Islam, Islamism and political order in Central Asia.

• Author: Walker, Edward W.
• Position: Pressing Issues

Above all, the West should make every effort to not present Muslims with a perceived choice between repressive secular governments supported by the West and repressive anti-Western governments run by Islamists--in other words, between Iran and Uzbekistan, or between the Taliban and Turkmenbashi.

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Islamism is the most potent ideology of resistance in the world today. (1) It is and will remain a central security concern for Western and non-Islamist governments in majority Muslim regions, including the five Soviet successor states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). In Central Asia today, as in much of the Muslim world, nationalism, socialism and liberalism have exhausted their capacity to mobilize militant opposition to existing regimes. Only Islamism offers a credible program of social transformation and resistance to Western cultural penetration, the dislocations of modernization and repressive governments. Combined with Islamists' promise of millenarian salvation, this ensures that transnational jihadist organizations will survive, forming and reforming themselves as needed, and that they will continue to target the secular governments of Central Asia.

Thus the weakly legitimated and increasingly repressive regimes of post-Soviet Central Asia have good reason to fear acts of political violence and destabilization by Islamist militants. Nevertheless, there is little risk that Islamists will come to power in the region soon, especially now that the collapse of the Taliban means Afghanistan is no longer a safe haven. The greater risk is that Central Asia's ruling elites will use the specter of Islamism as an excuse to avoid economic and political reforms that would mitigate the conditions under which militant Islamism takes root and survives. Regional elites are apparently convinced that pressure from Western governments, particularly the United States, to respect human rights and to democratize is essentially rhetorical. They remain unimpressed by Western academics, humanitarian organizations and government officials who argue that greater political repression in the long run forces oppositionists into the Islamist camp and encourages Islamic radicalization. As a result, there has been a general convergence in the direction of authoritarianism, corruption and patrimonialism in the region, trends which, if anything, have accelerated since the war on terror was launched.

If these trends continue, an important opportunity will be lost in the effort to contain the transnational militant Islamist movement. Despite its many problems, Central Asia is a Muslim-majority region where measured pluralism is possible in the short term, and where in the longer term it is even possible that formal democracy could take root. Unlike the Middle East at the time of decolonization, Central Asia inherited from the Soviet period a generally literate population, comparatively well developed state institutions and personnel, clear and for the most part legitimate state borders and a modernized economic infrastructure. (2) Nevertheless, Central Asia's post-Soviet states may follow the path of Middle Eastern post-colonial states and adopt authoritarian practices that protect the power and privileges of corrupt elites while disenfranchising and alienating their populations. The United States and its allies must therefore balance the immediate need to secure political and military support in the region with equal attention to the promotion of measured religious tolerance, political pluralism and respect for human rights in the short run, and liberalization, democratization and an improved standard of living in the long run.

ISLAMIC BELIEFS AND PRACTICES BEFORE INDEPENDENCE

Islam arrived in Central Asia--the vast region of Turko-Persian civilization that lies to the north of today's Iran and extends from the Caspian sea in the west to China's Xianjiang province in the east--at the hands of Arab invaders at the beginning of the seventh century. (3) It was, however, embraced only gradually and variously by the Iranian and Turkic-speaking peoples of the region, becoming the dominant religion by around the ninth century. By the 10th century, Central Asia emerged as one of the great centers of Islamic learning and culture, particularly the great Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Samarkand.

