Through Muslim Eyes

After last October’s terrorist attack

on a Moscow theater, Russia’s already

tense relations with its Muslim minority

became increasingly testy.

Russian Life Editor Lina Rozovskaya visited three of Moscow’s five mosques to explore

how Russia’s Muslims see their place in the

contemporary life of the capital.

Women wearing headscarves bustle about the cafeteria of Moscow’s Cathedral Mosque, laying out lavish plates of coldcuts, pies and fruits on tables covered in white linen. It is 4 pm. In seven minutes, the sun will set and guests will begin arriving to partake in iftar—the breaking of the fast. It is the twenty-first day of Ramadan, and Moscow’s Muslims are fasting from sunrise to sunset—not an easy thing to do in chilly November.

Rakhima Rakhmatullina, an amiable woman in her fifties whose hair is covered with a white scarf, slices up the last apple pie and puts it on the table alongside chunks of roast goose, steaming soups, fresh vegetables and a medley of traditional Tatar pastries. “They are going to be very hungry,” she says. “We serve everything that’s tasty. Everything except for alcohol and pork, of course.”

Rakhima and her husband Munir volunteered to host today’s iftar. It is not a cheap affair to feed over 30 people who have not eaten for ten hours, but for the Rakhmatullins it is a way to show respect to their ancestors’ traditions.

The iftar guests settle in around three spacious tables, conversing in a mixture of Russian and Tatar. The majority belong to the Moscow Tatar community, which has lived in the capital for generations. Rakhmatullina counts among their number. “Our parents and their parents always observed the fast during the holy month of Ramadan,” she says.

Muslim Moscow

Few people would associate predominantly Orthodox Moscow with Muslim traditions. Yet the Russian capital has some 1-2 million Muslims and people with Muslim roots, equalling at least 10% of the city’s population, though exactly how many Muslims there are in Russia is a matter of some debate (see box, page 27).

Even with this, however, one does not see mosque crescents on the city’s skyline. Moscow has just five mosques, three of them built in the last decade. You have to know which multi-storied apartment blocks to peek behind if you want to uncover enclaves of Muslim Moscow.

The Cathedral Mosque is situated next to the Olympic Stadium on Prospekt Mira. Built in 1904, it is the second oldest mosque in the city and the official “headquarters” of the Islamic faith in Moscow. It houses the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of European Russia, several Islamic publications, an Islamic school, a college and a university (where Rakhmatullina works as a professor of English).

Tatars, who have been in Moscow for hundreds of years, rightly note that Muslims are not newcomers to the city. Yet Moscow’s Tatars were only given the right to build their first permanent mosque, now known as the Historic Mosque, in the 19th century. Permission was granted in gratitude for Tatars’ participation in the War of 1812. In 1913, Baku oil magnate Shamsi Asadullaev constructed a building near the mosque to accommodate a madrassa (Islamic school), a printing house and a library. The building became known as “Asadullaev’s House,” and was the center of Muslim Moscow for the first half of the 20th century.

Under the atheist Soviet regime, Islamic believers were persecuted alongside believers of other religions. The Historic Mosque and Asadullaev’s House were closed down before the start of WWII. Public Islamic education was no longer accessible and traditions had to be passed on to children by their parents alone. The Cathedral Mosque, however, stayed open throughout the 20th century. Moscow’s Tatars continued going there on the Islamic holy day (Friday) and on religious holidays.

An old woman begging at the gate of the Cathedral Mosque said she moved to Moscow from Tatarstan after the war, to work on building sites. She said she and her girlfriends used to come to the mosque to socialize with other Tatars: “We all used to hang around here, by the mosque, to find a nice Tatar husband. And one day I found one right here, on this spot.”

Guests at the iftar recalled how difficult it was to observe Ramadan in the Soviet era. “At school,” one said, “I had to hide the fact that I was fasting, for fear that the teachers would force me to eat.”

