ISLAMIC DEVELOPMENT IN RUSSIA

Putin Opens New Mosque in Moscow Amid Lingering Intolerance

By NEIL MacFARQUHARSEPT. 23, 2015

News Clips By REUTERS 00:48 Putin Speaks At New Moscow Mosque

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia spoke on Wednesday about Islam and the war in Syria at the opening of Moscow’s largest mosque.

By REUTERS on Publish Date September 23, 2015. Photo by RIA Novosti/Reuters.

MOSCOW — Against rather long odds, including a hostile mayor, a vocal constituency irritated by Muslim rituals, and criminal rackets loath to see valuable real estate lost to charitable organizations, Moscow inaugurated a glittering, elaborate new mosque on Wednesday.

It took 10 years to come to fruition, in fact. The opening was a singular event in a city where a wave of bombings by Muslim extremists that started around 2000 generated an animosity toward the faith that never entirely abated.

Flanked by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, President Vladimir V. Putin used his speech at the inauguration of the mosque, which he called the biggest mosque in Europe, to emphasize that Russia would develop its own system of religious education and training to counter extremism.

 “Terrorists from the so-called Islamic State are compromising a great world religion, compromising Islam; sowing hatred; killing people, including clergy; and barbarically destroying monuments of world culture,” Mr. Putin said. “They are trying to recruit followers here in Russia, too. Russia’s Muslim leaders are bravely and fearlessly using their own influence to resist this extremist propaganda.”

The Moscow Cathedral Mosque, which replaces a much smaller structure built in 1904, took a decade to build. Credit Yuri Kadobnov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Known as the Moscow Cathedral Mosque, the grand structure can accommodate 10,000 people on three stories and replaces a much smaller building erected in 1904. The previous two-story mosque, with a squat dome and two short minarets, held only 1,000 people.

“Finally, Moscow, which lays claim to the title of the biggest Muslim city in Europe, has a big mosque,” said Aleksei Malashenko, an expert on Islam at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “It shows that the center of Islamic life in the Russian Federation is in Moscow.”

There are just three other official mosques in a city with a Muslim population that could be as high as two million. No one knows, because there are no exact public numbers. (Russian census numbers have long been considered dubious, and about 10 years ago, the government stopped counting according to ethnicity, which had been broadly used to estimate religious affiliation.)

If generally accurate, that would mean Muslims make up about 16 percent of the population in a city of 12.5 million, putting Moscow in contention for the title of most Muslims in Europe, not counting Turkey. Estimates of the number of Muslims in the greater Paris area, often described as having the largest concentration in the European Union, range from 1.2 million to 1.7 million.

Given the tens of thousands of Muslims who pray on city streets during major holidays, Moscow appears grievously short on mosques. Before now, the existing four could accommodate just 10,000 worshipers.

Often, 60,000 or more Muslims show up at this site on major holidays, like Eid al-Adha, which is being celebrated on Thursday in Russia and will be the public opening of the new mosque. The building is tucked into a corner near one of Moscow’s stadiums left over from the 1980 Olympics, and an adjacent parking lot now has the capacity for an overflow crowd of at least 20,000.

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 “It is strange that in such a big city like Moscow, there are only four mosques, and even this one does not solve the problems in terms of space,” said Maksim Shevchenko, a member of the Kremlin’s human rights council who focuses on religious issues.

Ravil Gainutdin, the chairman of the council of muftis in Russia, has suggested that every Moscow neighborhood should have one mosque — which would mean about 20 to 30 new ones. With at least 40 underground mosques estimated to be based in apartments, the Muslim clerical hierarchy argues that more official mosques would help curb recruiters for the Islamic State or other extremist groups.

However, plans to construct just a couple of more mosques in recent years were canceled in the face of vehement public protests. The fact that sophisticated criminal gangs have a hand in many Moscow real estate deals does not help either, Mr. Shevchenko said, as they tend to favor shopping malls or office buildings that generate revenue. (That was not an issue in this case, because the new mosque replaced an existing one.)

“One reason why mosques don’t get built is public opinion, unfortunately,” said Ildar Hazrat Alyautdinov, the senior imam at the Moscow Cathedral Mosque and the mufti of Moscow.

International By Natalia V. Osipova 12:23 Muslim Image-Makers, Made in Moscow

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By Natalia V. Osipova on Publish Date July 27, 2015. Photo by Natalia V. Osipova/The New York Times.

“When we studied the situation, we found that those who initiated such a mood were from the Russian Orthodox Church,” he added. “Their activists would rile people up — going door to door, telling people that the mosque should not be built. Maybe it is not their official position but the work of activists.”

There is no shortage of public grumbling, as well. Social media posts overflowed with venom — acidic remarks about animal sacrifices and the fact that worshipers blocked streets to pray on major Muslim holidays. One disparaging comment on Facebook suggested that a famous song about the golden domes of Moscow would have to be changed to the “golden minarets.”

The mayor of Moscow, Sergei S. Sobyanin, has gone on the record opposing any new mosques. Spot checks of worshipers’ identity cards indicated that many of them were not legal Moscow residents, he said in a 2012 interview, adding, “So it is not a fact that the construction of mosques is needed, namely in Moscow.”

Money has been another issue. The biggest chunk of the construction costs for the mosque, about $170 million, came from a wealthy Russian oil tycoon, mosque officials said, but foreign governments, including Turkey, Kazakhstan and the Palestinian Authority, also donated.

On Tuesday night, Russia’s state-run television channel, Rossiya 24, broadcast a 30-minute preview of the mosque opening. In it, Mr. Gainutdin, of the muftis council, went out of his way to present the building as an organic element of Moscow’s religious architecture.

The dome — of the onion family, if not exactly an onion, and encircled with an inscription from the Quran — was designed and clad in gold in order to fit in with the many gilded church domes in Moscow, he said.

The mosque is a bit of an architectural mishmash, built from grayish-green Canadian marble, with one of its two minarets meant to resemble a famous Kremlin tower. Design elements were drawn from Turkish mosques and various indigenous Russian traditions, Mr. Gainutdin said, but the overall effect was unique.

“It is something special to Moscow, a Russian Muslim style,” he said.

Recently, most attention on Islam in Russia has focused on Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the strong-arm leader of Chechnya, the southern republic where Russia fought two wars against Islamic extremists in the 1990s. He has tried to cast himself as the leader of all Russian Muslims and has encouraged traditional practices in his republic, including polygamy despite its being banned in the Russian Federation.

Senior Muslim officials and analysts noted that hostility toward Muslims had diminished somewhat in the last 18 months, given the war in Ukraine and the official vilification of the United States.

“Now that we hate Ukrainians and people from the United States, we have suspended our fears concerning Muslims,” Natalya V. Zubarevich, a demographics expert at Moscow State University, said with some irony. “They will come back at some future time. The authorities found another enemy, something fresh.”

Note:
Islam is promoting peace and friendly relationship with all the races, there is no forcing element to non Muslim to accept Islamic teach and faith.

Wallahualam.