‘Ordinary Wahhabism’ versus ‘Ordinary Sufism’? Filming Islam for Postsoviet Muslim Young People

Abstract

This study of Muslim documentaries in Dagestan today is the first attempt at a discursive analysis of the reproduction of postsoviet Islamic knowledge in the area, from written text to video, through investigation of debates on ‘true’ and ‘false’ Islam between competing factions of ‘Wahhabis’ and ‘traditionalists’, of the Cold War roots of Islamic visual propaganda, and of its young producers and audiences.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the orientalist Shamil' Shikhaliyev, the cinema historian Cloé Drieu and two anonymous reviewers for Religion, State & Society for their useful advice and comments on the draft of this paper.

Notes

The materials for this paper were collected during work for the project ‘From Kolkhoz to Jamaat: the Politicisation of Islam in the Rural Communities of the Former USSR: an Interregional Comparative Study, 1950s–2000s’ supervised by Stephane A. Dudoignon and Christian Noack, and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

It is interesting in this context to consider some more traditional genres of Muslim artistic output, for instance shamail, which are calligraphic pictures related to the life of the Prophet Muhammad and other topics of Muslim sacred history that emerged in Iran and the Ottoman Empire and became a distinct genre in the Volga region at the turn of the twentieth century (Alekseyev and Bobrovnikov, 2009, p. 9). In shamail (which are neither written texts nor images but their combination) images are similarly used to explain the plot of the texts and sometimes to supplant them.

In references to videos, the numbers indicate hours:minutes:seconds from the start of the relevant clip or film (or minutes: seconds if the film is less than an hour in length).

Bagauddin Magomedov, or Baha al-din Muhammad as he prefers to call himself in the Arab manner, is the famous spiritual leader of the Wahhabis and able opponent of their traditionalist Sufi adversaries. In the period from 1990 to 1999 he directed the largest Wahhabi madrassah ‘al-Hikma’ in the town of Kizilyurt. In the 1990s Bagauddin published a number of short leaflets on Muslim duties of prayer and an introductory textbook on the Arabic language. Recently his collection of sermons and religious legal opinions was published by the Moscow publishers ‘Badr’ (2006).

Muhyi al-Din Abu Zakariya Yahya al-Nawawi was a classical traditional jurist from thirteenth-century Damascus. He belonged to the Shafii religious legal school, which is also dominant in Dagestan. He has retained his high reputation to the present day. His commentaries to collections of hadiths by al-Bukhari and Abu Dawud are especially appreciated.

Muhammad Jamil Zeno (known in Russian as Zinu) was a highly respected yet controversial Islamic scholar of Syrian origin and a prolific author whose works were popular in English-speaking countries. His major works include: Islamic Creed (Questions and Answers); Pillars of Islam and Iman; How to Understand the Qur'aan; Methodology of the Saved Sect; and Al-Shamail al-Muhammadiyyah. In his youth he entered the Shadhiliyya tariqa but later left its Sufi practices for Salafism. From 1979 he taught at the Dar al-Hadith al-Khayriyya in Mecca. His treatise Islamic Guidelines for Individual and Social Reform was featured in the 2007 documentary Homegrown: Islam in Prison which was a part of the America at a Crossroads television series.

The name refers to the father of Maryam, mother of the prophet Isa (Jesus in the Christian tradition). The Quranic text also hints at another Imran, the father of the prophet Musa and his brother Harun (the biblical Moses and Aaron).

The creator of the clip quotes the Azerbaijani Arabist Elmir Kuliyev's translation of the Quran into Russian, which has been rejected in the academic world for its numerous inaccuracies; however, it nevertheless remains popular among the Caucasus Muslims.

The ‘h’ in this transliteration from the Russian reflects the fact that the original Cyrillic includes a Roman ‘h’ at these points.

See various video clips at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = eJ3HbfBL19Q&feature = related (last accessed 24 February 2011).

The author would like to thank Alexander Zheglov for his help in identifying the music used in the soundtrack.

In the original Russian this is a play on words: the Russian name ‘Vanya’ is modified to resemble the word ‘vonyat’’ – to fart or to smell.

In the original Russian:

My – shaika fashistov, ischad'ya ‘Kagala’

My – alchnaya staya sionskikh shakalov!

My grabim resursy, chtob vam ne dostalos'

Chtob bol'she u goyev detei ne rozhdalos' …

V Chechne, Ingushetii i Dagestane

Vragi sionistov zhivut – musul'mane.

Ubei ikh, Vonyushka – nayemnik ‘Kagala’

Chtob grabit’ tebya nam oni ne meshali.

Oni – ‘terroristy’, a my – tvoi bare.

Ne smei nam perechit’ – otpravim na nary … .

All to be found at the website http://guraba.net/rus/content/blogsection/21/106/ (last accessed 24 February 2011).

The traditional Islamic tasliya, or pious well-wishing, inserted after mentioning the Prophet. Translated from Arabic, the abbreviation means ‘may Allah bless him and welcome him’.

See material at http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t = 2924256 (last accessed 25 February 2011).

See material at http://www.kinoglaz.fr/u_fiche_film.php?lang = ru&num = 5791 (last accessed 25 February 2011).

http://www.afisha.ru/movie/201272/ (last accessed 27 February 2011).

http://shlakoblock.livejournal.com/262466.html (last accessed 27 February 2011).

In the original Russian, the word used here is ‘ChMO’. In modern Russian prison slang it is an abbreviation for ‘a person bankrupt in morals’, hence rendered here as PBIM. However, this loses a play on words present in the original: chmo is also a nineteenth-century Russian term meaning a pitiable, humiliated person, from the archaic verb chmarit’, to waste away, to languish, to decay (see Dal’, 1882, p. 628).

All quotations from entries at http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all_comments = 1&v = TITS9PQBKYw (last accessed 27 February 2011).

Some of the blogs are from Russian nationalists or self-identified Russian Orthodox, critical of Islam as such, and including inflammatory and blasphemous statements, but these do not contribute to the internal Muslim debate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 0jYOUNjBCdU (last accessed 24 February 2011).