Governing the religious in post-Soviet Azerbaijan

While some studies refer to increasing religious pluralization in post-Soviet societies (Pelkmans 2017; Alisauskiene and Schröder 2016; Wanner 2007), the question of how religious pluralization unfolds in urban contexts in the post-Soviet southern Caucasus has been largely overlooked. When analysing the post-Soviet return of religion to public spaces in the Caucasus, we should not disregard the fact that religious matters were not entirely suppressed in the Soviet period and that they have been significantly changed (Dragadze 1993). There were, in fact, particular ideals and tools for preserving religion as a state-sponsored ‘tradition’ based on the Soviet-style infrastructure of regulating relations between faith and the state. In this context, anthropologists have identified the centrality of the notion of religious belonging, not beliefs as such, as they have lost their original meaning in post-Soviet societies (Smolkin 2018). The notion of belonging still affects the way religion and its expression are perceived and practiced in the post-Soviet world (Luehrmann 2012; Wanner 2015; McBrien 2017). By highlighting the urban Azerbaijani context in Baku, I draw attention to the secularized example in the Islamic world, where religious belonging generally coincides with ethnic and language affiliations, and where there is no fixed normative religious system and knowledge that regulates people’s everyday lives. In the view of Azerbaijani secular elites, as the majority religion, Islam should be preserved as a cultural feature and as part of the country’s national heritage, rather than being used a social and political resource. As one of the ideologues of the post-Soviet policy towards Islam emphasized in his interview, ‘Faith is a matter of individual choice that should be practised in private rooms.’ |¹ Interview with Rafik Aliyev, a former ideologue of the State Committee for Working with Religious Organizations, conducted by the author in Baku, March 2019.|

Over the last twenty years, there has been a significant transformation of religious policy. Two periods of Azerbaijani state policies on religion can be discerned. The 1990s were a period of relative freedom in religious activities, in particular during and after the Karabakh war (1988-1994), when the Azerbaijani government welcomed many Christian missionaries and Islamic charitable organizations. The 2000s and 2010s, conversely, saw the re-introduction of a centralized policy of controlling religious groups and their expressions in public spaces. This process has been influenced by political and social factors that are driving the state to respond more rigorously to perceived external threats and oppositional religious activism, while also attempting to improve Azerbaijan’s modern image on the international stage.

The state authorities are therefore heavily engaged in defining the boundaries of the religious domain, which is seen as a matter of surveillance and control. All religious groups have to be registered; even local folk shrines are increasingly subject to control by state-sponsored clergy and the local administration. Azerbaijan does not explicitly privilege Islam in political narratives. Even Shia Islam, which was historically the de facto state religion and numerically the dominant faith in the country, has no special status in the modern constitution. Azerbaijan represents a specific secular constellation due to its early process of secularization that began at the end of the nineteenth century, |² On the anti-clerical movement at the end of the 19th century and the role of the Mulla Nasreddin journal, see Grant 2016.| the radical secularization of the harsh Soviet anti-religious campaigns, industrialization and contemporary Azerbaijani national secularism. It is therefore not surprising that we observe an official discourse about a relatively low level of religiosity in Azerbaijan after socialism and a policy of suppressing new global Muslim faith communities (Bedford 2009; Balci and Goyushov 2015; Wiktor-Mach 2017). Azerbaijan is therefore striving to preserve its secular heritage, often in the name of fighting religious extremism.|³ In this sense, contemporary Azerbaijani policy is comparable with the repressive policy in Tajikistan, which is justified with reference to countering extremism and entails not only banning laws but also official efforts to create a ‘proper’ Islam for its national population (Lemon and Thibault 2018).|

The centralized nature of regulations is very much linked to Soviet legacies shaping religious state policy, management style and language. The crucial institution for regulating Muslim religious life in Azerbaijan is the state-sponsored Caucasus Muslim Board (CMB), which was known until the mid-1990s as the Spiritual Board of Transcaucasian Muslims.|⁴ The Spiritual Board of Transcaucasian Muslims was established in 1872 by the Russian tsarist administration and relaunched in 1943 during WWII.| The post-Soviet continuity of this institution in Azerbaijan is obvious: for example, the leader of the CMB has held this position since 1987. Together with the State Committee for Working with Religious Organizations (2001), the CMB is responsible for controlling, monitoring and representing Muslim issues within and outside of the country.

