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.

Historical Overview

Islam was originally brought to Central Asia by Arab conquerors not long after the birth of the religion in the 7th century AD. It took about 300 years, however, for the religion to really be established as the dominant religion in the region, and even then it maintained a flavor that kept with the regional religions that predated Islam, such as nature worshiping, shamanism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. Some scholars have argued that the reason Sunni Islam won out over Shi’ism was because it was better at incorporating these previous faiths.

Central Asia became home to one of the most tolerant and diverse strains of Islam. During the tenth and twelfth centuries, Samarkand and Bukhara constituted the cradle of the Islamic renaissance. Naturally, urban centers, mostly in present day Uzbekistan, were the most fertile soil for Islam, with the steppe cultures much more difficult to convert, and even then conversion proved a relative term.

Subsequent invasions by the Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Russian one in the nineteenth were not accompanied with significant religious indoctrination, and while Islam suffered setbacks during these periods, it remained the predominant religion. The Russian occupation was for the most part pragmatic, and didn’t interfere in religious matters.

This situation changed significantly with the Bolshevik revolution and reassertion of power in the 1920s. Scholars have described the Soviet attitude toward Islam as viciously and destructively hostile at worst and schizophrenic at best. Pragmatic sovereignty was certainly out, as the Soviet mission was one of cultural as well as geopolitical domination.

Some academics have gone a bit overboard in describing the Soviet occupation as entirely atheistic and hostile toward Islam. To be sure, they pushed scientific atheism in the early period of their rule, and tightly controlled mosques throughout. But the Soviets were also acutely aware of the power of nationalism, and tried to co-opt it by controlling Islam, and pitching their version of it as part of the national identities of the then newly created Soviet republics. This fact is important because current regional rulers do the same thing, which is no surprise since the majority of them are former party officials.

The fall of the Soviet Union brought with it what scholars have termed the “Islamic Boom.” Mosques sprung up in great numbers, funded both by private sources and the regional governments themselves, who sensed the power that religious discourse would have in constructing post-Soviet national identities.

This Islamic rhetoric on the part of post-Soviet rulers was carefully tempered with tight control of mosques and religious leaders, and harsh denunciations of Islamic extremists. What were/are these rulers so afraid of?

Context: Rise and Fall of the Taliban

While many have rightly argued that Central Asian rulers have used terrorism as and Islamism as a convenient excuse to subjugate their populations, it is nevertheless useful to examine the context for their paranoia.

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to put down the anti-communist mujahedin rebels. The United States Central Intelligence Agency had started funding the mujahedin before the Soviets even got there, and in a deal negotiated between the Saudi Royal Family and President Ronald Reagan , Saudi Arabia agreed to match the American contribution toward the war effort dollar for dollar.

Unfortunately, allowing Saudi Arabia to have a direct role in this conflict had dire consequences. Saudi Arabia faced (and does still) the problem of having a massive population of young, fervently religious men who were and are highly critical of the excesses of the Saudi regime. The invasion of the godless Soviets into Afghanistan provided an ideal solution, and Saudi Arabia remedied its problem by exporting them to fight in the jihad.

Furthermore, Saudi Arabia set up religious schools along Pakistan’s border, an effort that coupled with these “Afghan Arabs” ultimately resulted in the Taliban. When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the United States lost interest until September 11, but the Saudis did not. Their money and religious expertise continued to poor into Taliban coffers, and it was not long before their gaze drifted north.

Chris DeVito writes:

Given the repression of Islam in Central Asia under the Soviets, and the fact that indigenous Islamic traditions were maintained by the more liberal Sufi tariqas of the region, it may come as a surprise the degree to which more conservative Sunni strains of thought have infiltrated the Islam of the region. It should not. The gradual opening of Soviet life under Gorbachev, and the subsequent collapse of the USSR, led to a massive influx of Saudi petrodollars aimed at claiming the region for conservative Sunni Islam. The Saudis built thousands of mosques, Islamic centers, and distributed untold numbers of Qu’rans and other conservative Wahhabi religious tracts in an effort that has served to radicalize significant numbers of Islamic activists in the region.

The independence of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia brought the opening of their borders, which in turn resulted in the influx of foreign money and influence. Missionaries and funding from countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia flooded across the newly opened borders. Mosques and madrassas were opened, Qur’ans were distributed, and in some cases, terrorist groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) were supported.

Political Islam: Threat, or Excuse?

As noted in the introduction, there is great disagreement over how much of a threat political Islam is to Central Asia. In some respects, this debate seems counterintuitive. It seems beyond debate that foreign-influenced Islamist movements do exist in Central Asia, and are a threat. It also seems beyond debate that regional rulers have abused the specter of this incursion for their own purposes, using it as a justification for gross human rights abuses and the consolidation of their rule.

