Said Nursi Arrives in Russia

Nursi was born to a peasant family in the Kurdish regions of the Ottoman Empire in eastern Anatolia. With an extraordinary memory and sharp intellect, he excelled through various disciplines of Islamic studies in the local madrasas of this region and earned fame as a scholar already in his teen years. This fame followed him when he traveled to Istanbul at the end of 1907 and then toured the empire to support its new constitutional regime following the Young Turk Revolution in 1908. He returned to eastern Anatolia in 1912 to open a madrasa where he would teach Islamic and positive sciences together. When WWI started, however, he organized his students and other volunteers into a regiment and commanded them against the advancing Russian forces. This is when he was captured and taken to Kostroma as a prisoner of war. When the Bolsheviks seized power at the end of 1917, he took advantage of the ensuing chaos and escaped to Istanbul through eastern Europe. He was welcome as a war hero in the imperial capital and appointed a member of the empire's highest council of Islamic affairs, Dârü’l-Hikmeti'l-İslâmiye. Yet Allied forces occupied most Ottoman territories, including Istanbul, at the end of the war. An independence movement emerged in Anatolia, and upon the invitation of its leaders, Nursi moved to Ankara in 1922 to support resistance against occupation. There, however, he noticed the secularist tendencies of the rising new regime's leaders and developed a strong aversion for factional politics. Shortly before the foundation of the Turkish Republic in October 1923, he went back to his native lands in eastern Anatolia, having decided to withdraw from society altogether and settle in a mountain cave. A Kurdish rebellion in the region disrupted this plan. Even though he had not supported the rebellion, the Republican authorities, who feared Nursi's local reputation, exiled him to a distant mountain village in western Anatolia called Barla.

Nursi wrote the bulk of the Risale-i Nur in Barla, in the form of short treatises that countered the positivist worldviews of the Republic's ruling elite and of a growing cohort of secularist Muslim intellectuals across the world through a side-by-side reading of the observable universe and the Qur'an. While the content of his work was profound, his ample usage of representations and parables rendered this content accessible even to the uninitiated peasants around him. As an outcast of the new regime, he was not allowed to publish, but his peasant readers together with small townspeople in the vicinity hand-copied his works and distributed them through a slowly growing network of followers, who came to be known as “Nurcus.” Nursi faced two more exiles and several court trials as a result, but eventually, the Risale-i Nur was acquitted of all charges. When Turkey adopted a more democratic, multiparty regime in the 1950s, Nursi managed to publish his works too.Footnote ⁷ As one of the most remarkable scholarly contributions to the Sunni Islamic tradition in the twentieth century, the Risale-i Nur became the most widely-read and influential work of Islamic scholarship in Turkey.Footnote ⁸ Since the 1950s, it has preserved religiosity among millions of Turkish citizens and inspired several religious movements.Footnote ⁹

Especially from the 1980s on, Nursi's followers translated his treatises into many languages and traveled to various parts of the world to spread the Risale-i Nur. They arrived in Russia in 1990, as the Communist Party lost its grip over society. Soviet authorities in the latter decades of the communist regime had concentrated their efforts in establishing government control over religious practices with a sustained expectation that the complete elimination of religion from social life would take place in time. Especially in Central Asia, as Eren Taşar meticulously documents, the authorities created an “autonomous sphere” within the confines of registered institutional settings for Muslim religious practice and left practicing Muslims relatively free as long as they remained within this sphere. In doing so, however, they also delegitimized religious practices that remained beyond the confines of these registered institutional settings either as “superstitious,” highlighting a government prerogative to define the authenticity of religious practice, or “Wahhabi,” implying both religious deviation and political threat affiliated with Saudi Arabia's then-proselytizing Islamist regime.Footnote ¹⁰ The legacy of this categorization in the post-Soviet period was a rhetoric that prioritized registered and officially endorsed Islamic practices, or “official Islam” as it came to be known, as true to the sources of religion and fit for the national body. In the process of recovering from state atheism, the elites of the traditionally Muslim post-Soviet communities designated and embraced “official Islam” as a “traditional” characteristic of the nations or ethnic groups that they aspired to build. What constituted “official Islam” in each of these polities varied according to local context and over time, but the primacy of official control over religious practice and its association with the definition of the Islamic tradition within each Muslim community remained a constant of the Soviet legacy.Footnote ¹¹

Nevertheless, the officially registered institutions that facilitated and regulated Islamic practice among post-Soviet Muslim communities were not equipped to cope with the sudden increase in the number of believers in the immediate aftermath of the communist regime. As a result, when various Muslim groups from around the world began arriving in the historically Muslim-inhabited regions of the former Soviet Union to “reclaim” their culturally Muslim brethren, it was not difficult for them to find interested audiences. Moreover, Muslim incomers from Turkey enjoyed the advantages of not being tainted with Wahhabi affiliations, sharing the family of Turkic languages with most former Soviet Muslims, and the historical legacy of the remarkable Muslim networks that spanned across the Russian and Ottoman borders before the advent of Soviet rule. As a result, Turkish Muslim proselytizers were often welcome by the dignitaries of official Islam among post-Soviet Muslim communities.Footnote ¹² Both the Turkish state, through its Office of Religious Affairs, and civilian religious networks, such as SüleymancılarFootnote ¹³ and the followers of the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen (b. 1941), or “Gülenists,” provided religious personnel and opened various institutions of education, including secular ones—especially in the case of Gülen's followers—in the post-Soviet space.Footnote ¹⁴

