Qibla and the Government House: The Islamist Networks

The Islamic revival in Central Asia seems to have been as surprising as the collapse of the Soviet Union for Western scholars. The two are closely associated, for the dormant seeds of atavist identities could only grow in the rubble of the Soviet construction. The swift establishment of networks between local and international Islamic and Islamist organizations has provided the fertilizer for this revival. However, an unsophisticated look at Central Asia as another frontier of a clash of civilizations is wrong. Islamist movements have not spurred the appearance of broad, multi-ethnic, multinational identities, but have remained concerned with local politics. They are opposition movements with an Islamist twist.

During the Soviet period, Central Asia was almost totally isolated from the rest of the Muslim world. ¹ From 1924 to 1941, Moscow launched a direct offensive against all aspects of Muslim social life. Afterwards, limited religious freedom was allowed under the auspices of an official clergy (muftiyya) based in Tashkent, the current capital of Uzbekistan. Meanwhile, in the countryside, unofficial clerics maintained the basic tenets of Islam, even though all mosques were closed. The Muslims of Central Asia took advantage of perestroika to establish or re-establish links with the Muslim world very quickly. Foreign support strengthened this re-islamization trend upon the independence of the Central Asian republics in 1991. The bulk of these new contacts had little to do with Islamic political radicalism. Foreign-based religious movements, like the Pakistani Jamiat ut-Tabligh, sent teams of missionaries into Central Asia to guide fellow Muslims back to what they considered the "straight path" of Islam, while the Saudis provided money to build or rebuild mosques. Thousands of pilgrims and students left Central Asia for the Gulf states and Pakistan. Religious books and leaflets were introduced and older, local material was reprinted.

The Islamic revival did not confine itself to the religious realm, but rather became politicized. The Central Asian connection with foreign organizations, like the Arab Muslim Brothers, the Pakistani Jamiat-i Islami, and the Islamic Republic of Iran, led to the creation of Islamist political movements, such as the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP) in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. This political dimension of the Islamic revival rapidly put the movement at odds with the former communist elites who controlled the Newly Independent States (NIS) and were striving to build their new legitimacy on ethnic nationalism by deliberately ignoring the common religious legacy of their countries. The different political regimes tried both to suppress the Islamist religious opposition and to put the Islamic revival under government control. This policy had mixed success. After a violent civil war, the Tajik authorities had to make peace with the Islamist opposition, which was co-opted through the establishment of a coalition government in 1997. The Uzbek government currently confronts an armed Islamist opposition based in Afghanistan. Still the different Islamist movements have been unable to overcome ethnic and national divides and are constrained by the framework of the national political identities in shaping their political strategy.

The Development of an Indigenous Fundamentalist Movement

Despite being isolated from the Muslim world during Soviet rule, an indigenous fundamentalist movement developed in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan around Qari Mohammad Rustamov Hindustani. Born in 1892 in the Ferghana Valley, which became the hotbed of a fundamentalist revolt against Russia six years later, Hinudstani went to Afghanistan and India to study in a madrasa, or religious school. He regularly spent time in jail in the Soviet Union because religious propaganda was forbidden before opening a semi-clandestine school in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Most of the leaders of political Islam in the early 1990s were his pupils, including the founding fathers of the Islamic Renaissance Party in Tajikistan, Mullah Nuri and Sharif Himmatzade, and the leading figure of the Islamist movement in the Uzbek Ferghana Valley, Allama Rahmatullah. Hindustani finished his life as a quasi-official mullah (teacher) in Dushanbe and died in 1989. Toward the end of his life, he...