POLITICS: ISLAM AND EURASIANISM
6. ARE RUSSIA'S MOSLEMS A COMMUNITY?
SOURCE. Dmitri Glinski, "Russia and its Moslems: The Politics of Identity at the International-Domestic Frontier," The East European Constitutional Review, Vol. 11, Nos. 1-2, Winter-Spring 2002.
Regular readers of JRL will be familiar with the name of Dmitri Glinski, senior associate at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences and co-author with Peter Reddaway of "The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy" (Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Pressm 2001).
In this article, Glinski considers whether Russia's Moslems constitute a community that "represents or could evolve into a cohesive and influential actor in domestic and foreign policy."
Some 40 ethnic groups in Russia are generally classified as "traditionally Islamic." According to the 1989 census, these groups made up about 12 million people, roughly 8 percent of the population. Current estimates range from 13 up to 20 million, a figure that the author thinks much too high, with the increase due to in-migration (e.g., refugees from the Caucasus and Tajikistan) as well as high birth rates among many "Islamic" ethnic groups.
Glinski argues that it is seriously misleading to estimate the number of Moslems on the basis of ethnic group affiliation. On the one hand, many "ethnic Moslems" (especially Tatars) lost their religious faith in the Soviet period and have not recovered it. On the other hand, many people who do not come from traditionally Islamic ethnic backgrounds, including young Russians, have converted to Islam in the last decade.
Islam has proven attractive to many spiritually disenchanted Orthodox Christians, the most famous such figure being the former priest Vyacheslav (now Ali Vyacheslav) Polosin. Moslem communities have appeared even in areas lacking an "ethnic-Moslem" population, such as Karelia in the far north of European Russia near the border with Finland. Here Moslems are said now to number 20,000 (3 percent of the population). Glinski suggests that people become interested in Islam for various reasons, including sympathy with a persecuted minority and the high level of moral and material support that a Moslem community offers its members.
The author points to the important dissimilarities between Islam in different parts of Russia -- on the Volga, in the Northern Caucasus, in Karelia, etc. Thus the Islam traditional to the Caucasus is suffused by Sufism and pre-Islamic beliefs. In the Caucasus as elsewhere, Islam commonly serves as an instrument of secular ethno-political priorities.
Nevertheless, Russian Islam may be in the process of cohering as a single political community. If this does occur, it will be as a defensive reaction to the intolerant Islamophobia of mainstream Russian society -- a syndrome shared by both Orthodox Christian Slavophiles (e.g. the CPRF) and Eurocentric liberals (e.g. Yabloko). Ruling circles in Moscow have persistently denied Russia's Moslems political representation and social recognition: for example, only 3 out of 154 government ministers serving in the seven cabinets between 1992 and 2002 were Moslems. Under these circumstances, even the best integrated "Islamic" ethnic group, the Tatars, begin to feel marginalized. Thus Huntington's thesis of the "clash of civilizations" -- even more fashionable in Russia than in the West -- becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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