QUANTITATIVE SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF THE TERRITORIALITY OF RELIGIOUS STRUCTURES IN TATARSTAN, RUSSIAN FEDERATION

 

MATTHEW DERRICK^*

 

 

Summary

 

This paper investigates the territoriality of religious structures in Tatarstan, a semi-autonomous republic of the Russian Federation, using government data from 2010. Although the region is populated in roughly even numbers by Sunni Muslim Tatars and Orthodox Christian Russians, it is host to a far greater number of mosques (more than 1,100), their construction largely bankrolled in the 1990s by a political elite that pursued an aggressive sovereignty campaign, than churches (fewer than 300). In fact, Tatarstan, in spite of the titular Tatars’ comparatively low level of religious observance, by a wide margin claims a greater number of officially registered mosques (both as a gross total and as a ratio of its Muslim population) than any other Muslim-majority region of Russia. Drawing on two sets of data—one on the ethno-national structure of Tatarstan at the district (raion) level, the other a database containing separates lists of all officially registered mosques and Orthodox churches in the republic—I conduct Geographic Information Systems-enabled analysis to show the spatial distribution of mosques vs. churches and their correlation to the spatial distribution of Muslims vs. Orthodox Christians in the republic.

 

Key Words: Territoriality, Tatarstan, mosques, churches, Islam, Orthodox Christianity, spatial analysis.

 

Introduction

 

In this paper I analyze the territoriality of religious temples in contemporary Tatarstan, a semi-autonomous republic of the Russian Federation that is populated in roughly even numbers by Sunni Muslim Tatars and Orthodox Christian Russians.^[1] I quantitatively survey the spatial distribution of mosques vs. churches in the region and their correlation with demographic indicators. Most important in a region, and country, where religious affiliation highly corresponds to ethno-national identity,^[2] is to discern the relationship between the location and number of mosques vs. churches and the ethnic make-up of the area, seeking to answer questions such as the following: Is there a significantly greater (or lower) number of mosques in areas home to greater (or lower) ethnic diversity? For instance, in parts of Tatarstan inhabited almost exclusively by Muslim Tatars, might the number of mosques per capita be lower? Or, conversely, in areas host to relative ethnic parity, might the number of mosques per thousand Tatars be greater?

This paper represents a part of a broader, ongoing research project in which I examine how political-territorial restructuring has influenced the character of Islamic revivalism in Tatarstan and other Muslim-majority regions of the post-Soviet realm.^[3] More specifically, I explore how and why, beginning in the early 1990s, the political and national elite of Tatarstan encouraged the development of a secular-leaning, reform-minded Islam (known as Jadidsm, from Arabic for “new way,” or alternately as Euro-Islam) that corresponded to their understanding of Tatarstan as the Tatars’ sovereign homeland, a nation-state on the Western European model.^[4] With the recentralization of the Russian Federation that has been accomplished following Vladimir Putin’s ascendance to the Kremlin, however, the political establishment of Tatarstan has shifted its support to more conservative Islamic practices deemed “traditional to Russia.” The current communication and reinforcement of an “official” Tatar Islam, above all loyal to the state (piquing the question, considering Kazan’s aggressive sovereignty campaign of the 1990s, which state?),^[5] simultaneously marginalizes Muslims in the region who adhere to more universalist conceptualizations of Islam, i.e. Wahhabism or Salafism—decried as foreign, fundamentalist, and extremist by local authorities—and alienates certain vocal segments of the Tatar national movement who, as they retain their vision of an independent Tatarstan, increasingly frame their territorial demands in an Islamist register.^[6]

Central to this paper, as well as my broader research project, is the concept of human territoriality, “a primary geographical expression of power,” according to geographer Robert Sack, who defines the term more fully as “the attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.”^[7] Sack emphasizes that territoriality is not an essential part of human behavior, unlike with animals, but rather a learned “strategy” through which power relations are reified via a threefold process of (1) classification of space, e.g. “homeland” vs. “foreign land,” “ours” vs. “not ours”; (2) communication of a sense of place, e.g. the erection of boundaries; and (3) enforcement of control, e.g. policing, surveillance.^[8] Following from this dynamic, the usefulness of territoriality as a control-oriented strategy lies in its efficiency: Power relations are depersonalized by moving attention away from individuals and to the entire extent of a bounded space. Hence, territoriality shapes group identity in its role of defining group membership, literally who is considered “in” and who is “out” of place.

