Moscow Eid: Video, Pictures and Russian Reactions

The video and pictures below illustrate the disruption to the daily life of the Russian capital that has become a familiar part of each Eid in recent years. Once again, thousands of Muslims have blocked streets with their prayers and 3,000 additional police were laid on to ensure that all passed off peacefully. Russia Today reported that:

Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Russian Muslims on the eve of the holiday, wishing them welfare, health, and success in good deeds. Putin said that by their "fruitful" activity, Muslim organizations are making a significant contribution to the preservation and development of Russia's national and cultural traditions.

Many members of the public in Britain and elsewhere who have no direct experience of Russia or who do not understand Russian harbour the misapprehension that Putin is some species of Russian ethno-nationalist. He is not. Putin is an opportunist statist, willing to use whichever elements of ideology – including some trappings of nationalism – for the benefit of himself and his supportive clique of oligarchs. Given this, he has no misgivings about treating with Islam, even with literalist interpretations of it as promoted by Putin loyalist and Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. Russia under Putin is therefore no bulwark against the Islamisation of European societies, although ordinary ethnic Russians – non-Muslims – are alarmed by what is happening to the demography of Moscow and the country at large.

Yesterday, it was announced that an agreement had been reached to construct a 60,000-capacity mosque on the outskirts of Moscow, but today, new demands have been made by the Council of Russian Muftis, calling for the building of a mosque in each of Moscow’s administrative districts. This would of course have a dramatic impact upon Moscow’s character and symbolise its accelerating Islamisation, a fact not lost upon ordinary Russians.

The comment thread attached to the article dealing with this announcement in today’s edition of Izvestia makes for interesting reading, providing as it does an insight into the thoughts of Russian readers. I have translated a number of these below that reveal a deep sense of unease amongst many ethnic Russians about the Islamisation that is being brought about by inefficient immigration legislation and Russia’s own version of multiculturalism. Some readers of a sensitive nature may find elements of what is reproduced not to their taste, but I have not bowdlerised the translations, and nor should it be taken that I necessarily agree with all of the sentiments expressed. Reaction to the announcement regarding the proposed mosque-building programme was uniformly negative. For those of you who read Russian, some screengrabs of the comment section appear after the video and pictures.The full thread can be accessed here.

Russian readers express their opinions on Islam in Moscow

Igor Kaftailov: “Russia needs to be cleansed of the Muslim plague, and no more mosques built. But our filthy venal authorities of course, will lick the backsides of the muftis all the same.”

Tamara Sheverdina: “That was also precisely WHY the BYZANTINE EMPIRE collapsed . . . Now Constantinople is in the hands of the Turks . . . And everything started out just as now . . . The Muslim religion is false and bloody.”

Russkii Ivanov: “This is just as in the Russian fairytale: “There was a hare with a little wooden cottage, and a fox with one of ice . . .” In Soviet times there was STRICT regulation of the movement of the slit-eyes [by which he presumably refers to Central Asians] from one place to another. Everything was regulated, therefore we lived NORMALLY.”

V.P.P. – V.P.P. – “Move the capital of the Muslims from Kazan to Moscow and the Kremlin! And the capital of the Orthodox ETHNIC RUSSIANS from Moscow to the Kazan Kremlin, together with the President and the Prime Minister of the Russian Federation!”

Alexander Lv: “For the whole of their existence, the ethnic Russians have struggled with the consequences of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, and here we now find the Judases are prepared to lay themselves down before the Muslims again. Today, even the NTV News started not with an Orthodox but with a Muslim celebration. I would sooner hear Russian bad language on the street than incomprehensible Muslim babble.”

Sergei Avramov: “Muscovites must come out and organise protests against the building of mosques. We must understand, that the Muslim yoke is being placed Moscow. Ethnic Russians must show the guests who is the master in the home, and show them their place. If our authorities do not wish to allow this, then there has to be a problem for them. Ethnic Russians – we need to organise ourselves, change those in power and defend our historical roots. Yet, under the pretext of tolerance we are abandoned to the enemies of the Russian people.”

