatars of Crimea, Astrakhan, and Siberia, as well as the Nogais and Bashkirs, from one another (Khakimov 2002a). For him, the Bashkir nation is an artificial construct created by the Bolsheviks, and the claims of the contemporary Kriashens3 and Bulgars to the status of separate peoples are

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similarly unfounded. He also virulently criticizes Tatar society’s lack of commitment to the adoption of the Latin alphabet; though deputies to the Second World Congress of Tatars voted in favor of the measure in 2002, it was deemed unconstitutional by the Russian Duma (Prina 2016). Khakimov’s theories have met with limited success, and this success has declined over time. His concept of Euro-Islam has been well integrated into Tatarstan’s ideological repertoire of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which places the republic at the core of Russia-Eurasia, at the crossroads of East and West—“We need Jadidism because it draws on the values of the West and the East in equal measure,” states Khakimov (1998a, 3)—and situates Tatarstan as Russia’s power broker in reaching out to the Islamic world. Yet the more Tatarstan invests in paradiplomacy toward the Islamic world (Sharafutdinova 2003), the less the reference to Europe is seen as relevant; it may even become counterproductive. Moreover, Khakimov’s theories are not appreciated by Russia’s Islamic institutions, which see in Euro-Islam an ideology of Tatar nationalism more than a statement of faith, as well as an expression of state-sponsored secularism vaguely tainted with religion that is far from the re-Islamization of mores and practices they call for. Last but not least, Khakimov’s Euro-Islam was in harmony with Russia’s broader atmosphere in the 1990s and early 2000s, when the West and liberal values were still praised as the model to follow and when national republics were allowed to criticize past Russian colonial domination. With the “conservative turn” taken by the Kremlin in the mid-2000s and more visibly in the 2010s, which has made it less favorable to political and societal liberalism and more sensitive to any questioning of Russian historical unity, Euro-Islam has found itself increasingly out in the cold. Khakimov’s withdrawal from politics into academia—he wrote a history of the Golden Horde (Business-Online 2017) and now primarily defends a Tatar national(ist) narrative—underscores that the window for EuroIslam seems to have closed.

The Rise of an Islamic Eurasianist Geopolitics Another ideological trend, more in tune with Putin’s Russia, emerged in the mid-1990s and gained increasing visibility in the 2000s: an Islamic Eurasianist geopolitics that claimed Russia and the Islamic world should forge an alliance to counter the United States’ unipolar world. The trend was embodied by Geydar Dzhemal, an esoteric philosopher of Russian and Azeri extraction, who drew parallels between Russian Orthodox nationalism and Islamic renewal and stated that the “red-brown” (nationalist) and “green” (Islamic) movements shared common objectives.

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Already active in Moscow’s dissident circles in the 1970s and 1980s, Dzhemal started to print copies of the Quran in samizdat and in 1980 went to Tajikistan to distribute them (Guzman 2005). He also published in samizdat a key text, “Orientatsiia—Sever” (Orientation to the North), a work with strong Hegelian influences that addresses the relationship between reality and the spirit and which became a classic in the Soviet Islamic underground. In the early 1990s, Dzhemal was a key figure of the Islamic Rebirth Party of the Soviet Union (Malashenko 1998, 121; Dzhemal 2015) and then sought other structures through which to spread his views. From 1993 until his death, he was the Russian representative of the International Islamic Committee, an empty structure originally funded by Sudan in its fight against the Saudi leadership that nonetheless guaranteed him some status. In 2009, some Duma deputies accused the Islamic Committee of supporting terrorism in the North Caucasus; in 2012, the Federal Security Service opened an inquiry against it on suspicions that it supported terrorism and extremism (Interfax 2012; Pirkova 2012). Dzhemal’s apartment was searched, but no compromising documents were found. Dzhemal regularly tried to promote a political alliance between Russian nationalist and communist movements, on the one hand, and Muslims, on the other. He collaborated with Russian military circles, was close to important nationalist figures such as Alexander Prokhanov and Alexander Dugin for decades, and opposed Vladimir Putin by supporting both Eduard Limonov’s now-forbidden National-Bolshevik Party and Sergei Udaltsov’s Left Front. Dzhemal was not alone in these efforts: on several occasions, the main Russian nationalist structures allied with Islamists as long as they were supporting Russia’s great power status. In the 1990s, Russia’s main nationalist and conservative weekly, Den’, later renamed Zavtra, published articles by members of the Islamic Party of Rebirth documenting the sympathy that some in the Russian nationalist movement felt for certain versions of radical Islam. In the 1995 legislative elections, the leader of the Union of Muslims of Russia, Ahmet Khalitov, a long-standing comrade in arms of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPR), was second on his party’s list of candidates; Nur’s leader, Khalit Yakhin, was an aide and advisor to the LDPR’s then chief ideologist, Alexey Mitrofanov. Fueled by German philosophy, Western occultism, and extreme-right metaphysics, Dzhemal saw in Islam, especially in Shia Islam, the new communism, the only structured ideology able to resist Western liberal thought and US geopolitical influence. He therefore articulated an Islamic version of liberation theology, linking faith with the fight for social justice, wherein religion should be both the weapon and the defense of the poor against the rich. In his theories, Dzhemal made recurrent references both to Marx— especially Marx’s early works—and to Lenin, though he regretted that both

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underestimated the revolutionary potential of Islam. According to him, class opposition is being transformed into opposition between countries or civilizations. The enemy is embodied by the United States, the “party of Satan,” which symbolizes all the evils of the modern world: colonialism, capitalism, and inequality. The New American World is engaged in a lethal fight with the Ancient World, which represents the “party of God,” shaped by the three Abrahamic religions. Of these three religions, only Islam has managed to preserve the authentic revolutionary tradition of monotheism and avoid compromising with the liberal order. In merging the protest potential of Islam with socialist resistance to the American world, Dzhemal hoped to make Islam the new vanguard of international resistance (Dzhemal 2004, 2005). Dzhemal’s geopolitics is intrinsically connected to his interpretation of Islam. He professed to be a Shia of the Jafari school of thought—the main form of Shia jurisprudence. He never concealed his support for the tenets of the Iranian Revolution, often visited Iran, and maintained friendly ties with the Iranian embassy in Moscow. He saw Iran as the legitimate regional power of the Middle East, given its history, culture, and location, as well as the fact that it was the only country to implement revolutionary antiWestern and anti-Israeli policies over several decades (Dzhemal 2012). He was a fervent supporter of the pro-Iranian movements Hezbollah and Hamas. Despite being Shia, Dzhemal shared some Salafi worldviews, stating, for instance, that Islam must regenerate itself by emulating the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers, the “pious forefathers”; that religious innovation (bida) must be forbidden; and that Islam must be purged of its non-Islamic elements, in particular Sufi traditions (the mystical movement in Islam). Dzhemal’s position thus went both ways. He supported Sunni radicalism in its opposition to the West but defended Iranian regional domination. A telling example of his ambivalence is his assertion that “Shias are, in reality, Salafis. They are Salafis who are more powerful than the Salafis themselves” (Kontrudar 2015). Sharing some Salafi views, Dzhemal could only cast a critical eye on Muslims in Russia and the post-Soviet space. He denounced the survival of Sufi traditions, as well as the political submission of Russia’s Muslim Spiritual Boards and the importance accorded to ethnic, local, and regional identities in Eurasian Islam. He believed that the only way to deliver Eurasian Muslims from their theological errors and geopolitical dependence would be to adopt Salafism as an ideological driver toward Islamic modernity. Dzhemal thus openly supported violent actions in the name of Islam in the North Caucasus and terrorist attacks such as those in Budennovsk in 1995 and Beslan in 2004. He backed Chechen leaders such as Dzhokhar Dudayev and Movladi Udugov during the First Chechen War; supported the leaders of the second Chechen insurrection, including Shamil’ Basayev; and

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stood behind the movement’s turn to terrorism. He also defended Said Buryatsky, a convert known for his inflammatory sermons, who left to fight in the Caucasus Emirate (Dzhemal 2009). He considered shahids, Islamic suicide bombers, the “pinnacle of Islam” (Kontrudar 2009). Dzhemal was quite unique in his ability to combine not only support for political Islam and celebration of Russia’s anti-Western geopolitical fate but also references to the European Far Right, especially its esoteric movements. Nonetheless, this combination is not exceptional per se. Historically, some Islamists displayed sympathies with Nazis and their esotericism during the 1930s and in the earlier period of World War II (Motadel 2014a, 2014b; Nicosia 2014). A large group of Turkish nationalists took inspiration from German fascism (Ihrig 2014); in Iran, philosophers such as Ahmad Fardid (1909–1994) and ideologues of the regime have been attracted to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and, through it, to some central ideas of Nazism (Mirsepassi 2010; Rafi 2013). Dzhemal’s legitimacy in advancing his Islamic liberation agenda was largely grounded in his ability to occupy the media space. He was very active online, hosting programs on Islam on Russia’s main channels in the 1990s, publishing many opinion pieces, and regularly being invited to appear on radio and television, mostly to comment on Middle Eastern issues. This Islamic Eurasianist geopolitics accumulates paradoxes: by standing with leftist figures such as Eduard Limonov and Sergei Udaltsov, Dzhemal was positioning himself in opposition to Vladimir Putin; yet he simultaneously called on the Kremlin to be more radical in its rejection of the Western model and liberal values. If, for many Islamic figures and institutions, Dzhemal’s ideological eclecticism was too eccentric and conformed insufficiently to Islamic orthodoxy, his main thesis of an alliance between Moscow and the Muslim world against the West remains widespread in Russia—and some ideas may have found their way in the current RussianIranian partnership in the Syrian theater.

Kadyrovism as an Extreme Islamic Putinism Another—quite extreme—example of blending Islam with loyalty to Russia can be found in the contemporary Chechen regime built by Ramzan Kadyrov since taking the reins of the small and restive North Caucasian republic from his father, Akhmad, in 2007. To support his own legitimacy, Kadyrov has, over the past decade, both appropriated the anticolonial Chechen narrative, now transformed into a Russian patriotic ideology that portrays the Chechens as harbingers of Putin’s successes, and promoted a conservative Islam with some trappings of Islamic practices inspired by the Gulf states.

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Kadyrov regularly peppers his speeches with trendy historical allusions that appeal to Russian patriotism; he happily name-drops Russian national heroes (even dressing up as Ilya Muromets, the knight-errant of Russian folktales), makes great use of the Russian flag when communicating on social media (Avedissian 2016, 20–43), and celebrates the capacity of Islam to embody the spirituality of Mother Russia under the historical leadership of the Orthodox Church. In 2014, he was received by Patriarch Kirill at the Danilov Monastery: the meeting signaled that the Chechen president had won some recognition of his federal status and was capable of getting it validated by the country’s most senior dignitaries (Moscow Patriarchate 2014). Moreover, Kadyrov presents himself as an advocate for modern Russia and for Putin’s ambitions. He has expressed complete loyalty to the Russian president on several occasions, casting himself as a “Kremlin man, a Putin man” and “a loyal soldier (vernyi pekhotinets) of Putin” who is ready to die for him (TASS 2016). In 2014, in a stadium in Grozny, Kadyrov made around 20,000 members of the Chechen Special Forces swear a collective oath of loyalty to Russia (Rossiia 24 2014), declaring, “For fifteen years, Putin has been helping our people. . . . Now, we stand ready to defend Russia, its stability and frontiers, and to fulfil any mission. . . . The Russian people have united around their leader Vladimir Putin, and the Chechen people occupy a central place in this unity” (TASS 2014). Kadyrovism has successfully co-opted some elements of radical Islam, once a powerful weapon in Chechen resistance to Russian domination, and tries to subordinate it on the pretext of promoting a “traditional” and “Chechen” form of Islam. Officially, the republic espouses Sunni Islam of the Shafi school, which is recognized by the Spiritual Administration of Chechen Muslims. The regime has embarked on the construction of numerous mosques and theological institutions. Kadyrov himself makes a public display of his devotion to Islam: he has visited Mecca twice and succeeded in having Islam’s most sacred site, the Kaaba, opened up for his family, a privilege granted only rarely by the Saudi royal family, guardian of the Holy Places. His Instagram page displays photos of him praying, as well as references to the Quran and Allah (Avedissian 2016). Yet the brand of Islam promoted by the Kadyrov regime is by no means clear-cut. Although he is the son of a mufti, Kadyrov’s theological knowledge is shallow and simplistic. He claims to promote “traditional” Islam but offers nothing more than a sketchy and often grotesque reinterpretation of Sufi tradition (from the Qadiriyya brotherhood), coupled with the traditional norms of adat. This combination was inherited from the Soviet Union, which regarded religious traditions as “holdovers” (perezhitki) from a past that ought to be left behind, to be tolerated only insofar as they were presented as national traditions or ethnic folklore. This Soviet attitude has been adopted and elaborated upon by the Chechen regime.

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One presidential decree requires, for example, that theatrical and musical performances “conform to the Chechen mentality and education” (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty 2012). All officials are invited to dress in supposedly traditional clothes, such as the long coat and small hat inspired by the Qadiriyya. Public performances of dhikr, repetition of the name of God, and the surahs (chapters) of the Quran, whether silently, aloud, or through dance, are part of the republic’s semiofficial branding. Religious pilgrimages to the tombs of local saints, particularly to that of nineteenthcentury Sufi leader Kunta-haji Kishiev, have been revived. The Kadyrov regime has also invented and promoted practices loosely associated with Christianity, such as the diffusion throughout the republic of “holy water” taken from a chalice that supposedly belonged to the Prophet and the exorcism of djinns (supernatural creatures) with the help of the Quran and traditional medicine. On the other hand, on the pretext of promoting traditional Chechen Islam, the Kadyrov regime has promulgated a very strict interpretation of the religion. It is not Salafi, in the sense that it does not confine itself to the original texts—the Quran and the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad— alone but includes many Islamic elements drawn from local culture, as enumerated above. According to doctrinal Salafism, the cult of saints would be condemned as idolatry (shirk). Nevertheless, Kadyrov’s brand of Islam is highly puritanical and claims to take its cues from sharia on issues of manners and mores: alcohol consumption is strictly monitored, gambling is officially banned, and the broadcasting of Western music on local TV stations has decreased since 2008, while programs dedicated to Islam have increased (Balmforth 2010). Restrictions imposed on women have multiplied in recent years. All women who work in the public sector are obliged to wear the hijab, as are female students. Under a so-called moralization program, it is now almost obligatory for women to wear the veil in public places. Kadyrov himself has reminded people that women are inferior to men (Bruneau 2015) and that they should dress “modestly,” in long skirts and with sleeves that cover their arms. On several occasions, groups of men have attacked women who refuse to submit to these strictures, and none of them has been prosecuted; on the contrary, Kadyrov has congratulated some of them (Human Rights Watch 2011). The Chechen president has also called for legalization of honor crimes and spoken out in favor of polygamy (Courrier international 2006; Dubrovskaia 2015). The stringent puritanism that Grozny promotes is also directed abroad: Kadyrov does not hide his desire to be recognized not only as Putin’s spokesman in the Muslim world but also as one of the leaders of the Islamic realm (Trofimov 2017). On several occasions, he has sought to burnish the Islamic credentials of the Chechen capital. In 2011, for instance, he arranged for the transport from London of a chalice that had supposedly been used by

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the Prophet Muhammed and protected by his descendants for centuries before being offered to Kadyrov. The chalice has since been held in the Grozny mosque (Elder 2011). In early 2012, meanwhile, hair claimed to be that of the Prophet was sent to Chechnya from Turkey and deposited in the city’s central mosque by Kadyrov’s son himself (Rossiia 24 2012). Kadyrov has met the Saudi and Jordanian royal families, as well as Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. In 2013, in search of investment into Chechnya, he toured the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, indicating a clear preference for the latter. In 2015, he traveled to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia again to scope out potential areas of cooperation; the Saudi Investment Fund has declared its interest in a number of projects that will take place in Chechnya (Sharkov 2016). Nevertheless, Kadyrov, always prone to contradictions, did not hesitate to strain diplomatic relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia by endorsing, in October 2016, a fatwa approved by a congress of theologians assembled in Grozny, which declared Wahhabism and Salafism to be dangerous currents foreign to Islam (Subbotin 2016). Beyond its caricatured excesses, Kadyrovism presents a new ideological means of combining loyalty to the Kremlin and its foreign policy and pushing for a more puritanical and Gulf-inspired Islam. This ideological pairing is not limited to Chechnya; on the contrary, it is likely to prosper across the whole of Eurasia. The existence of a sizable Chechen diaspora in several of Russia’s large cities, as well as the massive migration of Dagestani job seekers to other Russian regions, has helped to spread North Caucasian Islam and its custom of operating in jama’at (community) beyond its original homeland (see ongoing research by Saodat Olimova, among others; Olimova and Olimov 2018). A North Caucasian brand of Islam has now spread to the mosques of the Volga-Urals and exists among Central Asian migrant diasporas. In Central Asia, too, Kadyrovism is winning converts. In Tajikistan, some migrants who struggle to articulate their Islamic faith and undying loyalty to Vladimir Putin readily see themselves in the image projected by the Chechen president (Balmforth 2012). In Kazakhstan, which has hosted a large Chechen minority since Stalin’s deportations, Kadyrov has likewise met with some success, supported by Kenges Rakishev, president of one of the largest banks in the country, Kazkommertsbank, and son-in-law of Defense Minister Imangali Tasmagambetov, the former mayor of Almaty and Astana (Zonakz.net 2011; Bekbasova 2015; InformBURO 2016).

Conclusion This brief overview is far from exhaustive. Since the early 1990s, the chief mufti of the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate, Talgat Tadjuddin, has

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never hidden his friendship with former patriarch Alexey II, whom he considered “the country’s supreme spiritual leader” (Gvosdev 2000). He has used the expression “Holy Russia” on several occasions, and in 2015, in the middle of polemics about the impact of Islamic State propaganda on the Caliphate in Syria and Iraq, he went so far as to say, “Russia’s Muslims already have a caliphate: Holy Russia” (Islam Review 2015). The exaltation of Russia and its main religion, Orthodox Christianity, as Russian Muslims’ close ally has a long history, and this strategy has been updated for today’s conditions. Ethnic Russians who have converted to Islam also largely contribute to developing this ideological pairing. Their institution, the National Organization of Russian Muslims (NORM; Natsional’naia organizatsiia rossiiskikh musul’man), created in 2004, aims to reconcile Russian identity with conversion to Islam. According to Ali Polosin, a former Orthodox priest who converted to Islam in 1999 and became director of the Department of Relations with the State at the Council of Muftis, in addition to teaching comparative religious studies at Moscow Islamic University, Christianity is an alien religion with Jewish origins that was forcibly imposed on the Russian people (Polosin 2006). The Muslim converts share this hostility toward Christianity with the neopagans, culturally and politically the most radical wing of the Russian nationalist movement (Moroz 2005). There are many Islamic public figures who advocate for an alliance between their homeland, Russia, and their faith, Islam. Rafael Khakimov’s Euro-Islam made common cause with Russian liberals to advance an agenda of “Westernization” of Russia and Russia’s Islam until this narrative faded away in the second half of the first decade of the twenty-first century (2005–2010). Dzhemal’s Islamic liberation theology resonates with current debates in many Muslim countries and Islamist movements while simultaneously reproducing the mainstream geopolitical narrative of Russian nationalists: denouncing the West’s hidden goal of negating Russia’s great power status. Kadyrov’s case, quite unique in its scale and radicalism, seems to confirm that hard-line pietism, loyal to existing regimes but fundamentally anti-Western and puritanical, is prospering in the shadow of the Kremlin. This ideological pairing can thus take diverse forms, from discourse inspired by the Soviet “friendship of the peoples,” which celebrated Russia’s multiethnicity (the official position of the Muslim Spiritual Board) and Orthodox Christianity’s status as first among equals, to a more muscular narrative that invites Russia to respect and praise Islam and to ally itself with the rest of the Islamic world (the position of the Moscow Council of Muftis and of Geydar Dzhemal), to calls for conversion to Islam (the position of the proselytizing NORM movement), to hard-line “Kadyrovization.” Far from opposing or warring with its Muslims, as Western pundits tend to portray the

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country, Russia displays a large array of ideological articulations between Russian patriotism and Islamic values that help preserve stability at home and maintain support for the Kremlin’s foreign policy decisions.

Notes Previous versions of some portions of this chapter appeared in Laruelle 2016a, 81– 100, and Laruelle 2017. 1. Khan Kuchum was the defender of one of the last Siberian khanates. He was defeated by the Cossack Ermak on the Irtysh River in 1585. 2. About half the population is ethnic Russian, and the other half is Tatar: 48 percent Tatar to 43 percent Russian at the last Soviet census of 1989; 53 percent to 39 percent at the 2010 census. 3. The Kriashens are a group of Tatar speakers who have been Orthodox for several centuries. Kriashen nationalist intellectuals want the Kriashens to be recognized as a distinct “nationality.” In the 2002 census, “Kriashen” was included in the multiple-choice list of “nationalities,” something the Tatars perceived as a provocation staged by Moscow to weaken Tatar identity and challenge the Tatars’ status as the titular nationality in Tatarstan. However, the final result (about 23,000 people identified as Kriashens) did not have any particular repercussions. Since then, the debate has sporadically reappeared on the local scene.

4 Reporting on “Islam” and “Terror” in Russian vs. US Media Sergei A. Samoilenko, Olga Logunova, Sergey G. Davydov, and Eric Shiraev

The mass media play a critical role in how terrorist attacks are perceived by the public. Framing strategies can be used to personify these events and project fear and uncertainty in society. Understanding the relationship between the media and other institutions illuminates news outlets’ portrayal of terrorism and national security issues. News media use the dominant frames promoted by the authorities, and these later become institutionalized through legal rules and policies. Thus, an exploration of news coverage of terrorist events can help explain public reactions to terrorism and support for national public and foreign policy. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have changed the public perception of terrorism, transforming it from a remote issue into an immediate threat on a global scale. The events of 9/11 spurred the global “war on terror,” led by the United States against “the other,” largely represented in the media as Muslims and Islam in general. This “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1993) theme came to inform the media framing of terrorism— and, therefore, the public reaction to Islam—going forward (Lewis 2012; Powell 2011). Between 2013 and 2018, the occurrence of terrorist attacks in London, Paris, Berlin, and other cities in parallel with the European migration crisis led to the resurgence of Islamophobia across the continent. This was true even in Russia, a country historically known for its tolerance toward its large Muslim community (Laruelle and Yudina 2018). The rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Islamic State (IS), or Daesh—and the ongoing war in Syria pushed the issue of global terrorism to

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the top of the international news agenda. Russia’s military intervention in the Syrian conflict has challenged the United States’ claim to be the primary warrior against terrorism in the Middle East (Issaev and Eremeeva 2021). Specifically, Russia’s alternative antiterrorist discourse suggests some evident policy differences between these two international leaders in the fight against terrorism in Syria (Simons and Strovsky 2016). Media narratives and coverage did evolve when the fortunes on the physical battlefield evolved; for example, a US study demonstrated a narrative that transformed from physical threats in the physical world to psychological threats in the information world as ISIS was gradually defeated (Demetriades et al. 2021). Further, Ragozina (2020) details a Russian media narrative that distinguishes between the existence of a “good” traditional Islam and a “bad” “foreign” Islam. This chapter seeks to examine how the institutional symbioses of policy and media in the United States and Russia construct the image of Islam and Muslims in connection to terrorism. Two separate studies were conducted to address the specifics of media framing. By analyzing the media portrayal of Islam following terrorist attacks, the first study aimed to understand framing differences in communicating antiterrorism policies between Russia and the United States. The second study undertook a content analysis of the portrayal of the Islamic State in US and Russian newspapers in order to link media framing to foreign policy differences regarding the Syrian campaign.

The Dynamics of Cultural and Institutional Positioning It is extremely difficult to define terrorism, not least because most definitions are either incomplete or too inclusive (Norris, Kern, and Just 2003). But “inventing an enemy begins, paradoxically, with the invention of the self” (Vuorinen 2012, 1). The process of self-positioning, when performed in a timely and efficient manner, affords the subject a certain power to position and label others, as well as making it easier to occupy the moral high ground (Davies and Harre 1990). Positions are the moral locations derived from individual manifestations of rights, duties, and obligations in the context of narrative pragmatics (Cobb 2013a, 14). They are “woven into a narrative strand about who ‘we’ are and what we need or deserve.” According to Barth (1981), social identity forms along the boundary between groups by illuminating the relationship between “them” and “us.” In other words, the identity of an ethnic group is expressed in its cultural differences from “strangers” (Armstrong 1982). In the same vein, Said (2003) argues that the historical Orient was created by colonialist Europeans as a counterimage to everything Western. Naturally, our perceptions of our relationships with strangers affect our views on safety and security. The securitization of ethnic identity occurs when an ethnocultural group experiences realistic or

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symbolic threats to its own identity (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998). Realistic threats are posed by factors that have the potential to cause the ingroup physical harm or loss of resources. Symbolic threats are those that jeopardize the valued meanings of the in-group, including challenges to norms and values, language, culture, religion, self-identity, and self-esteem. In response to identity threats, the members of the in-group tend to maximize their self-esteem and status by discriminating and expressing prejudice against members of the out-group. The creation of “others” is typically accomplished through the establishment of stereotypes “based on convenient exaggeration of select features” (Vuorinen 2012, 1). The processes of othering and constructing the enemy image (Keen 2004; Zur 1991) are based on projecting certain unwanted features of the in-group onto outsiders. By assigning stigma and demonizing the other, the public is inclined to see the members of the out-group as more hostile, barbaric, and threatening to their culture. The process of demonization is an important element of othering, as it typically divides the world into aggressors and “in-group members as innocent victims of ‘them’” (Smitherman-Donaldson and van Dijk 1988, 18). The demonization and dehumanization of the enemy also legitimize discriminatory action against members of the out-group. These are particularly common features of moral disengagement (Bandura 1999), which entails sanctioning cruel conduct by using moral justification, sanitizing language, and attributing blame to those who are victimized. This allows people to treat “enemies” in a way that would normally be considered inhumane but is cognitively restructured as worthy and moral because the latter deserve such treatment. In addition, the in-group supports messages and frames that foster solidarity and the desired values. According to Campbell (2017), cultural discourses often combine with institutional and media narratives to reinforce dominant scripts and ideological storylines or frames. In response to their phobic reactions to outgroup threats, in-group members may demand that their political elites protect group identity by defending and promoting national symbols. Traditionally, political elites exploit citizens’ fears for political gain, using them to justify agenda setting and the promotion of dominant frames. By presenting “a central organizing idea,” frames suggest who might be responsible for an issue and what should be done about it (Gamson and Modogliani 1989). Frames assign meanings to political and societal events such as terrorist attacks and often satisfy society’s need for comprehensive explanation (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998). In international politics, self-positioning typically involves interpreting world events through the prism of national interests. It involves presenting the self-as-character as positive and legitimate in relation to his or her audience while constructing the other as somewhere between inappropriate and

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evil (Cobb 2013b). The state appeals to frames that relate to ordinary people’s mental scripts and expectations and promote their “structure of discourse” (Hall et al. 1980), which is represented by preferred meanings. The state achieves hegemony when it manages to legitimize its discourse to the point that the public sees the state’s narrative as everyday “common sense” (Gramsci 1980). The preferred meanings later become institutionalized through legal and normative documents and are applied according to a dominant ideology. According to Kumar (2010), since the events of 9/11, the dominant political logic—the “war on terror” frame—articulated by the “primary definers of news” has acquired the status of “common sense” in a climate of fear and intimidation. Once the narrative structure has been established and cemented by fixed character identifications, it becomes very difficult to reframe the narrative strand. Political elites promote their public agendas by communicating their positions on international and domestic issues. These positions simultaneously serve to remind the public of the legitimate power of the state and of its right to exercise this power when needed. Every piece of state propaganda attempts to present the other as a fundamental threat to national values and beliefs, frequently reducing the target to a lesser, more animalistic status. By demonizing and dehumanizing an adversary, the state can succeed in gaining public support for military measures against the cruel “other” purportedly threatening the culture of the civilized world. Unoriginal tactics are used to paint the enemy as embodying the exact opposite of what is valued in the society, as well as to characterize the target as subhuman or inhuman and lacking redeeming features (Johnson-Cartee and Copeland 2004). For example, during the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, “the Butcher of Baghdad,” was compared to Hitler and depicted as a voracious spider in cartoons.

Mass Media as Distributors of Dominant Frames As a dominant element of popular culture, mass media have the power to set a consistent agenda and encourage audiences to perceive reality in a particular way. News stories represent selective constructions of reality that are contingent on the choices journalists make (Entman 1993). The mass media do not exist independently of political institutions. As such, they can be impacted by ideological tilt (Lewis 2012). Governing elites and other powerful institutions have better chances of promoting their realities and opinions about controversial topics due to their privileged access to the media. Media outlets, driven by the imperative to grow their audiences and profits, unavoidably favor statements made by high-profile newsmakers. Consequently, they indirectly contribute to the distribution of

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preferred meanings, including state officials’ personal interpretations of key international events. To take one example, then Australian prime minister Tony Abbott characterized the Syrian civil war as a conflict between “goodies” and “baddies” (as cited in Simons 2016). Some scholars consider the news to be part of the ideological apparatus that reproduces hegemony and supports state-approved foreign policy (Entman 2003; Rachlin 1988). The surge of media hype is primarily observed during events positioned as major threats to national security, political stability, or foreign policy. Terrorist events present various actors with a perfect opportunity to put themselves in the spotlight and promote their agendas to domestic and international audiences. The mass media reproduce four main strategies of ideological discourse, summarized by Van Dijk (1998) as the ideological square: • • • •

Emphasize our good things. Emphasize their bad things. De-emphasize our bad things. De-emphasize their good things.

Securitization issues often provide political actors with an excuse to violate traditional democratic principles and enforce law-and-order policies (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998). Lukacovic (2016) argues that cascading activation provides a platform for integrating securitization into framing. For instance, a politician describes a problem as a threat to security. The cause of this problem is the proposed aggressor. The speech act claims that protecting the referent object is the morally adequate action, while threatening the security of the referent object is an immoral action. Finally, a vital aspect of securitization is prescribing solutions that entail extraordinary measures. Frames conceived by the political elite are generally passed to mass media organizations and from there to audiences. The public internalizes mediated frames to varying degrees, depending on the level of cultural congruence and other supporting conditions. Frequently, these framings find new life when institutionalized in the form of antiterror policies and practices. As an example, the “war on terror” frame, accompanied by the imagery of the Muslim terrorist, played a critical role in legitimizing the international military campaign launched by the US government after the September 11, 2001, attacks. By favoring certain agendas, the news media inevitably engage in the process of framing. Framing can be defined as highlighting the problem in a way that gives it media salience, naming the causes, making moral judgments, and prescribing solutions (Entman 1993, 2003). The limits of the news frame categorize what is “in” the frame and what is “out” of it (Hertog and McLeod 2001). Framing contributes to promoting perceptions and interpretations that benefit one side “while obscuring other elements, which

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might lead audiences to have different reactions” (Entman 1993, 55). News frame exposure may provoke emotional reactions, such as fear and anxiety, in the individual (Holm 2012; Kim and Cameron 2011). Emotional reactions are likely to mediate the effects of news framing on political opinions, attitudes, and behaviors (Lecheler, Schuck, and de Vreese 2013). Although framing can be a helpful tool for communicating complex ideas to the masses, it also leads to superficial coverage and oversimplification. When covering terrorist attacks, media companies diverge in their preferences for episodic or thematic framing (Iyengar 1991). Episodic frames focus on isolated events or individual actions without contextual elaboration. Using episodic framing to cover terrorism is associated with emotional appeal and greater stereotypical bias. Thematic frames, on the other hand, aim at understanding events in a broad context, as consequences of general societal trends or tendencies. They also direct the audience to reflect critically on the causes and effects of terrorism, as well as (potentially) the government’s role in preventing it. A media outlet’s choice between episodic and thematic framing is influenced by many factors, including the outlet’s ideological credo, its observance of professional journalistic standards, and its audience’s economic status, among others. For example, the thematic frame predominates in the British media, which is characterized by an emphasis on diplomatic solutions, whereas US media sources are dominated by the episodic frame and have a bias toward military solutions (Papacharissi and Oliveira 2008). Research demonstrates that episodic reporting and ethnocentrism are endemic in reports on terrorism (Martin and Draznin 1991; Norris, Kern, and Just 2003). Cooper (1991, 13) reports that news media often neglect to discuss the big picture by choosing to focus on one perspective—namely, that terrorism is enacted by “the other.” During terrorist attacks, individuals use media frames to make sense of the crisis and assign blame (An and Gower 2009). When an event is not situated in the larger political and social context, consumers are much more likely “to attribute responsibility for social problems to individuals, not systematic attributions, such as . . . cultural deprivation, educational and job inequalities, drug addiction, or discrimination” (Johnson-Cartee and Copeland 2004, 164). Iyengar (1991) found that when the media framed terrorism episodically, as an individual event, the public was more likely to blame individual perpetrators than to attempt to assess terrorism in the context of societal problems. News production is primarily driven by professional and commercial motives. Media outlets are instinctively “drawn to stories that suggest conflict and the potential for what is shocking and sensational” (Tuman 2010, 196). Terrorist attacks naturally serve as excellent news fodder, offering journalists a perfect opportunity to seize public attention. As audience members are likely to form their opinions about political issues when infor-

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mation is framed in terms of specific cherished values (Shen and Edwards 2005), journalists often cover the events through frames that are part of conventional myths, values, or shared beliefs. According to Bennett (2005), instead of presenting new information about events, the media either blend it into old frames or do not report it at all. In popular culture, terrorists are often represented in the context of generalized symbols of Islam and Muslims driven to violence by religion. The word Islam is simultaneously used to identify a society, a culture, and a religion, without any regard for the diversity exhibited among Muslims. According to Said (2003), modern negative stereotypes of Arabs are inevitably linked to jihadism. Shaheen (2001) argues that that since 9/11, American films and TV dramas have reinforced stereotypical images of Arabs and Muslims as violent villains threatening Westerners. Clearly, “when new information is translated into old formulas, there is no challenge for people to replace their prejudices with new insights” (Bennett 2005, 244). Moreover, the reality created by the media produces lasting images and stereotypes about groups, religions, and peoples (Maslog 1971).

