The Fires of Faith in Central Asia

Abstract

The salient fact about Central Asia today is that independent statehood was neither coveted nor sought by the region's ruling Communist elites. It was thrust upon them when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Thus the region's rulers were suddenly compelled to fabricate a new identity for their five ethnically diverse states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan and to contend for the first time with radically differing ideologies. A decade later, the same elites are in power. After a brief period of allowing some political freedom, they embarked on repressive campaigns to eliminate all forms of opposition, subverting democracy and elections almost as meticulously as the Soviets did and eliminating their political opponents through assassination, imprisonment, or exile. With the democratic and nationalist opposition effectively crushed, the survivors have moved underground and become armed and radicalized by Islamic fundamentalism, which seeks to overthrow the ruling elites, impose upon the region an imagined Islamic community of believers that has as its reference point seventh-century Arabia and the era of the Prophet Muhammad, and to restructure Central Asia through an antiWestern and anti-Russian crusade. Examining these insurgent groups will be the focus of this article. Every act of state repression has pushed these militants into adopting even more extreme positions, while the dearth of Islamic teachings during the 74 years of communism has created a new conundrum. The militants' philosophy is based not on the indigenous Islam of Central Asia, which was the birthplace of Sufism a tolerant, moderate form of Islamic mysticism or nineteenth-century Jadidism a modernist interpretation of Islam but on imported ideologies from the Taliban in Afghanistan, the militant madrassas (Islamic schools) of Pakistan, and the extreme Wahabbi doctrine of Saudi Arabia. Contrary to Central Asia's own history, jihad (holy war), rather than ijtihad (reinterpretation and consensus), has become the strategy of these groups to mobilize popular support. The civil war in Tajikistan (1992-97) was the first testing ground for the reinterpretation of Islam in Central Asia. Today, Islamic movements such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir al Islami and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan pose the greatest threats to the Central Asian regimes and stability in the region. Well armed and financed, highly motivated, and with extensive support from the wider world of Islamic radicalism and drug smuggling mafias based in Afghanistan, these are pan-Islamic and pan-Central Asian movements. The danger posed by Islamic radicalism in Central Asia is also rapidly changing the geostrategic picture as China, Russia, and the United States realign their regional strategies to meet this threat while the Taliban and Islamic groups in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, and Kashmir help fuel the process of radicalization.