A couple of years ago I took a look around in a bookstore in Delhi and found an English series titled ‘What if… ?’ The books, like a namesake history programme on BBC 4, elaborated on what would have happened and how the world would be today had certain historical events taken another turn than the one they did. How would Europe have been today, for example, if the Saracens had not been defeated at Poitiers in 732? Or how would the US have been like if the South had won the Civil War in 1865 ?

Some consider that sort of exercise mainly as a hobby for retired academics. If you’re in the humanitarian sector, however, scenario-building is not irrelevant. ‘What if’ becomes a question you often have to ask yourself.

Either case, I asked myself a similar question about Central Asia once: how would Central Asia have been without the USSR?

Scenarios are only limited by the limits of one’s fantasy of course. But assuming that the Russian advance into the Kazakh steppe, Central Asia and the Caucasus from the eighteenth century onwards was unavoidable due to a number of geographic, economic and political factors, much would have depended on what would have happened with and in Russia itself in and immediately after 1917. (more…)

Originally posted on Global Voices.

Vakhs valley, March 2006, Erik Petersson, Dushanbe Pictures.

Welcome to the latest roundup from the Central Asian and Caucasian blogosphere, brought to you by neweurasia. First off, apologies for the long delay in presenting you this edition. Now that final year exams are over, our postings should appear bi-weekly again.

As usual we take you through the countries alphabetically.

Armenia:
Onnik Krikorian writes that one of the most independent and popular TV stations has been denied a broadcasting frequency. The same blog also reports on a possible new momentum towards a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Nessuna is shocked to hear that another Armenian fell victim to a racist murder in Moscow. Christian Garbis over at Notes from Hairenik writes on the strange obssesion of each and every vendor in Yerevan about the correct change. (more…)

Ben says that a huge increase in Kazakhstan’s higher education spending has been decreed and Stavros comments that President Nazarbayev is a man of action and vision.

James reports on Tajikistan’s CIS chairmanship.

Stavros has the scoop on the use of the Russian language in Kazakhstan.

Luke has all kinds of tasty updates over at Mongolia, including an original interview with an opposition leader, a Mongolian sumo wrestler laying the smack-down (with pics), and a violation of parliamentary election law.

neweurasia welcomes Stavros, who in his first post writes that Nazarbayev is the Central Asian equivalent of Machiaveli, and deconstructs what his version of the Prince would look like.

Neweurasia has launched a new series of topic-specific posts across all of the country blogs in an effort to provide readers a comprehensive overview of current issues in Eurasia. The first focused on HIV/AIDS in the region, and the topic now at hand is the role of religion in politics across the region. You can find a country-specific discussion of this topic at each of the following country blogs:

• Azerbaijan by Marianna
• Kazakhstan by Ben
• Kyrgyzstan by Claire and by Yulia
• Tajikistan by James
• Turkmenistan by Peter
• Uzbekistan by Nick

Also, be sure to check out the broader context provided by Christopher DeVito, who describes the rise of Islam as a political force in the Middle East, and its significance to in Central Asia.

Introduction

The influence religion has come to have on politics has become an extremely charged topic in recent years, and Eurasia is no exception. With the majority of the population of most countries Muslim (key exceptions being Mongolia, Armenia, and Georgia; we do not have posts for any of those countries), this choice in topic inevitably narrows to political Islam, an even more controversial subtopic.

In other parts of the world, there is no ambiguity about the role of Islam in politics. Saudi Arabia does not even pretend to have a constitution, stating that the Qur’an is all that is necessary to govern a country. Although Saudi Arabia is an absolutist state, in countries with some degree of democratic rule it has come be hugely influential as a grassroots movement; Hamas, an Islamist party won a popular election in Palestine, and it is very likely that the Muslim Brotherhood would win such an election in Egypt.

Where does Eurasia fit into all this? What role does Islam play in politics, what role is it likely to play in the future, and what role should it play? The answer is far from clear, and academics, journalists, and bloggers on sites like neweurasia and Registan disagree vehemently.

This survey will attempt to make some qualified, generalized responses to exactly those questions based on the country posts, but first it is important to place the rise of the current religions in Eurasia in a historical context.

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by Christopher DeVito

The following is an overview of political Islam in the Middle East and its relevance to Central Asia as a context for neweurasia’s survey of relgion in politics.

Any comprehensive attempt to address the broad currents of political Islam in the Arab world and the influence that such movements have had on their counterparts in Central Asia would require much lengthier consideration than offered below. For our purposes I have looked briefly at a number of important subjects. They include some of the intellectual origins of modern political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Saudi Arabia.

Modern Political Islam: Origins
Many Scholars of Political Islam credit the Iranian born Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897) with the fathering of contemporary Islamic political activism. Often remembered as an Islamic modernist, the influence of Al-Afghani’s thought is still apparent in the philosophies of most contemporary Islamists. Cosmopolitan and widely traveled, al-Afghani did much of his most influential writing from London and Paris. While he was deeply opposed to British imperialism, he was also enamored with the scientific and technologically advanced societies of Western Europe. He, however, maintained the belief that the scientific advancement of European societies had been built on a foundation of Islamic science and philosophy.

In an attempt to reclaim what he saw as the Islamic world’s rightful position as a leader in these fields he sought to counter what he understood to be the “backwardness” of Islamic culture through the rationalization of religion. Like many modern day Islamic fundamentalist he saw the superstition and practice of the dominant folk religion, principally tasawuf or Sufiism, as a hindrance to the scientific and political ascendancy of the Muslim world. To this end he sought a return to the “true” Islam of the past, a movement knownas salafism. (I do not address al-Qaeda, or its affiliated organizations relationship to this intellectual movement as it is another topic in and of itself)

This attempt at a purification of Islam garnered influential followers such as the Egyptian jurist Muhammad Abduh, and (skipping ahead) would have profound influence on the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hassan al-Banna, and other luminaries of modern Islamic fundamentalism such as Muhammad Iqbal, Sayyid Qutb and Abu A’la al-Mawdudi.

The development of this new intellectual worldview, sometimes called neo-Salafism, was an urban phenomenon that attempted to reconcile the practice of Islam with modernity and a program of political renewal. To this end the neo-Salfis attacked the traditional social networks of most Sufi orders accusing them of being a source of the backwardness of Islamic societies in general. A notable exception to this trend was the Sharia, rather than mystically, oriented Sufi Brotherhood, or tariqa, of the Naqshabandis, prevalent in Central Asia, which to this day continues to harbor many reform minded fundamentalists.

(more…)

Open Source will be hosting a podcast discussion on remittances this Thursday, and they are interested in the Central Asian perspective on this issue. So if you are intrigued by the subject of remittances (“the new foreign aid?� they ask) and know something about the situation in Eurasia, head on over. They are looking for testimonies and first-person accounts.

Are remittances better suited to help small communities than aid, or are they just signs that aid is failing? What does it mean that workers are making these kinds of sacrifices, and what will it mean when governments learn to depend on those sacrifices? Are remittances a viable development strategy?