An update on Hadji Murad's people

Auster recently wrote an entry entitled "The Islamization of Chechnya" containing the following quotation from an article by Aymenn Jawad:

A recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), entitled "You Dress According To Their Rules," should highlight the growing need for policymakers in Moscow to counter the increasing entrenchment of sharia in Chechen society.

HRW's analysis documents extensively the enforcement of Islamic law vis-à-vis women's rights in Chechnya, as part of Chechen President Ramzan Akhmadovich Kadyrov's "Campaign for Female Virtue." In fact, Kadyrov, who was first appointed president of the Chechen Republic by the Kremlin in February 2007, has never disguised his advocacy of sharia. Soon after becoming president, he defended polygamy as part of Chechen tradition, and in 2009 he praised the male relatives of seven young women whom they shot in the head and dumped by a roadside as part of a series of honor killings. Speaking to journalists on a Friday afternoon outside a mosque in Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic, Kadyrov said that the women had "loose morals," thereby deserving death, and that "no one can tell us not to be Muslims." Even so, polygamy and honor killings are unambiguously prohibited according to Article 14 of the third chapter of the Family Code of the Russian Federation.

A key aspect of Kadyrov's drive towards sharia has been forcing women to wear the hijab. By the autumn of 2007, the Chechen president had publicly stated on television that all women working for state institutions had to wear headscarves, and that such an unwritten law should be implemented immediately. The results were soon evident as female television anchors, government officials, teachers and staff-members of the ombudsman's office began wearing headscarves to work by the end of that year. In schools and universities, where the hijab was introduced under Kadyrov as part of mandated uniforms in 2007, students who refused to wear the hijab were simply denied entry to their respective offices and academic institutions, even though no legal basis existed for this new requirement.

It's notable that the only part of the Russian Federation socially conservative and patriarchal enough to produce a president like Ramzan Akhmadovich also has a Total Fertility Rate far higher than other parts of the Russian Federation:

Total fertility rate (TFR) in Chechen republic exceeds the replacement level.

In 2008 it was 3.40 per woman at the age of 15-49.

For comparison, in the same year TFR in neighboring Republic of Dagestan was 1.95, in Republic of Ingushetia it was 1.96, in the  whole South Federal Districtit was 1.67 and in the whole Russian Federation it was 1.49.

Note I do not deny the possibility that the Chechans are taking social conservatism too far under the leadership of Kadyrov.

However, two things need to be pointed out:

1. They certainly aren't taking things too far in one direction more than the West is taking things too far in the opposite direction.

2. The Chechen way of doing things is more adaptive and natural than the current Western way of doing things.