Five years on from the violence that engulfed Dagestan in the late 2000s, the mountain village of Gubden is still associated with one of the most fearless units of the Caucasus Emirate, an umbrella terrorist group that aims to expel Russian power from the North Caucasus and transform the region into a sharia state. But Gubden, just south of the republic’s capital Makhachkala, has been quiet since 2011— not a single villager has joined the militant underground in the past few years.
However, many of the civic activists involved in countering radicalism in the region are registered on police lists as ‘Wahhabists’. Members of Salafi mosques end up on these lists after official Islamic organisations report them to the authorities, and this extrajudicial practice of registering ‘at risk’ members of the community can have serious legal consequences. These citizens, declared unreliable by the authorities, often find themselves in a legal ‘grey area’.
Religious revolution
‘Here’s Gurbuki, we’ll see Gubden in a moment,’ says Magomed Taimazov, a businessman, as we approach his native village. Turning the corner, Gubden appears before us—a big grey mass amidst the green hills.
