PROF. ADEEB KHALID
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the specter of religious extremism has haunted the policy agenda as concerns Central Asia. Fears of the spread of Islamist militancy to the region and the ‘radicalization’ of its population have framed security thinking both among Western professionals and in Central Asian governments. This is highly problematic. While extremist groups do exist, the focus on extremism and militancy is nevertheless misplaced
Among Western experts, “discourses of danger” are often based on little local knowledge and involve the projection of understandings of Islam in other parts of the world onto Central Asia, disregarding the region’s own history. For the Central Asian regimes, such discourses come in handy for burnishing their secularist credentials and placing them on the right side of the global war on terror. They provide them with a common language to use with Western governments and think tanks, even if their threshold for defining extremism is extremely low.
Discourses of danger
The prevalence of these “discourses of danger” in the West is all the more ironic given that during the Cold War Islam was widely seen as an antidote to communism. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing war there brought this question to the forefront. Several books discussed the threat Islam and Muslims could pose to the Soviet state, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) thought that Muslims “could do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union.” This was, of course, the 1980s, and Muslims who posed threats to the Soviet Union were a good thing. Few now remember that jihad was a good word in Washington in the 1980s, and the Afghan Mujahideen were lauded as freedom fighters.
The US-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan led to the jihadism of today, even if the Soviet Union collapsed without its Muslim population playing any significant role in its demise. Developments since World War II, little understood by outside observers, meant that Central Asia and its inhabitants were well integrated in the Soviet Union. Indeed, in 1991, in the last year of its existence, support for the continued existence of the USSR was nowhere higher than in the Muslim-majority republics of Central Asia. Central Asians proved to be the most Soviet of all Soviet citizens.
Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the Soviet Union ceased to be, but little about contemporary Central Asia can be understood without understanding the massive transformations the region experienced in the seven decades of Soviet rule. The Soviet legacy shapes the ways in which the vast majority of Central Asians relate to Islam. Put bluntly, nation and Islam coexist in Central Asia and there is little support for extremism or the Islamization of the state. Rather, the real story is that of the persistence of secularism in the state and of secular understandings of the world among the public.
To be sure, extremist groups do exist in Central Asia. A number of different outfits appeared in Uzbekistan in the political turmoil of the last months of Soviet power and sought the implementation of what they saw as the Shariah in the country. The regime’s reaction was swift. Such groups were persecuted and most of their activists driven into exile into the stateless expanses of Afghanistan where they formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU was a homegrown product and although it developed close links with al-Qaeda, its stated goal remained narrowly focused on Uzbekistan: To overthrow the regime of President Islam Karimov and to replace it with an Islamic state.
The IMU rose to global prominence in 1999 when it made an armed incursion into Kyrgyzstan in the hope of marching into Uzbekistan. The insurgents did not succeed and although they returned the next year, they eventually retreated to the IMU base in Afghanistan. The IMU was largely destroyed in the US bombing campaign in the aftermath of Sept. 11, but its remnants survive in Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal areas and play a part in the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan. (The Afghan jihad thus has come full circle, with its ostensible beneficiaries now waging war on Pakistan, one of its main benefactors.) Finally, in the last couple of years, Uzbek (and Tajik) volunteers have appeared in Syria and they also operate in the so-called Islamic State. There is also a sizable Uzbek presence in the international Islamist militant cyberscape.
Central Asia has also witnessed episodes of Islamist violence. Twin bombings in Tashkent in February 1999 were the trigger for the Uzbek state’s repression of all forms of extremism. Another series of seemingly connected bomb attacks in Uzbekistan 2004 was claimed by an organization called Islomiy Jihod (Islamic Jihad). In 2011, Kazakhstan experienced a number of violent episodes in several different cities. There is also the continuing success of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the international Islamist organization that hopes to establish a caliphate through nonviolent mobilization, in recruiting members across Central Asia. Taken together, these groups represent a sizable array of Islamist activity in the region.
Yet, a focus only on such groups and their actions can hide from view the plain fact that for the vast majority of Central Asians extremism has little appeal. A number of ethnographic studies make clear that the notion that the affairs of God and of the state can (and should) be separated has considerable traction among the Muslim populations of Central Asia. For many people, the operative term is “Muslimness” (musïlmanshïlïq in Kazakh, musulmonchilik in Uzbek), a communal identity in which being Muslim is predicated on a certain set of cultural and behavioral patterns in which faith and ritual observance are not the central features.