After the collapse of the Soviet regime, Russians sought to rediscover their religious identities. While the majority turned to the Orthodox Church, those with Muslim parents or ancestors turned to Islam.

Hava, a woman in her forties, said she learned everything she knows about Islam from her parents, but today her 16-year-old son has more opportunities to learn about his heritage. “My son can study Islam at a special school. He calls himself a Muslim and is not ashamed of it.”

Moscow Muslims insist they have always lived peacefully alongside other communities. Rakhmatullina said she lives on the same floor with both a Jewish and a Ukrainian family, and they have all grown to be good friends. “We used to sometimes go to see an Orthodox Easter celebration at midnight,” she said. “We did it simply because it was such a beautiful ceremony–with candles blazing in the dark and priests in beautiful attire.”

Naila sells religious literature at the Cathedral Mosque. She said many non-Muslim Muscovites come to her kiosk and ask her for gift ideas for their Muslim friends.

New Faces

In the last decade, the face of Moscow’s Muslim community has changed dramatically, as the capital has been flooded by immigrants from the former Soviet republics of Tajikistan and Azerbaijan and from the Russian regions of Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya. Unlike Tatars, the new arrivals are strangers to the city. Often unemployed and usually lacking legal resident status, they are frequently frowned upon by locals.

Rufat Hazrat, the 26-year-old imam of the Historic Mosque, said the majority of his parishioners come from the Northern Caucasus. “Some people who come here are refugees or immigrants who don’t have a Moscow registration. We have even had people come and try to spend the night here.”

Historic Mosque stands in a quiet Moscow courtyard on Bolshaya Tatarskaya street, surrounded by apartment blocks on all sides. On Fridays, the little yard of the mosque teems with life. Street vendors sell everything from head scarves and carpets to halal meat—that which is permitted for Muslims. Tadjik refugees—children and their mothers—hustle for money at the gate.

When the mosque was to be re-opened in 1993, some of the people living nearby protested. “They thought we were going to wash our dead here and such,” said Imam Rufat. There were more complaints when a lamb was butchered in the mosque yard. As a result, this ritual is no longer done in the open. And the mosque’s muezzin does not call its believers to prayer with a loudspeaker, so as not to disturb local residents. Today, Rufat said, the mosque’s relations with its neighbors are “more or less smooth.”

It is of some significance that Moscow mosques are much more than houses of prayer. They are also meeting places, according to Imam Rufat. “Say, if you are Chechen and you want to organize at some kind of a club. You immediately become a target for the police. So they meet at the mosque. On the territory of the mosque, they feel safe.”

And yet, the mosque does not offer sanctuary. After the October hostage taking in a Moscow theater by Chechen terrorists, the mosque was repeatedly raided by the police over a period of two weeks. “They came in, identified the people whose faces they didn’t like and took them to the police station for a check,” Imam Rufat said. “The police checked on me as well—they questioned me and took down my information.” Rufat said his mosque was not visited by the police before the hostage taking, but that he was sure “people in civilian clothes” were keeping an eye on the mosque.

At the mosque’s small cafe, a 20-year-old Chechen, who asked to be called Adlan, recalled one of the raids while breaking the Ramadan fast with iftar. “We were having some tea here when the police came in. They took all ten of us—Chechens, Azeris, Tatars; they didn’t discriminate against anyone in particular—to the police station, saying it was only for half an hour, then kept us there for five hours. They took our fingerprints and photos and never explained on what grounds we were arrested. But we knew why–because some Muslims had taken hostages at Nord-Ost [the name of the musical at the theater] a week earlier.”

The Fallout of War

In 1999, Russia ramped up its war in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, when Wahhabite extremists and Chechen warlords sought to expand the conflict into neighboring Dagestan. That conflict, the September 11 attacks two years later, and now the Nord-Ost crisis, have made “Islamic” and “terrorism” virtually inseparable terms in the Russian press. As a result, many of Moscow’s Muslims say they have been the targets of racism and bigotry, particularly in the last year.

