A super-mufti for Russia?

Moscow, Russia - Russian Presidential advisor Aslanbek Aslakhanov has called for the election of a single supreme mufti early next year to oversee all the Muslim communities of the Russian Federation, someone he said who could assist the government in its struggle against terrorism and fundamentalist Islam.

The proposal was greeted coolly by the Russian Federation's Muslim leaders, most of who view it as a direct threat to their power and influence. Despite the fact the introduction of a single muftiate will reduce rather than strengthen the Russian government's control over Islam, Moscow seems virtually certain to go ahead.

Aslakhanov presented this idea at a Moscow meeting "Islam for Peace" organized by various Muslim groups, Interfax reported. He told Kommersant newspaper it was only his "personal idea", but his comments and those of another Russian official at the session suggest otherwise.

Aslakhanov suggested his ideas would find favor within the Kremlin once he did share them with officials there, adding any opposition by Muslim leaders simply reflects their personal ambitions and unwillingness to subordinate themselves to anyone else.

"The muftis don't want to elect a chief mufti," Aslakhanov said, "because each of them wants to be the chief." But if such an election were to take place, he continued, "anyone who does not want to subordinate himself to the law and the regulations adopted on the territory of the country where he lives, well, those are his problems."

Aslakhanov was supported at the meeting by the country's deputy chief prosecutor, Vladimir Kolesnikov, who complained too many Muslims are studying abroad -- from 3,000 to 4,000 by his count -- and thus bringing back ideas that are alien to traditional Russian Islam and a threat to its current leaders as well as the country.

In other comments, Kolesnikov added that in his view the current administrative divisions within Islam had allowed far too many Muslim organizations to avoid registration with the authorities. He pointedly suggested Muslims were primarily to blame for the rise of xenophobia among Russians.

While Aslakhanov is undoubtedly correct that at least some of the heads of the Muslim spiritual directorates in the Russian Federation are calculating just how they might win the top job, none of them has come out in favor of Aslakhanov's proposal, and most have made comments that should but probably won't give Moscow pause.

Mufti Mukhammedgali Khuzin, who heads the administrative side of the Central MSD, told Kommersant the idea of electing or assigning a single mufti is unrealistic given the religious and legal distinctions which exist in the Muslim community" of the Russian Federation.

Muslims in the northern Caucasus, he pointed out, are primarily followers of the Shafai legal school within Sunni Islam, while most elsewhere are part of the Hanafi school. The Soviet authorities recognized this reality, he continued, creating within the Russian Federation two spiritual administrations, one in Ufa and another in the North Caucasus.

And in comments reported by Interfax the same day, Khuzin said in perhaps five to 25 years, it might be possible by slow negotiation and cooperation on education and other issues to overcome those divisions, but the divide between them mow is so great that "attempts to force the unification of Muslims can only deepen" this split.

Ravil Gainutdin, who heads the rival Union of Muftis of Russia, was not much more supportive of Aslakhanov's proposal. He told Interfax last Thursday Muslims understand the need for "a vertical of Muslim spiritual power" but "this must not be established by decree from above." Instead, Muslims must do it themselves.

In remarks reported by Kommersant many in the Kremlin are sure to read as a stinging criticism, Gainutdin said "the creation a single structure and of one chief representative" for the Muslims of Russia was "convenient" for the government, which would thus find it "simpler and easier to administer the Muslims."

And in views echoed by other Muslim leaders at the meeting, Gainutdin suggested the government's security agencies were behind Aslakhanov's proposal because most of them are inclined to see "all Muslims" as potential terrorists and thus want to place them under tighter control.

Meanwhile, Nafigulla Ashirov, who heads the MSD of the Asiatic Part of Russia, told Kommersant pressure from the authorities of the kind that a single supreme mufti might be expected to convey would only further anger, alienate and quite possibly radicalize the Muslims of the Russian Federation.

For more than a decade, Russian officials have repeatedly said the existence of three main Muslim organizations -- the Central MSD, the Union of Muftis of Russia, and the Coordinating Center of Muftis of the Northern Caucasus -- and more than 60 others represents an administrative and political nightmare.

The leaders of these institutions, all of which are modeled on bureaucratic structures set up by tsarist authorities and continued by the Soviets and none of which has any basis in the profoundly non-clerical faith of Islam, have often fought among themselves or exploited their ties with the government to advance narrow bureaucratic interests.

These conflicts as well as the links between some of these leaders and the state have undermined the authority of many of these leaders in the eyes of ordinary Muslims. And that has opened the way for radicals and foreign missionaries to gain a hearing and a level of influence they might not otherwise have achieved.

At the same time, however, the existence of these competing hierarchies and their relative lack of authority have had a positive side: It has helped to create the possibility of greater freedom of religious belief and practice among the Muslims of the Russian Federation than might otherwise have been the case.

Congregations angry at the hierarchy of which they are a part of and especially mullahs and imams who believe the MSDs are using the power of the state to control them over the past 15 years have been in a position to shift their bureaucratic allegiance or even opt out of the MSD system altogether.

If Aslakhanov's ideas are introduced, that will no longer be the case. Muslims of the Russian Federation will lose those possibilities, and the supreme mufti and his single MSD will be even more tightly integrated with the state, thus making both more illegitimate in the eyes of the faithful than the existing structures and leaders.

Consequently, there is every likelihood the Kremlin's latest approach to the increasingly numerous Muslims of the Russian Federation will backfire, leading to the radicalization of opinion among them and contributing to a decline in the ability of either the new super-MSD or the state to control what they do.

Despite that, however, the Kremlin appears likely to press ahead. Like its tsarist and Soviet predecessors, the current leaders want the Muslim community of the Russian Federation to be structured like the Orthodox Church. But in addition, they clearly believe setting up a single "power vertical" is the answer to all problems.