Russia’s Complex Challenges: Secularism, Christianity, Islam, Wahhabism, and War
For most of the last 1000 years Russia’s rulers have had a complicated history with religion, in general and with Islam in particular. While Islam has origins in the region that go back more than 1100 years, the relationship with the Ottoman Empire, Salafi Islam in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and now Shia Iran are all turning points that have impacted not only regional security, but also global geopolitics. With the war in Ukraine underway, Christianity and Islam come once again to the forefront to play a major role in shaping the narratives about the war and about the relationship between religion, politics, and violence.
A Brief History of Islam and Muslims in Russia
Muslims in Russia represent a significant population, exceeding 22 million people, a number that tempted Putin to brag about it, comparing it to the size of several Muslim countries that dwarf the population weight, when he was justifying his demand for a permanent seat for Russia in the Organization of the Islamic Conference. He asked leaders of this organization to look at the Muslims of Russia in absolute numbers and not by the percentage that stands at 15% of the total population of the country.
It is not wise to let the details of the Russian-Islamic friction in the last three centuries distract from learning about the facts since Islam entered Russia 1100 years ago.
Some Russian researchers did not exaggerate when they saw Prince Vladimir declaring Christianity the religion of his Russian emirate in 988 AD, as a reaction to the conversion of the Bulgarian people (where Tatarstan and Bashkiria are now) to Islam.
It is also not accurate to call the Muslims of Russia a minority population (if that is meant by a group that is alien to the indigenous peoples of the state’s land), as they are the original owners of the land, and they had their kingdoms and their sovereignty before their castles fell in the first half of the sixteenth century to write the submission of the Muslims of the Volga and the Caucasus to Russian control for each story is separate, even if it is similar in outcome.
Russia today consists of more than 90 administrative units, (republican regions, regions, autonomous districts, etc.), and Muslims are distributed in two main regions: the Volga region in the heart of Russia, in six republics (Tatarstan, Bashkiria, Chuvash, Mordovia, Mariel and Udmurt) in addition to the Orenburg region. The second region is the North Caucasus region and includes seven republics: Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Kabardin-Balkaria, North Ossetia-Alania, Karchiev-Cherkessia and Adygea.
The total number of Muslims in these administrative units is about 17 million people, in addition to 5-6 million others scattered across the Russian regions, from Russia’s borders with China and Japan in the east to its borders with Finland in the west.
Muslims in Russia belong to disparate ethno-linguistic families that ramify into 40 groups that represent an unrelated mosaic. The Soviet state systems deliberately forced population movement to prevent the formation of an ethnic majority in a republic, to avoid the opportunity for secession demands. The religious composition of the Muslims of Russia and their neighbors in the Caucasus and Central Asia also vary between Sunni, Shiite, Salafist, and Sufi trends.
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On October 22, 2013, the Russian President Vladimir Putin accused “foreign opponents” of exploiting what he described as extremist Islamic currents to weaken his country. He made the statement a day after a Muslim woman blew herself up on a bus, killing and wounding others.
Putin did not say which foreign opponents he was referring to, but he often accuses countries, including the United States, of trying to interfere in Russian affairs since he won a third six-year term as president last year, according to Reuters.
He also said in a statement released by the Kremlin that, “some political forces are using Islam, or rather its extremist currents to weaken our state and to create conflict zones in Russia that are managed from abroad, to sow discord between different ethnic groups and within the Muslim group, to ignite separatist feelings in the” Russian regions.
During a meeting with religious scholars in the Russian city of Ufa, the Putin added that tensions between the West and the Islamic world are currently increasing, and that “some people seek to exploit this situation and pour oil on the fire,” stressing that his country has no interest in that.
Putin stressed – within the framework of participating in the celebrations of the 225th anniversary of the founding of the Central Religious Administration for Muslims in Russia – that Islam is an integral part of his country’s history and an important element of its culture, calling for confronting attempts to politicize religion in all its forms.
He urged religious scholars to help Muslim immigrants adjust to life in Russia to reduce the likelihood of violence.
It is noteworthy that Russia has been subjected since 1999 to a series of bloody attacks, a number of which were carried out by women who blew themselves up, a method often accused of what is described as Islamic militants.
