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Pro-Russian Chechens declare jihad on Wahhabism
Chechnya's pro-Moscow Muslim clerics declared a jihad against extreme "Wahhabite" Islam on Thursday in the strifetorn region's second outspoken religious ruling in a week."Today we unanimously adopted a resolution. (The religious leaders) announced that (Wahhabites) will bring nothing but harm to the people and to Islam," said Ramzan Kadyrov, a politician who attended the meeting of clerics. "They are Wahhabites, and we must destroy them. If you ask me, we have a place where we can bury them -- three metres down," said Kadyrov in televised comments. Russian authorities habitually call their opponents in the Chechen conflict "Wahhabites", a term describing the strict Wahhabi branch of Islam but which in Russia has become near-synonymous with "terrorist" during the Chechen conflict. Chechens traditionally follow a Sufi form of Islam, but the presence of Arab volunteers in the fighting has given Wahhabi Islam a foothold. Kadyrov is filling in as prime minister while the regional premier Sergei Abramov is away on a tour to improve Chechnya's image in Russia, and has wasted little time in imposing his stamp on the region. Earlier this week, he ruled gambling was against Islam and ordered all gaming halls closed. During a brief 1996-9 period of de facto independence from Russia, Chechnya's rebel leadership imposed elements of Islamic law. Since Russian troops returned to the region nearly six years ago it has followed secular Russian law and it is not clear whether Kadyrov's latest rulings are legal. Experts say they doubted a declaration of jihad would help Russia win the war and was more likely a ploy for Kadyrov, who commands an army of former rebels, to increase his clout. "You can accuse anyone of being a so-called Wahhabite. If a man has a grudge against his neighbour, it is easy to say he is a Wahhabite. And how can you prove he isn't?" asked Ismagil Shangareyev, director of Russia's Islamic Human Rights Centre. "It's like 1937, when people were accused of being Trotskyites who had no kind of idea who Trotsky even was," he told Ekho Moskvy radio. Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-08-04 |
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