Paul Goble
Vienna, November 16 – More than 70 percent of the 300,000 immigrants in Moscow who come from countries outside of the former Soviet space are Muslims, and they now have their own non-governmental organization working to help them to integrate into Russian life.
Founded at the end of February 2007, the Federation of Immigrants of Russia includes immigrants from 26 countries, but because so many of them are Muslims, they are its primary focus, according to its president, a longtime Moscow resident from Bangladesh who is now a Russian citizen, Muhammad Amin Majumder.
In an interview posted on the Islam.rf website yesterday, Majumder said that its members were mostly “former students” like himself who came to the Soviet Union or to the Russian Federation, found work and wives, became Russian cities, and remained (http://www.islamrf.ru/articles.php?radel=1&sid=990).
After coming to the USSR 21 years ago, he continued, he married a Russian woman who decided to convert to Islam less to please him and his family than because he asked her to compare the Bible and the Koran and she found the latter more sympathetic, although some among her circle do not and she has kept her faith “in her heart.”
Majumder said that far more Russian women who married Muslim immigrants would have converted to Islam in the past had services in Moscow’s mosques been conducted in Russian rather than Arabic or Tatar as was the case until the mid-1990s and had Russian attitudes against Muslims not been inflamed by the war in Chechnya.
But now, he said, Muslims from “the far abroad” face new and different challenges, even though he insisted that because of the country’s demographic problems and much improved economic prospects, “Russia needs immigrants” just as much as “the immigrants need Russia.”
On the one hand, Russia’s economy is now growing rapidly, and the country needs new workers, especially since by the end of this decade, working age men will be declining by a million a year or more. If the country is to move forward, it needs the commitment to hard work that only immigrants can bring.
And on the other, most of Russia’s Muslims tend to ignore immigrants from beyond the former Soviet space. The recent Muslim forum in Moscow, for example, committed itself to integrating Muslims from elsewhere in the CIS but made no mention of those from the Middle East or South Asia.
Both because of these realities and because of the negative attitude of some Russians to those with a different skin color or religious faith, Majumder said, he and others like him had formed the new NGO to work with them and their government to integrate this community and thereby help Russia at the same time.
The Federation, he noted, is “an instrument of civil society which is in the process of coming into being and strengthening in Russia.” It thus serves as a bridge between the individual immigrant, Russian citizen or not, and state institutions like the Federal Migration Service and the Russian parliament.
Majumder indicated that his group has particularly close relations with Senator Vladimir Slutsker, who chairs the joint commission on nationality policy and cooperation with religious organizations in the Council of the Federation and who believes that “our federation” can help promote the integration of new arrivals.
He has been most helpful, the NGO leader said, but “the millions of immigrants in Russia need the assistance of the state for their adaptation and integration into Russian society,” a task whose resolution is equally important for the immigrants and for the broader Russian community.
Responding to a final question about how his group reacts to those Russians who would like to see all immigrants other than ethnic Russians like themselves go home, Majumder said that he and his fellow Federation leaders – and he provides a list of the top 15 – tell them that they need to remember their history.
“For centuries,” he pointed out, “Great Russia has been enriched by the Ruriks from Scandinavia, by the German colony in Moscow, by the Danes Vitus Bering and Vladimir Dal, by numerous German scholars, and by Lermontov with all his Scottish family roots.”
And the best Russian leaders, including Peter I and Catherine II, have recognized the important contribution such immigrants can make, this Bangladeshi with a Russian passport said. But, he continued, “the clearest example of what an immigrant can give [to Russia and the Russians] is to be found elsewhere.”
It involves those immigrants from Africa, out of which sprang “the genius of Russian literature, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin.”.
Copnsequently, Majumder said, he and his colleagues tell Russians to remember that “Russia is now again on the rise, it needs people who love to work – and no small part of its emerging success will depend precisely on the future ‘Pushkins’” that immigrants to Russia can be counted on to produce.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Window on Eurasia: Muslim Neighborhoods Now Forming in Moscow
Paul Goble
Vienna, November 16 – An increasing share of the more than two million Muscovites of Islamic heritage are now living in ethnically distinct neighborhoods, a pattern that disturbs many longtime residents of the Russian capital who have little experience with ethnic enclaves but one that is encouraging some Muslim leaders living in them to make big plans for the future.
