Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia leverages the strengths of multiple scholars to provide a comprehensive review of Central Asia's post-Soviet Islamic revival. Pauline Jones, the volume's editor, encourages us to move beyond familiar yet distorting binaries of Central Asian Islam: official or informal, radical or traditional, militant or peaceful. Instead we are offered multiple overlapping perspectives: society's view on Islam, the state's view, religious elites’ views, and the views of international actors toward Central Asian Islam. We are introduced to Islam's many manifestations and encouraged to view ongoing processes of Central Asian Islamic revival not as sui generis, but rather, as similar to processes of religious revivalism elsewhere in the postcolonial world.
The book resonates with a diverse audience. Readers new to the region will find the volume an accessible introduction not only to Central Asian Islam, but also to Central Asian polities more broadly. Area specialists will welcome the volume's dismantling of radical Islamist tropes that both Central Asian states and some scholars of the region have advanced. And all readers will find in Jones's work a much-needed alternative to the countering violent extremism (CVE) lens that has distorted much of the recent Islamic revivalism literature.
Part one grounds the reader with three case studies. Rouslan Jalil explores the extent of Kyrgyzstan's Islamic revivalism. Svetlana Peshkova investigates symbolic manifestations of Islamic identity in Uzbekistan. And Vera Exnerova studies the Islamist Mujaddidiya and Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HBT) movements in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Reviewing a public opinion poll conducted among nearly 2,500 respondents across Kyrgyzstan's seven regions in 2011–12, Jalil finds that, while outward, formalized institutions of Islam have proliferated—there are more mosques today than there were two decades ago, halal food is easy to find, and Islamic dress is now common—Kyrgyz respondents’ participation in what Peshkova labels as the “scriptural” or “text-based scholarly” rituals is low. Only one third of those polled reported attending mosque or reading the Koran regularly and less than half of all respondents knew the Five Pillars of Islam. Despite these seemingly low rates of “correct belief,” the overwhelming majority of respondents (96 percent), self-identified as Muslim. These survey results lead Jalil to conclude Kyrgyz “believe without belonging” (22).
Peshkova does not dispute Jalil's findings. She does suggest, however, that if we consider Islamic practices outside quantifiable indicators of religiosity, outside of “acts of identity that scholars often associate with ‘Islamic revival’,” we gain new insights into how religion informs everyday life (35). Thus, Peshkova introduces us to two Uzbek women who find meaning in Islam in ways that may be unexpected. Nafisahon, a Soviet-trained nurse, is now a popular practitioner of transcendental “bioenergy” healing. Ruhshonoz proselytizes “clear-seeing” and “clear-thinking” and promotes a “spiritual all-inclusive religiosity” that draws on but is not limited to her understanding of the Koran. Both women self-identify as Muslim but, as Peshkova demonstrates, self-identify in ways that “take us beyond dominant understandings of piety” (53).
Like Peshkova, Exnerova explores expressions of religious identity outside the perceived mainstream. Indeed, it is distance from the mainstream, Exnerova explains, that attracts some Central Asians to Islamist groups. Hizb-ut-Tahrir and the Mujaddidiya, by encouraging followers to love according to the values that prevailed during the time of the Prophet, help to “free” Muslims from the corrupt practices of the Central Asian state and muftiate. Exnerova's analysis of the Mujaddidiya and HBT, like Peshkova's discussion of Islamic healers and clear-thinkers, offers us clarifying insights into Jalil's findings that Central Asians believe but do not belong. That Central Asians are not attending mosque regularly may not be a sign of diminished religiosity. Rather, many Central Asians are suspicious of the “official” Islam that the state and muftiate promote.
Part two of Jones's edited volume offers a detailed accounting of how Central Asian states attempt to, in the words of David Abramson and Noah Tucker, “engineer Islam.” Much as the Soviet state engineered the economy, the post-Soviet state maps out officially-acceptable Islamic practice. The muftiate crafts sermons for Friday prayers and state television offers programing that “attempts to bend and mold Islam for its [the Uzbek state's] purposes” (91). We know from Peshkova and Exnerova that these clumsy attempts at control from above are often ineffective. Abramson and Tucker agree and discuss how “tech-savvy” Uzbeks study Islam in digital media environments outside the state's control.
