"The State Council will soon hold session to discuss anti-terror combat. Legislative ban on Wahhabism will be on the agenda thus to tie in terrorism with Islam," he said to today's Moscow conference of the Russian Interreligious Council. The Federation Council, parliament's upper house, was hosting.
Islam and terrorism are different things, pointed out the Mufti.
"Law drafters ought to consult experts of the Russian Muslim Board. We want to see the bill, especially the definition it makes of Wahhabism-we must know what will be punishable if the bill is passed, left innocent Muslims suffer," he stressed.
The definition must be quite clear. "If, by Wahhabism, we mean terror and calls for violence and bloodshed, we, too, are dead set against it, and we shall not object to its prohibition. If, on the other hand, Wahhabism is merely a particular ideology, we have to see that there is no way to suppress an ideology. How are we to know what ideas one has?" remarked Mufti Gainutdin.
The Senators promised to make his opinion known at the federal top.
Vladimir Kolesnikov, federal Deputy Prosecutor General, thinks Wahhabism ought to imply criminal liability, as he announced on a previous occasion. The academic community regards the prospect as direly clashing with democracy, on which Russian statehood rests. "That would mean we have a religious state, which meddles into its citizens' religious life to order them what to profess. That boils down to persecution for faith," says Sergei Arutyunov, prominent Islamic scholar.
Dire developments in Chechnya have made Wahhabism notorious. What is it, now? Ethnologists say it is a politically-lined 18th century Arab religious movement, launched by Mohammed ibn Abd ul-Wahhab (1703-1787). Spearheaded against the Ottoman Empire, it sought to unite Arabia under a theocracy. Described by many as Islamic Protestantism, it is official religious denomination of Saudi Arabia.
What we Russians know as Wahhabism is not Wahhabism proper but a warped and misinterpreted branch of Muslim fundamentalism, says Mr. Arutyunov.
"If we set in pursuit of Wahhabism, we shall finish by persecuting Islam as such, or particular Christian denominations, for that matter. Not religious theories are at the crux but people who use theology to get their selfish or downright criminal ends. When law enforcement people cannot do a thing, they start inventing things. That's the whole problem," says Gennadi Gudkov of the State Duma, lower house-and he certainly has a point.
