Kazan — summer 2010

Today (Thursday) we had an excellent lecture on Islam in Tatarstan. The young man who delivered it is actually a comp sci specialist. I liked that. It meant that he wasn't someone who had a professional stake in Islam. He had a personal stake.

I'm going to abbreviate his comments quite a bit. In 1773 Catherine the Great essentially declared that the State should not interfere with Islam in Tatarstan. From that time forward Tatar Muslims had free association with foreign Muslims. Tatars could study in other Muslim countries, and Muslims of other countries could study in Tatarstan. The Russian revolution in 1918 changed that. From that time forward all religion was frowned up. People educated in the Soviet period on the whole did not embrace Islam or Christianity.

Beginning in the early 1990s young people could again freely explore Islam. Many did so. There is a small number of women in Tatarstan now wearing the Islamic head scarf, which before the 90s was almost unheard of. There are now tens of thousands of practicing Muslims in Tatarstan. When we say "practicing Muslims," we mean people who are praying five times daily, though they do not yet necessarily adhere to other practices of Islam in the way, say, that Wahibis from Saudi Arabia or Sudan do. Our speaker said that if you go to a mosque nowadays in Tatarstan, about 20% of the attendees are old folks. About 10% (educated in the thick of the Soviet system, so there are very few of them) are middle aged. About 70% are young folks, meaning people in their twenties and early thirties. This demographic is significant. They are slowly growing into their financial and political power. In terms of business, as they have slowly aged and came into greater social power, they have started opening halal restaurants. Then Islamic medical services. Over just the last few years some financial institutions guided by Islamic principles have come into being. Islamic charitable funds are still new and weak here, which is natural considering the age of these folks, but they are developing. They now have some Islamic business associations.

Our speaker, to my way of thinking, was a sincere young man. When I asked whether he himself read the Koran, he said he did. When I asked what attracted him to reading the Koran, he cited the example of his older brother, along with the experience of something greater than himself when he prayed with other Muslims. When he spoke about Islam, he said things like, "Islam is one" and "As long as you can say 'There is no God but God, and Mohammad is His prophet,' then you are a Muslim." I appreciated his sentiment. He is looking at Islam from the point of view of a man of pure heart who wishes to serve God, and therefore he assumes that all the good things that he sees and follows in Islam are the essence of Islam, and departures from those good things are, by his experiential definition, not true Islam.

I believe he is mistaken. Like most huge religions, Islam is not one, at least in the ordinary sense of human words. The Islam of Tatarstan is gentle and lovely. It is not oppressive of women. It is not afraid of foreign influences; it exists peaceably as itself in the midst of Orthodox Russianness. (And the Russian Orthodox exist peaceably with their Muslim brethren in Tatarstan. Both sets are peaceful neighbors. I suspect that the majority of both racial groups are actually atheists. The atheists also live peaceably here.) The Wahibi portion of Islam of Saudi Arabia is oppressive of women and, combined with the social problems of polygamy and unemployment, produces a significant subset of young men prone to violence. The Islam of Tatarstan does not. These are very different things, and to call them one is the error of someone who is good-hearted and not yet aware of the negative consequences of the practices of other people who share similar words but who are of lesser character.

Bearing in mind the stage of life of the young Muslims in Tatarstan, I predict a growing influence of Islam here. Current Russian Orthodoxy offers little in the way of interest to young Russians/Tatars, and Islam seems a way to reject all the bad things that accompanied the negative influence of the Russian revolution. Whether the Tatar Muslims have the insight to preserve the best of their own Islam without succumbing to the evil aspects of some of its foreign adherents, is something that remains to be seen.

Note: There is only one Protestant church and only one Catholic church in this entire city of 1.1 million people; that astonishes me.