ISLAM AND THE DYNAMICS OF ETHNO-CONFESSIONAL REGIMES IN RUSSIA, 1990-2012

What explains Russian state policies toward Islam during the first two decades after the Soviet collapse? Research on secularism and state policies toward religion suggests several models of interaction. However, these models are often better at describing static relationships than they are at explaining change. This study advances a framework for understanding the conditions that presage a transformation of state-religion relations by examining significant differences between Russian state attitudes toward Islam in the early 1990s and the 2000s. In particular, notable changes in the licensing of Imams, the building permissions granted for mosques, and registration requirements for religious organizations call for explanation. In the 1990s, state-Islam relations were accommodationist: the state granted unrestricted access to the Russian public sphere for all Muslim communities and allowed a wide range of Islamic religious practices. State-Islam relations after about 2000 became regulatory: the state assumed a more active interventional role in the domestic Islamic community in order to control religious practices of particular Muslim factions and assure a privileged access to the Russian public sphere for state-approved “traditional” religious organizations. This study finds that, contingent on the interplay among competing national ideologies, which shape the country’s ethno-confessional regime, the state may either embrace unrestricted religious pluralism or adopt a regulatory stance toward certain religious communities. In their turn, structural factors such as public safety conditions and economic performance of the country may play an important role in determining the outcome of a struggle for ideological dominance. This framework largely explains the dynamics of Russian state attitudes toward the largest minority religion in the country during the first two decades after the collapse of the Soviet state and offers analytical insights on the dynamic nature of state-Islam relations in other secular states with considerable Muslim populations