The Foreign Service Journal, April 2007

world — including becoming an observer at the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 2005, the most important international organization of Muslim states. Nevertheless, sharp cultural, ethnic and religious divi- sions within the Muslim community have limited the political influence of Russian Muslims, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Since the start of Soviet efforts at modernization in the 1920s, Russia’s Muslims have been divided between city-dwellers and vil- lagers. Urban Muslims look down on their rural cousins as uncultured and tradition-bound, while rural Muslims see urbanites as having abandoned the ways of their com- munity in favor of Russian culture. As modernization and urbanization have continued and more people have moved from the villages to urban areas, recent migrants to the cities have come to the forefront of efforts to maintain traditional cultural and religious values. These migrants are particularly likely to turn to radical Islam, especially if they encounter difficulties in adapting to city life. Ethnic divisions played an important role in the early years after the end of communism, as ethno-nationalist movements were the primary challengers to Russian rule. And ethnic identity will continue to play an impor- tant role in disagreements within Russia’s Muslim com- munity. Tensions between Bashkirs and Tatars over the status of several hundred thousand Tatars living in Bashkortostan will divide the Volga Muslims, while Balkars and Cherkess in the Caucasus will continue to agitate for the formation of their own ethnic regions, separate from the larger Kabardin and Karachai com- munities with which they are now joined. Ongoing eth- nic tensions in Dagestan among Dargins, Avars and Kumyks may become more severe now that Avars con- trol all of the region’s political institutions. There is a fur- ther division between members of these indigenous eth- nic groups and the Muslim migrants from Central Asia and Azerbaijan, who live in the larger Russian cities and work primarily as traders. The dominance of ethnic divisions over Muslim unity has been one of the main sources of grievance among F O C U S A P R I L 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 47