Russia's Islamic Threat by Gordon M. Hahn (review)

Muslims probably make up a little over 10 percent of the population of the Russian Federation—a bit more than in France, and maybe a bit less than in India. In all three cases, current demographic trends imply that the percentage of Muslims will continue to increase, and in each case any realistic shortlist of the country's current policy headaches would include a Muslim problem (and by the same token, Muslims could be said to have a Russian, French, and Indian problem). But of course these problems differ in their genesis and character. One major difference relates to vulnerability to separatism. Since letting Algeria go, France has contained no Muslim-majority region that could form the basis of a Muslim state; by contrast, separatism among the Chechens and their Muslim neighbors of the northern Caucasus has been the cutting edge of Russia's Muslim problem, just as Kashmir is the most septic component of India's. Another major difference is that France and India, whatever their political imperfections, are democracies in good standing, whereas Russia, after a chaotic postcommunist experiment with democracy and federalism, has effectively returned to a pattern of repressive centralism. The combination of these differences makes Russia potentially the most explosive of the three cases. Here the key issue is whether the relatively assimilated, not to say bourgeois, Tatars and Bashkirs of the Volga region could be swept into the jihadi maelstrom that in recent years has devastated the northern Caucasus.

A generation ago, Alexandre Bennigsen dreamed that the Muslims of the Soviet Union could play a central role in bringing down the edifice of communist power. Hahn now sketches a nightmare scenario in which the Muslims might do the same to the Russian Federation. My suspicion is that he is being unduly alarmist, just as Bennigsen was being unduly optimistic. One reason is that Islamism has not shown much ability to engender political unity in Muslim populations; another is that the Muslims of Russia may themselves be willing to accept a good deal of repression if the alternatives look even worse. But the tale Hahn tells is one of such unrelieved nastiness on all sides that it is hard to imagine a happy ending. The one moment of relief is a story about a policeman in the northern Caucasus who lost both hands when he intentionally absorbed the force of an exploding grenade and thereby prevented the outbreak of civil war between the Kabardians and the Balkars.