KAZAN, Russia
Almira Adyatullina pulled out her tattered Soviet internal passport, which she must still carry with her at all times. In somber black and white, it shows her as she was 15 years ago, with dark curly hair, round glasses and a frown on her face.
Today, she is a different woman, a woman of Islam. Her hair, long since turned white, is covered by a white scarf, her short sleeves abandoned for a demure baggy dress.
Here in the semi-autonomous republic of Tatarstan, Adyatullina's passport has become a matter of high politics, the unlikely subject of legal wrangling and presidential pronouncements. Required to trade in her Soviet-era ID for a new Russian passport, Adyatullina refused when she learned of a government decree that she could not wear her head scarf in the picture.
Instead, she and more than a dozen other Muslim women launched unprecedented court cases, declaring the new policy a violation of the religion they have embraced since the Soviet Union's collapse.
Their cases have tested the limits of Russia's tolerance for the rebirth of Islam inside its borders. Last week, President Vladimir Putin weighed in during a visit to this city, a mixture of mosques and Orthodox churches topped with onion domes. Putin scornfully dismissed the centuries-old Islamic tradition of head scarves as nothing more than a "fashion" that might disappear in a few years. There must be national standards for passports, he said, and women with such scarves don't meet them.
"They say this is a fashion, and it will go away. This is absurd," said Adyatullina, 64, as she showed off souvenirs from her pilgrimage to Mecca. "For a Muslim woman, this is like telling us to go outside without pants on. They are violating our rights to religious freedom. I am an old woman and I am going to die soon -- I just want to live according to Allah."
For Russia's estimated 20 million Muslims, the matter of the head scarves has become a symbol of their uneasy status. The leadership in Moscow is waging a long-running war against Chechen rebels it calls Islamic terrorists. Since the attacks last September against the United States, Muslims here have complained bitterly of a backlash, an "Islamaphobia," as Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiev put it to a Russian interviewer.
Such complaints are particularly resonant here in Tatarstan, an independent-minded republic of 4 million located in the center of Russia, 500 miles from Moscow. For a decade, the region has sought as much freedom as it could get from Moscow -- short of going to war to get it -- and leaders here believe that Russian politicians in the central government have seized on the Tatars' Islamic heritage as a pretext to crack down on what is mostly a nationalist movement.
"Praying five times a day is not dangerous. Wearing a head scarf is not dangerous. The struggle against terrorism has nothing to do with women in head scarves," said Rimzil Valiyev, a Tatar nationalist leader. "But whenever there is a political storm in Russia, they take it out on the Tatars. They crack down on us as a prophylactic measure against Islam whenever there is a problem in Russia."
All across Russia, Muslims have reported instances of harassment since Sept. 11. A Muslim cemetery was desecrated in Krasnodar in southern Russia. A mysterious shooting took place inside a mosque in Irkutsk, Siberia. In Volgograd, Valiyev recalled, a gang broke into a mosque construction site an hour before the groundbreaking ceremony, and local officials told the distressed delegation, "We don't need a mosque here."
In Tatarstan, where the population is almost evenly divided between Muslim Tatars and ethnic Russians, some Muslim women reported being harassed on the street, their scarves ripped off their heads. Mullahs were no longer invited to open Tatar political meetings with prayers after Sept. 11 for fear of controversy, and religious activists began arguing that a tolerant, nonviolent version of Islam has always prevailed here.
This spring, a delegation of leaders from Moscow arrived on an official mission to investigate claims of extremism among Tatarstan's Muslims. "After September 11, we had to show that Muslims here had nothing to do with terrorism," said a top local official.
"In the last year there has been a lot of fear in Kazan," said Zulfat Gavdullin, a teacher here at the Mohammediya madrassa, or Islamic school, that has about 1,000 students. "Our republic is a key part of the Russian Federation, and many people don't like that there is a renaissance of Islam here."
The history of Islam in Tatarstan has been a troubled one ever since Ivan the Terrible conquered the region for Russia in 1552 and burned down the great mosque in Kazan's kremlin. In the centuries that followed, Islam was officially repressed by the Russians, with many of Tatarstan's mosques closed and its citizens forcibly converted to Christianity.
In the 19th century, during a brief period of liberalization, Kazan became the center of Islamic thought in the far-flung Russian empire, propounding a progressive Sunni theology known as Jadidism.
