THE MUSLIM EAST AND RADICALIZATION OF ISLAM IN THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS

Amirkhan MAGOMEDDADAEV

---

Amirkhan Magomeddadaev, Ph.D. (Hist.), head, Department of Oriental Studies, Scientific Center of Daghestan, Russian Academy of Sciences (Makhachkala, RF)

---

In the 1990s, extremist terrorist organizations and movements operating under religious and ethnic slogans and trying to impose their own ideological and moral principles on others became very active in the Northern Caucasus. Their radicalism and extremism stemmed from trends and organizations that tried, like ultra-left revolutionaries, to monopolize the right to speak for the people and express their interests and hopes. They distorted the Koran and the Sunna in an attempt to adjust them to their purely political aims.

For this reason it is hardly correct to use “Islamic terrorism” and the “Islamic threat” to describe extremist movements and groups acting in the Muslim world. All of them are out to change the social and political life of the Muslim countries according to the principles of “pure,” original Islam, which means that they are, in fact, apologists of the ideology known as Islamism.

M. Roshchin, Ph.D. (Hist.), who is well known as an expert in Daghestan, has pointed out that the first seat of Islamic fundamentalism in the Northern Caucasus appeared in Daghestan, from where it gradually spread across the region. By the mid-1990s, the republic had already become the ideological center of fundamentalism, while Chechnia promptly developed into its proving ground.

In 1989-1995, these structures were living on huge amounts of money from abroad, yet foreign influence was obvious even earlier. In the latter half of the 1980s, the founder and leader of……………………..

---

Please fill subscription form to obtain full text of this jounal