The region’s Sufi heritage also plays a part (even though chains of Sufi initiation were largely destroyed in the soviet period). The anthropologist Maria Louw reports that she often heard the Naqshbandi aphorism, “The heart with God, the hand at work,” quoted to her by people in Uzbekistan during her field research. Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, working in Xorazm province in northern Uzbekistan, makes the even stronger point that for most of the people she met during her fieldwork, Islam resided in domestic rituals, shrine visitation and healing. Most assumed the absence of religion from public life to be normal and natural. The same is borne out by opinion surveys. Given the less than open political atmosphere in the region, these surveys are problematic, but they nevertheless do tell us something. It is clear from them that Central Asian attitudes differ from those in other parts of the Muslim world. A Pew survey from 2012, for example, found Central Asians to have low levels of support for making the Shariah the law of the land or giving religious courts jurisdiction over family life and property disputes.
The Soviet legacy
To understand why this is so, we need to turn to Central Asia’s experience under Soviet rule. The Soviet period was both intensely destructive and highly productive. It destroyed much of the infrastructure of Islam in a series of antireligious campaigns in the 1930s, which pushed Islam out of the public sphere and greatly shrunk the amount of religious knowledge present in Central Asia. Yet, Soviet policies also produced an educated and mobilized populace deeply invested in ethno-national identities. These national identities, mainly crystallized during the later Soviet period, could accommodate Islam as an aspect of national identity and heritage. As a result, Islam, nation and tradition came to coexist happily in the region.
The antireligious campaigns were devastating. No state has left Islam alone in the modern age. In Turkey, the early republic also attacked the authority of Islamic elites and pushed back against the influence of the ulama in the life of the country. It banned Sufi orders (tarikats), put restrictions on religious garb and effectively nationalized mosques, turning imams into servants of the state. The Soviet regime was, however, in a completely different class. It sought nothing less than to extirpate religion from the world in its quest for a fully rationalist enlightenment. This meant eradicating religion from people’s minds as well as destroying the institutions that supported it. Beginning in 1927, qadi courts were abolished, waqf property nationalized and madrasas shut down. Mosques, shrines and Sufi lodges were closed by the hundred (some destroyed, most turned to other uses and a few saved as “architectural monuments”) and countless ulama were sent to labor camps as enemies of the people
. The campaign continued, with some twists and turns, until 1941, when the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union put a halt to it. After that, the Soviet state contented itself with a combination of regulation and repression -- without, however, resorting to the violence of the 1930s. In 1943, it even allowed the establishment of the Spiritual Directorate for the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (known as SADUM after its Russian initials) with the remit of operating a limited number of mosques and eventually, running two institutions of Islamic learning. This “official Islam” was tolerated and at times made to serve Soviet foreign policy goals in later decades.
But if the violence eased, none of the infrastructure destroyed in the 1930s was rebuilt. For six decades, then, until the end of the Gorbachev period, Muslim societies in Central Asia existed with almost no formal religious education, no public presence of Islam, no religious publishing and very little contact with the rest of the Muslim world. There were plenty of unofficial, semi-clandestine mosques, but in the absence of generally accessible religious education the amount of Islamic knowledge available locally was vastly circumscribed. Official disapproval of Islamic observance meant that Islam was completely pushed out of public life. It did not disappear, but it was localized and rendered synonymous with tradition.
Yet, the Soviet experience was not only one of destruction. The Soviet state recognized nationality as a crucial (and politically relevant) part of its citizens’ identity. In its view, the Soviet Union was built on the basis of the friendship of peoples, each of whom had a long and glorious past and a host of defining national characteristics. There were limits, of course, but the celebration of individual national identities was absolutely legitimate and often carried out in organizations (institutes of historical, ethnographic and folkloric research, museum, film, novels, literary journals) funded by the Soviet state. The Soviet state, in fact, presided over the world’s greatest experiment in nation building. Central Asia was no exception. In the post-Stalin period particularly, national identities crystallized in each of the republics of the region and were widely internalized by their citizens. This sense of national identity and solidarity provides post-Soviet regimes with a deep well of legitimacy, which they deploy eagerly.
