We present the statement by Rushan Abbyasov, first deputy chairman of the Council of Muftis of Russia, chairman of the Religious Muslim Board of the Moscow Region, at the third meeting of the Russia - Islamic World strategic vision group in the Chechen capital Grozny in May 2017.
Dear participants and guests of our regular meeting of the Russia – Islamic World strategic vision group. I am very pleased to welcome all of you.
First of all, on behalf of Sheikh Ravil Gaynutdin, permanent member of the Strategic Vision Group, Chairman of the Religious Muslim Board of the Russian Federation and of the Russian Council of Muftis, let me to convey his best wishes for success to the current meeting whose goal is to explore prospects for economic interaction between Russia and the Muslim states together with the development of counter measures against expanding threats to security, with the support of traditional spiritual values accumulated by Islam and other world religions.
Since our last meeting, the Religious Muslim Board of the Russian Federation and the Russian Council of Muftis have continued to strengthen ties and cooperation with Islamic countries.
Moscow’s Cathedral Mosque and other our Muslim mosques and educational institutions were attended by dozens of official foreign delegations. In return, the representatives of our organization took part in various conferences in all over the world.
Sheikh Ravil Gaynutdin met with the heads of state, religious leaders, members of parliaments of such states as Turkey, Palestine, Bahrain and others many times. This year we continued our good tradition to sign memorandums with foreign partners. For example, a few days ago, as honorable Sheikh Abdelrahman from Bahrain noted, the Russian Council of Muftis and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs of the Kingdom of Bahrain signed a memorandum. Currently, the same memorandums have been prepared and agreed together with our Saudi, Kuwaiti and Omani counterparts.
We have translated into Russian and published a comprehensive AAOIFI Sharia Standard collection on Islamic finance. Its presentation was held on April 12, 2017 at the annual conference organized in Bahrain which is seen as a key international event on Islamic finance.
Providing humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees in Lebanon has become one of the most important tasks for us. It was a response of Russian Muslims to the Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s call to the international community. I would like to express special gratitude to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and the Russian Embassy in Lebanon for their support in this important charity event. Certainly, we are going to expand these activities and currently we are raising funds for the construction of a school in a refugee camp.
I would also like to emphasize that the Islamic world is composed not only of states that declare themselves Muslim, but also of multi-million Muslims associations thanks to its integrating features and underpinning spiritual values. These foreign diasporas prove to be an increasingly important asset for domestic and foreign policy for many non-Muslims states of Europe and Asia.
Therefore, in our opinion it is extremely important for our country to set up and maintain direct friendly ties and business partnership with foreign Muslim communities. Such important and extremely useful ties may be established and effectively operate through leading religious Muslim organizations of Russia.
The Russian Council of Muftis is a prime example here. The Council has close ties with different religious and scientific and educational organizations of both the Muslim world and European states.
For example, with the personal assistance from our respected Mufti Sheikh Ravil Gaynutdin the establishment of relations between the Religious Muslim Board of Belarus and the Department of Religious Affairs in Turkey ended in construction of a mosque in Minsk. It was unveiled late last year with the participation of President Alexander Lukashenko and Recep Erdogan.
On May 5, 2017 the opening ceremony of the Memorial Mosque in Kostroma was held together with Professor Mehmet Hermes, Head of the Religious Affairs Department of the Republic of Turkey. We also established close relations with the Muslim organizations of Poland, Albania, Bosnia, France, Spain, Germany, the UK, and especially Finland. As you know, our annual international Muslim forum was successfully held in London with the participation of many leading religious figures in Europe in late 2015. The next forum will be held in Helsinki at the end of the year.
I also want to focus on the development of relations between the Russian Council of Muftis and China. On July 22-26, 2016, the State Administration for Religious Affairs of the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Association of China held an international symposium on “The idea of golden mean and countering extremism” in Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Previously the idea of this symposium was discussed during the official visit of Mufti Sheikh Ravil Gaynutdin to the People's Republic of China in 2015. The symposium was attended by leading religious figures and representatives of government agencies from Central Asia, and as a result the Chinese government fully supported our initiative to hold international conferences under the common title Spiritual Silk Way.
These conferences are dedicated to its significant historical role as an example of establishing friendly ties and positive, peaceful cooperation between nations, including Muslims.
We believe that such conferences will feature a broad range of contemporary humanitarian issues linked with the common goal of a constant combat against extremist threats leading inevitably to such extreme forms as international terrorism.
As part of this project we held a number of conferences such as “The oasis of the Silk Road: contemporary problems of the ethnography of Central Asia nations”. These conferences were attended by representatives of leading national centers of ethnography of Oriental studies.
Together with Mardzhani Institute of History and Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, we co-hosted a round table on the “Golden Horde on the Great Silk Road” as part of the fifth International Golden Horde Forum. In addition to Russian scientists, it was attended by various researchers from Oxford, Sorbonne and other famous universities.
The international scientific conference “Spiritual Silk Road: Median, Creation and Integration” will become the culmination of these events this year. It will take place in September in Kazan. We will partner with leading scientific and religious organizations of China and Central Asia and get support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation and President of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov. I take this opportunity to invite you to take an active part in this initiative.
May Allah help us in the implementation of all our beginnings and plans. We also ask our almighty creator to make our current Group’s meeting successful, to make Group’s activity more effective in this great initiative of strengthening interaction between Russia and the Islamic world on mutually beneficial grounds. Thank you for attention.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"