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Russia’s Islam and Orthodoxy beyond the Institutions: Languages of Conversion, Competition and Convergence
Alfrid K. Bustanov and Michael Kemper
The five articles gathered here offer glimpses of the diversity of Islam in Russia, and of Islam’s complex interaction with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). We do not look at the core of the officially promoted faith bureaucracies that usually attract most attention, the Moscow Patriarchate and Russia’s various Muftiates. Rather, we attempt to map the vibrant field at the margins or beyond these large religious apparatuses. What is the agency of academic experts and journalists, of Orthodox and Islamic missionaries, and also of radical Muslim public intellectuals and jihadist ideologists? How do they operate in the Russian political environment, where the official religious authorities are largely co-opted by the state, and where all religious issues are highly sensitive?
Just like the ROC (as well as Judaism and Buddhism), Islam is recognized as a ‘traditional religion’ of the Russian Federation, and both the ROC and organized Islam contribute to the patriotic discourse that regards these faith organizations as important pillars of morality and social orientation. Islam and the ROC contribute to mobilizing the population to hold a positive view of Russia’s peculiar multi-ethnic past and present. Both also present themselves as important national assets with regard to foreign relations (with the Orthodox and Muslim worlds, respectively) (see Payne 2010; Curanović 2012), and for national security and the fight against radicalism. And just as the ROC is interested in curtailing the influence of Catholic, Protestant and other allegedly ‘Western’ religious organizations (see Fagan 2013), so too Russia’s officially registered Muftiates aim at eliminating Islamic movements coming from Turkey, the Arab world and South Asia, as well as domestic contenders that offer alternative views on Islam.
In this triangle with the ROC and the state, Islam is clearly treated as the minor brother of the ROC. This of course reflects the differences between them in size and scope: while the ROC claims to represent some 150 million Orthodox worldwide, including in Ukraine, Belarus and Central Asia, the number of Muslims residing in the Russian Federation is estimated at about 20 million. And while the ROC is an expanding unitary organization with a clear hierarchy and with the Patriarch as its prominent figurehead, Russia’s officially recognized Islam is fragmented over perhaps as many as 70 local, regional and national Muftiates (in Russian: Dukhovnoe upravlenie musul’man, DUM; ‘Spiritual Administrations of Muslims’) (for overviews, see Zdorovets 2007; Silant’ev 2008).
One major player in this competition for Islamic authority in Russia is Talgat Tadzhuddin (b. 1946), ‘Grand Mufti’ and chairman of the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Ufa (TsDUM). This umbrella organization grew out of the Imperial Muftiate founded in 1788 by Catherine the Great (see Azamatov 1999; Crews 2009, 31–91), and restructured under Stalin (see Ro’i 2000). Tadzhuddin’s major challenger has been Ravil’ Gainutdin, Mufti of the DUM of the Russian Federation (DUM RF) in Moscow that emerged in 1994. Gainutdin is also chairman of the Council of Russia’s Muftis (Sovet muftiev Rossii), an umbrella organization that includes the ‘Volga Mufti’ Mukaddas Bibarsov (in Saratov) and Nafigulla Ashirov of the DUM of the Siberian Part of Russia, among others. Many regions and cities with Muslim populations have two or more DUMs, one under the Moscow umbrella and others officially following Tadzhuddin in Ufa; mosque communities attach themselves to one of them or to independent Muftiates. Beyond these two major networks, there are ‘republican’ DUMs that largely depend on the political administrations of the regions where they operate: thus the Tatarstani DUM in Kazan is closely connected to the leadership of the Republic of Tatarstan, and all North Caucasus republics of the Russian Federation (such as Daghestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria) have their own ‘national’ DUMs, and tolerate no competitor on their territory. A special case is Chechnya, where the national Muftiate supports the policies of Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov to position himself as Russia’s foremost Muslim leader. The various Muftiates are entrenched in fierce competition for state recognition and funding, and thereby inhibit each other’s outreach and capacities.
Weakened by fragmentation, official Islam in Russia is struggling to reaffirm its identity while at the same time being forced to follow in the footsteps of the dominant Christian confession and, above all, to allay anxieties about the growing prominence of Islam in the public sphere. This leads to tensions between officials of the two confessions. At times the Patriarchate and the Muftiates make alliances to pursue common goals, as for instance when it comes to the introduction of religious subjects in public schools and of PhD tracks in theology at universities, but here too the ROC clearly enjoys preferential treatment.