The post-Soviet Islamic revival
This was the situation when the Soviet order began to collapse in the late 1980s. The crumbling of the moral authority of communism was accompanied by a stunning religious revival across the lands of the Soviet Union, and Central Asia again was no exception. As the walls came tumbling down, links with the rest of the Muslim world were reestablished. Muslims of many different stripes appeared in the region to propagate their versions of Islam. Devotees of the Tablighi Jamaat from Pakistan rubbed shoulders with followers of Fethullah Gülen from Turkey and Sufis from everywhere. Saudi Arabia funded new publishing ventures. Mosques were reopened or rebuilt, while many new ones began to be constructed, and Islamic education reappeared. As observance of ritual and Islamic injunctions increased and Islamic knowledge returned, Islam reappeared in the region’s public life.
This revival is not uniform across Central Asia. A sizable part of the urban population continues to have little interest in religion and there are marked differences across regions. The Fergana Valley, divided between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, has the highest rates of religious observance and is the epicenter of piety and religious conservatism. Other regions of Uzbekistan, such as Xorazm, and large parts of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan offer a sharp contrast. Nevertheless, the religious situation in Central Asia today is very different from what it was 30 years ago.
This religious revival made the region’s political elites extremely uncomfortable. Soviet-era political elites survived in power in Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as indigenous Communists reinvented themselves as national leaders, using the language validated by Soviet nationalities policy itself. The presidents of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have been in power since 1990, that of Tajikistan since 1992. The presidents have changed in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, but there has been little structural change in the elites that run those countries. These elites retain the Soviet suspicion of religion even as they are forced to deal with the rising piety of their citizens. At the same time, they base their legitimacy on the nation and celebrate its cultural heritage. The result is a complex but quite logical position toward Islam. The regimes valorize Islam as part of each nation’s cultural heritage and invoke the moral and ethical values stemming from it, but they also seek to define Islam as properly national.
They make no bones about their hostility to the wrong kind of Islam, one that makes political claims of any sort, or indeed one whose expression the regimes themselves do not control. In Uzbekistan, for instance, the state honors the “golden heritage” (oltin meros) of the nation that includes the work of great Islamic scholars of the past such as the Imams al-Bukhari and al-Tirmidhi, as well as the local tradition of Hanafi Islam and Sufism. These are all considered national and celebrated as an example of the humanist traditions of the region. In Turkmenistan, the notion of “Turkmenness” (Türkmençilik) -- raised to the level of an official doctrine -- defines the parameters of a national Islam. All other expressions of Islam, however, are deemed to be alien to the traditions of the nation, foreign imports that threaten to derail the nation from the path to progress. Such forms of Islam have to be fought mercilessly.
After independence in 1991, the regimes used Soviet-era methods to manage Islam. SADUM did not survive the breakup of the Soviet Union, but each new state established its own national successor to SADUM that came to define officially acceptable Islam. All “unofficial” Islam was suspect and prosecuted. Undesirable mosques were closed, obstreperous religious figures were arrested (or they disappeared) and Islamic education and publishing tightly controlled.
Then came Sept. 11. It made antiterrorism the common currency of international security discourse and allowed Central Asian regimes to use the language of antiterrorism against all unauthorized Islamic activity. Another effect of Sept. 11 was a seismic geopolitical shift that saw the US acquiring the use of air force bases in former Soviet territory, including one in Kyrgyzstan and two in Uzbekistan. The irony of the US using Soviet-built air bases to conduct its war on groups that were a direct result of the American jihad against the Soviets proved too subtle for most people to notice, but the new political alignments made possible by it strengthened the resolve of Central Asian governments to control Islam and to crack down on all unauthorized expressions of it. The government of Uzbekistan has taken the harshest stance on this, but Kazakhstan and Tajikistan have also moved in that direction in recent years.
In 2011, the government of Kazakhstan banned prayer rooms and worship in state institutions. In 2010, the government of Tajikistan ordered all its citizens studying in religious institutions abroad (mostly in Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) to return home. A campaign of closing unofficial mosques culminated in a 2011 law “on parental responsibility for educating and raising children” that outlawed mosque attendance by children under the age of 18. Parental responsibility for children now extends to ensuring that they do not skip school to go to prayer at a mosque. The law is perhaps inherently unenforceable but it gives a clear indication of the Tajik state’s attitude toward Islam.
