Let no-one think that Islam can give a people freedom. In Algeria, it was the comparatively secular National Liberation Front that freed the country from French colonialism, only to find itself battling the Islamist Armed Islamic Group during the decade-long Algerian Civil War. For a very personal account of said war, see the memoir Contre-espionnage algérien: Notre guerre contre les Islamistes.
Consider also the case of Chechnya. The Chechen Atatürk, the architect and leader of the mountainous land’s independence movement during the 1990s, was Dzokhar Dudayev, a figure of grand vision and towering intellect. Since the Chechen case is here being adduced merely as an example, this is not the place for a detailed investigation of the man’s religious beliefs or lack thereof. Let us therefore take account mainly of one scholar’s opinion, which accords with all the evidence I have seen.
According to political scientist Aleksey Malashenko, a leading expert in the politics of historically Islamic regions, “Dudayev did not consider himself an ardent Muslim believer. In fact, he could not have been one because of his upbringing, way of life and professional occupation.” Indeed, the decision by “Dudayev and his associates” to emphasise the Islamic factor in their war for independence was a calculated one, as they came to believe “that appeals for a holy war were capable of uniting the nation.” Even this calculation seems to have been merely a response to a historical accident: as Malashenko notes, “the Chechen conflict began amid a general ‘Islamic renaissance’ on the territory of the former USSR.”
Consider, also, the previous history of Chechen resistance to Russian domination. Although the two centuries before the twentieth saw Islam function as the main ideological basis for Chechen warring against Russia, certain combants’ programme “of establishing an Islamic state” sowed discord among the indigenous population. Moreover, in service to this religious agenda, “Sheikh Mansur […] destroyed whole villages which dared to disobey him.” Later, during the Soviet period, the communists sometimes suppressed the locals’ Islam and, at other times, used it to control Chechens for their own ends: “the government flirted with the Muslims, pitting them against the anti-Soviet Cossack movement (as in the 1920s).”
Possibly the most striking passage in Malashenko’s paper is this:
“Unlike their ethnic mountain peoples’ solidarity, Islam was not a decisive factor for the Chechens’ survival in an alien environment. Much more effective was their adherence to national traditions, such as the custom of burying their dead at all costs in their native land.”
To sum up: the use of Islam as a basis for the region’s struggle for independence led to infighting on the level of mass atrocities; the religion was instrumentalized by the Soviets to control the Chechens, and when times were toughest, Islam failed where nationalism succeeded in preserving the Chechen community.
In the years since the Chechen rebels were defeated in 1996, religion has again been used to subjugate them. In 2007, it was reported that Ramzan Kadyrov, Vladimir Putin’s proxy ruler of Chechnya, was “promoting a brand of ethno-territorial nationalism that is based largely on popular Islam” and imposing religious behaviour on his population, for instance by “requiring that all women employed in the state sector, and all female school and university students, wear the hijab.” In other words, he was attempting to define Chechen national sentiment in terms of Islam, a creed whose expressions and institutions he would control.
In an interview from 1996, Dudayev sounds downright despondent about Chechnya’s turn towards the religion of Mohammad: “[The Russians] have forced us to take the way of Islam even if we were not properly prepared to embrace Islamic values. Now we could succumb to a perverted form of Islam, which might be dangerous to the West.” Sure, he is not explicitly lamenting Islamisation as such, merely stating that the Chechens were not ready for it. But does anyone actually think along such lines? I doubt anyone can show me a devout European or American politico who wants to see his country embrace Christian values at some point in the future, but not yet.