The Restructuring of the Religious Landscape in Azerbaijan and the Stake of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

This article is a republication of a 2008 and slighly modified article published by the World Religion Watch (Political Studies Institute of Aix en Provence - France).

Even if this article is a little outdated (and does not take into account the subsequent struggle against fethulacci school for example ) it presents none-the-less a snapshot of the situation at the beginning of the 2000s and an overview of the dynamics of Islam within the Azerbaijani society. The conclusion of the article still remains relevant today regarding the domestic political evolutions in both Armenia in Azerbaijan, as well as the lack of significant progress of the Minsk Group until 2020 or the recent French Senate resolution to recognize the independence of the Nagorno-Karabakh republic this year.

Since its independence from Moscow at the beginning of the nineties, and like the other predominantly Muslim ex-soviet socialist republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, Azerbaijan has been undergoing a deep sea-change in its identity. A genuine re-examination of Islamic practices and knowledge, arriving through highly diversified transmission channels originating from abroad, has replaced the communist-era symbolic framework characterized by official soviet atheism and more-or-less moribund dialectical materialism. This process has shattered the strongly secularised character of Azerbaijani society, which since the beginning of the twentieth century, thanks to its precocious oil boom, had witnessed, in Baku in 1901, the creation of the first school for Muslim girls and that of the first modernist djadid school in Tabriz (Iranian Azerbaijan), with the publication of a satirical journal, Mollah Nasreddin, created in 1906, emblematic of the freedom of speech of the period, and very critical towards the mullahs and the prevalence of Shiism. Above all, these developments were followed on May 28 1918, by the proclamation of the first democratic republics of Azerbaijan ensuring the laicity (secularisation) of the state, which was to last until April 28,1920, after successive occupations by the Turks, the British and finally the Soviets.

Any study of the religious question in this small, sociologically complex transcaucasian country, forming a competitive market for “the economy of symbolic goods”, to adopt Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology, must take into account an extreme diversity of Islamic currents and theological and juridical positions, reflecting the effective division of the global Umma in the world today.

The Shiite religious tradition of Azerbaijan is a popular Islam, characterized by numerous pilgrimages to shrines, for instance the tombs of such saints as Mir M?vsum Aga and Bibi Heybat (or to many other sanctuaries, such as those of Rahima Xanim, Ali Ayaghi or Yeddi Gapi).

However, the country is undergoing the increasing impact of the proselytising of the Wahhabi trend, whose focus of diffusion is the Abu Bakr mosque built in 1997-98 on a Chechen initiative and financed by the millionaire Muhammad Ibn Budeya, where the preaching by imam Gamet Suleymanov, trained at the universities of Khartoum City in Sudan and of Medina in Saudi Arabia, are prized by an increasing number of believers. In 2006 an article published by Baku Today revealed the recruitment of young Azeri women to participate in suicide attacks by al-Qaeda “the worst discovery for years” according to Minister of National security, Elmar Mahmudov. In the same year, the APA agency in Daghestan reported the following remarks by Daghestani religious leader Abdul Umarov in Kizilyurt : “We are accused of Wahhabism. A lot of people want to hide this fact, but not me. We will hoist our flag on the highest peaks of the Caucasus. We have close relations with such groups in northern Azerbaijan. The coming caliphate will include the Zakatala–Balaken and the Quba–Qusar–Khachmaz districts in Azerbaijan. That is our strategy. We are the warriors of God.. Nothing can prevent us from fighting for our ideals”. Since the independence of the country, the presence of terrorist organisations such as Djeyshullah (Allah's Army), al-Qaeda (The Base) or cells of radical political and religious organisations such as Al Djihad, Gama'a al-Islamiyya ( Islamic Terror), Djami'yat al-ikhvan al Muslimin (the Society of the Muslim Brothers), Hizb -ut -tahrir al -islami (Party of the Deliverance of Islam) has been attested by Arif Yunusov, a historian and chairman of the Centre for Human Rights in Baku. When the limitation by the United States of the country’s political, economic and religious links with Shiite Iran, which has a very large Azeri minority (2/3 of all ethnic Azeris), is also taken into account, all these trends are converging towards a strengthening of Azerbaijan’s cultural links with the Sunni majority of the global Umma.

In a like manner, the implantation throughout the country of a proselyte network of Sunni fethullaci schools, a highly organised and modernist branch of the neo-sufi brotherhood nourdjou trend, whose modes of action are close to those of the “temsil” (exemplary nature), are also participating in the restructuring of the religious landscape. The adepts of this movement have undeniably become actors in the foreign religious policy of Turkey, with their Diyanet Vakfi in the ex-soviet socialist Turkish-speaking republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, as the IFEA researcher, Bayram Balci, has convincingly shown.

The modernisation of Shiism is embodied by the personality of a young, brilliant imam, Hadji Ilgar Ibrahimoglu, formerly of the Djuma Meshid mosque, which was closed in January 2004, because of his open support for the opposition. He is, in addition, an associate of the International Association for Religious Freedom, an American NGO created by the 7th Day Adventists, a coordinator of the Centre for the Defence of consciousness and religious Freedom, and has found an ally in Forum 18, a Norwegian association for the defence of the 18th article of the Declaration of Human Rights, guaranteeing religious freedom. Every year, on the occasion of the Ashura, the community organises blood donations for the child victims of thalassemia, and Ibrahimoglu, aware of the stakes of Globalisation, has taken commitments in all the current international religious debates.

