Red Hot Russia reports that, during a raid on a Muslim cafe in the city of Surgut on 3 March, apparently in search of undocumented migrants, officers from the riot police (OMON) threatened customers with automatic weapons and forced three of them to cut their beards.
Afterwards the local TV station conducted a poll on the question: “Are strict measures acceptable for the treatment of migrants?” More than 85% respondents answered “Yes”.
The Mayor of Moscow says there are no plans to build a new mosque in the city, and says the “excessive” number of economic migrants was a “harmful thing”.
“It has turned out that the praying Muslims are not at all Russian citizens and they are not Moscow residents. They are labor migrants. There are only 10 percent of Moscow residents among them and building mosques for everyone who wants it – I think this will be over the top,” Sergey Sobyanin said in an interview with Moscow’s Echo radio.
The top city official went on to say that “Muscovites now get irritated by people who speak a different language, have different manners, with aggressive behavior. This is not purely ethnic, but this is connected with some ethnic traits,” Sobyanin said.
At the same time, the Moscow Mayor explained that there are no ethnic enclaves in the city and expressed the hope that such enclaves would never appear as closed districts like that usually have a very high crime rate.
President Vladimir Putin spoke against the wearing of hijabs at Russian schools Thursday saying that the practice runs counter to Russian traditions. “Why should we adopt outside traditions?” Putin said during a marathon question-and-answer session with Russian and foreign reporters on Thursday.
A test case of Russia’s hijab policy emerged in October, when Muslim parents in a village in Russia’s southern Stavropol Region complained to prosecutors over a ban on headscarves at their daughters’ school. The parents said the ban violated their daughters’ constitutional rights to receive an education and practice their religion.
Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported on Tuesday that Stavropol governor Valery Zerenkov signed regulations banning school students from wearing headscarves as well as “immodest” dress such as shorts and low-cut dresses.
Education and Science Minister Dmitry Livanov had previously said wearing headscarves did not violate any law on education.
It was not immediately clear whether the headscarf ban applies to all educational institutions in the district or only state-run schools.
The parents of a schoolgirl living in the village of Privolny, Stavropol Territory, are complaining that their daughter has been barred from school for wearing a headscarf.
“Today we sent our daughter to school on the school bus. The senior teacher put her back on the bus and it took her home. She has been barred from classes over the headscarf for about two weeks now,” the girl’s father Rizak Rizakov told Interfax.
A ban on girls wearing the Islamic headscarf to a school in southern Russia has angered Muslims and forced President Vladimir Putin, who has robustly defended the Orthodox Church, to affirm that Russia is a secular state.
Muslims in the town of Kara Tyube in the Stavropol region say the ban on the hijab at School No. 12 forces their children to choose between their religion and a state education.
Several Muslim families pulled their daughters out of schools in Russia’s south after the girls were told they were not allowed to wear their hijabs, a top Muslim said on Monday.
The Mufti of the southern Stavropol region Muhammad-Haji Rakhimov said he had received complaints from several parents whose daughters were for the first time not being allowed into their schools wearing their hijabs. The situation resembles a “stalemate” because both the Muslim parents and school authorities refuse to budge, and several girls including second-graders have not been to school for two weeks now, he said.
“The parents of these girls are not letting them go to school, which can lead to the child welfare services taking them away,” Rakhimov said. He could not explain the authorities’ sudden change in school policies. “There have not been any problems before this month.”
He added that there were now “many girls” in the Stavropol region who were being kept out of school for this reason, and their parents were too poor to send them to private schools.
One such institution is a rural public school in the village of Kara-Tyube, close to the overwhelmingly Muslim region of Dagestan. The school’s list of rules posted on its website says that students’ appearance should be in line with the “business style used in a secular society, excluding provocative elements”.
Nationalist organizations have criticized Moscow Chief Mufti Albir Krganov’s initiative to build more mosques in Russia to accommodate the needs of the large inflow of immigrants from Muslim countries.
“This approach is not totally correct,” chairman of the Russkiye movement’s supervisory board Alexander Belov [pictured] told Interfax on Tuesday.
“It is necessary to decide once and for all – whether Russia will turn into an Islamic state or will remain a secular state, where foreign immigrants come, find jobs and leave after their work is over,” he said.
“If immigrants live no one knows where but want to build a mosque in my yard, this approach is certainly wrong,” Belov said.
A court in Moscow ruled Monday that an anti-Islam film that has sparked violent demonstrations around the world can no longer be shown in Russia.
Tverskoi court’s ruling follows a similar local decision taken last week by a court in Grozny, the provincial capital of Russia’s Muslim-dominated province of Chechnya.
In Moscow, Justice Ministry spokeswoman Marina Gridneva said the film was deemed extremist because it could incite ethnic and religious hatred.
Expose draws our attention to a link to a YouTube video that was posted on the official EDL Facebook page this morning. It features a brutal attack by Russian skinheads on an anti-racism festival at Miass in August 2010. The link has since been removed without explanation.
The soundtrack to the video is “Kick the Reds In” by the neo-Nazi band Whitelaw, which you may recall was also used by the EDL’s Essex Division to advertise an anti-mosque protest in Chelmsford last month.
Up to 2,000 people rallied in a Moscow neighborhood after local authorities announced the building of a Muslim cultural center and mosque in the area. The protest ended with officials being forced to cancel the planned construction.
The impromptu demonstration on Wednesday evening was gathered through social networks. Residents of the Mitino district came to voice their fears over the plans to build a Muslim cultural center and mosque in the neighborhood, which would be able to accommodate up to 60,000 believers during a service.
The would-be Muslim prayer house is subject to much speculation, even though construction project is far from being finalized. The rumor mill describes it as “a 13-story mega mosque,” which would broadcast calls to a morning prayer all over the neighborhood.