No, the fighting in the Caucasus is not evidence of a “clash of civilisations” between the Islamic world and other geopolitical blocks
Oct 7th 1999
*Calling all Chechens: Commander Basaev
*Khattab (centre): an “Afghani” in the Caucasus
*A time to dance: independence celebrations in Chechnya
AT LEAST until recently, the main enemy of Islamic terrorism seemed to be the United States. However diverse and quarrelsome its practitioners, they knew what they hated most: the global policeman whom they accused of propping up Israel, starving the Iraqis and undermining the Muslim way of life with an insidiously attractive culture.
Anti-Americanism, after all, has been a common thread in a series of spectacular acts of violence over the past decade. They include the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in February 1993; the explosion that killed 19 American soldiers at a base in Saudi Arabia in June 1996; and the deadly blasts at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
In many of the more recent attacks it has suffered, the United States has discerned the hand of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born co-ordinator of an international network of militant Muslims. In February last year, he and his sympathisers in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh issued a statement declaring that “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it.” Such blood-curdling talk was inevitably seized on by believers in the “clash of civilisations” described by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor who said in 1993 that cultural or religious fault-lines were the most likely source of conflict in the post-cold-war world.
Now, it might appear, Russia’s turn has come to do battle on a new front in this many-sided conflict. The Russian government has blamed terrorists from the country’s Muslim south for a series of bomb blasts in Moscow and other cities which have claimed over 300 lives. And it has launched a broadening land and air attack against the mainly Muslim republic of Chechnya, where the terrorists are alleged to originate.
In their more strident moments, officials and newspaper columnists in Moscow say that Russia is in the forefront of a fight between “civilisation and barbarism” and is therefore entitled to western understanding. “We face a common enemy, international terrorism,” Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, told President Bill Clinton last month. As evidence that anti-Russian and anti-American guerrillas have at least one common source, officials in Moscow have pointed to the alleged involvement of Mr bin Laden and his fighters, both in the Caucasus and in the urban bombing campaign.
In most of their comments, President Boris Yeltsin and his lieutenants have been careful to distinguish between their current adversaries and Muslims in general. “Terrorists are an enemy with no faith or nationality,” Mr Yeltsin has said. Russian diplomats are stressing the support they have received from many Muslim governments—particularly Iran’s, which is seen in Moscow as an important strategic partner and counterweight to western influence in the Caspian.
Whereas western countries have chided Russia (mildly) for its military operation against Chechnya, Iran has been much more supportive. Kamal Kharrazi, Iran’s foreign minister, has promised “effective collaboration” with the Kremlin against what he has described as terrorists bent on destabilising Russia. Russia, for its part, has thanked Iran for using its chairmanship of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to present the Russian case.
Perhaps because of Russia’s friendship with certain parts of the Muslim world, Mr Putin has firmly rejected the view that the “bandits” Russia is now fighting could properly be described as Islamic. “They are international terrorists, most of them mercenaries, who cover themselves in religious slogans,” he insists.
But ordinary Muslims in the Moscow street—whether they are of Caucasian origin, or from the Tatar or Bashkir nations based in central Russia—fear a general backlash. “Politicians and the mass media are equating us, the Muslim faithful, with armed groups,” complains Ravil Gainutdin, Russia’s senior mufti. Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox church, has been urging his flock not to blame their 18m Muslim compatriots for the recent violence. “Russian Christians and Muslims traditionally live in peace,” he has reminded them. His senior bishops—probably with a nod of encouragement from Russian officialdom—are engaged in a set-piece theological dialogue with Iran’s spiritual leaders.
Clash, or conspiracy?
But even if Russia’s southern war is not yet a “clash of civilisations”, might it soon become one? And if so, would that bring Russia closer to the West, or push it farther away?
Islam is certainly one element in the crisis looming on Russia’s southern rim, but it is by no means the only one. The latest flare-up began in August in the wild border country between Chechnya—which has been virtually independent since Russian troops were forced out, after two years of brutal war, in 1996—and Dagestan, a ramshackle, multi-ethnic republic where a pro-Russian government has been steadily losing control.