Terrorism Discourse in the United States and Russia Terrorism Discourse in the United States Before 9/11, US foreign policy assumed that terrorism had at least three characteristics: suspension of reason, suppression of inquiry into causation, and unqualified support for violent and retaliatory response (Ahmad 1986). After 9/11, terrorism became defined mostly by ethnocentric labeling and came to be discussed primarily in terms of a conflict between the West and the Muslim world (Campbell 2017; Nacos and Torres-Reyna 2003). Deitrickson (2007) defines ethnocentric labeling as initial righteous self-positioning and designating terrorism as what “they” do to “us.” A common method of creating the perception of a binary opposition between “us” and “them” is through dualistic categories, such as rational vs. irrational or modernity vs. antimodernity. These categories are inadvertently linked to other distinctive characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, and religion. Thus, “who gets labeled as terrorist depends on who is doing the labeling” (Deitrickson 2007, 62). Defining terrorists as foreign, Islamic, and extreme may make the idea of homegrown terrorists seem outlandish. Chermak and Gruenewald (2007) demonstrate that most incidents of domestic terrorism receive little to no coverage in the news. When they do, they are “cast as a minor threat that occurs in isolated incidents by troubled individuals” (Powell 2011, 90). By contrast, news coverage plays up the international theme of “Muslims/Arabs/Islam

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working together in organized terrorist cells against a ‘Christian America.’” As a result, although the United States has a growing and highly diverse Muslim population, the general American public—especially Republicans—views Muslims far less positively than it views members of most other major religious groups (Pew Research Center, 2017). Americans are split over whether there is a “natural conflict” between Islam and democracy, and half of US adults say Islam is not part of mainstream American society. As mentioned earlier, the preferred meanings and dominant frames rooted in the ethnocentric perspective support the interests of dominant groups. Studies demonstrate that government officials label terrorists from their perspective and according to their interests (Taugott and Brader 2003). In the US context, an increasing fear of terrorism after the 9/11 attacks is linked to a more aggressive foreign policy (Khakimova Storie, Madden, and Liu 2014; Powell 2011; Snow 2007). Antiterrorist policies are connected to ideals of patriotism, the “war on terrorism,” and fear of “those who hate freedom.” Mass media can help political actors gain public support for unpopular policies (Greenslade 2003) or disguise the national interests of players during international coalition campaigns (Snow 2003). Thus, stereotypes and fear of terrorists may lead to changes in governmental practices, such as restrictions on civil liberties and increased support for racial profiling (Altheide 2006; Norris, Kern, and Just 2003). Altheide and Grimes (2005) demonstrate how news coverage played a part in promoting the idea that the events of September 11 were the result of the enemy’s hatred of freedom and democracy. Moreover, journalists gave little context for the terrorist attacks and did not ask officials critical questions for fear of appearing unpatriotic. This ethnocentric coverage of terrorist events deprives “the other” of humanizing qualities. Moreover, it frequently overlooks the devastating suffering of Muslims, who become subject to both Western and extremist violence (Campbell 2010, 2017). The binary structure of the American antiterrorist narrative partially explains why the “culture of war” dominates the United States’ domestic and foreign policies (Marsella 2011). It portrays America as the guardian of liberty, regardless of the means used. One popular narrative is America’s self-positioning as the world’s policeman, uniquely placed to guarantee peace and stability (J. Klein 2012). The exceptional role of the United States is granted by the special protection of God in a battle between Christianity and Islam. Thus, “counterterror measures—including war—seem inevitable and even desirable” (Campbell 2017, 16). According to Simons and Strovsky (2016), this self-projected image has become increasingly obsolete and less credible in the context of the rapidly changing distribution of geopolitical power.

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Terrorism Discourse in Russia In Russia, the notion of terrorism is drastically different from the official US discourse. In the United States, terrorism is perceived primarily as an external threat to the American national identity. The securitization of Islam has seen it transformed into an existential threat affecting policy and media discourses. As a result, US policy seeks to extend the national discourse of terrorism internationally. In Russia, there is a long tradition of understanding terrorism as a domestic phenomenon. That includes seeing terrorist acts as a means of forming a national identity (e.g., revolutionary terrorism, populism, etc.; see Ely 2016). In modern Russia, terrorism is generally associated with “extremism” and “separatism,” the understanding of which has been shaped by the two Chechen wars as well as numerous local terrorist acts since the 1990s. Importantly, Russian public and expert perceptions tend to view terrorism in a broader context, explicable by its socioeconomic roots, growing global inequality, and increased geopolitical competition (Polikanov 2006). Both the Russian public and the expert community believe that the main causes of terrorism are “the new world order based on energy resources, natural resources, and markets,” “politicians’ inability to cope with human development tasks,” and “the U.S. redivision of the world in its favor.” Few support the view promoted by the United States of terrorism as a “war between Christian and Muslim civilizations” (Polikanov 2006, 50). Therefore, a different historical and cultural background informs the Russian media’s framing of Islamic terrorism than informs media narratives in the United States and other countries. For example, Anders Breivik, who committed the 2011 Norway attacks, was labeled a “terrorist” in the Russian media, whereas US and British media portrayed him as either a “radical politician” or a “murderer” (Pronkina 2013). In the United States and Europe, the conflation of “Islamism” and “extremism” is widespread, while in Russia both the authorities and the mass media tend to be more careful in their evaluations (Laruelle and Yudina 2018). Russian legislation defines terrorism not in terms of race or religion but as deliberate violence that poses a threat to state security (Simons 2006). The official outline for antiterrorist discourse in Russia is represented by the 2000 Doctrine of Information Security, intended to create a “single information space” to counter misinformation in the name of a better society. The official narrative of the Russian political establishment serves a dual purpose. First, it upholds the inherited Soviet discourse that sees Islam as a constructive and positive element of Russian statehood and culture. Notably, even in light of Russia’s involvement in Syria against the Islamic State and the inflow of labor migrants from culturally Muslim countries, the Russian public’s perception of Islam and Muslims remains

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generally positive (Levada-Center 2018). In addition, the official narrative articulates a current perspective on radical Islam, dismissing both radical and nonconformist versions of Islam as “Wahhabism.” The terrorist attacks of the early 2000s (e.g., the Nord-Ost theater siege) revealed several points of contention between the security services and the media, which encouraged the state to impose online censorship and strict legal control over the flow of information (Richter 2002; Simons 2006; Simons and Samoilenko 2017). According to Simons and Strovsky (2006), the threat of terrorism in Russia presented authorities with both a problem and an opportunity to censor media coverage during emergencies on the grounds of law-and-order concerns. For example, just like in the United States, the notion of journalists’ “patriotic duty” has been used as a mechanism for controlling the mass media. Media legislation has become another efficient instrument of censure, with a series of restrictive federal legal acts (Simons and Samoilenko 2017). A set of internet laws allows the government to block, shut down, or blacklist, without acquiring a court order, any websites that are considered extremist or appear to promote extremist activities. That allows the government to ban virtually any website that propounds dissenting views. Another piece of legislation—the notorious Article 133 of the Penal Code known as the “Offending the Religious Feelings Law”—can be applied to any case where community members make the necessary charges. As a preventive measure, the news media engage in self-censorship when covering events related to Islam and Muslims. On the one hand, this is a precaution intended to mitigate the reaction of Russia’s active Muslim communities, which openly denounce discrimination against them and other Muslims worldwide. In September 2017, for example, thousands of protesters gathered in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the Chechen capital of Grozny to protest the “genocide of Muslims” by Burmese authorities. On the other hand, mass media companies are responding to antiterrorist legislation that imposes penalties for the publication of materials considered to ignite nationalist sentiments or xenophobia. In 2016, Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal media supervision service, requested that the mass media avoid republishing any caricatures or other materials printed by the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (Kravchenko and Verkhovsky 2016). At the same time, anti-extremism legislation also targets organizations and individuals who belong to Islamic organizations and contribute to the spread of publications considered extremist. The United States and the Russian Federation also differ in their ideological and doctrinal approach to antiterrorist policy (Simons 2006; Simons and Strovsky 2016). Russia’s policy tends to address terrorism issues through the use of public diplomacy based on collaboration with the international community. Russian media often promote a sense of

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shared problems and common suffering between Russia and other nations. For instance, in the United States, the framing of Osama bin Laden’s death worked to promote the notion that the United States, as the leader in the global fight against terrorism, had committed a necessary act. Therefore, it was framed simply as the triumph of good over evil. The Russian media, meanwhile, framed the killing of bin Laden as a noncollaborative effort to support US policy objectives (Khakimova Storie, Madden, and Liu 2014). Russia often denounces the international community for its discordant antiterrorist measures and its double standards that paint some terrorists as “good” and others as “bad.” After the 9/11 attack, the Russian authorities put pressure on Western countries that had granted asylum to key Chechen separatists (Simons and Strovsky 2006). Similarly, the Russian media expresses frustration with the West’s perceived failure to commemorate the suffering of Russian citizens killed by suicide bombers (Simons 2006). The Syrian military campaign exposed a new wave of geopolitical struggle between the United States and Russia, highlighting their position as both allies and rivals in the war against global terrorism. Since the news media are the primary distributors of dominant policy frames, a comparative analysis of media discourse about Islamic terrorism should illuminate critical differences between Russia’s and the United States’ competing policies in the Middle East.

Analyzing the Image of Islam and the Islamic State in US and Russian Newspapers Two separate studies were conducted to assess US and Russian newspapers’ approaches to framing Islam and terrorism. The following questions were posed: RQ1: How do US and Russian newspapers frame the relationship between “terrorism” and “Islam?” RQ2: What framing strategies do US and Russian newspapers use to portray the Islamic State? RQ3: Are the portrayals of Islam and ISIS in US and Russian newspapers indicative of their respective states’ antiterrorism policies? Study 1: Islamic Terrorism in Russian and US Newspapers The first study aims to examine the relationship between “terrorism” and “Islam” in US and Russian newspapers. Specifically, this comparative

60

Samoilenko, Logunova, Davydov, and Shiraev

analysis focuses on their framing differences when covering terrorist acts. In addition, it examines in what context news media use the words “Islam,” “Islamic,” and “Muslim” to describe radical Islamism. Methodology. A quantitative content analysis of newspaper publications

addressed three prominent terrorist attacks: the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2013, the Paris terror attacks in November 2015, and the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016. All three terroristic attacks were linked to radical Islamism; two of them were organized by the Islamic State. For our analysis, we selected the following US newspapers: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Boston Globe. The Russian newspapers analyzed were Rossiyskaya gazeta, Kommersant, Novaya gazeta, and Moskovskii komsomolets. The news media were selected on the basis of their status (elite vs. popular media), regional focus, and ideological orientation. The data sample was generated from two databases: Integrum for the Russian newspapers and Factiva for the US newspapers. The time frame of the sample was set to begin with the date of the attack and end with September 30, 2016. Different keywords were used in each case: for the Boston Marathon bombings, “Boston Marathon,” “attack,” and “Tsarnaev”; for the Paris terror attacks, “Paris,” “terrorist,” “Bataclan,” and “Stade de France”; and for the Orlando nightclub shooting, “Orlando” and “Pulse.” The unit of analysis was “news item,” defined as the group of continuous verbal and visual elements related to the same topic. The total sample size included 252 articles (news and analytical items), 117 from Russian newspapers and 135 from American ones. News items were selected based on their publication dates and coded according to the basic unit parameters; people and countries mentioned; visualization; the tone of the event; and Islam-related symbols (see Table 4.1).

Table 4.1

The Number of Publications Analyzed

N.

Newspaper

Country

Boston Marathon

Orlando

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Boston Globe New York Times Washington Post Wall Street Journal Rossiyskaya gazeta Novaya gazeta Kommersant Moskovskii komsomolets

USA USA USA USA Russia Russia Russia Russia

1,141 631 313 439 16 8 18 47

53 165 77 76 7 3 3 15

Paris 14 171 46 64 83 52 63 79

Reporting on “Islam” and “Terror” in Russian vs. US Media

61

Key findings. The findings demonstrate that both US and Russian newspa-

pers discuss Islam in relation to three main themes—religion, radical Islam, and terrorism—in almost the same proportion. The tone of publications ranges from positive (related to economic issues) and neutral (cultural and social issues) to outright negative (political issues). Media in both countries tend to compare terrorist attacks to previous acts of terrorism that occurred on their own soil (typical reference points include the 9/11 tragedy and the 2002 Nord-Ost Moscow theater hostage taking). This trend is observed more frequently in the Russian media. The data analysis shows that both Russian and US media tend to evaluate terrorist events in terms of their impact. Political materials frame terrorist events in terms of their international impact, while materials addressing economic and sociocultural issues focus on the impact within the local context. Within political discourse, terrorism is framed as a symbol of war (46.4 percent) and death (40.6 percent). Within social discourse, Islam is presented using the symbolism of death, victims, and so forth (see Table 4.2). Within cultural discourse, the symbols of death and war are equally pronounced; the symbols of mourning and sorrow are also discussed. Only a small proportion of news items (10 percent) address the issue of radical Islamism. However, the content of newspaper publications portrays Islam as something hostile, bloodthirsty, extralegal, and contrary to common sense. The negative perception of Islam is commonly linked to terrorist attacks (58 percent) and crime (12 percent). Both US and Russian media imply that the main reasons for terrorist attacks are ISIS activities and Islamic religious factors. Regression analysis reveals that US and Russian news media link “radical Islamism” to migrants coming from Muslim countries; migrants are often perceived as the causes of terrorist events. This framing was especially pronounced in the materials covering the attacks in Paris and Orlando. The European migrant crisis became a

Table 4.2

The Symbols of Islam (percentage) Political

National architectural   elements “Special victims” The symbol of war The symbol of   mourning/sorrow The symbol of death National flags Humor/irony

Economic

Social

Cultural

37.7

0.0

16.7

32.1

7.2 46.4 18.8

0.0 50.0 0.0

31.8 56.1 21.2

21.4 46.4 39.3

40.6 7.2 10.1

100.0 0.0 0.0

68.2 6.1 3.0

50.0 3.6 7.1

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Samoilenko, Logunova, Davydov, and Shiraev

separate discourse, allowing for the discussion of migrants as a cause of various social and political problems. Russian media have a more general agenda: the terror, fear, and danger associated with Islam. In addition to these topics, American news media also cover other issues, including religion, minority rights, and so forth. The Russian media tend to present facts without providing explicit details, whereas US newspapers typically personalize stories by providing details about the victims, their identities, and their suffering. Study 2: The Islamic State in US and Russian Newspapers This study is derived from another research project, “ISIS as Portrayed by Foreign Media and Mass Culture” (Davydov et al. 2016), which examines how international media outlets portray the Islamic State. An extensive content analysis of ten newspapers from different countries reveals a consensus on how to cover ISIS activities. It is generally believed that ISIS is “an enemy that should be destroyed” (Davydov et al. 2016, 19). ISIS is portrayed as “a complex and controversial transnational construct formed on an intersection of traditional and modern frames resulting from information efforts made by both ISIS and the antiterrorist coalition states” (ibid.). In fact, there is a cumulative attempt to describe a new sociopolitical phenomenon using “outmoded media language that makes it impossible to convey the essence of the ISIS phenomenon” (ibid.). An additional content analysis of three Russian newspapers was conducted to compare media coverage of ISIS in the United States and Russia (see Table 4.3). The news sources, published between June 29, 2014,1 and November 30, 2015, were selected based on differences in ideological focus. The keywords “ISIS,” “ISIL,” “Daesh,” and “Da’ish” were used to identify materials in the Factiva database (for American sources) and the Integrum database (for Russian ones). Key findings. Both the US and Russian news media discuss ISIS as a polit-

ical phenomenon. News materials were more commonly found in Russian newspapers, while analytical materials dominated US newspapers (see Table 4.4). Neither Russian nor US newspapers favored materials on ISIS featuring expert discussion. US newspapers focused more on the military campaign against ISIS, which was portrayed as a global threat, and tended to frame the Islamic State as religious fanatics and murderers. Russian newspapers discussed the military campaign in Syria less; they were also more likely to consider IS a state (as opposed to a terrorist organization) than those in the US sample. Many texts in US newspapers primarily discussed the phenomenon of the Islamic State as a novelty but showed little interest in its organizational structure and the broader context surrounding its origins. Notably, ISIS

Reporting on “Islam” and “Terror” in Russian vs. US Media

63

Table 4.3 Universe and Sample of Publications in US and Russian Newspapers Mentioning ISIS No.

Media

Country

Universe

Sample

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

New York Times Wall Street Journal USA Today Kommersant Rossiyskaya gazeta Komsomolskaya pravda

USA USA USA Russia Russia Russia

1,477 602 335 382 459 319

100 98 100 101 100 99

3,574

598

Total

Table 4.4

Genres of Publications (percentage) News/ Discussion Informational Analytical (Several Material Article Interview Participants) Column Other

New York   Times USA Today Wall Street   Journal Total US   newspapers

34

54

1

2

5

5

36 42

28 49

0 2

11 2

11 3

14 2

37

44

1

5

6

7

Kommersant Rossiyskaya   gazeta Komsomolskaya   pravda Total Russian   newspapers

84 45

6 26

7 9

3 0

0 17

0 3

43

31

15

0

2

8

58

21

10

1

6

4

Total

47

32

6

3

6

5

leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has not become an important media reference in either country. Any mentions of the Islamic State are highly impersonal. The US media covered ISIS activities more extensively following the beheading of American photojournalist James Foley in August 2014 and the Kobanê massacre in June 2015. Predictably, the execution of Foley became an important reference in the US narrative on ISIS but not in that of Russia. Both countries did, however, see media activity peak during the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. For its part, Russian media interest in ISISrelated stories picked up following the start of the Russian military campaign

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Samoilenko, Logunova, Davydov, and Shiraev

in Syria. Predictably, both countries focused on their national leaders, both of whom ranked first on their country’s list of the most frequently mentioned persons in the context of ISIS, as Table 4.5 shows. The data on the projection of binary realities demonstrate the frequency with which publications in both countries used frames that added to the construction of the enemy image (see Figure 4.1). The most pronounced binaries were constructed across the categories of “us” and “them,” observed in 39 percent of Russian articles and 33 percent of US ones. The West vs. Russia and West vs. East binaries were popular dichotomies in Russian newspapers. Newspapers in the United States, meanwhile, discussed the phenomenon of the Islamic State in relation to the opposition between moderate and radical values, Christianity and Islam, and victim and aggressor. The opposition between “Christianity” and “Islam” was frequently used by the Wall Street Journal (22 percent of articles).

Conclusion This chapter demonstrates that US and Russian newspapers share many similarities in their patterns of covering Islamic terrorism and the Islamic State. The notions of “Islam” and “terrorism” are commonly discussed in terms of a binary opposition between “us” and “them” by creating dualistic categories, such as rational vs. irrational or the civilized world vs. barbarians. The narrative created after the 9/11 attack, which remains prevalent, causes collision between Islam and terrorism, Islamic and Islamist,

Table 4.5

Top Ten Most Frequently Mentioned Individuals in the Context of ISIS US Sources

No. Person  1.  2.  3.  4.  5.  6.

    Russian Sources

Mentions Mentions

Barack Obama Bashar al-Assad George Bush James Foley Hillary Clinton Vladimir Putin

133 41 24 18 18 17

45 14 8 6 6 6

 7. Saddam Hussein  8. Jeb Bush  9. Abu Bakr   al-Baghdadi 10. John Kerry

16 14 13

5 5 4

12

4

Person

Mentions Mentions

Vladimir Putin Bashar al-Assad Barack Obama Sergey Lavrov John Kerry Recep Tayyip   Erdogan François Hollande Moshe Ya’alon Alexander   Lukashevich Angela Merkel

88 57 55 29 23 16

29 19 18 10 8 5

14 14 14

5 5 5

12

4

Reporting on “Islam” and “Terror” in Russian vs. US Media

65

and therefore results in the discussion of terrorism in connection with ethnicity and religion. This leads to further archetypization and oversimplification of this very complex issue by activating the hybrid frame of “radical Islam” and making it more accessible in the public mind. The “radical Islam” frame has become increasingly associated with migrants, who are commonly discussed in connection with terrorist attacks. There is also a binary opposition between “good Muslim” and “bad Islamist”—that is, Islam is a religion, while Islamism is a religious-political ideology. It is

Figure 4.1

Binary Portrayals in US and Russian Publications on ISIS (percentage)

66

Samoilenko, Logunova, Davydov, and Shiraev

presumed that “good Muslims” are part of “us” and share “our” ideology, while Islamists are foreign and pose a threat to “our” culture and values. Narratives about ISIS are still produced as dramatic stories about archetypal characters (heroes and villains). These narratives are easily recognizable by any audience and build on ordinary people’s preexisting mental scripts and expectations. In the American press, the Islamic State is presented as a mob of religious fanatics killing Americans. The execution of American photojournalist James Foley became an important reference point for US newspapers’ ISIS narratives. This demonstrates that terrorism is still frequently discussed through the “US fear culture” frame that demonizes the other and sets up an opposition between the West and Islamic-based extremism. This “pragmatic” media frame focuses on similarities and differences in shared values, as distinct from the more “social” frame used by the European media (Davydov et al. 2016). Interestingly, Russian newspapers reflected less on the Russian military campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, while its preferred dichotomies for framing ISIS-related discussions were the oppositions of West vs. Russia and West vs. East. The fact that US newspapers offered more diverse coverage of ISIS than their Russian counterparts can be explained by differences between the two countries’ media systems. The US media system is more complex, represented by more media outlets with divergent editorial policies and agendas. The current perception of ISIS is formed through the application of traditional and modern frames, resulting from differences between US and Russian antiterrorist policies. It is also explained by the need to assign meaning and explain the Islamic State as a new political phenomenon. The unique nature and structure of the Islamic State explain the scarcity of expert discussion of ISIS-related issues in both the US and Russian media. At the same time, there is a cumulative attempt to describe a new sociopolitical phenomenon using “outmoded media language that makes it impossible to convey the essence of the ISIS phenomenon” (Davydov et al. 2016, 19). In sum, Russian and American media outlets formulate the image of Islam in relation to terrorism in almost identical terms. The main difference is that whereas US media consider terrorism an external threat, Russian media see it as both an external and an internal problem. The United States has a long history of successfully exporting its national antiterrorism agenda and integrating it into the global terrorism discourse. The international media build on these policy frames, transforming them into prominent narratives that can later be used to explain new issues and phenomena that emerge in the global world. Russian media, on the other hand, import international concepts and frames used to cover these phenomena. Their materials contain less content focused on discussing or analyzing the issue; publications primarily inform citizens that events have occurred and indi-

Reporting on “Islam” and “Terror” in Russian vs. US Media

67

cate the state’s official position. Understandably, cases of domestic terrorism related to Islam are covered differently by the Russian media than such events that occur overseas. This framing analysis demonstrates not just mutual opposition to Islamic terrorists but also competition between the antiterrorism policies of the two states leading the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. US media frames, for instance, reflect the dominant discourse in US antiterrorism policy of geopolitical struggle as purely a matchup between good and evil. If the US news media primarily support this government policy by focusing on the state’s military campaign against the Islamic State, Russian media outlets support other policy items in their ISIS-related news materials. This news may not be directly related to Russia’s mission of fighting international terrorism but clearly supports the Russian Federation’s broader policy objective of maintaining its status in the Middle East. Future studies should address how antiterrorism policies affect the framing of homegrown terrorist acts in relation to Islam in US and Russian newspapers.

Notes 1. The day ISIS announced its “Caliphate” in the territories of Iraq and Syria under its control.

5 Perceptions of the Hajj Zilya Khabibullina

In today’s globalizing world, a pilgrimage is understood as a universal ancient religious practice that is still preserved, but in the form of what has become one of the most actively developing large-scale phenomena that has religious, political, social, and cultural importance (Mols and Buitelaar 2015). The phenomenon of pilgrimage exists in every religion and plays a special role in Islam. The Hajj (a journey to Mecca) is the fifth key act of worship among those prescribed to all Muslims. In addition to basic dogmatic objectives, the pilgrimage in Islam implements a number of other functions conducive to the development of the Muslim Ummah, as it satisfies the need of the believers to see the power of this religion and represents one of the mechanisms to ensure all-Muslim unity. In Russia the Hajj indicates a believer’s affiliation with the Muslim community and constitutes one of the fundamental elements in relations between the Russian state and the Muslim community. Personal experiences, perceptions, and accounts have been shown to change and evolve along with changes in international politics. Russia’s contemporary domestic politics and the culture of Islamic learning within a Muslim community interact and influence each other, with sacred spaces transformed by the mix of local culture and the priorities of national politics (Ross 2021). This chapter is devoted to some aspects of the Russian Muslim pilgrimage that will help us better understand the image of Islam in Russia. 1. Principles and practice in organizing the Hajj in Russia 2. Dynamics of the number of pilgrims at the national and regional levels 3. Local features and culturally relevant results of the continuation and development of the practice of pilgrimage in the Southern Urals

69

70

Khabibullina

4. Hajjis (persons who have successfully completed Hajj trips to Mecca): influence of pilgrimage on their religious awareness and status in the Muslim community. In our research we place special emphasis on the regional aspect and consider in detail the problem of Muslim pilgrimage in the Southern Urals. As is known, Islam in Russia does not form a single sociocultural entity, and researchers recognize its several areas with specific social, cultural, psychological, and structural characteristics. These are the Northern Caucasus, the Urals, the Volga region, and western Siberia.

Hajj Organization After many decades of restrictions on the Hajj in the USSR, Russian Muslims got the opportunity, in the 1990s, to take a free trip to Mecca. Since that time, one can observe an increase in the number of pilgrims from year to year. Since 2009, 20,500 Russian Muslims have arrived in groups in Saudi Arabia for the Hajj every year according to the quota established by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for the countries with Muslim populations (one Muslim per every thousand people). The quota is based on the largest possible number of Muslims in the Russian Federation (i.e., twenty million people). Even this quota is insufficient. As reported by the Russian Hajj Committee, 3,000 to 4,000 of those who wish to perform the Hajj are left without travel permissions, but in fact, there may be many more such people. In the opinion of Ilyas Umakhanov, chairman of the Russian Hajj Committee, Muslims in Russia might be satisfied with a quota of 25,000 people.1 Nevertheless, Russian Muslims have taken the initiative to give part of the quota to migrant workers.2 Since 2017, migrants from Central Asia can also use the Russian quota, provided that the total number of visas for citizens from other countries is not more than 5 percent of the Russian quota.3 From the standpoint of the state, the possibility of performing the Hajj is one of the basic conditions for the functioning of Russia as a multireligious state, implementation of the principle of freedom of religion, and expansion of international relations with Arab countries. The issues of its organization are a focus of federal government attention. In Russia, there is a centralized system for Hajj organization, and interesting experience has been accumulated in the interaction between the spiritual administrations of Muslims and government authorities. Since 2002, the Hajj Committee has been functioning under the government of the Russian Federation as a nonprofit public association to coordinate the activities of the spiritual administrations of Muslims. The committee incorporates both heads of the largest centralized Muslim organizations in Russia

Perceptions of the Hajj

71

and representatives of the government authorities. The Regulation of the Russian Hajj-Mission was approved in 2003. It consists of Hajj group leaders, guides, interpreters, and medical professionals (about 200 staff members) who take care of Russian Muslim pilgrims in Saudi Arabia during the Hajj season. The primary objectives of the committee include negotiations with the Saudi Ministry of Hajj on the following issues: • Establishment of quotas for Russian Muslims, terms and conditions for their stay, transportation, accommodation, meals, and payment of fees and duties • Organization of the Hajj-Mission • Distribution of quotas among the regions in Russia, selection of pilgrimage tour operators, and coordination of their activities with the Saudi embassy • Interaction with the government authorities in Russia • Exchange of information among the spiritual administrations of Muslims (Mukhametzyanova-Duggal and Khabibullina 2010, 57)

Issues of Quotas and the Number of Pilgrims The Hajj Committee distributes the Russian quota inside the country among the spiritual administrations of Muslims, and the latter, in turn, pass the information to accredited tour operators. The main role of the spiritual administrations of Muslims in organizing the Hajj is to represent the interests of their parishioners, to equitably distribute the quota among parishes, and to carry on organizational and explanatory work. The religious associations make lists of future pilgrims, giving priority to those performing the Hajj for the first time and to older people (see Table 5.1).4 The problem of the quota distribution over the regions is of much importance, and its current situation exemplifies vividly the development of Muslim religious life in Russia. The majority of pilgrims are from the Northern Caucasus. If one or another region cannot take up the whole quota allocated, the vacant places create a reserve quota to be reallocated to other spiritual administrations with a higher number of those who wish to make the Hajj. For example, the quota of the Republic of Dagestan comprised 6,000 persons in 2009, and in fact there were 12,400 pilgrims.5 Primarily Dagestanians (80 percent of the total number of Russian pilgrims) perform the Hajj from Russia, but Tatars and Bashkirs predominate in the Russian Muslim population (53 percent) (Nurimanov 2008, 73) (see Table 5.2).6 The problem of a balanced quota distribution—with regard to the possibility of equal representativeness of all regions, municipal units, and ethnic

72 Table 5.1

Hajj Quotas and the Number of Pilgrims

Date

Saudi Arabia Quota

Number of Actual Pilgrims

20,000 20,000 20,000 20,000 20,500 25,000 20,500 20,500 20,500 22,500 20,500 16,600 16,400

4,650 6,700 9,100 13,000 18,600 18,000 23,000 20,499 20,500 20,350 20,653 16,650 16,400

2003 2004 2005 2006 January 2007 December 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2016

Table 5.2

Distribution of the Russian Quota Among the Religious Boards of Muslims, 2009–2016

Centralized Religious Associations MRB, Republic of   Dagestan MRB, Chechen   Republic Russia Muftis   Council MRB, Republic of   Tatarstan Central Spiritual   Administration of   Muslims of Russia MRB, Republic of   Ingushetia Coordination Centre   of Northern   Caucasus Muslims Central Spiritual   Administration of   Muslims of Russia MRB, Republic of   Ingushetia Coordination Centre   of Northern   Caucasus Muslims

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2016

6,000

8,000

10,000

8,000

8,000

6,000

3,000

3,000

3,000

4,000

3,600

2,600

3,750

3,000

2,500

2,000

3,000

2,500

3,000

2,000

2,000

1,500

1,500

1,200

2,000

2,000

1,300

1,200

1,300

1,100

1,500

1,500

1,500

1,500

1,800

1,400

1,250

1,000

1,220

1,200

1,300

1,100

2,000

2,000

1,300

1,200

1,300

1,100

1,500

1,500

1,500

1,500

1,800

1,400

1,250

1,000

1,220

1,200

1,300

1,100

Perceptions of the Hajj

73

groups—is discussed actively on various information platforms. This problem frequently provokes complaints about and distrust of centralized organizations and their leaders regarding just distribution of the Hajj quota to protect the interests of the various interest groups and communities above Muslims. Nevertheless, the quota allocation process can have such negative features as commercialization, intermediation, and discrepancy between the formal quotas allocated to the spiritual administrations and the actual number of pilgrims taking the trip. The creation of a single database in 2013 will probably solve these problems.

Hajj from the Southern Urals Local features of Muslim pilgrimage in the Southern Urals were studied on the basis of my own ethnographic materials collected since 2005. Historically, the Southern Urals represent a region with a large, consolidated Muslim population. At the same time the Southern Urals are a multiethnic and multireligious region. For example, more than 160 ethnic groups7 live in the Republic of Bashkortostan, belonging to twenty-two religious communities. The majority of the Southern Ural Muslim population is concentrated in Bashkortostan. Islamic adherents among Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, and others live also in Orenburg, Chelyabinsk, and Kurgan Oblasts of the Southern Urals, where they constitute religious minorities. It should be noted that, by and large, Hajjis represent a unified community within the region according to their basic values and lifestyle regardless of their place of residence. They strictly follow the Islamic laws but often refrain from visiting mosques. More often than not, they feel disappointed in local religious leaders and prefer to celebrate holy days with their narrow circle of relatives. It should be noted that participation in the Hajj increases observance of global Islamic practices such as prayer and fasting while decreasing participation in localized practices and beliefs. The Hajj helps to integrate the Muslim world, leading to a strengthening of global Islamic beliefs, a weakened attachment to localized religious customs, and a sense of unity and equality with others who are ordinarily separated in everyday life by sect, ethnicity, nationality, or gender but are brought together during the Hajj. While the Hajj may help forge a common Islamic identity, there is no evidence that this is defined in opposition to non-Muslims. On the contrary, the notions of equality and harmony tend to extend to adherents of other religions as well (Clingingsmith, Khwaja, and Kremer 2009,1134). Over many decades of atheism and the absence of diplomatic relations between the USSR and Saudi Arabia, traditions and knowledge of the Urals Muslims concerning the Hajj have been lost. Though the majority of Russian Muslims live in the Southern Urals, the dynamics of the Hajj pilgrimage

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there still remains rather insignificant. The average number of pilgrims from Bashkortostan is 300 or 400 persons per year. This is associated, to a greater extent, with economic difficulties (see Table 5.3).8 According to the survey conducted among the Muslims of Bashkortostan, the main reason for not performing the Hajj is a lack of money. Most of the pilgrims must earn the required sum by themselves, and only 9 percent can rely on outside financial sources.9 Today, the standard cost of the Hajj is $4,000 to $5,500.10 Holy places are situated far from the Urals, and the region has a high level of secularization.

Local Pilgrimage Practices of Southern Urals Muslims The pilgrimage activity in this region is directly associated with features peculiar to Islam. The Muslim mentality reflects also ethnic traditions and pre-Islamic beliefs. Here, Islam has coexisted with different religions. There are local sacred sites represented by the shrines of Islamic missionaries, influential religious figures, ascetics, and Sufis. Today, one can see the most active reconstruction of old ziyarat11 (grave visiting) traditions and creation of new ones as well as the recovery of historical memory about the so-called saints of Allah (Aulia). Its intensification in the region coincides with growing religious awareness during the post-Soviet period and development of the religious component in the identity of the Turkic peoples. The process of religious ren-

Table 5.3 Year of the Pilgrimage 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

The Number of Pilgrims in the Republic of Bashkortostan Number of Pilgrams 50 54 120 225 350 310 200 150 300 370 200 460 153 500

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aissance in Russia shows that pre-Muslim beliefs, along with official Islam, have become an important factor responsible for trends and characteristics of contemporary religious processes. Researchers attribute the formation of the tradition to visit the Aulia graves to the previously existing cult of ancestors—the belief that souls of the dead are not indifferent to the destinies of living descendants and can exert influence on their lives. During the Islamization, the cult of ancestors was transformed among Bashkirs and Tatars into a cult of saints. As a rule, the religious psychology of the Turkic peoples assumed the form of “popular Islam,” combining Islamic postulates with some folk customs and ethnic features. This cult is sufficiently widespread in the Islamic world and includes a whole range of elements and specific manifestations, primarily the veneration of actual deceased or imaginary persons considered “saints” and worship of their graves, as well as trees, water bodies, and rocks associated with saints in one way or another (Syzranov 2006, 4). One such manifestation is the preservation of regional sites of pilgrimage. The pilgrimage (ziyarat) to the graves of Muslim “saints” and missionaries has become an important element of Bashkir and Tatar everyday life alongside observance of the Muslim holy days, such as Ramazan Bayram (fasting), Kurban Bayram (sacrifice), and Mawlid (celebration of the Prophet’s birthday).12 At present there are about 300 specially venerated Aulia graves known in the Southern Urals. The pilgrimage to local holy places is an integral part of the life of modern-day Muslims, an important component in constructing local Islamic identities, and a subject of ideological discrepancies inside the Muslim Ummah. There are several groups of Muslims in the Urals. The largest group includes the so-called ethnic Muslims, or traditionally “Islamic” peoples (Bashkirs, Tatars, Kazakhs) who relate their religious identity to the affiliation with some definite ethnos. The second group includes practicing Muslims for whom religious identity is the dominant factor. This community is actively developing at the moment both quantitatively and qualitatively. The public discourse on further development of Islam is very pronounced in this group. The gap in the Islamic tradition and the absence of any succession with the prerevolutionary stage in the development of Islam triggered intellectual inquiries among the most active members of Muslim communities.