Islam in Central Asia today
In all of this, it is crucial to make a number of distinctions. The increased piety and levels of observance of Islam are not the same as radicalization. Rather, they betoken a rising cultural conservatism that is hardly unique to Central Asia and in which the regimes also participate through their celebration of traditional “national” values. Nor are all unofficial groups political, let alone radical. Since the governments outlaw all groups not under the supervision of official religious directorates, many religious groups are by definition illegal. It is in the interest of the regimes to cast all underground groups as extremist and anti-state, but such claims should be examined critically. Unofficial groups include Sufi groupings or practicing Muslims who do not follow the officially prescribed Hanafi modes of worship. Nor should we assume that local Islamic groups are globally networked; there is reason to doubt whether the local branches of Hizb-ut-Tahrir are part of a seamless international organization and not locally oriented phenomena.
It is also crucial to remember that almost a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia still stands outside of most networks that connect other Muslim countries to each other. Whether it is patterns of travel or labor migration, television access, language use, modern popular culture or the transport grid, Central Asian states are far more closely tied to Russia than to Turkey or any part of the Middle East. The hopes unleashed in Turkey by the collapse of the Soviet Union that Central Asia would become part of a Turkic bloc with a common alphabet and a common foreign policy very quickly ran aground on the shoals of reality. Seventy years of Soviet rule had shaped Central Asia in crucial ways.
Today, Turkey has a presence in most of the Central Asian states (although its relations with Uzbekistan, the most populous of the five, have always been frosty), but it seldom provides a model for political action.
For all the fears that Central Asian states have of religious extremism, the real problems of the region lie elsewhere -- in the weak economies of its states (Kazakhstan being the major exception), in the kleptocratic nature of many of the regimes and in the curse of cotton monoculture that especially afflicts Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. All Central Asian states, with the significant exception of Kazakhstan, have experienced massive labor migrations as young men go off to find jobs that do not exist at home.
Their destinations tell us a great deal about both the economic realities and the way contemporary Central Asians imagine the world. The vast bulk of the migrants go north to Kazakhstan and Russia, to work in those countries’ construction and service sectors. The scale of the migration is massive, for it encompasses as much as 10 percent of the population of Tajikistan, mostly men, and remittances account for perhaps up to half the country’s GDP. The situation is only a little less drastic in Kyrgyzstan (where remittances account for 15 percent of the GDP) and Uzbekistan. The dismal state of Central Asian economies provides many push factors, but the pull comes overwhelmingly from the former Soviet lands. Very few migrants go south to the Middle East. The labor migration thus recreates links with former Soviet space under new conditions.
In fact, the conditions in which the migrants find themselves may cause radicalization more than anything at home. Central Asian migrants in Russian face poor living conditions, discrimination and the hostility of local society, all of which are conducive to reconsiderations of identity and the discovery of religion. At the same time, the discourse of the Russian media on world affairs has much in common with the narrative of US culpability for all the world’s wrongs that Islamist militants espouse. It is perhaps not surprising that many, if not most, Central Asians fighting in Syria and Iraq are recruited from the labor migration in Russia.
In the region itself, we should remember, Islam or Islamist radicalism have played no role in the two overthrows of presidents in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010 or in the brutal ethnic riots that broke out in that country’s south in June 2010. The latter episode, the single most violent episode in Central Asia since the Andijan massacre of May 2005 (when Uzbek security forces answered an antigovernment demonstration with a massive assault), was in fact a depressing reminder of the strength of ethno-national discourses in post-Soviet space -- it was the post-Soviet language of nation and national rights rather than that of Islam that provided the easiest channel for the mobilization of discontent.