Two factors came together to set the scene for conflict. One was the long-running feud between Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s elected president, and Shamil Basaev, a younger and more militant figure with a history of involvement in spectacular acts of violence. The other factor was the emergence, in the morass of lawlessness and poverty that has engulfed both republics, of a new and more zealous form of Islam, mainly imported from Saudi Arabia.
A few weeks ago, Mr Basaev and his militant Dagestani friends (who, at least so far, have been a small, unpopular minority among their compatriots) proclaimed a sort of mini-state inside Dagestan. They spoke of creating a Russia-free zone stretching at least from Chechnya to the Caspian Sea. In its biggest show of force for three years, the Russian high command blasted the rebels with fighter-bombers and artillery. By early September, it claimed to have forced them to retreat from Dagestan into Chechnya.
The story took an entirely new turn with a series of bomb attacks in Russian cities in September. The worst, on September 13th, claimed 119 lives. The authorities were quick to blame the explosions on Chechen terrorists, though they did not provide evidence, and Chechen leaders denied involvement.
Many people in Russia did not need any evidence; the government’s allegations simply confirmed the anti-Chechen, and generally anti-Caucasian, prejudice they already harboured. Other Russians take a more cynical view. They believe the bomb attacks are somehow related to the power struggle raging in Moscow as the “courtiers” of President Yeltsin try to cling to their power and privilege in the face of looming electoral defeat.
Even those who believe that Chechens, and only Chechens, are responsible for the bombs have had their faith tested at times. In the town of Ryazan, the security services were caught virtually red-handed after placing a quantity of explosives in an apartment building. They claimed it was part of an exercise to “test the readiness” of the population.
Such incidents are grist to the mill of Moscow’s conspiracy theorists. Some believe that the bombs were indeed the work of Chechen extremists, but insist that the fighting in the south is mainly the result of Russian provocation; some say it is the other way round. Whatever the truth, the crisis has certainly played into the hands of the most hardline elements in Russia’s leadership. But there are also signs that people from outside Russia have been stirring the pot.
Mark Galeotti, a British lecturer on Russia’s armed forces, says there is evidence that Mr bin Laden, while not the instigator of the urban bombing campaign, has offered financial help to its perpetrators. And fighters under the influence of Mr bin Laden have certainly been active in Chechnya and Dagestan—though their presence is probably not the main reason why war is raging now.
With or without some mischief-making by dark forces in Moscow, Russia would have a problem in the northern Caucasus. Hostility between Russians and Chechens goes back to the north Caucasian wars of the 19th century, when the tsar’s forces took more than 50 years to bring the Chechens under control. As well as strong family loyalties, part of the glue that held the Chechens and other north Caucasian people together was Sufism, the mystical strand of Islam.
Although Sufism is often associated with contemplation, among the proud mountain clans of Chechnya and Dagestan it acquired a strongly anti-Russian flavour. The Sufi sheikhs, or holy men, preached that a true Muslim could not tolerate the rule of foreign infidels. There were two acceptable forms of jihad, or holy war. A Muslim could serve Allah as a fighter or as a scholar. The Chechens became famous for their warrior prowess, the Dagestanis for their Koranic learning.
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 promised to liberate all the subject peoples of the tsarist empire. As civil war loomed, Lenin and Stalin made a cynical bid for Muslim support by promising the creation of semi-independent Islamic states in Russia and Central Asia, saying: “All you whose mosques and houses of prayer have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been flouted by the tsars and the oppressors of Russia—from now on your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are free and inviolable.”
The reality of Soviet rule was, of course, very different. Periods of repression alternated with periods of relative toleration, but repression was the norm. In 1944, the Chechens (along with seven other ethnic groups) were deported en masse to Kazakhstan as part of Stalin’s policy of punishing “untrustworthy” ethnic groups. But Chechen culture, in particular, proved remarkably hard to destroy.
By the 1980s, there were estimated to be 50m Soviet citizens of Muslim ancestry. For most of them, Soviet rule had had a powerful secularising effect. Out of cultural habit, many still circumcised their baby boys and buried their dead according to Muslim custom. But the closure of all but a handful of mosques, and the virtual end of religious education, meant that knowledge of Islam had nearly evaporated.
