Islam in Dagestan under Gorbachev

On 4 February 1989 T ASS reported that following Friday prayers an unauthorised assembly in Tashkent by some 200 Muslim believers from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, had demanded the resignation of the chairman of the Religious Board for Central Asia and Kazakhstan, Mufti Shamsuddin Baba Khan. Three days later T ASS confirmed the resignation of the mufti and the nomination of Muhammad Sadiq Muhammad Yusuf as acting chairman of the Board pending formal elections. l On 14 March 1989 he was formally elected mufti. Some 2,000 Islamic students crowded the streets and the roof tops of Tashkent to greet their new leader, chanting slogans and waving banners proclaiming 'Islam is the only true way'. The new mufti was acclaimed by 400 imams and mullahs from all over the Soviet Union with a cry of Allah-u Akbar (God is great). 2 The solemnity of the occasion was further marked by the return of the seventh century Quran of Caliph Osman, one of the holiest of Muslim relics, by the Uzbek government. The prompt acquiescence of Moscow to the resignation of Shamsuddin Babakhanov, brought about by popular demand, and the orderly election of the new young mufti without, it would seem, administrative edict from above, are on the face of it a credit to giasnost' and testify to a new approach to Muslim affairs in the USSR. However, these events. took place in Tashkent an important regional capital frequently visited by foreigners from the Muslim world and the West, and in full view of the foreign media, considerations which no doubt contributed to a satisfactory handling of the crisis for the believers. The case of remote Dagestan, where similar developments took place three months later, is an altogether different story.