In an earlier article, I examined how preferred understandings of Islam and homeland—shifting along with the territorial restructuration of post-Soviet Russia—are communicated and reinforced via the Muslim Spiritual Board of the Republic of Tatarstan (DUMRT), a centralized ecclesiastical institution charged with monitoring the activities of all mosques in the region,^[9] which in 2010 numbered more than 1,100, up from only 18 in the late perestroika era.^[10] A number of observers have commented on the remarkable growth in the number of mosques in post-Soviet Tatarstan as evidence of a singular Islamic revival that grows in intensity and complexity in the region.^[11] Left unexamined, however, is the territorial logic behind the boom in mosque construction in Tatarstan. Of the current figure, about 1,000 mosques were in operation by the end of the 1990s, when Tatarstan was widely viewed as de facto sovereign^[12], and of that number about 70 percent were in various stages of construction already by the end of 1992.^[13] This sharp spike came in spite of the fact that, aside from religious holidays—viewed as national holidays by Tatars in the context of their national revival in the early 1990s—and family events (e.g. traditional wedding ceremonies, circumcision rituals, etc.), the newly opened mosques for the most part remained empty throughout the 1990s.^[14] As my previous research suggests, the rapid construction of mosques in the wake of perestroika, financed almost exclusively by Kazan-based political authorities,^[15] should be viewed not simply as a reflection of the Tatars’ renewed religious freedoms, but more so as an act of territoriality. The rapid growth in mosques in the early 1990s can be understood as part of a campaign by Kazan’s political and national leadership to Tatarize the republic’s landscape, to communicate boundaries in line with the vision of Tatarstan as the Tatars’ namesake nation-state, and thereby articulate more sharply what geographer Anssi Paasi terms the “symbolic shape” of territory.^[16] As a comparison, fewer than 200 Orthodox churches—less than one-six the number of mosques—have been restored or constructed in the region.

The aim of this paper is to complement my previous narrative-based approach with an approach based on quantitative spatial analysis to examine the territoriality of mosque construction. Approaching this question quantitatively is important because, as human territoriality is a controlled-based strategy, the patterns and relationships that emerge through spatial-statistical analysis offer the potential to bring to the surface previously unrecognized intentions of the political elite of Tatarstan who bankrolled the region’s mosque construction. The geographic Information Systems (GIS)-enabled spatial-statistical analysis in this paper primarily draws on two data sets. First is a 2009 database of Muslim and Orthodox organizations/communities (prikhody), i.e. mosques and churches, which I obtained from Tatarstan’s Council for Religious Affairs (CRA). Second is a 2004 database titled “National Structure of the Population of the Republic of Tatarstan,” which I obtained from the State Statistics Committee of the Republic of Tatarstan.^[17]

 

The Social Scientific Study of Religious Temples

 

Academic geographers and other social scientists have studied the significance of religious temples. An early, well-known contribution to this literature is David Harvey’s examination of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Paris and the manner in which it has contributed to French national consciousness while covering over a history of class-based conflict.^[18] The construction (or reconstruction, as the case may be) of religious structures in post-Soviet Russia, in light of its recent history of militant atheism, has attracted considerable scholarly attention. For example, Dmitri Sidorov studies the resurrection of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow as part of the country’s post-socialist nation (re)building.^[19] Political scientist Kate Graney’s analysis of the Kazan Kremlin, where one of Europe’s largest mosques— its construction completed in 2005—shares a common, highly symbolic space with a sixteenth-century Orthodox cathedral, is particularly relevant to my research.^[20] She interprets this landscape, with the two temples holding prominent positions side by side within the Kremlin, as a being framed as a “concrete reminder of the Russian Federation’s essentially multi-ethnic, multicultural nature.”^[21] In the context of contemporary Istanbul, geographer Amy Mills investigates a neighborhood deep in the process of gentrification to illustrate how representations of an Armenian church and a synagogue, although obscuring a violent history of minority persecution, are today narrated as evidence of the Turkish nation’s cosmopolitanism and multicultural tolerance.^[22] Common to these and other high-resolution, narrative-based studies^[23] is a focus on the manipulations of political elites that are often involved with the construction and/or reconstruction of prominent religious structures and the (often contested) relationship to group identity.

