RELIGION AND POLITICS: NTERACTION AGAINST AN AZERBAIJANIAN BACKGROUND

Abstract

There is a religious upsurge in the Azerbai- janian Republic (AR) directly connected with the country’s political and ideological trans-formations and the transition period that followed the Soviet Union’s disintegration in 1991. The Soviet Union collapsed along with the bankrupt Soviet totalitarian regime and the Communist ideology, allowing freedom of conscience to flourish in the republic in the absence of the “hand of Moscow "as a centralizing and controlling instrument.  A religious renaissance is taking place in the independent country; it draws its strength from the spiritual legacy rooted in our nation’s ancient culture and traditions. This is primarily true of Islam, the dominating religion, yet other traditional religions have also acquired a chance to revive and develop. At the same time, new hitherto unknown nontraditional religious trends have made their way into the republic. To a certain extent, this is ex- plained by more than seven decades of the Soviet society’s “spiritual” blindness, the current quest for religious answers to the most burning issues of to-day, and the activity of foreign forces and foreign missionaries.
 The present religious upsurge, mainly owing to the resurrection of Islam, does not allow “West-ern influences” to penetrate the AR, thus depriving our citizens of a chance to learn and embrace universal values found outside Islam.
 The leaders of our republic are using religion as an instrument to influence the masses and strengthen their power, while foreign forces, in turn, exploit this instrument to penetrate Azerbaijan and gain a stronger foothold. This is happening in many other countries, too. The result is a situation in which it is sometimes hard to predict how it will affect the relations between religion and political power and the attitudes of the faithful. Therefore, I have chosen the following aspects: the situation in the religious sphere—the zones and confessions;ethnoconfessional minorities—territorial distribution and size; and freedom of conscience and security of the state.
 The guarantees of a secular state in the religious sphere are one of the pivotal points: the state’s religious tolerance has its limits. In fact, tolerance ends where the threat of religious totalitarianism ap-pears, that is, when there is a potential threat of a secular political system turning into a theocratic one. In a secular society, religion and the state, faith and politics cannot blend, otherwise the secular social-political order will disappear along with the democratic institutions. This will destroy the constitutional pillar of any secular state and violate the corresponding framework documents issued by the world community that regulate the relations be-tween religion and political power and between faith and civil society.