c. 1996 Religion News Service
(RNS)-Chechen separatists face overwhelming odds in their fight against the better-equipped and far larger Russian military machine. Yet they persist, taking hostages on land and at sea and displaying a seemingly reckless willingness to die for their cause.
Two factors keep them fighting, according to expatriate Chechens and others familiar with their motivations. The first is a burning desire to be free of Moscow’s domination, which Chechens have unsuccessfully fought for more than two centuries.”To be free of the Russians is a tradition we pass from generation to generation,”said Mohammed Shashani, who teaches electrical engineering at Pennsylvania State University and heads the 5,000-member Chechen-Ingush Society of America.”My son is 12 and he talks about growing up and going to fight for Chechen independence. And he is an American citizen.” The second factor sustains the first and is deeply rooted in the Chechen religious soul.
The 1.3 million Chechens identify with mainstream Sunni Islam, but their stronger identification is with Sufism, a brand of Islamic mysticism that has long sustained them as they suffered one crushing defeat after another.”Sufism has provided the Chechens with a spiritual cure for the degradation they have faced in the physical world,”said Yo’av Karny, a Washington-based Israeli journalist who is writing a book about Chechnya and the Caucasus region.”It’s been a formula for survival during a history of periodic suicidal spasms.” Moscow has alternately dismissed the Chechen rebels as mere gangsters or-even worse by the standards of culturally Christian Russia-Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
While lawlessness has always been prevalent in the Caucasus region, Sufism is in no way synonymous with fundamentalism. Its esoteric emphasis on inner experience is actually at odds with fundamentalism’s accent on the minutiae of outward religious practice.”Many fundamentalists even think of Sufis as being heretics because their love for saints and holy men can be seen as conflicting with the doctrine of Muhammad being the final prophet,”Karny said.
Moreover, on the surface, Chechens would appear more irreligious than anything else. Alcohol-which is anathema to orthodox Muslims-is widely consumed, and there are few mosques in Chechnya. The latter is largely attributable to 70 years of Russian communism’s anti-religious policies, which only served to drive religious practice underground, an atmosphere in which Sufism thrived.
Sufism-the term derives from the Arabic word for wool and denotes the rough woolen garments worn by early Sufi ascetics-purports to offer direct knowledge of God and can be traced back to Islam’s seventh-century origins. A central practice of Sufism is the zikr, an ecstatic dance in which men move in circles while chanting prayers for hours on end. The result is a trance-like state that gave birth to the term whirling dervish.
In 1864, noted Karny, Moscow was so”unnerved”by the hold that the zikr held over Chechens that it outlawed its performance. To take part in a zikr became a capital offense and the Russians slaughtered thousands of Chechens unwilling to go along with the decree and banished many others to Siberia.
The zikr is no longer outlawed, but Chechens have kept resisting Russian rule. Between 1922 and 1943 alone, there were five separate Chechen uprisings. In 1944, Stalin deported almost the entire Chechen nation to what is now the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, claiming that it had plotted with the Nazis against the Soviet Union. In the late 1950s, the Chechens were allowed to return to their mountainous homeland.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev declared his nation independent. In December 1994, Moscow sent in a large force to quell the revolt, maintaining that Chechnya was a gangster-ruled, renegade region that was part and parcel of the Russian Republic. President Boris Yeltsin predicted a quick victory.
The events of recent days have shown just how far from accomplishing that goal Moscow remains.
The desire for political independence is what prompted the latest revolt against Moscow, said Sa’id Benno, a Chechen community leader living in Amman, Jordan, where he was once King Hussein’s minister of public works.
But as Chechens have come to realize that neither the West nor other Muslim nations are willing to challenge Russia and come to their aid, the religious dimension of the struggle has grown for Chechens, Benno said in a telephone interview from his home.
For one, identifying the conflict as the struggle of an oppressed Muslim minority has enabled the Chechens to gain the support of some radical Islamists-the so-called mujahadeen fighters who also turned up in Bosnia to help that nation’s Muslim-led government fight Orthodox Christian Serbs.
While only a relative handful of mujahadeen are in Chechnya, Benno noted that many more non-Chechen Muslims have contributed humanitarian aid to the Chechen cause. In Jordan, where about 15,000 Chechens live, several million dollars have been collected for Chechen aid, he said.
Shashani, the Penn State professor, noted a second reason for the Chechen fighters’ increased emphasis on Islam.”Chechens realize they only have themselves, that the world has abandoned them to the Russians,”said Shashani, who lives in Pittsburgh.”When you have no faith left in mankind, then there is only Allah to turn to. Allah has sustained Chechens through terrible times in the past, and he will do so again.”We have nowhere else to turn.”
MJP END RIFKIN