“Holy Places” in the Islamic Discourse Nowadays the practice of Islam is being developed in the Southern Urals in two forms: Salafism and Sufism. The first one is based on transferring the Islamic tradition, principles, and authority system from the historically Muslim areas where the traditions of Islam remain unbroken. The second is aimed at restoring the traditions using locals’ own sources. Both groups lay

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claim to domination in terms of intrareligious Islamic society, especially in the Republic of Bashkortostan. Therefore, the groups hold different positions on a number of key issues, including religious practices, “correct understanding,” and observance of Islamic principles. Thus, Salafites act vigorously against the “holy places.” By contrast, adherents of Sufism are concerned with the restoration of historical memory about Aulias forgotten and neglected during the period of Soviet power. Representatives of the “Haqqania” Tarikat emerged in Bashkortostan to find or create new sites of worship. For two consecutive years the republic was visited by Sufi sheikh Nazim Al-Haqqani to bless new holy places. Later on, he was expelled by a group of Muslims who did not share his ideas.13 In order to stabilize the local pilgrimage movement among the Urals Muslims and to establish a single center for visiting believers, every year the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims organizes special days in memory of Husain-Bek with visits to his mausoleum and collective prayer. Husain-Bek is honored here as the enlightener and the first Islamic missionary in the Southern Urals. For a long time, the fragments of his skeleton have been under anthropological investigation, his personal appearance being reconstructed on the basis of the skull. In 2016, the missionary’s remains received a ceremonial reburial. In the opinion of Muslim spiritual leaders, this will increase the number of visits to the site. Visits to “holy places” are an integral part of Muslims’ religious life. Research on the Muslim community of the Republic of Bashkortostan shows that the practice of making a pilgrimage to local cultic sites facilitates collective identity formation and consolidation in Muslims, enables among Turkic peoples awareness of and a feeling of interrelation and general affiliation with Islam, and makes it possible for people to associate themselves with one or another religious organization or group and develop a sense of unity in the Muslim community. During the prerevolutionary period, pilgrimages to ziyarats were fairly widespread, but in the Soviet years, the flow of pilgrims became considerably reduced. According to archival materials, Muslim believers, mostly from rural areas, visited only three sites (the Husain-Bek and Turah-Khan mausoleums and Yagafar Ishan’s grave) either in groups or alone during great Muslim religious festivals. Each festival was attended by approximately thirty people.14 Today ambiguous processes associated with “sacred places” are noted to occur in the Muslim community. The situation in Bashkortostan is the most representative in this respect. Over the past two decades of religious freedom, Bashkortostan has seen different versions of this practice, starting with traditional visits to already existing graves of the “saints,” reconstruction of neglected burial grounds, and restoration of historical memory about the most famous Aulias of the past, and ending with the creation of new

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places of worship, declaration of archaeological burial mounds as the graves of the Prophet’s companions, actions by destructive sects, dissemination of the “Haqqania” Tarikat, and aggravation of contradictions between Salafis and Sufis in the Muslim community.

Creation of New Places of Worship Among the recreated cultic sites, a special interpretation is given to the socalled grave of the Prophet’s companions in the Miyakinsky District of Bashkortostan. They are father and son Zubair bin Zait and Abdurrahman bin Zubair. According to archaeological evidence, this “holy” place is a burial mound (Ilchigulovo 4). It was studied by anthropologist Nikolai Maliev in the nineteenth century and Gennady Garustovich in 1986. Two stone structures were discovered during the excavations. One of them was empty; beneath the second structure a nomadic grave of the early Muslim period (fourteenth or fifteenth century) was found. This burial place on Narys-tau Mountain is also mentioned in the Bashkir folk epic “Idukai and Muradym” dating to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. It is about the Golden Horde’s Temnik (General) Edigei, aka Idukai, who began his military career in Tamerlane’s army and was in opposition to Khan Tokhtamysh. At the end of the epic the hero dies and is buried at the top of this mountain (Akhatov, Bakhshiev, and Tuzbekov 2016, 36). In 2010 Sufi sheikh Nazim Al-Haqqani (Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus) declared Narys-tau Mountain to be the “Sahabah” burial place. After the regional mass media had disseminated information about the discovery of the “Sahabah” burial place, active construction was launched at the site. In 2011 a domed monument was erected on the mountain to perpetuate the names of the Prophet’s two companions. In 2012 a mosque dedicated to the “sacred” place was built at the bottom of the mountain. All expenses for the construction of the whole complex were covered by the “Ural” Charitable Foundation headed by Murtaza Rakhimov, ex-president of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The “sacred” site is starting to be actively developed. The local dwellers would like to convert it into a popular tourist destination, building a hotel, a Muslim religious school for future priests, and a good road. At present representatives of different nations (Russians, Udmurts, Mari, and others) visit this place. Most often people come to appeal to God or take part in excursions. Regarding this “sacred site,” one can speak about both the spontaneous sacralization of archaeological monuments and their use as symbols to disseminate the ideas of the Sufi Tarikat and ethnically consolidate Muslim believers of the republic around the so-called Bashkir Mecca.

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Uralian Muslims treat the Aulia graves with high respect and take care of trees, groves, bodies of water, and rocks associated with saints in one way or another. It is a custom to fetch water from neighboring springs, leave coins and gifts, and tie ribbons representing wishes, requests, and intentions to trees. Collective prayers for rain and peace were held on the Aulia graves in different years. The main reason for visiting ziyarats in our day is to receive blessings and healing. We have recorded a great many stories that deal with recovering from a disease diagnosed as incurable by modern medicine after visiting the “holy places” and praying. The preservation of history, memory, and traditions associated with local cultic sites depends mainly on clergymen. There are many neglected graves of “saints” in the Urals, especially in rural areas, where imams have a negative attitude toward those visits or hold an ambivalent position. Modern-day clergymen do not always approve of the custom of visiting “holy places.” In 2011 a survey among spiritual leaders in Bashkortostan concerning the possibility of visiting and worshipping the “holy places” showed that 44 percent of respondents considered this ritual a harmful superstition prohibited to true Muslims; 25 percent answered that visits to the “holy places” are, by and large, possible without worship, because a Muslim should worship only genuine holy places in Mecca and Medina; 19.8 percent had a positive attitude toward this phenomenon and assessed it as a tradition established in the republic to worship local Muslim holy places; and 11.2 percent were unable to say for sure.15 The majority of clergymen treat visits to the Aulia graves not as a pilgrimage or worship but as a prayer for the soul of a dead person; they strongly recommend not deifying the saint and not equating this visit with the Hajj. Since the Aulias were often deeply faithful people in life and tried to enhance religious feelings and moral principles in society, spiritual leaders think it necessary to restore the memory of their deeds. The local “holy places” are not a focus of national policy in the Republic of Bashkortostan. The reproduction of this tradition is a matter of concern for nationally oriented groups, adherents of the Sufi Tarikat, and sects aimed at recruiting new members. The existing situation with the “holy places” demonstrates that the Muslim Ummah has disintegrated in the region and does not have the necessary unity in the face of global challenges.

Hajjis My field materials make it possible to outline the following culturally relevant results of the Muslim pilgrimage. Muslims of the Southern Urals perceive the Hajj primarily as a dream they wish to fulfill during their adult lives. The Hajj is an important turning point in the life of a Uralian Muslim,

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and he either leans toward “orthodox Islam” or decides that it is not yet time to knit himself with religious ties (the latter tendency is characteristic of secular intellectuals). The pilgrimage to Mecca attests to piety and sincere faith in the Muslim community. The Hajjis form an elite group in the community and can exert effective influence on the formation of the climate of opinion. In selection or appointment of leaders of the Muslim community, preference is given to those who have performed the Hajj. Museums of local history in district centers and villages of the Southern Urals display information about their first post-Soviet pilgrims with biographical data and photos from the Hajj.16 There is now a whole corpus of artistic and literary works devoted to pilgrimages both to Mecca and to local sacred sites. It needs to be studied separately. The very first journeys of Russian Muslims to Mecca reveal some peculiar features. One of them is a large number of women wishing to perform this physically and spiritually difficult travel. Nowadays the number of female pilgrims continues to grow, and they have great enthusiasm for the Hajj. The history of the Russian Muslim pilgrimage shows that the Hajj associated with danger and challenges was always for men. In the past it lasted for half a year or even several years and was performed mainly by religious figures and well-off Muslims. During the Soviet period, the number of pilgrims was strictly regulated (no more than twenty to thirty individuals from all over the country). The candidates were selected and thoroughly checked by state security organs. Judging from the lists of possible candidates, they also were men.17 The distinctive feature of the Hajj from the Southern Urals is a high number of female pilgrims. There are dogmatic stipulations for a woman to take part in a Hajj trip (she should be accompanied by either her husband or another close male relative with whom marriage is prohibited [mahram]). In the Southern Ural region, this problem is usually tackled by having a representative of the Spiritual Administration accompany a women’s group. There are both spiritual leaders and secular people aged fifty-five to sixty among the pilgrims from the Southern Urals. The majority of Hajjis consist of true believers of Islam who are eager to fulfill their religious duty. In the early 1990s, many women brought goods for sale from Hajj trips (cheap clothes, carpets, gold items) to recoup their expenses. Even now women continue to use Hajj trips for commercial purposes, since the majority of female pilgrims are unemployed. However, there is a recent tendency to perform the Hajj by well-educated women who have their own business or a high-paying prestigious job. Important to note is the desire of some women to visit Mecca repeatedly. Thus, many of them performed the Hajj four or five times. After visiting Mecca, the majority of women think it necessary to take the Holy Land tour every year. Instead of resting in resorts, they try to save money and visit Saudi Arabia once again.

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The large portion of women among Uralian pilgrims is due primarily to more favorable conditions for performing the Hajj: today its organization is a tourist service. The instructors provide detailed training of Muslims on what to do in rituals; the pilgrims are brought to Mecca by air. The presentday religious situation in Bashkortostan reflects the situation characteristic of the whole country, where women know and practice their faith better. The same situation holds for Islam. The majority of believers consist of women; many of them try to fulfill religious laws, one of which is an obligatory visit to Mecca. A major result of female pilgrimage is the formation of new behavioral patterns among Muslim women and norms for the perception of these patterns in society. The Hajj essentially changes a person’s attitude toward life, and he or she often becomes deeply religious on returning home and begins to fulfill all the precepts of Islam. Meeting coreligionists in the Holy Land allows every Muslim to feel him- or herself a part of the global Islamic community (Ummah), united with the confession of faith and adherence to core values in the lifestyle based on the Quran, Sunnah, and sharia law (Stetskevich 2006, 99). Women gain the feeling of solidarity with female Muslims from other countries, strengthen their faith, and find many positive aspects in the precepts of Islam, including the wearing of headscarves and high-necked dresses. The majority of Muslim female respondents tell about their trips with tears in their eyes. Women seldom feel disappointed with the trip and experience tremendous delight in almost all cases. Men tend to evaluate the conditions of the pilgrimage rather soberly and mention some unpleasant situations. As a whole, the interviews show that, despite inconveniences and all sorts of difficulties associated with the travel itself and the stay in Mecca, pilgrims come back feeling deep spiritual enrichment.

Conclusion A person who has successfully completed a Hajj trip is endowed with the honorary title “Hajji” or “Hajjiah.” The Hajj improves Muslims’ status, including for women, in the community. For example, when other women meet a Hajjah, they should put on a kerchief (a piece of fabric covering the head), like they do in the mosque. Believers who have no opportunity to perform the Hajj try to participate in it by joining the pilgrims’ arrival and departure ceremonies, getting gifts and Zamzam holy water, or simply touching the Hajji on the return from the Hajj (Khabibullina 2016, 122). It is of interest to note the impressions of male coreligionists about women performing the Hajj. Their opinions on women’s behavior during the Hajj are not always favorable. Men are indignant at the absence of an

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accompanying person, women’s commercial activities during the Hajj trip, “hysteric behavior, claims for exclusive attention, contacts with other men, participations in discussions on unfeminine problems,” and so forth (Sakhautdinov 1997, 23–24, 27). “All innovations in Islam are bid’ah (new things in opposition to Muhammad’s words and actions) and came from women,” they say.18 Yet, male pilgrims also emphasize great fortitude and a high degree of punctuality characteristic of representatives of the opposite sex. Muslim women are aware of their gender role and demand respect of male traveling companions. Thus, one cannot say that Muslim women are of low status in the Southern Urals. Their status often becomes a subject of various discussions on stringent standards for a woman’s behavior. However, as our observations show, Muslim women in the region under consideration do not suffer from discrimination, constant oppression, home confinement, or infringement of their rights. The Hajj gives the pilgrim a chance to know another culture and gain an outside perspective on his or her own culture, thus contributing to his or her ethnic identity. The Hajj is the best way to immerse oneself in the Islamic lifestyle. One’s regional identity becomes sharper during the trip. Russian pilgrims in Mecca make up groups according to the regions from which they arrived. The development of the pilgrimage movement attests to the inevitable integration of Russian Muslims into the global Islamic community, accompanied by greater “orthodoxy” and influence by large Islamic centers. Muslim peoples in Russia have a growing need for solidarity, unity, and cohesion inherent in the concept of the Muslim Ummah. The number of devout believers is projected to grow because of wider contacts with Muslim countries during the post-Soviet period.

Notes 1. “Ilyas Umakhanov About the Hajj of 2011,” Medina Publishing House, www.idmedina.ru/books/history_culture/?4748. 2. “Migrants from Central Asia Can Perform the Hajj by the Quota of the Russian Federation,” Ria.ru, February 21, 2017, https://ria.ru/religion_news/20170221 /1488495890.html. 3. Ibid. 4. According to Russian Hajj Committee data. 5. “Hajj 2010: Results,” Islam in the CIS Countries, http://islamsng.com/rus /culture/919. 6. According to Russian Hajj Committee data. 7. All-Russia Population Census, Official Website of the Federal State Statistics Service the Russian Federation, http://perepis2002.ru. 8. According to Spiritual Boards data (Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia and Muslim Religious Board of the Republic of Bashkortostan). 9. Author’s field materials, 2009, Bashkortostan, Ufa.

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10. Risalyat (religious education newspaper) 6 (179) (2013), Ufa, 12. 11. For a complete definition of ziyaret, see https://www.definitions.net/definition /ziyaret. 12. Prozorov 2006, 1:59. 13. “Radicalists Made Mess in the Bashkir Mosque,” Interfax, September 2, 2015, www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=59986. 14. Central Historical Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan, fond 4732, opis 1, delo 20, list 31. 15. Author’s field materials, 2011, Bashkortostan, survey among spiritual leaders concerning the possibility of visiting “holy places.” 16. Author’s field materials, 2013, Bashkortostan, Zianchurinsky District, village of Isyangulovo; Askinsky District, village of Kartkisyak. 17. See, e.g., Central Historical Archive of the Republic of Bashkortostan, fond 4732, opis 1, delo 24, list 9; fond 4732, opis 1, delo 25, list 213, etc. 18. Author’s field materials, 2013, Bashkortostan, Karaidelsky District, village of Karaidel.

6 Between Russia and Islam Rahim Rahimov

A constructive legacy of the Soviet era in the Muslim-majority republics of the former Soviet Union and Muslim regions of Russia is that they represent secular Muslim societies, in which the mosque is separated from the state and moderate Islam dominates. However, the Russian Federation’s Chechnya became an exception to this rule. Although state and mosque are officially separated in Chechnya, radical ideologies, extremist undergrounds, and related acts of violence have been present there for years. In this chapter, I address the question of why the image of Islam in Chechnya became so notoriously different from that in other parts of Russia and the former Soviet Union. To better grasp what has caused this phenomenon, I first explore the ethnic and religious dimensions of the Soviet ideological paradigm. Then, I present Chechnya as a case study. The hypothesis examined here is that the two Chechen wars have transformed Islam in Chechnya from a simple attribute of the Chechen national identity into a radical ideology. Moscow sought to defeat the Chechen secessionist movement at any price. Some Chechen warlords and groups were thirsty for revenge. The core of mobilization and its success or failure depended on the feeling and perception of inclusion and exclusion at the local (Chechnya) and international (Ummah) levels (Wilhelmsen 2020). At this point, external forces with radical ideologies stepped in with funding, fighters, and radical ideologies. However, the Chechen government authorities also work on polishing their self-legitimacy—through mass media outlets on topics such as religion and security—with audiences in the republic and in the federal

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center (Iliyasov 2021). As a result, the image of Islam in Chechnya was significantly affected. To test the hypothesis, I have broken down the Chechen conflict into various phases, such as radicalization of nationalism, Chechenization of the conflict, Islamization of radicalism, and hijacking of the nationalsecessionist cause as Islamist extremism.

A Soviet Ideological Paradigm vs. Islam The emergence of secular Muslim nations from the Soviet Union was a positive legacy, while the numerous ethnonational and secessionist conflicts represented a negative legacy of the Soviet era. Understanding the complicated nature of the ethnic-religious background during the Soviet period will pave the way for identifying the underlying circumstances that gave rise to numerous conflicts as part of the processes of disintegration of the Soviet Union. Those conflicts were mainly related to ethnic, national, and secessionist factors, while religious factors were either absent or negligible. The Chechen conflict turned out to be the most notorious of them, not only in terms of civilian casualties and physical devastation but also in the complexity of the actors and factors, both domestic and external. Since the Chechen conflict emerged as an ethnonational secessionist conflict and had a few symbolic religious traits at its initial stages, the religious as well as ethnic and national dimensions of the Soviet ideological paradigm need to be identified in order to better grasp what caused the conflict and to analyze it. Due to the indiscriminate distribution of negative or hostile attitudes and policies toward religion generally in the Soviet Union, believers of all faiths felt united in a shared destiny; hence religious hostility among different religions was not triggered. Due to the numerical dominance of ethnic Russians and other Slavs, other ethnicities in the Soviet Union felt unequal: Russians were regarded as “superior,” with other Slavs being “quasi-superior,” while other ethnicities found themselves considered “secondary.” Therefore, although tensions and hostilities between religions were absent, ethnic tensions and hostilities were present, though often implicit. The superior role of people of Russian ethnicity, whose faith was largely Orthodox Christianity, sometimes led Muslim ethnic groups to perceive the Soviet ideology as anti-Islamic. Was it specifically antiIslam by nature? No one religion was singled out: Christianity, Islam, Judaism—all were oppressed. The Soviet ideology was not just anti-Islam but antireligion in general and in essence. Islam was a religion like Judaism or Christianity, from the official Soviet perspective. The Soviet ideology was as much anti-Islam as it was anti-Christianity or anti-

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Judaism. Religion was to be minimized, if not eliminated altogether. And the ideology was even more aggressive toward Christianity than Islam in some ways, specifically toward the Russian Orthodox Church because the Bolsheviks regarded it as a part of the ideology of the tsarist regime. From the beginning, the chief Bolshevik ideologist, Lenin, was an atheist, and the Soviet ideology was based on Marxist atheism. Throughout its history, the Soviet Union was antireligious and promoted atheism, although the antireligious tone went through more aggressive and more moderate times in different periods for different reasons. And this was the case for all religions, with no exception. So, what triggers perceptions, in the Muslim world and beyond, that the Soviet Union and Soviet ideology are anti-Islamic? The discourse of many Muslims and others emphasizes the anti-Islamic nature of the Soviets while sometimes overlooking their anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, or antiBuddhist nature. One reason is that Muslims are more sensitive about their religious symbols, and their way of worship is more public/social and demonstrative; religious rites and feasts are longer and more explicit. When these were squeezed or banned, they felt more oppressed because they needed to hide their Islamic attributes, worship, and lifestyle, and they had more to hide than people of other religions. For example, although fasting is present in other religions, the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan is longer and has more restrictions and symbols. And Azan, which is a Muslim call to prayer, is made five times a day from the minarets of mosques. While church bells remind the faithful of the time to pray, Azan is also a prayer in itself. Muslim women don headwear, veils, and burkas. By the way, Jewish men wear a headpiece called the kippah. This is not an exhaustive list. Islam is a community religion. This means that believers are encouraged to pray and exercise religious rites together, as a community, a single unit. Since restrictions discouraged the social nature of Islam, Muslims felt again more oppressed. At that time, when communication technologies were primitive, if they existed at all—when there was no landline phone or radio, let alone the internet or social media—ordinary Muslim populations were not aware that these restrictions and oppressions were also being imposed on Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others, in some cases more harshly than on Muslims. Enemies and rivals of the Soviet state and Bolsheviks, like Mensheviks, former landlords, and capitalists, tried to present the Soviet antireligion campaigns as solely anti-Islam to Muslims, particularly those residing in remote regions. So, perception of the Soviet Union as antiIslamic is a holdover from that period. Sources and motives were forgotten, but opinions remained in the minds of people. Another fact contributing to that perception is the issue of the forced settlement or exile of whole ethnicities of the Muslim faith from their

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native lands to Siberia, Central Asia, and other parts of the Soviet Union. Such forced population transfers happened not only to Muslims but also to non-Muslim populations. This occurred in particular due to the impact of World War II. Not only Muslims but also Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Koreans, Greeks, Poles, and others were forcibly transferred from their homelands. These forced settlements were not based on religious identity. They arose out of fears that those transferred nations might collaborate, or out of allegations that they had already collaborated, with Nazi Germany and the enemies of the Soviet state. Such deportations first happened to ethnic Poles and Koreans in the mid-1930s. They were not Muslims. Muslim ethnicities were subjected to such mass deportations in the 1940s during World War II. And such depopulated areas were then resettled mainly by ethnic Russians, who were more “reliable” in the opinion of the Soviet leadership. But again, it was not just about religion. It was also, and more importantly, a matter of perceived trust. In fact, many minority ethnicities in the Soviet Union saw Russians as invaders and were possibly willing to collaborate with others in hopes of getting rid of Soviet or Russian rule. But that didn’t mean that they necessarily sympathized with Hitler or the Nazis. There were also believers and religious people who saw an opportunity to freely practice their faith and religion. In that particular context, Russians seemed more reliable to the Soviet leadership. The ethnic-national problem had long existed during the Russian Empire, reflecting the rift between Russians and Muslims of a variety of ethnicities, who viewed Russian nationalism as dominant and hostile. Again Russians emerged as the single biggest and most dominant ethnicity in the Soviet Union. That view was passed from the generations of the Russian Empire to those of the Soviet Union. Since Russians were Christians, individual Muslim ethnicities perceived ethnic tensions and problems between Russians and themselves as religious rather than ethnic. Thus, the ethnic factor led to many Muslims’ perception of the Soviet Union as anti-Islamic. Following events related to September 11, 2001, and later developments such as the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Islam has come to the forefront of studies, research, and debates. The more Islam in Russia and the Soviet Union is debated, the more the discrimination against Muslims becomes more obvious. And this is another reason why the Soviet Union as a system is perceived as anti-Islamic. Ruling elites in the post-Soviet nation are another important factor to bolster the perception of the Soviet Union as anti-Islamic. The ruling elites sometimes try to resell the message of freedom of religion to populations as their own achievement. They underline the antireligious and anti-Islamic lines of the Soviet Union to make freedom of religion an achievement of

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the ruling elites rather than a fruit of independence in order to divert attention from other domestic problems. Following the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks appealed to the Muslims of Russia to condemn hostile treatment of Muslims by the tsarist regime, vowed freedom of religion and other rights and freedoms, and called for their support for the revolution and state. The primary purpose of this appeal was to gain support for the revolution from Muslim regions and fight against those who opposed it. Thus the Bolsheviks sought to attract Muslim populations by addressing their religious sentiments and grievances. Furthermore, they aimed to relax ethnic tensions by avoiding the religious context. And finally, the Bolsheviks intended to gain time to firmly establish their government and correctly formulate its stance and policy on the religion. Despite this brief thaw toward Islam in the aftermath of the revolution due to the political reasons and motives mentioned above, Marxist theory was incompatible with religion. So were Lenin’s views of religion. Lenin was hostile to and intolerant of religion in general. Since Marxist theory equates the emergence of religion with material conditions and organization of private structures, Marxists initially held that religion would disappear with the elimination of private property and settlement of material relations. Marxists and Leninists held that religion was instrumentalized by capitalists and rulers to maintain their grip on power and was a consolation for poor and exploited people, who hoped for paradise in the afterlife in exchange for their sufferings in this material world. This idea was perfectly reflected in the famous Marxist phrase “Religion is the opium of the masses.” So Lenin viewed atheism as a weapon in the struggle to overthrow the ruling classes. Under such circumstances, the Bolsheviks toned down their discourse and attitude toward religion and Islam during the first years of the revolution. This also provided the Bolsheviks with opportunities for political maneuvering. Therefore, the years following the October Revolution saw the establishment of institutions to study the Quran and Islam. One of the aims was to find out whether Islam fit the Bolshevik ideology or how to fit it into that ideology. Perhaps the most significant aim was to study Islam in order to better fight it. As a result, several theories were created. Initially, there were a few attempts to somehow accommodate Islam within the Soviet ideology in efforts to attract Muslims. For example, in 1923 the Navshirvanovs movement found “primitive communism” in early Islam and more prominent communism in Islamic Sufism (Навширванов 1923, 274–279). This theory seemed to conform Islam to communism. However, this idea didn’t go further, perhaps due to a shift in the Bolsheviks’ position on religion and the end of the Russian Civil War, which solidified the Bolsheviks’ grip on power. In 1923, shortly before his death,

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Lenin announced the concept of “Cultural Revolution,” which focused on the role of enlightenment and education. This shift was also mirrored in the discourse of theoreticians. It appeared that although Bolsheviks initially tried to attract Muslims using Islam and religious sentiments, they then developed theories designed to alienate Muslim populations from the religion of Islam. At that time, many people in Russia and the Soviet Union were anticapitalist and antifeudal, in accordance with the spirit of the Bolshevik ideology and the October Revolution. Newly emerging anti-Islamic theories of the Bolsheviks emphasized the role of capital in the creation of Islam to trigger negative connotations in the minds of the poor Muslim peasantry and working classes. For instance, Mikhail Reisner and Evgeny Beliaev both emphasized the role of trade and capital in the emergence of Islam. Reisner found a few positive things in the emergence of Islam as it provided a law for Arab merchants (Рейснер 1926, 134–149, 146–164). Unlike Reisner, Beliaev saw nothing positive in early Islam. Reisner portrayed Allah as capitalist, while Beliaev wrote that in praying to their God, Muslims bow down before the only god that they respect, namely capital (Беляев 1930, 48–60). Such descriptions would humiliate Muslims rather than alienate them from Islam. Perhaps that is why they didn’t find their way into the mainstream discourse of the Bolsheviks. Valentin Ditiakin and Sanzhar Asfendiarov emphasized the role of the Bedouins in Islam and rejected Reisner’s theory that Islam emerged out of trade capital interests. According to Ditiakin, Islam emerged out of a dying Bedouin culture’s revolution against developing trade capital (Дитякин 1922, 82–85). Asfendiarov explains Islam as uniting Arab tribes and as an economic movement of Arab tribes to break the isolation of Arabia (Асфендияров 1928, 12–59). According to Mikhail Tomarа’s theory, which was regarded as a peasant theory, the nomadic Bedouins and urban traders mattered to the emergence and spread of Islam, but served negative functions (Томара 1930, 19–47). Trade capital was a fierce opponent of Islam and drove it out of Mecca. The nomads accepted Islam only superficially. Tomarа considered poor agriculturalists in and around towns to be crucial to the emergence of Islam. He made many references to the Quran in order to support his theory. Lucian Klimovich held that Islam emerged from trade capitalism and characterized early Islam as a progressive social protest movement. Perhaps, by emphasizing early Islam as progressive and the following period as reactionary, he intended to build up a new discourse to hit the social basis of Islam in the Soviet Union. He also rejected the idea that Islam and socialism were compatible. A reason for such rejection was that some Mus-

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lims in the Soviet Union believed Lenin may have borrowed some of his socialist and communist ideas from the Quran and Islam. Equality, care of needy people, and the community nature of Islam were among those concepts that led to such perceptions. The Bolsheviks didn’t approve this kind of perception; perhaps such disapproval was an impediment to furthering discourses like Navshirvanovs’s theory that “primitive communism” was present in early Islam. To prevent such perceptions and better fight Islam in the Soviet Union, later Klimovich brought the Quran under critical scrutiny in his book Soderjanie Korana (Russian: Содержание Корана; English: Contents of the Quran) (Климович 1929). It appears that he was not satisfied with just criticizing the Quran. A year later, he went even further to question the existence of the Prophet Muhammad, proposing that if Muhammad never existed, then the author of the Quran was a different person or persons (Климович 1931, 189–218). Klimovich retreated from his view that early Islam was a progressive social protest movement and classified it as reactionary. Klimovich fully adopted the feudalism theory and concluded that Islam emerged from a process of feudalization and centralization of Arab tribes as the ideology of feudal lords. Such a shift in Klimovich’s discourse happened according to the aggressive tone of the Soviet regime led by Stalin in the 1930s. Kh. Naumov’s discourse reflected that of the regime. He harshly criticized previous scholars, including Beliaev, Klimovich, and other Marxist Orientalists (Наумов 1932, 325–339). The aim here is not to discuss those theories. In fact, bringing attention to them is intended to show how multiple, diverse, and often contradictory they were. And these contradictions and controversies were not just of an academic or scholarly nature; they reflected differences and contradictions in attitudes toward Islam among the political leaders of the Bolsheviks, who didn’t have a unified view of Islam and religion. Thus, what Bolsheviks urgently needed was a unified theory of or discourse on Islam. Such a unified theory was finally created. And that was feudalism theory, which regarded Islam as a feudal product. Feudalism theory was not strong but became dominant during the Stalin era mostly because it confirmed the Soviet doctrine and partly because Muslim regions and populations of the then Soviet Union were mostly peasants engaged in agriculture. This theory was aimed at attracting and mobilizing Muslim peasantry by presenting Islam as a feudal product. In that period the term feudal was regarded by the peasantry as having an utterly negative and hostile meaning. Although almost all of these theories claimed to explain the emergence of Islam, they, in essence, explained the spread of Islam instead. Those scholars presented the explanation for the spread of Islam as the explanation for its emergence. As a result, their theories didn’t emerge as

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solid. Those scholars were definitely aware of the shortcomings of their theories but conformed to the tone of the regime in order to survive professionally, politically, and even physically. With the death of Lenin, the launch of the Cultural Revolution, frustration of the expectation that religion would disappear on its own with the end of class struggle, and the rise of Stalin to power, Bolshevik rule became more aggressive in its treatment of religion. The League of the Militant Atheists (also known as the League of the Militant Godless, the Society of the Godless, or the Union of the Godless) was created to promote atheism and exterminate religion. In fact, the league acted as the leading institution of the Communist Party to implement antireligion activities. Although Lenin was an atheist and antireligious, he wanted the state to be neutral and tolerant in relation to religion, while the party should seek to gradually eliminate religion from society. However, it was unrealistic for the state to be neutral while the Communist Party was atheist and antireligion, because the Soviet Union was a single-party system, and the Communist Party was synonymous with the state apparatus. In that context, the league was an important institutionalized instrument for the party to fight religion. The league’s slogan was “Struggle against religion is struggle for socialism.” There were some controversies within the league. For instance, its Tashkent branch tried to translate the Quran into the Uzbek language with a view to enabling more Muslims to read it in their native language and understand its contents. The stated intention of this idea was that once Muslims had read and understood the contents of the Quran, they would reject it. Another controversy was that the Tatar branch of the league demanded greater autonomy for Tatarstan. But the Tatarstan branch of the League of the Militant Atheists were punished. With Stalin’s introduction of restrictions on religion in 1929, the league became even more aggressive. With Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Stalinist regime had to thaw its treatment of religion in order not to cause religious people and believers to turn away from the Soviet state. Allies also pushed Stalin to stop antireligious persecutions. This affected the League of the Militant Godless as well. In 1941 its leader, Yemelyan Yaroslavski, said that atheism should be promoted gradually by reeducating people without offending their religious sentiments. Then the league was disbanded sometime between 1941 and 1947. Until the end of the Soviet Union, atheism was an official state policy. The antireligious behavior of the Soviet Union again became more aggressive after the end of the war during the Stalinist regime and then during Nikita Khrushchev’s period in power. There was a more moderate interval after the downfall of Khrushchev in 1964. However, the 1970s saw an aggressive antireligion campaign led particularly by Yuri Andropov.

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In particular, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, related anti-Soviet sentiments in Muslim nations, and the potential negative influences on the Muslims of the Soviet Union triggered fears within official circles, which resulted in some anti-Islamic campaigns in the 1980s. Such campaigns were neither large-scale nor brutal. They were local, small-scale operations confined mainly to confiscation of banned religious literature. With Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost policies, the situation in the religious sphere started relaxing, leading to a religious and Islamic revival in the late 1980s in the Soviet Union. Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, atheism was a state policy promoted by all means. Even the Institute of Atheism was established to meet that end. Then atheism was transformed into “scientific” atheism. In fact, scientific atheism was similar to atheism. By adding the term scientific, the Soviet authorities aimed to polish the image of atheism as a fight against “religious superstition” backed by science, with scientific proofs to refute the existence of religious “miracles.” In scholarly and academic literature, some authors identify either atheism with secularity or antireligious campaigns with forced secularization in the Soviet Union (see, e.g., Froese 2004, 35–50). This is fundamentally wrong: secularization means separation of the state from religion, while atheism rejects religion entirely. Forced secularization means separation of the state from religion by violent or forcible means. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, the state was separated from religion. But more than that, religion was also separated from public and even private life. Even as a private matter, it was discouraged by all means—in media, academia, propaganda vehicles, and so forth. Violent, aggressive, and coercive Soviet policies and campaigns against religion have caused some authors to perceive it as forced secularization on one hand. And on the other hand, during the Soviet Union, religion had nothing to do with the state and was absolutely separated from the state and public life. The only relation between religion and the state occurred in the specific state institutions charged with controlling limited religious activities. There were special bodies in the four Muslim cities of Baku, Ufa, Tashkent, and Makhachkala to oversee Islamic religious activities. Atheism rejected religion not only in state circles and the public sphere but in all strata of life. Thus, atheism cannot be identified with secularization; nor can the Soviet treatment of religion be equated with forced secularization. The eradication of religion was not an end in itself. Religion was one of the greatest obstacles and threats to formation of a single Soviet nation and Soviet citizenry. The eradication of religion was considered instrumental to nurturing a single Soviet nation and Soviet citizenry with no religious divides.

