Here's a Model for How to Shape a Muslim State

KAZAN, Russia. So you find yourself responsible for a recently liberated police state, with a Muslim population that has chafed for decades under the oppression of socialist thugs. The euphoria of deliverance passes quickly.

Rabble-rousers arise, demanding that you step aside to make way for Islamic law, and opportunists start picking off scraps of power for themselves. Now what?

That is pretty much the predicament Russian authorities faced here a dozen years ago. President Bush will probably not be looking to Vladimir V. Putin for advice on how to proceed in Iraq when they meet later this month in St. Petersburg, particularly after the Russians snubbed us at the United Nations Security Council. Besides, Moscow's record of manhandling its own Muslim minority, especially in the blood-drenched battleground of Chechnya, does not inspire confidence.

Amy Waldman/The New York Times Moscow has accomplished in one Islamic province in central Russia, called Tatarstan, something the U.S. seems to want for Iraq: A secular society.

But since the end of Soviet rule, Moscow has accomplished in one Islamic province here in central Russia, called Tatarstan, something we seem to want for Iraq: an easygoing, secular, peaceable, multicultural society that is, in a small way, a model for its neighbors. Improbable as it may seem, we might learn something here.

Tatarstan, to be sure, is a far cry from Iraq, although Islam was imported here from Baghdad in the 10th century. The most conspicuous difference is that Muslims here constitute only about half of the population. During four centuries of stressful coexistence with Russian Orthodox Christians, the Muslim Tatars have necessarily become the most adaptable of Islamic peoples. (The conventional epithet is "cunning," which Russians mean as an insult and Tatars take as a compliment.) The prevailing language is Russian, the dress is Western, intermarriage is commonplace.

But there are some relevant similarities. Like the Iraqis, Tatars have a historical memory of a time when they represented a cosmopolitan culture.

In the early 20th century, Muslim schools here taught science and engineering, Kant and Descartes, alongside scripture. For many Tatars, as for many Iraqis, Islam is just one component of a rich ethnic identity.

Like the Iraqis, the Tatars saw their leaders crushed, their mosques closed and their faith suppressed in the name of revolution. And like the Iraqis, the Tatars reacted dizzily to the first rush of freedom. Zulfia Fathkullina, a young Tatar woman who studies at a Kazan religious school, says she had an overpowering feeling of deja vu watching the toppling of Saddam Hussein on television, the crowds that had recently cheered the tyrant now pouring into the streets to shred his picture. The delirious mixture of relief and disorientation reminded her vividly of those days in the early 1990's after the Soviet Union collapsed.

For a time, Russia had nightmares of Tatarstan as the epicenter of an Islamic uprising. Separatist rhetoric flourished here. The Soviet Union had unraveled, and now Russia, itself a federation of 90 regions, threatened to disintegrate, just as many people worry that Iraq might do now that the heavy hand of Mr. Hussein has been lifted. The new Russian authorities were alarmed.

Russians had experienced the havoc a few agitators can cause. (Remember Lenin?) They had, moreover, just lost a real war to the Taliban of Afghanistan, and they were beginning to recognize that with low Russian birthrates, they were losing a demographic war as well. Given their tendency to ruthlessness and paranoia, a heavy-handed reaction seemed imminent in Tatarstan. But it didn't happen.

The first thing Moscow did right, in hindsight, was to leave Tatarstan under the control of someone who knew the lay of the land. The Tatars got as their new boss not a retired general or a democrat from exile but their durable old party boss, Mintimer S. Shaimiyev, shrewdly repositioned as a Tatar nationalist. Mr. Shaimiyev is more a feudal populist than a democrat. But he regularly wins elections because he has figured out how to keep peace with Moscow without seeming to be a puppet.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's favorite in Iraq, probably knows more about democracy than any mullah angling for influence. But so did the man we brought from exile to run Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and he now seems to be little more than the mayor of Kabul. The Russian experience suggests we take a closer look at the independent local talent, even if they don't fit the James Madison template.