Among the few places in the Soviet Union where Islam remained fairly strong was the northern Caucasus. The Sufi tradition was well able to survive in semi-clandestine conditions. Even without mosques, the Chechens were able to go on venerating the memory of their local sheikhs and performing traditional dances and chants. Anna Zelkina, a Russian expert on Islam, says the KGB knew a lot about the Sufi brotherhoods, but found Sufism too deeply rooted to be eradicated.
Enter the Wahhabis
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Sufi tradition has faced a challenge of a very different type. Emissaries from the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia, have flooded into the Caucasus and Central Asia, seeing an opportunity in the spiritual and economic wasteland left by Marxist ideology.
Financed by Saudi petrodollars, these preachers have begun propagating a new form of Islam, which has become known (through a slight over-simplification) as Wahhabism: in other words, the austere form of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia. The new version of Islam strives to be as close as possible to the faith’s 1,400-year-old roots. It opposes the secularism of Russian life. Its universalising message aims to transcend ethnic and linguistic barriers, and it has no place for the local cults of Sufism.
Many Chechens and Dagestanis find the new form of Islam alien and uncomfortable, and some actively oppose it. It has caused division, and even violence, within families. But by building mosques and establishing scholarships, the Wahhabis have won a following, especially among the young—often impatient with what they see as a corrupt official religious establishment left over from Soviet times. Moreover, in the confusion of post-Soviet Russia, the new creed offers disillusioned and unemployed young men money and weapons and a sense of purpose which they cannot find anywhere else.
“For the disenchanted,” writes Nabi Abdullaev, a journalist based in Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital, “Wahhabism has become a spiritual refuge.” At first, the Wahhabis acted peacefully. They took over a few villages in Dagestan and established new communities where their strict interpretation of Islam was followed. But they gradually began to arm themselves and set up semi-autonomous enclaves where they enforced the sharia (Islamic law).
They claimed they needed weapons for self-defence because of harassment by the police and the local authorities. But local officials became convinced they were dangerous foreign-backed fanatics. In 1997, the Dagestani authorities outlawed “Wahhabism” and a number of the movement’s leaders were arrested. Some escaped, with or without their followers, into neighbouring Chechnya. With its long tradition of warrior prowess, Chechnya became the military base of the “new Islam”, and Mr Basaev its military leader.
A daredevil hijacker and hostage-taker, Mr Basaev took part in the Russian-backed war against Georgia in 1992-93, and then fought ruthlessly against Russia in the Chechen war of 1994-96. Trained in the Soviet army, he now says his life’s mission is to wage holy war against Russia and avenge its crimes against his people. He is not himself a Wahhabi, but he seems to have decided that the new Muslims would make useful recruits for his jihad, even though he does not share their extreme puritanism.
Mr Basaev is both a Muslim and a Chechen patriot; the two qualities are inseparable. But despite his bushy beard and talk of holy wars, he does not quite correspond to the image of a single-minded fundamentalist. His heroes, after all, include Garibaldi and Abraham Lincoln. There is, however, another member of the Basaev camp who comes closer to fitting the bill: a young Arab fighter known as Khattab, whose trademark is a mane of long black hair.
Educated in Saudi Arabia, Khattab fought the Russians in Afghanistan before settling in Chechnya. In other words, he is one of the “Afghanis”—the 15,000 or so volunteers from all over the Middle East (particularly Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Algeria) who did battle, with strong American support, against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. Since the war ended, these fighters have returned to their homelands, or moved to other countries, in search of new Islamist causes to fight.
It is the existence of the Afghanis (of whom the most notorious is Mr bin Laden himself ) which helps to explain why Russia regards its own Islamic adversaries as Frankensteinian monsters created by western governments and their friends in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.The Afghani connection also helps to explain why Russia and Iran see eye-to-eye on the question of Islamist violence. As well as loathing the West and all its works, some of the Afghanis—as zealous practitioners of Sunni Islam—are sworn enemies of the Shia Muslim faith, of which Iran is the main bastion.
Ramzi Youzef, the Afghani (and protégé of Mr bin Laden) who was convicted of bombing the World Trade Centre, has also been linked with the June 1994 bombing of a Shia holy place in Iran. From Iran’s point of view, both the Afghanis and the Taliban movement that now controls most of Afghanistan are manifestations of the Sunni fundamentalism that has been called into existence by the United States and its friends.