The great majority of Central Asians are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school of Islamic law (madhhab), one of four such schools within Sunni Islam (the others being Shafi'i, Hanbali and Maliki). (4) Shi'a Islam predominated in most of what is today Iran and across the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan. Shi'ism was also embraced by most Khazaras of Afghanistan and Pamiris in the Badashkhan region of Tajikistan and Afghanistan (in the form of Ismailism), as well as by minority groups among other Central Asian nationalities such as the Turkmen. (5) Central Asia would later become a cradle of Sufi Islam, a mystical and popularized form of Islamic worship that is particularly open to customary beliefs and practices, including the veneration of ancestors, shrines and saints and ritualized chanting and dancing (practices that are particularly offensive to fundamentalists). (6)

The speed and degree to which the peoples of the region embraced Islam varied. In general, Islam was accepted more readily by the sedentary peoples of the region--particularly the ancestors of today's Uzbeks and Tajiks, who cultivated land and formed a majority in most of the region's oasis towns and cities. The region's livestock-herding nomadic peoples--ancestors of today's Turkmen, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz--converted more slowly and retained more pre-Islamic beliefs and practices. The nomadic peoples also lacked the elaborate ecclesiastical institutions that developed in the settled and urbanized areas, including Islamic secondary schools (madrasas) and charitable organizations.

Medieval Central Asia was home to a tremendous diversity of languages, peoples and cultures. The vernacular tended to be a Turkic language, the primary exception being Tajik, an Indo-European language of the Iranian language group (Turkic languages are Altaic). The dominant language of literature, however, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. The Turkic vernaculars were themselves highly diverse and overlapping, with "accents" blending into dialects and dialects into distinct languages that might be intelligible in some fields of communication but not others. Typically, ethno-linguistic communities overlapped geographically and were without clear territorial boundaries. Least of all did political identities coincide neatly with linguistic or cultural borders. Instead, the medieval states of the region (known generally as emirates or khanates) had a great diversity of ethnicities as their subjects and were legitimated on dynastic and religious, not national, grounds. Neither were they theocratic states: the obligation of the ruler was to uphold the faith, to provide order and justice and to create conditions under which it was possible for Muslims to practice their religion in peace. (7)

Russian colonization, which began in the first half of the 19th century, was driven primarily by geopolitical rather than religious concerns. Russian colonial administrators, who by then had centuries of experience bringing Muslim peoples into the empire (Russia's annexation of the Tatar Khanate took place three centuries earlier), for the most part allowed local peoples to preserve their customary laws and religious practices without interference. It was not until after the Bolshevik Revolution that a full-scale assault on Islam was launched. Initiated in the mid-1920s, the campaign intensified dramatically during Stalin's "revolution from above" and the purges of the late 1920s and 1930s. The great majority of Central Asian mosques were destroyed, and the Islamic clergy was decimated. Nevertheless, Islamic beliefs and practices of everyday life survived until World War II, which brought a softening of the regime's anti-religion campaign.

Eventually Soviet authorities and Islam reached an accommodation of sorts. (8) While the clergy was formally prohibited from proselytizing, the Islamic establishment was legalized. A Muslim Religious Board was established in Tashkent for Central Asia and Kazakhstan, which became the most prestigious of four such Muslim religious boards in the Soviet Union. The official clergy was deeply compromised by the political police, and important appointments were vetted by Communist Party organs, but it was nevertheless given considerable autonomy over ecclesiastical matters, albeit within hazy and shifting limits. At the same time, Central Asians, like Muslims elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, adapted Islamic beliefs and practices to Soviet conditions. Clerics found ways to represent Islam as politically non-threatening, and lay believers engaged in non-politicized practices such as daily prayer, the visiting of shrines, the veneration of ancestors and saints and Islamic life cycle rituals such as circumcisions, marriages and funerals. Even Communist Party officials were frequently buried in accordance with Islamic strictures, including the longtime Party leader of Uzbekistan, Sharaf Rashidov.

Islam thus remained an important part of everyday life and identity in Soviet Central Asia despite official hostility. This so-called "parallel" or "unofficial" Islam (in contrast to the "official" Islam overseen by the Muslim Religious Boards and monitored by the Communist Party) was not, however, necessarily political or hostile to the regime. Nor was it fundamentalist. Most Central Asians who considered themselves believers smoked tobacco, drank alcohol and prayed intermittently at best, although few ate pork. Women rarely covered their faces in public, let alone wore the hijab or the burqas that prevail in Afghanistan, although many...