Petr Petrov: “If we wait and nothing changes then perhaps it will be too late. We are supporting not the ethnic Russian citizens who founded the state, but foreigners.” 

To Monin: “We ethnic Russian folk must oppose the penetration of Muslims into our society.”

Iurii Shchekin: “But in the mosques we shall rear pigs, then they will be useful :-)”.

To Monin: “We - the ethnic Russian folk - must become a single force, capable of resisting the influx of Muslims into our SACRED RUS’.”

Muslims pray in Moscow's Prospekt Mira

Pussy Riot to protest in Moscow Mosque?

Tomorrow the Muslim population of Moscow will celebrate Eid, and in recent years these celebrations have brought parts of the Russian capital to a standstill as tens of thousands of Muslim worshippers have prayed in some of the city's main thoroughfares. Now however, Russia Today has announced that permission has been granted for a mosque capable of accommodating 60,000 Muslims to be built on the outskirts of Moscow.

The city is thought to have a population of circa 2 million Muslims, a number that has grown rapidly in recent years owing mainly to internal migration from Russia's Muslim regions and the arrivals of Muslim immigrants from the "near abroad" of the former Soviet states of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Given Pussy Riot's recent protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, who is willing to bet that members of the group will stage a similar protest in Moscow's new mosque once it is built, drawing attention to Islam's systematic degradation of women?

Although I have not yet been able to discover any images of the proposed mosque, perhaps it will resemble the Grozny Kadyrov Mosque, opened by Putin's pet Islamist - Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov - alongside Putin himself back in 2008. As can be seen, the opulence and dimensions of the mosque are striking, particularly when taking into account that this was built in the wake of much of Grozny being razed to the ground during the First and Second Chechen Wars. Oddly enough, it was the outbreak of this second war that propelled Putin into the Russian presidency under the patronage of the then ailing Boris Yeltsin. Somehow, it seems hard to believe that all of the damage to Grozny's housing and general infrastructure had been made good by the time that this grandiose mosque was opened.

Grozny Kadyrov Mosque: will Moscow's be similar?

 

The Mosque's opulent interior

Grozny after the First Chechen War: 1994-1996

“You have made a great personal contribution to Russian statehood.”

Thus ran the written greeting from Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to Ramzan Kadyrov as he was officially inaugurated into his second five-year term as Chechen President last week reports Izvestiia. These were warm words indeed from Medvedev, but they paled in comparison to Putin’s gushing message which was relayed via Aleksandr Gennad’evich: “I think, considering such services to the Fatherland, that these five years should last for fifty years!” This brought forth a storm of applause from the hall.

In this phrase, one discerns Putin’s attitude towards democracy: it’s useful for providing a rubberstamp for authoritarianism, but otherwise rather troublesome. Kadyrov may be an Islamist, but he’s one of Moscow’s Islamists, so the Russian political elite is willing to let him run his writ in Chechnya providing that he keeps his Islamising tendencies within the boundaries of the autonomous republic. There was an implicit nod towards the importance of Islam in Chechnya by one of the official representatives sent by Moscow – Aleksandr Khloponin – who stated: “We in the Caucasus have a saying: there is nothing more precious than faith.” Given the state of this part of the world, this was a sad but accurate observation, although I am sure that Khloponin did not intend it to be interpreted in such a fashion.

Kadyrov’s address was short, but included the words “We will pay, as we have done formerly, special attention to the development of civil society.” What manner of civil society does Kadyrov have in mind? The behaviour of his law-enforcement agents in targeting women for not wearing headscarves (even if they’re not Muslim) does not fill me with hope that this “special attention” will make the lives of people in Chechnya better than hitherto. It is likely to propel them backwards socially, towards social norms informed and governed by Shariah. Interestingly, Izvestiia reporter Nataliia Alekseeva notes that Kadyrov did not employ the word ‘Russia’ once in his inauguration speech, which should strike one as odd for an individual lauded for having “made a great personal contribution to Russian statehood.”

Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov (photo - AP)

Ramadan in Moscow: is Islamisation catching up with Russia?

When the Soviet Union was still in existence, many senior policymakers were concerned about the implications of differential fertility rates in its constituent ‘republics’, for it was clear that at some point in the near future these would lead to a situation in which the USSR would become more than 50% Muslim. Such a pattern was already startlingly evident by 1970 when the census revealed that the RSFSR’s birth rate was already at sub-replacement level with an average of only 1.97 children per family. In Ukraine, the situation was only slightly better with the equivalent figure being 2.04, but in the Muslim republics of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan the corresponding figures were respectively 4.63, 5.95 and 5.64. These sorts of contrasts of course are witnessed today across Western Europe, where indigenous Europeans are outbred by an assortment of Muslim immigrant populations: Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in England; Algerians in France and Turks in Germany to give but a few examples. The English, the French and the Germans are breeding at sub-replacement levels, whereas the resident Muslim populations are exploding.

Being reliant upon a conscript army the Soviets were concerned about the potential impact of demographic Islamisation upon the reliability of its armed forces. This was also an issue in which the Americans were interested, but from their perspective, the resultant tensions that demographic Islamisation would generate within the Soviet Union should be welcomed as it would help to undermine its stability.

When the USSR fragmented in 1991 the Russian Federation emerged as a fully-fledged independent state shorn of its former ‘Muslim’ republics of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. However, although the proportion of Muslim citizens in this new state was lower, its Muslim population was still significant. The territorial entities that had been the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics of the RSFSR remained constituent parts of the new Russian Federation, and a number of these contained peoples which had traditionally been Muslim: Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Dagestan and Tatarstan being some of the main examples. Of course, to describe the majority populations of these territorial entities as ‘Muslim’ in any meaningful sense at the time of Russia’s independence is to ignore the deep impact of decades of Soviet socialisation and atheistic campaigning which had led to a decrease in religious practice. Nonetheless, a component of the ethnic and national reawakening which swept the Soviet Union and its successor states was a turning towards traditional forms of religious identity.

In English, we fail to distinguish between ethnic Russians – russkie – and Russian citizens – rossiiane. Whereas russkie were traditionally Orthodox Christians, many rossiiane – Bashkirs, Tatars, Chechens, Dagestanis – were traditionally Muslim. The example of Chechnya and the growth of Islamism in that republic has been well documented. Islamism has fused with ethnic identity, and has even been embraced its current President (Ramzan Kadyrov) who has made the wearing of the headscarf mandatory for women in Grozny whether they’re Muslims or not, advocates Shariah and supports polygamy. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is well disposed towards Kadyrov, and it was his backing when he was President that secured Kadyrov his political position. This highlights the bogus nature of Putin’s alleged Russian patriotism.

As well as possessing large officially recognised Muslim populations, there are also many illegal immigrants in Russia drawn from the USSR’s former Muslim republics. Being the centre of Russian economic life Moscow acts as a particular magnet for such people, so much so that an estimated 2 million people living in Moscow are now Muslims. Although the Bolsheviks committed many dreadful acts of wanton destruction and removed many of the city’s Orthodox churches, a number of these beautiful buildings remain, but for how much longer? Muslims now wish to use them for worship and are demanding that more mosques be built to accommodate their growing numbers. Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the video footage of Muslims in Paris blocking the streets with their Friday prayers, but the video below taken in Moscow on Eid ul-Fitr depicts a scene that dwarfs anything yet seen in France. An estimated 55,000 Muslims blocked one of Moscow’s major thoroughfares – Prospekt Mira – to pray in a demonstration of Islamic strength and assertiveness, which must surely have produced a sense of unease amongst the group of russkie videoing this event from the rooftops.

Ethnic Russians are not reproducing at replacement level, and as elsewhere in Europe it is the swelling Muslim population that is displacing them. My sympathies are with the plight of ordinary Russians: we are in this together.

Prospekt Mira swamped by Muslims