On the night of the election of Russian President Vladimir Putin as President of Russia for a second term in mid-March, a famous site for the so-called Caucasian separatists drew a drawing of Putin as a vampire, at a time when a spokesman for the Russian Fatwa Council was declaring that “Mr. feelings of Russian Muslims on all Islamic occasions and sought to link them to the Islamic world.”
Despite the dangerous generalization in the comparison, it is inevitable to acknowledge that the geography of Islam in Russia today almost represents a duality of clash and understanding. The clash is embodied in the Caucasus, with the Chechen project at its fore, while the understanding is represented in the Volga region, with the Tatar project at its forefront.
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For northern Russians, while they were in the country of snow and frost hidden in the north of the globe, were never far from Islam and the Islamic peoples adjacent to them in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Anatolia, and the countries of Eastern Europe. Rather, Russian-Islamic relations, whether Arab or non-Arab, go back to distant times more than a thousand years ago. Since the tenth century CE, many Russians embraced Orthodox Christianity, and became affiliated with the Eastern Church of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantines, or Istanbul, and this new alliance resulted in a kind of common hostility and hatred of Islam and Muslims.
Relations between the two continued in this way, until the Russian Empire expanded, starting from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries CE, and was able to take control of the Muslim Tatar regions in the northern Caspian Sea, and then entered into bitter conflicts with the neighboring Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the Ottomans lost vast areas in the Caucasus to the Russians, and when the First World War (1914-1918) broke out, and before the Bolshevik revolution took place in Russia and converted it to communism in the year 1917, the Russian Tsars had taken the side of the Christian countries that were fighting the Ottomans, including Greece, Montenegro, and Armenia.
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The history of the entry of the Dagestan region in the Caucasus into Islam goes back to the era of Caliph Umar Ibn al-Khattab when he sent Suraqah to it in the year 20 AH. Conquests in this region continued and were scaled up in the era of the Umayyad dynasty, and since the second half of the first century AH, the people of Dagestan become in close contact with Islam, its civilization and its culture. This region was subject to the rule of the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Seljuks, and the Ottomans until it came under the control of the Russian Tsarist rule in the late eighteenth century.
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This long history of contact between Islam and Russian Christianity created many layers of relationships and connections between Muslims and Russians belonging to different religions and ideologies.
The Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, for example, described Islam as a great religion for which he has deep respect and called for the need for concerted efforts between Islam and Eastern Christianity.
Mikhalkov acknowledges that Islam is a great culture in which there is no aggression or seeking to stifle the world or change it, and that there is an Islamic civilization that must be dealt with respect and its teachings and laws must be accepted and protected, stressing that the attempt of the Western world to impose its civilization on Muslims will lead to events like those that happened in Afghanistan.
Mikhalkov believed that Russian Orthodox Christianity is much closer to Islam than to Catholicism, and their cultural and moral ideals are very close and they have a common view of human problems, and that the history of Russia, which represents a true bridge between East and West, has proven that Islam and Orthodoxy have coexisted together in peace.
So was it the Eastern orthodox Church that has a special relation with Islam or is it the political regimes that forced them to coexist? To shed some light on this and related matters, including the role of religion in the current war in Ukraine that united together, Christian Russians and Chechen Muslims, it might be helpful to take a close look at the kind of Christianity that exist in Russia, its origins, functions, and evolution.
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The History and Evolution of the Eastern Orthodox Church
Most Christians around the world celebrated Christmas a few days ago, while Orthodox Church members await the holidays after them by about two weeks, but the war that separated the siblings of this sect prompted the Ukrainians to bypass their long-standing traditions and fast forward to undertake the celebration with other sects in order to contradict their Russian brothers, which again highlights the organic connections between religion and politics.
Centuries ago, it was customary for Catholics and Protestants to celebrate Christmas on December 25 of each year, due to their reliance on the Gregorian calendar, but the Orthodox churches postpone this celebration to January 7 based on the old Julian calendar.
Although the constitutions stipulate that both Russia and Ukraine are secular states, the facts clearly reveal the political role that the Orthodox churches play in governing both countries in terms of popular mobilization and the strengthening of identity.
Schism, Diversity and Pluralism in Christianity
Christianity arose under Roman persecution, and its first followers continued to pursue secret work for about three centuries, until Emperor Constantine I assumed power, and decided to recognize Christianity as one of the religions of the empire in 312 CE. He then adopted it as a religion for the state that was then the most powerful empire in the world.
