TALLINN, Estonia, March 23 (UPI) -- Muslim leaders in the Russian Federation are demanding that the Russian government punish militia officers responsible for the desecration of a Koran in a Dagestani village earlier this month -- or face the prospect of protests across the country and the expansion of violence in the northern Caucasus.
At the end of last week, Mufti Mukkadas Bibarsov, the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate of the Volga Region, said that this act of desecration "must receive exactly the same categorical condemnation from the government and Russian society as did the publication of the caricatures of the Prophet".
And Mufti Nafigulla Ashirov, the head of the directorate for the Asiatic part of Russia, echoed these words, arguing that no one, Muslim or non-Muslim alike, could fail to be angry at such actions and the dangers they pose to the unity and stability of the Russian Federation.
Two things make their statements significant. On the one hand, neither of these Muslim leaders has close ties with the north Caucasus, a region with very different traditions than those they practice. Consequently, their remarks suggest that the events in Dagestan are now having an impact far beyond the borders of that region.
And second, Bibarsov and Ashirov are both deputy chairmen of the Council of Muftis of Russia, headed by Ravil' Gainutdin. That group, which unites a large percentage of the Muslim organizations on the territory of the Russian Federation, has become ever more willing to speak out against actions of the authorities, as this incident shows.
That in turn could set the stage either for the emergence of an even deeper divide between Russian officials and the 20-million-strong Muslim community there or possibly for new efforts by the authorities to displace the council of muftis and its supporters and to extend greater support to the invariably loyal head of the Central Muslim Spiritual Directorate, Talgat Tadzhuddin.
All these possibilities had their origins in an event that took place in a village in the Khasavyurt district of highland Dagestan near the Chechen border on March 3. At that time, Russian Federation internal troops swept through six villages looking for arms and "extremist" religious literature.
According to a Dagestani journalist who visited the scene shortly after that date, here is what happened. Commanders of the internal troops failed to inform local officials of what they were doing, fired guns in the air, and otherwise disturbed things, Marko Shakhbanov reported online at islam.ru/pressclub.
In one case, they searched the house of someone they had told earlier that he "is guilty of something but there is as yet no evidence." In another, they threatened a woman that she would be beaten in a KAMAZ truck just as Muslims have been beaten "in Guantanamo or at Abu Ghraib."
But the action that has upset so many Muslims is described by Shakhbanov as follows: "Not satisfied with threats, one of the men in uniform pulled a Koran from the shelf and sitting on a chair, began methodically to rip out its pages. Then he threw it on the floor and walked over it as they went out into the yard.
"After that," the journalist continued, "a Dagestani militia man came in, and having gathered up the pages of the Koran, put them in the stove. But then the military officer again took the Koran from the stove and slowly, apparently with satisfaction, began to tear its pages with a knife."
Under pressure from her apparently fearful relatives, the Muslim woman who witnessed this scene refused to talk to reporters. But Shakhbanov reports they were able to piece together what happened from neighbors and also to see the copy of the Koran that had been desecrated as well.
Russian news agencies, including News.ru and Ekho Moskvy, have now picked up the story, and human rights groups in the Russian capital report that commanders of Interior Ministry forces are already investigating what they are calling "a serious case."
But as one Russian commentary noted, this incident is far from unique, and given where it occurred -- in a Muslim region next to Chechnya -- it is entirely possible that "a chain reaction" of Islamist violence will soon spread "like a terrible flood across all of southern Russia."
--
(Paul Goble teaches at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia.)
