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ABSTRACT
This contribution examines a symbiotic relationship between the state, represented by local government officials, and a mosque through a case study of the Yardam mosque in the central Russian region of Tatarstan. What in 2002 began as a community service-based project at a small mosque in the outskirts of Tatarstan’s capital Kazan, grew into a charitable foundation and a rehabilitation centre for the blind and disabled, housed under a newly-built mosque. The foundation is able to maintain its large-scale operations by forging strategic partnerships with local elites – local government officials and entrepreneurs – and by ensuring that the mosque’s leadership supports ‘traditional Islam.’ In turn, the local government showcases the mosque as a positive example of traditional Islam in Tatarstan: peaceful, community-service-oriented, and loyal to the state. As such, Yardam serves as a ‘desirable norm’ for the state and a real-life lesson for religious organisations: to be successful, their vision, mission, and work must be aligned with those of the state. Ultimately, the case of Yardam illustrates how Russia’s religious policy with the focus on ‘tradition’ can shape ‘mosque-state’ relations at the local level.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank participants of the Post-Communist workshop at GWU and anonymous reviewers for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Yardam translates as ‘help’ from the Tatar language.
2. A rehabilitation centre here refers to a place where people with physical and mental disabilities can undergo physical and mental therapy and learn important life skills.
3. I use Yardam’ to refer primarily to the mosque but also to its charitable foundation whose purpose is to fund work carried out at the mosque. While technically the two are separate entities, in reality the mosque and foundation can hardly be separated.
4. According to the mosque’s website, in 2017 the municipality of Kazan officially recognised the Yardam charitable foundation as ‘exemplary’ (‘Dostizheniia NIBF “Yardam” v ukhodiashchem 2017 godu’ [‘Achievements of the NICF “Yardam” in the departing 2017 year’]), a news update from the mosque’s official website. Accessed 1 March 2018, http://www.yardem.ru/publ/nashi_novosti/obshhie_novosti/dostizhenija_nibf_jardehm_v_ukhodjashhem_2017_godu/16-1-0-1631) .
5. Here, I am referring to the work of Feagin, Orum, and Sjoberg (Citation1991).
6. Other mosques in Kazan have engaged in grassroots charitable work with various outcomes. The Zakabannaia mosque, for example, is known for its cafeteria that serves free meals to the needy. However, its imam made controversial statements and was subsequently removed from his position (https://www.business-gazeta.ru/article/327887). Many other mosques in Kazan and Tatarstan have limited funds to draw from when individual requests for help arrive. The Muslim Spiritual Board of Tatarstan has set up the charitable foundation Zakiat to help people on an as-needed basis.
7. I use the terms ‘charity work’ and ‘community-service work’ interchangeably.
8. As Kristen Ghodsee (Citation2009) illustrates in her work on Islam in post-Soviet Bulgaria, the collapse of the state opened up the playing field for new players who not only brought much needed resources but new ideas about well-being, social justice, and the role of Islam and the state.
9. I use the word ‘policy’ as a short-cut to describe the ways the Russian state tries to manage religion (understood both as a social category ascribed to a group primarily on the basis of ethnicity and as a personal choice) (Brubaker Citation2012, 5).
10. Russia’s status as a secular country is reflected in items 1 and 2 of Article 14 of the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation.
11. In 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed two laws which, for the first time since 1917, granted legal status to some religious institutions (including the Russian Orthodox Church) and guaranteed religious freedom: the Law on Freedom of Consciousness and Religious Organizations and, a month later, the Law on the Freedom of Religion. The latter prohibited ‘state interference in religious affairs and vice versa, allowing the unrestricted proliferation of religious organizations of all kinds’; it also created the conditions for an unprecedented degree of religious pluralism (Papkova Citation2011, 74).
