Coronavirus and the revival of extremist fundamentalism: religious and not only the results of 2021 from a layman with an Islamic background
For the second year in a row, the main result is the victorious march of the coronavirus and its mutations across Russia and around the world. He is walking quite (for him) successfully, despite the suspiciously quickly invented and actively introduced vaccines against COVID-19.
Over the past two years, the coronavirus, or rather its pandemic, has become a kind of “para-religion“, that is, a kind of doctrine addressed to a person, but implicated in an irrational beginning. The attitude of the man in the street to the invisible, but terrible and almighty coronavirus, which turns the whole life of mankind, is a cult. There is a semblance of his “iconography”, actively presented to citizens through the media, where the deadly monster appears either in the form of a bristling sea urchin, or a smaller copy of an anti-ship mine. A “creed” also appeared, implying the belief that with the help of a miraculous vaccine it is possible to attack this attack, as well as to defeat all its strains, including those that have not yet appeared. If we summarize the information-visual picture that has been shown to the average person for almost two years now, it is easy to understand that such an impact simply cannot but affect those segments of the human mind that are responsible for religious ideas and feelings.
This dualistic para-religion, professing the constant struggle of “ontological” evil (or at least adversity) in the person of the coronavirus with good, although not ontological, but effective in the person of Sputnik V, has its followers professing salvation through Sputnik ”, Or – on the contrary – who deny salvation through the vaccine and follow the Absolute Predestination in the person of the virus. History repeats itself for the fourth time: only in different countries they will hit the timpani on the occasion of nationwide immunity and a decrease in the incidence, and here – bam! – and the fourth wave.
Of course, the pandemic has dramatically affected religious life, primarily its community, social component, in which significant groups of people come into contact. In 2020, in fact, there was no hajj and pilgrimage to the main Christian shrines; in the past year, the situation has hardly changed. The martyrology of clerics who have gone to another world due to the consequences of coronavirus infection is impressive. And the principles of social distance (“do not gather more than three”) hardly fit into the practice of Christian liturgical life and prayer of Muslim jamaats.
The global “transition to a remote location”, the general crisis situation in world politics and economics, and the obvious weakness of historical confessions in the face of many problems of our time (the growth of ethno-nationalism, xenophobia, gender issues …) – all this, in our opinion, has a certain rejection of the traditional “church”, fundamental-ritual religiosity in favor of – no, not atheism – but internal religiosity, as informal as possible. Simply put, there is a conversion from religion (as a cultural phenomenon) to faith as the inner state of the soul. In addition, last year it became obvious that religion, either in Russia or in the rest of the world, is no longer a factor that really influences social and political life. If you only exclude Islam as a religion, legal system and political ideology in one bottle.
And here is the time for the author to recall his experience of Islamic studies and sum up the results of 2021 in the life of the followers of the faith of the Prophet Muhammad. Here the conclusion is quite unambiguous: the return to the forefront of public life of fundamentalism and the evolution of “moderate Islam”, according to Erdogan’s Turkey, towards pan-Turkic nationalism. There are enough facts to illustrate this: the election of a Sharia lawyer and, possibly, the future new “leader of the Islamic revolution” Ebrahim Raisi as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, parliamentary elections in Iraq, where, after the collapse of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, a parliamentary republic was created according to Western patterns, as a result of which more and more fundamentalist religious circles are coming to power …
If earlier “secular” Shiites came to power, often with Western education and experience of living in democratic countries, now power in Iraq may end up in the hands of the nationalist Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his people. Returning to Power in Afghanistan – Effortlessly! – the fundamentalist Taliban movement immediately after the withdrawal of the Western coalition troops once again confirmed the elementary truth that the termination of force support from the outside opens the main road to power for radical fundamentalists in many, first of all, “problematic” Muslim countries, as well as another the truth is that the “Islamists” have real and broad support in these societies.
The outgoing year has also shown that even a constituted and developed Muslim society is a breeding ground for hatred and religious violence. We are talking about Pakistan, which is constitutionally an “Islamic republic”. Here, in the public space, extremists of various stripes feel at ease – both Pakistani proper and the Taliban guests from neighboring Afghanistan. The result of their activities is as follows: several killed representatives of the unorthodox Muslim Ahmadi movement, violence against Shia Muslims and Christians. The outrageous case took place about a month ago in the city of Sialkot, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab. A foreign top manager, a native of Sri Lanka, removed from the wall a poster with the text of the Koranic sura, for which he was torn to pieces by a crowd of Muslim fanatics, who, after such an “auto-da-fe”, burned the victim’s body. Such was the year …
However, in Russia with Islam already “everything is calm.” Largely because Islam (more precisely, a religious administration, since there is no clergy in the usual Christian sense of this concept in Islam) actively fits into the servilistic system of the current Russian state. For example, in Tatarstan, one of the key Muslim regions of Russia, imam and teacher of the local Islamic university Gabdarakhman (Albert) Naumov received 6 years in prison for belonging to the “extremist” group “Nurcular” and studying the works of the Turkish-Kurdish theologian Said Nursi. The extremist nature of the teachings of this theologian has long been questioned by authoritative experts. By the decision of the RF Armed Forces in 2008, this movement (by the way, it is not known for certain whether it exists in the RF at all) was recognized as extremist in our country, in particular, on the grounds that it was then banned in Turkey as well. But since 2014, everything has changed in Turkey, the “Nurists” seem to be under the protection of the Turkish state, with which the Kremlin has rather warm relations …
At the end of the year in Tatarstan, several more samples of Muslim literature, which were recognized as extremist, were banned in court, and among them … – “Sahih” (collection of hadith-legends about the life of the Prophet Muhammad and his sayings) al-Bukhari. This is the most authoritative collection of hadiths, long recognized throughout the Muslim world, as the core of the “sacred tradition” of Islam. Can Christians imagine the “ban for extremism” of the writings of John Damascene, the Cappadocian Fathers, or the “History” of Eusebius of Caesarea, if they contain polemics with the bearers of other views and criticism of them, actual for their time? Unlikely. But in Russian “traditional” Islam, anything is possible.
This is happening, apparently, because recently Moscow has begun to put pressure on the remnants of Tatarstan’s sovereignty, which outwardly manifested itself, in particular, in the fact that now the heads of the regions of the Russian Federation are forbidden to be called presidents, and until recently this title was used only in Tatarstan. Apparently, in order to resolve the issue of their own self-preservation and at the same time demonstrate loyalty to Moscow, the local national nomenklatura decided to use the old method of combating “religious extremism”, which is very opportunely suited to the current authoritarian-xenophobic political atmosphere in Russia.
That’s how everything is with us somehow … Coronavirus. And if the situation with the pandemic does not change next year, then summing up the results of life (including religious life) will be less and less different from year to year. Because the time is now. And peace.
Valery Emelyanov, IAC “Time and World”,
for the Portal “Credo.Rress”