The inversion of the domestic approach to the transmission of Islam, a typically modern phenomenon, which is to be found in other countries of the Muslim world, such as Algeria, the increasing number of conversions to Sunnism, often correlated with the reconsideration of the pilgrimages to shrines and of a much-criticized confusion between tradition and religion (for instance, the issue of Novruz), the return to a certain austerity in practise and a higher respect for taboos, the many departures to the Islamic universities of the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Iran or Egypt, may go in some way to explain the increasing quest, notably among Azerbaijani youth, for authenticity in the transmission of the Koran’s message and the Muslim faith. Beyond this fact, what is at stake is a constant striving for the definition of Islam, in competition with that imposed by the Administration of the Muslims of the Caucasus, directed by Sheikh ul- Islam Allahshükür Pashazade, an institution of the soviet era and often described as having become obsolete.

Between 2002 and 2006, any observer will have noted two characteristic trends. First the clear propagation of wild-cat capitalism and a certain westernisation of mores, with the rapid spread of luxury cars, the erection of high rise buildings in the place of the old popular suburbs in the centre of Baku, and the wearing of expensive sports shoes. Besides the multiplication of shops selling Islamic products, the increasing number of young girls wearing the veil and of men with long beards and the decreasing number of shops and restaurants selling vodka, are widely observed.

Even if, according to the researcher Alta? Geyushov of Baku University, “the Islam that we have today is not the traditional one of the country. It is totally new Wahhabism or new forms of Shiism”, we can say that it is the prevalence of the context of reform, in the quasi-protestant sense of the term, and the quest for the “right Islam” which characterizes, from now, the evolution of the religious question in Azerbaijan and which is at stake in all these conflicts concerning the definition of the Islamic doxa. In the image of Nariman Qasimoglu, first translator of the Koran into Azeri language and a democrat, relying on “Koranic logics” and a “literal translation” of the Koran - for whom: “ It is necessary to give preference to the Koranic text and reconsider the Sharia law which is derived from the history of Muhammad [...] Faith in God is enough. There must not be any mediation between the human being and God, that is to say no mosques, no religious leaders...” and who declares “I am not a Shiite, I am not a Sunni, not a Wahhabt. When I am asked what my sect is, I answer Koranic Islam” - all these movements lead to an original re-reading of the Koran and an updating of its message which must adapt itself to the norms and values of the society of the 21st century. This reformist theology in germ has not been fuelled by the Salafi movement, which lauds the return to a Shariat dictated by the norms of Arab society in the 7th century, to the extreme opposite of which it is situated. In the success of Wahhabism, a new cultural and national emphasis on the Arab roots of the Muslim religion must be seen, participating in this desire for reform, but which doesn't seem to have become durably rooted in a society which is looking for a universal approach, in sympathy with the modernity embodied, in people’s minds, in a fantasized Western World and the new society of consumer capitalism. The fethullacis also want to offer a clear pattern of compatibility of Islam with the capitalist system, the belief in profit and unlimited economic growth and an elitist ideology of merit.

This ongoing reform is largely inflected by the “individualisation of belief” and the freedom of interpretation of the Book. The disappearance of the mediation between God and the believers represented by the pilgrimages to holy shrines around which the traditional Islam was organised or by the hierarchy of the Shiite clergy (two elements against which the Wahhabis are fighting) is one of the characteristics just emerging from this evolution.

If a progressive collapse of the traditional Islam in Azerbaijan can be anticipated, the emergence of a reformed Islamic cult depends on the success of the process of local democratic construction, with regard to which we may remain pessimistic. The fact that the Karabakh conflict is gradually, in discourse, taking on a clearly more religious nuance than at the beginning of the 2000 decade, renders ever more indispensable its resolution, if an inexorable rise of Wahhabism on the frontline of Europe is to be avoided. This movement is fuelled by the wrath and despair of the Azeris at the amputation of 20% of their territories since the beginning of the nineties and who still have not benefited from any of the long hoped-for distribution of the wealth generated by the oil production in a country subjected to a distorted clannish political game, enabling in 2003 the succession to presidential power to still remain the hereditary possession of the Aliev family. The UN has, at last, required on Friday, March 14, 2008 “the instant, complete and unconditional pullback of all Armenian forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan” and recognized “the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan”, to which the United States, Russia and France, the three co-presidents of the Minsk group on charge of the resolution (or rather of the non-resolution) of the conflict of Nagorny Karabakh, were opposed.

The outcome of the presidential elections of October 2008 and of this conflict, about which there is (eerily?) so little debate in the French media, even appears crucial for the complex political and religious situation of this member state of the European Council and for the limiting of the risks of religious radicalism in south Caucasus.

Does France always prefer to support an occupant Christian state for its short-term electoral interests at the expense of the international law rather than really participating to the resolution of a conflict by accompanying the parties to lose a little in order to gain a lot, knowing that the conflict serves undemocratic regimes and deadly societal dynamics? Regrettably it seems that the answer remains : yes.