The transformation of religious policy has been formalized in legal amendments that foster a hierarchy among so-called ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ religious organizations. This approach has led to the unequal treatment of different religious communities and created a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religions. In this regard, different religious communities and sacred sites have different relations with the state authorities in terms of visibility, legitimacy, the built environment and access to public structures. Traditional religious groups include local Shia and Sunni Muslim communities, the Russian Orthodox Church and Judaism. Officials in Baku use the term ‘non-traditional’ to identify a set of institutionalized confessions with transnational linkages and ‘foreign’ backgrounds. Among the communities considered by the state authorities to be non-traditional are a number of Evangelical and Charismatic Protestant Churches, including the Seventh-day Adventists and the Baptist Union, Krishnaism, new Muslim communities established after 1991, such as the Salafis and the Nurcu movement, and other minorities, including historical communities such as the Bahai faith.|⁵ Interview with Agil Shirinov, vice rector of the Azerbaijan Institute for Theology, conducted in Baku in February 2019.| Thus, the Azerbaijani authorities use the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ in a political way that allows them to regard certain religious communities as potential challenges and to intervene in their practices by applying bureaucratic terminology like ‘licensed’ and ‘unlicensed’ to them.

Three main strategies can be identified in faith-state relationships in Azerbaijan. The first is restrictive control over faiths and their presence in public spaces, in particular in the case of Jehovah’s Witnesses, new Muslim communities and oppositional Shia communities in rural areas. The Azerbaijani government views them as a threat to national security, as they are often thought to be under the influence of foreign powers, such as Iran and other Gulf states. As an imam at one mosque frequented by Salafis emphasized, religious issues are subordinated to urban traffic rules:

When I was driving to morning prayer, a traffic policeman stopped me and told me that I had broken the rules. He said that I was driving fast. I asked him to issue a fine, as I was in a hurry. He asked where I was hurrying to. I said that I was hurrying to pray and needed to arrive in time. He asked why it was so important to be on time. You can pray later. I cannot explain to people that if I do not come to the mosque on time, no one will be able to come and pray. So there is such a rule. Just think, the number of people participating in the morning prayer is about 600, but I cannot keep them waiting…

The second strategy involves selected restrictions on ‘non-traditional faiths’ such as Evangelical Churches, Krishnaism and the local Bahai faith. In 2014, an amendment to Azerbaijan’s constitution prohibited the dissemination of religious literature and financial support from abroad, which affected the issue of the registration of non-traditional religious organizations by the State Committee for Working with Religious Organizations. For many non-traditional religious communities, it became difficult to obtain registration. Registration is the state’s way not only of endorsing the existence of a religious community and its ‘purity’ in the eyes of the authorities, but also of legitimizing the community’s presence and visibility in physical space. The third strategy is strategic co-optation of those faith groups that can be useful for Azerbaijan’s international relations, in particular Judaism, the Russian Orthodox Church and Catholicism. To advance its national and international politics, the Azerbaijani state uses these specific religious communities as additional soft power to promote good relations with regional and international partners such as Russia, Europe, Israel and the United States. For instance, as a result of the ban on foreign missionaries introduced in the 2010s, all religious leaders must be citizens of Azerbaijan. However, the Catholic and Lutheran Churches seem to be exceptions to this rule, as they have special agreements with the State Committee for Working with Religious Organizations and are allowed to invite foreign pastors from countries such as Germany and Slovakia.|⁶ Alongside intense state monitoring, the privileged religious communities receive a donation from the Presidential Fund. The amount is not fixed, and these communities receive far higher amounts than non-traditional groups. For example, an imam at a mosque in Azerbaijan receives a monthly state salary of about 400 manat ($235). In 2018, fourteen imams received a gift from the state of Azerbaijani-made Khazar cars. By contrast, some Shia imams who received their education in Iran and Iraq, or religious leaders at new ‘purist’ Muslim communities, are not supported by state funds.|

