Soviet Muslims Storm Government Building : Ethnic strife: They are driven back in a dispute over quota and cost for pilgrimages to Mecca.

In a rare flare-up of violence inspired by Islamic militancy, hundreds of Soviet Muslims stormed government headquarters in Dagestan as they clamored for the right of all Muslims to undertake the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and receive government subsidies to help pay their way.

After police fired in the air Thursday to drive back an unruly crowd congregated in Lenin Square in the city of Makhachkala, the legislature of the mountainous territory convened in extraordinary session and imposed a 30-day state of emergency effective Friday.

Armored vehicles and soldiers were reported patrolling Makhachkala’s streets and the square in front of the government building after adoption of the emergency decree.

For the Kremlin leadership of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, which for more than three years has faced burgeoning nationalist movements in outlying republics, it was a sudden reminder of the potential divisiveness of religion in a society of many creeds already deeply riven by ethnic and political disputes.

According to state-run media, the causes of Thursday’s outburst in Dagestan’s capital on the Caspian Sea were government regulations limiting to 4,000 nationwide the number of Muslims who can travel this year to Mecca and establishing the price at 30,000 rubles per person--more than eight years’ earnings for the average Soviet industrial worker.

In negotiations with Dagestan government officials, the protesters demanded that the fare be cut to 3,000 rubles, or about $1,675 at the official commercial rate of exchange, the official Tass news agency reported.

Dagestan’s government demurred, noting that more than 10,000 people had signed up for the hajj --the visit to Mecca that is one of the rites of the Muslim faith--and that the cost to the state of subsidizing round-trip travel would amount to more than 30 million rubles, or $16.7 million.

Dagestan, administratively part of the Russian Federation, has been alloted 1,200 slots for residents desiring to undertake the hajj this year. The quota of 4,000 nationwide, though representing the largest projected Soviet participation since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, is minuscule when compared to the size of the country’s Muslim population, estimated at more than 45 million.

Violence in Makhachkala erupted after a 10-day protest in Lenin Square by Dagestan residents disgruntled by the quota system. According to Tass, hundreds of “Muslim believers” tried to break into a building belonging to the Council of Ministers to plead their case in person to officials but were repulsed by authorities.

A Tass report Friday blamed “hooligan groups of youths” for the disturbance that rocked the city of more than 320,000, but videotape broadcast on Soviet television clearly showed that the crowd included old men as well as young and middle-aged women in white kerchiefs, many of whom brandished fists as a sign of solidarity.

After being pushed back from the modern, stone-and-glass Council of Ministers headquarters, protesters showered rocks on local police and members of the special Interior Ministry anti-riot squad who rushed to the scene. The authorities countered with water from fire hoses.

Police also fired warning shots into the air, Tass said. According to initial Tass reports, some return fire came from the crowd.

Russian Federation television said that five people were wounded in the melee.

In negotiations with the demonstrators, Dagestan’s government pleaded a lack of financial resources. It asked the Russian Federation government, as well as central Soviet authorities, to slash the price of the Mecca pilgrimage and to boost the exchange rate to permit pilgrims to buy more foreign currency with their rubles.

Dagestan, scene of heroic but doomed resistance to Soviet power in the early 1920s, has been one of the centers of an Islamic revival that has taken place in this country in recent years, in great part because of a liberal attitude toward religion adopted by Soviet authorities under Gorbachev.

In the spring of 1989, what a local newspaper described as an “incensed crowd” stormed the seat of the official religious board in Makhachkala and arrested the local Muslim leader, or mufti, whom they said they intended to put on trial on charges of immorality and corruption.

Police arrived in time to rescue the mufti, Mahmud Gekkiev, but he was replaced in the post in January, 1990, during a congress of Muslims in the north Caucasus region.

Last year an Islamic Revival Party was founded in the Soviet Union with the prominent participation of delegates from Dagestan. Yet signs of “pan-Islamic” sentiment have been contradictory. Some of the country’s bloodiest ethnic disputes have taken place between neighboring Muslim communities--between Uzbeks and Kirghiz, for example, and between Uzbeks and Meskhetian Turks.