Mosque Closures Anger Azeris

Mosque Closures Anger Azeris

"The fact is that they don't like us because we have spent some time abroad," said Abasov, who spent some time in Central Asia. BAKU – The closure of several mosques in predominantly-Muslim Azerbaijan only a few months after a new law to monitor and control who leads prayers is drawing fire. "They closed our mosque just after the new law came in," Vidady Abasov, the muezzin of the Akhli Sunni Mosque in the city of Ganca, told the BBC News Online on Tuesday, November 3. "It made us angry. Why did they do it?" The government says the mosque has been closed for restoration, a claim refuted by Abasov. "The fact is that they don't like us because we have spent some time abroad," said Abasov, who said he had spent some time in Central Asia. "They think we are too radical." The closure of the mosque in September came two months after the parliament passed a law banning anyone who received their education abroad from leading prayers. Under the new law, the government has taken steps to monitor and control who leads prayers and religious services. It requires everyone who leads mosques to have state approval. "We have been faced with the problem of radicalism and it continues," says Hidayat Orujov, the Minister for Works with Religious Associations. "People don't want us to be another Chechnya, Dagestan or Ingushetia." The authorities announced in 2007 they had thwarted an attack on oil installations and the US and British embassies by a "radical Wahhabi group." Earlier this year, a court jailed two Lebanese for plotting to attack the Israeli embassy in Baku, linking them to Al-Qaeda. Official statistics put at 90 percent the number of Muslims in Azerbaijan, officially a secular state with a total population of 8.2 million. The US State Department has expressed concerns over the closure of mosques in predominantly-Muslim Azerbaijan. Exaggerated The government has also closed down the Abu Bakr Mosque, accusing it of radicalizing people. "There is no extremism here, and we reject the label of radical Wahhabis often put on us," insists Gamet Suleymanov, the mosque's imam. "We are Salafis, not Wahhabis." A grenade was thrown into the mosque building in 2008 killed two worshippers. The mosque congregation insists they were targeted because they are not radical enough. Imam Suleymanov warns the government that if they continue to try to prevent his community from praying in the mosque it could cause ill-feeling and spread radicalism rather than prevent it. Anar Valiyev, an independent analyst based in Baku, agrees. He believes the government is exaggerating the threat of extremism to tighten controls on religion and to restrict freedom of expression. "Definitely there were extremist organizations existing in Azerbaijan," he told the BBC. "They were mostly liquidated. And at some point the law enforcement agencies couldn't stop," he maintained. "You had public figures coming out and saying Wahhabis are terrorists and it was just to put a negative image on the whole religion." The US State Department has expressed concerns over the closure of mosques in Azerbaijan. "There were changes to the constitution that undermined religious freedom," it said in its 2009 International Religious Freedom Report. It also cited "some deterioration in the status of respect for religious freedom by the government.