Religious extremism exists in Central Asia, but the far more mundane story of the persistence of the Soviet legacy is more important. This encompasses both the salience of ethno-national identities that the incumbent regimes rely on and continuing attitudes that see religion and the state as discrete entities. More important (and perhaps more dangerous) are the discourses of danger that exaggerate the threat of extremism and serve as a cover for the authoritarianism of local regimes.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the specter of religious extremism has haunted the policy agenda as concerns Central Asia. Fears of the spread of Islamist militancy to the region and the ‘radicalization’ of its population have framed security thinking both among Western professionals and in Central Asian governments. This is highly problematic. While extremist groups do exist, the focus on extremism and militancy is nevertheless misplaced
Among Western experts, “discourses of danger” are often based on little local knowledge and involve the projection of understandings of Islam in other parts of the world onto Central Asia, disregarding the region’s own history. For the Central Asian regimes, such discourses come in handy for burnishing their secularist credentials and placing them on the right side of the global war on terror. They provide them with a common language to use with Western governments and think tanks, even if their threshold for defining extremism is extremely low.
Discourses of danger
The prevalence of these “discourses of danger” in the West is all the more ironic given that during the Cold War Islam was widely seen as an antidote to communism. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ensuing war there brought this question to the forefront. Several books discussed the threat Islam and Muslims could pose to the Soviet state, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) thought that Muslims “could do a lot of damage to the Soviet Union.” This was, of course, the 1980s, and Muslims who posed threats to the Soviet Union were a good thing. Few now remember that jihad was a good word in Washington in the 1980s, and the Afghan Mujahideen were lauded as freedom fighters.
The US-sponsored jihad in Afghanistan led to the jihadism of today, even if the Soviet Union collapsed without its Muslim population playing any significant role in its demise. Developments since World War II, little understood by outside observers, meant that Central Asia and its inhabitants were well integrated in the Soviet Union. Indeed, in 1991, in the last year of its existence, support for the continued existence of the USSR was nowhere higher than in the Muslim-majority republics of Central Asia. Central Asians proved to be the most Soviet of all Soviet citizens.
Almost a quarter of a century has passed since the Soviet Union ceased to be, but little about contemporary Central Asia can be understood without understanding the massive transformations the region experienced in the seven decades of Soviet rule. The Soviet legacy shapes the ways in which the vast majority of Central Asians relate to Islam. Put bluntly, nation and Islam coexist in Central Asia and there is little support for extremism or the Islamization of the state. Rather, the real story is that of the persistence of secularism in the state and of secular understandings of the world among the public.
To be sure, extremist groups do exist in Central Asia. A number of different outfits appeared in Uzbekistan in the political turmoil of the last months of Soviet power and sought the implementation of what they saw as the Shariah in the country. The regime’s reaction was swift. Such groups were persecuted and most of their activists driven into exile into the stateless expanses of Afghanistan where they formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU was a homegrown product and although it developed close links with al-Qaeda, its stated goal remained narrowly focused on Uzbekistan: To overthrow the regime of President Islam Karimov and to replace it with an Islamic state.
The IMU rose to global prominence in 1999 when it made an armed incursion into Kyrgyzstan in the hope of marching into Uzbekistan. The insurgents did not succeed and although they returned the next year, they eventually retreated to the IMU base in Afghanistan. The IMU was largely destroyed in the US bombing campaign in the aftermath of Sept. 11, but its remnants survive in Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal areas and play a part in the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan. (The Afghan jihad thus has come full circle, with its ostensible beneficiaries now waging war on Pakistan, one of its main benefactors.) Finally, in the last couple of years, Uzbek (and Tajik) volunteers have appeared in Syria and they also operate in the so-called Islamic State. There is also a sizable Uzbek presence in the international Islamist militant cyberscape.
Central Asia has also witnessed episodes of Islamist violence. Twin bombings in Tashkent in February 1999 were the trigger for the Uzbek state’s repression of all forms of extremism. Another series of seemingly connected bomb attacks in Uzbekistan 2004 was claimed by an organization called Islomiy Jihod (Islamic Jihad). In 2011, Kazakhstan experienced a number of violent episodes in several different cities. There is also the continuing success of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the international Islamist organization that hopes to establish a caliphate through nonviolent mobilization, in recruiting members across Central Asia. Taken together, these groups represent a sizable array of Islamist activity in the region.
Yet, a focus only on such groups and their actions can hide from view the plain fact that for the vast majority of Central Asians extremism has little appeal. A number of ethnographic studies make clear that the notion that the affairs of God and of the state can (and should) be separated has considerable traction among the Muslim populations of Central Asia. For many people, the operative term is “Muslimness” (musïlmanshïlïq in Kazakh, musulmonchilik in Uzbek), a communal identity in which being Muslim is predicated on a certain set of cultural and behavioral patterns in which faith and ritual observance are not the central features.
