The number of mosques has gone up by hundreds with the authorities in Tatarstan, Russia's mostly Muslim republic on the Volga, looking favourably on - but they stand empty while the youngsters seek spiritual identity with forbidden radical sects.
After decades of Soviet atheism, Islam has found its rebirth a series of difficult pangs in this central Russian republic.
"The rebirth of Islam is mostly material, focusing on construction of mosques that now top 1,000 as compared to 18 in the Soviet era," said Valiulla Yakupov, the first deputy of Tatarstan's chief mufti.
"Only one to two percent of Tatarstan's Muslims visit the mosque regularly and only five percent do the namaz prayer five times a day. But there is a psychological quirk and 90 percent consider themselves believers," he added.
"People don't go to mosques because the imams are poorly educated and have one answer to every question - go pray five times a day. What is it that people can learn?" charged Rafail Khakimov, an advisor to Tatarstan's president.
Yakupov said the majority of imams in Tatarstan were "not up to the task."
Most of the Muslim clerics here studied in the Soviet era at a school in Bukhara in Uzbekistan that was heavily influenced, if not strictly controlled, by the official Soviet atheist ideology.
Others went after the Soviet Union's fall to train in Saudi Arabia, "where the Scriptures are forbidden and where they have a vision of Islam that is totally inappropriate for Tatarstan that has almost as many Christians as Muslims," Yakupov explained.
The Tatar leadership meanwhile published the works of Tatarstan's reformist theologians and would propagate a model of "European Islam" adapted to the era of globalisation, Khakimov said.
Once a Communist, President Mintimer Shaimiyev had put religion at the service of his political aims, but has paid dangerously little attention to the growth of extremist sects in the republic, his critics say.
"Religion has allied with Tatarstan's authorities in the 1990s to justify separatist aspirations and inspire patience and veneration of the leaders in the believers," explained Irek Murtazin, politologist and Shaimiyev's former spokesman.
"Power and religion have fused together. And the young that are interested in religion are turned off by this Islam imposed from the top," he added.
The authorities which maintain a tight grip on the mosques idealise the situation and close their eyes to the problem of radical groups, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily's reporter Vera Postnova estimated.
Tatarstan's Deputy Interior Minister Rinat Timirzyanov warned in March against the spread of "clandestine radical groups that prepare attacks."
It is those groups that are held responsible for regular attacks on high-voltage electricity lines or gas pipelines in Tatarstan, religious and law enforcement sources said.
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