Geidar Dzhemal, chairman of the Russian Islamic Committee and someone whom others label a Wahhabi (see pravaya.ru/dispute/5349), said in an interview posted on Portal-Credo.ru that "the term 'Wahhabi' which is currently used by bureaucrats and militia was in fact created in the bowels of the KGB" 20 years ago.

The Soviet security agency took that step, he said, as part of its "struggle with the Islamic movement of resistance." Its officers realized that "calling a dissident a Muslim or an Islamist would be incorrect since this would cast a shadow on Islam in general. Therefore, they had to find a term equivalent to the word 'fascist.'"

Hence that epiteht passed into the political and journalist vocabulary, even though those who follow that trend which never call themselves "Wahhabis" and even though the influence of this group on Muslims within the former Soviet Union and the Russian Federation is on the wane, Dzhemal said.

Indeed, he continued, "Wahhabi" has become little more than a term of abuse officials apply to Muslims whose views they do not share and whose influence they do not like. And today it is often used to denigrate "those who speak out against corrupt officialdom, its neo-feudal methods, and also against semi-literate [Muslim] teachers."

To say this is not to argue that there are no radical elements within the Muslim community or that none of them have drawn ideas from Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia where Wahhabism was born and is state policy. Rather, Dzhemal says, it is to insist that the use of this epithet gets in the way of understanding Muslims in Russia.

According to Dzhemal, Wahhabism "as a religious trend already long ago lost its significance" in the Russian Federation, and there "the reformist movement in Islam has gone much further and is more connected with contemporary European thought than with the archaic teachings of Abd-al-Wahhab," the 18th century Arabian founder of the Wahhabi movement.

Because Russian officials use the term "Wahhabi" as a disparaging epithet and a surrogate for investigating the real motivations of Muslims in their country, he continues, they "do not understand that Muslim young people are their chief allies" in the North Caucasus.

"Those forces that come out with guns in their hands against the clan system and the corrupt bureaucrats in Kabardino-Balkaria are not coming out against Russia," Dzhemal saids. To say otherwise, as Dzhemal said most officials do, "is a total distortion of a reality about which no one wishes to speak."

"Regional officials [in the north Caucasus] up to now have been able to convince the Kremlin that they are the only obstacle standing in the way of 'Wahhabist' chaos," Dzhemal said. And consequently, Moscow continues to accept the notion that "any attack against them is a threat to the security of the state as a whole."

"This is an absolutely false picture" of the situation on the ground in the North Caucasus, but until Moscow dispenses with the use of the term 'Wahhabi' and recognizes that reality, Dzhemal said, "the processes of destabilization" in that region will only continue to intensify.

At least some people in Moscow appear to be aware of that danger. Akhmet Yarlytkhanov, a scholar at the Moscow Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, told the "Caucasian Knot" news service last week that it was his impression that officials were inventing Wahhabi-related "phantoms" to justify their actions.

And Aleksandr Torshin, the vice speaker of the Russian Council of the Federation who is overseeing the investigation of the situation in the North Caucasus, told Interfax news agency that "the specter of Wahhabism was haunting" that region and that the term must be legally defined so that it is not misapplied.

But until that happens -- or quite possibly even if it does -- the use of this spurious and demeaning term is likely to continue, often in truly absurd ways. One of the clearest examples of that comes from Daghestan where officials in that republic's Muslim Spiritual Directorate (MSD) sought to use that term to close down a bookstore.

MSD officials said on local television that a bookstore in downtown Makachkala was selling "Wahhabist" literature and should be closed down, and these same officials issued a fatwa prohibiting the sale or distribution of these books and pamphlets by that store, Islam-info.ru reported.

But it turned out, the news service said, that the MSD was more concerned with advancing its own commercial interests than in protecting the community from alien influences: Despite the fatwa against the sale of these books and pamphlets by the Sunna Book Store, the MSD continued to offer these same publications in its own shops.

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