Iran has always been resentful of America’s connections with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, even though its own relations with those two countries have been improving. Russia sympathises, to put it mildly, with that resentment. America, for its part, is highly suspicious of Russia’s friendship with Iran.
The many faces of Islam
If there is a geopolitical stand-off involving Russia, America and the Islamic world, it is not a simple triangle. If anything, Russia and America have each identified different bits of the Islamic world as friends, and each is suspicious of the other’s partnerships.
Although Russian diplomacy has been quite adept at manipulating the geopolitical divisions within the Muslim world, there is a real possibility that its own clumsiness and brutality could create a Muslim enemy within its borders, as well as alienating Muslims farther afield. Already, the Kremlin’s heavy-handedness has galvanised the Chechens to mobilise for a new war against Russia. The neighbouring Ingush people, related to the Chechens but hitherto willing to accept Russian authority, may now be drawn into the conflict—along with at least four or five other north Caucasian peoples who have until now been content to let Russia run their affairs.
If Russia found itself at war with half a dozen Muslim peoples in the Caucasus, the effects would certainly be felt in places farther north, such as Tatarstan. Tatarstan’s leader, Mintimer Shaimiev, has trodden a careful line beween co-operation with the Kremlin and indulging the anti-Slavic feelings of local Tatar nationalists and Muslims. In recent days, he has insisted that no conscripts from his republic will fight Russia’s war in the Caucasus.
But if some sort of common Muslim front ever emerges in Russia, resentment of Moscow will be the only factor that holds it together. In the Caucasus and elsewhere, Muslims are fragmented; there is not even a united or coherent Wahhabi movement.
Nor is there any natural unity between Chechnya and Dagestan. Chechnya (a bit smaller than Wales) is ethnically homogeneous. Dagestan (the size of Scotland) is a mosaic of 34 distinct ethnic groups. The two also differ over their relations with Russia. The Chechens still feel the scars of their last war with the Russians, and so the secessionist impulse is much stronger than in Dagestan, which has little sense of a common national identity and is economically heavily dependent on Russia.
Nor is it inevitable that Islamic militancy in the northern Caucasus and in other parts of the Muslim world will reinforce one another. Rather than being proof that political Islam is spreading, the fighting in the Caucasus is a reminder that Islam exists in many different forms. In the heartland of the Muslim world, the Middle East, the wave of Islamic militancy appears to be receding. In the early 1980s, the years immediately after the Iranian revolution, the Arab countries and Turkey felt themselves most vulnerable to political Islam.
Those expectations are now subsiding. Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia—all countries that experienced serious Islamic opposition—have survived, bruised but intact. Even Algeria, where Islamism took the most violent form and was suppressed with particular harshness, seems to have entered a more hopeful phase.
Olivier Roy, a French expert on Islamic movements, believes that the phenomenon has moved from the centre to the periphery—from the Middle East to the fringes of the Muslim world. In the Middle East, the main promoter of political Islam (the Iranian revolution) came in 1979, so the movements which imitated the Iranian experience have had two decades to play themselves out.
In the Caucasus and Central Asia, as in former Yugoslavia, the moment of opportunity for political Islam came a decade or so later, with the collapse of communism, and so the new Islamic movements are younger and still developing. They are a powerful and potentially destabilising force, but they are no more destined to win power than their equivalents elsewhere.
There is, however, a form of “peripheral” Islam which ought to be giving Russian policymakers food for thought: the impressive strength of the Muslim faith, sometimes accompanied by political radicalism, in western cities that lie thousands of miles from the heartlands of Islam. From Detroit to Lyons, young Muslims have been rediscovering their beliefs and identity—often as a reaction against the poverty, racism and (as they would see it) sterile secularism of the societies around them. This phenomenon owes nothing to geopolitical calculation, or to the policies of any government, either western or Middle Eastern; nor can it be restrained by government action. If radical forms of Islam can flourish in places like Glasgow and Frankfurt, there is no reason why they cannot do so in Moscow and Murmansk—particularly if the Russian government seems to be fighting a brutal, pointless war at the other end of the country.
