Russian Blacklist Grows
And so the list grows. On Saturday, the Kremlin added thirty more publications to its blacklist of extremist materials. That makes a total of 61 banned books, music, and films. The first list released in July was mostly a tally of Russian ultra-nationalist and Nazi literature. The sixteen works added in October continued along those lines. The new additions, however, mostly comprise of Muslim texts. The works of Said Nursi were particularly targeted, a move that surprised Russia’s Muslim leaders. “Said Nursi was a proponent of the most tolerant forms of Islam,” Nafigula Ashirov, the co-chair of the Russian Council of Muftis told Kommersant. He added that this seemed to suggest a “new wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in Russia” despite his and other Muslims support for United Russia. It appears that Russia’s local courts didn’t get the memo. This past ..read more
