There are signs that radical Islam has taken root in Russia’s prosperous republic of Tatarstan, east of Moscow, after attacks which left one Muslim leader dead and another severely injured last month.

Russian police have detained seven suspects, officials say. But local security sources told the BBC that more than 100 people had been questioned and according to some Tatar Muslim groups, the number of detainees is as high as 500.

A former pro-Kremlin Muslim leader, Valiulla Yakupov, was shot dead in the republican capital Kazan on 19 July. Later that day the Mufti of Tatarstan, Ildus Fayzov, was seriously wounded when his car was blown up in the city.

One of those arrested ran a body called Idel-Khadzh, organising Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca. He was allegedly in dispute with the mufti.

“The explosions and the gunfire that just rang out are only the beginning,” a well-known theologian, Mufti Farid Salman, told the BBC.

He thinks there are already more than 3,000 radical Islamists in Tatarstan, many of them opposed to peaceful dialogue.Radical Muslim internet forums have already called for the murder of people who frequently and openly criticise the spread of Wahhabism in Russia. Valiulla Yakupov’s name had appeared on one of their lists.

Wahhabism, a strictly conservative form of Islam that demands observance of Sharia law, has become popular among some militants in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus.

But Tatarstan, a mainly Muslim region on the Volga River, has long been seen as harmonious and stable. Even decades ago, in the Soviet Union, Tatarstan was seen as a model of peaceful co-existence for different nationalities and religions.

Paying ‘tribute’ to radicals

The mood has changed now, as extremist militants threaten to start a campaign of violence.

As we walk through a park an acquaintance greets Farid Salman with the words: “Hello, Farid! I’m glad to see you alive”.

Radical Muslims are getting some serious support from the criminal underworld, Russian security sources told the BBC.

Racketeers now encourage the collection of “tribute” at some of Kazan’s markets, exploiting the Muslim custom of paying Zakat (alms) – but donations are allegedly channelled towards militants waging violent jihad.

They also extort money from merchants who do not practise Islam, calling it an “infidel tax”.
‘Peace and quiet’

Radicalised Tatars have been found in the ranks of insurgents in Chechnya and even among the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Some experts say that followers of extremist branches of Islam in Tatarstan have put doctrinal disagreements aside and are combining forces in order to broaden their influence.
“The authorities preferred to maintain the pretence that peace and quiet reign in the region,” says Rais Suleimanov, head of the Volga regional branch of the Russian Institute for Strategy Research.

“They didn’t listen to us and they didn’t let us speak. As a result the situation got out of hand, and now that peace and quiet is no more than an illusion.”

After publishing research in 2010 on the development of Islamic fundamentalism in Tatarstan he was fired from his post at Kazan University’s Centre for Eurasian Research, and soon after that the centre itself was closed.

Mufti Farid Salman says the July attacks were “an overt, bold provocation”.

“It seems we’ve already reached a point of no return. More than one generation of convinced Wahhabis has already come of age in Tatarstan.”

After the assassination attempt on Tatarstan’s Mufti, the head of local interior ministry, Artyom Khokhorin, suddenly acknowledged that “an undeclared war has been going on in the region” for 13 years.

He said hundreds of extremists had been identified and monitored by the police. He added that in the past two years alone four armed rebel groups had been suppressed in Tatarstan.
Pretext for crackdown?

But now Russian security bodies are “using the situation to jail people they wanted to get or were ordered to,” according to a prominent Moscow lawyer, Musa Pliev. The head of a local nationalist organisation, the Azatlik Tatar Youth Union, agrees. Nail Nabiullin alleges that “this is all a provocation, led by Moscow”.

“We do not have Muslims who can commit such an evil crime,” he says.

Mr Nabiullin has already organised several rallies with the head of a Kazan mosque “against the suppression of Muslims”.

The organisers of one such rally on 5 August held it “according to Sharia rules”. All the participants, outsiders and even journalists were asked to stay “strictly in the male or female sections of the square”.

My colleagues and I tried to argue, but felt obliged to comply when four or five tall men with beards and calling themselves “Muslim police of the meeting” told us to follow the rules.