Azerbaijan amended its law on religious freedom significantly in 2015 and 2017. Strict re-registration requirements and bureaucratic procedures have become important instruments of state control over local and transnational Muslim religious groups (Bashirov 2018). In this way, access to Sunni and Shia mosques and the call to prayer (azan) has been limited during Ramadan in Baku and other major cities, and more recently during larger international events such as the European Olympic Games in summer 2015 or the Formula One championships (2016-2019). In 2015, a presidential decree ruled that religious symbols, slogans and ceremonies may only be used and performed inside places of worship, near sacred sites, or during official, state-orchestrated ceremonies.

These strict requirements have meant that performing the recently revived Shia Muslim Ashura mourning ritual outside mosques is now prohibited in Azerbaijan. Instead of the symbolic collective self-flagellation ceremony held in the streets on Ashura Day, an annual day of mourning for the martyr Husayn ibn Ali, the state now only permits the enactment of Ashura rituals indoors. In addition, instead of self-flagellation, a new secularized practice – medical blood donation – has been introduced and implemented at central and larger mosques and shrines.|⁷ A similar prioritization towards ‚acceptable’ and ‘non-acceptable’ religiosity ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of public expression of religion is observable in the European urban contexts. See in Martinez-Arino and Griera 2020.| The rule requiring worship to take place indoors or behind the walls of the church or mosque applies to other confessions and religious minorities too. For instance, public Orthodox Easter processions on the streets outside the Russian Orthodox churches have also been prohibited in Azerbaijan.

Finally, it is worth noting that recent oppressive changes to the state regulation of religious life recall the Soviet model of state-faith relations. For example, new regulations were introduced in 2015 according to which all religious buildings and prayer houses in the country are claimed as state property. The state has intervened in recent renovations carried out at mosques, churches and synagogues in Azerbaijan by installing new surveillance technologies. As one imam of a local mosque emphasized in an interview:

Inside the mosque, there are audio and video cameras installed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There are cameras installed by the Foundation for the Promotion of Moral Values and the Caucasus Muslim Board. The mosque is monitored inside and outside 24 hours a day. And before we had these cameras, there were no attempts to provoke a conflict. A person must be able to adapt to the society in which he lives. If they don‘t, they will be isolated from the society.

Religious presence is ambivalent in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, where administrative regulations can either curtail or promote particular religious expressions and configurations.

Different actors are involved in this uncertain process of restoring and rebuilding sacred sites in the post-socialist city: state authorities, city planners, official religious institutions, international organizations. In studying the religious presence and diversity of religious place-making strategies in the context of post-Soviet Azerbaijani urbanism, we have to look at grassroots religiosity and vernacular sacred sites. They emerge in a non-religious environment and are embedded in mundane urban infrastructures and ordinary residents, who also can help shape and produce religious configurations in the urban space. A number of recent studies are critical of the dichotomy that is usually drawn between the secular and religious domains in post-socialist societies, calling for the revision of the boundary between the secular and the religious. I agree that interactions between these two domains are complex and that the urban context provides good examples of their interweaving. In this context, the term ‘urban-religious configuration’ can be useful, referring as it does to an assemblage of material, spatial, symbolic and sensuous spaces and practices in which the religious and the secular/urban overlap and intermingle (Lanz 2018, Burchardt 2019). Like Lanz, I suggest avoiding treating the secular/religious dichotomy as involving two extreme poles with clear-cut boundaries. From this perspective, the process of religious place-making in post-Soviet Azerbaijan includes formal and informal, official and vernacular sets of religious practices and expressions aimed at the symbolic and material appropriation of the urban space.