Beyond these cultural and historical patterns, the overall openness of each regime and the nature of their governments’ relations with the Turkish state determined the reach of Turkish proselytizers in the primarily Muslim-inhabited post-Soviet republics.Footnote ¹⁵ In the Russian Federation, on the other hand, the minority status of several Muslim communities and the degree of their leaderships’ autonomy from Moscow complicated the situation further. A pluralist law that the federal authorities passed in 1990 introduced religious freedoms and re-legitimized religion after the Soviet experiment with state atheism. This created a relatively free atmosphere for religious activity and enabled the religious dignitaries of each Muslim community in Russia to establish direct contacts with foreign Muslim representatives. Then, toward the end of the 1990s, following a broader trend in Russian politics, Moscow began to push for a more centralized approach to religion and gradually built measures to restrict the influence of religious groups with foreign origins.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet, the leaders of official Islam among the federation's various republics responded to Moscow's demands slowly, thereby delaying the practical consequences of those restrictive policies and enabling Turkish proselytizers to continue their activities for several more years.

Nursi's followers increased their activity in the Russian Federation during the early stages of this transition from pluralist and liberal religious policies toward more assertive and centralized ones. Thanks to the closeness of the Turkish and Azeri languages, a dedicated cohort of Risale-i Nur readers had already emerged in Azerbaijan by this time under the supervision of Mustafa Sungur (1929–2012), arguably the most senior living student of Nursi at the time. Upon his encouragement, the Azerbaijani followers of Nursi began translating his works into Russian; some of them also moved to Russia along with others from Turkey. In 1997, Sungur himself traveled to Russia, met several of the federation's Muslim dignitaries, such as Gainutdin, and presented them with translations of the Risale-i Nur. The response he received was highly positive. No less than Tatarstan's charismatic president Mintimer Shaymiyev would kiss the book that Sungur presented to him and touch it on his forehead as a sign of respect.Footnote ¹⁷

Nevertheless, the 1997 “Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations” passed days after Sungur's visit to Russia, signaling the end of religious pluralism and a return to the late-Soviet model of regulation and containment. This law limited legitimate religious activity to the oversight of officially-registered organizations and introduced various barriers that rendered registration by religious groups of a non-Russian origin difficult. Perhaps following tsarist precedents, the return to regulation and containment in religious policy was to a large extent the result of a defensive approach to the challenge that various Christian missionary groups posed to the Orthodox Church's assumed centrality in Russian society. The Church establishment and its allies in the administration would at times turn their attention to Islam as a challenge to this centrality too, but at least at the beginning, they were mainly concerned with warding off what they perceived as the intrusion of various foreign Christian denominations.Footnote ¹⁸

The representatives of Russia's official Muslim institutions—muftiates, or directorates, at the federal, republic, and district levels—were not interested in countering the influence of religious groups from Turkey in a similarly aggressive fashion at the beginning. In most cases, the religious models that these groups from Turkey advocated did not differ fundamentally from the traditional Islam that the Russian muftiates attempted to revive. The Turkish groups’ affiliation with the Hanafi legal school in Islamic jurisprudence and Naqshbandi Sufi origins in several cases offered a convenient and familiar alternative to the much dreaded Wahhabi intrusion. Moreover, owing to the aforementioned minority status and predominantly Turkic origins of Russia's Muslim communities, severing ties with Turkey could also be perceived as detrimental to the Russian muftiates’ relative autonomy from Moscow. Thus, in 1998, a year after the introduction of the law “On Freedom of Conscience and Religious Associations,” Gainutdin did not mind calling for Turkish support for the construction of the Kostroma Mosque while attending a conference in Istanbul organized by a foundation that supported research on the Risale-i Nur.Footnote ¹⁹

Nevertheless, this tolerant and even cooperative approach to Muslim groups from Turkey did not last through the millennium's first decade. The Russian muftiates grew organizationally over time and became more capable of regulating Muslim practice in their respective jurisdictions. As Roman Silant΄ev controversially suggests, they became more jealous of the resources to which this jurisdiction entitled them.Footnote ²⁰ As Russia returned to a highly centralized and illiberal regime under Putin's administration, however, the muftiates also lost their ability to disregard Moscow's directives and priorities. Meanwhile, the overlay of the post 9/11 global fear narrative over the country's domestic anti-Muslim prejudices created a highly xenophobic environment that ultimately forced Russian Muslim dignitaries to distance themselves from their Turkish counterparts and keep silent when the Russian courts banned the Risale-i Nur in 2007.

The Global Fear Narrative about Islam

Islamophobia, or “anti-Muslim prejudice,” was already a problem in Europe and North America, as it was in Russia, in the 1990s, but the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 exponentially magnified the problem.Footnote ²¹ The US and its allies declared a “Global War on Terror,” and the seeming necessities of this global war subjected Muslims collectively to the scrutiny of security agencies as potential threat. As Mahmood Mamdani insightfully captures in the title of a 2004 book, yes, there were “good” Muslims, but given the perceived level of risk from what came to be known as “Islamist terrorism,” each Muslim could be treated as a “bad” one until proven “good.”Footnote ²²

