Boston Attack Spotlights Struggle Half a World Away
Still, it is clear from interviews with friends and relatives in Dagestan and in the United States that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had firm views about the violent split between moderate Sufi Muslims supported by the Russian government and adherents of Salafism, an orthodox form of Sunni Islam — a tug of war that has driven the religious politics in the North Caucasus for two decades.
Mr. Tsarnaev sided squarely with the Salafist camp, which includes the jihadist rebels for whom violent revenge and score-settling are a way of life developed through years of anti-Russian insurgency. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, many of the Salafists studied at religious universities in the Middle East, forming a cadre of young ideologues who returned with strong objections to the more tolerant forms of worship they found in their homeland.
At his mosque in Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Tsarnaev had shown a preference for a strict Salafist interpretation of Islam, objecting to a sermon that approved the celebration of Thanksgiving and saying that he would not celebrate the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad. While those views seemed out of place in the university town of Cambridge, in the wind-swept villages of Dagestan they are a part of the daily discourse, and of a legacy of violence going back decades.
Over the years, the Dagestan insurgency spawned its own ideological framework, based on Islam. In 1998, several mountain villages in Dagestan, in an area known as the Kadar Zone, rejected Russian law enforcement and courts and practiced Muslim religious law, called Sharia.
They were crushed by the Russian military in 1999, but the movement survived. Insurgents say they are fighting to uphold Islamic law and reject Russian institutions and practices, like women wearing revealing clothes and the sale of alcohol, and also to substitute for corrupt courts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/europe/boston-bombing-stirs-echoes-of-unrest-in-caucasus.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesworld&_r=0
