This week another plenum of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia (SAMR) was held in Moscow. The event was quite ordinary and unremarkable, except perhaps for the speech given by its chairman, Ravil Gaynutdin. The text of this speech can be found on the SAMR website (http://dumrf.ru/upravlenie/speeches/19552). However, the most interesting part of it was not included in the published version. But the whole speech can be seen in a video (https://youtu.be/qGpgJPm0fBU?t=1251). For those who do not have the desire or ability to read it all, we will provide relevant excerpts.
Ravil Gaynutdin spoke about the pressures he faces in his work, including death threats: «For 25 years they have been pressuring me, trying to stop me. There was a time when I received threatening letters, I received threats that they would send Cossacks to kill me».
But two things remain unclear. First, what exactly do they want to stop the chairman of the SAMR from doing, even with such a formidable force as the Cossacks? Second, who exactly is trying to do this? Of course, one could also ask another question — why doesn’t it work for them, but let’s leave that aside for now…
As for the second question, however, a clue to the answer can be found in the part of Gaynutdin’s speech where he criticized the former curators of Islam in the administration of the Russian president. Calling on his followers not to be «slaves of an official who works today and will be fired tomorrow,» he began to mention them as examples: «Loginov, Abramov, Ostrovsky, Grishin. They are officials, they should carry out state policy, fulfill their duties properly. If you don’t fulfill your duties properly and demand things from the imam, from the chairman — they give you coins, sweets, you do this, now go to this office, wait here in the corridor, you will be invited. Do we have to humiliate ourselves like this? We humiliate our turban, our title. We humiliate our Muslims. It turns out that we are humiliating our holy religion.»
To be honest, other than the waiting in the hallway that humiliated Gaynutdin’s title and turban, it is not very clear what exactly upset him so much and what they were trying to stop him from doing. Nor is it clear why it took 30 years for the Muslim community to find out about it and what conclusions can be drawn from it.
At most, it can be understood that all the curators of Islam in the administration of the president did not perform their duties and state policies adequately. But who repeatedly appointed such bad officials, and why was there not a single exception in this line that the experienced Gaynutdin could mention with kind words? Maybe because it is not «the king is good, the boyars are bad,» but… it is frightening to think, let alone to say aloud…
In general, all these banal things could be left unnoticed if it were not for the main conclusion that follows from all these «revelations» — a call for all Muslims of Russia to unite around Ravil Gaynutdin and SAMR, whom some unnamed forces have been trying to stop for 30 years.
Forgive me, but unite for what exactly? The answer to this question has been eagerly awaited even by many of Gaynutdin’s supporters who followed him, seriously considering him as the shield of the Ummah that an Imam should be. After all, unity itself cannot be an end goal, otherwise why did Ravil Gaynutdin himself start his independent work by separating from the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims (CSAM) of Talgat Tadzhuddin? He and those who followed him at that time know the answer to this question: because, in their opinion, Tadzhuddin and the CSAM did not protect the interests of Muslims, they were not the shield that an Imam should be for the Ummah, which is why Ravil Gaynutdin volunteered for this role. But it doesn’t seem to have worked out very well.
Now he is once again calling for unity around him in the face of a threat from those unknown people who are trying to stop him for unknown reasons. But let’s be realistic — in the system that has been built in Russia over the last 30, if not 20 years, everything that happens in state policy, including towards Islam and Muslims, does not come from «bad officials» but from the «good king» who appoints them and gives them instructions.
And even a week ago, Muslims in Russia had an opportunity to express their attitude towards this policy and those who implement it, completely peacefully and legally. And perhaps if they had been told out loud that their «spiritual leader» has been facing 20-30 years of attempts to stop and intimidate him, they might have acted differently than they did (https://golosislama.com/news.php?id=40125). Instead, we see fists waving after another brawl. This is unlikely to change the position of the one who is waving, and unlikely to affect those to whom he is appealing in this way.