Public concern about this perceived threat channeled large sums of money toward the investigation of extremist or terrorist organizations that claimed to act in the name of Islam and of potential radicalization among various Muslim communities around the world. Scholars, journalists, and government experts produced copious amounts of research on the subject. In the aggregate, however, such concentrated attention to the threat factor blew actual threats out of proportion and justified the reduction of public concern about Muslims to questions of “radical Islam,” “Islamic extremism,” or “Muslim terror.” Even when only a small and marginal faction in a particular population was radicalized, supported extremism, or participated in terrorist activity, the perception of threat associated with that faction magnified its activities into the one essentially significant consideration about the entire population under scrutiny.Footnote ²³ Observers who studied otherwise meaningful issues concerning that population but did not pay significant attention to the threat factor risked being accused of having missed the perceived elephant in the room and ended up confining their research to the marginalized niche of an underfunded academic interest. Gradually, even the most diligent researchers and officials found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle in which threat justified their work and the products of their work both justified and magnified the public's sense of threat.Footnote ²⁴

Russia's Muslims in the Global Fear Narrative

The global securitization of public attention toward Islam affected global perceptions about Russia's Muslims, too. Scholars observed the country's traditionally Muslim communities as well as immigrant Muslims from elsewhere to detect, analyze, and avert various forms of threat. The cover of an otherwise conscientious book on the subject, titled Radical Islam in the Former Soviet Union, illustrates the reductive consequences of this paranoid search. A photograph ornamenting the book's cover exposes five unassuming Tajik girls wearing light-colored headscarves as they casually pose for the camera in a madrasa courtyard in Khujand, Tajikistan. The relevant section in the book does not suggest anything radical about them, but the cover design puts them right in the box of “radical Islam.”Footnote ²⁵ The seemingly unfounded association of Muslim girls wearing headscarves and radicalism may have been an inadvertent oversight, but what makes such an oversight possible in the first place is the presence of an ill-defined category of “radical Islam” that draws publicity and attention through the magnifying effect of fear.

On the other hand, a 2016 Newsweek article by Denis Sokolov, titled “Russia's Other Pipeline: Migration and Radicalization in the North Caucasus,” highlights how research spills into a discursive environment characterized by fear. Sokolov is a diligent scholar of the North Caucasus who justifiably boasts having spent “seven years in the field . . . researching transformation and migration.” Yet, he writes in his Wilson Center-sponsored opinion piece: “The events that drove—and continue to drive—these movements [transformation and migration] are poorly understood. Yet understand them we must if we are to comprehend the larger developments in that part of the world—including the growing number of fighters from this region prepared to strike within Russia and outside its borders.”Footnote ²⁶ The events Sokolov refers to include post-Soviet urbanization, ethnic conflict, state formation, corruption, return to religion, and much more. In his broader work, he examines all of them and provides correctives to critical misunderstandings about the experience of North Caucasian Muslims.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, what earns him Newsweek publicity remains the eventual interpretation of his research to provide insight about “the growing number of fighters from this region [who are] prepared to strike.”

Appropriation of the Fear Narrative in Russia

The inclusion of Russia's Muslims in the globally-circulating fear narrative about Islam after 9/11 gave Russian authorities and the broader Russian public an opportunity to justify their existing Islamophobic policies and attitudes. Muslims had long been an integral part of Russia's social fabric.Footnote ²⁸ These existing Islamophobic policies and attitudes, however, were largely the outcome of two visible developments since the disintegration of the Soviet Union: the Chechen bid for independence and the influx of labor migrants from formerly-Soviet and culturally-Muslim countries. In his memoirs of the two Chechen wars, Khassan Baiev offers a firsthand account of being Chechen in Russia outside the Caucasus in the 1980s and the early 1990s. His memories bring to life a gloomy picture of ethnic prejudice and discrimination against Muslim nationalities from the Caucasus region even before the First Chechen War in 1994.Footnote ²⁹ When this war turned into a protracted conflict in the next decade, the involvement in it of transregional militant groups claiming to act in the name of Islam and the consequent terrorist activities organized by Chechen fighters further aggravated such ethnically-defined prejudices.Footnote ³⁰ Meanwhile, at the turn of the 2000s, millions of Muslim natives of the former Soviet Union's economically-dysfunctional “southern republics,” such as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, began traveling to major Russian cities. Here, they sought livelihoods in substandard living and working conditions as illegal but systematically-tolerated migrant workers. The cultural difference, poverty, and vulnerability of such a large and visible population of Muslims further contributed to growing anti-Muslim sentiments among the broader Russian public.Footnote ³¹

The Russian authorities and public observed the post-9/11 securitization of public attention to Islam in Europe and North America with a sense of vindication. In the decade following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia had reoriented its cultural aspirations toward western Europe. Although its human rights violations in Chechnya did not trigger an effective response from the governments of the former First World, they had still stalled Russia's efforts to recast its image as a “western” country. Consequently, in the wake of 9/11, the Russian authorities and media were eager to relate al-Qaeda's attack on the US to the activities of Chechen fighters in Russia and to present Moscow's brutal suppression of Chechen separatism in the early-2000s as contributing to the “Global War on Terror.”Footnote ³²

Meanwhile, various factions in the Chechen resistance movement responded to government brutality in Chechnya by spreading their attacks to Russia's cosmopolitan cities. The resulting terror, which could now be presented as an extension of transregional “Islamist terrorism,” began blurring the line between widespread prejudice against specific Muslim ethnicities and religiously-defined anti-Muslim prejudice in the Russian Federation. Indigenous Muslims of Russia outside the Caucasus region who had better integrated into the Soviet society before its breakup, such as the Volga Tatars and Bashkirs, never experienced the same level of profiling and discrimination that their Caucasian and immigrant coreligionists did. The overlay of the post-9/11 fear narrative on Russia's existing anti-Muslim prejudices, however, shaped government policies and public opinion about Muslims more broadly from the early 2000s on, and began to hurt all Muslims in the country.Footnote ³³ Conservative representatives of the Orthodox Church and their followers in the broader Orthodox population began to view Muslim presence in Russia as a demographically growing threat to the integrity of the social fabric of what they perceived to be an Orthodox Christian society.Footnote ³⁴