Oct 7th 1999
*Calling all Chechens: Commander Basaev
*Khattab (centre): an “Afghani” in the Caucasus
*A time to dance: independence celebrations in Chechnya
AT LEAST until recently, the main enemy of Islamic terrorism seemed to be the United States. However diverse and quarrelsome its practitioners, they knew what they hated most: the global policeman whom they accused of propping up Israel, starving the Iraqis and undermining the Muslim way of life with an insidiously attractive culture.
Anti-Americanism, after all, has been a common thread in a series of spectacular acts of violence over the past decade. They include the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in February 1993; the explosion that killed 19 American soldiers at a base in Saudi Arabia in June 1996; and the deadly blasts at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.
In many of the more recent attacks it has suffered, the United States has discerned the hand of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born co-ordinator of an international network of militant Muslims. In February last year, he and his sympathisers in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh issued a statement declaring that “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it.” Such blood-curdling talk was inevitably seized on by believers in the “clash of civilisations” described by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor who said in 1993 that cultural or religious fault-lines were the most likely source of conflict in the post-cold-war world.
Now, it might appear, Russia’s turn has come to do battle on a new front in this many-sided conflict. The Russian government has blamed terrorists from the country’s Muslim south for a series of bomb blasts in Moscow and other cities which have claimed over 300 lives. And it has launched a broadening land and air attack against the mainly Muslim republic of Chechnya, where the terrorists are alleged to originate.
In their more strident moments, officials and newspaper columnists in Moscow say that Russia is in the forefront of a fight between “civilisation and barbarism” and is therefore entitled to western understanding. “We face a common enemy, international terrorism,” Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, told President Bill Clinton last month. As evidence that anti-Russian and anti-American guerrillas have at least one common source, officials in Moscow have pointed to the alleged involvement of Mr bin Laden and his fighters, both in the Caucasus and in the urban bombing campaign.
In most of their comments, President Boris Yeltsin and his lieutenants have been careful to distinguish between their current adversaries and Muslims in general. “Terrorists are an enemy with no faith or nationality,” Mr Yeltsin has said. Russian diplomats are stressing the support they have received from many Muslim governments—particularly Iran’s, which is seen in Moscow as an important strategic partner and counterweight to western influence in the Caspian.
Whereas western countries have chided Russia (mildly) for its military operation against Chechnya, Iran has been much more supportive. Kamal Kharrazi, Iran’s foreign minister, has promised “effective collaboration” with the Kremlin against what he has described as terrorists bent on destabilising Russia. Russia, for its part, has thanked Iran for using its chairmanship of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to present the Russian case.
Perhaps because of Russia’s friendship with certain parts of the Muslim world, Mr Putin has firmly rejected the view that the “bandits” Russia is now fighting could properly be described as Islamic. “They are international terrorists, most of them mercenaries, who cover themselves in religious slogans,” he insists.
But ordinary Muslims in the Moscow street—whether they are of Caucasian origin, or from the Tatar or Bashkir nations based in central Russia—fear a general backlash. “Politicians and the mass media are equating us, the Muslim faithful, with armed groups,” complains Ravil Gainutdin, Russia’s senior mufti. Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox church, has been urging his flock not to blame their 18m Muslim compatriots for the recent violence. “Russian Christians and Muslims traditionally live in peace,” he has reminded them. His senior bishops—probably with a nod of encouragement from Russian officialdom—are engaged in a set-piece theological dialogue with Iran’s spiritual leaders.
Clash, or conspiracy?
But even if Russia’s southern war is not yet a “clash of civilisations”, might it soon become one? And if so, would that bring Russia closer to the West, or push it farther away?
Islam is certainly one element in the crisis looming on Russia’s southern rim, but it is by no means the only one. The latest flare-up began in August in the wild border country between Chechnya—which has been virtually independent since Russian troops were forced out, after two years of brutal war, in 1996—and Dagestan, a ramshackle, multi-ethnic republic where a pro-Russian government has been steadily losing control.