The region’s Sufi heritage also plays a part (even though chains of Sufi initiation were largely destroyed in the soviet period). The anthropologist Maria Louw reports that she often heard the Naqshbandi aphorism, “The heart with God, the hand at work,” quoted to her by people in Uzbekistan during her field research. Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, working in Xorazm province in northern Uzbekistan, makes the even stronger point that for most of the people she met during her fieldwork, Islam resided in domestic rituals, shrine visitation and healing. Most assumed the absence of religion from public life to be normal and natural. The same is borne out by opinion surveys. Given the less than open political atmosphere in the region, these surveys are problematic, but they nevertheless do tell us something. It is clear from them that Central Asian attitudes differ from those in other parts of the Muslim world. A Pew survey from 2012, for example, found Central Asians to have low levels of support for making the Shariah the law of the land or giving religious courts jurisdiction over family life and property disputes.
The Soviet legacy
To understand why this is so, we need to turn to Central Asia’s experience under Soviet rule. The Soviet period was both intensely destructive and highly productive. It destroyed much of the infrastructure of Islam in a series of antireligious campaigns in the 1930s, which pushed Islam out of the public sphere and greatly shrunk the amount of religious knowledge present in Central Asia. Yet, Soviet policies also produced an educated and mobilized populace deeply invested in ethno-national identities. These national identities, mainly crystallized during the later Soviet period, could accommodate Islam as an aspect of national identity and heritage. As a result, Islam, nation and tradition came to coexist happily in the region.
The antireligious campaigns were devastating. No state has left Islam alone in the modern age. In Turkey, the early republic also attacked the authority of Islamic elites and pushed back against the influence of the ulama in the life of the country. It banned Sufi orders (tarikats), put restrictions on religious garb and effectively nationalized mosques, turning imams into servants of the state. The Soviet regime was, however, in a completely different class. It sought nothing less than to extirpate religion from the world in its quest for a fully rationalist enlightenment. This meant eradicating religion from people’s minds as well as destroying the institutions that supported it. Beginning in 1927, qadi courts were abolished, waqf property nationalized and madrasas shut down. Mosques, shrines and Sufi lodges were closed by the hundred (some destroyed, most turned to other uses and a few saved as “architectural monuments”) and countless ulama were sent to labor camps as enemies of the people
. The campaign continued, with some twists and turns, until 1941, when the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union put a halt to it. After that, the Soviet state contented itself with a combination of regulation and repression -- without, however, resorting to the violence of the 1930s. In 1943, it even allowed the establishment of the Spiritual Directorate for the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (known as SADUM after its Russian initials) with the remit of operating a limited number of mosques and eventually, running two institutions of Islamic learning. This “official Islam” was tolerated and at times made to serve Soviet foreign policy goals in later decades.
But if the violence eased, none of the infrastructure destroyed in the 1930s was rebuilt. For six decades, then, until the end of the Gorbachev period, Muslim societies in Central Asia existed with almost no formal religious education, no public presence of Islam, no religious publishing and very little contact with the rest of the Muslim world. There were plenty of unofficial, semi-clandestine mosques, but in the absence of generally accessible religious education the amount of Islamic knowledge available locally was vastly circumscribed. Official disapproval of Islamic observance meant that Islam was completely pushed out of public life. It did not disappear, but it was localized and rendered synonymous with tradition.
Yet, the Soviet experience was not only one of destruction. The Soviet state recognized nationality as a crucial (and politically relevant) part of its citizens’ identity. In its view, the Soviet Union was built on the basis of the friendship of peoples, each of whom had a long and glorious past and a host of defining national characteristics. There were limits, of course, but the celebration of individual national identities was absolutely legitimate and often carried out in organizations (institutes of historical, ethnographic and folkloric research, museum, film, novels, literary journals) funded by the Soviet state. The Soviet state, in fact, presided over the world’s greatest experiment in nation building. Central Asia was no exception. In the post-Stalin period particularly, national identities crystallized in each of the republics of the region and were widely internalized by their citizens. This sense of national identity and solidarity provides post-Soviet regimes with a deep well of legitimacy, which they deploy eagerly.