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The indiscriminate application of antireligion attitudes and policies to all religions, not forced secularization, led to secular Muslim nations in the former Soviet Union. Ivan the Terrible’s forced Christianization led to a strengthened Islamic identity among the Tatars. Islam became a symbol of past independence and aspirations for future reestablishment of independence in the case of Tatarstan. The forced imposition of an alien religion on peoples of a different faith instinctively and naturally triggers resistance and even hatred, which obstructs secularization. The USSR’s policies toward Islam and religion were a different case. It didn’t Christianize or Islamicize any religion but aimed to eradicate religion from life and society altogether. Therefore, it didn’t cause hatred between religions. And Muslims didn’t feel oppressed by Christians or other faiths. In other words, negative and hostile attitudes and policies against religion were indiscriminately distributed among all religions. Nevertheless, advantages were discriminately distributed among ethnicities. As a result, Russians were regarded as superior and other Slavic ethnicities as quasi-superior. Most of the remaining ethnicities had access to neither the advantages nor the benefits Russians and Slavs enjoyed. That was clear in almost all spheres of life. In particular, high-ranking posts in the Kremlin and elsewhere were dominated by Russians and then other Slavic ethnicities, mainly Ukrainians and Belarusians; in individual republics, significant posts in both the Communist Party and other authoritative bodies were predominately occupied again by Russians followed by Ukrainians and Belarusians. It was not just about posts but, even more importantly, about the social and economic advantages provided to the Slavic ethnicities vs. others in so many areas, from housing to education. The undisputed linguistic hegemony of the Russian language was another significant instrument to empowering cultural, social, and other advantages of the Russian and Slavic ethnicities. The only Muslim and Azerbaijani member of the Politburo and the first deputy chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, Heydar Aliyev, recalled in a documentary an episode from his life in the Kremlin: “Tikhonov, Chairman of the Cabinet of Ministers of the USSR, said in a private conversation that many in Politburo including himself would like to see Aliyev as the person second in command [of the Soviet Union] after Chernenko, however, that person must be Russian or at least Ukrainian or Belarusian” (Mustafazade 2002). This was confirmed by Gorbachev himself in the same documentary, when he acknowledged, “Well, it was clear, that person must be Slavic” (Mustafazade 2002). However, the relationship between Russians and other Slavic peoples, like Ukrainians and Belarusians, was not absolutely equal. Although Ukrainians and Belarusians were much more privileged than non-Slavic ethnicities because of their ethnic ties to Russians, they were regarded as

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ethnic “little brothers.” Nowadays, twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that becomes more evident. Belarus’s president has repeatedly and publicly referred to the Russian-Belarusian relationship as one between big and little brothers, where Belarus is the little one. During the 2016 Forum of the Russian-Belarusian Regions attended by President Vladimir Putin, President Aleksandr Lukashenko (2016) again reaffirmed that relationship by stating, in reference to the idea of Slavic brotherly peoples, “Belarus is where your even little but brothers live.” Meanwhile, the first president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk (2015), who asserted, “Russians and Ukrainians will never become brothers again,” said of RussianUkrainian relations, “The good days occurred when Ukraine accepted Russian proposals without any objections; as soon as Ukraine took its own stance, disagreements immediately appeared.” Therefore, post-Soviet ethnic problems and conflicts are connected with the negative Soviet legacy in most cases, while religious and Islamic problems are linked to other, often external factors. The Chechen conflict broke out overwhelmingly due to the presence of unsettled ethnic problems from the Soviet period, while its transformation into an Islamist context was extensively related to external factors. Islam was reborn with the collapse of the Soviet Union with varying peculiarities in specific nations, regions, and communities in the postSoviet space. Underpinning these various religious “rebirths” is the shared experience of powerful nation- and statebuilding in the twentieth century (Derrick 2012, 213). Those religious “rebirths” didn’t bring about Islamic nations in the post-Soviet space; instead secular Muslim nations emerged. An indiscriminate application of negative and even hostile attitudes and policies against all religions during the Soviet era made believers of all faiths feel united in the same destiny and thus did not trigger religious hostility among different religions. But this was not the case for all ethnicities. The unsettled ethnic issue was a legacy of tsarist Russia inherited by the Soviet Union. However, the Soviet leaders and authorities were not able to resolve this issue. They “froze” rather than settled it. That is why the ethnic tensions and clashes recurred many times in many parts of the USSR during the Soviet era. This problem was transferred to most, if not all, of the post-Soviet nations, including Russia itself. The Chechen conflict was and remains one of the most tragic of the problems pending settlement from the times of the Russian Empire. But unlike other conflicts in the post-Soviet space, the ethnonational and religious elements were much blurred in the case of the Chechen conflict. As a result, Chechnya became known as one of the notorious hotspots of religious extremism. The key question is why the image of Islam became so different in Chechnya than in the other Muslim-populated regions of Russia. The following

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case study of the Chechen conflict explores the transformation of the Chechen secessionist agenda into an Islamist agenda and sums up the case of Chechnya as an entity stuck between Russia and Islam.

The Case Study of the Chechen Conflict Radicalization of Nationalism With the collapse of the Soviet Union, nationalist and secessionist movements rose in the Muslim regions of the Russian Federation. Although most of those movements were moderate, the Chechen movement appeared to be belligerent, determined, and uncompromising. The Chechen movement culminated in a declaration of independence from Russia in 1991, and the federation treaty was rejected in 1994. As a result, the brutal war of 1994 to 1996 broke out. Disproportionate force, including air bombing and heavy artillery bombardment, was applied to Grozny and other areas of Chechnya. This resulted in tens of thousands of civilian lives lost. As a result of the heavy civilian casualties and economic, material, and moral devastations, Chechen society, and particularly sections of the Chechen separatist movement, became radicalized. Chechnya and Tatarstan were the only republics that refused to sign the 1994 federation treaty between the Russian Federation and the autonomous republics. Then Tatarstan signed a special deal with Russia in a pragmatic move to avoid serious confrontation. But Chechnya and Russia failed to negotiate such a deal. Ultimately, the First Chechen War, of 1994 to 1996, broke out. Moscow’s attempts to declare a state of emergency and disarm Chechen military formations produced a countereffect: putting aside differences, almost all layers of Chechen society united around Djokhar Dudaev as a living symbol of Chechen independence, thereby amplifying his political influence (А. В. Кудрявцев 1994, 65). The Russian leadership, including some high-ranking military officers, diverged regarding the military campaign in Chechnya. The Russian military forces suffered heavy human losses. Due to the military operations, high numbers of civilian causalities were reported. As a result, even much of the internal opposition to Dudaev in Chechnya condemned the Russian military actions and started viewing Russia as hostile. The point that Moscow missed, according to Svante Cornell (2005, 208), was that the opposition to Dudaev didn’t oppose his ideal of independence from Russia. Thus, even anti-Dudaev Chechens turned away from Moscow and became aligned against its military actions in Chechnya. Moscow’s military campaign caused many Chechen volunteers to join the separatist army. The causes of the First Chechen War significantly contributed to the radicalization of Chechen nationalists and the national movement. The

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Russian campaign appeared a solid justification for those who urged and fought for Chechnya’s full-fledged sovereignty and independence. The Russian military campaign during the First Chechen War contributed to radicalization of Chechens not only individually but also as a whole community. Firing on demonstrators in Grozny and large civilian losses in Grozny and other parts of Chechnya heavily contributed to radicalization of not only Chechen fighters and leaders but also ordinary civilians. The only ethnic Chechen general of the Soviet army, Djokhar Dudaev, who had led the Chechen movement and become the first president of Chechnya, was killed by a Russian guided missile in April 1996. Then, Aslan Maskhadov, another former officer of the Soviet army, was chosen as his successor. Both leaders were nationalists, and during their presidencies, the Chechen separatist movement was based on nationalism. Although Djokhar Dudaev had Chechen opponents, leading to internal tensions, the first Chechen campaign induced his opponents to align with him against Russia. Chechnya was well unified under Djokhar Dudaev during the First Chechen War, and there were no considerable signs of Islamist elements as nationalism dominated; the religion served merely as a symbol of Chechen defiance. “Aside from a fringe group of radicals headed by the future president of Chechnya, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the vast majority of Chechen politicians and commanders to lead the independence movement were committed nationalists, largely unaffected by religion” (Dunlop 1998, 92–95). Also, in terms of funding, the first war was nearly “purely Chechen,” with the resistance movement “financed primarily by the Chechen population inside Russia and additionally, by the Chechen Diaspora in Jordan, Turkey and UAE” (Wilhelmsen 2004, 41). Dudaev’s leadership skills played an important role in maintaining the movement as national and unified. During the First Chechen War, Dudaev secured his command and control of the conflict. Charles W. Blandy (1998) explains how Dudaev succeeded in keeping warlords and commanders under his rein as follows: “During the time of active operations, the leaders of the Chechen resistance worked like a well-oiled machine: Interior Minister Yusuf obtained and brought the money over from abroad; Dudaev distributed it, whilst Maskhadov fought. It was not only Maskhadov who was dependent on funding from Dudaev, but also all the other field commanders, such as Shamil Basayev, Ruslan Gelayev, Vacha Arsanov and Salman Raduyev, to name but a few.” Chechenization of the Conflict Djokhar Dudaev was a unifying leader who garnered international sympathy for the Chechen movement due to his refusal to use armed forces under his command in the Baltic region against peaceful demonstrators in Estonia. Then, the 1996–1997 peace accords were signed. The killing of

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Djokhar Dudaev and then the signing of the peace agreement led Chechen warlords and armed factions to begin fighting among themselves, weakening and fracturing the national movement in the absence of a unifying leader and ultimately leading to the “Chechenization” of the conflict. Chechenization meant that Chechens fought among themselves rather than concentrating on Russian forces. In the wave of nationalism, Islam appeared to be just a symbol of defiance of Moscow and an attribute of the Chechen identity. The leading role of the Chechen elites, including Djokhar Dudaev, who were brought up in the atheist Soviet environment, did contribute to such a symbolic role of Islam in Chechnya during that period. The Islamist agenda neither had a strong social basis nor enjoyed public support in Chechnya. The 1997 presidential elections, in which nationalist Aslan Maskhadov won presidency with around 60 percent of the vote, is solid proof of that. Movladi Udugov, with his radical Islamist agenda, got just 1 percent of the vote. Radical leaders Shamil’ Basayev and Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev also lost these elections. The Khasav-Yurt Accord of August 31, 1996, on the withdrawal of Russian forces, the Russia-Chechnya agreement on economic relations and reparations of mid-November 1996, and the Moscow peace treaty of May 12, 1997, were signed. However, as time went by, “Moscow didn’t seem to be pursuing a strategy, economic or political, that honored the promises of that treaty and strengthened Maskhadov’s regime” (Wilhelmsen 2004, 48). The agreements that ended the First Chechen War were made possible by some factors on both sides. War-torn Chechens needed time and a break for resilience. President Boris Yeltsin was running for a second term as president, and the morale of the Russian army was low amid heavy losses in what Gorbachev described as a “disgraceful war.” Chechnya proved to be just another Afghanistan, only this war was even deadlier and less successful, and the opponents were even more determined (Cornell 2005, 218). International condemnation of the Russian actions was seriously damaging Russia’s reputation, while the war in Chechnya was alienating other ethnicities from the federal government. Later developments proved that beyond these factors, Russia’s strategic approach could have been crucial to signing the peace agreement. Signing of the agreement and withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya paved the way for internal divisions to deepen and for Chechen warlords and armed groups to fight among themselves, thereby weakening and fraying the national movement and, ultimately, Chechenizing the conflict even further. A peace treaty was signed three months after the killing of Djokhar Dudaev, the unifying president and undisputed leader of the Chechen national movement. Perhaps the timing was not coincidental. Struggle for power among Chechen leaders intensified with the death of

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Dudaev, and this was very useful during and after the presidential elections. In particular, the end of the First Chechen War witnessed the Chechen movement’s ideological disintegration into nationalist and Islamist ideologies. In many terms, Moscow disregarded the peace treaty, particularly the economic provisions. The lack of support for the Maskhadov regime must be seen in light of the growing support for the radical opposition from international Islamists (Wilhelmsen 2004, 46). Therefore, the rise of radical Islamist ideologies, as opposed to nationalism, would also give further legitimacy to the Russian campaign. Russia’s Perspective From the Russian perspective, the Chechen conflict was an existential threat to Russia and heavily jeopardized Russia’s national interests. If Chechnya had been left “untreated,” then Chechen independence could have had a domino effect on other Russian regions. Apart from that, restoring Russian authority in Chechnya was not just an end itself because it would have heavily damaged Russia’s reputation internationally and, more importantly, in its “near abroad.” That would have had very negative implications for Moscow’s intentions to establish a Russia-centric union such as the Eurasian Economic Union or Collective Security Treaty Organization that came about later. Thus, restoring the Russian authority in Chechnya was also aimed at protecting Russia’s international reputation and preparing strong domestic grounds for reestablishing Russia’s authority in its near abroad, which Russia viewed as its “rightful sphere of influence.” February 1996 saw the demolition of the ruins of the Chechen presidential palace in Grozny. The demolition was a highly symbolic move but contained a clear message that no sovereignty or independence would be tolerated by Moscow. And that message was addressed not just to Chechens but also to other Muslim-majority regions of Russia. The destruction and demolition of the presidential palace, the killing of Dudaev two month later, and the signing of the peace accords three months after that were not merely events in a chronology. Two symbols of Chechen independence—the presidential palace and the president—were eliminated. The demolition of the palace was symbolic, but the killing of the president was both symbolic and, much more importantly, practical because the absence of the unifying separatist leader proved a crucial blow to the movement and ultimately splintered it into opposing warlords with opposing ideologies. The 1996–1999 period between the two Chechen wars was characterized by a failure to restore law and order and build an economy, warlords’ opposition to the government, internal divisions, lawlessness, abductions, violence, illegal raids, robbery, the rise of radical ideologies, and the formation

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of Islamist groups. That period was a fertile ground for generating internal divisions, disseminating radical ideas, and spreading confusion and despair. The Gudermes fighting of July 1998, between the Chechen National Guard and Islamist militias, showcased a culmination of internal conflicts and the rise of Islamist extremism. Despite hopes for improved relations with Moscow following the signing of the treaty between the Russian Federation and the Chechen government, Operation Jihad—the incursion into Dagestan led by Shamil Basayev and a warlord of Saudi origin, Ibn AlKhattab, in August 1999—triggered the Second Chechen War, smashing any remaining hopes for a peaceful resolution. “That invasion gave Russia the pretext it needed to start what it called a war on terrorism, which was characterized as a religious war, as opposed to the first war, which had been framed in a nationalist context” (Al-Shishani 2014, 87). Moscow took the incursion as an opportunity not only to finally stamp its authority on Chechnya through a military campaign but also to gain international legitimacy and domestic support for the action as combating religious extremism. There is a conspiracy theory that the incursion and related military campaign were related to power struggles in the Kremlin. But irrespective of whether those conspiracy theories are true or not and who would be coming to power in Russia, a crackdown in Chechnya was just a matter of time. Sergei Stepashin, a former interior minister who also served as prime minister for a short period before being replaced by Yeltsin with Putin, said that the planning of an active military action in Chechnya had started in March 1999 (Stepashin 2000). The killing of Djokhar Dudaev gave rise to differences and internal conflicts among the Chechens. The 1997 presidential elections in Chechnya reflected those tensions. In the wake of the elections, the split was obvious. That split was not just about the struggle to take and maintain power; it also heralded an emerging Islamism in the Chechen movement. Maskhadov remained a nationalist, while Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev and Shamil Basayev emerged as Islamists. Even Maskhadov publicly condemned Yandarbiyev for importing Wahhabism into Chechnya. With the death of Dudaev, the end of the First Chechen War, and the signing of peace agreements with Moscow, Chechen warlords and rebels were turning out to be Islamist. Islam was an attribute of Chechen independence and a symbol of the historic defiance of Russia during the first years of the national movement and during the presidency of Dudaev. Now it had become more than that. Chechen leaders after Dudaev and Maskhadov were becoming more Islamist than nationalist. Chechen forces conducted a surprise operation in Grozny against Russian forces in August 1996. This operation was prepared by Maskhadov and Basayev, who called it Operation Zero and Operation Jihad respectively. The difference in the naming

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of the operation showcased a fundamental split of the Chechen movement into nationalists and Islamists. The clear division within the rebel command, personified by these men and crudely framed as the nationalistseparatists vs. the Islamists, stymied the formulation and implementation of a coherent military strategy and undermined international support for the Chechens (Tumelty 2005). This division would take on even more significance within a few years. Basayev managed to radically change the world’s perception of the Chechen cause, from that of a “small nation resisting victimization by Russian imperialism into another outpost of the global jihad” (Radu 2006). That Islamist content was used by the central authorities, who were seeking to label the movement as anything but a nationalist or independence movement. Moscow wanted to equate Maskhadov with Basayev in order to justify the elimination of both men as terrorists (Murer 2006, 103). In October 1999, Moscow rejected an offer by Maskhadov to crackdown on warlords following the incursion of Dagestan, as the Kremlin viewed him as a terrorist and compared him with Osama bin Laden. With the assassination of Maskhadov, a way opened for the “radical movement, headed by Basayev, to assume control over the resistance” (Al-Shishani 2006).

Islamization of Radicalism The catastrophic war triggered frustration and an existential vacuum among Chechens, who looked for moral shelter or relief. Religion—that is, Islam—could provide such shelter. At this point, external forces stepped in with funding, fighters, and radical ideologies to take advantage of the situation to push their own agendas. In many ways, Moscow disregarded the 1996–1997 peace accord, in particular its economic provisions. The nationalist-oriented President Maskhadov’s government lacked sufficient economic support from other countries as well as its own resources. This lack must be seen in the light of growing financial support for the radicalized warlords from international Islamist groups. Consequently, Maskhadov failed to keep the Chechen national movement unified. Meddling by external forces in the Chechen movement through radical ideologies, which were encouraged mainly by funding as well as by provision of foreign fighters, ultimately contributed to the scattering of the movement domestically and, simultaneously, the “disgracing” of it as radical Islamist and extremist internationally. With the numerous years of killings, the demise of the older nationalist leaders and commanders, and the coming of age of a younger generation, who had been exposed to Islamic ideas and radical ideologies, the Chechen

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movement witnessed an Islamist turn with the end of the First Chechen War and the fundamentalists’ emergence in the interwar period. Moreover, because of the First Chechen War, the Chechen economy had been devastated. The economic and social situation was regrettable. Chechnya was increasingly becoming a notorious zone for organized crime, such as kidnapping and hostage taking. Increasing hostility among warlords and different groups complicated the plight of the people. Another result of the First Chechen War was the deep split within the secessionist movement and the radicalization of nationalist attitudes. Due to the regression in the national movement and fatigue with the war and its troubles, many Chechens were experiencing a moral or existential vacuum. The First Chechen War led to radicalization of nationalism in Chechnya due to a bloody military campaign and the plight of the people, whose lives were turned upside down. This period witnessed the arrival of Islamist ideologies in Chechnya. Mass civilian hostage taking became symptomatic of the growing radicalization of elements of the Chechen separatist movement due to the First Chechen War. Thus, not Islam but the First Chechen War had mostly caused the radicalization. Radicalization first appeared in a nationalist form. However, due to multiple problems and troubles of a social, political, ideological, and economic nature, people were experiencing an existential vacuum. Those people sought a moral shelter. Moreover, the formerly sizeable intellectual elite in Chechnya, which was educated in the paradigm of the Soviet system of governance and traditionally served as a moderating and peacebuilding force, had largely emigrated in the early 1990s, and its traditional role had been filled by a socially elevated group of military leaders (Kroupenev 2009, 4). Due to the military conflict, divisions among those leaders, and the devastated economy, the leaders desperately sought funding and weaponry, as well as experienced and committed fighters, for the state’s survival. At this point, external forces came with radical Islamist ideologies, which were not native to Chechens, who traditionally and for centuries had belonged to the peaceful Nagshibandi and Kadiriyya orders of Sufi Islam. Those external forces appeared to be encouraging import of radical ideologies into Chechnya in the form of funding as well as foreign fighters. Funding was essential in politically seducing Chechen warlords, while the supply of foreign fighters was important but supplementary to the funding. Warlords and rebels, who broke with the nationalists, also needed ideologies in their power struggles to unite people around themselves. And external forces wanted to expand the sphere of such ideologies into new geographies. Chechnya itself was viewed as fertile ground for exporting those ideologies but also for reexporting or disseminating them into neighboring regions. The funding they provided

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made those forces and ideologies attractive. Chechen leader Yandarbiyev said that aid should not be distinguished as coming from Wahhabists or from others (Супонина, 2001). He also mentioned that Arabs didn’t hand out money for no purpose. The import of radical ideologies into Chechnya was thus encouraged essentially in exchange for funding, with supplementary provision of foreign fighters. Those fighters didn’t simply represent combat force but, more importantly from the perspective of the external actors, were carriers of radical religious ideologies. Those forces made sure, by sending Islamist fighters, that the ideologies they pursued would be better implanted and funding could be used “purposefully.” Foreign charities brought in funding and resources. According to Chechen historian and official Yavus Akhmadov, who ran the Information Department of the pro-Russian Chechen government, money, armament, and fighters provided by radical counterparts from abroad were crucial to the Chechen resistance against the federal forces and enabled Wahhabists to become an influential group in the republic (Akhmadov et al., 2009, 17). Thus, the Chechen national movement started taking on a more Islamist than nationalist nature, leading to perception of Chechnya as an emerging center of Islamist extremism and global jihad. With Dudaev’s death in 1996, “Yandarbiyev assumed the presidency and announced that Chechnya would be an Islamic state with Sharia courts, causing charity organizations and individuals from the Middle East, particularly from the Gulf states, who favored Salafi-Jihadis, to become active in Chechnya” (AlShishani 2006). Another contributing factor to such perception was the inflow of foreign Islamist fighters. According to a US court, in the 1990s al-Qaeda dispatched a few operatives to Chechnya and provided material support to Fathi, Al Khattab, Saif-ul-Islam, and others through its “trademark” charity, the Illinois-based Benevolence International Foundation (USA v. Enaam M. Arnout 2003, 26–27, 73–93). However, it should be noted that the scale of that support is measured by just thousands and not millions of US dollars. In fact, the amounts referred to in the court file were symbolic and like a drop in ocean, considering the heavy burdens of the Chechen wars. So were the numbers of foreign fighters coming into Chechnya. Those organizations, though, were able to push their own agenda into the Chechen movement using that limited aid “effectively.” Ultimately, this amplified the internal divisions and ideological differences among Chechen leaders that had arisen and deepened with the death of Dudaev. Thus, the radicalization of elements of the national separatist movement was followed by the Islamization of the radicalism, which first appeared in the phrase “Operation Jihad” in 1996. The Islamist tone dominated the whole movement in Chechnya as militant radical ideologies became rampant

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during the Second Chechen War and nationalist leaders like Aslan Maskhadov and Abdul Halim Sadulaev were killed. A nationalist group led by Ahmad Zakayev in London was still operating though.

Islamist Tone Dudaev and Maskhadov sought Moscow’s recognition of Chechnya’s independence. However, other Chechen leaders publicly urged the expulsion of Russia from the entire North Caucasus. Perhaps those leaders were motivated by religious considerations. Some Islamic ideologies like Salafism or Wahhabism ignore ethnicities to emphasize the Islamic Ummah. This context explains the motives behind the incursion into Dagestan, Operation Jihad, and declaration of the Caucasian Emirate. However, not all of the Chechen proponents of the secession of the North Caucasus regions from Russia were motivated by jihad or global jihad. Some understood that tiny Chechnya alone represented a weak form of resistance to the central authorities. But should the regions of the North Caucasus act simultaneously, even if not together, for secession, greater autonomy, or independence, that would, from their perspective, make it much harder for Moscow to cope with. Aslan Maskhadov’s successor as Chechen president, nationalist and religious figure Abdul Halim Sadulaev, urged the spread of the anti-Russia fight into other republics of the Northern Caucasus in 2005. Sadulaev’s declaration of the strategic mission of forcing peace on the Kremlin instead of Maskhadov’s search for a peaceful resolution and his formation of the Caucasian Front effectively removed two of the three fundamental principles that guided and dictated the rebel strategy under Maskhadov—the confinement of the war to Chechen territory and the search for peace— while the third, noncombatant immunity, remained in place. Sadulaev has repeatedly echoed the sentiment expressed in his statement “Our blows to Russia will by no means target civilians” (Tumelty 2005). Perhaps that was a response to increasing realization among the Chechen secessionists that Chechnya alone was not in position to resist Russia and fight for independence. Sadulaev initiated and created the Caucasian Front, which was designed to unite forces from all the regions of the North Caucasus to force Russia out of the region. The Caucasian Front comprised Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Stavropol, Adygea, and Krasnodar. He persuaded both nationalist and Islamist leaders to unite forces in the Caucasian Front. Although he gained support and loyalty from Islamist warlords, Sadulaev remained committed to not targeting civilians. His rapprochement with radical and notorious war-

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lords, such as Basayev, raised questions. Hinting at that in an interview, Sadulaev said that the Chechen nation is very small, so unity within the resistance was of paramount importance, and he would try to channel its efforts in a single direction (Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty 2005). From the Chechen perspective, this dubious alliance between Chechen nationalists and Islamists was necessitated by the fact that this tiny nation appeared to be in a head-to-head conflict with Moscow’s massive hard power and by the belief that the Chechen leaders felt they had been abandoned by the international community in the post-9/11 environment and had to remain united despite obstacles. Sadulaev seemingly viewed “Caucasian independence as the only option” to achieve Chechen independence from Russia (Smirnov 2006). After his death, Sadulaev was succeeded by Doku Umarov, seen by many analysts as a nationalist. Even the prominent Chechen journalist Timur Aliev, who has served as an assistant to Ramzan Kadyrov since 2013, expected in 2006 that Doku Umarov would try to curb radical Islamist influence over the rebel group. Umarov “represented an older generation of armed separatists, those who studied in Soviet institutes and didn’t look like a fanatic given what he says and what he does,” according to Alexey Malashenko of the Carnegie Institute in Moscow (Aliyev 2006). But with Doku Umarov, the Chechen secessionist movement took a different turn. Umarov’s surprise turn symbolizes the Islamist tone that dominated throughout the Second Chechen War.

Hijacking of the National Cause or Updating of the Chechenization Strategy Moscow successfully used the post-9/11 international environment to rebrand its Chechen military campaign as Russia’s own “war on terror.” Accordingly, Russia updated the strategy of Chechenization of the conflict by labeling the Chechen movement as radical Islamist, extremist, and terrorist. Moscow demonized Chechens by indiscriminately labeling both nationalists and Islamists as terrorists to justify and legitimize their elimination. Eventually, radicalized and nationalist-turned-Islamist Chechen warlords allied with the external meddling and hijacked the Chechen national movement. Moscow’s policies and the post-9/11 environment facilitated the hijacking. The events of 9/11 radically shifted Russia’s perspective on the Chechen conflict and changed the world’s perception of it. The worldview promoted by the US administration after 9/11 characterized the main cleavage in international politics as between the civilized world on the one side and evil

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Islamist terrorists on the other (Wilhelmsen 2004, 62). Moscow successfully labeled Chechen nationalists as Islamist terrorists to shift itself to the civilized side. The “rebels,” “armed resistance,” and “freedom fighters” of the first war were replaced in Western public perception by “Islamist terrorists.” Since 9/11 the Western public has tended to perceive the Chechens, as it were, through Russian eyes (Russell 2005, 3).

End of Conflict? The influx of foreign fighters was in decline in Chechnya in the wake of international developments after 9/11 due to Russia’s resolute campaign, the cutting off of funding, the outflow of fighters to join wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the physical liquidation of Chechen warlords. The liquidation of the Chechen warlords left those fighters unwelcome in Chechnya. “The success of allies who participate in a war depends mainly on the acceptance of the locals, who shelter those people, particularly in tribal communities. But the Salafi-Jihadist ideology was not conducive to the traditions of Chechnya; and consequently the role of Arab fighters in Chechnya receded” (Al-Shishani 2006). The active military campaign has ended, and the extremist undergrounds have been considerably curbed. Nevertheless, the negative legacy of the previous periods persists, making Chechen generations to come vulnerable in the face of radical ideologies. Despite the physical liquidation of Chechen warlords and rebel commanders by the Russian forces and pro-Moscow Chechen government forces, as well as the fact that funding and other supplies for them have been almost completely cut off, new followers arise, and radical ideologies persist. This reveals that the tactics of killing leaders, cutting off funding and other supplies, and applying forceful and administrative actions have been effective in curbing the radical ideology, but they have not addressed its root causes. Nor have they prevented the emergence of new, younger generations who embrace radical ideologies. In a sense, the war has not fully ended; rather, the battlefield has shifted from Chechnya to Syria. The point is that Chechnya was a major contributor to refilling the human capacity of the Islamic State. Although countries around the world have supplied young jihadists to ISIS, the biggest non–Middle Eastern contributors are not the United States or European countries but Russia (Xenakis 2015). A major contributor of jihadists to the Islamic State among the Russian regions is Chechnya. There are news reports about the children of high-ranking Chechen officials joining the Islamists. For instance, the daughter of the head of the

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Chechnya branch of the Federal Migration Service, Asu Dudurkaev, reportedly fled Chechnya to Syria (РИА Новости 2013), allegedly to reunite with her fiancé, who had earlier gone there to join the fighters (Life.ru 2013). This case suggests that not only socially disadvantaged, poorer, and uneducated Chechen youth but also those who are better off are vulnerable to radical ideologies. The outflow of fighters from Chechnya to Syria may be characterized by different perspectives. In any case, the fact on the ground is that the activity of the Caucasian clandestine cells was halved during the Syrian War, a fact confirmed by law-enforcement bodies, experts, rights activists, and residents of the region (Milashina 2015). The extremist undergrounds in Chechnya have been severely weakened but still persist. The war and conflict in Syria and elsewhere will have to end at some point in future. But the end of the Syrian conflict and the Islamic State doesn’t mean the end of radicalization and extremist recruitment. The radicalization and recruitment may continue (Rahimov 2017). This means that despite the end of the active phase of the conflict, the latent conflict may persist in Chechnya.

Russia’s “Why Not” Logic Moscow curbed religious radicalization through its counterterrorism operations by killing the Islamist warlords. In fact, in Chechnya radical Islam was mainly embodied in those warlords. Just eliminating them physically hugely contributed to the weakening of radical Islam there but not of its negative legacy and impact, particularly on the upcoming Chechen youth, which still persists. Furthermore, unlike radical Islam, nationalist ideas have deep, historical roots in Chechnya. The history of Russian-Chechen relations shows that Chechen nationalism may have been “frozen” or dipped below the surface, but it has not died away permanently. When Moscow quashes nationalism, Islamism pops up, and when Moscow quashes Islamism, nationalism pops up. Neither effort works effectively from the Russian perspective. This suggests that Russia should seek another option. Furthermore, Russia’s controversial foreign policies could also evoke Chechen national sentiments. Before the outbreak of the Chechen conflict, Moscow’s backing was crucial to the emergence of separatist regimes in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh, Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Moldova’s Transnistria—all in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Such separatist regimes could have been an inspiration for Chechnya. And the new wave of Moscow’s backing for separatists in Georgia and Ukraine may represent another stimulus for Chechnya. To justify its annexation of Crimea

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and recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russian leaders have repeatedly stated that Kosovo declared its independence and was recognized, so why not Crimea? Russia’s own advocacy and recognition of secessionist regimes in its near abroad, like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, based on the Moscow establishment’s “why not” logic might reawaken Chechen national sentiments by the force of the same logic: Why not Chechnya?!

Conclusion Chechnya became an exceptional case in the post-Soviet space, where both inter- and intrareligious peace was sustained after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Religious radicalization and extremism not only became rampant in Chechnya but also penetrated into other regions of the North Caucasus and Russia. The question of this chapter is why the image of Islam became so notoriously different in Chechnya than in other parts of Russia. The hypothesis was confirmed: due to the devastating Chechen wars, Islam in Chechnya was transformed from an attribute of the Chechen national identity into a radical, violent ideology. Moscow sought to defeat the Chechen national movement at any price. Some Chechen warlords and groups were thirsty for revenge. At this point, external actors with radical ideologies stepped in with funding, fighters, and radical ideas. As a result, the Chechen movement experienced a large transformation to pursue a radical Islamist agenda, and the image of Islam in Chechnya was consequently drastically affected. Moscow used the Islamist factor to legitimize its controversial military campaign to stamp out the Chechen national movement, while warlords used it to gain funding, fighters, new followers, and a unifying ideology. These external actors took the opportunity to promote their own agenda in Russia’s North Caucasus. The rise of religious extremism in Chechnya is much connected to Russia’s wider problem of the unsettled national issue in its Muslim regions, where the religion of Islam is indigenous and not foreign. Yet the demise of the Chechen national movement largely served as a catalyst for the flourishing of radical religious ideologies and extremism. The unsettled ethnic issue was the legacy of tsarist Russia inherited by the Soviet Union and passed on to modern-day Russia. An indiscriminate application of negative, often hostile attitudes and policies against all religions during the Soviet era made believers of all faiths feel united in the same destiny; hence religious hostility was not triggered among different religions. However, this was not the case for ethnicities. That is why ethnic tensions erupted in parts of the country during the Soviet era. The Chechen conflict, which has persisted and been pending settlement since the times of

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the Russian Empire, became one of the most tragic ethnic problems in 1990s and 2000s. Yet Russia’s dubious role in other separatist conflicts in neighboring post-Soviet Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia represented another complicated dilemma and possible inspiration for the rise of Chechen nationalism and secessionism.

7 The Role of Islam in Russia’s Middle East Policy Nicolas Dreyer

The so-called Arab Spring, which began early in 2011 and led to revolutions and positivist expectations of democratization in the region, also caused a counterrevolution in Egypt, an ongoing civil war in Syria, and continuous fighting by Islamist groups for control in certain Arab countries, such as Libya. Following the Arab Spring, the region also experienced the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) from 2013 to 2015. At present, ISIS has been largely defeated militarily and has lost most of its territorial base in both countries. In December 2017, Iraq declared victory over ISIS (Coker and Hassan 2017), whereas in Syria, ISIS still controls relatively small territories; yet the organization continues to actively pursue its goals and has not yet been completely destroyed (Heiduk 2018, 5–6). Rather, an estimated 30,000 members of ISIS in Iraq and Syria continue to pose a threat (Lederer 2018). Furthermore, it is feared that the “caliphate” of the “Islamic State” may operate more dominantly in Central Asia (Daniel Pipes Middle East Forum 2017), South Asia, and Southeast Asia (Heiduk 2018), as well as in Yemen and in North, East, and West Africa (Lederer 2018). The multiple and sometimes fluid conflicting interests that dominate in the Syrian civil war complicate Russia’s conflict management in Syria. Russia needs Iran as an ally to defeat the militant groups opposing Bashar al-Assad’s regime, including ISIS (Times of Israel 2018; O’Connor 2018b); Israel opposes the emergence of a Shiite, Iran-dominated “crescent” stretching from Lebanon across Syria to Iran and Iraq and fights Iran’s arms supplies to Hezbollah as well as Iranian hostilities emanating from Syrian territory (Avdaliani 2018a; cf. O’Connor 2018a; Issacharoff

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2018); Turkish and Syrian government interests clash in northern Syria (Sly 2018); the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG) sets two allies and major opponents of Assad against each other: Turkey fights the YPG, whereas America supports it (Jones 2018). Yet Russia has managed to talk to all international powers involved in Syria (O’Connor 2018b) and initiated in 2017 the so-called Astana process, bringing Russia, Turkey, Iran, and initially also Syrian opposition groups and the Syrian government together to discuss solutions and determine cease-fires in the civil war (Collin 2018). Further regional developments have affected Russian policy toward the crisis. For example, in July 2017, Iraq and Iran, whose relationship has for decades been marked by a pronounced hostility, declared themselves allies in fighting terrorism (Asadi 2017); in May 2018, however, a new, nationalist Iraqi government was elected and seems to be less receptive to both American and Iranian influence, restoring relations with Gulf Arab states, prominently including Saudi Arabia, instead (Ibish 2018). In August 2017, the United States and the Russian Federation agreed on enforcing a cease-fire in parts of southern Syria (DeYoung 2017). One year later, both Russia and the United States and their respective, differing allies in Syria prepared for their final efforts to defeat ISIS; Assad’s regime troops also intended to recapture territories currently controlled by Turkey (e.g., Sly 2018). Since then, Russia has been gradually sidelining the United States international diplomatic efforts through the creation of the Astana Process involving Iran and Turkey. At the international level, a significant deterioration in US-Russian relations during the second presidential term of Barack Obama and the third presidential term of Vladimir Putin also affected Russian policies. This stemmed from Russia’s illegal annexation of the Crimea in 2014; its interference in eastern Ukraine, even if indirect, with subsequent US and European sanctions against Russia; and its support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Russian hopes were then set on US President Donald Trump to improve the countries’ bilateral relations and to cooperate in specific fields. Such cooperation was expected to focus on the fight against international terrorism, and Russia attempted to use the Syrian civil war as a bargaining chip vis-à-vis the Ukrainian crisis. The US Congress, however, convinced of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential and congressional elections,1 imposed new sanctions on the Russian Federation in July 2017 (US Congress 2017) and again in August 2018 according to various peoples’ accounts (Talley and McBride 2018). Russia retaliated against the 2017 sanctions diplomatically (Strokan’ and Chernenko 2017). These developments seemed to make an American-Russian rapprochement, which both presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had declared to be among their policy goals, increasingly difficult, even though a high-profile summit

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between the two leaders took place in July 2018 (Rutland 2017, S45; NTV 2016; Mindock 2018). The wars and conflicts, traditional allegiances and shifting alliances, strategic interests of various regional and international actors involved, major and minor religious divisions, and popular unrest in the Middle East (here understood to comprise North Africa, the Arab nations, Israel, Turkey, and Iran) make this region exceptionally complex. Thematically speaking, the region generates discussions on topics from petroleum to religion and from water to nuclear weapons. Geographically speaking, news about the region has broad relevance from the Hindukush to China in the East and from the Mediterranean to the United States in the West. Studying individual conflicts and events in this region without taking into account many wider issues pertaining to politics in the area is hardly possible; likewise, it is hardly possible to take into account all factors that may somehow bear on a specific issue. One major factor that appears omnipresent in this area is Islam.2 This world religion dominates the region, since the Middle East (including North Africa and Iran) is home to about 400 million Muslims, who make up about 25 percent of the world’s Muslim population (Pew Research Center [PRC] 2011). Islam is therefore the major ideological background for much that affects regional politics. The Arab Spring took Russia, as other powers, by surprise (Demchenko 2012, para. 52; Rossiiskaia gazeta 2012). Yet Russia has subsequently become directly involved in the Arab and especially the Syrian crises that have shaped the region in recent years. Given the role of Islam and Islamic fundamentalism in Russia and in these crises, it may be informative to examine how Russia relates to the role of this religious factor in recent events. Therefore, in this chapter I discuss in which ways Islam has affected Russian policies in the Middle East, particularly with regard to the ongoing Arab and Syrian crises from their onset in 2011. I will do so by examining Russia’s conceptual response to the Arab Spring and by studying Russian perceptions and policies as responses both to Islam as a positive strategic and diplomatic factor and to Islamist fundamentalism as posing a security dilemma. Lastly, I will discuss how Russia’s policy objectives in these respects may be evaluated in light of the results of such policies. It is beyond the scope of this chapter, however, to systematically assess such “Islamic” factors in relation to other major factors that have shaped Russian regional policies, be they Russian fears of a “colored revolution” at home; Russian–Middle Eastern bilateral relations and economic interests;3 the state of US-Russian relations; the Ukrainian crisis since 2013; or UN sanctions against Iran, their subsequent lifting following the Vienna nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) between the permanent members of the United Nations Security

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Council, Germany, the European Union, and Iran in 2015, followed by America’s pulling out of the agreement in May 2018 and its renewed imposition of sanctions against Iran in August 2018.

