Politicizing Islam in Central Asia

Abstract

Abstract A study of Islamist emergence and mobilization in Central Asia from 1917 through 2022, this book explores the causes, dynamics, and variation in Islamist movements—within the USSR, and then in post-Soviet Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. During the Soviet era, atheist state repression politicized Islam. By the 1970s, those passing on narratives of religious oppression encountered new ideologies promising justice through an Islamic state—Islamist ideas and models seeping into the USSR from the Middle East, Afghanistan, and South Asia. A new generation of young mullahs in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan became religious entrepreneurs and founded a first wave of Islamist movements to challenge communism. From the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, a second wave emerged, this time in response to post-Soviet state oppression of religion. This wave included the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan, which attempted to compete as a peaceful, Islamic democratic party; the transnational, pro-caliphate Hizb ut-Tahrir, which sought to overthrow the Central Asian regimes nonviolently; and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which began by declaring jihad against the Karimov regime but then intertwined itself with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. A third Islamist wave emerged following the rise of ISIS. Central Asians became one of the largest regional groups of foreign fighters in Syria, as thousands joined either ISIS or al-Qaeda. After the Syrian caliphate collapsed, many continued waging jihad in Afghanistan. The book explains the strategies and relative success of each movement. In each case, state repression of Islam and Islamist ideology motivated and enabled Islamist mobilization.