The largest of these “enclaves” in Moscow, an article in Komsomol’skaya pravda reported yesterday, is to be found in the city’s Butovo district, where almost a third of that region’s 200,000 residents are Azerbaijanis, Daghestanis, Chechens and Tatars (http://www.kp.ru/daily/24002/4/81044/print).
Murat Alimov, who serves as imam there, talked with that newspaper’s Aleksandr Kots both about how some ethnic Russians are reacting to this development, about the relationship between ethnicity and religion there, and about what he and his community hope to achieve.
When Kots arrived, Alimov told him that he regularly receives emails from Russians telling him to “go back to [his] own aul.” But just where is he supposed to go, the imam asked rhetorically, pointing out that he is a native Muscovite who attended Russian schools there -- although he did receive his higher Islamic education in Qatar.
The Muslim leader said he came to Butovo to organize and then seek government registration for an Islamic community in which approximately 100 Muslims take part on a regular basis. Although that is a tiny fraction of the 60,000 ethnic Muslims there, Alimov indicated that he has great hopes for the future.
He told Komsomol’skaya pravda that he and his fellow Muslims hope to build a cultural center under one wing of the mosque, a Sunday school, a branch of the Moscow Islamic University and a halal market, as well as theaters, conference halls, hotels, and swimming facilities (divided by gender) just for Muslims.
To date, of course, Alimov only has his dreams, but his enumeration of them, Kots argued, suggests that he and other Butovo Muslims want to live apart from other Muscovites, however often they insist that they are very much part of the broader Russian community there.
And perhaps not surprisingly, many ethnic Russians are reacting to such assumptions by choosing to leave these neighborhoods for other areas, thus increasing the percentage of Muslims in them in much the same way that the rise of Islam in the North Caucasus over the last 15 years has driven many ethnic Russians from that region.
At the present time, Kots acknowledged, “Butovo is more the exception” than the rule in that regard. Muslims do form significant and rising percentages of the population in the Southwestern and Northeastern districts of the city but nowhere else do they constitute as great a share as in Alimov’s area.
Moreover, the journalist continued, “in these regions people unite more on the basis of their nationality than on their religion,” but of course, judging by the numbers Kots and Alimov provide for Butovo, that is still largely true there as well, however often Russian observers conflate non-Russian ethnicity with Islamic faith.
To supplement Kots’ relatively brief article, the editors of Komsomol’skaya pravda attached to his article two comments from experts: Igor Beloborodov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Demographic Research, and Ruslan Kurbanov, an academic specialist on Islam in the Russian Federation.
Beloborodov suggested that the appearance of such Islamic communities in Russian cities – and they are to be found not only in Moscow – is creating a situation that is sufficiently destabilizing that Russians as a whole should be willing to consider radical measures to prevent developments in these neighborhoods from getting out of hand.
On the one hand, the Russian demographer argued, Muslim efforts to create such separate neighborhoods underscores the harsh reality that “assimilation is a beautiful idea” that can seldom be achieved in “real life,” at least when those involved are of Islamic background.
And on the other, he said, the dangers of the rise of such Muslim-dominated enclaves are so great that Russians need to think about limiting the influx of such people and even using the power of the state to disperse those already here throughout the rest of the city lest they come together as they have in Paris and other Western cities.
For his part, Kurbanov insisted that such concerns were overblown. He noted that most of those Russians call Muslims are only members of historically Islamic nations rather than active practitioners of the faith, a situation totally different from the ones in Western Europe and the United States.
And he pointed out that even if Moscow’s Muslims do choose to live in neighborhoods with others like themselves in order to have easy access to halal markets and the like, they nonetheless remain far more integrated than the predominantly foreign-born Muslims elsewhere.
Most speak Russian and share many of the values and ideals of Russian culture, he noted, and because they are a minority even in these neighborhoods, they interact with Russians every day, an experience that will help integrate them unless members of the Russian community push them away.
But if that happens – and both the emails Imam Alimov is getting and the comments the Moscow demographer offered suggest that it easily could – then these Muslim neighborhoods could become ever more isolated and radical than either they or those living around them would like.
Vienna, November 16 – An increasing share of the more than two million Muscovites of Islamic heritage are now living in ethnically distinct neighborhoods, a pattern that disturbs many longtime residents of the Russian capital who have little experience with ethnic enclaves but one that is encouraging some Muslim leaders living in them to make big plans for the future.