The Emperor established the “Constantinople Church” in Rome over the tomb that is believed to belong to St. Peter, one of Christ’s disciples and it is the church that is today the seat of the Vatican. Then the emperor moved his capital to a fishermen’s village in Asia Minor, which enjoys a strategic location to oversee a strait in which Europe touches with Asia, and he also derived a name for it from his name (Constantinople), which is the city of Istanbul today.
In the year 325 CE, the Ecumenical Council was convened in Nicaea (today’s northern Turkey) to decide on the pillars of belief and the organizational and ritual issues of the new religion. Thus began the emergence of Eastern Orthodoxy, when Christianity split as a result of the political division into the Eastern Roman Byzantine Church in Constantinople, and the Roman Western Latin Church in Rome.
In 1054 CE, the dispute developed into what was called the “great schism” between the two churches, and among its most important items was the issue of the emanation of the Holy Spirit, the rites of the Eucharist, the right of the Pope of Rome to have global papal authority, and the subordination of the Patriarch of Constantinople to Rome. The political and cultural differences between the Greeks and the Romans had a major role in the occurrence of this rift.
Thus, the Orthodox doctrine of the Byzantine Roman Church arose, in contrast to the Catholicism of the Holy See in Rome. Orthodoxy – which in Greek means the straight path – has remained, since its inception, loyal to the authority in the eastern countries that are subject to it, just as Catholicism in Western Europe enjoyed great authority in terms of the Pope’s possession of both religious and political (worldly) powers.
Since its inception, The Orthodox Church has not been able to compete with Catholicism in strength and spread, as estimates today indicate that the number of Catholic followers is approximately 1.2 billion, which makes this branch of Christianity alone the most widespread religion in the world, then comes followers of Protestant churches with an approximately 800 million people, while the number of followers of the Eastern Orthodox in the whole world may not exceed 300 million. Note that Protestantism had split from Catholicism at the beginning of the Renaissance, which means that the numerical difference between the followers of Catholicism and the Orthodox Church was much greater.
The two sides exchanged accusations of infidelity and heresy even before the defection, and when the Pope of Rome launched the Crusades, massacres and fierce wars took place between them, until the Latin church leaders temporarily seized Constantinople and plundered it in the Fourth Crusade in 1204 CE, but the major blow to the Eastern Church was the Ottomans’ seizure of Constantinople in 1453 CE and its conversion into a capital for the Islamic State “Islambol”, meaning the city of Islam.
The Ottomans did not eliminate the church and its followers, but Sultan Muhammad al-Fateh turned its headquarters, the “Ayasofya Cathedral”, according to the custom followed in the conquests of the Ottomans and after its purchase, into a mosque, so the Ecumenical Patriarch Matta II moved his headquarters to the Monastery of St. George in the northwest of the city, which is still so far the seat of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and many churchmen moved to Greece at the time.
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In 988 CE, Prince Vladimir of Kyiv (today’s capital of Ukraine) embraced Christianity according to the Orthodox doctrine, and with the spread of Orthodoxy in the Russian and Balkan countries, the bishopric moved from Kyiv to Moscow in the year 1448.
With the collapse of the Byzantine state, the dreams of the Russians to inherit this glory before its demise began, then the Prince of Moscow – known as Ivan the Terrible – found in the Orthodox Church a golden opportunity to grant his nascent state religious legitimacy, and with his coronation to become the first Russian Tsar in 1547, Ivan used Orthodoxy to justify his absolute power.
Caesar was adhering to the divine right of the ruler on the grounds that he was the representative of God on earth, which gave him the right to brutally punish all his opponents, as historical accounts document his revenge on his victims by drowning and burning them alive, as well as torturing them with boiling or freezing water, citing these images from the punishment of God’s enemies in hell.
Although he considered himself a loyal follower of Christianity, Ivan the Terrible was ready to change the laws of his religion according to his whim, as he did not care about the church’s position on polygamy and he had 7 wives, as he was interfering in the affairs of the church and isolating its bishops and priests and executing or torturing them to achieve his interests.