A young Tatar woman at the Historic Mosque said she was slighted for the first time in her life for being Muslim while discussing the hostage-taking at the theater with a friend: “She said to me: They would have let you go – you are Muslim.”

An iftar guest, a forty-something doctor, said that after the hostage crisis some of his Russian colleagues started acting differently towards him. “I can feel they are somehow suspicious of me, because they know I am Muslim,” he said.

Aleksei Malashenko, an expert on Islam at the Carnegie Foundation in Moscow, said that after September 11, Islam started being perceived by Russians as an “aggressive religion.” “This [perception] is found all over the world,” Malashenko said, “but in Russia things were exacerbated by the fact that it has only been a decade since people discovered they belong to different religions. Most people still have many questions about the others’ identity.”

Imam Rufat said he feels that it is mostly “uneducated people” who are prejudiced against Islam. “They don’t know anything about the religion, and for them it is all the same—Muslims, Chechen terrorists, Azeri mafia in the food markets—it is all mixed up in their heads.”

Rufat’s colleague, muezzin Rais, said that it is not only “people of Caucasian nationality” who are under attack. “I am Tatar, you know, but maybe because of my beard and everything, I look more like someone from the Caucasus. The police stop me all the time on the way to the mosque.”

Rais said his wife and daughters are also often stopped for ID checks: “If they are wearing head scarves, they must be Muslim. If they are Muslim, they are suspicious.”

Imam Rufat said it is not always easy for Muslims in Moscow to follow their chosen lifestyle: “Take a woman wearing a head scarf outside a mosque. She is guaranteed to be frowned upon.” He said that after the female Nord-Ost terrorists were shown on television, some young women complained to him that they had been called “terrorists” on the metro.

When Muslim women in Tatarstan requested to be photographed in headscarves for their passports last year, the state said “no.” President Putin dismissed the tradition of wearing hidjab as a temporary “fashion.”

“I used to wear a head scarf only to the mosque,” said Leleya, a Tatar, “but now I wear it in the streets as well.” It has become, she explained, her “personal jihad” against Islamaphobia.

Praying Behind Bars

Islam might not be the easiest religion to practice in Russia today, but, according to community leaders, the number of converts is growing steadily. And they are coming not only from among so-called “ethnic Muslims,” people whose parents or ancestors were Muslim.

Sergei, 24, an advertising manager, is a Russian who converted to Islam because he said he liked the lifestyle his Muslim friends were leading. “My family still cannot accept my choice,” Sergei said. “Not that they are Orthodox, it is just because of politics. Islam is not the coolest religion to convert to today.” Yet his colleagues at work have been understanding. “They don’t mind me being Muslim at all. They think it’s kind of exotic and ask me lots of questions,” he said.

Thirty-two-year-old Denis has not found his new life as a Muslim to be an easy one. He comes from a Russian-Tatar family which is agnostic, and said he has had problems getting a job because he does not want to hide his religion. “My family is always telling me not to ‘publicize’ the fact that I am Muslim,” Denis said. “They respect my choice, but just don’t want me to talk about it. They think people will hate us for it.”

Similarly, Sergei said his wife did not want their young son to practice Islam, because she thought “it would make life difficult” for him.

Despite the problems and tensions, most Muslims consider Moscow a reasonably tolerant city. Yakub, 25, lives in Ingushetia and frequently visits Moscow on business. He says he has never felt hostility from ordinary people. “Muscovites are fine people,” he said. “No one minds me being Muslim or coming from Ingushetia. The bad guys are the authorities and the police. But even they won’t give you too much trouble if you can bribe them.”

Shamil, also from Ingushetia, said that even the police were not “that bad.” He recalled how they let him pray in his cell at the police station, where he had been taken because of his failure to produce a Moscow registration. “They didn’t mind us praying,” he said. “So we prayed behind the bars and they just looked on from the other side ... with curiosity.”   RL