Two factors came together to set the scene for conflict. One was the long-running feud between Aslan Maskhadov, Chechnya’s elected president, and Shamil Basaev, a younger and more militant figure with a history of involvement in spectacular acts of violence. The other factor was the emergence, in the morass of lawlessness and poverty that has engulfed both republics, of a new and more zealous form of Islam, mainly imported from Saudi Arabia.
A few weeks ago, Mr Basaev and his militant Dagestani friends (who, at least so far, have been a small, unpopular minority among their compatriots) proclaimed a sort of mini-state inside Dagestan. They spoke of creating a Russia-free zone stretching at least from Chechnya to the Caspian Sea. In its biggest show of force for three years, the Russian high command blasted the rebels with fighter-bombers and artillery. By early September, it claimed to have forced them to retreat from Dagestan into Chechnya.
The story took an entirely new turn with a series of bomb attacks in Russian cities in September. The worst, on September 13th, claimed 119 lives. The authorities were quick to blame the explosions on Chechen terrorists, though they did not provide evidence, and Chechen leaders denied involvement.
Many people in Russia did not need any evidence; the government’s allegations simply confirmed the anti-Chechen, and generally anti-Caucasian, prejudice they already harboured. Other Russians take a more cynical view. They believe the bomb attacks are somehow related to the power struggle raging in Moscow as the “courtiers” of President Yeltsin try to cling to their power and privilege in the face of looming electoral defeat.
Even those who believe that Chechens, and only Chechens, are responsible for the bombs have had their faith tested at times. In the town of Ryazan, the security services were caught virtually red-handed after placing a quantity of explosives in an apartment building. They claimed it was part of an exercise to “test the readiness” of the population.
Such incidents are grist to the mill of Moscow’s conspiracy theorists. Some believe that the bombs were indeed the work of Chechen extremists, but insist that the fighting in the south is mainly the result of Russian provocation; some say it is the other way round. Whatever the truth, the crisis has certainly played into the hands of the most hardline elements in Russia’s leadership. But there are also signs that people from outside Russia have been stirring the pot.
Mark Galeotti, a British lecturer on Russia’s armed forces, says there is evidence that Mr bin Laden, while not the instigator of the urban bombing campaign, has offered financial help to its perpetrators. And fighters under the influence of Mr bin Laden have certainly been active in Chechnya and Dagestan—though their presence is probably not the main reason why war is raging now.
With or without some mischief-making by dark forces in Moscow, Russia would have a problem in the northern Caucasus. Hostility between Russians and Chechens goes back to the north Caucasian wars of the 19th century, when the tsar’s forces took more than 50 years to bring the Chechens under control. As well as strong family loyalties, part of the glue that held the Chechens and other north Caucasian people together was Sufism, the mystical strand of Islam.
Although Sufism is often associated with contemplation, among the proud mountain clans of Chechnya and Dagestan it acquired a strongly anti-Russian flavour. The Sufi sheikhs, or holy men, preached that a true Muslim could not tolerate the rule of foreign infidels. There were two acceptable forms of jihad, or holy war. A Muslim could serve Allah as a fighter or as a scholar. The Chechens became famous for their warrior prowess, the Dagestanis for their Koranic learning.
The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 promised to liberate all the subject peoples of the tsarist empire. As civil war loomed, Lenin and Stalin made a cynical bid for Muslim support by promising the creation of semi-independent Islamic states in Russia and Central Asia, saying: “All you whose mosques and houses of prayer have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been flouted by the tsars and the oppressors of Russia—from now on your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are free and inviolable.”
The reality of Soviet rule was, of course, very different. Periods of repression alternated with periods of relative toleration, but repression was the norm. In 1944, the Chechens (along with seven other ethnic groups) were deported en masse to Kazakhstan as part of Stalin’s policy of punishing “untrustworthy” ethnic groups. But Chechen culture, in particular, proved remarkably hard to destroy.
By the 1980s, there were estimated to be 50m Soviet citizens of Muslim ancestry. For most of them, Soviet rule had had a powerful secularising effect. Out of cultural habit, many still circumcised their baby boys and buried their dead according to Muslim custom. But the closure of all but a handful of mosques, and the virtual end of religious education, meant that knowledge of Islam had nearly evaporated.