In 1589, the head of the Russian Church acquired the title of patriarch, placing himself in the rank of the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, hoping to grant Moscow the title of the Third Rome after the fall of Constantinople, which was not approved by the Orthodox churches themselves, as well as Catholicism.
After about a century and a half, Peter I changed the face of Russia. With its transformation into a sprawling empire, European values began to penetrate it, and the Emperor decided to abolish the patriarchy, making the church one of the state institutions whose affairs are managed by a council of bishops.
With the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the authority of this church collapsed, and it suffered from persecution by the atheist communist authorities in the Soviet era. And when communism fell after seven decades or so, churches of all denominations around the world had lost all their powers, as in European countries. The new constitution stated that the Russian Federation is a secular state, and that no religion may be adopted as its religion.
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The Orthodox Church could not unify its ranks in a hierarchical system, as is the case with Catholicism, which is subject to the authority of the Pope of the Vatican. Today, Orthodox parishes are divided into nine major patriarchates, including the Moscow Patriarchate, whose followers are estimated at 165 million people, in addition to 6 large Orthodox churches that follow the episcopal system.
Although the Russian dream of transforming Moscow into a third Rome has not been completed, the Russian Church still has remarkable influence over other Orthodox churches that are not officially affiliated with it.
For example, the Serbian Church became independent from the Patriarchate of Constantinople since 1879, and the Patriarchate of Belgrade and all of Serbia became completely independent in 1920 with the same rank as the Patriarchates of Moscow, Constantinople, and others, but most Serbs still maintain their loyalty to Russia spiritually, until Serbian Interior Minister Alexander Volin announced last summer that his country is “the only country in Europe that has not imposed sanctions on Russia” because of the war it started against Ukraine in February 2022.
Although the constitution provides for the secularity of the Russian state, President Vladimir Putin – who ascended to power from the intelligence ladder in 2000 – reshaped the country’s identity by restoring its tsarist glory with his religious background, and in 2009 the new Patriarch Kirill succeeded in persuading the president to return the confiscated church property.
Kirill stated in 2011 that Putin is a “miracle” sent by Providence to save Russia, while Putin regards the Church as one of the most important soft-power elements of his imperial ambition. Analysts monitor many features of the mutual interests between the two institutions in gaining local and global influence.
With the increase in tension between Russia and the West, the analyzes of the American thinker Samuel Huntington rise to the surface, He, in 1993, put forward the theory of the “clash of civilizations”, in which he considered that Western civilization based on secular values, with its Catholic and Protestant backgrounds, is in conflict with other civilizations, including the Orthodox civilization.
Today, Russia is keen to lead this civilizational bloc by its leadership of the Orthodox Church, considering that the Patriarchate of Constantinople – which is still based in Istanbul – does not deserve to assume leadership since it fell into the hands of the Ottomans, especially after the accession of the secular Turkish Republic to the Western camp and NATO.
From this standpoint, many Orthodox followers see Moscow today as being able to save the white races from the moral decay and degeneration of values whose banner bears the Western liberal agenda. Russia’s State Duma (parliament) last month unanimously adopted a detailed bill banning propaganda for gay and bisexual people and influencing children’s sexual identity and gender change.
And while American and European leaders are keen to declare on every occasion their protection of the values of freedom and democracy, while integrating gender ideology into this system, Russian officials, on the other hand, declare their protection of family values, while also integrating them into the Orthodox system, including the statement of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov when he said in late August 2021:
“The Russian Orthodox Church carries its values abroad, defending traditional educational moral values that are under very strong attacks by the neoliberal elite in a number of Western countries.”
In 2017, an opinion poll showed that 80% of Serbs believe that the presence of a strong Russia is necessary to counter Western influence, and these feelings also spread in other countries such as Armenia, and partially in some regions of Greece, Estonia, Latvia and Montenegro, and in eastern Ukraine, and these are called the phenomenon of Russophilia, that is, “love of Russia”, is often spread among the Orthodox and nationalists who consider Russia as the motherland.