The largest of these “enclaves” in Moscow, an article in Komsomol’skaya pravda reported yesterday, is to be found in the city’s Butovo district, where almost a third of that region’s 200,000 residents are Azerbaijanis, Daghestanis, Chechens and Tatars (http://www.kp.ru/daily/24002/4/81044/print).
Murat Alimov, who serves as imam there, talked with that newspaper’s Aleksandr Kots both about how some ethnic Russians are reacting to this development, about the relationship between ethnicity and religion there, and about what he and his community hope to achieve.
When Kots arrived, Alimov told him that he regularly receives emails from Russians telling him to “go back to [his] own aul.” But just where is he supposed to go, the imam asked rhetorically, pointing out that he is a native Muscovite who attended Russian schools there -- although he did receive his higher Islamic education in Qatar.
The Muslim leader said he came to Butovo to organize and then seek government registration for an Islamic community in which approximately 100 Muslims take part on a regular basis. Although that is a tiny fraction of the 60,000 ethnic Muslims there, Alimov indicated that he has great hopes for the future.
He told Komsomol’skaya pravda that he and his fellow Muslims hope to build a cultural center under one wing of the mosque, a Sunday school, a branch of the Moscow Islamic University and a halal market, as well as theaters, conference halls, hotels, and swimming facilities (divided by gender) just for Muslims.
To date, of course, Alimov only has his dreams, but his enumeration of them, Kots argued, suggests that he and other Butovo Muslims want to live apart from other Muscovites, however often they insist that they are very much part of the broader Russian community there.
And perhaps not surprisingly, many ethnic Russians are reacting to such assumptions by choosing to leave these neighborhoods for other areas, thus increasing the percentage of Muslims in them in much the same way that the rise of Islam in the North Caucasus over the last 15 years has driven many ethnic Russians from that region.
At the present time, Kots acknowledged, “Butovo is more the exception” than the rule in that regard. Muslims do form significant and rising percentages of the population in the Southwestern and Northeastern districts of the city but nowhere else do they constitute as great a share as in Alimov’s area.
Moreover, the journalist continued, “in these regions people unite more on the basis of their nationality than on their religion,” but of course, judging by the numbers Kots and Alimov provide for Butovo, that is still largely true there as well, however often Russian observers conflate non-Russian ethnicity with Islamic faith.
To supplement Kots’ relatively brief article, the editors of Komsomol’skaya pravda attached to his article two comments from experts: Igor Beloborodov, the director of the Moscow Institute of Demographic Research, and Ruslan Kurbanov, an academic specialist on Islam in the Russian Federation.
Beloborodov suggested that the appearance of such Islamic communities in Russian cities – and they are to be found not only in Moscow – is creating a situation that is sufficiently destabilizing that Russians as a whole should be willing to consider radical measures to prevent developments in these neighborhoods from getting out of hand.
On the one hand, the Russian demographer argued, Muslim efforts to create such separate neighborhoods underscores the harsh reality that “assimilation is a beautiful idea” that can seldom be achieved in “real life,” at least when those involved are of Islamic background.
And on the other, he said, the dangers of the rise of such Muslim-dominated enclaves are so great that Russians need to think about limiting the influx of such people and even using the power of the state to disperse those already here throughout the rest of the city lest they come together as they have in Paris and other Western cities.
For his part, Kurbanov insisted that such concerns were overblown. He noted that most of those Russians call Muslims are only members of historically Islamic nations rather than active practitioners of the faith, a situation totally different from the ones in Western Europe and the United States.
And he pointed out that even if Moscow’s Muslims do choose to live in neighborhoods with others like themselves in order to have easy access to halal markets and the like, they nonetheless remain far more integrated than the predominantly foreign-born Muslims elsewhere.
Most speak Russian and share many of the values and ideals of Russian culture, he noted, and because they are a minority even in these neighborhoods, they interact with Russians every day, an experience that will help integrate them unless members of the Russian community push them away.
But if that happens – and both the emails Imam Alimov is getting and the comments the Moscow demographer offered suggest that it easily could – then these Muslim neighborhoods could become ever more isolated and radical than either they or those living around them would like.
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