The post-Soviet Islamic revival
This was the situation when the Soviet order began to collapse in the late 1980s. The crumbling of the moral authority of communism was accompanied by a stunning religious revival across the lands of the Soviet Union, and Central Asia again was no exception. As the walls came tumbling down, links with the rest of the Muslim world were reestablished. Muslims of many different stripes appeared in the region to propagate their versions of Islam. Devotees of the Tablighi Jamaat from Pakistan rubbed shoulders with followers of Fethullah Gülen from Turkey and Sufis from everywhere. Saudi Arabia funded new publishing ventures. Mosques were reopened or rebuilt, while many new ones began to be constructed, and Islamic education reappeared. As observance of ritual and Islamic injunctions increased and Islamic knowledge returned, Islam reappeared in the region’s public life.
This revival is not uniform across Central Asia. A sizable part of the urban population continues to have little interest in religion and there are marked differences across regions. The Fergana Valley, divided between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, has the highest rates of religious observance and is the epicenter of piety and religious conservatism. Other regions of Uzbekistan, such as Xorazm, and large parts of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan offer a sharp contrast. Nevertheless, the religious situation in Central Asia today is very different from what it was 30 years ago.
This religious revival made the region’s political elites extremely uncomfortable. Soviet-era political elites survived in power in Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as indigenous Communists reinvented themselves as national leaders, using the language validated by Soviet nationalities policy itself. The presidents of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have been in power since 1990, that of Tajikistan since 1992. The presidents have changed in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, but there has been little structural change in the elites that run those countries. These elites retain the Soviet suspicion of religion even as they are forced to deal with the rising piety of their citizens. At the same time, they base their legitimacy on the nation and celebrate its cultural heritage. The result is a complex but quite logical position toward Islam. The regimes valorize Islam as part of each nation’s cultural heritage and invoke the moral and ethical values stemming from it, but they also seek to define Islam as properly national.
They make no bones about their hostility to the wrong kind of Islam, one that makes political claims of any sort, or indeed one whose expression the regimes themselves do not control. In Uzbekistan, for instance, the state honors the “golden heritage” (oltin meros) of the nation that includes the work of great Islamic scholars of the past such as the Imams al-Bukhari and al-Tirmidhi, as well as the local tradition of Hanafi Islam and Sufism. These are all considered national and celebrated as an example of the humanist traditions of the region. In Turkmenistan, the notion of “Turkmenness” (Türkmençilik) -- raised to the level of an official doctrine -- defines the parameters of a national Islam. All other expressions of Islam, however, are deemed to be alien to the traditions of the nation, foreign imports that threaten to derail the nation from the path to progress. Such forms of Islam have to be fought mercilessly.
After independence in 1991, the regimes used Soviet-era methods to manage Islam. SADUM did not survive the breakup of the Soviet Union, but each new state established its own national successor to SADUM that came to define officially acceptable Islam. All “unofficial” Islam was suspect and prosecuted. Undesirable mosques were closed, obstreperous religious figures were arrested (or they disappeared) and Islamic education and publishing tightly controlled.
Then came Sept. 11. It made antiterrorism the common currency of international security discourse and allowed Central Asian regimes to use the language of antiterrorism against all unauthorized Islamic activity. Another effect of Sept. 11 was a seismic geopolitical shift that saw the US acquiring the use of air force bases in former Soviet territory, including one in Kyrgyzstan and two in Uzbekistan. The irony of the US using Soviet-built air bases to conduct its war on groups that were a direct result of the American jihad against the Soviets proved too subtle for most people to notice, but the new political alignments made possible by it strengthened the resolve of Central Asian governments to control Islam and to crack down on all unauthorized expressions of it. The government of Uzbekistan has taken the harshest stance on this, but Kazakhstan and Tajikistan have also moved in that direction in recent years.
In 2011, the government of Kazakhstan banned prayer rooms and worship in state institutions. In 2010, the government of Tajikistan ordered all its citizens studying in religious institutions abroad (mostly in Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) to return home. A campaign of closing unofficial mosques culminated in a 2011 law “on parental responsibility for educating and raising children” that outlawed mosque attendance by children under the age of 18. Parental responsibility for children now extends to ensuring that they do not skip school to go to prayer at a mosque. The law is perhaps inherently unenforceable but it gives a clear indication of the Tajik state’s attitude toward Islam.