Among the few places in the Soviet Union where Islam remained fairly strong was the northern Caucasus. The Sufi tradition was well able to survive in semi-clandestine conditions. Even without mosques, the Chechens were able to go on venerating the memory of their local sheikhs and performing traditional dances and chants. Anna Zelkina, a Russian expert on Islam, says the KGB knew a lot about the Sufi brotherhoods, but found Sufism too deeply rooted to be eradicated.
Enter the Wahhabis
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Sufi tradition has faced a challenge of a very different type. Emissaries from the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia, have flooded into the Caucasus and Central Asia, seeing an opportunity in the spiritual and economic wasteland left by Marxist ideology.
Financed by Saudi petrodollars, these preachers have begun propagating a new form of Islam, which has become known (through a slight over-simplification) as Wahhabism: in other words, the austere form of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia. The new version of Islam strives to be as close as possible to the faith’s 1,400-year-old roots. It opposes the secularism of Russian life. Its universalising message aims to transcend ethnic and linguistic barriers, and it has no place for the local cults of Sufism.
Many Chechens and Dagestanis find the new form of Islam alien and uncomfortable, and some actively oppose it. It has caused division, and even violence, within families. But by building mosques and establishing scholarships, the Wahhabis have won a following, especially among the young—often impatient with what they see as a corrupt official religious establishment left over from Soviet times. Moreover, in the confusion of post-Soviet Russia, the new creed offers disillusioned and unemployed young men money and weapons and a sense of purpose which they cannot find anywhere else.
“For the disenchanted,” writes Nabi Abdullaev, a journalist based in Makhachkala, the Dagestani capital, “Wahhabism has become a spiritual refuge.” At first, the Wahhabis acted peacefully. They took over a few villages in Dagestan and established new communities where their strict interpretation of Islam was followed. But they gradually began to arm themselves and set up semi-autonomous enclaves where they enforced the sharia (Islamic law).
They claimed they needed weapons for self-defence because of harassment by the police and the local authorities. But local officials became convinced they were dangerous foreign-backed fanatics. In 1997, the Dagestani authorities outlawed “Wahhabism” and a number of the movement’s leaders were arrested. Some escaped, with or without their followers, into neighbouring Chechnya. With its long tradition of warrior prowess, Chechnya became the military base of the “new Islam”, and Mr Basaev its military leader.
A daredevil hijacker and hostage-taker, Mr Basaev took part in the Russian-backed war against Georgia in 1992-93, and then fought ruthlessly against Russia in the Chechen war of 1994-96. Trained in the Soviet army, he now says his life’s mission is to wage holy war against Russia and avenge its crimes against his people. He is not himself a Wahhabi, but he seems to have decided that the new Muslims would make useful recruits for his jihad, even though he does not share their extreme puritanism.
Mr Basaev is both a Muslim and a Chechen patriot; the two qualities are inseparable. But despite his bushy beard and talk of holy wars, he does not quite correspond to the image of a single-minded fundamentalist. His heroes, after all, include Garibaldi and Abraham Lincoln. There is, however, another member of the Basaev camp who comes closer to fitting the bill: a young Arab fighter known as Khattab, whose trademark is a mane of long black hair.
Educated in Saudi Arabia, Khattab fought the Russians in Afghanistan before settling in Chechnya. In other words, he is one of the “Afghanis”—the 15,000 or so volunteers from all over the Middle East (particularly Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Algeria) who did battle, with strong American support, against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. Since the war ended, these fighters have returned to their homelands, or moved to other countries, in search of new Islamist causes to fight.
It is the existence of the Afghanis (of whom the most notorious is Mr bin Laden himself ) which helps to explain why Russia regards its own Islamic adversaries as Frankensteinian monsters created by western governments and their friends in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.The Afghani connection also helps to explain why Russia and Iran see eye-to-eye on the question of Islamist violence. As well as loathing the West and all its works, some of the Afghanis—as zealous practitioners of Sunni Islam—are sworn enemies of the Shia Muslim faith, of which Iran is the main bastion.
Ramzi Youzef, the Afghani (and protégé of Mr bin Laden) who was convicted of bombing the World Trade Centre, has also been linked with the June 1994 bombing of a Shia holy place in Iran. From Iran’s point of view, both the Afghanis and the Taliban movement that now controls most of Afghanistan are manifestations of the Sunni fundamentalism that has been called into existence by the United States and its friends.
