What I would like to stress is that the current religious revival will determine the future of Islam in the region. The future is very uncertain and there is a great need for understanding this situation and its dynamics. Depending on the outcome of current competition between Islamic traditions Azerbaijan in the future may be either a Sunni or Shia majority country. So far, it seems that Sunni Islam, in the Turkish variant, attracts most new followers, but Shiism—in its various interpretations, not necessarily pro-Iranian, is not giving up. It is also likely that this present religious competition will provoke tensions between Sunnism and Shiism that characterize other Muslim regions.
In the current chapter I will focus on the “religious” Muslims and present contemporary Azeri Islam through the perspective of its internal divisions. Although, as I have underlined earlier, the sectarian divide does not translate into political fights or mutual hatred, it does exist. This internal split in Islam gives people an opportunity to choose, more or less consciously, one of the options to follow. It is worth noting that it is not only the Sunni-Shia division that is relevant to Muslims. There are diverse models inside each of the branches that reinterpret Islam and offer further possibilities. Identification of those models and their characteristics is a tough empirical question.
The aim of the chapter is to contextualise Islam and its internal pluralism in contemporary Azerbaijan. For this reason, I find it useful to look inside the local Islam and identify the divisions that really matter to people and are significant either in private or public spheres. Such an approach entails rejecting the most common theoretical dichotomic frameworks that are usually used to describe the Muslim religion. The next chapter will be focused more on people’s choices. I am trying to understand the process of changing the Muslim identity from the “cultural” to the “religious” one. This is a bottom-up perspective on understanding Islam as a social reality. The future of Islam will depend on the outcomes of contemporary rivalry between the models of Islam proposed by diverse groups and supported by diverse states. Those Islamic movements and leaders that can appeal to “cultural Muslims,” and to identify their spiritual and socio-economic needs, as well as to present Islam in an attractive way will win the competition. It is vital to get the grasp of how this process is taking place.
Islamic Revival in the former USSR
After two decades following the dissolution of the USSR, the research on Islamic revival in the post-communist countries of Central Asia and the Caucasus is quite rich. Particularly since the beginning of the 21st century the topic of rising interest in Islam and religious identities among ordinary people has been receiving a lot of attention. Apart from the dominant topic of Islamism and Islamic radicalism (Wilhelmsen, 2009), there are also valuable works presenting empirical research on the social and cultural aspects of Islam with the focus on everyday Islam and religious practices of ordinary Muslims (e. g. Khalid, 2007; Poliakov, 1992; Rasanayagam, 2011; Roi, 2000). There were also larger projects, like the one at the Max Plank Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle, with a dedicated team of researchers conducting ethnographic studies with an explicit focus on religion in various Central Asian states. This project resulted in a very insightful book “The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe” (Hann, 2006).
It is, however, worth noting that this kind of scholarship is quite recent for this particular region. Field studies on the mainstream experience of the Islamic revival were not frequent in the late period of perestroika, when the phenomenon became visible. As Rohoziński argues (2005, p. 9), the newly created fundamentalist movements in Central Asia were unnoticed during the first years after the Soviet Union had collapsed. He suggested that from the Western perspective the movements that today are seen as promoting radical religious ideals were interpreted as post-colonial uprisings against Russians. It was supposed to be a temporary ferment, complicated reaction of societies that unexpectedly (re)gained independence and had to reorganize almost all spheres of public life. The term “transition” was used to account for all unique processes. Therefore, Islamic movements in the region were treated as a temporary phenomenon, and were generally not linked to global developments in the Muslim umma. For some observers, the rise of Islam was an aspect of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1988–1994 was sometimes presented as a Christian-Muslim war that supported the Huntington thesis of the clash of civilisations. This bloody conflict was then seen as a catalyst for Islamic renaissance, as a force that radicalised Azerbaijani Muslim against their rivals. In fact, Islam did not form a real basis for the war ideology, it was not a political argument.24 However some years later, after signing a truce with Armenia, Islamic ideas were still gaining popularity and there was an increasing body of evidence that Islam was to become a constant part of post-Soviet life. Only then researchers set up to explore this process and its dynamics (see e. g., Abasov, 2001; Balci, 2004; Motika, 2001; Świętochowski, 2002; Tohidi, 1996, 1997; Valiyev, 2005).
One of the first publications to explore the religious revivalism in that part of the world was a collection Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, edited by Andreas Kappeler, Gerhard Simon and Georg Brunner (1994). It explored various dimensions of Muslim identities: national, tribal and religious. It was an early attempt to provide a more contextual framework for understanding the violent events in which Islam played a role. In 1993 Dmitri Trofimov undertook a research project consisting of a series of field visits to Central Asia and Azerbaijan to gather data on mosques and their leaders. His publications serve as one of the basic references concerning the official statistics and additional information regarding the numbers of mosques, biographies of their imams, numbers of worshippers, etc. (Trofimov, 1996). The sheer numbers of mosques provide us with a picture of the religious revival from early 1990. Table 5.1 presents the statistics on Friday mosques (known also as jami), which present an important part, but only a part, of the total places of worship. Apart from Friday mosques, which are the largest and most influential, there are also smaller, more local mahalla mosques or masjids, and places of worship linked to a family.
