ABSTRACT
Can Muslim and Christian faith communities live together? What kind of political, ethnic and cultural order is required to facilitate such co-habitation? Does Russia provide a model for reconciliation and co-habitation? Or is the Russian Federation itself increasingly vulnerable to the further expansion of ‘Islamic extremism’ (Poliakov 2001: 21), situated on the ‘front-line’ in a new war between Islam and the West? What does that mean for the future of the Russian Federation? These are some of the fundamental questions that underpinned the research begun in 1996 upon which this book is based. Since that time these questions have come to be voiced far more widely and more urgently than we could have anticipated. In this concluding chapter, we outline how Russia’s ‘Islamic problem’ has been re-cast in the light of the events of 11 September 2001. More importantly, however, we compare and contrast the way in which Islam has been engaged – in both public and private spheres – in the process of shaping ethnic, national and religious agendas in Russia’s autonomous republics. It is this detailed historical and contemporary ethno-political and socio-cultural contextualization of Islam, we argue, which provides the starting point for answering the ‘bigger’ questions posed above.