Incapable of blocking the digital presence of Islamic revivalist groups that are sometimes critical of the state, increasingly Central Asian leaders are encouraging Islamic movements that accommodate secular autocratic rule. Central Asian Sufism, Emily O'Dell explains, is “an indispensable ally of the state” (99). Sufism, in its promotion of multiple “inner practices of Islam” and its celebration of local charismatic sheikhs, both past and present, offers Central Asian states a form of Islam that is at once nationalist and decentralized. Central Asian governments can point to their own Tajik, Turkmen, or Uzbek Sufi leaders and, in so doing, can “disempower schools of jurisprudential thinking that are seen as incompatible with state security, national identity, cultural memory, and heritage preservation” (125).
The symbiotic relationship between Sufi practitioners and the region's governments that O'Dell describes, critically, is one that was slow to emerge. As Erin Tasar explains, post-Soviet Central Asian states, with independence foisted upon them in 1991, initially faced a “major crisis of confidence” (148). Charismatic religious elites outside of formal state structures only added to this crisis of confidence. Only recently have Sufi leaders come to occupy a tolerated “gray area,” one in which popular sheikhs preach in ways that, unlike HBT and the Mujaddidiya, do not directly challenge secular autocracy.
Part three explores wellsprings of religious authority. Noor O'Neill Borbieva identifies three areas of authority: state muftiats, local norms, and global Islam. Official or state Islam “prescribes practices that are conspicuous and public, such as wearing hijab or attending juma namaz” (166). Local norms, in contrast, are invoked to justify deviations from officially-prescribed practices. In Kyrgyzstan, for example, many feel that youth—due to pressures of family and career—need not observe the five daily prayers. It is far worse “to begin praying and stop than never to begin at all” (166). Both these local norms and those the muftiates promote are influenced by the arrival of global Islam. Religious texts, long inaccessible to Central Asians, are now widely translated into local languages. With direct access to these texts, a state-approved clerical elite can no longer lay exclusive claim to religious authority.
The ability of global Islam to penetrate locally critically varies among Central Asian states. Religious authority in Tajikistan, Tim Epkenhans explains, accrues from “affiliation with a Sufi order, mostly by descent from an influential Sufi lineage such as the Naqshbandior Qadiriyya” (178). While access to Islamic texts in the local vernacular may be welcome in Tajikistan, Epkenhans explains that “personally transmitted religious knowledge and initiation constitutes a more important form of symbolic capital than a formal education” (179). Epkenhans’ research parallels O'Dell's in that he finds the Tajik state is unable to fully control Sufi leaders. Such incomplete central control, as Alisher Khamidov demonstrates however, can paradoxically be an asset. Khamidov's contrast of violent protest in one southern Kyrgyz town, Nookat, to the absence of protest in nearby Kara-Suu, deftly illustrates how the state's toleration of gray areas can mitigate conflict. In 2008, the Kyrgyz administration directed local governments to “prevent HBT from using the (Islamic) festivities to advance its goals.” Nookat officials, acting on this directive, canceled Orozo-Ayt (end of Ramadan) festivities. Kara-Suu officials, in contrast, worked with community leaders—local imams and wrestlers from the local martial arts school—to secure buy-in and “muscle support” for the Orozo-Ayt celebration. Whereas the Nookat local government was met with violent protest, the Kara-Suu government's Orozo-Ayt's festivities were marked by “an atmosphere of friendliness and good neighborliness” (216).
The final chapters explore international influences on Central Asian Islam. Mukaram Toktogulova studies Kyrgyzstan's Tablighi Jama'at proselytizers. Aisalkyn Botoeva reviews international Islamic banks’ “sharia-compliant lending and borrowing” to Kazakh and Kyrgyz entrepreneurs (262). And Manja Stephan-Emmrich analyzes how studying Islam abroad helps Tajik students reshape their identities once back home. These three chapters advance the shared finding that views from the outside concomitantly influence and are influenced by local understandings of Islam.
What these final chapters and the volume more broadly demonstrates is that Central Asia's Islamic revival shares much in common with religious revivals elsewhere. Central Asian polities, like those in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, are navigating the challenges of what Jones explains in conclusion is the “postcolonial experience.” While there can be no denying the Soviet legacy of secular autocracy, the region's autocrats cannot steer the course of Islamic revivalism. Postcolonial Central Asia is part of the “Islamic core.” The region's religious future will shape and be shaped by Central Asia's embeddedness in the global Islamic community.