Russia’s Conceptual Response to the Arab Spring As with any state’s foreign policy, Russian foreign policy is shaped and determined by four factors and constraints pertaining, first, to the international arena and the international and normative system; second, to national and domestic interests, including institutional politics; third, to regional issues; and fourth, to the people and officials involved in the making and executing of policies. Russia’s revised Foreign Policy Concept (FPC) of 2013 (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation [MFARF] 2013), which contains parts that respond to the Arab Spring, describes reactively how Russia assesses international and regional politics and how it intends to pursue its interests at various levels. The 2013 FPC highlights “Russia’s increased responsibility for setting the international agenda and shaping the system of international relations” (I.3), identifying Russia as one of the “competitive poles of the modern world” (I.4.a), and suggests that the “ability of the West to dominate [the] world economy and politics continues to diminish” (II.6). In Russia’s analysis, therefore, the West is in decline (Manea 2016) and Russia must, on grounds of both political opportunism and moral responsibility, fill this strategic and geopolitical vacuum. This requires “new approaches” and a “new vision of priorities” (I.3), furthering the “creation of a polycentric system of international relations” (II.5) by making use of “flexible nonbloc network alliances with Russia’s active involvement” (I.4.e). With such clearly articulated foreign policy objectives, the stage has been set for the foreseeable future for Russia’s ambition to actively shape world politics and take advantage of the weaknesses and failures of Western strategy and policy. The 2013 FPC also refers to Islam, both directly and indirectly. In so doing it is a discernible response to Russia’s experience and perception of the Arab Spring. Acknowledging Islam as a world religion and political force that affects Russian foreign policy, the 2013 FPC observes an “increased emphasis on civilizational identity” as a reaction to globalization. Such a reaction is evident in other regions in the Middle East and North Africa, “where political and socio[-]economic renewal of society has been frequently carried out under the banner of asserting Islamic values” (II.14). Civilizational clashes may provoke “xenophobia, intolerance and tensions in international relations leading eventually to chaos in world affairs” (II.14). The “radicalization of public sentiment giving rise to reli-

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gious extremism and ethnic and interconfessional tensions” (II.16) may now be understood as an additional transborder threat and challenge. In response, Russia aims at forging a “partnership of cultures, religions and civilizations in order to ensure a harmonious development of mankind” (II.14). Likewise, Russia hopes for a “common moral denominator,” a “set of common values as a foundation for joint action” based on commonalities shared by the major world religions, such as the “pursuit of peace, justice, dignity, freedom and responsibility, honesty, compassion, and work ethic” (II.21). Likewise, combating international terrorism and its financing is viewed as a major domestic and foreign task. Russia believes in “inclusive dialogue and negotiations of all parties” (III.32.q) involved in various regional conflicts. Russia views its own century-long experience of “harmonious coexistence” as a multinational and multiconfessional state as facilitating “dialogue and partnership between cultures, religions and civilizations” and as countering “extremism, radicalization, intolerance and division” (III.32.u). In relation to the Middle East and North Africa, Russia’s intention is to make a “meaningful contribution to the stabilization” of the region, promoting “peace and concord among the peoples . . . on the basis of respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity of states and non-interference in their internal affairs” (IV.88). On the one hand, judging purely on the basis of this FPC, Islam within Russia and in Muslim states is viewed as a political asset, in terms of both regional interest and strategic rivalry with the West. On the other hand, however, the evolution of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism challenges the peace, stability, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of states in the Middle East, North Africa, and Afghanistan and of Russia itself. Countering these threats also necessitates Russian cooperation with the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the European Union. Islam has an ambivalent role in Russia’s foreign policy, therefore: it figures in considerations of security, strategy, and diplomacy. Our discussion of these dimensions regarding Russian policy vis-à-vis events in the Middle East since 2011 will begin with security considerations.

Security Considerations In 2003, a Russian observer noted, “Russia is working hard towards securing the most favourable positions inside the global partnership system so as to use them to maintain an adequate level of control across the territory of the Russian Federation (including the zone controlled by the terrorists in Chechnya) and preserve Russia’s influence along its borders within its geopolitical expanse” (Bogaturov 2003, 89).

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Referring both to international objectives and to the necessity of stabilizing the Russian state and safeguarding its territorial integrity, the above comment seems to suggest a subordination of foreign policy to internal problems. It directly mentions Chechnya. It is not, however, only Russia’s fight against Chechen separatism and terrorism that has caused concerns in Moscow. Concerns about domestic security relative to Islam in Russia are multidimensional. They relate to the relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims in Russia; between locals and migrants; between the Russian Federation and the “Subjects of the Federation” (that is, its constituent regions with significant Muslim populations); and between moderate Muslims in organizations loyal to Moscow and more radical Muslim opposition groups (Halbach 2013, 1–4). Ultimately, these concerns raise questions about Russia’s territorial integrity and its cohesion and stability as a multiethnic, multireligious, yet secular state. Islam is recognized as a “traditional faith” of Russia, alongside Christianity (particularly Russian Orthodoxy), Judaism, and Buddhism; it has about twenty million adherents in the country, constituting about one-seventh of the total population. Forty ethnic groups or nationalities are Muslim, including 5.5 million Tatars (Halbach 2013, 1).4 Russia’s Muslim population amounts to about 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population (PRC 2011). The two major historical regions of Russia with predominantly Muslim populations are the Volga region and the North Caucasus. Official statistics on religious affiliation in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet states were silent about levels of religiosity and religious practice due to the specific Soviet understanding of religion as ethnicity based and the general communist suppression of religion. The post-Soviet period has witnessed a religious revival, however, with many new mosques being built (Halbach 2013, 1).5 Concerns about Muslim loyalty to Moscow have been reinforced by separatist tendencies in the predominantly Muslim regions of the North Caucasus, South Russia, and the Urals, as well as by the cross-border identity of some 80 million adherents of mostly Turkish origins in the “near abroad” south of Russia (Cohen 2002, 559). The influx of an estimated 4 million Muslim migrants from Central Asia and Azerbaijan seeking work in Russia’s urban centers has increased ethnic tensions in Russia. However, there are also some areas of agreement: the Russian Orthodox Church and Islam share a dislike of “Western culture.” Running through a number of conflicts that have characterized Islam in Russia are fault lines between a “traditional” or “Caucasian” Islam, defined in ethnocultural terms and often characterized by Sufism, on the one hand, and a fundamentalist Islam, influenced from abroad and rejecting ethnic traditions in favor of religious devotion, on the other. The second kind of Islam has often been referred to as “Wahhabism.” It has been argued that the undifferentiated perception of

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religious extremism by state authorities may actually have encouraged religious radicalization in some regions, for example, in Dagestan in 1999. Arguably, radicalization has also been facilitated by the employment of extralegal violence by local and federal law enforcement agents in their fight against terrorism (Halbach 2013, 3–4; Malashenko 2013, 20; cf. Halbach 2015c, 404–405; Souleimanov 2015a, 115–129). The main center of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the post-Soviet space is the North Caucasus, particularly Chechnya. In different variants Islamic fundamentalists have called for the creation of a sharia-ruled caliphate or an Islamic North Caucasian republic encompassing Russia’s western Muslim republics. Such calls constitute a threat to the Volga region and the Urals and thus to Russian territorial integrity. The cases of legal separatism in Muslim regions, such as Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia, including attempts to introduce sharia law (Cohen 2002, 560–561; Bowker and Ross 2000, 98), illustrate the challenges Moscow faces in maintaining control over these regions and Russian internal peace. A “Caucasian Emirate” was proclaimed in 2007 and was responsible for a number of terror attacks in Russia. The Volga region has also been affected in recent years by Muslim radicalization and Salafism, witnessing a combination of both Tatar nationalism and Islamist sentiment (Halbach 2013, 1–4). The Arab Spring has had an enormous impact on Muslim radicalization in Russia. According to Russian scholar Alexey Malashenko (2013, 16), Russia was surprised by the fact that the “triumph of Islamism in the Arab Spring has resonated with the Russian Muslim population.” Generally, it appears that the ascent to power of Islamists in the Arab Spring also provided impetus to Islamists in Russia and its neighboring states. A number of Russian scholars and moderate Muslim officials view the spillover effects from the Arab Spring to Russia in negative terms for several reasons: Russian Islamists seem to receive financial and diplomatic support from Islamists in the Middle East; the Muslim community may be influenced by outside forces; and Russian Islamists might not only become an internal Muslim opposition but also turn Russia’s Muslims into an opposition force. The spillover effects of witnessing both the overthrow of authoritarian governments and the subsequent political victory or rising importance of Islamist movements, at least since mid-2012, have resulted in an undefined number of Russian Muslims joining the Syrian opposition in its fight against the Assad regime. Furthermore, on their return, these fighters will likely wish to put their newly acquired combat skills and extremist experience to use in advancing Islamist goals in Russia (Malashenko 2013, 16–17, 19–21). The three regions of interest to Russia in the context of radicalization are the North Caucasus, the Volga region, and Central Asia. In the North Caucasus, especially in Dagestan, Muslims have expressed solidarity with

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their fellow believers in the Arab world, including the Hizb ut-Tahrir fundamentalist Islamic movement. They have expressed opposition to the political regimes in Russia, Tatarstan, and Syria and to Russia’s Syrian policy, as well as the view that the implementation of the “law of Allah” (cited by Malashenko 2013, 17) is a legitimate Islamic goal, both in Syria and in Russia. Russian authorities and the official Muslim clergy have responded by organizing international conferences involving prominent Muslim clerics from abroad. These efforts have been aimed at getting Muslim leaders to condemn radicalism and to enable dialogue between Muslim representatives loyal to Moscow and the local Muslim opposition, which is suppressed by the state and religious authorities. In Malashenko’s (2013, 17–18) assessment, such endeavors have been unsuccessful in stemming extremism. The Volga region, as well as the Southern Urals and Siberia, have likewise experienced a growing Islamic radicalism motivated by the uprisings in the Arab world against the ruling regimes. In Tatarstan, inner-Muslim strife and violent conflict have increased, including acts of terrorism against traditional and moderate Muslim leaders. Again the authorities have tried to calm extremism through the mediation of moderate religious and ethnic leaders. Central Asia has not witnessed a comparable surge in radicalism, a fact that may be due to both its authoritarian regimes and its politically passive populations. Nevertheless, the region is not isolated from such developments and may yet be affected, not least in terms of Islamist opposition to its secular authoritarianism.6 Above and beyond the fact that Central Asia is the source of large migrations of possibly between two and five million Muslims to Russia, some of whom are members of Salafist and Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami groups, which envisage a caliphate, Russia may also fear a Saudi-supported increase of Sunni fundamentalism in Central Asia (Malashenko 2013, 19–20). The impact of events in the Middle East on Russia’s Muslims became even greater through both the rise of the “Islamic State” and Russia’s military involvement in the Syrian civil war. In 2015, after the Ukrainian crisis had absorbed some of Russia’s attention, ISIS supplanted Afghanistan as a major security threat to Russia. Russia quickly supported the Iraqi government with the delivery of heavy weapons (Baev 2015, 13). It also became obvious that not only Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims but also Russian Muslims were being recruited by ISIS. Again, an undefined number ranging from several hundred to several thousand Russian citizens, especially Chechens and Dagestanis, were fighting in Syria or Iraq in 2013 (Malashenko 2013, 20). Perhaps up to 2,000 Central Asian Muslims were also fighting for ISIS. As a side effect of this recruitment of Russian Muslims to fight alongside ISIS, a lessening of terror activities has been observed in Russia;

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it has been suggested that Russia has even encouraged jihadists to fight in the Middle East rather than in Russia (Halbach 2015b, 3). The al-Qaedaaffiliated “Caucasian Emirate,” founded in 2007 to coordinate the Islamist underground in the North Caucasus, has been weakened since certain field commanders left to join ISIS. In June 2015, ISIS proclaimed a “Province Caucasus,” and Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov appealed to all Muslim countries to unite against ISIS. Since 2015, ISIS has also been more active on the Russian internet, such as through “Furat Media.” Only in December 2014 was ISIS placed on Russia’s list of terror organizations (Halbach 2015b, 1–4). In 2017, it appeared that about 4,000 Russian citizens were fighting for ISIS, making Russia the world’s third-largest supplier of Islamist fighters to ISIS and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq. In Chechnya in 2016, extremist-related violence increased massively from 2015, necessitating a large-scale counterterrorism offensive early in 2017, which led to a clampdown on an underground group recruiting ISIS fighters (Rahimov 2017). Analyst Rahim Rahimov (2017, para. 4–7 of 9) relates such an increase in violent extremism in Chechnya to the demise of ISIS, since during the Syrian civil war the activity of the Caucasian underground was halved: ISIS and the Syrian civil war have been absorbing a significant part of Islamist activity from Russia. Hence, one may empirically speak of a correlation between the strength of ISIS and the weakness of Islamist extremism and terrorism in the North Caucasus.

Strategic Considerations Having explored the central security considerations that connect Islam to Russia and the Middle East, it seems appropriate now to turn to the diplomatic and strategic dimension of Islam, which has more positive connotations in Russian minds. The value ascribed to Islam as a positive civilizational and moral force in the world, as set out in Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept of 2013, intends to demonstrate to both Russian Muslims and the Muslim world in general that Islamic affairs matter to Russia. Such a declaration entails three dimensions. First, it acknowledges the reality of political Islam playing a decisive role in regional and world politics, a fact that cannot be ignored by powers like Russia; Malashenko (2013, 22) writes, “With the Arab Spring, the issue of relations and dialogue with Islamists has acquired increased importance for the outside world, including the West, Russia, China, and India. Islamists’ successes on the political scene can no longer be regarded as isolated episodes.” Second, it aims at communicating to Muslims that their interests receive a sympathetic hearing in Moscow, thereby providing Russia with

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better access to Muslim states and communities. Such a positive stance toward Islam is implicitly set over and against what has often been viewed in the Muslim world as anti-Islamic Western policies, in particular US and allied actions in the Middle East. These include the two US-led wars against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 (which was based on UN Security Council Resolution 678) and in 2003–2004 (the legal legitimacy of which has been contested); the post-9/11 antiterror Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force mission there; the sanctions regime against Iran; and the international intervention in Libya in 2011 to oust Libyan leader Mu’ammar Qaddafi. Such Western interventions are viewed by Russia as aggravating anti-Western sentiment and Islamism in the Middle East and as being ultimately coresponsible for the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS, and the deteriorating security situation throughout the region (Halbach 2015a, 3; Malek 2015, 20; M. Klein 2012, 2–5; Souleimanov 2015b, 24–25; see also Putin 2012). The late Russian prime minister, foreign minister, and Middle East specialist Yevgeny Primakov, for example, even though he acknowledged that the initial impetus for the protests of young Arabs early in 2011 stemmed from their legitimate social and political discontent, criticized foreign involvement, by America and also by other Middle Eastern states in the Syrian civil war and by NATO in Libya, as violating the principle of national sovereignty and as increasing the tensions between the West and the Arab and Muslim worlds (Primakov 2011; Rossiiskaia gazeta 2012). It should be added that his criticism came in 2011–2012, at a time when Russia had not yet intervened militarily in the Syrian conflict; Russia’s military intervention began in September 2015, reportedly at the request of Syria. Third, it acknowledges the possibility of presenting Russia as an “honest broker”7 between the West and the international community, on the one hand, and the Muslim world, on the other (cf. Walker 2017). Likewise, Russia has endeavored to become the “indispensable mediator” (Souleimanov 2015b, 24;8 cf. Malek 2015, 5–7) in the Syrian conflict. Russia also views the Muslim world or Islam as a “pole” and a possible strategic ally in its efforts to supplant American and Western hegemony in a “multipolar” world order or an “international partnership system,” in which Russia, the Islamic world, Asia, and other emergent powers stand at eye level with the United States and its allies as equal global partners (Malek 2015, 8–9; Souleimanov 2015b, 25).9 Russia’s involvement with the international intergovernmental Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) may instructively be viewed in this context of Russia stepping into a strategic space of civilizational diplomacy with the Islamic world, which in the past two decades has experienced worsening relations with the West (Wipperfürth 2011, 70); at the same time,

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however, it has also been motivated by security concerns. The OIC has been described as an organization that commands predominantly symbolic influence, owing, among other reasons, to its being hostage to intra-Muslim politics; it therefore has to generate diplomatic support from other global actors (Kayaoglu 2017, 57, 73, 91–92). Russia and the OIC have maintained official ties since 2003; in 2005, Russia became an observer member state. Its desire to become a full member was not granted, however, since the OIC’s revised charter of 2008 demanded that a full member state’s population have a Muslim majority (Kayaoglu 2017, 79–80). Over the years, the leaders of both Russia and the OIC have expressed satisfaction concerning their mutual partnership; the OIC views Russia as “supporting the Muslim world at the international level and catering to its concerns and sensibilities” (Kayaoglu 2017, 80)—for example, by assuming pro-Palestinian and anti-American positions; Russia has been interested in trade and security dividends as well as in expanding its international influence. In Kayaoglu’s (2017, 80–81) assessment, at the time of joining the OIC, Russia strove particularly to improve its image vis-à-vis the Muslim world against the background of its Chechen campaigns (1994–1996; 1999–2009), as well as to gain the OIC’s assistance in reducing Muslim aid to the Chechen rebels. Previously critical of Moscow’s Chechen policy before Russia’s entry into the organization, the OIC later came to regard it as an “exclusively internal matter of the Russian Federation” (Kayaoglu 2017, 81). The OIC has also developed direct ties with Russia’s Muslim majority regions, such as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, helping to raise their profile (Kayaoglu 2017, 81). President Putin described Russian opposition to American claims of exceptionalism and foreign interventions in his September 2013 New York Times article; he concluded by stating, “We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal” (Putin 2013). Russia’s desire to prove President Obama’s relegation of Russia to the status of a “regional power” (Wilson 2014) wrong, to regain its ability to influence world politics proactively and shape them to its own advantage, motivates both its striving to win global and regional allies in countering American might and its Middle Eastern policies (cf. Lukyanov 2016, 31, 35; Baev 2015; Blank 2014). In fact, Russia has emphasized in recent years its distinctly Russian cultural and national identity as essentially different from the omnipresent “global” Western culture and values and its view of contemporary Western culture as a threat to Russian values (Bidder 2017, 6).10 Russia, whose president has been described as the “leader of global conservatism” (RBC 2013; cf. Bidder 2017, 6), suggests itself as the partner of Islamic and Asian civilizations in their efforts to defend themselves against Western, specifically liberal, democratic, and capitalist, aspirations to universality

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(Kotkin 2016, 8; Lukyanov 2016, 35–36; cf. Geopolitika.ru 2013; Amin 2012, 83; Dorsey 2019). Russian political scientist Andrei Manoilo, for example, views the “color revolutions” of the Arab Spring in the context of an indirect involvement of Western powers aimed at a “forced democratization” of the region and at the export of “liberal civilization” to it (Manoilo 2013, 32, 34; cf. Manoilo 2015). Similarly, Russian analyst Andrew Korybko (2015) describes Russia’s intervention in Syria as a response to “American Exceptionalism and the aggressive abuse of unipolar privilege after the Cold War”: Russia intended to become the leading foreign power and to weaken America’s influence in the Middle East by “restoring order out of the chaos” of American policy, as well as by strengthening the notion of the sovereignty of states and their governments. Korybko (2015) regards the destruction of “illegal and terrorist entities” by Russia and Syria as a logical consequence of such a Russian presence in Syria. American historian Stephen Kotkin (2016, 8) describes Russia’s fundamentally different values as ascribing the highest value to the state, not the individual. This means that “Western” values such as liberty, private property, and human rights are “usually set out in opposition to the state.” From this, it follows that the supreme political value and imperative for Russia has been a strong state (Kotkin 2016, 4, 8). In 2002, two Russian observers noted the following about the Russian pursuit of strength and pragmatism in foreign relations, something that may still be viewed as valid today, apart from the fact that Russia has since achieved a much higher degree of political stability, of course: “[The] pragmatism [characteristic] of Russia’s present foreign policy is primarily aimed at creating conditions that serve to strengthen Russian statehood. . . . Russia is at present still a politically unstable product of the disintegration of the Soviet Union; the future of [its] geopolitical greatness and [its] foreign political orientation has not yet been defined conclusively” (Kosach and Melkumian 2002, 45). Such a conflict about fundamental values underlies more superficial political disagreements between Russia and the West (Kotkin 2016, 8); this also explains Russia’s search for “civilizational” allies agreeing with Moscow on nonliberal and more traditional values. The following suggestions, written in 2003 about the Iraqi crisis in which economic reasons stood at the forefront of Russia’s Middle Eastern policy, may nevertheless be applicable today; insofar as economic reasons are still important to Russia’s regional interests, Russia’s desire to develop positive relations with Muslim countries may be seen in a context of “civilizational” coalitions as outlined above. Aleksandr Lukin (2003, 20–21) wrote the following about Russian Middle Eastern policy in the context of balancing relations with the West and China:

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Moscow is gradually mastering this art: it should learn not to be overfriendly or hostile, borrow from each of the partners what it needs and clearly outline the narrow sphere of Russia’s national interests are worth aggravating relations with the outside world. Russia badly needs this sort of pragmatism. . . . There will be no obvious enemies and no obvious allies while coalitions will acquire an ad hoc nature. Russia will have to find a place of its own in this world and a possibility of ensuring its economic development.

According to German analyst Uwe Halbach (2015a), Russia’s efforts to distance itself from what it views as “Western pseudo-values” became particularly visible in debates and reactions concerning the publications of—and attacks on—the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, as well as concerning the question of how to respond to the “Islamic State.” For a number of years, not just in the wake of the terror attacks against Charlie Hebdo in Paris in 2015, Russia has been taking a view diverging from the Western emphasis on freedom of speech, as Russia privileges the protection of religious feelings over freedom of speech. An example of this was the prosecution of the punk band Pussy Riot (following their controversial protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow in 2012) and a Russian law that came into effect in 2013, punishing the violation of religious feelings. Even though President Putin condemned the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Russian politicians and thinkers expressed the view that attacks on religious feelings must not be tolerated and that freedom of speech must be restrained. A similar attitude was expressed in 2005 following caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Uzbek president Islam Karimov, and also the Georgian government, both reacted to the terror attacks in Paris by warning against attacks on religion (Halbach 2015a, 1–2). Halbach (2015a, 2) observes not only a tendency in Russian public and political discourse to equate religious and national values but also a “patriotism with an anti-Western emphasis” (Halbach 2015a, 4) cultivated by both the state and the Russian Orthodox Church. Moreover, Russian efforts to set Russian culture apart from Western “modern pseudo-values,” as Patriarch Kirill (cited by Halbach 2015a, 4; cf. Interfax 2016) put it, resonate both with the official Muslim organizations in Russia and with foreign powers like Turkey, India, and China (Halbach 2015a, 4). Chechnya provides an instructive example of the challenges involved in balancing differing religious adherence with the secular character of the multireligious Russian state. Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov has repeatedly professed his loyalty to President Putin and the loyalty of his republic to the Russian Federation. At the same time, he has pursued a culturally secessionist policy that may ultimately result in Chechnya being turned into an Islamic state within Russia. Kadyrov has been calling for a

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return to traditions. Those traditions, however, are less reminiscent of ethnic Chechen traditions than of radicalized Islam (Halbach 2015a, 2–3). At a rally in Grozny in 2007 following the Jyllands-Posten caricatures, the largest rally ever held in the North Caucasus, Kadyrov agreed with President Putin that “Islam is a vital part of Russian culture” (Halbach 2015a, 2). Exemplifying the ambivalence of his role, Kadyrov recommended himself as both the leader of all Muslims and someone who combats terror (Halbach 2015a, 2), including ISIS (Halbach 2015b, 4). Yet another security factor relating to Islam in Russia and the Middle East is the fate of adherents of the mostly Muslim Circassians, an ethnic group that originated in the North Caucasus. Syria is home to the largest group of Circassians abroad, with possibly 30,000 to 100,000 members (Demchenko 2012, para. 49 of 52), and their pressure on Russia to be allowed to return to the North Caucasus has increased during Syria’s civil war. Several hundred Syrian Circassians requested repatriation and left for Russia, supported by Circassian organizations in the republics of the Northwest Caucasus. Russia is wary of importing additional instability from the Middle East to the North Caucasus in the form of ethnic demands by this group. Circassian organizations demand a resolution of the “Circassian question.” By this they mean the repatriation of their tribe of Adygea; the protection of their minority rights in the Republic of Karachaevo-Cherkessia; a discussion about the results of the Chechen war; and recognition of the “Circassian genocide” during the incorporation of the North Caucasus by Russia in the nineteenth century. Moreover, Circassians demanded discussions about the hosting of the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi (Demchenko 2012, para. 49–50 of 52). Furthermore, even though this relates more to the diplomatic realm, such repatriation, whose quantitative dimension is unknown, may have amounted in 2012 to a recognition that the Syrian regime could no longer guarantee the safety of its residents (Demchenko 2012, para. 50 of 52). At the level of domestic politics, Malashenko (2013, 16) points to an “‘Islamic lobby,’ made up of politicians of Muslim origin who think that Russia has a new opportunity to bolster its position in the Middle East and the Muslim world in general” and who even aspire to a Russian partnership with Islamist governments and groups (Malashenko 2013, 16–17). Irrespective of such demands, and despite Russia’s declared and practiced willingness to cooperate with all parties involved in conflicts, including radical ones—such as Hezbollah and Hamas (Malek 2015, 9)11 or the Muslim Brotherhood (which, unlike Hamas and Hezbollah, was declared a terrorist organization by the Russian Supreme Court in 2003) (Malashenko 2013, 9)—Russia prefers cooperation with “moderate representatives of Islam, whose worldview is close to the traditions of Russian Muslims,” as Presi-

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dent Putin explains (Putin 2012, cited by Demchenko 2012, para. 35 of 52). Another demand of Russia in dealing with new Islamist regimes in the Arab world is that they refrain from interference in Russian affairs (Demchenko 2012, para. 35 of 52). This means that Russia’s condition for cooperation with Islamist groups holding political power is that they forgo efforts to spread their ideology in Russia. Likewise, Russia’s international coalitions, such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and its already discussed participation as an observer in the OIC, as well as its bilateral relations with Iran and its direct and indirect cooperation with the Shiites in Iraq and with Hezbollah and Syria, may be viewed in the context of Russian efforts to form a “countervailing power” in opposition to the West (Malek 2015, 8–9). So the emerging alliance of the Shiite powers and forces in the region, ranging from Iraq, Iran, and Hezbollah (in Lebanon and Syria) to Alawite Syria and Russia, have a related purpose for Russia— apart from the immediate objective of defeating Assad’s Sunni enemies, or at least of saving Assad’s regime in a Syrian “rump” state. At the operational and political level, Russia offers to this coalition its political and military capabilities, while Iran offers its finances, local knowledge, and Hezbollah as a fighting force, enabling both to fight the Syrian insurgents. At the regional level, the alliance fills the power vacuum left in the wake of the Arab Spring and regime changes. In this way, internationally, Russian-Syrian-Iranian cooperation relegates the United Nations, the United States, and Europe to observers of events rather than active shapers of the current Middle East. Without Russia’s consent, the UN Security Council cannot agree on any action, and American policy under the leadership of Barack Obama was often perceived as indecisive, thereby leaving a power vacuum into which Russia and Iran have willingly stepped (Amidror 2015a). A further diplomatic concern for Russia has been the fate of Christian minorities in the Middle East in the wake of the Arab Spring and the fear that the Middle East will lose its “civilizational variety” through an ongoing process of de-Christianization (Demchenko 2012, para. 51 of 52). At the beginning of the twentieth century, ancient Christian minorities constituted about one-quarter of the Arab populations, a percentage that by 2007 had fallen to about 5 percent, or twelve to fifteen million people, for reasons of both migration and a lower birthrate compared to Muslim Arabs. Russia viewed the secular regimes against which the “Arabellion” (Arab rebellion) of 2011 was directed as guarantors of the safety of religious minorities. Islamist radicalization and violence against Copts in Egypt and threats to Syrian Christians have led, however, to an increase of migration from the region (Demchenko 2012, para. 51 of 52).

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Evaluation of Russian Policy Objectives Having outlined Russia’s central concerns relative to Islam and the Middle East at the levels of both security and strategic diplomacy, this discussion will now turn to an evaluation of the role these “Islamic factors” may have played in a few instances of Russian decisionmaking during the Arab and Syrian crises. To this end, a number of Islam-related Russian policy objectives will be discussed in comparison to policy outcomes. In this context, three major policy objectives will be examined: (1) establishing Russia as a mediator between the West and the Islamic world, (2) stopping radical Islam from spreading to Russia, and (3) fighting terrorism and ISIS. First, Russian policy objectives of mediating between the Arab and Muslim worlds and the West, on the one hand, and of garnering Muslim support in an anti-Western coalition, on the other, were of limited success. There were two major reasons for this. Relative to Russia’s approach in the Arab Spring, characterized by its surprise at these events and subsequent indecisiveness, Moscow intended to support the secular Arab regimes for a variety of reasons, some of which have been outlined above. However, when radical groups gained power temporarily, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Kremlin was forced to deal with them and hope that their Islamist ideology would not backfire on Russia (Malashenko 2014, 9). Russia openly acknowledged the miserable record of governance by Arab regimes and the Arab populations’ legitimate demands for development and improved situations (Demchenko 2012, para. 4–5 of 52), but it also feared that interference would potentially destabilize the entire Middle East (Putin 2012, 2013); it consequently stood against what the West initially welcomed as popular uprisings for freedom and democracy. It that sense Russia could hardly play a mediating role between the West and a Middle East ruled by radical Islamists. However, Russia played a modest mediating role during the Arab Spring vis-à-vis the secular regimes in Egypt (Demchenko 2012, para. 9–13 of 52) and Libya (Malashenko 2013, 11; M. Klein 2012, 2–4). After seeing the UN Security Council’s March 2011 vote for a no-fly zone in Libya—a vote from which Russia had abstained—misused by the US-led coalition for purposes Russia disagreed with, Russia consequently showed strong support for Assad, arguing against foreign intervention and embargoes in Syria and voting accordingly in the UN Security Council. Russia’s desire to be perceived as an “honest broker” has been challenged by the opposition of major Arab states to Assad and by the Arab League’s ban of Syria in November 2011 (M. Klein 2012, 4–6; cf. Halbach 2015a, 3). Furthermore, the Russian mediating role is made more difficult by divisions between Arab and other Muslims states. These divisions exist

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along religious lines, such as the rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran (cf. Goldberg 2018); they also exist along historical ethnic and national lines, such as Turkey’s antagonism against Assad and the Kurds, and along lines of political and social tradition and constitution, such as between the secular Arab republics and the more traditional and oil-rich Arab monarchies. Relative to the Syrian civil war, Russia’s support of Assad’s regime and military intervention on its behalf, as well as its cooperation with Iran and Iraq, have set it in opposition to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and could also potentially alienate Russia’s own predominantly Sunni Muslim population (Trenin 2016, 27; Halbach 2015b, 4); in fact, during Russia’s military intervention in Syria, Russia targeted mainly Sunni insurgents, regardless of their affiliation with ISIS (Amidror 2015b). As result of the civil war, over five million Syrian refugees have migrated to neighboring countries like Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and others.12 Above and beyond the general depletion of Syria’s human capital, the mass flight also significantly affects its ethnic and demographic composition: the Alawite Shiite population, which constituted 12 percent of Syria’s population when the conflict began, may reach 25 percent, considering the flight of millions of Sunnis. In a similar way, the influx of Sunni Syrian refugees into Lebanon may change that country’s ethnic and sectarian makeup (Amidror 2015b). Turkey, of course, with apparently neo-imperialist ambitions and claims to leadership in the Muslim world, even though it is an important trading partner for Russia and has embarked on an authoritarian and Islamist course in recent years, is nonetheless a NATO member state and also a US ally; post–Arab Spring Egypt and Saudi Arabia are likewise strategic American partners. These Sunni Muslim nations, therefore, are less likely to become part of a Russian and Muslim-Arab anti-Western, even if temporary, coalition. On the other hand, through its cooperation with Iran and Syria (cf. Avdaliani 2019), Russia has attained a strategically and geopolitically crucial influence in much of the Fertile Crescent, something that may well be seen as evidence that Russia is “cultivating an intermediate international position between the Western powers and those countries that are overtly seeking to challenge the established order” (Gomart 2009, 132, cited by Blank 2014, 14). At the same time, however, Russia also needs continued regional and strategic cooperation with the West, as an unchecked rise to power by China, India, and Iran would also challenge Russia, at the levels of both security and the economy (Gomart 2009, 132, cited by Blank 2014, 14; Avdaliani 2018b). Second, Russian objectives were to stop or reduce the spread of radical Islam to Russia, something that partly motivated Russia’s cautious position vis-à-vis the Arab Spring. It also seems to have motivated in part Russia’s intervention in Syria, given that in 2015, the Foreign Minister Sergei

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Lavrov called ISIS Russia’s “main enemy at the present moment” (Izvestiia 2015; cf. Souleimanov 2015b, 26). The potential return of North Caucasian veterans of the Syrian civil war has been seen as the main threat to Russia. In fact, however, the Islamist resistance movement in the North Caucasus— the “Caucasus Emirate”—appears fragmented and weak, and young men inclined to fight for an Islamist ideology have been drawn to fighting in Syria and Iraq rather than to the North Caucasus, making it difficult for North Caucasian jihadists to recruit fighters (Souleimanov 2015b, 27). Moreover, as Emil Souleimanov (2015b, 27) argues, jihadist fighters tend to adopt a transnational Islamist identity, integrating into the local community into which they move, often marrying women from the region and continuing their jihadist efforts there. Even verbal threats by ISIS against Russia may best be viewed in terms of a worsening situation for ISIS than as evidence of its real potential of directly threatening Russian security, as Souleimanov (2015b, 27, citing Radio Ekho Moskvy 2015) suggests and as Russian policymakers seem to think. The terror attack on the St. Petersburg metro in April 2017, which was committed by an ethnic Uzbek and Kyrgyz-born Russian citizen who may have had links to ISIS (Gorelik 2017) and who may have been trained by ISIS in Syria (Filipon and Roth 2017), demonstrates that Islamist-related terrorism continues to be a threat to public life and infrastructure in Russia. Likewise, in July 2017 the Federal Security Service announced it had prevented twelve terror attacks in Russia since the beginning of the year; the last prevented attack was planned by Uzbek migrants in St. Petersburg on the Russian “Day of the Navy,” targeting municipal infrastructure heavily used on such a holiday; the planned attacks were possibly also motivated by a connection with Islam in some way or the other (Gorelik 2017). As suggested earlier in this discussion by Rahim Rahimov, Russian policymakers may view ISIS as a convenient magnet drawing the attention of Russian, Caucasian, and Central Asian jihadists away from Russia and turning it instead toward the Middle East. In a similar vein, Dmitri Trenin (2016, 27) writes that Russia “has also wagered that keeping Assad’s military afloat will ensure that the thousands of Russian and Central Asian jihadists fighting for ISIS in Iraq and Syria will never return to stir up trouble at home.” For such tactical reasons of homeland security, Russia may in fact have been interested in seeing ISIS’s continued existence as a territorially based radically Islamist quasi-state. If such a political tactic were indeed in place and needed by Russia, it would point to both Russia’s inability to solve its Islamist problems from within and its possibly unsuitable approaches to dealing with radical Islam. In its turn, this may perhaps suggest asking larger questions about the quality of governance in Russia in general and in the North Caucasus in particular.