Other scholars have gone beyond single-case studies in the attempt to formulate generalizations on the locational aspects of religious structures and their significance in multi-confessional contexts. For example, geographer Chad Emmett, drawing on several case studies in various geographic and historical contexts, analyzes how the siting of mosques and churches can provide insight into the degree of tolerance or intolerance in a given society.^[24] Likewise drawing on multiple case studies, anthropologist Robert Hayden sets forth to challenge what he characterizes as the “simplistic assumptions” that the coexistence of temples belonging to different faiths is an indicator of pro-pluralist tolerance. Instead, he develops the concept of “antagonistic tolerance,” contending that “coexistence may be a matter or competition between members of different groups manifesting the negative definition of tolerance as passive noninterference and premised on a lack of ability of either group to overcome the other.”^[25] Hayden in particular deserves recognition for debating basic questions of “tolerance” vs. “intolerance” in places host to religious diversity. However, his analysis not only bears strong traces of essentialism, but also is redolent of narrative-based, micro-scale analysis in at least one aspect: He relies on single-site cases, although collected from various geographical and historical contexts and examined comparatively, rather than investigating (in a quantitative manner) broader geographical patterns of coexistence and/or exclusion.

 

Tatarstan in Comparison

 

Among Russia’s seven Muslim-majority regions, Tatarstan is home to the third-largest ethnic Muslim population, numbering just over two million (see Table 1). Unlike Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia in the North Caucasus, where populations almost entirely identify with Islam, Tatarstan’s ethnic Muslim population forms only a slight majority (54 percent), with ethnic Russians (nearly 40 percent of the republic’s population) and other traditionally Orthodox Christian ethnic groups accounting for virtually all of the remainder. Tatarstan is similar to neighboring Bashkortostan is this regard, as well as in total number of ethnic Muslims; however, unlike in Bashkortostan, where the umma (community of Islamic believers) is split between Bashkirs (51 percent of the republic’s Muslim population) and Tatars (45 percent), Tatarstan’s Muslim population is comprised almost exclusively of Tatars, the republic’s titular ethno-national group. In this manner, Islam in Tatarstan is closely associated, almost synonymous, with Tatarness, and vice versa, as has historically been the case in the region.^[26]

 

TABLE 1: Comparison of Muslim-majority regions of Russian Federation

 

 

Data compiled from the 2002 All-Russian Census of Population; R.A. Silant’ev, Islam v Sovremennoi Rossii. Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Algoritm, 2008); http://tatarstan.ru/eng/about/religion.htm; and http://islamio.ru/

 

In part as a result of having been brought into the Russian Empire much earlier than the peoples of the North Caucasus, Volga-area Muslims have been subjected to a greater degree to the forces of modernization, attested to by higher rates of industrialization and urbanization, as well as lower birth rates, etc.^[27] In line with modernization theory, previous research indicates that Muslims of the Middle Volga Basin are significantly less active in their religious beliefs and commitments than their counterparts in Russia’s far south. For example, Lehmann presents survey data illustrating that, whereas Muslims in Chechnya and Dagestan actively practiced their faith at rates of 71 percent and 51 percent, respectively, only 21 percent of Tatarstan’s titular group were active in their religiosity; for Bashkortostan, the figure stood at 17 percent.^[28] Whereas only 9 percent of Dagestan’s Muslims self-identified as “atheists,” and no Chechens claimed unbelief, 30 percent of the titular groups in both Bashkortostan and Tatarstan described themselves as “atheists.”^[29] Focusing on the Tatars of Tatarstan, Musina’s examination confirms that “only a very small number” of the republic’s Muslims are observant of even the most basic tenants of Islam; for instance, she cites survey data from the early 1990s revealing that only 8.3 percent of urban Tatars of Tatarstan performed even home prayer.^[30]