This political constellation has also shaped the existing research literature. Russia’s Islam and the ROC are mostly studied in isolation from each other, and each in relation to the state.1 Research on interfaith relations is largely limited to institutional interaction (see, e.g. Peyrouse 2008; Verkhovsky 2008; Warhola 2008). In the case of Islam, the fragmentation of the organizational landscape makes many scholars focus on regional issues (see, e.g. Matsuzato and Ibragimov 2005; Matsuzato 2007; Graney 2016), perpetuating the image of Russia’s Islam as a patchwork of unconnected Muslim islands in the form of the ‘national’ autonomous republics such as Tatarstan and Daghestan. The broader perspective on Islam in Russia as a whole is chosen when it comes to radicalism and terrorism studies, which usually argue that jihadism spread from the Middle East to the North Caucasus and then further to Russia’s Volga region (see Hahn 2007). Only a few Russian insiders manage to make the regional trends of Islamic identity projects speak to each other in an overall Russian framework of Islam (see Malashenko 2007).
We argue that the conventional focus on contending religious apparatuses obfuscates the interaction between religious players who operate beyond the confessional institutions or at their margins, where they often find themselves under considerable pressure, but where they can also establish niches for themselves and attract much prominence. Some of these marginal or external players provide major challenges to the official paradigm of Russia’s ‘traditional’ inter-confessional harmony. This makes these actors vulnerable, and some of the major characters that we deal with in this special issue have suffered a violent death – either because their perseverance made them targets of terrorism, or because they themselves became terrorists. But, as Danis Garaev shows in this issue, even among the terrorists we observe the processes of convergence, of ‘Russifying Islam’, that otherwise characterizes the patriotic discourse of the officially recognized religious authorities.
Conversions of faith and language
The case studies presented in this issue of Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations pay attention to individual careers, to how actors accumulate religious and at times political authority, and in particular to the strategies they develop in the competition for influence. Very prominent are instances of conversion – from atheism to religion, from one faith to another, and from moderate views to radicalism and back again. Perhaps these massive conversion processes are the most characteristic feature of contemporary Russia’s religious dynamism; religious actors navigate their path in a very complex and fluid environment.
Some prominent Islamic authorities (such as the Tatar Deputy Mufti Valiulla Iakupov, who was assassinated in 2012) (see Bustanov and Kemper 2013a), gained their first organizational experience in the Komsomol. This, however, does not mean that religiosity’s rise to political prominence since the late 1980s can easily be explained by the vacuum left by socialist ideology. A more adequate explanation would be to acknowledge that religions benefitted from the end of state restrictions on religious expression, and from the opening up of the public realm to missionary movements and literatures. These came not only from beyond Russia but also from within: in the post-Stalinist USSR, the spectrum of religious practices was already diverse, and even post-Soviet Salafism has local roots (see Muminov 2005; Dudoignon and Noack 2014; Bustanov forthcoming). In this light, the ongoing fortification of the official ‘traditionalism’ paradigm also appears as a return to Soviet styles of administering religion – with significant funding from the state, and with a growing readiness of the authorities to limit or silence the expression and practice of alternative views and experiences.
The presentation of ‘traditionalism’, vaguely defined as the good home-grown Islam and Orthodoxy, and the denunciation of all other contenders as unpatriotic foreign threats to Russia’s ‘spiritual security’ (Fagan 2013, 101–110), ignore not only the diversity of those global alternatives but also the wide scope of Russia’s historical approaches to Islamic interpretation. The strong support for the construction of ‘traditional’ Islam as a supposedly ‘unpolitical’ and loyal bulwark against radicalism in fact contributes massively to the politicization of Islam in its entirety. The victims of these political processes are not only alternative religious convictions, beliefs and spiritualities, but also the development of theology as a discursive field where legitimate propositions are elaborated and critically discussed. The shrinking of what can legitimately be said about religion creates the real vacuum, and we argue that it is private actors that step into this void. In spite of the state’s attempt to defy globalization, Russia’s Islam remains strongly shaped by global processes of individualization and the privatization of religion, which make religion a big market place for individual choices and bricolages (see, e.g. Kirmse 2010). A deconstruction of the macro narratives – whether promoted by the state, the Church, the official leaders of Islam, or by the Islamic militants – reveals the various ways in which individuals and communities re-assemble elements of national, religious and historical discourses in the form of new identity projects. The religious apparatuses regard these projects as targeted provocations.
Next to this focus on religious entrepreneurs, the second methodological commonality of the contributions assembled here is their attention to discursive strategies, and more specifically to the use of language. As the Russian language has been steadily gaining ground as an overarching language of Islam that is accessible to all Muslims in Russia, we argue that the Russian language itself is also going through a process of conversion: when writing about Islam, Russian-speaking Muslims have to make linguistic choices about how to present Islamic concepts in Russian. These linguistic practices enlarge the Islamic repertoire of the Russian language.
