Ban on the Indigenous People's Religious Practice

In 1958-1989 the coloniser declared Chechen shrines closed, put people on trial for printing the Quran and kept believers on file. On 10 December 1958 the Moscow agency supervising religion sent its officials in the regions a circular headed thus: "On Measures to Stop Pilgrimage to So-Called 'Holy Places'"; its task: "to achieve the cessation of pilgrimage and the closure of so-called 'holy places'"^[1]. In Chechnya this circular fell upon the grave of the mother of Sheikh Kunta-Haji, founder of the largest Chechen brotherhood. The same agency's report for 1973 says: the grave "was declared 'closed' by the local authorities about fourteen years ago. However, from 1961 the religious activists began restoring it without permission… In 1970-1971 this so-called 'holy place'… was visited by over 10 thousand people… On the way the pilgrims, often with the participation of adolescents, perform the collective religious rite of 'zikr' [a joint prayer with circular movement and chanting]"^[2]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: "The performance of the 'loud' zikr [prayer aloud] of the Qadiri tariqa [brotherhood] (the order of Kunta-Haji) was suppressed with particular severity"^[3]. On 29 June 1979 the Oktyabrsky district court of Grozny tried Alaudin Bogatyrev, Salaudin Dubaev and Anatoly Yushkin; the verdict states that Bogatyrev "with the aim of engaging in a prohibited trade… was engaged in the production by printing methods, on a significant scale, of literature of religious content in the Arabic language": from 1971 to 1978 they had clandestinely printed 2,500 copies of the Quran, 600 copies of parts of it and 500 Arabic textbooks, and the court ruled "to subject" Bogatyrev "to 6 years of deprivation of liberty with confiscation of property, to be served in a strict-regime corrective labour colony", and Dubaev and Yushkin to four years each^[4]. On 5 April 1983 Moscow adopted a resolution "On Measures for the Ideological Isolation of the Reactionary Part of the Muslim Clergy"; Muzarov, the official supervising religion in the region, reported on 25 August 1983: "59 murid [religious] groups and societies have organisationally ceased their activity and the activity of more than 100 ministers of the cult [mullahs] has been neutralised… Work was carried out to put all extremist elements and fanatics on file, a map of murid [religious] organisations was drawn up"; "The number of murids [members of brotherhoods] has fallen - from 20 thousand to 9 thousand"^[5]. The Chechens did not submit: on 5 May 1989 the agency supervising religion counted 311 brotherhood groups in the republic, "uniting about 8,300 people", of which "the 'Kunta-Haji' brotherhood - 183 groups"^[6].