Given the strategic expediency, pervasiveness, and power of the fear narrative, even Russia's official Muslim dignitaries had to adopt its language to gain recognition for their concerns on various issues and controversies. A statement by the Chief Mufti of Russia, Talgat Tadzhuddin, illustrates this situation well. In November 2016, the Central Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of the Russian Federation (TsDUM-R), which Tadzhuddin leads, cosponsored an international conference in Ufa on Islam and education. In an interview about this conference, Tadzhuddin explained that in addition to the question of Islamic education, the participants addressed “the wave of extremism and terrorism that has swept over nearly the entire world of Islam.” Then, he called for more government investment in the field of training Muslim religious personnel in Russia as a measure to avoid the “recruitment of Russian [Muslims] as terrorists,” which, he implied, is what happens when Russian Muslims learn Islam from sources that are not controlled by the Russian state. The chief mufti wanted Muslim men of religion to be trained in Russian seminaries and to preach and edify Russian Muslims in mosques supervised by Russian government agencies, that is, by his office.Footnote ³⁵

It may be unfair to suggest that Tadzhuddin remains blind to the possible benefits of providing religious education to Russia's Muslims for non-security related purposes. Nevertheless, at least while justifying government investment in such education, he confined his argument to the necessity of curtailing radicalization. In doing so, he first reduced Islam and Muslims to a potential threat to be restrained, then offered state-supervised Muslim institutions, such as religious seminaries and mosques, to restrain them. Thus, the TASS caption of the interview would pick the following quote by the chief mufti as the highlight of the interview: “In the war with terrorism, it is important to explain the true nature of Islam and faith.”Footnote ³⁶

Another example of the dependence of Russia's Muslim dignitaries on the fear narrative to steer public opinion and secure official support can be observed in a controversy about the language of mosque sermons in the Russian Republic of Tatarstan. In August 2016, the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of the Republic of Tatarstan (DUMRT) decided to require imams to give sermons exclusively in Tatar in Tatarstan. This appears to have been a nationalist move to encourage Muslim Tatars to learn and use the Tatar language by excluding the Russian language from their religious rituals. When asked about making exceptions for a few designated mosques in the republic to offer Russian-language sermons, the Mufti of the Republic of Tatarstan, Kamil Samigullin, who heads DUMRT, categorically rejected the idea and said: “This is the Republic of Tatarstan. If not in Tatar, then in what?”Footnote ³⁷

In January 2017, however, Gabdulla Galiullin, who had served as the first head of DUMRT after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and now served as a mosque imam, publicly denounced Samigullin's decision in a Friday sermon. A group of imams from the city of Kazan΄, he said, had met to discuss “the war against terrorism and extremism in Kazan΄ and in Russia.” Claiming to represent the collective opinion of these imams, he averred that giving sermons both in Tatar and in Russian would make “a huge and significant contribution to the war of Tatarstan's religious personnel with terrorism and extremism.” In the cities of Tatarstan, he explained, there were many Muslims, such as the Central Asian immigrants, who spoke Russian but not Tatar. Giving sermons only in Tatar would amount to leaving those immigrants to the uncontested influence of extremists, who tried to reach out to their audience with printed and online literature in Russian. Evoking the authority of no less than Putin, Galiullin declared: “Before us stands a task about which President V. V. Putin has said: ‘War on terror is a shared matter.’” He then ended on an intimidating note: “And whoever stands in the way of this war with terrorism and extremism, regardless of whether he is an imam, supervisor over imams, or mufti, will be an accomplice of terrorism and extremism in Russia.”Footnote ³⁸

This controversy over the language of sermons could be conceived as a disagreement over the nature of Tatar nationalism, or it can be related to a preexisting personal feud between Galiullin and Samigullin.Footnote ³⁹ Regardless of the actual motives and agendas that underlined this controversy, however, Galiullin found it expedient to frame his argument in the context of the fear narrative because this is what works in post-9/11 Russia. The fear narrative's self-confirming claims about the perils of Islam defines public opinion, silences or veils alternative approaches, resonates among the country's decision makers, and mobilizes state-controlled resources more reliably than any alternative. It is in the context of this dependence on the fear narrative that we need to understand how the dignitaries of official Islam in Russia withdrew their support for the Risale-i Nur as prosecutors built a case against it by 2007.

The Ban

Russia's gradual return to the regulation and containment model in religious policies after 1997 corresponded to a secularist military intervention in Turkey, known as the February 28 process. Turkish intelligence services actively persecuted the members of many religious groups in this period and reached out to their counterparts in other countries, including Russia, to do the same.Footnote ⁴⁰ This brought Nursi's followers under the radar of Russia's security establishment primarily as part of a concern related to the activities of Turkish Muslim religious networks, especially the followers of Gülen. Most analysts, including some representatives of official Islam, such as Valiulla Yakupov, a prominent critique of foreign influences among Russia's Muslims who was assassinated in 2012, understood that Gülenists and Nurcus were not the same. However, they were often confused in thinking of the Gülenists as yet another branch of the Nurcu network and representative of the Risale-i Nur movement broadly, due to their size and visibility.Footnote ⁴¹

