Recently, Alexei Navalny went through the «main act of idiocy,» as he aptly characterized the idolatrous-militaristic hysteria surrounding the return of Czechoslovakian T-34 tanks from Laos to Russia. We ourselves regularly write in harsh tones about similar state idolatry at the expense of citizens of different faiths and nationalities in Russia.
However, in this commentary by Navalny, we paid attention to this small fragment. Like Navalny, we find «state paganism right here (in the throat), and it is simply unbearable. And we agree that «our state (to what extent it is ours, of course, is another question) has turned into a state of some wild and absurd shamans.
But when it comes to the phrase that «in the beautiful Russia of the future… there will be no shamanism except in the territories of the Far North, where it is a traditional religion,» we would like more precision. As Muslims, we are the last to be suspected of sympathizing with shamanism, which is not even a religion of the people of the Scriptures, but pure paganism.
But in this case, we are concerned about the prospects for Muslims in this «beautiful Russia of the future.» For if Navalny claims that religions alien to the majority of the population, namely Orthodox Russians, can exist only in their traditional territories, then according to this logic it will be possible tomorrow to restrict the practice of Islam to the territories of the Muslim republics of the Russian Federation.
Especially since Navalny himself has previously suggested that there are too many mosques in Moscow, and also criticized mass holiday prayers or women wearing the hijab. Of course, if you try very hard, you can deduce from the context of Navalny’s speech that he was referring precisely to state shamanism, which will not exist in his «beautiful Russia of the future».
And if he considers it acceptable to use shamanistic rituals and symbols at official events, for example, in the places where the peoples of the Far North live, but wants to say that they will not exist in the rest of Russia, that is one thing. However, it is the responsibility of a politician who wants to lead a country in which representatives of different peoples and religions live, to express his thoughts on such sensitive issues carefully.
Otherwise, he may be perceived, with full justification, as in a well-known joke, when a patient rushed to a surgical clinic demanding castration. And when he discovered the results of the operation with astonishment, he said that, as it turned out, he meant circumcision…