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Third, among the objectives that Russia pursued in its intervention in Syria, fighting terrorism and ISIS figured prominently. It should be noted that for all practical purposes, the Russian definition of terrorist is flexible, referring to whichever group is seen as a threat. In Syria, Russia’s use of the term terrorist points in particular to the Syrian opposition and the insurgent groups that fight Assad, including groups whose activities other powers, such as the United States or Turkey, each in their own way, support and regard as legitimate resistance against the Syrian regime (e.g., Al Jazeera, 2016b). Analysis of Russia’s military intervention suggests that until November 2015, Russian air and cruise missile strikes, coordinated with Assad’s military and with Shiite militias, mostly targeted provinces and positions held by insurgents (Malek 2015, 10–11). In fact, during ISIS’s largest offensive in the north of the province of Aleppo in October 2015, Russia’s air force was mostly occupied with strikes in the northwest of Hama Province, supporting an offensive of the Syrian army, rather than with fighting ISIS. As a consequence, Russia’s strikes indirectly aided ISIS by engaging the insurgents in Aleppo, who were forced to fight against both ISIS and the regime army; ISIS was thus enabled to push about ten kilometers into that area in October 2015 (Malek 2015, 11). After the first six weeks of Russian air raids, the Syrian regime had regained 240 square kilometers of territory but had also lost 120 square kilometers to ISIS (Malek 2015, 15). It appears that in October 2015, almost 80 percent of all air strikes were directed at the insurgents (Malek 2015, 16) and that Russian airstrikes benefitted not only Assad but also ISIS. They did so not only by absorbing some of the insurgents’ capabilities to fight and hold territory but also by enabling ISIS to recruit more personnel in the wake of a growing hatred for Assad (Malek 2015, 20). Russia only began a more serious bombardment of ISIS and its logistical routes after a Russian passenger jet was downed in Egypt on its way from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg on October 31, 2015, for which ISIS claimed responsibility (Malek 2015, 12). In mid-2017, as ISIS appeared to be nearing its defeat in Iraq, Russia was involved in bombarding ISIS in Iraq alongside Iraqi forces (AbdulZahra 2017), and Russia’s newest Foreign Policy Concept from November 2016 confirms its pursuit of cooperation with countries of the Islamic world, including Iran, Afghanistan, and the OIC, but makes direct mention of ISIS as an “international terrorist organization” that ought to be fought through a “broad international counter-terrorist coalition with a solid legal foundation, one that is based on effective and consistent inter-State cooperation without any political considerations or double standards, above all to prevent terrorism and extremism and counter the spread of radical ideas” (II:15) (MFARF 2016). Whether this explicit discussion of ISIS in Russia’s new Foreign Policy Concept indicates a substantially different

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threat assessment vis-à-vis ISIS or a greater preparedness to cooperate and coordinate with the West in seeking ISIS’s destruction, or whether the theme of fighting ISIS continues to be intended as a distraction from more important objectives, such as geopolitical competition in Ukraine (Souleimanov 2015b, 24; Avdaliani 2018a), remains purely speculative.

Conclusion In the final analysis, Islam in its various manifestations and perceptions has played a very ambivalent and perhaps even paradoxical role in Russia’s Middle Eastern policy in the present context. At first, one may be tempted to assume that Islam plays a major and central role in shaping Russia’s policy toward the region, given Islam’s omnipresence there. But on further inspection an observer may be surprised to learn that among the many international, regional, and domestic factors influencing Russian policy, Islam seems to be relevant in only two major regards: security and strategic diplomacy. First, radical Islam is perceived as a threat to Russia, its Muslim population, and its territorial integrity; ideological “interbreeding” and links between Islamist organizations in Russia, its “near abroad,” and the Middle East, as well as to ISIS, have allowed a flow of jihadist fighters in both directions.13 Islamist radicalization is also viewed as a danger to regional political, religious, and ethnic stability, potentially also affecting Russia itself. Second, Islam as a Russian and world religion is viewed as a “civilizational asset,” enabling Russia to form partnerships with moderate Muslim powers and organizations in their joint efforts to “multipolarize” or “polycentralize” world politics—that is, to withstand the perceived globalization of Western values, influence, political systems, and military interventions. If viewed in isolation and compared to other, more tangible interests that Russia may have been pursuing in the Middle East, ranging from economic to military and geopolitical interests, such “Islamic” factors are easily relegated to the second or even third row in retrospectively establishing Russian policy objectives. Even though “Islamic” factors are few compared to more visibly solid factors, the above discussion has shown that they do, however, play a very crucial role in Russian perceptions and policymaking. On the one hand, owing to the security threats emanating from Islamism, these appear to have a determining effect on Russian policy, perhaps even subordinating foreign policy to internal security needs. Such a relationship may be suggested if it is taken into account that Russia has not initially made major efforts to fight ISIS effectively in Syria; the reason for this may be that ISIS has indirectly reduced Islamist terrorist underground activities in the North Caucasus by drawing fighters to the Syrian arena. Whereas interna-

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tional factors, such as Russian military, political, and legal support for Assad, may seem as more important in shaping Russian actions, Russia’s domestic security concerns may play an even greater role than is easily recognizable. In this regard, political Islam may be viewed as a kind of “Achilles’ heel” to Russia. On the other hand, based on the perception of shared values with Muslim and Asian powers—values that are both socially and politically more traditional than in the West, often privileging the collective over the individual (i.e., state and security interests over individual freedom and human rights)—Russia seeks alliances that qualify as a “civilizational” and geopolitical counterweight to the West and its alliances. Given that the differences in fundamental values between Russia and the West go beyond “operative” policy disagreements concerning Ukraine, Iran, or Syria, for example, but affect such conflicts at a much deeper level, Islam and Muslim states may be viewed by Russia as a central geopolitical “pole.” Naturally, it is in Russia’s interest that such a “pole” stays manageable. In the end, therefore, Russia’s responses in the current Middle Eastern crises to “Islamic” factors, including Islamism, may well be conceptualized as part and parcel of Russia’s continuing quest for strength and of traditional great power politics concerned with seeking geopolitical advantages and influence.

Notes 1. For a scholarly discussion of Russian interference in the US elections, see Rutland 2017. 2. In this article, the terms “Islam,” “Islamic,” and “Muslim” are used to refer to the religion of Islam. The terms “political Islam,” “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” “Islamist,” and “Islamic fundamentalism” refer to religiously based ideologies that aspire to political dominance—that is, to a society ruled by Islam and Islamic law. 3. See, e.g., Kreutz 2007 and Moore 2014 for discussions of Russia’s general Middle Eastern policy and bilateral relations. 4. Approximate numbers of Muslims in Russia vary in academic literature. Whereas at the end of the Soviet Union in 1989 Russia’s Muslim population constituted 7 percent of the overall population (149.5 million in Russia in 1994) (Götz and Halbach 1996, 255), current estimates lie between 16 million (Malashenko 2014) and 20 million, or 15 percent of 142 million citizens (Kotkin 2016, 3; cf. Cohen 2002, 559). 5. For a fuller discussion of Islam in Russia, consult Malashenko 2009; for a discussion of pre–Arab Spring Muslim radicalization in Russia, see Dannreuther 2010; for a brief discussion of post-perestroika Muslim religious revival in the Caucasus, see Bedford and Souleimanov 2015, 77–78. 6. For a discussion on terrorist recruiting in Central Asia, see Manoilo and Shegaev 2018. 7. An “honest broker” is understood be an “impartial mediator” (Williamson 2015, 232), pursuing a policy of “evenhandedness” (cf. Singer 2000) toward the various partners to a conflict and “balancing” their divergent interests (cf. Lukyanov 2018).

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8. This and all subsequent translations from Russian- and German-language sources cited by me are my own. 9. See also, for example, references to notions of “equality” and “polycentric” international relations and to the West and China in particular in the Foreign Policy Concept of 2013, some of which are quoted above. 10. See, e.g., Vladimir Putin’s answer to a foreign correspondent’s question during a press conference, in which he argues that certain Western “quasi-values are only accepted by our citizens with much difficulty” and that without Russia’s traditional values, society “degrades.” “Putin o religii i zapadnykh tsennostiakh,” video posted to Youtube by Политические Реалии, November 15, 2011, www.youtube .com/watch?v=X3c4n6jthFg; Ak 2013; cf. Kremlin 2013. 11. For a discussion of Russia’s relations with Hezbollah and Hamas, see Blank 2014, 16–19. 12. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) states that there were 5,136,969 registered Syrian refugees in the Middle East as of July 6, 2017, and 5,640,126 as of September 12, 2019. UNHCR, http://data.unhcr.org /syrianrefugees/regional.php. 13. In 2013 and 2016, Russia took legislative measures to penalize returning fighters and to reduce their numbers (Rahimov 2017, para. 7 of 9).

8 The Impact of Islam on Russia-Iran Relations Hamidreza Azizi

During all the years of Soviet rule in Russia and a greater part of Eurasia (1917 to 1991), Tehran-Moscow relations were mainly affected by the international competition between Western countries and the Soviet Union. Before the Islamic Revolution, Iran was a member of the so-called Western Bloc. In this period, Iran-Soviet relations went through various ups and downs—from the 1921 Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship and the abolition of privileges of the tsarist era in Iran to the presence of the Red Army in the northern provinces of Iran and its support for the separatists there during the World War II, and from large commercial and industrial exchanges in 1970s to the economic and technical cooperation agreement in 1989. But following the Iran-Iraq War, the Red Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989), fundamental changes in the Soviet Union’s foreign and domestic policies under Mikhail Gorbachev, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union, the relations between the two countries entered a new phase. As a country with a majority Muslim population, Iran has always had a special place in the Muslim world. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution there, the establishment of an Islamic government further strengthened its Islamic feature. Since then, Islam has become a fundamental element in Iran’s domestic and foreign policies. In this context, based on the ideological principles of the Islamic Republic, Muslims of the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation—as part of the Muslim world—received a great deal of attention. Meanwhile, due to Russia’s sensitivities to the risk of instability caused by potential radicalization of its Muslim population, the Islamic nature of the Islamic Republic of Iran was raised as a critical

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element in Moscow’s relations with Tehran. In the contemporary volatile and evolving geopolitical world, Iran and Russia have tended to cooperate in the Middle East to resolve regional crises or to confront common enemies (Kiani 2021); hence their relational interactions have a pragmatic rather than ideological basis. In this chapter I investigate the impact of Islam on Iran-Russia relations since the end of the Cold War. I analyze first Russia’s approach toward Islam and its relations with Islamic countries, then the relationship between Tehran and Moscow with special emphasis on the role of Islam. I show that Islam, initially a cause of Russia’s suspicion toward Iran and an obstacle to the development of relations between the two countries, has now become one of the factors contributing to the development of cooperation between them.

Conceptual Framework: Islam and International Relations Since the establishment of international relations (IR) as a distinct scholarly field in the period between the two world wars, the connection between contemporary international relations and issues such as religion, ethics, and human values has always caused controversial debates among IR scholars and theorists. Until the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, scholars for the most part neglected discussion of the role of religion in international relations, and mainstream IR theories considered cultural and social factors, including religion, to relate primarily to the domestic sphere of the states, thus to be irrelevant to the study of international relations. Indeed, a large number of mainstream IR scholars started to show interest in the issue of Islamic revival in the Muslim countries only after radical Muslims targeted the Twin Towers of the World Trade Organization in September 2001, suggesting that for most IR scholars, nonmaterial issues are not worth taking into account unless they have specific and considerable material implications (Hadian and Shoori 2017, 13–15). Currently, as the Westphalian international order—which was primarily shaped against the religious and clerical order of the Middle Ages—is still dominant in international relations, and given the rise and increasing expansion of fundamentalist ideologies of different kinds, a considerable interest has emerged in the study of religion and its role in international relations. This new trend is mainly aimed at discovering the reasons for the expansion of the role of religion and whether it is leading the international system toward a new order or is just a reaction to the supposed inefficiencies of the current order that need to be fixed. In this vein, among the different religions, Islam is one of the main areas of concentration in contemporary

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IR studies. This has been particularly a result of the practical influence of political Islam in the Middle East and some other parts of the world. Apart from understanding the reasons for the emergence of contemporary Islamist movements, Western studies also deal with finding ways of overcoming political Islam (Gharayagh Zandi 2016, 114). However, putting aside this threat-based viewpoint, which is mainly oriented toward the containment of Islamic tendencies around the world, understanding the relationship between Islam—and religion in general— and international relations, as well as its impacts on the foreign policies of different states, is of importance to grasp a better understanding of the behavioral patterns of those states. In this vein, it could be said that Islam has four main principles in the field of international relations and foreign policy: 1. Friendship and unity with the Muslim nations: According to this principle, Islamic states are obliged not only to engage in friendly relations and avoid divisions and conflicts with other Islamic nations but also to work on peacefully resolving disputes among other Muslim nations. 2. Peaceful interactions with the non-Muslim nations: In the Quranic viewpoint, all followers of the divine religions are considered to be a unified nation (Ummah) since they’ve accepted the principle of prophecy (Risala) and believe in one origin and resurrection. According to this principle, the Quran invites the followers of all divine religions (Ahlul Kitab) to engage in fair and peaceful interactions. 3. Rejecting oppression and not giving in to oppressors: In the Quran, the followers of Islam are advised to fight those who seek dominance through oppression, not because they are nonbelievers but because they are not committed to the principle of peaceful coexistence. 4. Keeping promises: Islamic states may, according to their needs and circumstances, need to enter into a variety of political, economic, security, and other interactions with non-Islamic states. Consequently, in any agreements or treaties concluded with non-Islamic governments, all sides must stay committed to their promises according to those treaties (Ghanbarloo 2012, 132–134). Another manifestation of the influence of religion in international relations is its role as a legitimizing factor. The legitimizing role of religion can be a powerful means of encouraging or attracting others to support a specific set of policies. In other words, in either the domestic or the international sphere, decisionmakers can use religion to convince their own citizens or the leaders of the other states to accept their policies. For a number of reasons, religion as a legitimizing factor can affect international

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relations. First, since religion is a source of norms, and norms have gained increasing significance in international relations, religion could be considered to have enjoyed the same significance as well. Second, just like nationalism, which politicians use as a legitimizing factor, religion can create acceptance and compliance in public opinion, thereby having the same legitimizing effect. Third, religion is a source of identity, and identity has become a powerful factor in international relations. Fourth, since in contemporary international law, regulations concerning wars derive mostly from religious rules, it could be said that religion can be used as a factor in legitimizing war. Finally, like any type of ideology, religion as a political ideology can serve as a means of influencing the other states, creating partnerships or alliances among different states, establishing zones of influence, and so forth (Omidi and Zare’e 2010, 107–108). Another aspect of the influence of religion on international relations is its role in religious and local conflicts and their implications for the wider international arena. Local and religious conflicts may in several ways affect international relations and turn into international problems. First, following the Cold War, humanitarian intervention in these kinds of conflicts has increased and shifted from humanitarian assistance and mediation efforts to direct military interventions to protect oppressed minorities. Second, many local conflicts encroach beyond international borders and affect neighboring territories. A common example in this regard is refugees who lose their homes as a result of a conflict and turn to neighboring countries to seek asylum. Moreover, many such conflicts occur in border areas and engage neighboring countries. Third, the opposing sides may use international institutions to advance their agendas, and this could become a basis for shaping new international alliances (Omidi and Zare’e 2010, 108–109).

Russia and the Islamic Factor: Four Levels of Analysis From a historical perspective, the land that now forms the territory of the Russian Federation was for about two centuries completely dominated by the Mongols, who, after consolidating their position, accepted Islam and became Muslims. Only from the mid-sixteenth century and after obtaining relative unity did the Russians gradually notice “the Islamic South” and begin to move forward in those areas. This process lasted till the early twentieth century and led to Russian domination of all the Muslim lands of Central Asia, the North and South Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural region (Grousset 2000). By that time the Russians found themselves on the border between the “civilized” and “uncivilized” worlds and considered their mission to be “civilizing” the surrounding areas (Kostentko

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2004, 67–119). In addition, the course of history changed the primary trend, so that the Russians found themselves facing threats from the Islamic lands and began to regard them as a security concern. Such an image of Islam and the Muslims began to take shape during the expansion of tsarist rule in the Muslim lands, continued throughout the history of the Soviet Union, and was transferred to the Russian Federation. In fact, from the perspective of homeland security, the “Islamic threat” is considered very serious in Russia and is taken into account by the Russian authorities on several distinct but correlated levels. The first level comprises the Muslims living in the Russian Federation, mainly in the Volga-Ural region and the North Caucasus; their population is estimated to be about fifteen million (Laruelle 2016b). The concentration of the majority of Russia’s Muslim population within the territories of autonomous republics far from the capital has, by itself, created a latent threat for Moscow, as its potential correlation with separatist claims could pose a great challenge to the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. In fact, in the early 1990s, the power vacuum caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union led to an increase in the level of ethnic tendencies, which in turn provided a basis for the flare-up of radical discontents and the beginning of separatist movements. The combination of ethnic separatism with Islamic extremism and terrorism has already caused a great deal of trouble for Moscow. Over the past decade, events such as the Beslan hostage crisis in 2004, the Moscow metro bombings in 2010, and especially the new wave of terrorist threats related to Islamic State affiliates has showed that the threat of Islamic extremism is very serious for Moscow. The second level comprises the Muslims of Central Asia (Rowland 2012) and the Southern Caucasus (Charles 2010), with a population of over sixty million. In Central Asia, the process of Islamic revival started after the initiation of Gorbachev’s perestroika and intensified after the collapse of the Soviet Union; as a result the political role of Islam became more apparent throughout the region. Meanwhile, the threat of the expansion of Islamic fundamentalism in the region started to cause concerns especially in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. In Tajikistan, after 1992, the civil war between communists and national-Islamic forces raised concerns about the empowerment of extremist and fundamentalist Islam (Epkenhans 2016, 181–222). Moreover, political and fundamentalist Islam represented itself in the form of Islamic parties and movements in the region. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan was an example of the more radical groups, while the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan and Hizb ut-Tahrir were in favor of “softer” agendas (Olimova and Tolipov 2011). In this equation, Russia’s main cause of concern has been the possibility of exacerbating Islamic fundamentalist

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tendencies within the Russian Federation due to its linkage with the extremist movements in Central Asia. Non-Arab Muslim countries neighboring the above-mentioned regions (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey) are at the third level. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Moscow began to worry about a potential threat from the Islamic nature of the new revolutionary government. Meanwhile, with regard to Afghanistan, the Taliban’s direct and indirect support for the Islamic movements in and around Russia has always been a serious challenge for Moscow. During the First Chechen War (1994– 1996), some reports cited the presence of about 300 Arab Afghans in Ibn Al-Khattab’s International Islamic Brigade (Wilhelmsen 2005, 41). Regarding Pakistan, Moscow believes that Islamabad has the strongest and most influential leverage over Islamic extremist movements around Russia’s southern borders. Russia is particularly alert to the existence of a large number of extremist organizations in Pakistan that provide assistance to their fellow groups all around the Islamic world (Azizian and Vasilieff 2003, 39–40). However, regarding Turkey, Russia perceives a threat posed mostly by independent or semi-independent Islamic groups, whose overseas activities have intensified significantly since 2002, after the Islamist AKP party (ruling Justice and Development Party) came to power in Turkey (Balci 2003, 151–177). Finally, the Arab Muslim countries of the Middle East constitute the fourth level. The main source of the threat against Russia at this level is Saudi Arabia, which is known as the leading supporter of “Wahhabism” around the world. Following the outbreak of the Second Chechen War (1999), Russian security officials as well as Dagestan’s authorities directly accused the Saudis of supporting the Chechen rebels (Katz 2001, 612). Chechen war issues aside, Russia has always considered Riyadh’s direct and indirect support of various extremist groups, especially those active in the Middle East, as a potential threat. Alongside Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Jordan are among the other states whose support of extremist groups has sparked sensitivities among the Russians. All in all, it could be said that Russia’s main source of concern is the “threat potential” of such an Islamic belt, which could manifest in the spread of radical Islam and consequently the spread of separatism and terrorism.

Russia’s Relations with Iran as an “Islamic Government” Based on the above-mentioned classification, Iran is situated at the third level of Russia’s interactions with Muslims and with Islam in general. In this framework, after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the Russian authorities were concerned about the possibility of a threat from the

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Islamic Republic. In fact, the Islamic Revolution in Iran caused concern for Soviet leaders who feared the possible transfer of the revolution’s politico-religious ideas. Alexander Bennigsen and Marie Broxup were among the scholars who tried to explain the roots of Soviet leaders’ concerns over Iran’s Islamic Revolution. According to them, Iran’s revolution could pose a “threat” against the Soviet Union in four general ways. First of all, they point to the “anti-imperialist” aspect of the Iranian Revolution, as, according to them, it was “easy to draw a parallel between the foreign imperialism of the Americans in Iran and the imperialism of the Russians in the Caucasus and Central Asia.” Second, the “populist” aspect of the Islamic Revolution entailed the transfer of political power to a young, popular set of leaders—an idea that was very popular among the younger generation of Muslim intellectuals of the Soviet Union. Third, the fact that the cultural, moral, and political values of Islam were regarded as the core ideas of the Islamic Revolution could lead to the creation of a “sense of superiority of the Caucasian Muslims with regard to their non-Muslim (Russian or Armenian) neighbors.” Finally, there was a concern that apart from Islamic fundamentalism, Muslims of the Soviet Union could also be affected by the other types of revolutionary ideas of the Iranian Revolution, such as Ali Shariyati’s concept of “Islamic Marxism” (Bennigsen and Broxup 2011, 116–117). In this context, it is said that concern over a “Green Belt” surrounding the Soviet Union has been present since the early 1980s. Anxiety about the establishment of Islamic governments in the Soviet neighborhood and the potential impacts of Iran’s domestic developments on Afghanistan was a main factor leading to the presence of the Red Army in Afghanistan (Koolaee 2011, 340). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, speculation about the Islamic Republic’s possible intervention in Central Asia led to the perception that Iran supported the establishment of Islamic governments in the newly independent republics. Accordingly, a special attitude toward Iran formed in Russia and dominated the first period of relations between the two countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

First Period: Suspicion In the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, due to the priorities of Russian foreign policy, which was dominated by Atlanticism, or the Western-oriented approach, Iran-Russia relations were shadowed by a kind of suspicion. Russian foreign policy in that period was primarily directed toward Europe, such that Russian policymakers did not regard Asia and the Middle East as so important (White 2011, 307). From 1992 to 1994, the main decisionmakers of Russian foreign policy, particularly

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Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, did not believe Iran and Russia shared any common strategic interests. Kozyrev defined Iran as a source of instability on Russia’s southern strip. The Atlanticists, who advocated close cooperation with the West, supported the Western position in the Middle East and were in favor of Russia’s close relations with Israel. At the same time, the US-Iran enmity and Washington’s key policy of restricting Iran’s influence in Central Asia and the Caucasus reduced Russia’s interest in any closer relationship with Iran (Hunter, Thomas, and Melikishvili 2012, 633). At the same time, Russian president Boris Yeltsin raised the idea of “a joint political system between the industrialized countries of the North as well as a joint defense system between Russia and the US to confront the possible invasions from the South.” In fact, he meant that the Muslim countries, especially Iran, Afghanistan, and some other Middle Eastern countries, were a common threat to the North. The Atlanticists believed that Russia was at the forefront of resistance against the threat of Islamic extremism (Hunter, Thomas, and Melikishvili 2012, 633). They generally believed, and still do, in the policy of containment against Islam. According to the Atlanticists, Russia is at the forefront of the fight against Islam, and its historical role has been to defend Christians and Western civilization against aggressors (Godoretsky 2003 150). In this vein, to prove the existence of the “Iranian threat” the Atlanticists specifically pointed to the concept of “exporting the revolution” in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s political literature—a concept formed shortly after the Islamic Revolution. This concept had an important place in the Islamic Republic, at least until the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time, according to the dominant discourse of Iran’s foreign policy, not only did idealism have to be formulated and kept in its hegemonic place in Iran, but serious efforts had to be made to define its extent beyond known geographical borders in order to challenge the hegemonic and unjust world system. Iran’s foreign policy goals in those years included exporting the Islamic Revolution, waging cultural as well as military jihad, combatting arrogance, and pursuing “Islamic awakening” throughout the world (Azghandi 2005, 13–14). The leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, himself underlined the necessity of exporting the revolution as an important strategy to consolidate Islamic rule. He believed, “We must strive to export our revolution to the world and put aside the idea that we won’t export the revolution, because Islam does not differentiate between Muslim countries and supports all the oppressed people of the world.” As all the world’s great powers were gearing up to “annihilate” the Islamic Republic, “if we stay in a closed environment, we will definitely fail” (Khomeini 2006, 202). However, although some hard-liners favored “harder” ways to export the revolution, including armed support of the Islamic movements throughout

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the world, Ayatollah Khomeini believed in a “peaceful” approach, that is, promoting the Islamic Republic’s image as a pattern for the other Muslim nations and becoming a spiritual and ideological supporter of various Islamic liberation movements (Dehghani Firoozabadi 2010, 163–166). “Hard” or “soft” take aside, Muslim populations of the Soviet Union were considered a target for exporting the revolution. The combination of the two above-mentioned factors—namely, the dominance of Atlanticism on Russian foreign policy, with a positive attitude toward cooperation with the West and a negative attitude toward the whole Muslim world, together with the ideological record of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a government looking to promote the idea of revolutionary Islam beyond its borders—caused suspicion to shadow MoscowTehran relations. Such suspicion actually prevented positive cooperation and the development of relations between the two countries. However, upcoming developments caused a change to this trend.

Second Period: Pragmatism From the mid-1990s, a series of regional developments as well as some domestic changes in Iran and Russia transformed Russia’s attitude toward Iran as an Islamic country. The first regional development was the Tajikistan Civil War, in which Iran’s avoidance of taking the Islamists’ side and its impartial efforts to resolve the crisis by cooperating with Russia were considered very important by Moscow. In fact, the Tajikistan Civil War and Moscow’s concerns about the spread of the unrest across Central Asia became a subject of consultations between Iranian and Russian officials from 1992 to 1997. A total of nine rounds of negotiations to resolve the civil war in Tajikistan were held. The first round of talks was held in Tehran in March 1994, with the participation of the Tajik opposition, the Tajik government, Russia, and Iran; the last round was held in Moscow from June 24 to 27, 1997 (Safari 2008, 315). In fact, the 1994 inter-Tajik talks in Tehran, attended also by delegates from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, was a significant breakthrough, marking a real start for the political process to resolve the conflict. As a clear indication of Iran’s seriousness in bringing together the conflicting Tajik sides, then president of the Islamic Republic Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani personally attended the talks. On the other hand, the two different Tajik sides had an official meeting with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (Ettefaghfar 2009, 35). Although the talks were supposed to have a consultative nature, they actually prepared the primary requirements for a cease-fire in Tajikistan and led to what is known as the Tehran Agreement. The agreement, which enjoyed

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Moscow’s support, was also welcomed by the United Nations Security Council, which on September 22, 1994, declared its support for the latest peacemaking initiatives (United Nations 2000). Given the significance of the Tehran Agreement in shaping the next developments regarding conflict resolution in Tajikistan, it became a symbol of Iran’s role in ending the conflict. Over the years, Iran’s positive role in resolving the Tajikistan Civil War has been considered an example of positive regional cooperation between Iran and Russia. The Afghan Civil War (1992–1996) was another venue in which IranRussia cooperation contributed to a change in Russia’s approach toward Iran. Despite some special features of alignments in Afghanistan, the conflict was primarily a confrontation between moderate and radical Islam. Therefore, to prevent the spread of Islamic radicalism, Russia aligned itself with the moderate Islamic movements in the country. Those movements involved exactly the same ethnic groups that, due to their linguistic and religious commonalities (Persian and Shiite), were supported by Iran (Shafiei 2008). Therefore, understanding their common concerns, Iran and Russia started to support the Northern Alliance led by Ahmed Shah Massoud. The ties between the Afghan Taliban and Chechen separatists, the insistence of Taliban leaders on recognizing Chechen independence, and their declared readiness to establish a political office in Chechnya sparked serious concerns among Russian authorities and caused the Russian media to characterize the Taliban as an enemy. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s violent acts against Afghan Shiites, on the one hand, and its attack on Iran’s consulate general in Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998, killing eleven Iranian diplomats, on the other, caused Tehran to start considering more serious measures against the Taliban. Therefore, Iran and Russia started to coordinate their anti-Taliban efforts in Afghanistan, with support for the Northern Alliance at the core of their common approach (Safari 2008, 315). In this vein, Russia realized that Iran not only did not support extremism but was in fact aligned with Moscow in fighting it. Besides the Tajikistan issue, collaboration in Afghanistan further contributed to the change in Russia’s approach toward Iran. However, the most important issue in this period was the approach adopted by Iran toward Chechnya. By the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999, Iran held the presidency of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). At the time, although some Islamic countries tried to lead the organization to speak out against the Russian government’s military operation in Chechnya and to support the Chechen Muslim separatists, Iran made great efforts to hold the criticisms of Moscow to the lowest level possible. Generally speaking, Iran has always emphasized that

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the issue of Chechnya is a Russian “domestic affair” not requiring foreign intervention. This approach led some analysts to argue that, in fact, Iran “supported” Moscow’s policy in Chechnya. In 2004, Sergei Mironov, chairman of Russia’s Federation Council, emphasized the same position and expressed appreciation of Iran’s management of the Chechen issue in the framework of the OIC (Malek 2008). In fact, Iran’s stance on the Chechen issue had a direct impact on the mainstream Russian view of Iran: Iran’s restraint in criticizing the Russian repression of the Chechen secessionists, which was in contrast with the more vocal criticisms of other Muslim countries . . . sent clear messages to the Russian leadership of the seriousness of Tehran’s desire for closer relations. It also underlined the fact that Iran had no intention to promote an Islamic agenda in Russia’s domestic affairs. Although Iranian officials always talked about the need for a peaceful settlement of the conflicts in the Caucasus, their supportive stance toward Russia on the Chechen issue was meant to convey the pragmatic non-ideological interest of Iranian foreign policy in Central Asia and the Caucasus (Koolaee 2010, 3).

These developments were accompanied by the occurrence of a major change in Russia’s domestic sphere that further paved the way for the development of relations with Iran. The change was the domination of Eurasianist discourse in Russian foreign policy since 1996 (Laruelle 2009, 20). The Neo-Eurasianists consolidated their position in Russia’s foreign policy and, on the one hand, aimed at developing and strengthening relations with the former Soviet republics and, on the other, emphasized the importance of Asia and the Middle East (Islamic countries) in Russia’s foreign policy. From this perspective, Russia’s special interests in central Eurasia could be better pursued by regulating relations with neighboring countries, especially China, India, and Iran. In this framework, Iran’s confrontation with the United States could present Russia with favorable conditions for regulating its relations with Washington (Koolaee 2008, 208). A key figure among the Eurasianists, former Russian foreign minister and prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, saw an important distinction between Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic extremism. According to him, Russia could interact with the former, but no engagement was possible with the latter. Obviously, Iran could be classified in the first group, with which Russia could interact (Dannreuther 2004, 36). All these developments combined led to a change in Russia’s approach toward Iran, from seeing it as a state supporting Islamic extremism with the potential to jeopardize Russia’s national security to considering it a

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reliable partner in the Muslim world. On the one hand, Iran had supported the Russian government’s stance toward Muslims; on the other hand—at least as far as Moscow’s interests were concerned—Iran was unwilling to export its Islamic revolutionary ideas. Meanwhile, since the early 1990s, a new political approach had gained dominance in the Islamic Republic. Leaving behind the idea of exporting the revolution, the new ruling approach adopted an introspective viewpoint and put economic growth and development at the top of its agenda. This approach paid special attention to national interests and regional arrangements and emphasized the necessity of refraining from any foreign incitement in the context of its normalization policy (Azghandi 2005, 15–17). In other words, the concept of exporting the revolution started to be defined mainly in economic terms. As an important component of this new approach, the Iranian leaders declared more clearly their opposition to exporting the revolution by force as well as any interference in the internal affairs of the other nations, emphasizing peaceful coexistence with the international community and pursuit of relations with governments instead of subnational-level groups or movements. Iran’s then president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a key figure among the Iranian pragmatists, described the new orientation in Iran’s foreign policy as follows: “Those who think that we export our revolution through war and aggression are wrong. Instead, in the current circumstances, if we can present a [proper pattern] of political, social and economic development and a model of development, progress and evolution [based on] Islamic spirituality to today’s world, then we will be successful in achieving what the world is afraid of [now], that is Exporting the Revolution” (Yazdani and Akhjasteh 2012, 79). This new set of factors eliminated the negative role of the Islamic factor in Iran-Russia relations, and the dominance of the pragmatic view in the relations between the two countries led to the development of cooperation in various economic, technological, and military-defense fields. The new positive atmosphere in the bilateral relationship was especially reflected in the development of economic ties between the two countries, as well as military and nuclear cooperation. In this vein, the value of trade between the two countries experienced a threefold increase within a decade, from US$335 million in 1994 to $1.03 billion in 2004. Between 2000 and 2005 the two countries signed a series of arms deals with a total value of about US$500 million. They also showed signs of a serious willingness to overcome their difference regarding the Caspian Sea legal regime and to promote regional cooperation in the Caspian basin (Safari 2008, 320–321). This pragmatist trend continued to be the main feature of Iran-Russia relations for more than two decades.

