In most back
yards, you can find farm animals: cattle, sheep, horses, chickens and
geese. You can’t survive in the countryside without a smallholding — all
the workshops and small factories of the Soviet era are long gone.

The Islamic renaissance

Young
Russians move to the cities in search of work and a better life. The
Tatars stay and start families, trying to live by traditional Sharia
rules. Instead of going out and drinking, they go to the mosque five
times a day, learn Arabic and study the Quran.

“I had a friend
who was a combine operator,” says Valery Konstantinov, the former
district council chief who is showing me round. “He was a typical bloke —
he drank, ran after girls, occasionally ended up in a ditch. And then
he suddenly announced he was a Muslim. He grew a beard, started wearing a
skullcap, stopped drinking wine and eating pork. Now he’s one of the
faithful and I’m an infidel. He doesn’t even look at me when he walks
past me in the street, and who knows what he’ll do next!”

Kul Sharif Mosque, Kazan. CC Sergey Yeliseev / Flickr.

  “Did you ever think about adopting Islam?” I ask him. “You’re a Tatar, after all.”
 “We converted to Christianity back in the days of Ivan the Terrible,” Valery declares proudly. “We are Orthodox!”

Valery’s faith is more like the
healthy scepticism of the peasant with his feet on the ground — his own
ground.
Valery’s old friend, businessman Nurgayan Nizamutdinov,
is cut from the same cloth. 
Not long ago Nurgayan was still a member of
the Soviet Communist Party, though admittedly not out of choice…

“They
locked me in the District Committee headquarters and said: ‘Fill in the
application!’ 
‘I’m not ready to join, comrades,’ I said. ‘I’m not yet
worthy.’ Then my wife runs in: ‘Get out and feed the sheep! One of them
has lambed, and you’re sitting here! 
Sign the thing, for heaven’s sake!’
So I signed.”
“But have you always believed in Allah?” I ask.
“In
my heart, yes, but it wasn’t something you could talk about. Our family
came to Malmyzh at the beginning of the last century, fleeing from
persecution. 
In those days there was discrimination against the mullahs
and anyone who believed in Allah, so people fled. 
But we’re still here.”
“What’s life like for Tatars now?” I ask Nizamutdinov.
“Life is good if you have work; but if you don’t, then it’s not. You just need to work!” he says.
“I
drove through both Tatar and ethnic Russian villages to get here,” I
tell him, “and there’s a huge difference between them. The Tatar
villages are all spick and span, but most of the Russian ones are
unkempt, with houses leaning this way or that. What do you think that’s
about: is it religion or just good old Russian laziness?”
“I don’t
know what it’s about. I just know that Tatars are up at the crack of
dawn and at work by six o’clock, and only stop when it gets dark. 
Your
Russian, on the other hand, sleeps until lunchtime, eats, takes a
smoking break and then it’s time for a drink!”
“But are Tatars allowed to drink?” I ask.
“Drinking
is a sin whether you’re a Russian, a Tatar or a Jew. But we still have
the odd drink! Civilisation has arrived here; a new drinks chain has
just opened a shop and you can buy vodka there, which is very tempting!”

“And can a Tatar take a second wife?”
“It’s allowed under
Islam, but the only polygamist here is an ethnic Russian. He has two
wives: the older one is a Tatar, the younger a Russian. He built a
separate house for each of them, but they share a courtyard. They both
work, and bring up the children together. But I have no idea what
religion he follows. He might be a Muslim, he might be an Orthodox
Christian — or he might be something in between.”
“How can that happen?” I ask.
“We
all live together here, our communities all intermix and we live in
harmony. We don’t have any Wahhabis or jihadists, and if any of them
turn up in our mosques we’ll throw them out straight away. We don’t need
war in Russia!”

“There have been seven generations of Islam in my family”

Today
is Friday, the Muslim holy day, and everyone has gathered in the mosque
for the special prayers. 
There are grey-haired elders in their best
green skullcaps, well-dressed men who have arrived in expensive cars and
young guys who look as though they have wandered in from an internet
café. It’s difficult to believe that they are into religion. But as soon
as the call to prayer rings out in Arabic, they all kneel and bow in
unison on the carpet in the centre of the mosque.

To my surprise,
they allow me, a female journalist obviously not dressed for the
occasion, to be present at their service. 
I sit down quietly in a
corner.
There are no other women present; they have a separate
prayer session at a different time. 
The young imam recites some verses
from the Quran. 
Ravil is a highly educated young man, who until recently
taught at Kazan’s Islamic University and speaks not only Tatar and
Russian, but Turkish, Arabic and Farsi too.

Ravil Romankulov. Image courtesy of the author.

“There
have been seven generations of Islam in my family,” Ravil tells me. “My
great grandfather was executed under Stalin, and the family moved to
Kazakhstan, where I was born. It was difficult there; there was a lot of
discrimination against Muslims. Mullahs were murdered, mosques ravaged,
holy books destroyed. 
Before the 1917 Revolution, the Tatar language
was written in Arabic script, then for a while it adopted the Latin
alphabet and eventually ended up in Cyrillic, like Russian. So what old
books had survived were very hard to read.”

On the question of
whether Muslims face discrimination today, Ravil replies: “We have no
problems now. We can worship as we like; the mosques are open; we can
educate people about Islam and can read the Quran and Hadith freely.
Make the Hajj to Mecca – no problem! There has never been such a
favourable climate for Islam in Russia for the last hundred years. 
The
only fly in the ointment is the disruption of our relations with the
Turks, who are our brothers in faith.”
“But if Russia is already an Islamic state, why do people go off and join ISIS?” I ask him.
“They
are ignorant, misled. They adopt Islam on the Internet, not in a
mosque. As the Prophet wrote in one of his Hadiths: ‘Satan does not fear
an ignorant Muslim who prays at night, but he does fear even a sleeping
scholar.’ You can have a skinhead who beats up Muslims one day and
becomes a Muslim the next, and goes off to be a jihadist.”

