Islam and Russia have been co-existing peacefully?
Then who the hell are the Chechens? Or in some parallel Orwellian universe, have the Russians and Chechens always been at peace?
They NEVER had these kinds of problems under Stalin.
A bit misleading. Political Islam is largely an invention of Moscow itself, which used Islamo-Marxism is a tool to turn the Muslim world against the United States and its allies. Many known Muslim terrorist leaders have had ties with the Russian KGB/FSB. In fact, Alexander Lintvenenko, the fellow who was poisoned by Polonium 210, had alleged that Russia had recruited and trained Al-Qaeda’s former number two man (now number one).
There is no living peacefully with islam - ever.
I was in Tatarstan in 1994. Tatars flew fighter jets over their capital, there were green flags, crowds of muslims gathering here and there to listen hate speechs from crazed imams. They looked on infidels like predators on their prey. It was pretty scary for non-muslims who knew about atrocities being commited by Chechens at the time, which has started in exact same manner a few years earlier.
All of this islamist crap disappeared in a few days after the First Chechen War started. BBC aired airstrikes and all the dead and devastation. As a rational people, tatars shaved their beards and got rid of hijabs that same moment. Instead of attacking infidels they kicked imams’ behinds down to Saudi Arabia.
My idea of islamism it’s pretty controllable in middle class societies among people who has something to lose. Fear is a main factor. Muslim are pretty calm and friendly people as far as they know that their traditional behavior will bring them hell.
The title does not match the fact in the article.
The coexistence in question is (or was) between radical Muslim in Tatarstan and the traditionally (*) quite docile Tartars; in other words, the subject of the article is the ethno-religious politics of a relatively small region inside Russia.
This docility is apparently coming to an end due to the influx of more radical Muslims from, for example, Chechnya.
Tatarstan was a model of peaceful coexistence also in the sense that the relationships between Russia proper, Christian Orthodox overwhelmingly, and Tatarstan, overwhelmingly Muslim, were indeed harmonious. But unlike in North Caucasus, the tension is between two kinds of Muslims, not, so far, between the ethnic Russians and the ethnic Tartars.
However, none of that can be projected to a wider theater of relations between Russia proper (i.e. culturally Orthodox ethnic Russians) and various Muslim lands in the Russian Federation. There, the picture varies region to region: two brutal wars in Chechnya, tense but not violent anymore rest of North Caucasus, peaceful Tatarstan and Bashkorstan.
Of course, Russia lost her satellite formerly Soviet republics, that are now independent.
Have they not heard of Beslan?
Where were they when the Moscow theater thing happened in 2003? I remember being thrilled to read how the Chechen women were executed point-blank while anesthetized by the Fentanyl the KGB pumped in prior to raiding.