Mosque & Kremlin
Broun, Janice A.
Commonweal: 174 SOARING BIRTH RATES & SECRET SOCIETIES Mosque & Kremlin JANICE A. BROUN THE soviet union is now the fifth largest Muslim country in the world. But Soviet Muslims represent an...
...Haidar Aliyev, First Secretary of the Communist Party in Azerbaijan, is now a member of the Politburo...
...This figure must be compared with the number of mosques before the Revolution: twenty-six thousand...
...There are now twenty-five thousand Afghan students in the Soviet Union...
...In an article in the Moscow periodical Zhurnalist in January 1981, a local official complained that' 'fanatics'' were bullying and persecuting Russian teachers and other members of the intelligentsia, and that "certain clerics and sectarians play on the confusion between national and religious feelings to inflame fanaticism and xenophobia...
...One Komsomol member, Mukhiddin, a former secretary of a collective farm on trial for his membership in Hairy Ishans, defended himself thus: "My Komsomol membership is necessary for this world, but my being a follower of religion is necessary for the next...
...They also told of "wartime collaborators" being tracked down, captured, and shot...
...Armed Muslim resistance was ruthlessly stamped out...
...Now, cases of terrorism and trials of so-called "religious fanatics" appear regularly in the local Central Asian media...
...There is a growing national awareness among Muslim intellectuals...
...Some now profess a much deeper respect for the ordinary people, the "Kara Khalq," who have kept the faith better than they...
...They refuse the lure of better-paying jobs in other regions with acute labor shortages...
...Soviet Muslims comprise thirty diverse national groups, most of whom were only conquered during czarist colonial expansion of the last century...
...they demanded Muslim funeral rites and burial...
...In March 1982 Muslim groups clashed with Communist party members in several towns and villages in Central Asia...
...Some are fanatically anti-Russian and promote the spirit of the jihad or holy war...
...They demand total loyalty from their adherents...
...The Directorates administer the four main Muslim areas: European Russia and Siberia...
...In 1983 the media carried stories of contemporaries, regarded by local people as living saints, describing them as charlatans interested only in taking money from the people's pockets...
...It is being made quite clear, by references to the (eventual) efficiency of the Communists in dealing with the prolonged Basmachi revolt in the 1920s and 1930s, that "we have beaten you before and can beat you again...
...Some are Communists, but many are Muslims...
...They are perhaps the most devout Muslim people in the Soviet Union, and are staunchly anti-Soviet...
...Those five raised objections to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, and the conference ended in disarray...
...The tariqas are mystic Sufi secret societies which originated during the Mongol invasions, and have spread under Communist rule...
...One is the North Caucasus, especially the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic, where 60 percent of the people are tariqa members...
...Yet the number of mosques permitted, probably fewer than five hundred, is far lower than the number of places of worship allowed to any other state-recognized religious group...
...Only six inadequate editions have been published since the Revolution...
...The more books written, the more lectures given to "unmask Islam" and condemn such practices as fasting during Ramadan (said to be particularly harmful to schoolchildren), the more tenaciously people are likely to cling to them...
...No explanation was ever given, and no assassin ever arrested...
...Many Christians have gone to prison for violating the law...
...Apart from the more sophisticated and westernized European Tatars, conquered in the sixteenth century, who practice a reformed Islam, the Muslim peoples were largely primitive...
...Inwardly, they remain Muslim in outlook if not always in deep religious conviction...
...They would be best advised to sit back and wait, and let the men in the Kremlin do the worrying...
...But atheist propaganda has proved counterproductive...
...SOVIET MUSLIMS remain apart...
...The whole people were deported following an uprising in 1941-43...
...There is no central organization...
...Ko-rans are difficult to come by...
...Teaching religion to minors is a punishable offense...
...But in Muslim areas until the present, religious persecution has been a rarity...
...By invading Afghanistan, the Soviet government has compounded its religious problem...
...THE GOVERNMENT is extremely worried by the significant increase of interest in religion among groups previously most affected by secularism and atheist indoctrination, the intellectuals and the young...
...For example, in 1979 the Soviet Union hosted a well-attended conference, a preliminary one for its 1980 Tashkent Panislamic conference, which was to celebrate the fifteenth century of Hegira (the migration of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina and the starting point of the Muslim era and cafendar...
