A modern Turkmen carpet depicting the ancient Köneürgenç (Konye-Urgench). Photo from the Turkmen government.

Editor’s note: Turkmen Islam has long been renowned as a private and not particularly fervent affair. However, the situation is rapidly changing, particularly among Turkmenistan’s young. neweurasia’s Annasoltan tries to sew together the picture about what’s really going on, beginning with the “warp”, namely, problem of authority and the combination of traditional laxity and modern totalitarianism.

In my last post in this series, I explored some of the possible reasons behind the rise of Islam in my country, Turkmenistan. But these were all recent reasons, and also tied to, let’s call them fairly exoteric issues.

Now I turn to the deeper causes. Since 2009, neweurasia‘s been covering a lot of ground on the religious and educational topography of Turkic Central Asia, going back into the shamanistic past with Paksoy to a forgotten dawn in Ashgabat with Schwartz and the halls of the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek with Orazdurdy. I’m about to sew the threads of this Turkmen carpet in a way that even surprised me when I first began my research.

Let’s start with the “warp”: what’s at stake with Islam in Turkmenistan is the whole question of authority — both spiritual and mental. There are two aspects to this that get intertwined: the traditionally lax ways of the Turkmens and the very modern totalitarian ways of our government.

On the one hand, this is a government that has tried to replace spirituality with its own ideology. On the other hand, Turkmens are actually a very practical and nature-oriented nomadic people at heart. Generations of us have been raised on anecdotes, folk tales, and the wisdom-teachings of their ancestors, stretching back to Zoroastrianism and Shamanism.

In fact, the government’s efforts to “religify” its ideology is actually done in this traditional format. For example, the Ruhnama is made up of a lot of real and pseudo-folk lore and “archaic” wisdom. Another example is the Gurban Bayram celebration as a kind of replacement for Eid. Here’s what our government says about it:

“People gather together nearby the swings, which are installed all over of towns and village in the country as an integral attribute of the Kurban bayramy festivities. According to popular belief, people are cleansed of their sins by swinging to the skies. This wonderful ritual has no analogues in traditional rites of other Muslim nations that add unique national colours to this holiday of Turkmenistan.”

Swings are not a Muslim tradition but a local one, probably shaman (I’ve included photos from the government press release below). I once heard a Turkmen girl and a young Turkmen man speaking: “I thought sins would be shaken off by swinging,” she said, to which he replied with a laugh: “No. If that were true, there would be swings installed everywhere inside the mosques. Swings are so ridiculous and so un-Islamic.”

So, the government is emphasising local, non-Muslim traditions like this one instead of focusing on the “purely” Islamic for two reasons: one, because of a genuine desire to promote Turkmen culture, but also two, to diminish the intellectual possibility of Islamism.

By the same token, the consultations with mullahs for advice on disputes and family/business issues that are so common in neighboring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan takes place in Turkmenistan to a much lesser degree. Again, on the one hand, in general the role of Shariah law has a lot less centrality in Turkmen life. For example, a man with more than one wife is quite the rarity among Turkmens. And on the other hand, there are no independent madrassahs today. Our traditional religious leadership continues to act under the strict aegis of the government, as it did during the Soviet era.

So, it’s not as if there would be much room for a more “purely” Islamic religious expression to operate, anyway. The leadership just isn’t there. Which means that it’s actually got to be imported — or at least, that’s what the government fears is going to happen, and as I’ll explore in my next post, they expect it from the rest of the Turkic world, in particular Kyrgyzstan and their ostensible “friend” and “benefactor”, Turkey.