These basic contours of active religiosity among Russia’s Muslim groups are not matched by tallies of officially registered Muslim communities (i.e. mosques). Tatarstan, where religious observance is comparatively low, by a large margin registers the greatest number of Muslim communities, several hundred greater than comparatively highly religious Dagestan. Tatarstan is also the leader in the number of officially registered Muslim communities as a ratio to population, with .55 mosques for every 1,000 Muslims; Karachai-Cherkessia, with only about one-eighth of the population of Tatarstan, comes in a distant second place, with a ratio of .37 mosques per 1,000 Muslims. Observers generally agree that official mosque counts for Dagestan, Chechnya, and Ingushetia do not reflect reality. Silant’ev, for example, puts the number of mosques in Dagestan “at a minimum three times higher” than the official figure, a discrepancy in part reflective of the growing popularity of Wahhabism, Salafism, and other forms of the religion unwelcome by regional authorities intent on protecting only Islam considered “traditional” to the area.^[31] He also estimates 450 to 500 mosques operate in Chechnya,^[32] while the “real number of Muslim communities is at least two times greater” than the official figure in Ingushetia.^[33] With these readjusted figures, Dagestan would surpass Tatarstan, in both gross and (although marginally) ratio terms, although Chechnya and Ingushetia would not. Perhaps more striking, though, is the comparison to neighboring Bashkortostan, where Muslims are roughly equal in number, they comprise an almost exact proportion of the population, and they traditionally follow the same type of Islam as followed in Tatarstan. The main difference, again, is that Tatarstan’s umma is mono-ethnic, while Bashkortostan’s Muslim population is divided between Bashkirs and Tatars. Nonetheless, in spite of the similarity of these profiles, Tatarstan is home to greater than twice as many officially registered Muslim communities.

 

Data Overview: Description and Issues

 

Analysis in this paper draws on two data sets. The first, obtained in October 2009 from Council for Religious Affairs (CRA) of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Tatarstan in Kazan, is comprised of two separate lists of all officially registered Muslim and Orthodox Christian organizations/communities (prikhody) in Tatarstan. This data presents some challenges in conducting subsequent analysis. The first challenge arises due to the diverging geographic-administrative levels at which they were collected. For officially registered Orthodox Christian communities, precise locational information is given; each is listed by district (raion), as well as city (gorod), settlement/town (posiolok), or village (selo). For officially registered Muslim communities, however, data is presented at the administrative level set by the Muslim Spiritual Board of the Republic of Tatarstan (DUMRT), consisting of 45 regional units (called mukhtasibaty) that for the most part replicate the republic’s political districts (raiony) (see Figure 1). Of the 45 mukhtasibaty, 43 are sub-regions of Tatarstan and the remaining are the republic’s two largest cities, Kazan (population 1.1 million) and Naberezhnye Chelny (population .5 million) (see map below). A problem with this data is that, beyond classification of which administrative district each mosque belongs, there is no further locational information, i.e. no exact city, settlement/town, or village is given. In light of these scalar issues, it was necessary to conduct analysis at the administrative district (mukhtasibat) level set by DUMRT, which, again, is largely coterminous with the political districts (raiony) of the republic.

 

 

A second issue connected with the database on religious communities is the question of classification and counting. The classification of a Muslim organization/community (prikhod) is fairly straightforward: Each individual mosque is generally classified and registered as a separate community. However, even here, there appears to be a discrepancy. The list of Muslim communities for each of DUMRT’s administrative district (mukhtasibat) obtained from the CRA totals 1,247 mosques, yet an addendum on the document states that, as of October 2009, only 1,098 Muslim organizations were officially registered with the state agency.^[34] For officially registered Orthodox Christian organizations, the situation is more complex. The total of 291 organizations listed in the database obtained from CRA, in addition to “cathedral” (sobor) and “church” (tserkov’), also includes organization/community classes such as “monastery” (monastyr’), “chapel” (chasovnia), “hermitage” (pustyn’), and even “wellspring” (istochnik). Moreover, multiple objects of individual monasteries are each classified as separate religious organizations; for example, a single monastery in the Zelenodolskiy district is classified as having seven separation religious communities/organizations, including two cathedrals, four churches, and the monastery itself. An attempt to create a semblance of parity between Tatarstan’s two main faiths, this case of organizational inflation likely comes as a result of widespread complaints, beginning in the latter part of the 1990s, of the Kazan-based government heavily favoring the construction/reconstruction of mosques while neglecting Orthodox religious structures and compounded by the overriding tendency of political-territorial recentralization of the Russian Federation in the Putin era.^[35] In spite of these discrepancies, analysis is based on the full list of organizations provided for each religion in the Tatarstan (for Muslim communities, n = 1,247; for Orthodox Christian communities, n = 291).