The second thing Moscow did right was to make sure that people had a life.

Tatarstan was fortunate to be the center of some industries that weathered the Communist collapse - petrochemicals and military and civilian aircraft. Nervous Russian officials pumped in fresh subsidies and encouraged foreign investment to ward off the discontent that breeds rebellion. Today the region has pockets of misery, but Kazan is among the more prosperous of Russia's cities. This is not the easy, narcotic wealth of oil, with which we hope to buy peace in Iraq. (Tatarstan is sometimes described as "oil rich," but the oil it has is of inferior quality.) Rather it is the kind of mixed industrial growth that employs a skilled work force, which in turn supports a thriving consumer economy, keeps the engineering school busy and breeds a middle class.

The most instructive and most surprising success is how Moscow has handled religion. This, to put it mildly, has never been the Kremlin's strength. Russia's tradition is to meddle - pick favorites, co-opt and tame them, isolate the others and run them out of town, or arrest them, or in the case of Chechnya bombard them. It's a great recipe for envy and unrest.

When Communism fell, Tatarstan was due for a Muslim revival. Some young Tatars went abroad in search of inspiration, mostly to that font of Sunni orthodoxy, Saudi Arabia. When they came back, they found much to condemn.

Their people seemed softened and secularized. Women, as in Iraq, were treated almost as equals. Modesty and sobriety were in short supply. A few fired-up mullahs set out to purify the province. The Saudis sent preachers and money, as they had in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to help restore fundamentalism.

The Russian authorities fumbled around for a bit, but they ultimately came up with an approach that was unusually deft. They decided to create a space for Islam to flourish - within limits. They have allowed the reopening of 1,000 mosques, though most have too few worshipers to support a full-time imam. The state hired Turkish contractors to replicate an enormous mosque that Ivan the Terrible had demolished inside the whitewashed walls of Kazan's old fortress. They have allowed Muslim newspapers and licensed Islamic religious schools, including a tiny university where 170 young men study to be imams.

A visitor who recalls the Soviet knack for enforcing conformity might expect to find the university a bastion of pious propagandists. It is certainly no jihad factory, but the teachers and students seem to have their own opinions, influenced more by the Pan-Arab TV station Al Jazeera than by Russian state television. The schools' brand of moderate Islam attracts students from Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, former Soviet republics that lag far behind Russia in democracy.

To the extent that more radical Islam has any foothold at all in this province, it is in a few grimmer cities like Naberezhniye Chelny, a crumbling concrete metropolis the Soviets built around a truck factory. The busiest mosque there is run by Malik Ibragimov, a charismatic, Saudi-trained imam who admires the Taliban and scorns the practices that prevail in Tatarstan as "not real Islam."

One of Mr. Ibragimov's students was captured by Americans during our war in Afghanistan and is now imprisoned at Guantanamo. Others have joined Chechen insurgents.

The imam's moral authority would probably mushroom if Moscow really cracked down. So far, though, the police keep an eye on the imam and sometimes drop by to hassle him, but he is allowed to hold services and teach young acolytes.

	Agence France-Presse Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, joined in a national Sabantuy celebration in Kazan.

There are rumors that President Putin intends to assert Soviet-style central control over Islam through a handpicked mufti, which would almost certainly have the opposite of the intended effect. As Mr. Ibragimov says, "One of the reasons for extremism is oppression by the state."

In Tatarstan, authorities no longer give entry visas to Saudi preachers, or allow foreign money to pay for religious education unless they have approved the curriculum. In one dispute still being fought in the courts, officials refuse to let devout Muslim women submit passport photos in which they wear head scarves - a courtesy extended in many non-Muslim states, including the United States. But for now, by the standards of Communist times or, for that matter, most Arab states, Tatarstan is a zone of religious tolerance.

"We have gone from totalitarian to authoritarian," said Rafik Moukhametshin, a historian at the Islamic university. He meant the remark not as a complaint but as a progress report.