ENTER THE WAHHABIS

ENTER THE WAHHABIS. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Sufi tradition has faced a challenge of a very different type. Emissaries from the Arab world, especially Saudi Arabia, have flooded into the Caucasus and Central Asia, seeing an opportunity in the spiritual and economic wasteland left by Marxist ideology.

Financed by Saudi petrodollars, these preachers have begun propagating a new form of Islam, which has become known through a slight over-simplification as Wahhabism in other words, the austere form of Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia. The new version of Islam strives to be as close as possible to the faiths 1,400-year-old roots. It opposes the secularism of Russian life. Its universalising message aims to transcend ethnic and linguistic barriers, and it has no place for the local cults of Sufism.

Many Chechens and Dagestanis find the new form of Islam alien and uncomfortable, and some actively oppose it. It has caused division, and even violence, within families. But by building mosques and establishing scholarships, the Wahhabis have won a following, especially among the young often impatient with what they see as a corrupt official religious establishment left over from Soviet times. Moreover, in the confusion of post-Soviet Russia, the new creed offers disillusioned and money and weapons and a sense of purpose which they cannot find anywhere else. A daredevil hijacker and hostage-taker, Mr Basaev took part in the Russian-backed war against Georgia in 1992-93, and then fought ruthlessly against Russia in the Chechen war of 1994-96. Trained in the Soviet army, he now says his lifes mission is to wage holy war against Russia and avenge its crimes against his people.

He is not himself a Wahhabi, but he seems to have decided that the new Muslims would make useful recruits for his jihad, even though he does not share their extreme puritanism.

Mr Basaev was both a Muslim and a Chechen patriot the two qualities are inseparable. But despite his bushy beard and talk of holy wars, he does not quite correspond to the image of a single-minded fundamentalist. His heroes, after all, included Garibaldi and Abraham Lincoln. Educated in Saudi Arabia, Khattab fought the Russians in Afghanistan before settling in Chechnya.

In other words, he is one of the Afghanis the 15,000 or so unteers from all over the Middle East particularly Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Algeria who did battle, with strong American support, against the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. Since the war ended, these fighters have returned to their homelands, or . moved to other countries, in search of new Islamist causes to fight. It is the existence of the Afghanis of whom the most notorious is Mr bin Laden himself which helps to explain why Russia regards its own Islamic adversaries as Frankensteinian monsters created by western governments and their friends in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The Afghani connection also helps to explain why Russia and Iran see eye-to-eye on the question of Islamist violence. As well as loathing the West and all its works, some of the Afghanis as zealous practitioners of Sunni Islam are sworn enemies of the Shia Muslim faith, of which Iran is the main bastion. Iran has always been resentful of Americas connections with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, even though its own relations with those two countries have been improving.

Russia sympathises, to put it mildly, with that resentment. America, for its part, is highly suspicious of Russias friendship with Iran. Chapter 4.