...Transcaucasia, which includes Georgia and Azerbaijan...
...What is ominous is that the new campaign against parallel Islam has a hard and brutal edge to it...
...Moreover, there is widespread sympathy for Afghan Muslims, particularly among the Baltic peoples, Ukrainians, and Christian Caucasians, where national and religious opposition to Soviet rule is running high, and the necessity to send conscripts to fight Russia's war is causing deep resentment...
...At local levels, Soviet officials, relying on local personnel, ignore the activities of thousands of self-appointed unregistered mullahs (clergy are supposed to be registered with the state) who continue to teach the Koran, sometimes on state property...
...In this, tariqas are particularly important...
...One radical tariqa has its own criminal courts, its own budget, a network of Koranic schools and clandestine prayer houses, its own self-defense group, and has engaged in terrorist activities...
...The Soviet role as' 'defender of Islam'' had lost all credibility...
...Outwardly they seem to conform to the requirements of Soviet life...
...They got their way...
...Some become professionals...
...All but five delegations boycotted the Tashkent conference...
...The KGB, usually so skillful in infiltrating and crushing underground groups, has met its match...
...Later they were allowed to return, but although there are half a million of them, they were not permitted an official mosque until 1978...
...They can explain to Soviet Uzbeks the motives and actions of the Afghan Mujahi-deens and enlist sympathy for them...
...Two of the accused had already served sentences on the same charges...
...A survey of young Chechen-Ingush showed that 20 percent carry out their full religious obligations as scrupulously as external conditions permit...
...Currently, however, full commitment to Islam is on the increase because of the continuing existence of a "parallel," unofficial Islam — resourceful, adaptable, and outside Soviet control...
...In the last census of 1979, Muslims numbered 44 million, one-sixth of the population...
...She has published articles in Commonweal, America, Christian Century, Worldview, Our Sunday Visitor, and other journals...
...Today there are less than two thousand mullahs as compared with forty-five thousand in 1912...
...SOVIET INTERNAL policy towards Islam is being forced to change...
...These societies are experienced and prepared, if necessary, to practice taqiya, a custom which permits apostasy in times of extreme danger...
...They are well aware that most of their people's needs are adequately provided for by "parallel" Islam...
...North Caucasus and Dagestan...
...In face of all this, how have they managed to remain Muslims...
...Even today most are country folk who preserve strong community structures and oral traditions, safeguarding the stability of family life in its religious setting against the erosive pressures of a materialist, secularized society...
...There continue to be denunciations of pilgrimages to holy places, many of which are the graves of local anti-Russian heroes of the last century...
...Reports spoke of major riots in towns in the North Caucasus, involving Russians as well as Muslim nationals, which were ended only by military intervention and a ten-day curfew...
...By the year 2000, it is predicted, Muslims will constitute a quarter of the Soviet population, and, even more dangerous and significant, one-third of the conscripts in the Soviet armed forces...
...In March 1981 Kazakhs in Alma-Ata demonstrated against the burial in a city cemetery of Kazakh soldiers killed in Afghanistan...
...These officials also wink at the existence of thousands of illegal mosques...
...All Koranic schools — fourteen thousand in 1912 — were closed...
...Muslims in the Soviet Union have enjoyed relative political and economic security, an absence of conflict, and thanks to their own initiative, more space in which to practice Islam than would at first appear...
...Few Soviet Muslims ever make the pilgrimage to Mecca...
...In 1927 women were forcibly emancipated by law...
...The government had fostered an international image as a "defender of Islam,'' and had utilized the leaders of the Directorates as adept mouthpieces for a policy of rapprochement towards the Muslim world...
...Each tariqa is autonomous...
...But they appear to be making little headway in abolishing such groups...
...Islam is very much a way of life as well as a religion, with simpler, more clear-cut demands than Christianity...
...Soviet authorities denounce clandestine organizations as dangerous and make examples of party members who are tariqa leaders...
...Muslims are acquiring the most unlikely sympathizers, including Lithuanian Catholics...
...This explains why the leaders of the Directorates, apparently the most docile religious administrators in the Soviet Union, were prepared to accept without comment the minimal facilities allowed for worship...