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Third Period: Cooperation and Partnership After 2014, a set of regional and international developments led to the beginning of a new era in Iran-Russia relations, characterized by an unprecedented level of cooperation between the two countries. In the meantime, the Islamic factor has played an important role in bringing the two countries closer to each other. In this period, due to the revival of extremist Islamic movements and their alliance under the banner of some notorious terrorist groups like the Islamic State—also known as ISIS—and alNusra Front, Russia is once again—perhaps more than ever—worried about the possible transmission of waves of extremism and terrorism across its borders and also the potential for instability in its peripheral regions. This is especially important because during this period, ISIS not only recruited many extremists from the North Caucasus to fight in Iraq and Syria but also succeeded in activating its terror cells in the same region to threaten Russia from within (Sokirianskaya 2016). In such circumstances, fighting against extremism and terrorism has become once again one of the main priorities of the Russian government—with the difference that Russia, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, decided to conduct a direct military operation in a country not adjacent to its territorial boundaries (i.e., Syria). Since September 2015 and in the wake of the Russian military operation in Syria, Iran-Russia cooperation to counter the extremist and terrorist groups in Syria and support the government of President Bashar alAssad has entered a new phase. On the official level, the serious intention of both parties to cooperate in this area first appeared during the meeting of the defense ministers of Iran, Russia, and Syria in Tehran on June 9, 2016 (Karami 2016). The cooperation culminated in August 2016, after it was announced that Russia had used a military base in Iran to conduct its operations inside Syria (Al Jazeera 2016a). In fact, the Syrian issue has become the most significant representation of a growing partnership between Iran and Russia, defined primarily on the basis of their common interests as well as common threats, but at the same time showcasing how important the role of fighting radicalism and terrorism is in defining such commonalities. Against primary concerns in some Iranian circles that Russia might turn its back on Iran after its core interests in Syria had been preserved or as a result of a possible “grand bargain” with the United States, Moscow has, during the past three years, showed increased signs of willingness to engage Iran in its various diplomatic efforts to end the Syrian crisis. A very important example was the official naming on March 15, 2017, of Iran alongside Russia and Turkey as one of the guarantors of the Syrian

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cease-fire, initiated a short time before during international peace talks in the Kazakh capital, Astana. Russia also included Iran in its plan to establish the so-called de-escalation zones in Syria, which was proposed with the aim of securing a truce between the Syrian government and moderate rebel groups in different parts of the war-torn country (Azizi 2017a). In fact, since the very beginning of this new period, the statements of the senior officials of both sides made clear that bilateral relations had entered into a new phase. Iran’s ambassador to Russia, Mehdi Sanaei, spoke of the start of a new chapter in the relations between the two countries. On the other side, Russia’s presidential press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said that Moscow had continually developed friendly relations with Tehran (Mikheev 2016). Meanwhile, during his first term as president (2013–2017) Iranian president Hassan Rouhani met nine times with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, which was interpreted as a sign of a growing relationship between the two countries. Regular bilateral meetings between the other high-ranking political and military officials of the two countries and Moscow’s declared willingness to develop its cooperation with Iran at the multilateral level—especially within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Eurasian Economic Union— have been the other significant features of this new period in their relationship (Azizi 2017b). At the same time and at the informal level, some currents have been formed inside the Russian Federation referring to the differences between Iranian Shiite Islam and radical Islam. These newly formed currents have been looking for the development of Russia’s relations with Iran (Mudallali 2012). An important point in this regard is that cooperation with Iran, as an Islamic country, against Islamic extremist groups is of a great importance for Russia, because it gives more legitimacy to Russian antiterrorist operations in Syria. On the other hand, maybe such an understanding at both the governmental and public levels has caused Moscow to more actively reject widespread claims that Iran is a supporter of radicalism. In fact, one of the first major disagreements between the Russian government and US President Donald Trump’s administration occurred when Trump labeled Iran as the “number one terrorist” nation. To the Russians, when it comes to fighting Islamic extremism, “all those who see Islamic State as an existential threat should start to act in a coordinated manner and . . . if we look objectively at potential members of this [possible anti-ISIS] coalition, Iran should, of course, be part of our joint efforts” (Meyer and Kravchenko 2017). However, it should be pointed out that, as during previous periods, in this new era factors other than Islam have contributed to the development of Iran-Russia relations. One of these factors is President Putin’s special approach in the field of foreign policy. Some Russian analysts refer to his

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policy as “great power pragmatism” (Tsygankov 2008) and believe that it reflects Russia’s aspirations to status as a world power. By combining the eastward and westward approaches, Russia’s foreign policy in Putin’s era has shifted toward presenting an independent face of Russia, on the one hand, and pragmatism and activism, on the other, which means providing a balance between foreign policy goals and domestic interests and potentials and trying to restore Russia’s great power status. In this era, Russia has pursued its Middle East policy within the framework of a southward approach, in which Iran has played an important role in expanding Russia’s influence in the region (Jafari and Zolfaghari 2013, 28). In addition, since 2014, Russia’s relations with the West, particularly the United States, have entered into one of their darkest periods since the end of the Cold War over the Ukraine crisis (Pifer 2014). Accordingly, through a series of measures, including the development of relations with the regional powers in different regions, Russia has been seeking to balance the US role, and the Middle East has appeared to be one of the most important regions for Moscow in this regard. In this vein, Russian authorities have seemingly defined a special role for Iran in their strategy. In addition, on the Syrian issue, as an example of close cooperation between Iran and Russia, Moscow’s geopolitical considerations have been raised as one of the main factors inciting Russia’s direct military intervention in Syria. The need to ensure the security of Russian military bases in western Syria led Moscow to send troops and fighters to support President Assad. In fact, Moscow only decided to get militarily involved in Syria after rebel and terrorist advances raised the specter of such groups dominating western regions. In other words, the current status of the Iran-Russia relationship and especially their partnership in Syria has been primarily caused by their understanding of having common interests and facing common enemies. However, Islamic radicalism has appeared to be the most dangerous common enemy connecting the two. At the same time, understanding a broader picture brought Moscow and Tehran to the conclusion that they could initiate a closer coordination. As pointed out by the Russian International Affairs Council in a 2014 report, the understanding first began to take shape following the Arab Spring events in the Middle East: Since the outbreak of the Arab Spring, Iran’s leadership believed that the management of those events . . . was aimed at “reformatting” the geopolitical map of the Arab East, while radically weakening the role of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the region. There was also a plan to finally squeeze Russia out of the Eastern Mediterranean and the maximum complication of hydrocarbons transition from Russia (or with the help of Russia) to the West European markets. . . . [The other parts of the plan included] expelling Russia from the Arab East, the demonstration of

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All in all, one should not be mistaken about the nature of the IranRussia relationship or the impact of the Islamic factor on their relations, because the leaders on both sides apparently have a clear understanding of it. Iran and Russia are neither “allies” nor “strategic partners” in the true sense. The current partnership between the two countries, on the one hand, stems from their pragmatic approach in the Middle East and beyond and, on the other hand, is the result of more than two decades of trust building about what the role of Islam is in Iran’s foreign policy, especially when it comes to its stance on Islamic extremism. Accordingly, Iran, once considered by Russian leaders to be at the third level of “Islamic threat,” has now become a partner of Russia in its fight against that same threat.

Conclusion Over the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Iran-Russia relations have experienced many ups and downs. In the meantime, the Islamic factor, especially Iran’s identity as a Muslim country with an Islamic government, has played an important role in the bilateral relationship. In the first period after the Cold War, internationalist revolutionary approaches in Iran, on the one hand, and the Western-oriented approach of the Russian government, on the other, led to much pessimism and became an obstacle to the development of relations. In the second period, a series of positive actions by Iran to support Russia’s position toward Muslims, together with internal political developments in the two countries, paved the way for normalization of relations. In the third period, the common threat of Islamic extremism provided the ground for closer cooperation between the two. In this vein, it could be said that the Islamic factor is one of the main factors playing an effective role in IranRussia relations. As such, the legitimizing function of religion appears to be the main aspect of the Islamic factor affecting the Iran-Russia relationship at the current stage. On the one hand, Iran, as a Muslim country, legitimizes its military presence in the Syrian civil war by depicting it as an attempt to fight radical groups operating under the “false flag” of Islam but with the real aim of weakening the so-called Axis of Resistance in the Middle East. On the other hand, by taking sides with a Muslim country, Moscow has been able to convince its own Muslim population, as well the wider Mus-

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lim community around the world, that its operation in Syria is not about taking over a Muslim country or fighting the Muslim groups but rather aims at fighting the terrorists that pose a real challenge to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The principle of “rejecting oppression and not giving in to oppressors” seems to be another aspect of the role of Islam in the development of IranRussia relations. Based on this important principle, which is also reflected in the Islamic Republic’s constitution, Iran considers resisting “arrogant powers” a priority in its foreign policy, which has led to its usually being defined as a “revisionist” state in the international system. In this vein, the increasingly confrontational state of relations between Russia and the West during the past several years has caused Iran to see in Moscow a potential ally in challenging the US global hegemony. Whether or not and to what extent such a definition is correct is, of course, open to further debate, but this has had an undeniable effect on how Tehran has defined its relations with Russia, especially in the third period. However, it would be an oversimplification to consider Islam as the only factor affecting Moscow-Tehran relations. As mentioned in this chapter, in all three periods, internal developments in the two countries and complex regional and international situations have been involved in this trend. Therefore, it could be said that a combination of all these factors has formed the nature of Iran-Russia relations since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the Islamic factor gaining a more and more positive role in the development of the bilateral relationship.

9 Conclusion: What Have We Learned? Greg Simons, Marat Shterin, and Eric Shiraev

As editors, we have attempted to bring the reader new perspectives and viewpoints by gathering a constellation of authors from a range of cultural backgrounds and countries. In this final act, we aim to make sense of this vast amount of data and variety of perspectives by identifying certain patterns and trends that emerge from these individual case studies and theoretical reflections. For this purpose, we start by returning to the three research questions posed in the first chapter. Building on this analysis, we then propose a research agenda for the study of Islam in Russia and possibly beyond.

Answering the Research Questions How do the book chapters contribute to answering our research questions? 1. To What Extent Do the Concerns and Interests of the Russian State and Regional Authorities Play a Role in Shaping Islam in Russia? The state has a great role to play in shaping any religion, Islam included, by imposing legal frameworks for religious practice, delimiting the boundaries of religious authority, and imposing a host of other regulations that may affect, directly or indirectly, religious institutions and believers (Asad 2003; Beckford and Richardson 2003). Some of this book’s chapters engage with the domestic developments in Islam among Islam and Muslims in Russia and emphasize two aspects relevant to this question: the political authorities’

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concerns about national security and national identity. These issues have been significant both in the run-up to and the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, as religion became a significant factor in forging ethnic and individual identities, drawing the attention of various actors in the new political environment (Simons and Westerlund 2015; Shterin 2016). With respect to Islam, the authorities were particularly concerned about hard security, or the task of minimizing “radicalization” and terrorism, and about national identity, or the ability to “integrate” Muslims and Islamic institutions into the idea of a wider Russian identity, as the successive political post-Soviet regimes understood it. In Chapter 2, Marat Shterin introduced the reader to the notion of ambient Islam—which derives from the concept of ambient faith, elaborated by Matthew Engelke (2012) and Catherine Wanner (2014)—as a conceptual lens to understand how Russian Muslims engage with the living aspects of the religious tradition to address their concerns and aspirations in the post-Soviet world, including forging their individual and group identities associated with Islam. Shterin shows that in doing so, they also draw on and are influenced by a variety of different sources, not least from the Soviet past and contemporary Russian culture. Thus, many of those seen as radical Islamists or ethnic nationalists share an interest in Eurasianism with contemporary Russian ethnic nationalists, with both sides sometimes forming ideological alliances. Muslims selectively adopt certain expressions of Islam and the broader culture in forging their sense of belonging to both their ethnic communities and the Russian nationhood. In turn, various Islamic institutions and movements and the Russian state compete for particular representations of the tradition in order to control Muslims’ allegiance and behavior. This is of significance when the state agencies define the religion and Muslims through categories such as “moderate” or “radical” and “official” or “nonofficial” (Dannreuther and March 2010), with the assumption that Muslims’ “radicalism” derives from the influence of particular versions of Islam that subvert their sense of belonging to the Russian state. This view overlooks certain “elective affinities” between Muslim and non-Muslim radicalism and between Islamic and non-Islamic radical ideas. In Chapter 3, Marlene Laruelle notes that both scholarly and public portrayals of the interaction and relationships between Russia and Islam are predominately presented through the lens of conflict, be this the Chechen wars, the official narrative on the fight against terrorism, or Russia’s military intervention in Syria. Largely missing from these accounts, Laruelle argues, is “the peaceful articulation of both being a patriot of Russia and having an Islamic agenda” (see also Aitamurto 2016). She observes, for example, that the president of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, vocally supports President Vladimir Putin and at the same time pursues the

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vision of a “pure” form of conservative Islam in Chechnya. Laruelle refers to Kadyrov’s (rather extreme) example as “Islamic Putinism.” This fits with the analysis by Shterin of ways in which some activists and ideologues engage with ambient Islam and Russian nationalism in constructing Muslim identities in both alliance with and opposition to Russian patriotism and the state. Laruelle further argues that this represents a centurieslong state policy tradition and tension aimed at selective integration of Muslim elites into the Russian elite in a process that involves mutual cooptation (see also Sagramoso 2020). This policy manifests itself in the traditional Muslim-majority areas of the Northern Caucasus and the Volga but is also further complicated by the recent mass migration of Muslims from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. As part of the process of mutual co-optation, institutions are created, such as the National Organization of Russian Muslims or the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate, in order to influence, regulate, and manage the relationships, perceptions, and actions of Russian Muslims both at home and abroad. Zilya Khabibullina, in Chapter 5, focuses on the post-Soviet development of the Hajj to Mecca and analyzes a number of national and regional issues that the regional and federal authorities have to manage in relation to this. Alongside the growing number of believers seeking to perform the Hajj, local pilgrimage places and practices are also emerging, expressing a sense of Islamic identity among Russian Muslims that is connected to their homelands and localities. To use the notion of ambient Islam, this in turn creates a sense of local emplacement and unity with the global Muslim Ummah—a sense, Khabibullina argues, that functions as an emotional expression of the multiconfessional character of the Russian state as embodied in the Russian constitution. However, the attempts by the state to regulate the Hajj of the Russian Muslims through its stake in the Hajj Committee (Mukhametzyanova-Duggal and Khabibullina 2010) is a source of both support and friction. This particularly concerns the quota distribution (the Hajj Committee coordinates the allocation of the Saudi quota for Russian Muslims) with, the author argues, a heavy bias toward pilgrims from the Northern Caucasus in spite of Tatar and Bashkir having 53 percent of the Russian Muslim population. In addition to the need to defuse the possible emergence of domestic tensions, the Russian state also faces the possible implications of the integration of Russian Muslims into the global Islamic community through easier access to and contact with Islamic spiritual centers, which may affect their perceptions of identity and culture. Chechnya has had a complex relationship with Russia, which has stretched from imperial times, through the Soviet era, into the current postSoviet period (see also Ware 2013; Sagramoso 2020). Rahim Rahimov, in Chapter 6, refers to the legacy of the Soviet era in the Muslim-majority

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areas whereby secular versions of Islam were created, with the mosque being separated from the state and where “moderate” Islam dominated. Like Laruelle in Chapter 3, Rahimov uses a case study of Chechnya to examine the extent to which the image of Islam in Chechnya reflected tangible facts or resulted from particular media constructions that mirrored prevailing political priorities. Rahimov shows that the two Chechen wars transformed the image of the republic from one characterized by a secular national identity to one dominated by Islamist radicalism and violence (see also Sagramoso and Yarlykapov 2013). Moscow’s attempts to quell the nationalist movement encouraged groups and movements that were intent on revenge, often with support from foreign sponsors, thus adding to the spiral of radicalization and violence. This was, in turn, used by the authorities to legitimize their crackdown on what they saw as radical Islam (see also Shterin and Yarlykapov 2013). While Russian security forces were successful in killing many of the leading Islamists, a subtler, hidden problem persisted whereby militant radicalism has spread more widely beyond Chechnya. In particular, some young people have proven to be vulnerable, with the children of a number of Chechen officials traveling to join jihadi groups in Syria. On the other side of the coin, Ramzan Kadyrov has used the Islamic identity of Chechnya to send soldiers to Syria as a form of “military diplomacy” (see also Fainberg 2017). This demonstrates the interplay between Russia’s domestic and foreign policy, influencing the opinions and perceptions of segments of the Russian public. 2. What Are the Ways in Which the Image of Islam Is Constructed and Mediated by the Russian Mass Media and with What Consequences for Its Perception by the Wider Public and for Islam and Muslims? Mass media are a center of cultural production, one of a society’s institutions that manage the cultural codes of thought and behavior. Through distribution of informational products, mass media set the example of what is significant in society and what is expected of citizens to belong to and function in that society (Louw 2001). Among other things, mass media and journalists have played a crucial role in shaping the public reactions to and perceptions of post-Soviet-era conflicts, including those associated with Islam and Muslims (Simons 2010; Hutchings and Tolz 2015). Chapter 4 deals with the media coverage of Islam in Russia and the United States. In this chapter, Samoilenko et al. examine the institutional symbioses of policy and media in connection to reporting on Islam and terrorism. Mass media are critical and instrumental in forming the public perceptions of and reactions to both terrorism and the official policy to combat it. One of the major findings of Chapter 4 is the many sim-

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ilarities in the patterns of covering Islamic terrorism and the Islamic State by Russian and US newspapers. However, the coverage in US newspapers tends to be more diverse than in their Russian counterparts, which can be explained by the differences in the operation of the mass media in the two countries. Furthermore, the authors argue that US media tend to portray this threat as external, whereas Russian media frame it as coming from both external and domestic sources. In doing so, in both countries the mass media construct the notions of “Islam” and “terrorism” as linked to “the other” through coverage of the “realities” of a conflict through the opposing binaries of “us” vs. “them,” “rational” vs. “irrational,” “civilization” vs. “barbarism.” This illustrates the role of identity politics and cultural practices in defining the in-groups and out-groups that were discussed under research question one. The authors also show that Russian media framing of Islam and terrorism served as information support for the Russian government’s foreign policy, especially in portraying its presence in the Middle East as part of the fight against international terrorism, which brings us to the next research question. 3. In Russian Foreign Policy, What Specific Factors Shape Russia’s Islamic Vector in International Relations? After the breakup of the Soviet Union in late 1991, the emergent Russian state found itself among a number of newly independent Muslim-majority states as well as the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, which had been courted earlier by the Soviet Union. However, its political, military, and economic weakness placed a number of constraints on the new Russian state, which contributed to shaping its foreign policy priorities. The “Islamic vector” became one of the key factors in this policy and stemmed from the interaction and interconnection between domestic and foreign actors and events. During the period of more cordial relations with the West that lasted into Putin’s acting presidency (1999–2000) and his first term in office (2000–2004), the official approach to the Muslim world remained somewhat ambivalent. There was an element of symbolic unity and cooperation through the development of networks and institutions within the spheres of culture and identity, especially in the wake of the “Global War on Terrorism” in 2001 and the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 (Malashenko 2007b; Mukhametov 2012). The gradual souring of relations between the West and Russia and the relative consolidation of Russia’s political, economic, and military power prompted the desire and ability to be more active on the international stage. The Middle East and North Africa became one region in which Russia has invested substantial time, effort, and resources diplomatically and militarily, based on geopolitical calculations to achieve greater power status and compete with the

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US-led West (Simons 2019). Chapters 7 and 8 in this book are related to our third and final research question. In Chapter 7 Nicolas Dreyer investigates the manner in which Russian foreign policy has been affected by the perception of and interaction with Islam and Muslims. This concerns not only perceived political threats and security issues such as terrorism but also geopolitical and economic opportunities. The negative impact of the West’s foreign policy in the Middle East, especially following the “Global War on Terrorism,” has opened new opportunities for Russia’s reentry to the region. Islam is an almost ideal public diplomacy tool based on aspects of shared culture and identity, which can provide a strong basis for engaging in larger economic and geopolitical projects. The strategic and geopolitical factors then can become inseparable from the Islam-related aspects of the relationships and interactions between Russia and the countries of the Middle East. Dreyer concludes that Islam, in its different manifestations and perceptions, has played a highly ambivalent, even paradoxical role in Russia’s contemporary Middle Eastern policy, with a variety of different domestic and external factors influencing it. Russian foreign policymakers see Islam as a “civilizational asset,” as a means to form relationships and partnerships with “moderate” Islamic elements and organizations in the region, with the purpose of furthering the multipolarity factor in the global order at the expense of US hegemony. In Chapter 8, Hamidreza Azizi analyzes the impact of Islam in the relations between Iran and Russia. Azizi considers three distinct periods in these relations in the post–Cold War era. The first period, in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, witnessed Russian politicians being worried about possible efforts to “export” the Iranian Islamic Revolution to the country, causing their rather cautious and suspicious approach toward Iran. More generally, the perception of an external Islamic threat and security risk derived from the idea of subversive foreign identity and culture at a time when Russia was seen as weak and vulnerable to further territorial disintegration. The second period came when the Russian side concluded that the religious differences between Iran’s and Russia’s Muslim populations reduced the risks, while the approach by Iran to prioritize strategic over ideological considerations in relation to Russia contributed to a diminishing role of the Islamic factor in favor of more pragmatic aspects in renewed relations. From 2014, the third phase in Iran-Russia relations began with the rise of radical Islamist movements in the Middle East and the perceived threat of their spread into both Iran and Russia. Azizi argues that the perception of the mutual threat precipitated a joint effort to fight an antiterrorism campaign, where Russia saw value in aligning itself with an Islamic country in an effort to gain legitimacy in what it saw as its fight against extremist groups.

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This highlights that the symbolic aspects and signals of identity and culture, communicated in and through Russian and international mass media outlets, can be deployed in the country’s foreign policy and diplomacy in the Middle East. It is also indicative of the limits of the “Islamic vector” in Russian foreign policy, where pragmatic tasks and goals carry greater importance and significance, even when they are communicated with the Islamic factor narrative.

Future Research Agenda Rather than focusing on a particular topic, this book is an attempt by the editors and authors to offer readers an opportunity to explore and construct an image of Islam and its implications for contemporary Russian society and politics from a multitude of different angles and analytical lenses. This broadened approach also provides the opportunity for readers to connect various diverse parts into a bigger picture and to generate a deeper and wider understanding of Islam and Muslims in Russia in the larger social and political environment. Another benefit of this broader approach is the possibility to identify themes and questions that deserve further attention from researchers. The editors suggest that the three key themes and questions of the book will remain crucially important and involve a range of issues to address in future research. The relationships between Muslims and Russian state authorities at different levels cannot remain constant and will ultimately depend on the evolution of both the state and Muslim communities in the coming decades. To understand these processes and their implications will require both new ethnographies and conceptual deliberations, and it will call for novel interdisciplinary approaches. In particular we will need to observe and better understand ways in which evolving normative political, legal, and social frameworks will affect the development of Islamic institutions and Muslims’ individual engagement with Islam. Political and social sciences can assist a great deal in explorations of how the evolution of the Russian state and its style of governance will affect this development and engagement. For instance, considering the recent concentration of political authority and power in the institution of the presidency, with its personalized character in Russia, and in the security structures, it is very unlikely that the current Russian state will loosen its tight grip on the management of religious institutions and individual behaviors when it comes to expressions of political loyalty. Equally, it is likely that religion will remain instrumental in ways the state and its institutions define and frame their legitimacy in terms of representing the polity of a “unique civilization” in counter distinction to the “West” (Shterin 2016; Laruelle 2018).

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It remains be seen what forms the state management of religion and the trend toward civilizational legitimation may take. In the last decade or so, there has been a shift toward a heavier emphasis on the role of Russian Orthodoxy in the formation of the Russian civilization and its statehood, at the expense of other “traditional religions,” including Islam (Laruelle 2018). If this shift continues, how will it affect Islamic institutions, Muslims, and public perception of Islam? Future studies may gain a good deal of insight by going beyond content analysis of both Islamic activists’ and state officials’ rhetoric and looking into the changing legal context, such as constitutional changes, legislation, and litigation involving Islamic groups and individual Muslim participants. As some recent studies have suggested, academic experts play a significant role in shaping public perceptions and normative orders used in litigation on what constitutes socially and legally acceptable ways of practicing Islam (Kovalskaya 2020; Shterin and Dubrovsky 2019). In particular, considering its centrality in managing social and political dissent, more work needs to be done on the role of the Law on Combatting Extremism (2006) in managing Islam in Russia and regulating the behavior of individual Muslims. How will Muslim institutions, Islamic activists, and practicing Muslims react to the emphasis on “Russian civilization” in the official rhetoric and public discourse if this trend continues? Some analyses, including in this book, have already pointed out ways in which certain Muslim activists and Islamic institutions have embraced the key ingredients of this trend—the language and policies of Russian of patriotism, traditionalism, and antiliberalism (Medvedeva and Stoekl 2018). While subscription to “traditional” values has become a loyalty test by which the state defines the degree of its cooperation with and support for religious institutions, what consequences will this have for the internal diversity within Russian Islam and for individual Muslims’ commitment to and participation in Islamic institutions? Indeed, as both this book and other studies (Rubin 2018; Di Puppo and Schmoller 2020) have indicated, Russian Islam is marked by an immense, even dazzling diversity, which reflects the variety of forms in which Muslims inherit their religion and engage with its rich heritage, reflecting their individual biographies, their emplacement within particular territories and ethnic communities, and their sense of belonging to the larger Islamic world (Ummah). We therefore need to know more, from ethnographies and surveys, about how Muslims and Islamic institutions internalize or otherwise resist the framing and categorization of “legitimate” Islam by the state. Will we be able to identify patterns reflecting differences in ways Muslims from different generations construct their identities through references to Islam, ethnic belonging, Russian citizenship, or the Ummah? In this sense, research on Islam and generational differences could fruitfully

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engage with studies focused on the diversity of identities among young Muslims in a global perspective (Arweck and Shipley 2019). An interesting question in this respect is whether, in what versions, and with what implications decolonization discourses and politics will become part of the Russian public debate. One important implication of this diversity of identities and engagements with Islam among Muslims is the question of authority, or who in contemporary Russia speaks for Muslim communities in matters relating to Islamic norms, relationships with state authorities, and legal and other issues where the question of what constitutes the “proper religion” may arise. This line of research may take two different but intersecting paths that stem from the issue of the relationship between authority, both religious and secular, and Muslims’ human agency and creativity (Bayat and Harrera 2010; Di Puppo and Schmoller 2020). How and to what extent do the state and Islamic authorities shape ways in which Russian Muslims practice their religion and engage with it in their social and political pursuits? And how do Russian Muslims create their own versions of Islam against the attempts by the state and religious authorities to regulate their behavior? One theme that still awaits deep ethnographic research is the conversion of ethnic Russians to Islam. Who “crosses the boundaries,” why, and with what consequences, particularly when they can be widely seen as entrenched in ethnic, national, and even international demarcations and identities? Finally, given the demographic weight of Russia’s Muslim population and the country’s geopolitical location, Islam will likely remain a factor in its foreign policy and therefore a subject of interest for scholars of both international relations and Islamic studies. They may wish to go beyond monitoring events and observing trends and engage with other disciplines, such as social sciences, to better understand the relationships between the changing shape and face of Islam in Russia and the ways in which and the degree to which the Russian government deploys the religion in its foreign policy. Some intriguing questions present themselves here. How would a degree of success in creating a “Russian Islam” affect the country’s stance and influence among Muslim-majority countries? How would it handle the appeals of transnational Islamic movements to Russian Muslims, in particular those from younger generations? What we can be certain about is that Islam in Russia will remain a fascinating and immensely revealing focus of scholarly attention. Thinking “with Islam” will continue to tell us a great deal about the country that hosts the multimillion dynamic and vibrant Muslim population. Thinking about Islam in Russia will never cease to illuminate for us the religion itself.

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The Contributors

Hamidreza Azizi is assistant professor in the Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Shahid Beheshti University. He has also been an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Regional Studies, University of Tehran, and is a senior research fellow at the Iran and Eurasia Studies Institute (IRAS). Sergey G. Davydov is rector of the Media Industry Academy, Moscow. From 2005 to 2011, he was the head of media research in GfK-Rus. Since 2011 he has been associate professor at National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Nicolas Dreyer worked for an international charity based in Germany, assisting Holocaust survivors in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. He is currently writing his habilitation thesis at the University of Bamberg, Institute of Slavic Studies, Germany. Zilya Khabibullina, PhD, is senior researcher in the Department of Religious Study at R. G. Kuzeev Institute for Ethnological Studies—a subdivision of the Ufa Federal Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Marlene Laruelle, PhD, is associate director and research professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs, the George Washington University. She is also a codirector of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia) and director of the Central Asia Program at IERES.

187

188

The Contributors

Olga Logunova is associate professor at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia. Rahim Rahimov is an independent political analyst/researcher focusing on Russia and post-Soviet space with interests in conflicts, foreign policies, political and economic integration projects, and political Islam. Sergei A. Samoilenko is a term instructor in the Department of Communication at George Mason University. He is a cofounder of the Research Lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP) and former president of the Communication Association of Eurasian Researchers (CAER). Eric Shiraev is a professor at George Mason University, researcher, and author. He has authored, coauthored, and coedited eighteen books and numerous publications in the fields of international relations, political psychology, and comparative cultural studies. Marat Shterin, PhD, is professor of the sociology of religion and head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. He is also coeditor in chief of Religion, State and Society. Greg Simons, PhD, is associate professor in the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University. He is also lecturer in the Department of Communication Science at Turiba University and in the Department of International Relations at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Formerly, he was a lead researcher the Ural Humanitarian Institute of the Ural Federal University.

Index

Abbott, Tony, 53 Abdurrahman bin Zubair, 77–78 Afghan Civil War (1992–1996), 140 Afghanistan: anti-Soviet view, 91; counterterrorism campaigns, 118; effect on Iran-Russia relations, 137; external threat to Russia, 136; inter-Tajik talks, 139; US war in, 118 Akhmadov, Yuri, 101 Aliev, Timur, 103 Aliyev, Heydar, 92, 103 al-Nusra Front, 143 al-Qaeda, 101, 117 ambient Islam, 7, 13; combining with the Russian cultic milieu, 22; defining, 28–29(n1); the engagement of the state, 23–25; religious traditions drifting from religious institutions, 17–18; social grievances among Russian Muslims, 19–23; sources of, 150; unity through pilgrimage, 151 Andropov, Yuri, 90–91 anticolonial struggles, 4 anti-Islamic policy and campaigns, 91–92 antireligion campaigns, 84–94

antiterrorist policy: media frames of terrorism, 53, 56, 58–59, 66–67; Russia-Iran relations, 144, 154– 155; Russia’s political narrative, 57–59; US and Russian involvement in Syria, 49–50; US and Russian policies, 58–59, 66 Arab Spring: Christian minorities in the Middle East, 123; Russian criticism of American policy, 120; Russian involvement in regional politics, 8, 111–112; Russian Muslim radicalization, 115; Russia’s conceptual response, 112– 113; strategic dimension of regional foreign policy, 117–118 Arab states, Russia’s mediating role in, 124–125 Asfendiarov, Sanzhar, 88 Ashirov, Nafigulla, 35–36 al-Assad, Bashar, 64(table), 129, 143 assimilation initiatives, 5 Astana process, 110 Astemirov, Anzor, 12 atheism, 2, 85, 87, 90–91 Atlanticism (foreign policy approach), 137–139 Aulia graves, 74–78

189

190

Index

Axis of Resistance, 146 Azan (call to prayer), 85 Azerbaijanis, 92 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 63, 64(table) Basayev, Shamil, 41–42, 98–99 Bashkirs, Hajj participation by, 71–73, 151 Bashkortostan, pilgrimage practices in, 2, 73–80 Beckford, James, 15–16 Bedouins, role of trade in the emergence of Islam, 88 Being Young and Muslim (Bayat and Herrera), 19, 23 Belarusians, 92–93 Beliaev, Evgeny, 88 Benevolence International Foundation, 101 Bennigsen, Alexander, 137 Bibarsov, Mukaddas, 32 bin Laden, Osama, 59 Bolshevism, 4, 38, 85, 87–89 Boston Globe newspaper, 60–62 Boston Marathon bombings, 60–62 Breivik, Anders, 57 Broxup, Marie, 137 Buddhism, 114 burial mounds, 77–78 Buryatsky, Said, 21–23 Bush, George, 64(table) Bush, Jeb, 64(table) caliphate of the Islamic State, 46, 109, 115–116 capitalism: as an instrument of religion, 87–89; shaping the Russian perception of terrorism, 57 cascading activation by the media, 53 Caucasian Islam, 114 Caucasus Emirate, 12, 21, 102, 117, 126 censorship: Russian antiterrorist activities, 58 Central Asia: concerns over Islamic fundamentalism, 135–136; Islamic

radicalization, 116; pragmatic cooperation in Iran-Russia relations, 139–140; Russian domination of, 134–135 Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia, 72(table), 76 centralized Muslim authority, 3 Charlie Hebdo magazine, 58, 121 Chechen Republic, 2, 8; development of Muslim communities, 4; development of the Islamic image, 93–94; ethnonational and secessionist conflict, 84–94; Hajj quota distribution, 72(table); Iran’s policy towards, 140–141; ISIS recruitment, 117; as Islamic state, 121–122; Islamization of radicalism, 99–102; Kadyrovism, 42–43; Kadyrov’s Islamic Putinism, 31–32; radicalism and violence, 83, 106–107; Russian involvement in the OIC, 119; Russian Muslims’ integration into the global community, 151–152; Russia’s foreign policy concerns, 114 Chechen wars: chechenization of the conflict, 95–97; Dzhemal’s sympathies with, 41–42; end of, 104–105; media creation of Islamophobia, 6; radicalization of nationalism, 94–95; as resistance to central authorities, 102–103; Russian perspective, 97–99; as Russia’s war on terror, 103–104; shaping the perception of terrorism, 57 children: Chechen jihadists, 105 China: Russia’s Middle East policy, 120–121 Christian populations: Christian minorities in the Middle East, 123; ethnocentric labeling of terrorism in the United States, 56; state engagement with ambient Islam, 24

Index

Christianity: Kadyrovism co-opting elements of, 44; media framing of Islam and terrorism, 64; religious education in Russian schools, 5; religious traditions drifting from religious institutions, 16. See also Russian Orthodox culture Circassians, 122 civilizational asset, Islam as, 154 civilizational coalitions, 120–121 civilizational identity, 112–113 “civilizing” Muslim Russia, 134–135 Clinton, Hillary, 64(table) colonialism: creating an us-them relationship, 50–51; Euro-Islam’s narrative, 38–39, 41 communism: finding in Islam, 87–88. See also Marxism community religion, Islam as, 85 conflict: allegiances and alliances in the Middle East, 109–111; civilizational counterweights in Russian policy, 129; collapse of the Soviet Union leading to, 84; construction of post-Soviet Muslim identity, 7; media construction of Muslim images, 152–153; pragmatic co-operation in Iran-Russia relations, 139–140; religion as a source of, 134; Russia-Islam interaction, 32. See also Chechen wars; Syria and the Syrian civil war conflict resolution: Islam in IR and foreign policy, 133; Tehran Agreement, 140 containment policy, 138 conversion to Islam: Buryatsky, 21, 42; ethnic Russians, 157; Eurasianism, 22; Kadyrovists, 45; politicization of Islam, 31–32; reconciling Russian identity with, 46; Refakh movement members, 34–35 Council of Muftis, 35–36, 46