The Soviet Union was officially atheist, and sought to stamp out religion. Tatarstan's famed mosques and madrassas were shut down, its mullahs exiled or killed, and Islam was dormant here, as elsewhere in Russia, remembered only in secret prayers behind locked village doors and in the whispered reminiscences of grandparents. By the time of the Soviet collapse in 1991, there was only a single functioning mosque in Kazan.
But with the Soviet Union's demise, Islam flourished again. Today, there are an estimated 1,000 mosques in Tatarstan, including the grand new incarnation of the Kul Sharif mosque that Shaimiev is rebuilding inside the Kazan kremlin with money from the Saudi-based Islamic Development Bank. Religious education has boomed, with the opening of a Russian Islamic University in 1998 and permission to reopen madrassas like the Mohammediya, closed since the time of the czars.
As with any religious revival, there are many gradations to this reborn faith -- from the young woman who wears a dress that fits like a revealing glove along with her head scarf, to the one who sports a tight T-shirt and admits to drinking alcohol but says she has discovered Allah. Head scarves, while growing more popular, are still a rarity on the streets of Kazan, and it is the sound of Christian church bells, not the Muslim call to prayer, that rings out over the kremlin in the morning. Many here say, as Valiyev did, that "we are Tatars first, Muslims second."
But religious extremism is also part of this new mix, although many here are reluctant to discuss it. "There was a spiritual vacuum here after 70 years of communism and many extremist movements decided to use this vacuum," said Gulfiya Gainytdinova, 23, who said one of her acquaintances joined up with the Chechen rebels. "It exists -- we can't deny this fact."
In the industrial city of Naberezhnye Chelny, 125 miles from here, a madrassa was closed last year when authorities claimed religious extremism was being taught there. Russian media reported that some of the school's students had turned up fighting alongside rebels in Chechnya. And at least two of the seven Russian citizens captured by the United States in Afghanistan and held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, also allegedly passed through the madrassa.
Shaimiev's regional government, fearful of a backlash from Moscow, has tried to control the new religious fervor. The government has a Muslim "spiritual administration" to run Islamic activities and closely regulates the curricula at all registered religious schools. Teachers from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries have been kicked out in recent months, replaced with a small number of government-approved teachers from two of the "most reformed, most progressive" universities in Egypt and Jordan, according to Shaimiev's adviser, Rafael Khakimov.
At the same time, however, it is Shaimiev's own fight with Moscow that has helped make Tatarstan's Muslim renaissance into a political issue, according to government officials and religious activists here. A Soviet-era bureaucrat turned Tatar nationalist, Shaimiev has adopted symbols of the Tatars' Muslim heritage, like the reborn Kul Sharif mosque, to advance his own cause of maximum autonomy for the republic.
After Putin took office two years ago, he moved to rein in many semi-autonomous regions in Russia. He appointed super-governors to oversee the elected regional chiefs, and changed the way the regions were represented in the Russian legislature. This put Shaimiev on the defensive with the central government.
A decade ago, Shaimiev declared Tatarstan a sovereign republic and signed a treaty with Moscow outlining Tatarstan's rights as a member of the Russian Federation. Many regions negotiated similar treaties with Moscow. Putin, however, has demanded that the treaties be scrapped; Tatarstan is the only one of Russia's 89 regions still to have such an agreement. Now, Shaimiev is in the midst of heated negotiations with the president on what will replace it.
In such a delicate political situation, a decree that started turning up around Tatarstan this spring had an unexpectedly explosive effect. Headlined "Information for Muslim women," the notice from the federal Ministry of Internal Affairs warned that their wish to be photographed for internal passports with their heads covered would henceforth be considered "in contradiction" with the rules. The decree apparently applied only in Tatarstan and seemed to target the region with a security restriction for a problem that had never mattered before Sept. 11.
Some women had already gotten their new passports with their head scarves on. But Adyatullina and many other newly avid Muslims had not. In the city of Nizhnekamsk, not far from Kazan, three women decided to sue, while Adyatullina collected another group of plaintiffs in Kazan.
Their cases immediately caused a sensation when a court ruled in early August against the Nizhnekamsk women. Last week, the Supreme Court of Tatarstan upheld the ruling.
"If all this was happening at a different moment in time, no one would notice. But this case of the women has provoked such political noise because of the increased tensions with Moscow," said Lyubov Aigeyeva, a top aide in the Tatarstan State Council.
But to women such as Adyatullina, it's a matter far beyond the politics of the moment. "The Russian constitution guarantees us freedom of religion," she said. "They are violating a very simple human right here."