Islam, Ethno-Nationalism, and Transnational “Faith Community” in Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

The opening of the Soviet borders, at the turn of the 1990s, favored the penetration of new inflows and the import of new foreign Muslim religious models in Central Asia—the majority population of which is Sunni Muslim, belonging to the Ḥanafischool of Islamic law. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the contradictory types of (re-)uses of Islam, as a private and public religion, being undertaken by different actors in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. In a context of political “disenchantment” and economic slump, Islam appears as a paradoxical but unavoidable resource, albeit one subject to contrary instrumentalizations. This chapter delves first into attempts made by the Kyrgyz political authorities to promote a sort of specifically Kyrgyz Islam, in which all political Islam’s pan-Islamist dimensions are erased, so that it can serve in the creation of a distinctively Kyrgyz identity rooted in the national territory. Second, this chapter examines the question of how global forms of Islam, emanating from Pakistan especially, are impacting the construction of post-Soviet national identities through the case study of the “born-again” phenomenon. Kyrgyz narratives of re-Islamicization or of a second conversion to Islam are often carried out to the advantage of neo-fundamentalist and transnational movements such as the Tablighi Jama‘at (in Urdu) movement (Jama‘at at-Tabligh in Arabic). With the Tabligh, inner conversion gives itself the goal of integrating the “born-again” individual, supposedly freed of traditional affiliations (family, lineage, etc.) into a genuine “community of faith.” Aiming to present itself as an approach to the entry into modernity via a rupture with old community links, the community of faith thus in effect participates in the reintegration of the inner “converted” individual into a new Islamic community which is not circumscribed by the limits of the nation-state.