THE ISLAMIC UMMAH OF RUSSIA AND ISIS: ISLAMIC RADICALISM IN THE TURKIC-SPEAKING REGIONS

Ethnocultural conflicts in the world today are rooted in the increasingly incendiary globalization in the course of which certain regions cannot cope with migrant flows (EU member countries are a pertinent example) while others (the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China, Tatarstan, Chechnia, Bashkortostan, the Stavropol Territory, Tyumen Region, Adygea, and Ingushetia in the Russian Federation) are living in the complicated context of ethnic patchwork. Societies are moving towards blending different ethnocultural elements, causing havoc in human minds, unexpected ethnocultural situations and social and ethnic deviations which, as could be expected, consolidates the positions of the Islamic State. [1] It is difficult to study different aspects of the problem in depth in the age of the contemporary digital information society and various brainwashing strategies used by ISIS agents: they present ISIS as the best place for the development of genuine human qualities, which has already brought together members of several ethnic communities. The transnational extremist groups, Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami among them, have spread their influence to Central Asia and are gradually moving into Russian territory. Strongholds of extremism are not limited to the Northern Caucasus; they are present in the historically peaceful Volga area where Islamists have their own mosques and training courses and work hard to lure as many young people as possible to their side. Post-Soviet Islamism is a mixture of classic universalist Islamism and xenophobic fundamentalism. In Soviet times local Muslims treated the so-called Muslim world as something abstract, while Afghan mujahideen caused a lot of irritation in the Soviet Central Asian countries: Uzbeks or Tajiks, for instance, found it hard to associate the mujahideen persistent opposition with the defense of Islam. Today, the situation in the Muslim world is different. Former Soviet republics accept the universalist model of Islam as an endogenous phenomenon rooted in economic, political and ideological prerequisites. Fundamentalism/Wahhabism is seen as an exogenous phenomenon that forced some adherents of classic Islam out and drew the rest into its ranks. Political religions are never neutral. The difference between “us” and “others” is ontological. “Others” are a product of evil (ideologists of political religions do not hesitate to state that their enemies are “soulless”), therefore destruction is the only method to be employed against them. This paradoxical combination of cruelty and flexibility is typical of the post-modernist phenomena.