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

Nevskii Express Muslim Brotherhood Bombers Sentenced

On 27^th November 2009 a bomb attack took place on the Nevskii Express (pictured below) travelling from Moscow to St Petersburg, with a crank claiming that this had been carried out by a Russian cell of Combat 18 based in St Petersburg. This never rang true, and the main theory at the time of the explosion was that it was the act of Islamist terrorists, probably Chechens. Earlier this week, the culprits were finally sentenced for this act of terror, but rather than being Chechens, they were all Ingush males from the neighbouring republic of Ingushetia said to be members of the Muslim Brotherhood.  

 

Interfax reports that four of the men were sentenced to life imprisonment on the following counts: “the organisation of and participation in an illegal armed formation”; “banditry”; conducting a “terrorist act”; “murder”; “attempted murder”; the “illegal trafficking of weapons” and the “illegal preparation of weapons”. A further six were given 15-year custodial sentences. The attack that these men prepared and perpetrated claimed the lives of 27 passengers and wounded a further 132.

Although Ingushetia and Chechnya split from each other in the 1990s, both still technically remain in the Russian Federation and are hotbeds of Islamism. Russia has suffered from a series of serious Islamist terrorist attacks that have not received the attention that they often deserve in the Western media (e.g. Moscow Metro, March 2010; Kizlyar, March2010; Nazran, April 2010; Vladikavkaz, September 2010), and tensions with the Muslim peoples of the northern Caucasus remain high, as evidenced by a spate of clashes in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and its surrounding district. If it were not for the strategic importance of Chechnya occasioned by the fact that oil pipelines happen to cross its territory, it could well be to Russia’s benefit to let the ‘republic’ and the other Islamic peoples of the region – such as the Ingush – become independent.

“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