That this linguistic conversion is a conscious strategy became visible in January 2015, when Mufti Ravil’ Gainutdin, chairman of the Moscow-based DUM RF, introduced the Russian term rozhdestvo (in Russian, the feast of ‘the birth’, denoting ‘Christmas’) for the public celebration of mawlid al-nabī, the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. Gainutdin’s stated goal was to make Islam appear less alien to the general Russian public – and to the State Duma, where he would like to deliver the equivalent of the ‘Christmas Message’ given by the Patriarch. This innovation sparked a lively debate among Muslim and Orthodox observers (see Mukhametov 2015). Other examples of the deliberate adoption of Orthodox vocabulary are in the reference to the Moscow Friday Mosque as the ‘Cathedral Mosque’, or when regional Muftiates claim that they are in ‘canonical unity’ with an overarching Muftiate that operates on the national level. Another extreme case is when Gainutdin’s major challenger, Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin of the ‘Central’ TsDUM in Ufa, calls himself the ‘Grand Mufti of Holy Rus’’, thereby implicitly claiming for himself the same position as the Patriarch. But the use of Orthodox terminology to denote Islamic structures, practices and religious titles ultimately goes back to the imperial and Soviet eras, when state administrators were already reading Islam through the prism of Russian Orthodoxy.
Competing Islamic actors thus develop their own terminologies, styles and symbols to promote their specific theological and political standpoints. A Russian text full of Arabic loanwords speaks to other audiences than a text written in plain Russian, where Islamic terms are systematically replaced by Russian equivalents; as these equivalents are of necessity of Church-Slavonic origin, they carry Orthodox connotations. In a previous publication, we have suggested that Muslim authors in Russia develop distinct ‘styles’, which, taken together, form the emerging Russian Islamic sociolect. This can be defined as the specific variant of the Russian language that is shaped by Islamic content, expressions and symbolism, as well as by the occasions on which it becomes dominant and, of course, by its speakers’ intentions. One of these styles, which we have called ‘Russianism’, dresses all Islamic concepts in Slavonic equivalents, as is illustrated by the examples given above; its counterpart, ‘Arabism’, is marked by the massive introduction of Arabic-origin terms into the Russian language.2 These ‘styles’ are used side by side, and are often linked to particular interpretations of Islam: thus ‘Russianism’ is most often employed by the Muftiates, whereas ‘Arabism’ is by and large characteristic of Sufi and Salafi circles (showing that, despite their mutual enmity, Sufis and Salafis are developing the same idiom) (see Bustanov and Kemper 2012, esp. 7–26 and 403–416). Moreover, individual authors are able to switch between these codes to address different audiences, just as many Muslim authorities are able to alternate between Russian and, for example, their native Tatar when writing about Islam.
The Russian Islamic sociolect that we postulate shares several features with the Russian Orthodox sociolect, a concept that Moscow scholar Irina V. Bugaeva (2009, 2010) has introduced and elaborated upon. Yet while the Orthodox language is characterized by vertically organized styles depending on social settings (liturgy, parish, home, journalism, academia), the Islamic sociolect is shaped by the above-mentioned complementary distribution of ‘styles’ defined by lexical choices and connected to particular messages (Bustanov and Kemper 2013b).
Another horizontal fragmentation of the Russian Islamic sociolect stems from its interaction with Russia’s various ‘Muslim’ minority languages, including Tatar, Bashkir, Chechen and Avar (which themselves have been strongly impacted by Russian interferences). In this way, the Russian language is incorporating specific Islamic terms which, in their forms and pronunciations, reveal Tatar, Avar or other ‘ethnic’ origins. All this shows that any content-related analysis of how Islam is becoming ‘enrooted’ in Russian culture must go hand in hand with attention to linguistic strategies.
But convergences are also observed in the missionary strategies of Orthodox and Islamic activists, including borrowings from Protestant models, as Gulnaz Sibgatullina shows in her article in this issue. Furthermore, assertive Islamic and Orthodox missionaries develop common ground in their negative assessment of the official religious institutions in Russia.
Russia’s Muftiates and the paradigm of ‘traditionalism’
While the ‘traditional’ Muslim landscape in Russia is thus heavily fragmented both institutionally and linguistically, the leading positions in most Muftiates and major mosques in Russia (the North Caucasus excluded) are occupied by ethnic Tatars. In imperial and Soviet times, the Muftiate in Ufa was already administered by Tatars and, during the twentieth century, most mosques in Russia used the Tatar language for sermons and communication. However, recent demographic developments have changed the mosque-going communities: especially in big cities like Moscow and St Petersburg, the Tatar audience has become a minority among Muslim migrants from Central Asia. The state still supports the Tatar Islamic elite, with the obvious aim of preventing Islamic authorities from Central Asia and the Caucasus from rising to prominence. The Tatars are also expected to limit the influence of the growing group of ethnic Russian Muslims, some of whose radical representatives are very vocal (as Gulnaz Sibgatullina and Michael Kemper touch upon in this issue); the Church is particularly anxious about these Russian Muslims. Equally problematic is that the ‘old guard’ of Tatar muftis received their Islamic education only at the Mir-i Arab madrasa in Bukhara in Soviet Uzbekistan, where the Soviet secret service (KGB) controlled the curriculum, the staff and the student intake (see Tasar 2016). Even if they later added additional diplomas to their CVs, most of these senior muftis still lack a serious grounding in Islamic sciences, and therefore receive limited respect from a youn...