That outside observers fell into this confusion is understandable until the 2010s, when the Gülenists themselves claimed Nursi's legacy and the broader Nursian community did not definitively disown them.Footnote ⁴² The movement that Gülen originated, however, needs to be distinguished from the network of readers inspired by Nursi's works. While the Nurcus focus exclusively on reading the Risale-i Nur and disseminating Nursi's teachings as expressed therein, Gülen's followers never attributed the same level of authority to the Risale-i Nur. Especially as the volume of Gülen's publications and recorded speeches increased over the years, they relegated the Risale-i Nur to a secondary position and focused primarily on disseminating Gülen's views through a centrally-regulated network of institutions, such as media organizations or high-quality lay schools that targeted elite and promising students. This departure from the centrality of the Risale-i Nur and the promotion of Gülen instead caused much consternation among the broader Nursian community starting as early as the 1970s. Only when Gülen encouraged his followers to publish a linguistically-simplified version of the Risale-i Nur, however, did senior Nurcus—who considered attempts to simplify Nursi's language to be tantamount to its distortion—jointly, publicly, and definitively disown Gülen at the beginning of the 2010s.Footnote ⁴³

In the Russian Federation, the Gülenists’ institutionalization helped authorities identify them and terminate their activities by denying them visas and confiscating their schools in the early 2000s. Nursi's followers, on the other hand, did not have institutionalized affiliations. While this did not save them from being confused with the Gülenists, it rendered their identification and elimination by the Russian authorities more difficult. Moreover, since the 1990s, many Russian Muslims had also become familiar with Nursi's works and read them as a source of spiritual guidance. As a result, prosecutors had to establish cases against Nursi's readers based on their possession and distribution of his works, which often failed until 2007. Even though the prosecutors treated translations from the Risale-i Nur as proscribed literature and harassed their readers with searches, interrogations, and protracted trials, the initial persecution of the Nurcus often remained inconclusive.Footnote ⁴⁴

The endorsement that several Russian Muslim dignitaries extended to the Risale-i Nur, both publicly and in court-solicited reports, deflected government pressure on its readers in the period before 2007. Among those dignitaries were the imams of several prominent mosques, the heads of the Muslim spiritual boards of a few republics and districts in Russia, prominent Russian Muslim intellectuals, and the rector of the Russian Islamic University, Räfyq Möhämmätshin.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 2001, for instance, the Chief Mufti Tadzhuddin “confirmed” on behalf of TsDUM-R that:

Similarly, in response to an inquiry by the association that oversaw the construction of the Kostroma mosque, Gainutdin affirmed in 2004 that Nursi's works were “apolitical.” They aimed at “inspiring spiritual values” through enlightenment and by expounding “the profound meanings of the Holy Qur'an.” Gainutdin also declared that Nursi's works contained no “elements of extremism” and lent his support to their translation into Russian, provided that the translations were submitted for inspection in advance.Footnote ⁴⁷

Nevertheless, once the justice system banned Nursi's works in 2007, the country's senior Muslim representatives could not endorse them publicly any longer. The legal pretext for this ban was provided by the “Federal Law on Counteracting Extremist (ekstremistskii) Activity” that Russian law makers passed in 2002 by borrowing the notion of “extremism” from American post-9/11 discourse on Islam.Footnote ⁴⁸ The plight of Jehovah's Witnesses is probably the best known example of the consequences of this law, as it constituted the basis for the denomination's disbandment by Russia's Supreme Court in July 2017 after years of prosecution.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet the majority of legal action pursuant to Russia's 2002 counter-extremism law and various amendments to it have targeted Muslims, starting with the proscription of fifteen Muslim organizations, including al-Qaeda and Taliban but also borderline movements such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Muslim Brothers, as “terrorist” in 2003.Footnote ⁵⁰

The prosecution of the alleged members of Hizb ut-Tahrir between 2003 and 2006 reveals some of the workings of the fear narrative underneath the overall handling of Islam-related cases by the Russian justice system after the passage of the extremism law in 2002. It also explains why the 2007 ban would render public endorsement of the Risale-i Nur by representatives of official Islam nearly impossible. Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international political organization or social movement network that aims to unite all Muslims under a reestablished caliphate and claims to be pursuing its goals through exclusively non-violent means. In its decision to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir in 2002, however, the Russian Supreme Court reasoned that the organization's objective to establish a worldwide caliphal state would require overthrowing the existing international system—and therefore the Russian state—through eventual use of violence.Footnote ⁵¹ This obviously meant the criminalization of a group based on what its objectives supposedly entailed rather than what its activities included. After receiving several complaints from individuals jailed by smaller courts because of the Supreme Court decision, Russia's Memorial Human Rights Center decided to challenge it. Since the court's decision was based on an analysis of the literature published by Hizb ut-Tahrir, they contacted Shaykh Nafigulla Ashirov, the head of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate of Asian Russia, to comment on how the average Muslim reader would receive and interpret this literature. Ashirov concluded that nothing in the specific books submitted to him for evaluation would incite Muslim readers to violence or the overthrowing of authorities. But Moscow's public prosecutor countered Memorial's move with a “legal socio-psychological expert analysis” that concluded that Ashirov's report, as published on the Memorial website, might be evaluated as propaganda material to popularize Hizb ut-Tahrir, and hence, he ordered its removal.Footnote ⁵² Since then, numerous complaints and appeals to Russian courts to revise the ban have been consistently declined on procedural grounds, including the pretext that individuals who were sentenced for being members of Hizb ut-Tahrir were not a party to the case.Footnote ⁵³

