The "olive branch" -- a weapon of the proletariat (weekly review) By Vadim Borshchev, special to Prague Watchdog
Ingushetia’s Islamic insurgents (the “mujahideen”) have issued a statement declaring that they have no quarrel with fellow Muslims who practise so-called “traditional” Islam. The statement was published on the Hunafa.com website on September 18. This event can be called unprecedented, since it is more or less the Salafists’ first attempt to find common ground with the Sufis in spite of the fact that the mutual recriminations between them have been growing more radical and violent with every year. The gulf of enmity that exists between the "Wahhabis", as they are called in the North Caucasus, and the local Tariqatists has always seemed insurmountable. Each side denies the other the right to call themselves true believers. The Salafists describe traditional Islam as blatant paganism, claiming that the Tariqatists routinely violate the principle of Tawheed (the Oneness of God, or monotheism). By worshipping sheikhs, ancestors and sacred places and by saying prayers for the dead, they commit Shirk – the very grave sin of “associating partners with Allah”.
Nationalism, the preference of ordinary law over Sharia – the list of the sins of which the Salafists accuse the majority of Muslims includes all manner of crimes against the faith. The recent statement by Said Buryatsky charging most Chechens with unbelief can be viewed as a kind of summary of this enmity. For their part, the representatives of the official clergy and the "traditionalists" are just as uncompromising towards their radical opponents. They see e Salafism as a positivist totalitarian sect that confers upon itself the right to speak on behalf of Islam, sowing irreconcilable discord between Muslims by dividing them into true believers and hypocrites. In their opinion, the sect reduces the entire spiritual complexity and richness of Islam to a limited set of primitive truths that are based on a random selection from the Sunna and the Koran – an exclusive preference for those ayats and hadiths which can provide justification for their mechanistic view of life.
Without going into the theological details, I will say only that the dispute between the two groups of Muslims has long ceased to be purely doctrinaire and has turned into open war. For many long years now, the representatives of both camps have conducted a relentless hunt for one another throughout the whole of the North Caucasus – official Islam, which makes use of the repressive capacity of the state system, and the Salafists, who employ the methods of guerrilla warfare.
Why have the Ingush mujahideen made this attempt at calling for peace with their fellow believers? In all probability because the insurgency does not have the support of the population, and without it the insurgents are unable to continue their struggle, as is becoming increasingly apparent. Hard pressed as they are by the official security forces, the "Forest Brethren" can no longer afford to accuse the civilian population of djahilia – unbelief – and so they have no option but to abandon their traditional criticism of "popular" Islam.
Since it is the result of a political solution dictated by the present situation, the call for peace cannot be sincere or rooted in the religious foundations of Salafism, whose radical interpretation of the fundamental truths of Islam remains unchanged. Once upon a time, Vladimir Lenin borrowed the slogan "Land to the People” from the Social Revolutionaries, thus ensuring that the Bolsheviks had the sympathy of the land-hungry or landless Russian peasantry. However, the ideology of the Social Revolutionaries remained deeply alien to Communist doctrine, which denied the right to private property and insisted on the total nationalization of the land. The peasants placed their faith in the leader of the world proletariat, and paid no attention to the Social Revolutionaries’ complaints that the slogan had been stolen from them. The final episode in this story was Stalin’s nationalization.
Photo: AHLU-SUNNA. (Translation by DM) (P,DM)
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