RUSSIA - April 3 - Muslims Split Over Declaring Jihad.

The country's two top Muslim leaders - Supreme Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin and Chief Mufti Ravil Gainutdin - split over the question of whether to proclaim a jihad against the US. Supreme Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin, the leader of an Islamic Council claiming to represent all Russia, announces that the council's 29 Islamic departments have voted unanimously by fax to declare a holy war. The mufti announces the decision before an anti-war protest by some 2,000 students in Ufa, the largely Muslim capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan. While declaring a holy war, he does not say in detail what the council is asking ordinary Muslims to do, beyond contributing money for Iraqi war relief and weapons purchases. At the same time, the chief mufti of Russia, Ravil Gainutdin, rejects any call for a holy war "even though the situation in Iraq is deteriorating". He tells Interfax: "We must be realists. Jihad against the US has been declared by Saddam Hussein. This is enough". In an apparent reference to Tadzhuddin, Gainutdin says that religious leaders "must not engage in populism or politicking. Instead, they should pray to God that the Iraqi people's suffering end". (Gainutdin's Russian Council of Muftis controls 19 Islamic departments, fewer than Tadzhuddin, but is said to claim roughly as many adherents. The two muftis are rivals in a long-running contest for leadership of the country's Muslims and favour from the Kremlin, which has sought to consolidate the Islamic movements under a single council backed by the government. Tadzhuddin has launched an energetic campaign to create such a council and is said to have gained popular influence in recent months by taking a leading role in opposing US military action in Iraq. He has travelled to Baghdad and met twice recently with Pres. Putin, but the Kremlin has not publicly taken sides in the contest for leadership of the country's Muslims, and it is not known whom Putin favours. Gainutdin also has been a sharp critic of the war in Iraq, endorsing the Kremlin's position, and is a strong supporter of the Kremlin's referendum on March 23 on establishing a new government in the largely Muslim Republic of Chechnya, where a guerrilla war has raged for most of the last decade). The Kremlin has no comment on the declaration of jihad. But the Justice Ministry issued a statement saying that as long as the mufti was calling on Russian Muslims to offer aid and moral support to Iraqis, "there is nothing blameworthy" in the appeal. "If attempts are ever made to hire mercenaries, buy weapons and transfer them to Iraq, this is a crime", a senior ministry official told Interfax. (The number of Muslims in the country is only roughly known. Informed estimates place the figure at between 14 and 20 million, mostly in central Russia and in the south-western Caucasus Mountains region).