On December 16, the next stage of the confrontation between two structures controlled by the aggressor began on the occupied peninsula: the so-called “Tavricheskiy Muftiate” and the “Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Crimea”, where Emirali Ablaev, who has firmly taken his place in the “place in the sun” for himself and his numerous relatives in Sergei Aksyonov’s group, was declared the mufti.
Let us recall that Ablaev’s competitors from the “Tavricheskiy Muftiate”, declared in 2014 as the most loyal structure to the occupiers, headed by mufti Ruslan Saitvaliev, have been losing this confrontation for many years, having lost “leverage” in the “federal” Muslim structures and accused both by the “Spiritual Administration” from Ablaev and by the occupiers’ punishers of having ties to Habashism.
Paradoxically, the traditional attitude of the Habashites is to reject Wahhabism and publicly speak out against Hizb ut-Tahrir, which the Kremlin has declared to be an “extremist and terrorist structure.”
It is noteworthy that the “Tavricheskiy Muftiyat” has traditionally “exposed” Ablaev’s group both in “hidden Wahhabism” and in some “Ukrainian past,” as well as in “flirting with Hizb ut-Tahrir.”
At the same time, Mufti Saitvaliev and his team have tried their best to distance themselves from Habashism.
However, in the current “political structure” there is clearly no place left for Satvaliyev’s people on the occupiers’ “chessboard”, especially after the recent farce with the “congress of Crimean Tatar deputies”, which announced a certain “coordination council”, which, naturally, will include people close to Ablaev.
And therefore, the occupiers clearly do not intend to tolerate any “Muslim opposition”, even a completely “loyal” one, with the current imitation of “consolidation of the ranks” of the Crimean Tatar collaborators.
And so, on December 16, in Simferopol, the aggressor’s punishers closed another religious school of the “Tavricheskiy Muftiate”, and such a “drain tank” and, apparently, the “chief religious scholar” as Alexander Talipov stated that the school allegedly belongs to a “Muslim sect with ties to foreign ideologists”, and it “lacked statutory documents and official educational materials”.
On December 17, on this occasion, a group of supporters of the “Tavricheskiy Muftiate” made a video appeal to the Kremlin dictator and Sergei Aksyonov with a “request to stop the persecution” and accusing Ablaev of striving to “usurp control over all Muslims of Crimea”.
In response, the “muftiate” from Ablaev made a statement on December 19, which was distributed by the occupiers’ propaganda.
It talks about “provocative and false statements regarding our management of the adherents of the sect of Habashism” and the “sectarian activities” of the latter, including “by force holding the mosque” Juma-Jami in Yevpatoria and “refusing to return it to the owner”.
Ablaev’s group not only accused the “Tavricheskiy Muftiyat” of some “Kyiv connections” and the desire to “seize power”, but also stated that the real “Tavricheskiy Muftiyat”, as well as the “successor” of the Tavrichesky Mohammedan Spiritual Administration of the period of the Russian Empire, are precisely the Ablaevites.
Naturally, the supporters of Emirali Ablaev so actively joined in “exposing competitors” for a reason, here it is obvious that they are following the current Kremlin doctrine of “building our own Russian Islam”, without “foreign teachers”. In this “battle of the muftiates” the outcome is not difficult to predict, but an obvious “dialectical contradiction” remains behind it.
Russian special services traditionally try to use the Muslim structures under their control for propaganda and subversive work in many third countries; how they intend to do this, having launched the processes of “self-isolation” of the muftiates under their control from “external influence”, further events will show.
