THE “ISLAMIC REVIVAL” IN DAGHESTAN TWENTY YEARS LATER
Abstract
The Caucasian Muslims witnessed a tempes tuous Islamic upswing during the last decade of the 20th century and at the beginning of the new millennium. As though by the wave of a magic wand, the region was transformed from Soviet into Islamic. The outer appearance of towns and villages drastically changed, along with the very tempo of private and public life. Islam became the basis on which children and adolescents socialized. Islamic schools and higher education institutions opened. Islamic parties and movements of different trends, Islamic periodicals, and even a Russian-language Islamic Internet appeared. Sufi sheikhs emerged from the underground. In the East-ern Caucasus, the Naqshbandi, Shazili, and Qadiri orders are functioning openly again. Islam has be-come a marketable political trump card, and every politician is rushing to assure the Muslim how much he loves and wants to protect him. The statements of Daghestan President Mukhu Aliev are typical in this respect: “We have no history without religion, and we will help our traditional religious trends and strengthen the position of the Spiritual Admin-istration of Muslims with this goal in mind…”1 Daghestan found itself in the epicenter of the move-ment. Reislamization has assumed more vehement and at times grotesque forms here.
It will soon be twenty years since the Islam-ic upswing or revival, as the people in Daghestan like to call it, began. Perestroika set it in motion. It is worth doing some tallying up on the eve of this “glorious anniversary.” Particularly since, after all the upheavals of the post-perestroika period, it appears that life both in Russia and the Caucasus has calmed down somewhat. It is time to think about the lessons that can be learned from the Islamic boom in Daghestan. As an ethnographer, I would like to do this by turning to the information gathered in the republic between the fall of 1992 and the winter of 2006.2 I was lucky enough to witness both the beginning of the Islamic boom and the slump in the fervor over Islam that began at some point after the mid-2000s. Returning to the problem of the post-Soviet forms of Islam, which I have written about repeatedly, including in Central Asia and the Caucasus, I would like to clarify several still not entirely clear questions about the nature and consequences of the Islamic boom.
hat caused the Islamic revival? How does it correlate with the Soviet imperial past in the Caucasus? What has the Islamic boom done for Daghestan? What ended up being revived, and has any-thing actually been revived? And, finally, is there a correlation between the revival of Islam and the increase in conflicts and instability in the region?
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References
A. Shikhsaidov, “Islam v Dagestane,” Tsentral’naia Azia i Kavkaz, No. 4, 1999, p. 113.
I would like to thank my Daghestani colleagues and friends A.R. Navruzov, Sh.Sh. Shikhaliev, and K.M. Khanbabaev for clarifying several statistics and facts presented in this article.
See programs of the Islamic Democratic Party of Daghestan of the Daghestan branch of the Jamaat-ul-Muslimi Islamic Revival Party, in: Dagestan: etnopoliticheskiy portret, Compiled by V.F. Gryzlov, Vol. II, Moscow, 1994, pp. 262,277, 281-282, 284.
See: Makhachkalinskie izvestia, No. 24, 9 June, 1995.
Comment by French ethnologist F. Longuet-Marx (see: F. Longuet-Marx, “Le retour de l’imam,” Caucase. Axes anciens, nouveaux enjeux. Nouveaux mondes, No. 8, 1998).
A. Shikhsaidov, op. cit., p. 111.
See, for example: A.V. Malashenko, Islamskoe vozrozhdenie v sovremennoi Rossii, Moscow, 1998; A.A. Ignatenko,Islam i politika, Moscow, 2004; E.F. Kisriev, Islam i politika v Dagestane, Moscow, 2004.
For more detail, see: V. Bobrovnikov, “Mythologizing Shari‘a Courts in the Post-Soviet North Caucasus,” ISIM Newsletter, No. 5, June 2000, p. 25.
See: N.M. Emelianova, Musul’mane Kabardy, Moscow, 1999, p. 101.
See: K.M. Khanbabaev, “‘Shariatizatsiia’ postsovetskogo Dagestana: mify i realnost’,” in: Islam i pravo v Rossii,Issue 1, Moscow, 2004, p. 158; I.L. Babich, “Respublika Kabardino-Balkaria: mecheti i islamskie obshchiny,” in: Islam i pravo v Rossii, Issue 3, Moscow, 2004, p. 37; idem, “Respublika Adygeia i Krasnodarskiy kray: mecheti i islamskie obshchiny,”in: Islam i pravo v Rossii, Issue 1, p. 84.
Their number cannot be precisely calculated.
See: Sovetskiy Dagestan za 40 let, Makhachkala, 1960, pp. 119, 129, 131.
