AINA GAMZATOVA: THE MUSLIM WOMAN CHALLENGING PUTIN IN THE MARCH 2018 ELECTION
 |
| Aina Gamzatova says her candidacy should not be viewed as 'an attempt of Muslims to create a competitor' to Putin [Courtesy of Gamzatova's website] |
Moscow, Russia - Aina Gamzatova, a 46-year-old woman from Dagestan, has
made it official. She wants to run against Russian President Vladimir Putin in
the March 2018 election.
Hundreds of her supporters gathered around her to celebrate in
Makhachkala, Dagestan's capital, on Saturday, two days after she confirmed her
bid in a Facebook post.
Gamzatova heads Russia's largest Muslim media holding - Islam.ru -
comprising television, radio and print outlets, writes books on Islam, and runs
a charity.
Her husband, Akhmad Abdulaev, is the Mufti of Dagestan, Russia's
troubled province where a confrontation between fighters, clans and federal
forces has killed thousands.
She belongs to a Sufi order that has tens of thousands of followers and
whose leader, Said-Afandi Chirkavi, was killed by a female suicide bomber in
the Caucasus in 2012.
Muslim leader Said Muhammad Abubakarov, Gamzatova's first husband, was
blown up in his car back in 1998. His killers have never been found, but he
publicly lambasted "Wahabbis" - a term Gamzatova often uses to
describe the fighters she wants to get tough on.
They are "duplicitous" and "blood-thirsty", she has
said in books and speeches, despite death threats and the killings of other
Sufi-affiliated figures in Dagestan.
Gamzatova's candidacy has become a hot topic among Russia's Muslim
community.
 |
While some say she should not step outside her husband's shadow, others
applaud her determination.
"What about the moral teachings that a woman can't even leave her
house without her husband?" Patimat Ibragimova, an observant Muslim mother
of two from Dagestan's Makhachkala, told Al Jazeera. "Or she can, and the
law is for us, mere mortals?"
Aisha Anastasiya Korchagina, an ethnic Russian convert to Islam who
works as a psychologist in Moscow, said: "She was brave enough to use her
legal right, that is granted to every Russian national, to run for president,
she is brave enough to run a decent election campaign."
Some see her campaign - irrespective of its results - as a way to boost
the image of Muslim women in Russia and to attract attention to the needs of
impoverished, overpopulated and multi-ethnic Dagestan.
"Even if she loses, people will know that a girl in a hijab [a headscarf
worn by many Muslim women who feel it is part of their religion] is not just a
mother or a woman, but is also an educated, wise and respected woman,"
former Olympic champion in boxing and Dagestan's deputy sports minister
Gaidarbek Gaidarbekov wrote on Instagram.
NOT WINNING, BUT TAKING PART
It is something of a given that Gamzatova has no chance of winning,
even if every one of Russia's 20 million Muslims votes for her in a country of
more than 140 million people.
"Of course, she won't become president, it's stupid to even
discuss it," wrote Zakir Magomedov, a popular blogger from Dagestan.
But, she may receive a high number of votes in Dagestan and the
Northern Caucasus - something that will ruin Putin's image in the
unemployment-addled region that heavily depends on federal subsidies and where
– according to election monitors - officials routinely resort to vote rigging
and coercion of voters.
"She will definitely get a majority vote - and Putin won't get his
traditional 146 percent from the republic," Magomedov wrote, referring to
a joke among Kremlin critics about the percentage of Putin's loyalists.
Another expert said that Gamzatova's candidacy diversifies the pool of
mostly male presidential candidates.
"This is an exclusively PR step of a rather small scale" in
Russia's political landscape, Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, a Northern Caucasus
expert and director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Centre, a
Moscow-based think-tank, told Al Jazeera. "The more different candidates,
especially women, the better, and she is a Muslim woman, why not?"
Gamzatova, who did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for interview,
is by far the most surprising hopeful in the presidential race among a string
of nominal rivals and a couple of opposition figures whose ratings trail far
behind Putin's.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
So far, Gamzatova's statements are limited to catchy but unsubstantial
declarations.
"There is a good phrase, 'A house divided cannot stand'," she
wrote on Facebook Wednesday. "Our country, Russia, is our home, and if we
divide ourselves into Muslims and Christians, Caucasus natives and Russians,
our country's government will not exist."
[My candidacy] should not be seen within a clerical context or an attempt of Muslims to create a competitor to Vladimir Putin ... It is a desire to publicly announce and support on the federal level a harsh anti-Wahhabism stance.
AINA GAMZATOVA, PRESIDENTIAL
HOPEFUL.
But one part of her election campaign is loud and clear: she wants the
Kremlin to get tougher on fighters who want to establish a separate state in
the Northern Caucasus under Islamic law.
Her candidacy "should not be seen within a clerical context or an
attempt of Muslims to create a competitor to Vladimir Putin", she wrote in
a piece published on Friday on Islam.ru. "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."
The rise of armed groups in Russia dates back to the early 1990s, when
hundreds of fighters from the Muslim world joined separatists in neighbouring
Chechnya.
Many were Saudis, and their doctrine outlawed Sufis as
"polytheists" who venerate "saints" and holy sites.
Sufism has deep roots in the Northern Caucasus, where it helped
alleviate inter-ethnic tensions and cement resistance to czarist armies and
Communist-era efforts to uproot Islam.
The fighters alienated some Sufi separatists in Chechnya who preferred
an alliance with the Kremlin. One of them was Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's
current pro-Kremlin strongman.
In Dagestan, the fighters started Europe's "most violent
conflict" before the 2014 hostilities in Eastern Ukraine, the
International Crisis Group think-tank said. In 2012, the conflict killed at
least 700 people and wounded another 525, it said.
Security forces fuel violence with abductions, torture and
extrajudicial killings of people merely suspected of membership in
"radical" groups, Human Rights Watch has said. Even if a man is
blacklisted by mistake, threats, constant interrogations and beatings in
detention force him to join the fighters, according to the rights group.
Since 2013, North Caucasus fighters started pledging allegiance to the
Islamic State and other groups in Syria and Iraq, and flocked there in droves.
However, Gamzatova believes the problem is far from solved, despite
attempts by regional authorities to start a dialogue with fighters.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA
No comments