The debate is therefore over the extent of the threat. As evidenced by our various country-specific surveys on the blog, the story is different in each country, and any broad generalizations about whether Islam is a threat or bogeyman are consequently highly problematic.

For example, while expansionist political Islam of the Saudi-funded Wahhabi variety seems to be the main problem in much of Central Asia, Marianna writes that Azerbaijan has a sizable Iranian population, and that Iran is suspected of plotting social unrest in Azerbaijan. Consequently, Azerbaijan plays a rather different geopolitical balancing act than its neighbors, and grapples with a brand of political Islam historically at odds with Wahhabiism.

Moving east, Turkmenistan’s eccentric ruler Saparmurat Niyazov has eliminated opposition groups with such efficiency that political Islam has still failed to emerge as a significant opposition force.

Peter writes:

If religion has succeeded in enduring the challenge of Soviet domination, why has its ability to defy regime manipulation not lead to it generating a base for domestic opposition? Is the failure of politically engaged Islam to materialise a resultant effect of the president’s ability to wholly co-opt religion for the ends of regime stability?

Niyazov also seems to have been much more successful at co-opting Islam for his own devices than his neighbors, writing the infamous Rukhnama, a religious text that is inscribed on mosque walls alongside passages from the Qur’an, a practice entirely blasphemous to any variety of fundamentalist Islam. What’s more, Turkmenistan maintained good relations with Israel throughout the later half of the 1990s, and no mujahedin group ever crossed its borders. It is safe to say that political Islam is less a threat there than in other countries, though as Peter points out, that fact could change.

Aside from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan has probably taken the brunt of extremist Islam in the region, a fact that its despotic ruler Islam Karimov has capitalized on. While it is a fact that terrorist groups like the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) operate out of Uzbekistan, Nick writes that the existence of actual extremist groups has given Karimov an excuse to crack down on all Islamic groups.

Nick writes:

…it must be galling for Uzbeks re-embracing Islam to be labelled “fanatical,” “fundamentalist” or “terrorist.”

Perhaps most emblematic of the propensity of the Uzbek regime to use terrorism as an excuse to justify repression is the Andijon insurrection and massacre, which occurred almost exactly a year ago to this day. Not only did the Uzbek government cite Islamic terrorism as a reason for the crackdown, saying that most of the 187 people they admit to having killed were “foreign terrorists,” essentially implying that the “Afghan Arabs” were back with a vengeance, a claim not entirely inconceivable, but with little evidence to back it up.

Uzbekistan would be foolish to ignore the Islamist threat, but by targeting all Islam with repression instead of just actual extremists, the regime is in actuality increasing the latter group.

Continue east to Tajikistan, and you reach the one country in Central Asia that has taken more of a beating from extremist Islam than Uzbekistan. A civil war fought ostensibly from secular, Russian-backed forces and Taliban-supported Islamist rebels ravaged Tajikistan for much of the decade following independence. Nevertheless, there was a silver-lining to this dark chapter in Tajik history as moderate Islamic parties not only participate, but are guaranteed a voice, soft though it may be, in the political process.

Kyrgyzstan has historically taken a rather lax approach to Islam, although Claire points out that since the fall of the Soviet Union this is has been changing, and there is increasingly a divide between the north and south.

Claire writes:

Islam may not be explicitly political, but it certainly no longer apolitical. This is especially true as religious identities intersect with other identities, in particular those of the south of the republic (especially Jalalabad and Osh oblasti) and those of the Uzbeks and Uighurs.

While there have been numerous incursions and terrorist attacks by the likes of the IMU, there is actually little support for any kind of caliphate. Nevertheless, anti-extremist rhetoric remains a staple of even the post-Akaev regime, and arrests for extremism remain widespread.

Islamism is the most negligible in Kazakhstan, where barely half of the population is even Muslim. Not surprisingly, Islam is most firmly rooted in the region bordering Uzbekistan, and Ben notes that several of the 2004 Tashkent suicide bombers were from this region.

Kazakhstan’s government has engaged in some of the same anti-Islam rhetoric as its neighbors, but Ben points out that the situation there is still much different from that in Uzbekistan.

…while the Kazakh government’s meddling with religious affairs usually takes the form of bureaucratic chicanery, what one can see in Uzbekistan are often serious human rights violations, imprisoning of unregistered imams and a tight monitoring of Islamic education.

Conclusion

Cliche as it may sound, Eurasia truly is a region in transition, and there simply has not been enough time since the fall of the Soviet Union to tell how much influence will ultimately have on politics in the region. It is, however, becoming increasingly evident that the stifling of any viable political space in these countries will have consequences. Few would argue that the threat of extremism is nonexistent. By cracking down on all forms of religious organization in their countries, regional autocrats are ensuring that foreign monies flowing into the region are well spent. Central Asia has historically been a land of loose, cosmopolitan, and relatively tolerant Islam. There is no reason that needs to change in the 21st century.