Political Islam in Dagestan

AS WE STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND the motives of Islamic extremism and methods for coping with it, we may find it helpful to consider the experience of Dagestan, the southernmost Russian republic that lies along the Western shore of the Caspian Sea. Dagestan is Russia’s most ethnically heterogeneous republic, with 34 ethno-linguistic groups together comprising more than 2.1 million people. The extremity of Dagestan’s ethnic diversity is matched by that of its economic deprivation; along with neighbouring Chechnya it is Russia’s poorest republic. When Islamist extremism was exported from Afghanistan in the late 1980s, Dagestan was the second place where it arrived in the former Soviet Union. Throughout the 1990s Dagestanis struggled with the extremist movement they call ‘Wahhabism’.