The second database upon which analysis is conducted is a 2004 publication of the State Statistics Committee of the Republic of Tatarstan titled “National Structure of the Population of the Republic of Tatarstan.” Built from the final results of the 2002 All-Russian Census of Population, the database is comprised of information on the national structure of the urban and rural population for all cities of federal significance (n = 15), each in itself comprising a district (raion),^[36] and sub-regional districts (raiony, n = 43) of Tatarstan. Total population counts for each city of federal significance and sub-region district, including separate tallies for total, urban,^[37] and rural populations, are provided for each of the republic’s eight main ethnic groups; together these ethno-national groups comprise 98.6 percent of the republic’s total population (see Table 2). Tatars (with the exclusion of Kriashens, a sub-ethnic group of the Tatars that traditionally identifies with Orthodoxy) account for nearly 99 percent of Tatarstan’s Muslims; Bashkirs, the republic’s second-largest ethnic Muslim group, make up only 0.6 percent of the population. Ethnic Russians, who are urbanized at a rate significantly higher than Tatars, account for more than 86 percent of Tatarstan’s Orthodox Christians, while Chuvash and other nationalities on the table below make up most of the remainder.

 

TABLE 2: Ethno-national groups of Tatarstan

 

 

 

In light of the scalar issues addressed above, it was necessary to aggregate data for 13 of the 15 cities (with the exclusion of Tatarstan and Naberezhnye Chelny, each counted as a separate administrative district for DUMRT) with their surrounding political districts (see Table 3). Total populations range from a high of 1.1 million (Kazan) to a low of 14,401 (Tyulyachinskiy district), with an average population of 89,984. Urban rates vary from fully urbanized (Kazan and Naberezhnye Chelny) to completely rural (16 districts post urbanization rates of zero). Having accomplished that task, I then aggregated nationality population data according to religion (Muslim vs. Orthodox), as well as urban rates for each confessional group. Finally, the number of religious communities/organizations per 1,000 Muslims vs. Orthodox Christians was calculated, as well as the difference between the two, for each of the 45 districts. In ration terms, the number of mosques ranges from a high of 2.38 per 1,000 Muslims in the purely rural Apostovskiy district to a low of 0.05 in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny. For Orthodoxy, the number of organizations range from a high of 1.41 per 1,000 Orthodox Christians to a low of 0.0 in seven largely rural districts with small Orthodox populations.^[38]

 

TABLE 3: Comparison of Muslim-majority regions of Russian Federation

 

 

 

Spatial Analysis

 

To begin with the most base-level analysis, Figure 2 and Figure 3 display the total number religious organizations against total population and the number of religious organizations per 1,000 people against urbanization levels for each district. One would reasonably expect to find the greatest number of religious organizations in the districts with the greatest populations. Indeed, the western city of Kazan is host to the greatest number of religious organizations (n = 93). However, the second most populous district, the eastern city of Naberezhnye Chelny, has a total of only 18 organizations, a figure among the lowest in the republic. The southeastern district of Bulgumulskiy, a highly urbanized area with a population among the highest in Tatarstan, also has only 18 religious communities. Instead, a crescent of three districts—Arskiy, Kukmorskiy, and Mamadyshskiy—north of the Volga and Kama rivers, each with a population of only about 50,000 and urbanization rates less than 35 percent, have the second (n =71), third (n = 62), and fourth (n = 52) highest numbers or religious communities. Zelenodolskiy (west of Kazan) and Almetevskiy (in the center of the republic’s southeast) are the only other higher-urbanized districts with a population in excess of 100,000 among the top quartile in total number of religious organizations (respectively, n = 57 and n = 48).