Table 5.1Numbers of Friday mosques in Central Asia and Azerbaijan Source: Trofimov, Dmitri (1996), p. 217.
The questions I find fascinating in studying contemporary Islam are its internal heterogeneity, flexibility and dynamics. Like in other world religions, Islamic scriptures allow for multiple interpretations. The religious revival brings those models of religions into open competition. To understand this religious pluralism, as it manifests itself in discourses and practices of Muslims, we need to identify the main groups, their leaders and activists. Besides, it is crucial to understand their types of capital (in Bourdieu’s sense), strategies used in the intra-religious competition, the power relations, and geopolitical conditions.
In the contemporary public discourse in Central Asia and the Caucasus Islamic pluralism is frequently presented as an opposition between “traditional” and “fundamentalist” groups. This dichotomy still prevails in the contemporary public discourse, among journalists on one side, and analytics on the other. Generally, the former term refers to the “cultural Muslims,” who follow local customs and keep the conventional social systems. The latter category, a synonym to “Wahhabi,” describes those observant Muslims who contest the religious and social status quo. These schematic categories to some extent replaced older dichotomies, such as “official” (related to the state) Islam versus “unofficial” (independent), “high” (represented by urban elites) and “low” (rural), or “pure” (focused on the Scriptures of Islam) and “syncretic” (containing non-Islamic elements)25. While all these terms transfer some characteristics of religious forms, in the contemporary context of post-communist countries exposed to global and influences, such dichotomies are not of much use. A more fruitful way is to account for the present
religious situation by employing the concept of discursive traditions in Talal Asad’s (1986) interpretation. Such perspective allows us to appreciate a highly heterogeneous Islamic culture in its local context. As it was mentioned in the first chapter, the history of Islam in the Caucasus was extremely complicated and witnessed a large variation of religious branches and sects which either coexisted or competed with each other to win support of the local population. To some extent, today’s religious diversity resembles that from the past.
In contemporary Azerbaijan, the most visible division that is evident in everyday life is between the secular attitude (as characterized in the previous chapter) common to the majority of local Muslims and the attitude of Islamic piety, which is promoted by a wide range of religious movements, groups, institutions and individual actors. The ‘religious’ minority is also extremely diverse. There are Shia pious communities, embracing conservative, liberal, political, or reformist discourses and Sunni pious groups which are further differentiated into orthodox, Sufi, Turkish, and inspired by Arabic countries—the Salafi interpretation of Islam. Moreover, Islamic modernism, an identifiable historic tradition, is being constantly redeveloped by a few distinct actors, mainly Muslim Azerbaijani intellectuals. Even though its influence in society at the moment is rather limited, the modernists may possibly respond to the demand for local religious authorities in the future.
As some experts argue (see, e. g., Peuch, 2004), Azerbaijan represents Islamic diversity to a larger extent than any other Muslim post-Soviet republic, because only in this country Turkish, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian models of Islam have similar “market share.” With a gradual demise of the USSR, missionaries from many regions have been sent to promote “the only right” version of faith. Alongside, foreign charities and educational institutions were established. Fundamentalist groups are also present, but their activities in society are overestimated by the state and mass media. Scientific articles on Islamism in Azerbaijan rather stress the future possibilities and likelihood of winning mass support by Islamists than identify it as a crucial factor in Azeri socio-political life (Wilhelmsen, 2009). For that reason I decided to exclude this wing from my research. I will refer to fundamentalists only when I analyse the state policy concerned with the post-9/11 “war on terror,” and social perception of radical religious groups.
5.1Shiism
Shia Islam in Azerbaijan has its local well-developed infrastructure consisting of official mosques with their clergy and of multitude of shrines. Pilgrimages to holy places were, at least in the communist era, the most popular public manifestation of Shia religiosity. Some of them enjoy special status and attract the faithful even from remote corners of Azerbaijan and from abroad (see Balci, 2004; Grant, 2011). The rituals of ziyārat are highly privatized and do not require any kind of affiliation with a mosque or any other Islamic institution.
Official Islam, in practice represented mainly by the Shafei Shiites, has experienced continuities and changes in the last decades. Surprisingly, some religious structures stemming from the Soviet or even earlier times have survived political transformation almost unchanged. The Spiritual Board of the Transcaucasian Muslims was only renamed in 1989 to the Caucasus Muslim Board. Since 1980 it has been continuously headed by a Shiite scholar Haji Allahshukur Pashazade who holds the title sheikh-ul-islam. Haji Pashazade became the youngest Muslim boards’ head since 1943. Directly before his appointment as the highest religious official in Azerbaijan, Pashazadeh served for four years as an imam khatib in the main mosque in Baku, known as Taza Pir. He is well educated, apart from Azeri, Turkish and Russian, which are often heard in Azerbaijan, he speaks Arabic and Persian (Trofimov, 1996, p. 210), which in the era of limited contacts with the Islamic world gave him a distinct advantage over his colleagues. During his university education he focused on the history of Islam and wrote a master’s thesis on Islam in Azerbaijan. His doctoral dissertation was devoted to the institution of shura in Islam (ibidem). Political transformation has brought new opportunities for the class of official clergy. The problem of the lack of religious education under the Soviet rule was partially solved by the establishment of Islamic University in Baku in 1992 (in fact, an existing madrasa was transformed into a university).26 This higher educational institution aims at preparing new group of clerics ready to take over mosques’ leadership from mostly uneducated akhunds and mullas. I will later deal more thoroughly with the problem of clergy and the dispute over mosques and leadership in Azerbaijani Islam.