The
young imam smiles and introduces me to one of his parishioners, a middle
aged businessman called Rifat whose son has brought him to the mosque.

“These
days it’s the children who bring their parents to religion,” Rifat
sighs. 
“When I was young I had no interest in religion; I grew up on the
streets. We fought, acted like hooligans, worked out, tried to be cool. 
It was the 90s and I was into business. Allah – who was he? But my son
started going to mosque in his early teens, off his own bat.
“Then
after a year or two he started asking: ‘Dad, why don’t you go to
mosque? Come along with me.’ So I went with him and I really liked it.
Islam is the most benign religion. 
In Islam you’re not only forbidden to
hit anyone – you can’t even say something nasty to them! If you fall
out with someone, you need to make it up inside three days; otherwise
you’ve committed a sin!”


“How did your wife and friends react when you started living according to Sharia law?” I ask Rifat.
“My
wife is Russian. She was fine with it, and started to go to Muslim
prayers too. So now we are a Muslim family. 
It was more difficult with
friends. A lot of meetings and corporate events involve alcohol, but now
I’m a Muslim I can’t drink. I tried to explain to my friends and
colleagues that from now on we would only drink tea, and in the end they
understood what I was about.”

“European values are not for Muslim nations”

I
am introduced to another Muslim convert, a woman called Nurfia, who
adopted Islam at the age of 45. 
Nurfia previously worked as a livestock
technician, a secretary and an insurance agent, and had no interest in
religion. And then suddenly, to the surprise of friends and family,
Nurfia converted. 
Now she always wears a hijab and a long loose dress,
prays five times a day and has recently made a hajj to Mecca.

“I
bought 20 goslings,” she tells me over tea and sweets, “reared them and
sold them for 20,000 roubles [£185]. 
I also borrowed some money from my
husband and earned some more by selling insurance to people. I don’t
know how I deserved Allah’s grace, but I was able to go to Mecca. 
It is
such a holy place, so extraordinary! I was in tears the whole time
there! We slept in a tent in the desert, and people brought us blankets
and lamb and oranges to eat.”
“Nurfia, have you had any problems since you converted?”
“A
few. Even my family kept telling me how beautiful I was with my curly
hair, and there I was hiding it under a hijab. Wasn’t it too hot? But I
don’t find it hot, and I don’t have headaches any more.”

Nurgia
looks disapprovingly at my uncovered hair, which is not only short but
also dyed. 
I feel uncomfortable under her critical gaze.

“Tell me,” I ask, “is it true that under Islam women who commit adultery are stoned to death?”
“Yes,
that’s true. Adultery is a terrible sin and can only be cleansed by
death. But the adultery has to be proven; there have to be witnesses, so
it’s difficult to verify.”
“And what if a man commits adultery?”

Malmyzh’s newly-built mosque. Image courtesy of the author.

“That’s
bad as well, but not as sinful as for a woman, because the man can
marry the woman he has seduced. 
He can take her as his second or third
wife – but only if his first wife agrees and he can provide for all his
wives. 
Because a Muslim woman shouldn’t work to earn money, only for her
own satisfaction, if she wants to. The husband should support the whole
family, both wives and children. 
He doesn’t even have the right to ask
his wife how much money she earns; it’s a gift from Allah. But a man
mustn’t ask for a hand-out.”

“What about divorce – what can a Muslim woman expect? And can she divorce her husband?”
“In
Islamic countries, a woman can apply to a Sharia court and explain why
she wants a divorce, but there has to be a very serious reason for it —
if her husband is infertile, for example, or if he refuses to support
his family or beats or insults his Muslim wife. Under Sharia law, a
husband can’t beat his wife — even raising his voice to her is already a
sin. 
If a judge rules that there is sufficient reason for divorce, he
will grant it. She then takes her dowry back, her personal belongings
and any gift she has had from her husband. 
These are her property and no
one can take them from her. But her children stay with their father and
his family. 
It makes sense, because she will have problems remarrying
if she has children, and her new husband is unlikely to love them as if
they were his own.
“So that’s how we live by Sharia Law. European
values are not for Muslim nations — they represent depravity and are a
sin before Allah.” 

An ordinary tragedy

That evening,
Valery Konstantinov, the local council chief, invites me to dinner. 
He
is pleased to see that I don’t refuse a glass of vodka. 
“I was afraid
you would convert to Islam,” he says.
I start wondering whether I
could become a Muslim. 
In terms of theology, probably I could. 
(The
idea of one God seems more simple and logical than the complex Christian
doctrine of the Trinity. It would be pleasant to pray sitting on a
beautiful carpet, rather than standing for hours in a heavy coat in a
stuffy, packed Orthodox church.) 

But I can’t see myself in a
long dress and hijab, submissive to my husband, and I don’t fancy being
stoned to death. 
On the other hand, what I find attractive in Islam is
the sincerity and readiness to suffer for one’s faith that one finds in
its adherents. 
It was the same in the Orthodox Church when it was
persecuted under the Soviet Union, but that has pretty much disappeared
since it became Russia’s official religion.
Perhaps it is
this passionate faith that attracts young people. 
On my way out of the
village, I thought about the Russian revolutionaries who threw bombs at
Tsars and governors, dreaming of world revolution and the happiness of
the working masses. History does indeed repeat itself, but alas, not as
farce — but a tragedy.