191

counterterrorism: Russia in Chechnya, 105–106; the US as the world’s policeman, 56 countervailing power, Russia as, 123 Crimea, 14, 106 cult of ancestors: Turkic peoples, 75 cult of saints, 44 cultic milieu, 15–16, 20–22, 29(n2) cultic sites: grave of the Prophet’s companions, 77–78 Cultural Revolution, Lenin’s, 88, 90 culture: ambient Islam, 7; image construction by the media, 152– 153 Dagestan, Republic of, 2; ambient Islam, 17; causes of radicalization, 115; Chechen conflict, 98; development of Muslim communities, 4; engagement with ambient Islam, 25; Hajj quota distribution, 71–73; Russian view of the Chechen conflict, 99 dehumanization of the enemy, 51 deportations, 4, 85–86 diplomacy: diplomatic dimensions of Islam, 117–119, 154–155; Russian antiterrorist policy, 58–59; RussiaUS relations, 110–111 discrimination: anti-Islamic perception of Russia, 86–87; in-group behavior, 50–51 dissent, social and political, 156 Ditiakin, Valentin, 88 Doctrine of Information Security (2000), 57–58 domestic politics and policy: atheism as official policy, 90–92; Chechen Muslim migration to jihadi groups, 152; Eurasianist discourse, 141; Islamic lobby, 122–123; Putin’s “great power pragmatism” balancing foreign policy, 134; religion in international relations, 132; Russian perspective of the Chechen conflict, 97–99

192

Index

domestic security: territorial integrity and cohesion, 114. See also safety and security domestic terrorism, 55–57 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 18 Dudaev, Djokhar, 41–42, 94–98 Dudurkaev, Asu, 105 Dugin, Alexander, 14, 16, 22, 35, 40 Dzhemal, Geydar, 15, 20–22, 33, 39– 42, 46 education, 3; Lenin’s Cultural Revolution, 87–88; religious education in Russian schools, 5 Egypt: Arab Spring uprising, 109; fate of Christian minorities, 123; ISIS terrorism, 127; as potential threat to Russia, 136; Russia’s Middle East policy, 124–125 electorate, Muslim, 32–36 episodic frames by the media, 54 eradication of religion, 84–94 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, 64(table) ethnocentric perspective: terrorism discourse in the United States, 55– 56 ethnogenesis, 14 ethnonationalism: Russian-Muslim rift, 86 Eurasian Economic Union, 144 Eurasian Islam, 15 Eurasianism: influencing Russian Islamic identity, 150; origins and tenets, 20–22; rise of an Islamist Eurasianist geopolitics, 39–42; rising popularity, 14–15; Russia’s foreign policy discourse, 141 Eurasianist International Movement (EIM), 35 Eurasianist Party of Russia (EPR), 34– 35 Euro-Islam, 15, 36–39 Evrazii Party, 35 exile of Muslim groups, 85–86 expansion of Islam, 89–90 external threats and influences: early threats from Islamic lands, 134–

135; influences on Muslim groups, 3; Iranian threat to the Soviet Union, 138; Islamic countries threat to Russia, 136; Islamization of Chechen radicalism, 100–102; media hype surrounding, 53; media portrayal of terrorism, 8; religion in international relations, 133; Russia’s anti-extremism strategy, 154–155; Russia’s concerns over Iran, 136–137; securitization of ethnic identity, 50–51 extremism: Atlanticist foreign policy approach, 138; conflating with Islamism, 57–58; ethnic separatism and, 135–136; Eurasianist discourse, 141–142; Kadyrovism as Islamic Putinism, 42–45; Russian discourse on terrorism, 57; Russian internet censorship, 58; Russia’s concerns over Iran’s influence on, 143; shifting perception of, 12–13 Fardid, Ahmad, 42 fascism inspiring Turkish nationalists, 42 federal government: creating a uniquely Russian-Muslim identity, 157; function of the Hajj Committee, 70; postrevolutionary Iran, 131–132; regulation of the Hajj, 151. See also state authority federation treaty, 94 feudalist theory of Islam, 89 First Chechen War, 97; Arab Afghans’ presence in, 136; Dzhemal’s support for political Islam, 41; failed Chechnya-Russian federation treaty, 94–95; peace agreements, 96; radicalization resulting from, 97–98, 100. See also Chechen wars Foley, James, 63–64, 64(table), 66 folklore, patriotism and, 43–44 foreign fighters in Chechnya, 99–102, 104

Index

foreign Islam, 6 foreign policy: Islam in IR and foreign policy, 133–134; Western Atlanticism, 137–139 foreign policy (Iran): economic export of the revolution, 142; Putin’s “great power pragmatism,” 144– 145 foreign policy (Russia), 6–7; Chechen Muslim migration to jihadi groups, 152; the continuing role of Islam, 157; Eurasianist discourse, 141; Eurocentric approach, 137–138; evaluation of Middle East foreign policy objectives, 124–128; evoking Chechen nationalism, 105–106; influence of Islam on, 153–155; Kadyrov’s sympathies with, 45; regional considerations in Middle East policy, 110; security considerations in the Middle East, 113–117; strategic considerations for Middle Eastern policy, 117–123 foreign policy (US): anti-Islamic foreign policies, 118–119; terrorism discourse, 55–56 Foreign Policy Concept (Russia), 112, 117, 127–128 framing by the media, 53–54, 59–64, 66–67 fundamentalism, 111, 113, 115–116, 129(n2), 135–137, 141–142. See also extremism; political Islam Gaintudin, Ravil, 18, 35 Gaspraly, Ismail, 37 gender relations, 3 genocide, Circassian, 122 global Islamic community, 151–152. See also Ummah global neo-jihad, 26–27 global politics: cultural and institutional positioning, 51–52; Islamic factors in Russia’s foreign policy, 128; rise of Islamist Eurasianist geopolitics, 39–42;

193

Russia as a countervailing power to the West, 123; Russia bridging the West and the Muslim world, 118–119; Russia’s regional and global policy objectives in the Middle East, 110, 112–113; uniting force of religious pilgrimages, 69– 70; US and Russian antiterrorist policies, 59; the US as the world’s policeman, 56 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 91, 96, 135 “great power pragmatism,” 144–145 Green Belt, 137 Grozny, Chechnya, 43–45, 58, 94–95, 97–98, 122 Gumilev, Lev, 14, 21 Hajj, 8, 151; Hajjis from the Southern Urals, 73–74, 78–80; men’s impressions of female Hajjis, 80– 81; post-Soviet rise in Russian Muslim participation, 70–71; purpose and importance of, 69–70; quota distribution, 71–73 Hajj Committee, 151 Hamas, 41 Hanafi’ Islam, 2–3 Hasain-Bek, 76 Hezbollah, 41 Hizb ut-Tahrir movement, 116 Hollande, François, 64(table) holy places, pilgrimages to, 74–78 homelands, Soviet construction of, 2–3 honest brokers, 118, 124, 129(n7) humanitarian interventions, 134 Hussein, Saddam, 52, 64(table) Ibn Al-Khattab, 98, 136 identity: ambient faith and the construction of, 16–17; diversity of, 156–157; effect of Hajj participation, 73–74; effects of antireligion campaigns, 91–92; Islamic self-identification, 5–6; language and, 3, 31–32; religion as a source of, 134; Russia’s antiextremism strategy, 154–155;

194

Index

Soviet-constructed culture and ethnic identity, 1–3; Tatar Islam, 3–4 identity, civilizational, 112–113 identity, cultural: Russia’s emphasis on, 119–120 identity, ethnic: ethnogenesis, 14–15; forced population transfers, 86; media framing of terrorism, 54; Refakh movement, 34–35; securitization of, 50–51; shaping Islam in Russia, 150; shift to religious identity, 11–12; state engagement with ambient Islam, 23–27 identity, group: Russian Muslims’ integration into the global community, 151–152 identity, individual, 6; engagement with ambient Islam, 18–19; shaping Islam in Russia, 150 identity, national: Chechen conflict, 95–97; radicalization of Islam in Chechnya, 106; Russian discourse on terrorism, 57; Russia’s emphasis on, 119–120; shaping Islam in Russia, 149–150; Tatar’s Euro-Islam, 36–37; a uniquely Russian-Muslim identity, 157 identity, religious: media framing of terrorism, 54–55; shift from ethnic identity to, 11–12 identity, transnational Islamist, 126 identity politics, the increasing role of religion in, 1–2 ideological square, 53 ideology: chechenization of the conflict, 97; Eurasianism, 15, 39– 42; factors in Russian Islamophobia, 5; framing terrorism, 52; influencing Russian Islamic identity, 150; Kadyrovism, 42–45; political conflict over religious expression, 13–17; preventing the politicization of Islam, 31–32; Russia’s anti-

extremism strategy, 154–155; Russia’s Arab Spring policy, 124; Soviet-era religious oppression, 84–85; Tatarstan’s Euro-Islam, 36– 39; tilting media constructions of reality, 52–53 image construction, 1, 152–153 Ingushetia, Republic of, 2, 33, 72(table), 102, 115 international coalitions, 123 International Islamic Brigade, 136 International Islamic Committee, 40 international relations (IR): the connections with religion, 132– 134; factors shaping the Islamic vector, 7–8, 153–154; Hajj organization, 70; Russia’s role in international and regional politics in the Middle East, 112–113 internet censorship, 58 Iran: conflicting interests in Syria, 109–110; external threat to Russia, 136; international relations and religion, 132–133 Iran-Russia relations: age of pragmatic co-operation, 139–142; Chechnya policy, 140–141; Eurasianist discourse, 142; increasing cooperation and partnership, 143– 146; religious and political factors influencing, 146–147; the role of Islam in, 8; Russia’s antiextremism strategy, 154–155; Russia’s relations with an Islamic government, 136–137; Soviet era, 131–132; suspicion shadowing, 137–139 Iraq: Russia’s bombardment of ISIS, 127; US war in, 118. See also Islamic State in Iraq and Syria Islam, defining, 129(n1) Islamic awakening, 138 Islamic Central Muslim Board of Holy Rus’, 18 Islamic Committee of Russia, 33 Islamic Congress of Russia, 32–33

Index

Islamic Eurasianism, 15 Islamic Marxism, 137 Islamic Party of Rebirth, 32, 40 The Islamic Project and Islamic Alternative (Malashenko), 25 Islamic Putinism, 31–32, 42–45, 151 Islamic Rebirth Party, 32–33, 40 Islamic revival, 4 Islamic Revolution (Iran): anti-Soviet view, 91; Dzhemal’s affinity to, 41; Iran’s attempts to export, 138– 139, 142, 154; Islamization of Iran’s government, 131–132; Soviet concerns over, 136–137 Islamic socialism, 38 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS): binary opposition between Islam and terrorism, 64–67; Caucasian Emirate, 12; Chechen jihadists, 104–105; contrasting Russian and Western values, 121; ethnonationalism and the RussianMuslim rift, 86; increasing global awareness of terrorism, 49–50; most frequently mentioned individuals in the context of, 64(table); recruiting Russian Muslims, 116–117; Russia’s concerns over Iran’s influence on, 143; Russia’s policy objectives, 126–129; St. Petersburg metro attack, 126; Syrian civil war, 109– 110; the threat of Islamic extremism, 135; US and Russian media construction, 59–64, 153 Islamic vector of foreign policy, 6–7, 153, 155 Islamism: Arab Spring, 115; Buryatsky’s expression of, 21–22; Chechen conflict, 98–99; conflating with extremism, 57–58; defining, 129(n1); media frames of terrorism, 60–67; results of antiWestern sentiment, 118; RussianChechen relations, 105–106; security considerations of Russian

195

foreign policy, 128–129. See also Islamic State in Iraq and Syria Islamophobia: factors contributing to, 5; the rise of terrorism in Europe and the Middle East, 49–50 Israel: conflicting interests in Syria, 109–110 itjtihad (critical thinking), 38 Jadidism, 37–39 jama’ats, 25, 45 Jews and Judaism, 11–12, 114 jihad and jihadis: global appropriation of rhetoric and imagery, 26–27; migration of Chechen officials, 152; North Caucasus recruits, 126; Russian Muslims’ involvement with, 12 Jyllands-Posten newspaper, 121 Kadar Zone, 25 Kadyrov, Ramzan, 18, 31, 36, 43–47, 103, 121–122, 150–151 Kadyrovism, 42–47 Karimov, Islam, 121 Kazakhs and Kazakhstan, 2; ethnic and religious identity, 11; Eurasianist politics, 35; Hajj participation, 73; Iran’s inter-Tajik talks, 139; Kadyrovism, 45–46 Kepel, Giles, 19–20 Kerry, John, 64(table) Khakimov, Rafael, 15, 36–39, 46 Khalitov, Ahmet, 40 Khan Kuchum, 35, 47(n1) Khasav-Yurt Accord (1996), 96 Khomeini, Ruhollah, 32, 138–139 Khrushchev, Nikita, 90 Kishiev, Kunta-haji, 44 Klimovich, Lucian, 88–89 Kobané massacre, 63–64 Kommersant newspaper, 60–63 Komsomolskaya pravda newspaper, 63 Kosovo, 106 Kozyrev, Andrei, 138 Kravchuk, Leonid, 93

196

Index

Kriashens, 38–39, 47(n3) Kurdish People’s Protection Unit (YPG), 110 Kyrgyzstan: concerns over Islamic fundamentalism, 135; Iran’s interTajik talks, 139 language, identity and, 3, 31–32 Lavrov, Sergey, 64(table) law courts: state regulation of ambient Islam, 23–24 League of the Militant Atheists, 90 legitimacy of the Chechen government, 83–84 legitimizing role of religion, 133–134, 146–147 Lenin, Vladimir: Cultural Revolution, 90; Dzhemal’s Euro-Islam, 40–41; hostility to religion, 87–88; Islamic origins of communism, 89 liberalism: Khakimov’s Euro-Islam, 36–39 Limonov, Eduard, 40, 42 Lukashevich, Alexander, 64(table), 93 Malashenko, Alexey, 25, 103 Manoilo, Andrei, 120 Marxism: Dzhemal’s Euro-Islam, 40– 41; informing Dzhemal and Dugin’s radicalism, 21; Islamic, 137; Soviet atheism, 85; view of religion, 87–88 masculinity, post-Soviet, 18–19 Maskhadov, Aslan, 95–96, 98–99, 102 Massoud, Ahmed Shah, 140 Mdzhlis coalition, 33 media, 4; American discourse on terrorism, 55–56; binary portrayal of ISIS and terrorism, 65(fig.); the Chechen government’s selfidentification, 83–84; complexity and agendas of US and Russian media systems, 66–67; conflict resolution, 140; distributors of dominant cultural frames, 52–55; engagement with ambient Islam,

19; framing of terrorism and Islam, 49–50; image of Islam and ISIS in US and Russian newspapers, 59–64, 152–153; legitimizing Dzhemal’s EuroIslam, 42; representations of Muslims, 6; Russian discourse on terrorism, 57–58 mediated Islam, 6 mediation: honest brokers, 129(n7); Russia as bridge between the West and the Muslim world, 118–119; Russian foreign policy objectives between the West and the Middle East, 124–125 Merkel, Angela, 64(table) Middle East and North Africa (MENA), 8; conflicting interests in Syria, 109–110; decline of Russian relations, 134; evaluation of foreign policy objectives, 124– 128; international, regional, and domestic factors influencing policy, 128–129, 153–154; Kadyrov’s connections to, 45; Russia’s regional and global policy objectives, 112–113; Russia’s response to the Arab Spring, 112– 113; security considerations for Russian policy, 113–117; strategic considerations for Russian policy, 117–123. See also Iran; Syria migration: anti-Muslim feeling in metropolitan areas, 4–5; Hajj quotas for Russian Muslims, 70; increasing ethnic tensions, 114; Islamic radicalization, 116; Russianization of Russia’s Islam, 31–32; Russia’s Muslim population, 2 Mironov, Sergei, 141 Misunderstanding Terrorism (Sageman), 26 Mitrofanov, Aleksei, 40 moderate Islam: Chechnya, 151–152; influence on Russian foreign

Index

policy, 154; Islamic factors in Russia’s foreign policy, 128; Russian engagement with, 122– 123; Russian-Afghan alignment, 140; Soviet-era religious legacy, 83; state distinguishing between radicals and, 23–24 Mongols, Islamization of, 134 moral disengagement, 51 moral issues in ambient Islam, 7 Moskovskii komsomolets newspaper, 60–62 Mukhitdinov, Damir, 15, 18 Mukozhev, Musa, 12 Muromets, Ilya, 43 Muslim Brotherhood, 32, 122 Muslim-Islam relations, 13 national communism, 38 National Organization of Russian Muslims (NORM), 22, 46 national security. See safety and security nationalism: alternating with Islamism in Chechnya, 105–106; ethnonationalism and the RussianMuslim rift, 86; Islamization of radicalism in Chechnya, 99; legitimizing role of religion, 134; parallels with Islamic renewal, 39– 40; radicalization of nationalism in Chechnya, 94–95; Russian patriotism and Muslim identity, 151; Tatarstani Euro-Islam, 37 Navshirvanovs movement, 87–88 Nazim Al-Haqqani, 76–77 Nazis, Islamist sympathies for, 42 neo-Eurasianism, 14–15, 20–21, 141 New Muslims Movement, 22, 25 New York Times newspaper, 60–63 Niiazov, Abdul-Vakhid, 33–36 nonconformity, radicalism as, 24–27 nonofficial Islam, 23–24 norms: legitimizing role of religion, 133–134 Northern Alliance, 140

197

Northern Caucasus, 12, 114; antiRussian Chechen conflict, 102– 103; center of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, 115–116; Dzhemal’s support of terrorism in, 40–42; EPR, 34; fighters in Syria, 126; Hajj quota distribution, 71–73, 72(table), 151; history of Islam in Russia, 31–32; influences on Muslim communities, 3–4; ISIS recruits, 143; Kadyrovism blending Islam with loyalty to Russia, 42–43; mutual co-optation process, 151; New Muslims reinvigorating Russian Muslims, 22–23; repatriation of Syria’s Muslim Circassians, 122; Russian domination of, 134–135; sources of Russian Islamophobia, 5; Syrian civil war, 128–129. See also Chechen Republic; Chechen wars Novaya gazeta newspaper, 60–62 Nur movement, 33, 40 Obama, Barack, 64(table), 110, 119 October Revolution, 87–88 official Islam, 23–24 Operation Enduring Freedom, 118 Operation Jihad, 98–99, 101–102 Operation Zero, 98–99 oppression, rejecting, 28, 133 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), 127; Iran’s role, 140–141; Russian Muslims at the Hajj, 70; Russia’s diplomatic role in the Islamic world, 118–119 Orlando nightclub shooting, 60–62 othering, the process of, 51–52, 54–56 out-group: portrayal of Muslims bounded by Islamic values, 26. See also us-them perception Pakistan: external threat to Russia, 136 Paris terror attacks, 60–64 passionarity of ethnic groups, 21

198

Index

patriotism: ambient Islam competing for control, 18; Islamic agenda during peacetime, 150–151; Kadyrovism and Islamic Putinism, 43; use for controlling mass media, 58 peace agreement (Chechnya), 96 personal troubles, 12–13 Peskov, Dmitry, 144 pilgrimages, 8; Chechen branding of, 44; grave of the Prophet’s companions, 77–78; to local holy places, 74–76. See also Hajj political engagement: mobilizing a Muslim electorate, 32–36 political Islam: Central Asian parties and movements, 135–136; defining, 129(n1); Dzhemal’s worldview, 40–41; as political weakness, 129; religion in international relations, 132–133; role in regional and world politics, 117–118 Polosin, Ali, 46 popular Islam, 75 population statistics for Russia: Muslim population, 2, 129(n4); Muslims at the Hajj, 70; Muslims in Central Asia, 135; Siberia, 47(n2); traditional faiths, 114 population transfers, forced, 85–86 populism: Iran’s Islamic Revolution, 137 positioning, cultural and institutional, 50–52 pragmatism: cultural and institutional positioning, 50–51; media frame of ISIS, 66; pragmatic cooperation in Iran-Russia relations, 139–142; Putin’s “great power pragmatism,” 144–146; Russian foreign relations, 120–121 Primakov, Evgenii, 118, 141 primitive communism, 87–88 Prokhanov, Alexander, 14, 40 public issues, 12–13

puritanism, Kadyrovism as, 44–45 Pussy Riot, 121 Putin, Vladimir, 64(table); bilateral meetings with Iran, 144; Charlie Hebdo attacks, 121; Chechen support of, 121–123, 150–151; Crimea’s Christian background, 14; Dzhemal’s opposition, 40–42; “great power pragmatism,” 144– 145; Islamic Putinism, 31–32, 151; Kadyrovism, 42–45; military action in Chechnya, 98; Muslim political participation, 35–36; on religious heritage, 16; RussianBelarusian relationship, 93; US claims of exceptionalism, 119; USRussian relations, 110–111, 119– 120; on Western values, 130(n10) quota for the Hajj, 70–73, 151 radical Islam: alignment of Russian traditions and values, 122; Chechen separatism, 83–84; defining, 129(n1); influencing Russia’s Middle East policy, 128– 129; Islamic Republic of Iran, 131–132; Islamization in Chechnya, 99–102; Kadyrovism co-opting elements of, 43–44; legitimizing religion, 146–147; media frame of Islam and terrorism, 65–66; radicalization of the Chechen conflict, 94–95; Russian-Iranian cooperation against, 144–145; Russia’s Middle East policy objectives, 124–126; shifting perception of, 12–13; state distinguishing between moderates and, 23–24; state imposition of Islamic identity on Muslims, 150 radicalism: academic debate over terrorism and, 19–20; conflict resolution, 140; effects of foreign Islamism on Russian Muslims, 20– 22; global trend of associating

Index

Islam with, 21–22; IR scholars’ interest in Islamic revival, 132; Islamization of, 99; Islamization of the Chechen conflict, 106–107; media influence on perceptions of Muslim identity, 152; nonconformity as, 24–27; recent perceptions of Islam, 6; regions of terrorism and, 115–116; Russian perspective of the Chechen conflict, 97–98; Russia’s counterterrorism operations curbing, 105–106. See also political Islam; radical Islam Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi, 139, 142 Rahimov, Rahim, 151–152 Rakhimov, Murtaza, 77 Rakishev, Kenges, 45 Ramadan, 85 reality construction by mass media, 52–55 Refakh-Blagodenstvie movement, 33– 35 refugees, Syrian, 125, 130(n12) regional events and politics: creating a uniquely Russian-Muslim identity, 157; organization of Russian Muslim pilgrimage, 69–70; regulation of the Hajj, 151; Russian policy in the Middle East, 110; shaping Islam in Russia, 149– 152. See also Middle East and North Africa Regulation of the Russian HajjMission, 70–71 Reisner, Mikhail, 88 religion-state separation, 8, 83, 91–92 religiosity, 5–6, 114 religious freedom: Bolsheviks attracting Muslim populations, 87– 88; performing the Hajj, 70; pilgrimages to local holy places, 76–77 religious oppression, Soviet, 84–85 revisionist state, Iran as, 147 Rossiyskaya gazeta newspaper, 60–63

199

Rouhani, Hassan, 144 Roy, Oliver, 19–20 Russia-Chechnya agreement, 96 Russian Civil War, 87–88 Russian Orthodox culture: ambient Islam competing for control, 18; Crimea’s religious significance, 14; Dzhemal’s radicalization, 20– 21; equating religious and national virtues, 121; Kadyrovism and patriotism, 43; parallels with Islamic renewal, 39–40; religious education in Russian schools, 5; religious traditions drifting from religious institutions, 16; Russia’s traditional faiths, 114; Soviet-era religious oppression, 84–85 Russian passenger jet attack, 127 Sadikov, Maksud, 33 Sadulayev, Abdul Halim, 102–103 Sadur, Vali, 33 safety and security: creating an usthem relationship, 50–51; early threats from Islamic lands, 134– 135; ethnic profiling, 11–12; Muslim Circassians, 122–123; political Islam influencing policy decisions, 129; Russian involvement in the OIC, 118–119; Russian perception of terrorism, 57; Russian policy in the Middle East, 113–117; Russia’s antiextremism strategy, 154–155; Russia’s Muslim population, 2; securitization issues in the media, 53–54; shaping Islam in Russia, 149–150 Sageman, Mark, 26–27 St. Petersburg metro attack, 126 Salafi Islam, 4; Dagestani engagement with, 17; Dzhemal’s worldviews, 41–42; Kadyrovism and, 44; portrayal of transnational radicalism as, 26–27; religious traditions in the Southern Urals,

200

Index

75–77; returning to authentic Islamic roots, 22–23; Tatarstani Euro-Islam, 37 Salamworld, 36 Saudi Arabia: Hajj quota distribution, 72(table); role in the Second Chechen War, 136; Russian Muslims at the Hajj, 70–71, 73– 74; Russia’s Islamic radicalization, 116; Russia’s Middle East policy, 125 Second Chechen War, 6, 33, 41–42, 98, 102–103, 136 secular culture, 83; Chechen conflict, 84; Russia’s Middle East policy, 125; Soviet anti-religious campaigns, 91–92; Tatar model of Islam, 3; transformation of, 151– 152 self-identification, 5–6 self-positioning, 51–52 separatism: Chechen secessionism, 83–84; concerns about Muslim loyalty, 114; conflict resolution, 140; Georgia and Ukraine, 106; Russian discourse on terrorism, 57; threatening Russian territorial integrity, 135 September 11, 2001: effects on the perception of the Chechen conflict, 103–104; ethnonationalism and the Russian-Muslim rift, 86; framing the war on terror, 53; influence on the public perception of terrorism, 49–50; the narrative linking Islam and terrorism, 65–66; religion in international relations, 132; religious and ethnic identity, 11– 12; as a Zionist-CIA plot, 20 Seyfullah, Amir, 12 Shafi’ Islam, 2–3, 43 Shaimiev, Mintimer, 36–37 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 144 sharia law: ambient Islam, 25; imposition in Chechnya, 101;

Kadyrovism in Chechnya, 44; legal separatism, 115–116; purpose of pilgrimage, 80 Shia Islam: Dzhemal’s affiliation, 41; population statistics, 2; as revolutionary force, 20–21; Russia’s Middle East policy, 125, 127 Shoigu, Sergei, 35 Sidorov, Vadim, 22 Slavic ethnicities, 92 Slavophilic traditions, 18 Slezkin, Yuri, 1–2 social change, the role of ambient Islam in, 7, 23 social protest movement, Islam as, 89 socialism. See Marxism sociological imagination, 12–13 Southern Urals: grave of the Prophet’s companions, 77–78; Hajj participation, 73–74, 78–80; Islamic radicalization, 116; pilgrimage practices, 8, 69–70, 74–75; traditions of Salafism and Sufism in, 75–77; women’s status, 81 Soviet era: emergence of anti-Islamic perceptions, 84–94; Hajj regulation, 79; influencing Islamic identity, 150; Iran as a threat to the Soviet Union, 136–137; IranSoviet relations, 131–132, 136– 137; Kadyrov’s traditionalism and nationalism, 43–44; mobilizing a Muslim electorate, 32; Muslim population figures, 129(n4); nationbuilding and constructing communism, 1–2; pilgrimages among Muslim communities, 76; political narrative on terrorism, 57–58; political religion, 16; treatment of religion, 86–90 Spiritual Boards of Muslims, 34–36, 41, 46 Stalin, Joseph, 16; as martyred saint, 14; unified theory of Islam, 89–90

Index

state authority: creating a uniquely Russian-Muslim identity, 157; engagement with ambient Islam, 23–27; Russian pragmatism and fundamental values, 120; Russia’s relations with Iran as an Islamic government, 136–137; shaping Islam in Russia, 149–152. See also federal government strategic considerations for foreign policy, 117–123 Sufism: Dagestani engagement with, 17; Islam’s conforming to communism, 87–88; Muslim loyalty to Moscow, 114–115; religious traditions in the Southern Urals, 75–77; as revolutionary force, 20–21 Sunni Islam, 32; Chechnya, 43; Dzhemal’s ambivalence over, 41; population statistics, 2; Russian fear of fundamentalism, 116; Russia’s Middle East policy, 125 Syria and the Syrian civil war: Chechen Muslim migration to jihadi groups, 152; conflicting interests in, 109– 110; impact on Russia’s Muslim population, 116; Iran-Russian relations, 143–144, 146–147; media construction of reality, 53; Muslim Circassians, 122–123; refugee numbers, 130(n12); Russia as a countervailing power to the West, 123; Russian anti-terrorist activities, 144; Russian criticism of American policy, 120; Russian foreign policy objectives, 127; Russia’s Middle East policy, 125; Russia’s role as mediator, 124; shifting the Chechen conflict to, 104–105; US and Russian antiterrorist policies, 59; US and Russian media strategies surrounding, 50; US anti-Islam policy, 118. See also Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

201

Tadjuddin, Talgat, 18, 45–46 Tajikistan: concerns over Islamic fundamentalism, 135; Iran’s interTajik talks, 139; party mobilization, 32–33 Tajikistan Civil War, 139–140 Taliban, 140 Tamerlane, 77–78 Tasmagambetov, Imangali, 45 Tatar model of Islam, 3 Tatars and Tatarstan: engagement with ambient Islam, 18–19, 25; Eurasianism, 15; Euro-Islam, 36– 39; federation treaty, 94; Hajj participation, 73; Hajj quota distribution, 71–73, 72(table), 151; Muslim-Russian identity, 2; population statistics, 3, 114; Siberian population, 47(n2); women’s engagement with ambient Islam, 18–19 Tatarstan-New Century Party, 36–37 Tehran Agreement, 139–140 terrorism: academic debate over radicalization and, 19–20; Charlie Hebdo attacks, 58, 121; collapse of the Soviet Union, 135; defining, 50–51; Dzhemal’s worldviews, 41–42; ethnic separatism and, 135–136; Islamic Committee accusations, 40; media framing strategies, 7–8, 49–50, 54–55, 59–64, 152–153; as public threat, 126–127; regions of radicalization and, 115–116; Russian discourse, 57–59; Russia’s Middle East policy objectives, 124, 127; St. Petersburg metro attack, 126; shifting perception of, 12–13; US and Russian media framing of Islam and ISIS, 4, 59–64; US foreign policy and discourse, 55– 56 thematic framing by the media, 54 theology, Muslim identity without, 17

202

Index

Tikhomirov, Alexander, 21 Tomara, Mikhail, 88 trade and commerce: driving news production and framing, 54–55; Hajj trips used for, 79; Iran-Russia relations, 142; role in the emergence of Islam, 87–89 traditional faiths, 114 Trump, Donald: effect on US-Russian relations, 110–111; view of Iran as terrorist nation, 144 Turkey: conflicting interests in Syria, 110, 127; Eurasianist International Movement, 35; external threats to Russia, 136; Russia’s Middle East policy, 125; Syrian cease-fire, 143–144 Turkic peoples: Jadid tradition, 37–38; pilgrimage practices, 74–75; pilgrimage to local holy places, 75–77 Udaltsov, Sergei, 42 Udugov, Movladi, 41–42, 96 Ukraine: Chechen separatism and, 106; decline in US-Russia relations, 110; decline of Russian relations, 134; Russian policy in the Middle East, 145; Soviet legacy in Russia-Ukraine relations, 92–93 Umakhanov, Ilyas, 70 Umarov, Doku, 103 Ummah: ambient Islam, 151; Bashkortostan’s holy places, 78; Chechen separatism, 83–84; Hajj participation, 73–75; the importance of pilgrimages, 76–77; Islam in IR and foreign policy, 133; principles of interaction with others, 133; the purpose of pilgrimage, 69–70, 80–81; resisting institutional framing of “legitimate” Islam, 156–157; spread of the Chechen conflict, 102; Tatarstani Euro-Islam, 36–37

Union of Muslims of Russia, 33 United Nations Security Council: Iran’s peacemaking role, 140 United Russia party, 34, 36–37 United States: anti-Islamic foreign policies, 118–119; decline of Russian relations, 134; Dzhemal’s Euro-Islam demonizing, 41; funding the Chechen conflict, 101; media construction of Muslim images and terrorism, 8, 152–153; Russian and Iranian military operations in Syria, 143–144; terrorism discourse, 55–56; Trump’s view of Iran as terrorist nation, 144 urban migration, 4–5 urban-rural divides, 3 USA Today newspaper, 63 us-them perception: binary view of Islam and Islamism, 65–67; defining and characterizing terrorism, 50–51; ethnocentric labeling, 55–56; media portrayal of terrorism, 8; US and Russian media framing Islam and terrorism, 64–67, 153 Uzbekistan and Uzbeks: concerns over Islamic fundamentalism, 135; Iran’s inter-Tajik talks, 139; St. Petersburg metro attack, 126 values and beliefs: contrasting Russian and Western values, 119–121; equating religious and national virtues, 121–122; media framing of terrorism, 54–55; Putin’s view of Western values, 130(n10); state cooperation with religious institutions, 156 Volga region, 31, 70; Euro-Islam, 36– 37; Islamic radicalization, 115– 116; Kadyrovism, 45; mutual cooptation process, 151; Russian domination of, 134–135; Russia’s traditional faiths, 114

Index

Wahhabism, 35, 102; appeal to younger Muslims, 4; as external threat to Russia, 136; fatwa against, 45; importation into Chechnya, 98, 101; Islamic Party of Rebirth, 32; Russian perception of radical Islam, 57–58; security considerations for Russian Middle East policy, 114–115; split over pure Islam, 27 Wall Street Journal newspaper, 60–64 war, culture of, 56–57 war on terrorism: Chechen conflict as Russia’s war on terror, 103–104; framing by the media, 53; impact on US-Russian relations, 153; the public perception of terrorism, 49– 50 Washington Post newspaper, 60–62 Western politics and values: antiIslamic foreign policies, 118–119; Atlanticist foreign policy, 137–139; civilizational counterweights in Russian policy, 129; contrasting Russian and Western values, 119– 121; decline in Russian relations, 110–111, 134; Iran and Russia challenging Western hegemony,

203

147; Islamic Party of Rebirth mobilizing against, 32–33; Putin’s view of, 130(n10); Russia’s Middle East policy objectives, 124, 153– 154. See also United States Westphalian international order, 132 women: adherence to Kadyrov requirements, 44–45; Hajjis from the Southern Urals, 79–80; men’s impressions of female Hajjis, 80– 81; Tatar women’s engagement with ambient Islam, 18–19 World War II: forced population transfers, 85–86 Wright Mills, Charles, 12–13 Ya’alon, Moshe, 64(table) Yakhin, Khalit, 33, 40 Yandarbiyev, Zelimkhan, 95, 98, 101 Yarullin, Vafa, 33 Yeltsin, Boris, 96, 138 youth: engagement with ambient Islam, 19 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 40 ziyarat (grave visiting), 74–78 Zubair bin Zait, 77–78 Zuganov, Gennady, 14, 16–17

About the Book

Russia’s Muslims, numbering some 15 million, constitute far from a homogeneous sociopolitical group. So . . . What does it mean to be a Muslim in Russia today? How is the image of Islam constructed, and how do the country’s Muslims—and non-Muslims—perceive and react to it? These are the questions that gave rise to this book. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the authors explore in what ways, and with what impact, Islam in contemporary Russia has been shaped by the interactions of the Soviet legacy, local cultures and languages, and external forces. They also address the influence of Islam on Russia’s current Middle East policy. Their work is a rich and distinctive contribution to enhancing our understanding of the complexity and fluidity of Muslim identity in post-Soviet Russian politics and society. Gregory Simons is associate professor in the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University. He is also lecturer in the Department of Communication Science at Turiba University and in the Department of International Relations at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Formerly, he was a lead researcher the Ural Humanitarian Institute of the Ural Federal University. Marat Shterin is professor of the sociology of religion at King’s College London. Eric Shiraev is professor and senior research associate in the Schar School of Policy and Government, George Mason University.

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