The genuineness of Hizb ut-Tahrir's claim to non-violence is an open ended question in scholarship, and weighing in on that debate is both beyond the scope of this article and irrelevant to its premise.Footnote ⁵⁴ The process that resulted in the initial Supreme Court ban and subsequent imprisonment of several alleged Hizb ut-Tahrir members by smaller courts reflects the distorting effects of the fear narrative regardless. The employment of social scientists to manage religions was a practice that late-Soviet authorities institutionalized.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Russia returned to the late-Soviet model of containment and regulation in religious policy after 1997, its courts and executive state organs began also to rely heavily on lay expertise as the ultimate authority to assess religious groups. Yet, as Dmitrii Dubrovskii suggests, the heavy reliance of courts especially on philological and psychological expert opinions to evaluate decontextualized literature in criminal trials itself builds prejudice into the Russian justice system.Footnote ⁵⁶ The prosecutors choose the experts, limit the scope of their evaluation with targeted questions, and when religious representatives offer contradicting insight, they can be disregarded easily or even be accused of complicity, as in the case of Ashirov.

The systematic prioritization of incriminating expert reports played a crucial role in enabling the 2007 ban on Nursi's works, too. The early lay reports on the Risale-i Nur actually tended to be positive or inconclusive.Footnote ⁵⁷ When Tatarstan's public prosecutor in Kazan΄, Kafil΄ Fakhrazeevich Amirov, initiated a case against Nursi's readers in 2005, he failed to establish “direct intent to incite religious hatred” as the 2002 law required, and the case was dismissed in 2006. Yet Amirov persisted. Amid highly publicized police activity against Nursi's readers that demonstrated the effects of a scare campaign, he moved the case to the Koptevo District Court in Moscow, where many of the Russian translations of Nursi's treatises had been printed. Russia's Ombudsman for Human Rights, Vladimir Lukin, tried to intervene with an analysis that concluded that Nursi's works did not violate the law. However, prosecutors were able to produce more consistently-negative expert opinions in Moscow. Thanks to these reports, Amirov secured a ban on fourteen treatises of the Risale-i Nur as “extremist literature.” An appeals court upheld this decision the following year, and since then, other courts extended the ban to the rest of the translations of Nursi's works, reaching about sixty titles by 2015.Footnote ⁵⁸

An evaluation of the expert reports that constitute the evidential basis for the court cases that began in Kazan΄ and moved to Moscow illustrates the biased nature of the legal reasoning that designated Nursi's writings as “extremist literature.” All the problems that Dubrovskii identifies with the use of philological and psychological expert opinions in criminal cases are identifiable in the way that these reports were obtained and used. The prosecutors framed the experts’ analyses with questions that referred to particular laws and required the experts to scan the texts under examination for decontextualized statements or phrases that could be interpreted as violating the cited laws.Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet, even as the quality and accuracy of such analyses remain tenuous, the academic titles of their authors put authority behind their conclusions. And importantly, once the reports were presented to the courts, judges considered their conclusions in a discursive environment that associated all Islamic religious influences beyond the boundaries of official or traditional Islam with radicalism.Footnote ⁶⁰

Having originated in Turkey, the Risale-i Nur and its readers could not be a part of “traditional Islam” in Russia. Yet any informed student of Turkish Islam and the Nurcu movement within it would grant the absurdity of associating the Risale-i Nur with extremism. Nursi's followers consider safeguarding public peace and security as well as the avoidance of involvement in politics and government administration among the central tenets of his teachings, alongside more fundamental concepts such as monotheism, divine judgment, and an emphasis on following the prophetic model.Footnote ⁶¹ This is why even though secularist Turkish authorities had prosecuted Nursi's works and followers in upwards of a thousand court trials until the 1990s, with the exception of two minor and politically-charged cases, none of these trials had resulted in a noteworthy conviction.Footnote ⁶² Nevertheless, in the context of the appropriation of the post-9/11 fear narrative in Russia, Muslim groups with non-Russian origins such as Nursi's followers were a priori framed as radical or extremist and bore the nearly impossible burden of proving their innocence.

For those familiar with Turkish politics, the activities of Gülen's followers, including the involvement of some among them in an aborted coup in July 2016, may appear to contradict the above observation about the apolitical and benign nature of the Nursian community. This is why it needs to be highlighted that although the Risale-i Nur influenced Gülen, he and his followers parted ways with the broader Nursian community over time, and this departure led to their eventual denunciation by the Nurcu network already in the early 2010s. Therefore, the Nursian community attributes many of the initiatives and activities of Gülen's followers, including their involvement in government affairs and the 2016 coup attempt, not to Nursi but to an egregious breach of Nursi's teachings. The Turkish government also acknowledged this distinction between the followers of Gülen and Nursi when the Turkish Office of Religious Affairs printed Nursi's works in 2014 while simultaneously prohibiting Gülen-related publishers from doing so.Footnote ⁶³

Thus, as in several other cases in which the Russian courts have proclaimed certain texts as “extremist literature,” such as a popular Qur'an translation by Elmir Kuliyev or the official international website of Jehovah's Witnesses, the attribution of criminal extremism to Nursi's treatises tests the boundaries of reason and common sense.Footnote ⁶⁴ Beside the above-mentioned structural problems related to the initiation and framing of expert reports by prosecutors, such disconnect with reality often results from the inability of lay court experts to understand the context or even the content of the texts they evaluate.Footnote ⁶⁵ One of the early expert reports on Nursi's works, a linguistic evaluation commissioned by Amirov in 2005, illustrates how experts are selected without regard to even an elementary understanding of the context. Among the tasks of this report's author was a comparative analysis of fifteen of Nursi's treatises and the Qur'an, for which the reporter used a Russian-language translation of the Qur'an. In other words, a linguist who was unfamiliar with the context of Nursi's works or Islam more broadly and who had to rely on a translation of the Qur'an to access its content was commissioned to assess the compatibility of Nursi's works with the Qur'an. She concluded within one month that Nursi's treatises violated the law by claiming to expound on the meanings of the Qur'an, among other reasons. In this linguistic expert's opinion, Nursi's claim amounted to asking his readers to consult the Risale-i Nur instead of the Qur'an in order to attain “‘true’ faith.”Footnote ⁶⁶

