Tallinn, Estonia - The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation wants to "provide all possible assistance" to the official Islamic hierarchies there so that the latter can educate Muslims "in the spirit of traditional Islamic values" and "block attempts by foreign subversive and terrorist centers" to influence Russia's Muslims.
In an interview with the Interfax news agency reported last Wednesday, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev said that "joint efforts" were needed to immunize Russia's Muslims -- and especially young people in the North Caucasus - against efforts to promote "religious radicalism" or "justify terrorism by reference to religious dogma."
Patrushev said that this task was now urgent because of "the generational change among the Muslim clergy," one in which "anti-Russian radicals trained abroad were attempting to come to power" both in individual Muslim parishes and in the country's Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs).
While polls suggest that the Muslims in the Russian Federation like Muslims elsewhere are overwhelmingly opposed to terrorism, only a very few of them are likely to welcome Patrushev's offer of assistance. Indeed, they almost certainly will view this offer of assistance as yet another effort by the government to take control of their religious life.
A very large percentage of Russia's Muslim leaders received much of their training abroad. Even in Soviet times, the most senior MSD leaders studied at al-Azhar in Cairo or at other centers. And the explosive growth in Islamic institutions in the Russian Federation far outstripped the ability of domestic Islamic centers to train mullahs and imams.
Many of these leaders and even more of their subordinates and parishioners are certain to ask whether the FSB now plans to run background checks on all of them and whether a state institution will purge from religious bodies individuals that the government rather than the religious community finds questionable.
The involvement of the government Soviet and Russian in the MSDs discredited these institutions in the eyes of many ordinary Muslims. Islam is a non-clerical religion, and there is no theological basis for the existence of the MSDs, organizations that descend from institutions created by the tsars to control the Muslim community of the empire.
Consequently, Patrushev's high-profile plan almost certainly will further weaken these institutions both by highlighting the absence of any religious support for such organizations and also by providing yet another occasion for Muslim radicals to argue against the entire MSD system.
Indeed, the lack of respect for such institutions on the part of ordinary Muslims was one of the reasons behind the recent violence in Kabardino-Balkaria. But instead of learning from this as have some officials in the northern Caucasus, Patrushev appears to be planning simply to expand on what his agency and its predecessors have done before.
Moreover, Patrushev's offer, although clothed in the language of the counter-terrorism, strikes at the very heart of the Russian Constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion. Obviously Moscow must oppose those who advocate terrorism, but its plan to use Muslim structures as its adjuncts in that effort will raise some serious questions.
Many Russian officials want to ban Wahhabism, for example, but a large number of Russia's Muslim leaders have pointed out that banning a trend within Islam is not the best way to go. They argue that the state should use existing laws to fight those who advocate or carry out violent acts rather than seeking to ban one or another group.
Such leaders almost certainly will ask whether the FSB or some other government agency will attempt to make support of such a ban or the backing of other approaches a requirement for their remaining in office. They will note that restricting debate within Islam has often been the source of politicization and radicalization rather than its cure.
And many Muslims will see Patrushev's offer as openly discriminatory against Islam as such. On the very day that the FSB leader's statement was published, Interfax also carried remarks by Patriarch Aleksii II to a group of Russian Orthodox religious leaders being trained at the Academy of State Service, which operates in the Office of the Russian President.
In his speech, Aleksii made it clear that he opposed the reestablishment of the notorious Soviet-era Council on Religious Affairs, a body led by KGB officers that persecuted followers of all faiths in the Soviet Union and did everything it could to restrict religious liberties.
Such an institution is absolutely unnecessary now, Aleksii said, because "today, if we need to, we meet with the president and talk on the telephone with other ministers." Indeed, the patriarch continued, over the last 15 years, the relationship between the Church and the Russian state had evolved to a point unlike any in the past.
Aleksii's words suggest that there may be some in Moscow who want to revive that Soviet institution in order to control religious groups, but they also suggest that he is confident that he and the Russian Orthodox Church have sufficient clout to prevent that from happening.
Consequently, if the Russian state creates control institutions for Muslims that it does not or cannot for Christians, that action in and of itself will deepen the divide between the two and thus help to promote rather than prevent the very things that FSB chief Patrushev says he wants to block.