Iran has always been resentful of America’s connections with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, even though its own relations with those two countries have been improving. Russia sympathises, to put it mildly, with that resentment. America, for its part, is highly suspicious of Russia’s friendship with Iran.
The many faces of Islam
If there is a geopolitical stand-off involving Russia, America and the Islamic world, it is not a simple triangle. If anything, Russia and America have each identified different bits of the Islamic world as friends, and each is suspicious of the other’s partnerships.
Although Russian diplomacy has been quite adept at manipulating the geopolitical divisions within the Muslim world, there is a real possibility that its own clumsiness and brutality could create a Muslim enemy within its borders, as well as alienating Muslims farther afield. Already, the Kremlin’s heavy-handedness has galvanised the Chechens to mobilise for a new war against Russia. The neighbouring Ingush people, related to the Chechens but hitherto willing to accept Russian authority, may now be drawn into the conflict—along with at least four or five other north Caucasian peoples who have until now been content to let Russia run their affairs.
If Russia found itself at war with half a dozen Muslim peoples in the Caucasus, the effects would certainly be felt in places farther north, such as Tatarstan. Tatarstan’s leader, Mintimer Shaimiev, has trodden a careful line beween co-operation with the Kremlin and indulging the anti-Slavic feelings of local Tatar nationalists and Muslims. In recent days, he has insisted that no conscripts from his republic will fight Russia’s war in the Caucasus.
But if some sort of common Muslim front ever emerges in Russia, resentment of Moscow will be the only factor that holds it together. In the Caucasus and elsewhere, Muslims are fragmented; there is not even a united or coherent Wahhabi movement.
Nor is there any natural unity between Chechnya and Dagestan. Chechnya (a bit smaller than Wales) is ethnically homogeneous. Dagestan (the size of Scotland) is a mosaic of 34 distinct ethnic groups. The two also differ over their relations with Russia. The Chechens still feel the scars of their last war with the Russians, and so the secessionist impulse is much stronger than in Dagestan, which has little sense of a common national identity and is economically heavily dependent on Russia.
Nor is it inevitable that Islamic militancy in the northern Caucasus and in other parts of the Muslim world will reinforce one another. Rather than being proof that political Islam is spreading, the fighting in the Caucasus is a reminder that Islam exists in many different forms. In the heartland of the Muslim world, the Middle East, the wave of Islamic militancy appears to be receding. In the early 1980s, the years immediately after the Iranian revolution, the Arab countries and Turkey felt themselves most vulnerable to political Islam.
Those expectations are now subsiding. Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia—all countries that experienced serious Islamic opposition—have survived, bruised but intact. Even Algeria, where Islamism took the most violent form and was suppressed with particular harshness, seems to have entered a more hopeful phase.
Olivier Roy, a French expert on Islamic movements, believes that the phenomenon has moved from the centre to the periphery—from the Middle East to the fringes of the Muslim world. In the Middle East, the main promoter of political Islam (the Iranian revolution) came in 1979, so the movements which imitated the Iranian experience have had two decades to play themselves out.
In the Caucasus and Central Asia, as in former Yugoslavia, the moment of opportunity for political Islam came a decade or so later, with the collapse of communism, and so the new Islamic movements are younger and still developing. They are a powerful and potentially destabilising force, but they are no more destined to win power than their equivalents elsewhere.
There is, however, a form of “peripheral” Islam which ought to be giving Russian policymakers food for thought: the impressive strength of the Muslim faith, sometimes accompanied by political radicalism, in western cities that lie thousands of miles from the heartlands of Islam. From Detroit to Lyons, young Muslims have been rediscovering their beliefs and identity—often as a reaction against the poverty, racism and (as they would see it) sterile secularism of the societies around them. This phenomenon owes nothing to geopolitical calculation, or to the policies of any government, either western or Middle Eastern; nor can it be restrained by government action. If radical forms of Islam can flourish in places like Glasgow and Frankfurt, there is no reason why they cannot do so in Moscow and Murmansk—particularly if the Russian government seems to be fighting a brutal, pointless war at the other end of the country.
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