12. One of the key provisions of this law relevant to this contribution was the regulation of charitable activity that was now exclusively reserved for religious organisations that are registered with the state (Fagan Citation2013, 64). The Law also limited missionary (proselytising) activities, including those carried out in prisons, to religious organisations registered with the state. Missionary activity in Tatarstan’s prisons is one of Yardam’s newest projects. For a thorough analysis of the law, see Lekhel (Citation1999).
13. Papkova (Citation2011) suggests that the Law granted a culturally dominant role to Russian Orthodoxy as a religion, not the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) as an institution, and that it did not have a direct role in drafting and passing this piece of legislation (74–77). Shterin (Citation2016) illustrates the increasing role of the ROC in shaping Russia’s religious and national policy starting in the first decade of the 2000s (8–9).
14. Another rendition of the same notion is ‘official/unofficial’ religion. For an extensive discussion of these terms see (Fagan Citation20130, esp. ch. 6.; Dannreuther and March 2010; Lunkin Citation2011).
15. For example, a 1999 law officially banned Wahhabism in Dagestan or a 1999 Law on Religion in Tatarstan, which granted the then newly minted Muslim Spiritual Board of Tatarstan, whose charter outlines adherence to the Hanafi madhhab [a school of law in Sunni Islam], exclusive rights to conduct Muslim work in Tatarstan. The 1999 Law was later struck down on the grounds of contradicting federal law.
16. The exact provision of the law can be found here: http://minjust.ru/ru/extremist-materials.
17. For example, in 2009 the Ministry of Justice established the State Religious Expert Council responsible for drawing conclusions about religious organisations’ compliance with Russian laws. For a thorough overview of legislation that provided legal grounds for prosecution on the basis of religion and specific examples, see the SOVA Centre’s reports between 2013 and 2017.
18. For a detailed discussion of Tatar Islam in the context of ‘traditional Islam’ see Karimova (Citation2013, Citation2015).
19. A school of theology within Sunni Islam. In accordance with one of the tenets of this theology, one’s faith does not increase or decrease based on one’s actions; rather, it is one’s piety/religiosity that can fluctuate depending on one’s actions.
20. In Tatarstan, mosques are registered with the Muslim Spiritual Board of Tatarstan, which appoints imams in those mosques. It is difficult to verify if there are mosques that are ‘independent’ from the Spiritual Board’s affiliation, but the presence of such mosques is highly unlikely.
21. Malika Gel’mutdinova, a former public-school teacher, began her work at the Suleiman mosque, alongside her younger brother, as head of the education unit at the mosque.
22. I am using the term ‘visually-impaired’ as an English translation of the Russian word nezriachie. The employees of the mosque prefer this term to ‘the blind’ (slepye).
23. In Tatar: aunt.
24. All translations from Russian/Tatar into English are the author’s.
25. ‘National’ is translated from the Russian natsional’nyi, referring to the Soviet-legacy notion of nationality, which, in this case, is Tatar.
26. The Centre and charitable foundation cover fully students’ travel expenses, room and board, and specialised literature.
27. A complete list and description of the projects can be found on Yardam foundation’s website: http://yardemfond.ru/.
28. At the time of the interview in August, 2016. In my interviews with the board’s trustees (summers 2016 and 2018), I was unable to confirm or contest this figure. One trustee suggested that the Board of Trustees only contributed 10% in monetary funds toward the mosque’s monthly expenses. Four out of five of the trustees I interviewed stated that their contributions were not solely monetary but often consisted of services and goods. In fact, they suggested that, because of the financial crisis and difficulties associated with the Russian tax code, which heavily monitors charitable donations, they were inclined to move away from monetary contributions and continue their support to Yardam through in-kind contributions. Finally, while the trustees claimed that the foundation provides monthly reports on how incoming funds are used, they are not available to the public, which makes it impossible to verify the amount of contributions by the trustees.
