God the Creator and Angels by Pietro Vannicci Perugino.

Editor’s note: Religion and politics make strange bedfellows even in the West, so imagine the difficulties in the totalitarian regime of Turkmenistan. neweurasia’s Annasoltan explores the dangerous dance between the official Turkmen personality cult, which aspires to divinity, and the conscience of the individual believer in this new series.   Also check out Professor H.B. Paksoy’s series, especially, “The Prayer Carpets of Marx” and “The Conversation of the Gods”.

“Almost nothing.”

This is the answer of Felix Corley from Forum 18, the Oslo-based news service, to my question about whether there has been any positive change in Turkmenistan regarding the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

The same policy of state control over religious activity we saw under Niyazov is continuing under Berdimuhamedov.  Harassment of religious and civil society groups continues. Rulers should be judged by what they do. New laws on NGOs and religion were promised back in January 2008 [which was marked for 'priority'] but neither has been adopted.

Forum 18 was told in January 2010 that work on the text of a proposed new religion law has not even begun.  This despite the fact that Turkmenistan is home to a huge variety of faith communities, including Muslims, Russian Orthodox,  Armenian Apostolics, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, Hare Krishna devotees, and Baha’is.

Divide and convert

The country’s constitution guarantees religious freedom.  However, the government’s Council for Religious Affairs actively regulates all religious activity, executing what many observers interpret as a secret policy to discourage spirituality.

The primary target are, of course, Russian Orthodox and Muslims, who together comprise the majority of religious believers in Turkmenistan.  Corley remarks,

Religious communities cannot operate freely in the open, maintain places of worship, publish or import religious literature, conduct charitable activity, or conduct public events.  Religious believers cannot freely hold religious meetings in their homes, nor they cannot invite fellow believers from abroad for religious events or meetings.

Minority religious communities frequently find themselves the victims of police raids.  Those who change their religious affiliation, especially from the two maor faiths, are treated as spies.  The 2009 International Religious Freedom Report, released by the United States Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, remarks,

Ethnic Turkmen who choose to convert to other religious groups, especially lesser-known Protestant groups, are viewed with suspicion and sometimes ostracized.

Corley summarizes the situation thus:

The Islamic community is controlled from inside, with the President or his officials naming the chief mufti and senior imams and restricting Islamic education to state-run facilities.

All other communities are controlled from outside, by restrictions, threats, raids, and in extreme situations more direct pressure such as sacking from work, detention, beatings, public vilification.

But is a clash between two gods — Niyazov and Allah — quietly in the making?  In my next I’ll explore the current incompatible relationship between totalitarianism and Islam.