See: D.V. Makarov, Ofitsial’nyy i neofitsial’nyy islam v Dagestane, Moscow, 2000, pp. 5, 71; K.M. Khanbabaev,
Religioznoe obrazovanie v Dagestane,” in: Problemy polikonfessional’nogo obrazovaniia v Dagestane, Makhachkala, 2002,pp. 118-119.
See: An. Skachko, Daghestan, Moscow, 1931, pp. 127-128.
For more detail, see: V.O. Bobrovnikov, “Waqf v Dagestane: iz vcherashnego dnya v zavtrashniy?” in: Islam i pravo v Rossii, Issue 2, Moscow, 2004, pp. 150-165.
See: An. Skachko, op. cit., p. 89; V. Bobrovnikov, “Dagestan,” in: Islam na territorii byvshei Rossiiskoi imperii,Compiler and editor-in-chief S.M. Prozorov, Vol. 1, Moscow, 2006, pp. 123-124.
See: A.R. Shikhsaidov, op. cit., p. 110.
See my special article on this topic: V. Bobrovnikov, “Al-Azhar and Shari‘a Courts in Twentieth-Century Cauca-sus,” Middle Eastern Studies (London), Vol. 37, No. 4, October 2001, pp. 9-13.
Quoted from: A.R. Shikhsaidov, op. cit., p. 110.
See his interview with journalist Maxim Shevchenko: M. Shevchenko, “Znanie ot proroka,” Zov predkov, No. 2-3, 2001, p. 4. Said-afandi’s book with the Arabic subtitle Majmu’at ap-fava’id (Treasure-House of Blessed Truths), com-piled in the form of question-answer traditional for Daghestani ulema, was written and published first in Avar (Makhachkala,2000), and soon reprinted in Russian in Moscow (2001, 2003). What is more, Said-afandi published Tales about Prophets (K’isasul anbiya, Makhachkala, 1999) in Avar.
See: Uchebniy plan Severokavkazskogo universiteta imeni sheikha Muhammada-Arifa. Podgotovka sviashchennos-luzhitelei islamskogo veroucheniia (Curriculum of the North Caucasian Islamic University of Sheikh Muhammad Arif. Sx Year Training in the Islamic Faith for Clergymen), s.a. (manuscript).
Field material of 2002-2005. For more detail about the Islamic higher school in Daghestan today, see: A. Navru-zov, “‘The Yawning Heights:’ Islamic Higher Education in Post-Soviet Daghestan and International Educational Networks,”Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 1 (43), 2007.
See: D.V. Makarov, op. cit., p. 71; Current Archives of the Administration of Religious Affairs at the Government of the Republic of Daghestan. I am grateful to K.M. Khanbabaev for providing the information.
For more detail, see: V. Bobrovnikov, “Islam in the Russian Empire,” in: The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. II,Imperial Russia, 1689-1917, ed. by D. Lieven, Cambridge, 2006.
See: M. Kemper, Sufis und Gelehrte in Tatarien und Baschkirien, 1789-1889: der islamische Diskurs unter rus-sischer Herrschaft, Berlin, 1998.
D.Iu. Arapov, E.I. Larina, S.G. Rybakov i ego “Obzor” organizatsii dukhovnoi zhizni musul’man Rossii (April 1917), Moscow, 2006, p. 14.
For more detail, see: V.O. Bobrovnikov, “Dagestan,” in: Islam na territorii byvshei Rossiiskoi imperii, p. 123.
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See: Federal Law on the Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations, in: Legislation Code of the Russian Federation, No. 39, 1997, pp. 7677-7678, 7667, 7669, 7673, 7674-7676.
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See: D.V. Makarov, op. cit., p. 47.
See: Ibid., p. 47; Current Archives of the Administration of Religious Affairs…
For more detail, see: V. Bobrovnikov, “The Beslan Massacre,” ISIM Review, No. 15, Spring 2005, p. 13.
For more on the attitude of the Wahhabi movement to post-Soviet forms of Islam, see: V. Bobrovnikov, “Post-Socialist Forms of Islam: North Caucasian Wahhabis,” ISIM Newsletter, No. 7, March 2001, p. 29.
See, for example: A.A. Ignatenko, op. cit., pp. 181-188.
A. Jersild, Orientalism and Empire, Montreal, London, 2002, p. IX.
See: A.A. Yarlykapov, “Islam na Severnom Kavkaze: sovremennye problemy. Severo-Zapadniy Kavkaz,” in: Et-nicheskaia situatsiia v stranakh SNG i Baltii, Annual Report, ed. by V.A. Tishkov, E. Filippova, Moscow, 2005, p. 37.
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