Arab influence dating back to the 1990s played a big part in the region’s radicalisation and there are now many young religious leaders in Tatarstan who were educated in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

In 2011, Chechen insurgent leader Doku Umarov declared that Caucasian mujahideen should move to the Volga region to prepare local Muslims for jihad.

The armed struggle, he said, would result in a new state within a so-called Greater Caucasus Emirate.

On the day of the July attacks in Tatarstan, a video address by “the mujahideen of Tatarstan”, confirming Doku Umarov’s statement, appeared on the internet.

There are fears that if the authorities respond to the threat with tough action, there could be a backlash from Muslims in Tatarstan.

They are likely to find it harder to stem the spread of radical Islam now than they might have done just a few years ago.

SOURCE: BBC NEWS

A French mayor has revoked the suspension of four Muslim camp counselors following an uproar after he said they could not work properly because they might be weakened by their all-day fasting for Ramadan.

Muslim groups threatened to sue the Paris suburb of Gennevilliers for discrimination for recalling the four after an inspector found on July 20 – the first day of the Muslim holy month – that they were not eating or drinking during the day.

Lawyers for the counselors, who had accompanied children from the suburb on a town-sponsored stay at a summer camp in southwestern France, said they might also take the issue to a labor court.

Potential weakness due to Ramadan is also an issue at the London Olympics, where more than 3,000 Muslim athletes are competing. Some have delayed their fast until after the Games while others are fasting as they would any other year.

Muslim leaders presented the case as an issue of religious liberty, while the town’s Communist mayor Jacques Bourgoin insisted his concern was only for the safety of the campers.

“This is a discriminatory act,” said Abdallah Zekri of the French Muslim Council told BFM TV. “France has religious liberty, it is a fundamental freedom and it must be respected.”

Bourgoin said he revoked the suspensions because the public uproar over the issue prevented the calm discussion of safety issues that he planned to take up again later in the year.

“This has been blown out of proportion and we can’t discuss it calmly,” he told Europe 1 radio on Wednesday. “Many people interpreted this as discriminatory, but we did not take this decision in that way.”

MORE CALM AND COMPREHENSION SOUGHT

The mayor’s office said in a communiqué on Tuesday evening that the counselors’ contracts specifically noted they had to make sure both themselves and the children they monitored were regularly nourished and hydrated.

Bourgoin said the town required that because two children were injured in a traffic accident two years ago when a fasting Muslim counselor fainted at the wheel of the minibus in which she was transporting them.

This requirement applied only to monitors on long trips with round-the-clock responsibility for children, he added.

France is home to about 5 million Muslims, Europe’s largest Islamic minority, and disputes between them and local officials trying to apply the country’s strict separation of religion and the public service sometimes lead to tensions.

France has banned full Muslim face veils from public spaces and prohibited schoolgirls from wearing headscarves.

The clause in the counselors’ contracts requiring regular meals does not mention Muslims, but it clearly applies to them because they are presumably the only ones who would fast now.

Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, said exceptions to the Ramadan fast would normally be made only for pregnant women and ailing persons.

“French Muslims would resent any infringement of this religious liberty,” he said in a communiqué.

“In this period of Ramadan, French Muslims would hope for more calm and comprehension from the national community.”

SOURCE: REUTERS

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay says security forces are instigating violence in Myanmar, calling for an investigation into the persecution of Muslims in the country.

Reports say 650 Rohingya Muslims have been killed since June 28 during clashes in the Rakhine state in the west of the country. This is while 1,200 others are missing and 80,000 more have been displaced.

The government of Myanmar refuses to recognize Rohingyas, whom, it claims, are not natives and classifies them as illegal migrants, although, the Rohingyas are said to be Muslim descendants of Persian, Turkish, Bengali, and Pathan origin, who migrated to Myanmar as early as the eighth century.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims are living in temporary accommodation, having fled violence.

Over the past two years, waves of ethnic Muslims have attempted to flee by boats in the face of systematic oppression by Myanmar’s government.

Interview with Abdul Alim Musa, Imam of Washington’s Masjid al-Islam, to further discuss the issue.