On the other hand, a psychological evaluation commissioned again by Amirov in 2005 demonstrates the consequences of the author's inability to understand the content. The author, an assistant professor of applied psychology with no expertise in Islam, read through twelve treatises and concluded that nine of them violated the law by “deploying” stratagems to “influence personality” and by promoting the notion of an “absolute truth,” which, according to the author, reduced individuals’ “ability to think critically and perceive reality adequately.” She found Nursi faulty for aiming to convince his readers that his “religious doctrine. . .[was] not an abstract theory used to provide an interpretation of reality but the reality itself.” Such certitude, according to her psychological evaluation, might “cause exclusiveness and intra-group interdependence,” build “negative attitudes to all other common social, cultural, and religious norms and perceptions,” and lead to “isolation from reality, thereby contributing to the formation of behavioral deviations (deviations from the norm).” In other words, the author took the presence and objectivity of a scientifically accessible reality and certain socially-acceptable norms for granted. Then, she argued that because Nursi's “religious doctrine” deviated from that reality and those norms, his claim to “absolute truth” must be false, pushing his readers into isolation from reality and a pathological mental state. The subjectivity of such arguments aside, the author did not even understand Nursi's narrative, at one point confusing his criticism of positivist naturalism with claims about “the entire material world [being] an illusion” and the non-existence of “all thoughts, desires and actions that are not prescribed by the Qur'an and the Risale-i Nur.”Footnote ⁶⁷ A position about the illusionary nature of the material world has a place in the history of Islamic thought, but the irony here is that Nursi actually refutes that position in his writings.Footnote ⁶⁸

These two early examples represent the tone of many of the subsequent expert opinions, including the one that led to the eventual ban on Nursi's works in 2007. The authors of this eventual evaluation, four specialists of psychology and linguistics from the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Sciences, call their report a “Scientific Examination.” Using the language of the 2002 law, they conclude that the thirteen works they studied foment “religious discord,” “negative attitudes toward individuals,” and “the senses of superiority and inferiority of citizens based on their religious convictions.”Footnote ⁶⁹

To be clear, the courts received positive evaluations of Nursi's works too, but as a meta-evaluation of twenty-one expert reports from the 2005 Kazan΄ trials demonstrate, such positive assessments were gradually eliminated as prosecutors aggregated them on the way to a verdict. The authors of this meta-evaluation, two Moscow-based academics working in the field of psychology, dismiss the four opinions written by Muslim experts outright as biased and/or one-sided. They deem some of the other positive reports impartial but still dismiss all of them either as one-sided or for reaching positive conclusions by contextualizing the texts. They criticize some of the negative reports too, but either for blatantly partial language or for failing to connect their conclusions to their analyses sufficiently. The opinions that receive the authors’ relatively unqualified approval are the ones that reach a negative conclusion with an effort to expose the “hidden messages of the text” and without any attention to context.Footnote ⁷⁰

Several English-language studies in the past two decades have argued that the Russian traditions of studying the “peoples of the East” have avoided the flaws of Saidian Orientalism. The underlying rationale in highlighting these exceptions to Edward Said's paradigm seems to be an insistence on the self-consciously benign nature of the Russian scholarship on the “peoples of the East” due to Russia's own ambiguous place between Europe and the east.Footnote ⁷¹ What this argument misses is that the very secular authority to speak about Islam that tsarist and Soviet scholars have accumulated over a century is what enables lay experts to claim to study and understand Muslims objectively today.Footnote ⁷² In addition to the further institutionalization of this secular authority in the late-Soviet practice of relying on social scientists to regulate and contain religions, the weight of expert reports in the Russian justice system needs to be understood against the background of the legacy of Soviet anti-religious propaganda that broadly presented religion as irrational and institutionalized the use of psychiatry to suppress dissent.Footnote ⁷³ The combined effect of these historical factors offer immunity from allegations of prejudice to court experts and, by extension, to the courts that rely on their opinions in modern Russia. Yet the experts, who often lack even preliminary knowledge of Islam, write their reports by responding to prosecutorial inquiries that demand them to merely pick sides in the Russianized version of a global anti-Muslim fear narrative where each Muslim is boxed in a “good Muslim, bad Muslim” binary. On this discursive plane, “bad” or its variations such as “radical” and “extremist” stand for “danger.” It raises a powerful alert about security threats supposedly coming from Islam and Muslims. The clamor of that alert silences positive expert evaluations or, importantly, the voices of Muslim representatives.

