Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is getting a run for his money as mammoth crowd of supporters gather in Makhachkala, Dagestan, to celebrate Aina Gamzatova’s confirmation to run for Presidency come March 2018.
Gamzatova, 46, confirmed her Presidential ambition via her Facebook page. She is a writer of Islamic books, heads the country’s largest Muslim media holding ‘Islam.ru’ which comprises of television, radio and print outlets, and also runs a charity.
She is married to Akhmad Abdulaev, the Mufti of Dagestan, Russia’s troubled province, with confrontation between fighters, clans and government forces killing thousands.
Gamzatova, a member of a Sufi order with thousands of followers, led by Said-Afandi Chirkavi, lost her first husband, Said Muhammad Abubakarov, in a car blast in 1998.
Her candidacy is viewed by some as altering the monopoly of male dominance in presidential candidacy.
“This is an exclusively PR step of a rather small scale. The more different candidates, especially women, the better, and she is a Muslim woman, why not?”, said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, a Northern Caucasus expert and Director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Centre, a Moscow-based think-tank.
Gamzatova vows to deal with Wahabbist, referring to some of them as “duplicitous” and “bloodthirsty”, despite threats and killings of prominent figures with links to Sufism.
“It is a desire to publicly announce and support on the federal level a harsh anti-Wahhabism stance that both local authorities and some federal officials responsible for the region have tried to silence in recent years”.
A popular blogger from Dagestan wrote;
“Of course, she won’t become President, it’s stupid to even discuss it. She will definitely get a majority vote – and Putin won’t get his traditional 146 percent from the republic”, referring to a joke among Kremlin critics about the percentage of Putin’s loyalists.
Former Olympic champion in boxing and Dagestan’s Deputy Sports Minister, Gaidarbek Gaidarbekov, wrote on Instagram; “Even if she loses, people will know that a girl in a hijab is not just a mother or a woman, but is also an educated, wise and respected woman”.
The myths of Wahabbism
Wahhabism is a “movement” named after an eighteenth-century Islamic scholar, preacher and activist, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). He started a reform movement in the remote, sparsely populated region of Najd, advocating a purging of such widespread idolatry practices as the veneration of saints and the visiting of their tombs and shrines, all of which were practised all over the Islamic world in contravention of Islam itself.
He emphasised the principle of tawhid (the “uniqueness” and “unity” of Allah), using the Qur’an and Sunnah, which are the basic sources of Islam. Abdulwahab was influenced by great Islamic scholars like Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855) and Ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), both belonging to the Hanbali madhab (school of thought).
A unique feature of the Hanbali school of thought is its insistent on deriving rulings strictly from the sources of Islam. In cases where there is no clear answer in sacred texts of Islam, the Hanbali school does not accept jurist discretion or customs of a community as a sound basis to derive Islamic law.
While Ibn Wahhab thought obedience to leadership and placed the fighting against oppression (Jihad) strictly on the condition of a leader’s order, it is known and documented fact that rebel groups that have arisen among Muslims make the Muslim leaders their first target.
In the same light, extreme actions by rebel groups are often justified by political explanations. A method far away from pristine Islam and what Ibn Wahhab taught.
Russia is a multi-ethnic and multi-faith nation. Orthodox Christianity is Russia’s largest religion with 75% of the population, while Islam is professed by 5% of the population. Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism and Buddhism are professed by 1% of the population each.