In Syria, a country where most of its people embrace Islam, the Patriarchate of Antioch – based in Damascus – has enjoyed complete independence since its inception, as it is one of the oldest churches in the world, but it sympathizes with the Moscow Patriarchate, in exchange for the alliance of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (its competition for Orthodox leadership in the region) with Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Given the Syrian government’s political relations with Russia, feelings of loyalty and Russophilia spread among the Syriac Orthodox, which made it easier for Putin to justify sending his forces to Syria under the pretext of protecting Christians from the Islamic State, as if he was restoring the pretext of protection provided by Tsar in the nineteenth century to the Ottoman Sultan, which led to its rejection by the Sultan which led to the outbreak of the Crimean War.
Ukraine is now battle ground for war between brothers
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church had moved from Kyiv to Moscow in the fourteenth century, as we mentioned before, and the Ukrainian Church had been affiliated with Moscow since 1686. With the collapse of communism in the early nineties, churches returned to regain their freedom in the countries of the former Soviet Union, and the Ukrainian church enjoyed complete independence in administration its affairs while maintaining official subordination to Moscow. Then in 1992, the establishment of the independent Kyiv Patriarchate was announced, which Moscow considered a dissident from it, while the Ukrainian Church officially affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate continued its work in the country.
In 2014, Putin decided to militarily wrest Crimea from Ukraine and annex it to Russia, as it is a region of historical importance to the Orthodox Church, and this step was blessed by the Russian Patriarchate. The Ukrainian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate has come to a very critical situation, as it is obliged to swear allegiance to the Patriarchate that blesses the war on the country.
As for the Kyiv Patriarchate, it gained more popularity and continued its work without any international recognition, until the Patriarchate of Constantinople decided in October 2018 to recognize it as an independent church, a step that led to a historic schism between the churches of Constantinople and Moscow. US-backed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko declared at the time that Ukraine’s national security would only be achieved through religious independence from Russia.
Statistics estimate that the percentage of followers of the Kyiv Patriarchate reaches 44% of the Orthodox Christians in the country, which is three times more than the followers of the Ukrainian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.
Last February, Putin declared war again, and began to seize large areas of eastern Ukraine, especially those in which feelings of loyalty to “Russophilia” spread, and the churches again played a major role in managing the battle, so the rift widened between the followers of one sect.
The Ukrainian Church affiliated with Moscow tried to distance itself, and issued a statement describing the Russian military campaign as a “disaster”, and appealed to Putin to stop the “brothers” war immediately, but this position was not sufficient, so this church was forced, after three months, to announce its separation from the Moscow Patriarchate, to become a completely independent church.
Efforts are still being made to unite the two poles of the Ukrainian Orthodox churches without making much progress, as many view with suspicion so far the church that separated from Moscow, as the Ukrainian security services raided last month the main monastery in Kyiv and a number of its churches, and said that they had confiscated money and “Pro-Russian literary works,” prompting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce earlier this month a draft law banning the work of any religious organization affiliated with Russia, in a very significant indication of the political role played by Russian Orthodoxy even in lands whose people follow the same sect.
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Putin’s efforts did not succeed in winning the hearts of many Orthodox themselves. The rift caused by his policies among the churches of this sect seems deeper than the old rift between the Orthodox churches and Catholics. Although Orthodox church is the majority religion in the Balkans, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece Cyprus and Georgia are getting further away from Moscow and closer to the secular West, with its Protestant and Catholic backgrounds.
In order to realize the depth of the gap between the followers of one sect, it is worth noting the statements of the leader of the Kyiv Patriarchate, Metropolitan Epiphanius, who issued a statement shortly after the start of the war, in which he said that “the spirit of the Antichrist operates in the leader of Russia, and the signs of that are: pride, devotion to evil, cruelty, and false religiosity. Hitler had these qualities during World War II, and this is what Putin has become today.”
As for the leader of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, he did not hesitate to criticize the Russian war in Ukraine, and said in a television interview that the whole world is against Russia, warning that Putin’s policies will lead to a “new cold war.”
In Africa, the picture does not look much different. With the increasing efforts of the Russian Church in recent years to establish new dioceses in the brown continent, the Patriarchate of Alexandria considered this expansion an intrusion into its region, and its response came in favor of the Patriarchate of Constantinople’s recognition of the independence of the Patriarchate of Kyiv.
Three years later, just before Moscow declared the last war in Ukraine, the Russian Church announced the establishment of a patriarchal exarchate (an administrative unit of the church located outside its main territory) in Africa, which deepened the dispute between the churches of Moscow and Alexandria.