29. While the ‘mandatory’ nature of these contributions may seem like an oxymoron and at odds with the very concept of voluntarily supporting a charity, it fits with the Soviet notion of the ‘voluntary-mandatory’ (dobrovol’no-prinuditel’nyi) duty. Such duty implied moral collective obligation to do some good, which was binding on every member of the Soviet society. Such notion of moral collective duty is not dissimilar to that of the Muslim notion of being part of an umma (a Muslim community) and, thus, always having the moral obligation to support it, whether through deeds or financial means. One trustee I interviewed described his financial support to Yardam as his duty as, first and foremost, a Muslim.
30. Bayazitov attributed the decrease to the financial crisis in Russia in general and to the Russian Tax Code that dis-incentivises small- and medium-sized private businesses from donating to charities.
31. Personal interview with a mosque employee, September 2016.
32. When I asked a practicing Muslim Tatar, who also had been monitoring the work of the Yardam mosque, to explain whether the statement implied that Metshin contributed his personal funds or the municipal funds, his response was: ‘the mayor is in charge of vast financial and administrative resources in the city, so municipal funds in a way are his personal funds.’
33. In the context of the Russian state, an official in charge of a non-budgetary fund has sole discretionary power as to allocation of the money from that fund.
34. In a similar vein, suspending access to state or municipal resources/services may signal the local authority’s apprehension with, or an unfavourable perception of, a religious organisation. For example, in 2013, a small mosque in the same district of Kazan, where Yardam is located, was permanently shut down. While the official reason for the mosque’s initial closure was cited as failure to pay its utility bills, it was rumoured that the imams of the mosque had publicly criticised the republic’s Muslim officials and were subsequently accused of preaching radical Islam. For one perspective on the mosque’s closure, see, for example, an op-ed in the Kazan newspaper Zvezda Povolzh’ia, http://zvezdapovolzhya.ru/obshestvo/al-ihlas-21-09-2012.html, accessed January 2019.
35. In one instance, I was proudly told that a Turkish television group stopped by the mosque to shoot a short video as part of a documentary on Tatarstan, but they were so impressed by Yardam that they decided to scrap their plans and make an entire documentary exclusively about Yardam. One local scholar suggested that Yardam is particularly interested in opening its doors to potential donors and those who can bring publicity to the mosque.
36. Imam that delivers Friday sermons.
37. The council acts as a liaison between the ministry and the public.
38. In his book, Bayazitov (Citation2015) argues: ‘the establishment of modern and conventional Muslim media is also a strategic goal, which will allow to create competition to multiple sect-based sites that exist today’ (123).
39. The platform presents itself as the ‘News Agency of Muslims of the Russian Federation’: http://www.info-islam.ru/ .
40. The move was criticised as a measure that was aimed at not simply preserving the Tatar language, but also removing from the public space any non-Tatar speaking Muslims who may embrace non-traditional Islam.
41. His earlier (2014) book on social service in Islam became part of the 2015 book. Both books were published by Yardam’s printing press and are sold at the Yardam mosque store that also offers religious educational materials, clothing and accessories. Proceeds from the store benefit the mosque.
42. In August 2016, the Cabinet of Ministers of Tatarstan issued a draft decree that would shut down a Kazan-based regional rehabilitation centre for the blind – a state-funded organisation – and would distribute its functions across various divisions within the ministry of labour, employment, and social services (https://www.business-gazeta.ru/print/322645). A petition was initiated on Change.org to prevent the closure (https://www.change.org/p/не-допустите-закрытия-реабилитационного-центра-для-слепых-и-слабовидящих-в-татарстане?source_location=petitions_share_skip). The centre is located within close proximity to Yardam, and one commentator on the petition suggested that Yardam was trying to get rid of its competition. When I asked a visually-impaired employee of the mosque about his opinion on the potential closure, he said the centre was dilapidating and was providing fewer and fewer services. As of May of 2018, the centre remained open.
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Liliya Karimova
Liliya Karimova is a Professorial Lecturer in Communication in the Department of Organizational Sciences and Communication, George Washington University (GWU), Washington, D.C., USA. Her research focuses on Islam, moral discourse, social change, and gender politics in Tatarstan, Russia.