...One leader, who remained at-large for over thirty years, had murdered forty Communists...
...This group is strongly suspected of the little-publicized 1980 assassination of Sultan Ibrahimov, chairman of the Kirghiz Council of Ministers...
...But Soviet Muslims represent an increasing area of instability for the Soviet Union on its southern borders...
...The Jamiat-e Islami, a major Afghan resistance movement, now claims to have twenty-five hundred card-carrying members over the border in Tadzhikistan, enough to provide the nucleus for an active nationalist religious resistance movement within the Soviet Union itself, a development which could possibly threaten Soviet control over its Muslim borderlands...
...Despite the clamp-downs and growing Islamic discontent, nothing has yet curbed the soaring Muslim birth rate...
...Faced with an alien regime, many devout Muslims have taken refuge in these brotherhoods which are ideally equipped to teach and maintain Islam under persecution...
...There is virtually no intermarriage...
...This revival reflects the resurgence of Islam in the world at large, particularly the revolution in Iran just across the Soviet border and the Caspian Sea...
...But Khrushchev's drastic campaign against religion between 1960 and 1964 reduced the number of mosques to the present low figure...
...Five mosques opened in 1979 and 1980, after the fall of the Shah of Iran—a reflection of Soviet sensitivity to the increasing power of Islam in the world outside...
...In two areas in particular they are causing the government immense concern...
...In one local survey it was discovered that as many as 40 percent of those practicing Muslim rites such as circumcision, religious marriage, and burial in exclusive Muslim cemeteries were not believers...
...There has been a switch in emphasis away from friendship between the native population and their Russian "Elder Brother" towards the ability of "Elder Brother" to maintain order and eliminate various indigenous and foreign "traitors...
...The second is the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic, where, by using taqiya, a militant group, the Order of the Hairy Ishans, has gone underground since 1963...
...They make no attempt to integrate with the non-Muslim communities who have settled among them...
...Adepts may take part in exotic rituals which include trance-like states of ecstasy...
...During the period of relative tolerance towards religion after World War II, Muslims had up to seven thousand mosques...
...Previously these groups were isolated and often mutually hostile, with Islam being their only uniting factor...
...The "tariqa" is the institution which has done the most to keep the flame of Islam burning...
...Many join the Communist party...
...For decades, Soviet Muslims were effectively sealed off from contacts with the outside world, except through the official representatives of the Spiritual Directorates...
...They attend schools where Marxism and atheism are propagated, work in state factories and on collective farms...
...Central Asia and Kazakhstan...
...Only two out of 450 medres-sahs (seminaries) remain, and these are geared to train administrators in the four Spiritual Directorates, men who will become unofficial diplomats to the Muslim world serving the interests of the Soviet government...
...Half of its Muslims are ethnic Chinese, and the provision of mosques is apparently adequate...
...Many speak Uzbek...
...Then came the invasion of Afghanistan...
...JANICE A. BROUN is afree-lance writer doing research on the religions of Eastern Europe...
...During the 1970s the percentage of people of Muslim background on the Central Committees of the Central Asian Republics increased in proportion to the growth of their Muslim population...
...The government is reacting to this mood of defiance in (Continued on page 179) (Continued from page 175) certain communities by intensifying atheist propaganda and anti-religious activity...
...Whereas the Soviet Union's Slav population is barely replacing itself (abortions exceed live births), Muslims, treasuring the gift of children, maintain a birth rate two-and-a-half times that of the rest of the USSR...
...Muslim Shariat courts had been replaced by secular Soviet courts in the twenties during a concentrated clamp-down on religion...
...There is also evidence of a clamp-down on religious activities...
...A campaign launched in Dagestan in the North Caucasus in 1978 has been extended to most other Muslim areas...
...Ironically, China is now taking steps to fill this role...
...The number of activists being tried is increasing...
...Statistics reveal that today about 80 percent of Soviet Muslims practice their faith, a far higher proportion than any other major religious group in the Soviet Union...
...They also fulfill important emotional needs...
...In September 1982 thirteen people went on trial in Tashkent, charged with the production and sale of Muslim religious literature...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