In the Microcosm of Kostroma

It was the effects of this clamor that made the opening of the Kostroma Memorial Mosque such an awkward moment. The Muslims of Kostroma had approached Gainutdin to build a mosque in their city as early as in 1988 and registered as the “Muslim Religious Association of Kostroma (MRA)” in 1992.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1995, during the Russian Federation's initial period of religious pluralism, the Kostroma city administration gave the MRA the deserted clubhouse of a factory to use as a place of worship.Footnote ⁷⁵ The community did not have the financial means to build a new mosque yet, but that changed with the involvement of Turkish donors after Gainutdin's call in 1998. In the following year, the famous Turkish architect Necip Dinç designed a mosque project inspired by the Prophetic Mosque in Medina and with various symbolic details reflecting Nursi's life. While the MRA was originally promised ten thousand square meters of land for this purpose, by the time Dinç drew his blueprints and ordered a model to be built, the allotment was reduced to four thousand square meters. Still, with support from then mayor of Kostroma Boris Korobov, the MRA began construction in 2003.Footnote ⁷⁶

The construction work immediately led to an outcry among conservative Orthodox Kostroma residents who viewed the looming image of a large Muslim edifice with towering minarets as an affront to what they claimed to be an “Orthodox Christian city.” In a petition to the regional authorities, they even suggested that the mosque initiative was “a step toward the aggressive intrusion of Wahhabites from the Caucasus.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The MRA took several measures to dodge such negative attention and avert allegations of radicalism due to foreign, that is Turkish, support. Instead of naming the mosque after Nursi, they came up with the name “The Memorial Mosque” to highlight the centuries-long Muslim presence in the city. They engaged local architects to design a façade that would look more authentic in Russia. They lowered the height of their minarets below the lowest church bell tower in Kostroma. Finally, when asked about finances, they mentioned the Turkish businessmen in the city as just one of many funders.Footnote ⁷⁸

Yet the pressure continued. It was rumored that a massive administrative building erected right in front of the future mosque site was meant to screen it from the main road. When Korobov's successor, Viktor Andreevich Shershunov, who was highly supportive of the MRA, died in a traffic accident in 2007, the city administration turned completely against the mosque and stopped construction in 2009. This led to various litigations between the MRA and the city administration. Partly thanks to Gainutdin's personal intervention, the MRA was eventually able to secure a court order and restart construction in 2013. But the city administration intervened again in 2014 by not extending the construction permit and then repeatedly fining MRA for building without a permit. By mid-2015, the MRA had accumulated over a hundred thousand rubles of fines, and moreover, its resources had dwindled as relations between Russia and Turkey soured due to the two countries’ opposing positions in the Syrian conflict. The Kostroma authorities avoided open confrontation with the MRA in this period but stalled its work with various procedural obstacles. They even tried to take the mosque site back from the MRA through litigation, but when this failed, they focused on delaying the completion of the construction indefinitely.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet, Gainutdin's persistent interventions and another court order in 2015 enabled the MRA to finish the mosque in one final push and open it for service by the end of 2016.Footnote ⁸⁰

Meanwhile, relations between Turkey and Russia improved again as American engagement with Kurdish forces in northern Syria pressed Turkey to seek new allies despite its ongoing cooperation with the US in the region. It seems that Gainutdin wanted to take advantage of this rapprochement to secure a more legitimate presence for the Kostroma Memorial Mosque by organizing a highly-attended and publicized opening ceremony. Thus, he invited Görmez to Kostroma in May 2017, immediately after Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met in Sochi to fix their relations and seek ways to cooperate in Syria.Footnote ⁸¹

Yet, in this diplomatic maneuver, Gainutdin seems to have disregarded the significance of Nursi for the Turkish side of the Kostroma mosque project. Görmez, on the other hand, would not do the same: he was aware of the support that the Nursian community had given to this project. He personally appreciated Nursi as a scholar of Islam. The Turkish government wanted also to maintain good relations with Nurcus as it clamped down on the Gülenists after the 2016 coup attempt. Thus, Görmez carefully evoked Nursi's name in the Friday sermon that he delivered in Kostroma, and Gainutdin did the same, albeit in passing, in his official statement about the opening ceremony. Nevertheless, the name of the mosque in Kostroma remained the “Kostroma Memorial Mosque” to the disappointment of the Nursian community,Footnote ⁸² and the Russian courts continued to sentence Nursi's readers for possessing the banned Russian-language translations of his works.Footnote ⁸³ The post-9/11 global fear narrative about Islam as appropriated in Russia's public discourse and judicial system was by now too entrenched to be overcome by one diplomatic gesture.

The conspicuous eradication of Nursi's legacy from the Kostroma Memorial Mosque reflects the broader transformations concerning Islam and Muslims in Russian politics and society since the 1990s. Religious pluralism characterized Russian politics in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism and facilitated the revival of religions, including Islam. Local Muslims in Kostroma conceived the idea of a large congregational mosque and Nursi's followers travelled to the city in search of the legacy of their esteemed teacher in this period. Yet the genuine celebration of pluralism did not last long. Concerns about challenges to the perceived centrality of Orthodoxy in Russian society and the centralization of political power under Putin gradually brought back the late-Soviet model of regulation and containment in managing religions. The overlay of the conveniently-appropriated post-9/11 fear narrative on homegrown anti-Muslim prejudices further aggravated the effects of this more restrictive model upon Muslim experiences in Russia.

Such restrictions did not amount to the overt repression and condemnation of religions as was the case in the Soviet Union, but the difference here was in the degree to which the regulation and containment model was implemented, not in the model itself. The Russian Federation accorded a much larger space to religion than the former Soviet Union, but it still maintained the prerogative to define and regulate the boundaries of that contained space. Moreover, in the case of Islam, it policed those boundaries with augmented severity. This severity was a product of anti-Muslim prejudice and in turn justified it, too. Initially, anti-Muslim prejudice evolved locally in the Russian Federation, but the appropriation of the broader post-9/11 fear narrative about Islam aggravated its consequences. The delays in the construction of the Kostroma Memorial Mosque was one such consequence. The ban on Nursi's works as well as the persecution of his readers remains another.