Today I am going to look into the topic of Orthodox and Muslim cooperation, suggest one possible approach to this issue and give a practical example were this could be done immediately and with great benefit for all the parties involved. I consider this post today as the eighth installment of my “Russia and Islam” series and I suggest that those who have not read it take a look at
In the bad old days when I used to do analysis for a living, I had a boss which always insisted that I offer him several possible outcomes. He wanted me to tell him, “either X or Y could happen, but if not, then Z is a definite possibility”. In his mind, by covering all the possible outcomes our department’s “analysis” would never be wrong, and he would ways been
This is a topic which I have been most hesitant to cover for many reasons, including the fact that my views on this topic have come to change, and that they did so not as a result of the discovery of indisputable facts, but under the combined action of much “in between the lines” readings of events, many indirect events pointing in the same direction, combined with a very strong,
Yusuf al-Qaradawi “Russia has become the first enemy of Islam and Muslims because it has stood against the Syrian people; more than 30,000 Syrians have been killed by the weapons supplied by Russia” Yusuf al-Qaradawi Reading the words of al-Qaradawi, who is arguably one of the most influential Muslim clerics on the planet whose TV show is followed by 60 million Muslims, one might wonder how anybody could ever think
The first thing to which I would like to draw your attention to is that in the title Russia and Islam, part four: “Islam” as a threat I put the word “Islam” in quotation marks. This is very important, as most of the issues I will be discussing today are not directly linked to Islam at all. However, in the minds of many Russians, these issues are linked to Islam
In the first two installments of this series on Russia and Islam we have seen that the reasons why neither the modern European civilizational model nor the traditional Orthodox faith can, at this point in time, provide a viable and positive source of ideological or spiritual inspiration for post-Soviet Russia. While in the past three hundred years the ideologically dominant philosophical and political paradigm has been the “Westernizing” one, the
Most people assume that Russia is a Christian Orthodox country and that the Russian Orthodox Church is the spiritual leader of the Russian people. This is a very superficial view and, I would even say, a fundamentally mistaken one. To explain what I mean by this, I will have to explain something absolutely crucial and yet something most fundamentally misunderstood by the vast majority of people, including many Russians. The
Today, I am beginning a series of articles on the very complex topic of Russia and Islam, a topic which is mostly overlooked in the West or, when it is mentioned at all, is often completely misunderstood. I have been researching this fascinating topic for many months already and there is so much to say about it that I have decided to write a series of installments, each one covering