The number of mosques per 1,000 appears to have a high correlation to rates of urbanization. Districts with urbanization rates of 35 percent or lower have an average of 1.24 religious organizations per 1,000 people, while those with urbanization rates between 36 and 68 percent have an average of 0.82 religious organizations. Districts with an urban rate between 69 and 81 percent have an average of 0.36 religious organizations; and those with urbanization rates in excess of 82 percent have an average of 0.26 percent.

 

 

Figure 4 separates the total number of religious organizations into Muslim and Orthodox communities, i.e. mosques vs. churches, per district, while also displaying the percentage of Muslims (Tatars) for each district. The north-central and far eastern districts of the republic are overwhelmingly populated by Tatars and, consequently, host the highest numbers of Muslim communities; there are few—and, in some cases, no—Orthodox communities in these districts. The northern Tatar districts, as seen in Figure 3, are highly rural, as are the northeastern districts that are almost exclusively inhabited by Tatars. Kazan and its eastern neighbor, the more rural Laishevskiy district, which are both inhabited in almost even numbers by Muslims and Orthodox Christians, display parity in number of mosques and churches. The eastern urban belt running on the north-south axis is an area of inter-confessional diversity, with proportion of Tatars and Orthodox Christians roughly equal. However, in these areas the number of mosques is significantly greater in each of the districts.

 

 

Turning to Figure 5 and Figure 6, the number of mosques per 1,000 Muslims, again, is lowest in the districts of higher urbanization. Even in rural areas where Tatars form a minority, the number of mosques per 1,000 Muslims remains similar to figures for rural areas dominated by Tatars. This situation for Orthodox communities, however, is different. In the highly urbanized districts in the east, areas of inter-religious diversity, the number of churches per 1,000 Orthodox is similarly low. But in rural districts the number of churches per 1,000 Orthodox does not maintain a relative evenness independent of Orthodox Christians’ share of the population. In seven rural districts in Tatar-dominated north and east, there are no Orthodox churches. In the rural districts south of the Kama River, where there is relative parity between the religions, the number of churches per 1,000 Orthodox is lower than the two neighboring districts in which Orthodox form clear majorities. Across the Volga, in the rural Tetushinskiy district, Orthodox also comprise a clear majority, yet the district claims among the fewest churches per 1,000 Orthodox. In short, at least in rural districts, there appears to be more randomness in the number of churches per 1,000 Orthodox vis-à-vis the number of mosques per 1,000 Muslims.  

 

 

 

Concluding Remarks

 

The purpose of this article has been to offer a quantitative spatial analysis of mosques vs. churches and their correlations to ethno-national patterns in Tatarstan, Russia. Guiding the research and analysis is the theoretical-conceptual understanding that the construction of religious temples does not represent an objective reflection of new or renewed religiosity. Rather a rapid increase of religoius temples can be understood through the lense of human territoriality, especially in the context of an ethnically and religiously diverse post-Soviet enclave that has been center to ethno-territorial contestation. Indeed, as discussed above, the construction of some 1,000 mosques in Tatarstan in the first decade after the fall of the USSR far outstripped actual reported religiosity among the regions titular ethno-national group, and it far outpaced the (re)construction of churches for the region’s Orthodox Russians. These imbalaces should not be understood as accidental or coincidental, but, as asserted in this article, more likely constitute a broader campaign to Tatarize the ethnic republic’s landscape, communicating the primacy of Tatar ethno-national culture within the borders of Tatarstan.

Whereas previous contributions from social scientists most often have examined the spatial politics of religious structures from a textual-narrative approach, this article provides an alternative quantitative approach. Drawing on two main datasets—a 2009 database of Muslim and Orthodox organizations/communities (prikhody) and a 2004 database titled “National Structure of the Population of the Republic of Tatarstan”—I utilize GIS-enabled spatial analysis to divulge some basic correlations between the spatial patterning of religious temples and ethno-national distributions. This paper provides a model for future research in other parts of the post-Soviet realm, where the posited revival of religion has been accompanied by rapid increases of construction of mosques, churches, and other religious structures, yet has proceeded with a spatial and temporal unevenness. Quantitative analysis in this experimental paper is comprised of descriptive statistics. Future research could take this model a step further in the direction of inferential spatial statistics.