Shiism in Azerbaijani Islam does not amount to a set of occasional ritual practices. It has also a unique intellectual dimension. As a discursive tradition, it has always been developed in contact with Iran, the main centre of Ithnā ʿAsharī teachings. Iran’s activities on different levels contributed to the revival of Shiism among the Azerbaijanis, who had been isolated from the intellectual religious ferment since 1928 (Motika, 2001). It is thus not surprising that Iranian clerics turned out to be more successful in providing satisfactory knowledge on Shiite Islamic religion than the old local Azerbaijani establishment. After Azerbaijan regained independence, the major Iranian muǧtahids began to appear among Caucasian Muslims and established their offices. According to my informants the institution of wakīl (legal agent) functions in Baku, for instance in the district of Ganjlic. In the capital, religious shops offer a wide choice of books on Shiism imported from Iran, which have been translated into Azeri and Russian languages. In 2009, during Baku’s International Book Fair, on the Iranian stall around 200 books were promoted. Works of such prominent Shiite scholars as Ali as-Sistani, Fazil Lenkerani, Muhammad Huseyn Tabatabayi, Sayyid Mujteba, Musevi Lari are easily available. Among those prominent religious figures, marǧaʿ at-taqlīd Ayatollah Fazil Lenkorani, who died in 2007, gained special respect and popularity among Azerbaijanis. It’s worth noting that he descended from an Azeri family. His book Risale in its Azeri translation is quite popular. Among Lenkorani’s students in Qom, there was a significant group of Azeri students. Having learned the science of Islamic law, they set out to spread knowledge and their master’s ideas in their country (Balci, 2005). Shiism is also transmitted among the youth through self-education. Some young Shiites in Baku that I have talked to seek on their own for religious knowledge in the Iranian scholars’ interpretations. Especially at present, as most foreign missionaries are not favoured by state authorities, self-education is crucial. Thanks to Internet, the rulings of Shiite scholars are easily accessible and most questions can be asked through this channel. Numerous Shia web portals and discussion forums are also increasingly popular. For the younger generation it’s the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to get relevant information on a particular topic.
Traditional Shiite pious tradition is best exemplified by communities in three regions. One is the south of Azerbaijan, directly bordering Iran, where almost a third of Azerbaijani mosques function (Kuliev, 2005). Second is the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, an enclave enclosed by Armenia, Turkey and Iran. The third centre consists of villages around Baku on the Absheron Peninsula, among which Nardaran is considered to be the most conservative and pious. It is noteworthy that most scholars researching Shiism in Azerbaijan are interested in the question whether the Iranian revolution has a chance to spread to this neighbouring country. They usually point to those elements of Shia doctrine which are conducive to radicalism, such as the religious idea of rebelling against injustice, oppression and tyranny. Portraits of Imam Husayn, who gave his life fighting against illegitimate ruler, are often treated in publications as signs of revolutionary ideas. On the other hand, there are a few recent studies that provide important insights into the empirical reality of Shia religiosity. Far Center’s research (Hadjy-zadeh, 2005a,b) has been conducted in the south of Azerbaijan, in Astara and Lenkoran, where Shiite Muslims clearly dominate the religious landscape. Researchers have found out that almost all settlements have operating mosques, and that pirs are popular among inhabitants. Iranian missionaries use all possible op
portunities to actively propagate Twelver Shiism and the ideas of Islamic revolution. According to Jerzy Rohoziński (2005), the pro-Iranian inclinations of the local Shiite population are nevertheless mostly exaggerated. His own field research on religion in Nardaran indicates that the claims about prospective revolution among Shiite Azerbaijanis are based mainly on “armchair research” which employs second-hand data to support the theses. He admits that the break-up of the Soviet Union has facilitated relationships between Azerbaijan and Iran, and that numerous initiatives have been carried out to attract people to Iranian doctrines. In Nardaran, for example, Iran had given money for a madrasa and a pir. What is more, an Iranian akhund teaching in the madrasa gathered his students to paint revolutionary slogans on the settlement’s streetside walls. Shiite symbols, especially those referring to Muḥarram, function in the public sphere. Local people eagerly set out for pilgrimages to Meshed. Despite these signs and symbols, the local Shiite population, as Rohoziński argues, is far from accepting Iran as a spiritual and ideological patron. Contrary to the common perception, people from Nardaran do not feel attracted to Iranians, who are considered by them to be unmoral and slow-witted.
Religious Revival and Secularism in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan Page 17