Window on Eurasia: Muslim Crescent Moon Briefly Replaces Star Atop New Year’s Tree in Tatarstan

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, January 2 – In what one Russian commentator suggested was a Muslim effort to “Islamicize” a civic holiday, officials in Vysokaya Gora near Kazan have put a Muslim crescent moon rather than the traditional star on top of the New Year’s tree they have erected in that city’s Victory Park.

 

            Rais Suleymanov, a specialist on Islam notorious for his attacks on Muslims and Tatarstan, told a local paper that “this case should be seen as an attempt to Islamicize a civic holiday” and that it shows how the situation in Tatarstan now recalls that of Daghestan in that in both republics, Wahhabis have called on the faithful not to celebrate New Year’s.

 

            In both cases, he said, “the Wahhabis want to drive Muslims into some sort of ghetto,” into a place where they will be influenced only by Islam and will be kept separate from the surrounding population (kazan.mk.ru/articles/2014/12/31/novyy-god-stal-musulmanskim-v-raycentre-pod-kazanyu-glavnuyu-yolku-ukrasili-polumesyacem.html).

 

            The Tatarstan government has not reacted publicly, the Kazan paper says, but “unofficially,” it has reacted angrily and ordered the Muslim crescent to be taken down. “Judging from everything,” it continues, “the incident will be presented as something ‘excessive,’” a local action that went too far.

 

            The authorities may be able to make that version of events stick, the paper suggested, because the head of the district where this happened, Rustam Kalimullin, has the reputation of being a Wahhaby sympathizer.  But Suleymanov says that “not everything is so simple.”

 

            In his view, “the authorities were conducting an experiment in one specific region by deciding, so to speak, to ‘Islamicize’ the New Year’s tree.  This is not the first such case.” Last year, the Kazan Kremlin museum, holiday displays there were completely Arabized and Islamicized.

 

            Thus, in pace of Grandfather Frost and the Snow Maiden, “customary for children,” were shown “guests from Saudi Arabia Fatima and Said;” and ‘in place of the New Year’s tree itself, a palm tree and in place of snow, the Arabian desert.” Why the authorities thought an Arabian landscape was appropriate in Tatarstan is difficult to understand, he said.

 

            Not surprisingly, this singular event has attracted widespread attention in the Russian media which all too often reacts to any display of Islamic symbols as an attack on Russia and Russians even though there is a long tradition in the former Soviet space of nativizing not ony holidays but also the portrayal of  public figures (newsland.com/news/detail/id/1480035/).