The video also offers the opinions of two additional guests: Massoud Shadjareh, the head of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and James Jennings, the president of Conscience International from Atlanta.

What follows is a rough transcription of the interview.

Q: Now the United Nations has just called for a probe into the situation taking place in Myanmar. Imam Musa why do you think it took so long for the UN to even make a statement or to get involved and right now it’s asking for a probe that we don’t really know how long it would take from the probe to actually set up a safe haven. Why do you think it’s taking so long?

Musa: Well, a probe or a study, they do it on us in America all the time. African Americans or Latinos, they say we’ll have a commission to study oppression of people of color. This is the same way the UN is treating the people in Myanmar but what makes it so simple for the world?

It seems as though this Islamophobia, although the oppression of the people of Burma, Myanmar, the Muslims have been going on now for decades. In fact Keyhan was writing articles back in the 80s on their condition but what makes it OK for everybody anywhere in the world to attack Muslims? This Islamophobia and if we wonder why would peaceful Buddhists get involved, we believe there is some extra national encouragement or an enticement to commit these atrocities.

Q: What do you mean by that Imam Musa?

Musa: Well, it’s not proven but we feel if all over the world there is attacks on Muslims and let’s say if [the people of] Saudi Arabia are Muslims and they’re worried about the people of Syria so much, while they’re not worried about the people of Bahrain, right? Then why would the same peoples be worried about what’s going on in Libya last year and not care anything about the people in Myanmar.

It seems like there is a heightened focus on destroying Muslims. In Bosnia this was a first Muslim state being born in Europe so the US and other countries put a blockade on arms to that area. Why because the Muslims didn’t have any weapons. Everybody else in what was Yugoslavia did.

Now if you look at the Muslims when the Muslims call the government to help, right? The government gets involved in killing them. In fact there was one report that three boats sank full of refugees trying to escape. Why would people be slaughtered trying to escape?

It seems like that there is a nudging by the international agencies and I mean European and even Asian. There is one point we should never forget Myanmar has been isolated for quite some time. Now with its natural resources being up for grabs, India has just signed some contracts for oil. You have China on the other side. So everybody feels like we’ll just be quiet and extract the national resources. You see this is what it points to.

Q: Imam Musa let’s look at what Mr. Shadjareh talked about. He talked about the prodemocracy movement and I want to look at that because we know there is Nobel peace laureate there, Aung San Suu Kyi who has been lauded by the West and much of the international community and yet either has remained silent and as a matter of fact has encouraged what is been going on by basically saying that these people need to go back to their own country.

How you do put these two together: on the one hand we have someone who is praised all the time and wanting peace and democracy but on the other hand either keeping silent or even encouraging this type of oppression?

Musa: Well, we all cheered her along for her decades of struggle and we actually pull for the whole country to come out from under this dictatorship. Although in 1982 they declared the Muslim people as noncitizens but why would she- I think brother Massoud hit the nail on the head when he talked about ultra nationalism and the bonding that’s going on between those peoples.

Why wouldn’t she take the side of justice which she has been crying for for decades is because she is a part of that bonding process and neither has she spoken out nor has her coalition spoken out.

They won several new seats in the parliament there but neither her nor her coalition has spoken out about it and I think it’s because that they as brother Massoud said, they want to look forward to a new Myanmar without the Muslims as part of the landscape.

Q: How likely is the international community to do this when many would say this is the same international community that has encouraged these negative images to be propagated about Muslims in general. Can people rely on that same international community now to put the pressure down that is needed to stop the killing in Myanmar?

Musa: I think we should focus; we are Muslims; we are over a billion strong; we should concentrate on unity and cooperation between each other first, not to exclude anyone else but we should concentrate on Muslims in Myanmar. We should focus on justice for people in Bahrain, Hazara that are being killed in Pakistan, the ‘fitna’ that goes on in Syria and the people of Palestine. We Muslims should focus on justice for all including all the other issues of people around the world whether it’s Tibet or what have you but also Kashmir. We should be running the humanitarian race altogether toward justice. We don’t believe the UN is going to do anything.

SOURCE: ABNA.co