Find Moscow on a map of Russia, trace a line south until you hit the Caucasus mountains, and you are pointing at the heart of Russia's war on terror. At the eastern end of the range lie Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, off-limits to all but the best-protected visitor. To their west is North Ossetia, a Christian region still recovering from September's massacre of hostages in the town of Beslan, where more than 330 people died, many of them children. Many foreign governments advise against any travel to the North Caucasus, and the Kremlin is hardly more encouraging.
Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said last month the entire North Caucasus region was "a breeding ground for Wahhabism" -- a puritanical type of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia and now a by-word for Islamic extremism in Russia.
"Devotees of Wahhabism, with foreign backing and against a background of social problems in the region, are becoming the main people who carry out terrorism," he told Russia's lower house of parliament.
Go further west along the mountains, and people say they are fed up with being tarred by the terrorist brush, complaining that the authorities use the word "Wahhabi" to create a convenient witch-hunt.
"During seven years of going to the mosque, I've never met a Wahhabi -- but I've seen lots of people calling other people Wahhabis," said a 23-year-old from Nalchik, capital of the region of Kabardino-Balkaria, who asked not to be named.
The region's name, like that of neighbouring Karachayevo-Cherkessia, only hints at the complex ethnic jigsaw beneath the surface.
Soviet officials created the regions in a deliberate attempt to force rival clans together and pacify them by destroying their ethnic identity. Entire peoples were also deported to Central Asia in their hundreds of thousands.
The result in Nalchik and Cherkessk, the capital of Karachayevo-Cherkessia, is a constant fear of ethnic conflict and separatism and a wariness of giving Islam free rein. Chechen violence and the Beslan bloodbath have kept those fears alive.
Islam is barely visible in Nalchik and Cherkessk. Residents drink alcohol and eat pork and there is no call to prayer -- a chant that resonates five times a day across the Muslim world.
"For 70 years they said there was no God. People of 50 and above have lived for 40 years under the Soviet Union. You can't just change people's attitudes," said Ismail-haji Bastanov, rector of the Imam Abu-Khanif Institute in Cherkessk.
"Once they took Islam away from us, people began to drink," he added. Asked if he enjoyed the odd cognac, he merely smiled.
Cherkessk's only mosque lies on the outskirts of town, almost deserted in an orchard where an old shepherd tends sheep.
Local Muslims criticise the authorities for neglecting the mosque while funding a second, new Russian Orthodox church in town. Its gold domes sit gleaming in the church garden, waiting for a crane, while the Imam himself rebuilds the mosque wall, trowel in hand.
"I don't suppose you know how to plaster a wall?," he asked.
In Nalchik, a grid of dusty streets closer to Baghdad than Moscow, there are two mosques -- but five churches. Some Muslims say they are wary of attending prayers after security forces began noting the names of those who turned up.
Security forces also drew up a list of 500 people suspected of belonging to "jamaats", or Wahhabi fighting units, which would find ample cover in the rugged terrain around Elbrus, Europe's highest mountain.
One such jamaat, calling itself "Yarmuk", posted a statement on the Chechen rebel Web site www.kavkazcenter.com in September, claiming responsibility for killing two policemen.
The statement also accused authorities of planting evidence on the bodies of two dead fighters in an attempt to link the group to a murder of a family in nearby Stavropol.
Many Nalchik Muslims say they do not back the insurgents but regard the Wahhabi list as a ploy to crack down on dissidents.
"I know a couple of guys who are on the list but they're not into violence," said a salesman at one of Nalchik's three Muslim shops, selling religious clothing, souvenirs and trinkets.
"They just dress conservatively and read the Koran and let their beards grow. That sort of thing," he said, handing over a leaflet explaining that Islam does not support terrorism.
People laughed at village meetings when told of the list of 500 Wahhabis, online Islamic newspaper IslaminKBR.com reported.
At a rowdy town hall meeting called after a spate of murders in Cherkessk, a local deputy challenged Dmitry Kozak, President Vladimir Putin's special representative in the Caucasus, to explain why so-called Wahhabis were always first in the frame.
"Who is a Wahhabi in our republic? I can't understand why officials like the interior minister keep coming on television and saying the Wahhabis around here celebrated Beslan and so on," he said to applause from a crowd of distraught relatives whose loved ones had gone missing, presumed murdered.
"Yes, there are individual Wahhabis. But there are extremists in every society," he said.
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