Russian Blacklist Grows
By Sean at 17 December, 2007, 5:52 pm
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 May and September were critical months in this alleged “new wave.” It was then that the Tuimazinskii District Court in Bashkirostan banned the journal Al-Bai and books by Takiuddina an-Nabokhoni and the Koptevskii District Court in Moscow banned a number of Nursi’s works. The blacklist makes anyone in possession of these works subject to criminal prosecution.
National Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov called the blacklist “the first steps toward political persecution” and a form of “censorship that violates the Russian Constitution.” Article 29 of the Russian Constitution states, “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought and speech” and “The freedom of the mass media shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be prohibited.” Limonov, who has yet to be added to the list, knows what being banned is like. Russian authorities have prohibited and labeled his National Bolsheviks extremist. Andrei Sharov of the state-run Rossiiskaya gazeta, of course, maintains that the courts’ decisions were consistent with the Russian Criminal Code and that the they have “a duty to fight the appearance of extremism including those dressed in the form of articles, literature, film and even music.” Given this view, I’m sure that the list will grow even more with time.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I have never seen any waves of anti-Muslim sentiment in Russia, old or new.
Were their any explanations given for Said Nursi’s inclusion? There must be some reason.
… There must be some reason.
http://www.rian.ru/society/20070523/65959691.html
I speculate that the issue is not Nursi himself but the interpretation some pwople have made of his work:
http://www.myislamweb.com/forum/showthread.php?t=14235
Dagnabit, when I google his name most of the stuff I get is in Turkish. This makes me wish I was still in contact with my grad school roommate (who was a Turk with a graduate degree in Islamic Theology. He’s writing books on Gadamer nowadays: http://www.crvp.org/book/Series02/IIA-5/contents.htm).
Nursi’s work had prosecuted in Turkey more than thousand times with the similar indictment, however courts always resulted as innocent. I think, the goverment could not understand “How a religious movement can be w.o material benefit”
Even, he has always denied the chairs (positions) offered by the gouverments.
respectfully
I thought Nursi was dead?
Can somebody tell me if Triumph of the Will is pod zapretom? I ask because I’m on a Leni Riefenstahl kick, and although I had no problem finding Olympia in my local video store, I can’t find Triumph anywhere.
(I balanced out my viewing of The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefentahl with a subsequent viewing of that masterpiece, Alien. vs. Predator. Ah, the joys of crap bubblegum entertainment!)