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THE ROLE OF ISLAMIC FACTOR IN CRISIS SETTLEMENT IN CHECHNIASergey BEREZHNOY
Sergey Berezhnoy, Leading analyst, Department of Analysis and Information, the Staff of the Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Federation in the Southern Federal Okrug (Rostov on Don, Russian Federation)
Academics, politicians and journalists alike have been displaying a profound interest in the role the Islamic factor and its most radical manifestations play in the Chechen crisis. Chechnia is an Islamic region in which the Sufi orders of Qadiriya and Naqshbandiya predominate. Islam has been gradually coming to the fore in the republic’s latest history, the progress became especially obvious in the early 1990s. The crisis of communist ideology pushed the leaders of the Chechen-Ingush republic toward reviving Islam as the dominant idea. Step by step the faithful were getting their mosques back, new mosques appeared, declarations about the role of Islam in Chechnia were cleansed of atheistic wordage. The Sufi orders had left behind many years of clandestine existence and the masses greeted their leaders as popular figures. At that period Islam was treated as one of the remedies designed to restore the Chechens as an ethnic entity.
As soon as General Dudaev came to power Islam was turned into an ideological weapon to be used against the federal Center to set the faithful Chechens against the infidel Russians and against the local forces wishing to continue the dialog with Russia. In his Sufi republic Dudaev staked on the Qadiriya tarekats the members of which had been isolated during the years of Soviet power. Those who supported the Naqshbandiya tarekats found themselves in opposition to Dudaev and his regime while the contradictions inside the Chechen Muslim community made the crisis deeper and tinged it with religious hues.
The war that started in 1994 radicalized the Chechen society still more. Amid fighting many political forces appealed to Islam and its most radical forms. During the first campaign of 1994-1996 traditional Islam had to make space to considerable numbers of those who supported the “revivalist” movement in Islam and called on the people to translate the literal meaning of the Koranic prescriptions into life. They rejected all traditions of the Chechen variant of Islam and Sufism as one of them. It was early in the 1990s that Wahhabism came to the republic. This was possible because society had become more……………
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