Islam in Central Asia today
In all of this, it is crucial to make a number of distinctions. The increased piety and levels of observance of Islam are not the same as radicalization. Rather, they betoken a rising cultural conservatism that is hardly unique to Central Asia and in which the regimes also participate through their celebration of traditional “national” values. Nor are all unofficial groups political, let alone radical. Since the governments outlaw all groups not under the supervision of official religious directorates, many religious groups are by definition illegal. It is in the interest of the regimes to cast all underground groups as extremist and anti-state, but such claims should be examined critically. Unofficial groups include Sufi groupings or practicing Muslims who do not follow the officially prescribed Hanafi modes of worship. Nor should we assume that local Islamic groups are globally networked; there is reason to doubt whether the local branches of Hizb-ut-Tahrir are part of a seamless international organization and not locally oriented phenomena.
It is also crucial to remember that almost a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia still stands outside of most networks that connect other Muslim countries to each other. Whether it is patterns of travel or labor migration, television access, language use, modern popular culture or the transport grid, Central Asian states are far more closely tied to Russia than to Turkey or any part of the Middle East. The hopes unleashed in Turkey by the collapse of the Soviet Union that Central Asia would become part of a Turkic bloc with a common alphabet and a common foreign policy very quickly ran aground on the shoals of reality. Seventy years of Soviet rule had shaped Central Asia in crucial ways.
Today, Turkey has a presence in most of the Central Asian states (although its relations with Uzbekistan, the most populous of the five, have always been frosty), but it seldom provides a model for political action.
For all the fears that Central Asian states have of religious extremism, the real problems of the region lie elsewhere -- in the weak economies of its states (Kazakhstan being the major exception), in the kleptocratic nature of many of the regimes and in the curse of cotton monoculture that especially afflicts Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. All Central Asian states, with the significant exception of Kazakhstan, have experienced massive labor migrations as young men go off to find jobs that do not exist at home.
Their destinations tell us a great deal about both the economic realities and the way contemporary Central Asians imagine the world. The vast bulk of the migrants go north to Kazakhstan and Russia, to work in those countries’ construction and service sectors. The scale of the migration is massive, for it encompasses as much as 10 percent of the population of Tajikistan, mostly men, and remittances account for perhaps up to half the country’s GDP. The situation is only a little less drastic in Kyrgyzstan (where remittances account for 15 percent of the GDP) and Uzbekistan. The dismal state of Central Asian economies provides many push factors, but the pull comes overwhelmingly from the former Soviet lands. Very few migrants go south to the Middle East. The labor migration thus recreates links with former Soviet space under new conditions.
In fact, the conditions in which the migrants find themselves may cause radicalization more than anything at home. Central Asian migrants in Russian face poor living conditions, discrimination and the hostility of local society, all of which are conducive to reconsiderations of identity and the discovery of religion. At the same time, the discourse of the Russian media on world affairs has much in common with the narrative of US culpability for all the world’s wrongs that Islamist militants espouse. It is perhaps not surprising that many, if not most, Central Asians fighting in Syria and Iraq are recruited from the labor migration in Russia.
In the region itself, we should remember, Islam or Islamist radicalism have played no role in the two overthrows of presidents in Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010 or in the brutal ethnic riots that broke out in that country’s south in June 2010. The latter episode, the single most violent episode in Central Asia since the Andijan massacre of May 2005 (when Uzbek security forces answered an antigovernment demonstration with a massive assault), was in fact a depressing reminder of the strength of ethno-national discourses in post-Soviet space -- it was the post-Soviet language of nation and national rights rather than that of Islam that provided the easiest channel for the mobilization of discontent.
Religious extremism exists in Central Asia, but the far more mundane story of the persistence of the Soviet legacy is more important. This encompasses both the salience of ethno-national identities that the incumbent regimes rely on and continuing attitudes that see religion and the state as discrete entities. More important (and perhaps more dangerous) are the discourses of danger that exaggerate the threat of extremism and serve as a cover for the authoritarianism of local regimes.
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