Russia in Global Affairs

The defeat of Islamic State is apparent. What next, then? Islamic extremism will come full circle. Having failed to preserve Islamic State, the extremists will focus on punishing their “offenders” by returning to the methods previously employed by al-Qaeda.

True, dialogue is unable to produce final solutions to global problems or achieve the triumph of world peace. But it is a mandatory condition for the coexistence of civilizations, cultures, peoples, and countries, of the West and the “Easts.”

Despite its geographical remoteness from conflicts involving radical Islamists, the Russian Far East is not completely isolated from them. Preventing the growth of extremist threats in the Russian Far East and the Asia-Pacific region as a whole requires joint efforts of all states concerned.

Islam is one of the forms of expressing social protest in Muslim regions. Religious phobias will have a negative impact on inter-ethnic conflicts. The Kremlin has little time left to update its policy towards Islam and the Russian Muslim community.

Attempts by Putin’s Russia for rapprochement with the Moslem world have not allayed mutual distrust. Both Moscow and the Moslem capitals seem to view their mutual sympathy as a showoff of unity, and as a way to confuse the West and perhaps even make it resentful, as neither party has been successful in romancing it.

Russia’s attitude to Islam and Muslims also fits into the general context of xenophobia that in the first half of the 1990s was considered to be a hangover of post-totalitarian thinking; 10 years later, however, it has turned into a core element of the public consciousness.

The relations between the Moslem community and the West are being put to a serious and, possibly, final test. The world is only now approaching a true dialog between the two civilizations. The essence of this dialog is quite specific: what can the Moslem community and Islam borrow from the West without losing its identity?

Presently, the ‘Islamic threat’ to the ruling regimes in Central Asia is nonexistent: the Islamists are not prepared to take certain risks at a time when any measures against them would not be overly criticized in the world. However, the grounds for radical Islamic protests in the region still exist. There also remains the possibility that the existing Islamic organizations will survive, while new ones could emerge.