Yesterday we already wrote about Polosin, who was an Islamic caller and ideologue of Orthodox Russia, and how he was born as an apologist for the Putin regime and its aggressive foreign policy from a pseudo-Islamic point of view (https://golosislama.com/news.php?id=40538).
However, attention should be paid to how this private «shameful fatwa» relates to the general aspect of his tumultuous activities in recent years. We’re talking about the justification and promotion of his project of «pan-Russian civic identity of Muslims in Russia», for which the presidential administration provides substantial grants, for which he has long sold his conscience.
The significance of these subsidies will be nullified by this article for those who think about it, just as the significance of the huge expenditures on the Russian army and other power structures is now being nullified by their confrontation with the Ukrainian army.
But first, the background of the issue. Our long-time readers should know that we do not take such maximalist positions that prohibit Muslims from being part of civil societies and patriots of individual states in which they live, including non-Muslim states, provided they are given the opportunity to practice, observe and preach Islam.
Moreover, both we and some of our readers and supporters were part of the Russian Islamic movement, whose prominent representatives held precisely such positions. In the mid-2000s, the center of these ideas in Russia was the Islam.ru website (the old one, not the one it became after a raid), where such ideas were mainly refined and expressed.
Specifically, ideas about the need for an agreement between the Russian state and the Russian Muslim community that would guarantee the latter autonomy and participation in public and political life in exchange for loyalty to the state.
That was a time of great hope, born out of the inertia of perestroika and the spirit of the 90s, and now we can say that it was a time of great illusions. And then something happened — some of us, who in the 2010s realized the illusory nature of these hopes under the conditions of the regime that had finally established itself in the country, stopped playing these games.
And those who had the courage began to oppose it, and those who decided simply to preserve their conscience quietly withdrew from affairs, for which we also thank them, because according to a famous hadith, the least that can be done is to resist evil in one’s heart. Others, understanding that a regime of such an ideology and nature had been established, which they had recently opposed, accepted it and went into its service.
Kurbanov, Salakhutdinov, and Polosin are just a few examples. In essence, it can be said that the Russian Islamic movement experienced the same split as the participants in the Chechen resistance, some of whom continued it in one form or another, while others accepted the Kremlin’s dominance and began to serve it. The great lie of Polosin’s project of «pan-Russian civic identity of Muslims in Russia» lies in the fact that its essence, which was born in a normal Islamic movement, was completely distorted, just as the ideas about the liberation and renewal of the Russian people through Islam, which he preached, were betrayed.
Let’s look at this with a concrete example. Yesterday, in the comments to one of the reposts of our article, a participant in one of the events told how Polosin had convinced hesitant Muslim youth that according to Sharia (!) they were obliged to fight for Russia because they were its citizens and it was involved in the war. This is the essence of Polosin’s «pan-Russian civic identity of Muslims in Russia» in a nutshell, generously sponsored by the presidential administration, while its justification can easily be washed away like muddy water.
But have we ever advocated such a «contract» between the Muslim community and the state? Of course not. After all, there is no such treaty for this state, neither with the Muslim community nor with anyone else, even in cases where such treaties existed before. For example, when the Kremlin refused to renew an agreement with Tatarstan signed during the Yeltsin era, Kiriyenko openly and clearly justified it: Russian statehood is not based on a contractual principle.
Thus, the universal answer of Russia’s rulers to all these speculations about treaties is that there can be no treaties within this state with anyone, at least not in the first place. And the ones it makes outside are not worth the paper they are written on. The real relationships in Putin’s Russia are based on a very simple and clear principle: «dominance and submission.
Moreover, these relations of dominance and submission have an obvious religious component. Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is the dominant religious corporation that ideologically determines the country’s foreign and domestic policies. And all other religions and religious organizations in the country are either tolerated or not, depending on the attitude of the Moscow Patriarchate toward them.
In the 1990s and the first decade of the present century, such a structure of the country was a nightmare for the true Islamic movement in Russia. It was what they fought against, standing for equal distance between the state and the main religions, freedom of the media and socio-political life, federalism, and a peaceful and balanced foreign policy. Only if such principles prevail in the country, it would be possible to talk about an agreement between the state and the Muslim community as an integral part of a broader social contract.
In this case, if someone attacks such a country, Muslims, as its citizens, would indeed be obliged to defend it with weapons in hand, just as Muslims in Ukraine are now defending their civil dignity and rights recognized in that country, which has faced aggression. It is in Ukraine that, since 2014, the model of social and confessional coexistence once advocated by the Islamic movement of Russia has been implemented. In Russia, on the other hand, there has been a despotism with a distinctly religious tinge, in which Muslims are not citizens but are called to be loyal subjects, without any rights other than the «right» to die for Putin’s and Gundyaev’s «Russian world».
The current campaign to turn ethnic minorities into Russians, promoted by Ruslan Kurbanov on his own channel, implies exactly this (https://youtu.be/Xoj7mikj6w8). Why should they become Russians and not just Russians? Because «Russian» is now an ideological concept, where Margarita Simonyan isolates those who do not support the Kremlin’s policies from being Russian. Therefore, by calling themselves «Russian,» any ethnic minority today essentially agrees to be cannon fodder for the «Russian world» and to be ready to fight for it without asking unnecessary questions.
This is the kind of «pan-Russian civic identity» that Polosin and other «Muslims of the Moscow Patriarchate» promote among Muslims in Russia.