To understand the competing strands of Islam in Chechnya it helps to look at how societies process catastrophe
By B.C.
EVER since two Chechen brothers were implicated in the Boston bombings, people have been thumbing through atlases and history books to see what, if anything, is distinctive about Islam on Russia's mountainous southern rim. Whatever answers we come up with, they won't prove anything about the murky background to the Boston attacks. But they may help us understand part of the context.
Maybe the first point to make is a big, broad one about religious history. When a nation large or small suffers a human and geopolitical catastrophe, that has multiple and often contradictory effects on its faith and culture. Take one huge example, whose results are still with us: the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258. One response to that disaster came from Ibn Taymiyyah, pioneer of a harsh, puritanical, stripped-down reading of the Muslim credo. His spiritual progeny still dominate Saudi Arabia and hence exercise huge influence over global Islam. A diametrically opposing reaction was that of the Sufis who sought consolation in the mystical, pursuing a direct, ecstatic experience of God. At a minimum, Baghdad's fall helped to ensure that in some places, Islam's propagation was left to wandering Sufi preachers rather than conquering armies. A contest between the puritans and the Sufis is still going on in many parts of the world.
The effects of disaster have been no less contradictory among the Chechens, a small benighted nation whose losses from two recent wars probably run into six figures, and whose memories of mass deportation by Stalin are still vivid.
Chechnya and the neighbouring territories have seen a resurgence of Islam, in several contrasting forms. Jokhar Dudayev, the Soviet air force general who launched Chechnya's doomed bid for independence two decades ago, would be amazed to see the brand-new mosques and ubiquitous female headscarves in his capital, Grozny. Such amazement is still felt by many ordinary, secular-minded residents of the city. Dudayev was so far from his Islamic roots that he once burbled that people should pray three times a day, unaware that the proper frequency, for Muslims, was five times.
These days, both the local pro-Russian regime and its bitterest foes claim to be acting in the name of Islam. The region's sharpest Muslim voice, disseminated through the website www.kavkazcenter.com, is that of the self-proclaimed Emirate of the Caucasus. This body, which exists only on the web but enjoys the loyalty of real fighters and commanders, aspires to hold authority in Islam's name over the whole north Caucasus, and perhaps beyond; and to wage unlimited war against infidel Russia. Using the language of ultra-militant jihad, it rejects all non-Muslim ideologies, from democracy to communism, and it lauds the Taliban's fight against Western forces in Afghanistan. However it has strongly denied any responsibility for the Boston attacks and alleged a Russian hand in the conspiracy.
Although it preaches Islam of the harsh Saudi variety, the Emirate excoriates the Saudi regime for being too friendly to the West; in this and other ways its rhetoric resembles al-Qaeda. Other targets for the Emirate's scorn include Westernised Chechen nationalists who lobby for the cause in America or Western Europe. Given the Emirate's anti-Russian fury, you might think that Chechen jihadism and Russian nationalism were incompatible causes; but there have always been Russian nationalists, including some close to officialdom, who think Islamic militancy could ultimately be a partner in a contest with the West.
Meanwhile, Chechnya's pro-Russian leader Ramzan Kadyrov and the Moscow-aligned leaders of neighbouring states promote their own version of popular Sufism, a tradition with deep local roots. True, the brutish and gaudily materialistic Kadyrov regime has little in common with the intellectual Sufi tradition which attracts many Westerners. But for a political boss, the Caucasian Sufi tradition has traction. From the late 18th century, Sufi fraternities with distinctive local customs and shrines were co-ordinating Caucasian resistance to Russia. Mr Kadyrov traces his descent from one such fraternity, and he uses its rites and symbols. He is no mystic; he once exuberantly fired into the air while elderly men performed the zikr, a prayerful dance. But in Islam, as in other religions, rival readings of the faith can be an effective way to demonise foes. Mr Kadyrov calls his jihadist enemies Wahhabis or Salafis, overlapping catchall terms for puritanical back-to-basics Sunni Islam; they call him an apostate both because of his elaborate Sufi rituals, and his relations with the Russian infidels. In Chechnya, his "Sufi" regime has the upper hand over the Salafis; in neighbouring Dagestan, the Salafi challenge to the regime is faring better.
Alexander Knysh, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Michigan, says Chechnya's ritualistic Sufis and puritanical jihadis are not as totally different from one another as they claim to be. The Sufis revere the wisdom of local sheikhs, living and dead, while the jihadi fighters operate in small, secretive cells headed by an emir. Both, he reckons, are expressions of a "segmented, cantonised society with perpetual power struggles" between different clans and localities. And both help to create an atmosphere in which it is hardly possible to be too stridently Muslim.
