FORCE OF ISLAM

Shackles Off, Russia's Muslims Are Still Chafing

KAZAN, Russia, Nov. 5 - Summoned by a familiar, plaintive call, young men dazed from studying stumble from their dorm rooms with slippers on their feet and prayer on their minds.

From 20 regions of Russia and bordering nations, they have made their way to an institution whose very name was unthinkable a decade ago: the Russian Islamic University.

Founded in 1998, the university already has 148 students in its newly refurbished building. It also has the support of the former Communist who rules Tatarstan, the semiautonomous republic centered around this urbane city on the Volga River.

A decade after the fall of the Soviet Union ended constraints on religious observance, the university seems to suggest a state-sanctioned Islamic revival. Though most Russian Muslims, numbering from 13 million to 20 million, are secular after decades of religious repression, young people are becoming more observant.

Now there are ever more places to pray: in Tatarstan, where there were about 18 mosques under Soviet rule, there are now more than 1,000, including one rising, on a grand scale, inside the white walls of this city's government fortress.

But in Russia, and even in tolerant Tatarstan, the state reaction to Islam seems to depend very much on what form of Islam it is.

Less than 200 miles from the Russian Islamic University, another Islamic religious institution, the Yoldyz madrassa, set in the bleak industrial city of Naberezhnye Chelny, feels itself to be under state siege.

After reports emerged of madrassa graduates going to fight against Russia in Chechnya, the Tatarstan government sent the school's Arab teachers back to their home countries and revoked the school's license. To seem less threatening, Yoldyz transformed itself into a girls' madrassa. Still no license. The state wants the school closed.

The rise in Islamic fundamentalism has concerned Russian officials, many of whom are wary of any religion that is not Russian Orthodoxy. The ongoing battle in Chechnya, whose rebels increasingly identify with Muslim extremists, has fueled anti-Islamic attitudes. Much of the concern has focused on the influence, in Chechnya and beyond, of money and ideology from Islamic countries.

Islamic revivalism may pose no immediate threat to the Russian federation, but it does present a challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin and his successors.

In seven republics of Russia, including Chechnya and, just barely, Tatarstan, Muslims are already a majority. They are not immigrants whose visas can be revoked. Their history here extends back more than a thousand years.

The madrassa reflects a younger generation's view that Russian Islam, shaped by accommodation to Czarist, and later Soviet, rule, is not worth preserving. The school's director, Malik Ibragimov, 36, who studied in Saudi Arabia for four years, says fundamentalist Islam is the only Islam. He calls the notion of a Russian Islam "rubbish."

The university, by contrast, reflects an effort to contain radical Islam by promoting Russian Islam ? defined as a centuries-old tradition of coexistence with other faiths and deference to the state.

But that deference is sure to be tested, and indeed already has been. Opposition is growing among Russia's Muslims to the American bombing of Afghanistan, and moderates say its continuation will radicalize their ranks. Some religious leaders are openly critical not only of America's policy but also of Russia's support for it. One said this week that Russian Muslims could justifiably take up arms to support the Taliban.

In the coming months, President Putin's favorable reception in the West may be countered by rising discontent at home among Muslims, not to mention Russian nationalists.

The president has met with Muslim leaders, and speaks about Russia's rich history of religious coexistence. But Muslims say he has done too little to control local authorities who, sometimes in collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church, have blocked the building of new mosques.

They say that by feeding fears of Islamic terrorism, Mr. Putin has encouraged antipathy toward Islam itself. The government blamed a series of unsolved bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people on Chechen Muslim terrorists. The estimated one million Muslims in Moscow, many dark-featured refugees from Chechnya and other republics in the northern Caucasus, are accustomed to police harassment.

Such measures are necessary, Russian leaders insist, lest other separatists draw inspiration from Islamic fundamentalism.

"If extremist forces manage to get a hold in the Caucasus," Mr. Putin said last year, "this infection may spread up the Volga River, spread to other republics, and we either face the full Islamization of Russia, or we will have to agree to Russia's division into several independent states."

Wahhabism, the puritanical Islamic sect that is strong in Saudi Arabia and is followed by Osama bin Laden, has long been an obsession of the Russian state and news media. Some Caucasus rebels studied in Saudi Arabia and identify with the Wahhabi branch. "Wahhabism" is now a Russian code word for extremism, and is banned by several republics.

But some believe that repressive measures aimed at Islamic fundamentalism will only help it spread. At Friday Prayers, the mosques are packed with young people who say that feeling persecuted by their own government only drives them deeper into Islam's embrace.

"When you go out from the mosque, you feel yourself stronger," said Rasim Zagirov, 25, a student from Dagestan living in Moscow.

Young Muslims are picking up where their grandparents left off when Communists executed thousands of Islamic teachers and closed most of the country's mosques and religious schools. Unable to look to parents for instruction on anything but the most basic rituals, some young people have turned to preachers and teachers who studied in Arab countries beginning in the 1980's.

Their education abroad, coupled with an influx of Arab emissaries offering spiritual guidance and financial support after the Soviet collapse, helped forge a generation of ardent believers.

Orkhan Djemal, the press secretary for the Eurazes Party, a Muslim-led group that controls a small faction in Parliament, said that for Russians like him, in their 20's or 30's, Islam is "not just some cultural code," not folklore. "It's a certain system of justice, freedom, honest life." He says that in majority Muslim areas, Islamic law should apply.

Fearful that young radicals could help fill the growing need for Islamic teachers, conservative Muslim leaders have encouraged President Putin to pay more attention to Islamic education. So has Tatarstan's president, Mintimer Shaimiyev.

Mr. Shaimiyev, a wily politician who survived the Soviet Union's fall, has formed strong economic relations with Arab and Muslim countries. But when it comes to religious education, even his prized Islamic university, President Shaimiyev no longer wants the help of Islamic countries. "We think it's better to render that support ourselves," he said.

A few years ago, concerned that Arab teachers were spreading Wahhabism, President Shaimiyev engineered the election of a moderate, Gousman G. Iskhakov, to head Tatarstan's Muslim Spiritual Board. Mr. Iskhakov, who is also rector of the Islamic university, quickly took religious schools in hand.

Those who advocate an Islamic state in Russia, or preach intolerance for other faiths, he said, threaten to disrupt the harmony between Muslims and Christians that has held for centuries in Tatarstan.

"The ideas proclaimed in Saudi Arabia don't fit here," he said.

Mr. Ibragimov, of the Yoldyz madrassa, hardly seems hopeful that his fellow Tatars, who he said prefer drinking to scripture, are ready for Islamic rule. Rather, he says he believes that the state fears that observant Muslims will start applying Islamic notions of justice to the corruption they see around them.

Indeed, the madrassa's message seems as much at odds with the go- go capitalism that now governs Russia as the Communism that once did. A drawing on a wall shows an unhealthy heart infected by the trappings of Western success - a car, a cell phone, a bag of money.

During his four years in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Ibragimov noted, "there were no drug addicts, no theft, no alcoholism, no killings like in Russia, and if they call that Wahhabism, then I am for Wahhabism like that."