SALAFISM IN CENTRAL ASIA AND THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS

Bakhtiar MIRKASYMOV

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Bakhtiar Mirkasymov, Head, sector of the APR Problems, Russian Institute of Strategic Research (Moscow, Russian Federation)

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By 2000 population of the Muslim countries reached the figure of 1,263m and is growing at a fast pace (by 2.6 percent every year against the world’s of average 1.7 percent). While in the mid-1990s the Muslims comprised 18.5 percent of the world’s population the total GDP of all Muslim countries barely reached 4.4 percent. These figures reflect the low and dropping per capita income, the factor that drives socially excluded groups to radical Islam and that makes religion an instrument of dramatic changes of state order in certain countries. Some of the Muslim ideologists have armed themselves with Islamic slogans to demonstrate their determination to adjust the entire world (and its Muslim part, in the first place) to their ideas. No wonder certain Islamic political forces turned their attention to Central Asia and the Caucasus, an arena on which fundamentalists and Salafis are especially active.

The Situation in Central Asia

Although the new independent Central Asian states are predominantly Muslim they differ radically from the Middle Eastern Islamic countries. Under Soviet power they were living in the conditions of official atheism with Muslim traditions partly preserved in everyday life. Sunni Islam of the Hanafi School was restricted to the madrasahs of Samarkand and Bukhara while the official religious structures slavishly obeyed the authorities. Parallel Islam in the form of Sufi brotherhoods Naqshbandiya and Qadiriya was practiced mainly in the countryside.

Students from the Soviet Union were sent to theological universities of friendly Libya and Syria and also to the famous universities of Egypt and Jordan while Iran was carefully avoided. Quite unexpectedly those of the Soviet students who studied in the Sunni Arab countries succumbed to the ideas of the Muslim Brothers though none of them joined the anti-Soviet dissident movement.

Having obtained independence the Central Asian countries joined the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) and other international Islamic structures. Some of the republics included Muslim symbols in……………..

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