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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25.3 (2005) 554-566



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The Making of Militants:

The State and Islam in Central Asia

In Central Asia, as in other regions of the world with large Muslim populations, opposition groups are increasingly turning to the ideas of militant Islam in their efforts to challenge authoritarian rule. Activists from Kokand to Kabul have learned that political Islam provides an unusually potent language of opposition. In Central Asia, a wide array of opposition movements—the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic Renaissance Party, and Hizb ut-Tahrir—have, with varying degrees of militancy, applied the banner of Islam to their struggle with local authoritarian rule. The March 2004 suicide bombings and gun battles in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in which more than forty people died and dozens were injured are only the most recent reminder that, despite seven decades of Soviet rule, Islam remains a powerful mobilizing force in Central Asia.

That Islamist movements have reemerged in Central Asia in the wake of the Soviet collapse is clear.1 What is less clear, however, is why tensions between the state and Islam have been significantly more pronounced in some Central Asian regions than in others. Variations in the extent, militancy, and intensity of Islamist movements, much like the many different and markedly varied authoritarian states these movements oppose, are rarely differentiated in the social science literature. Thus, while scholars have helpfully devised theories to explain the recent upsurge in Islamist political mobilization, few of these theories explain why Islamist movements are more pronounced and more militant in some authoritarian states than in others. Seeing these differences in Islamist mobilization to be of both theoretical interest to social science theory and immediate import to state-society conflicts not only in Central Asia but also in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and, more and more, in the Western world, I seek to explain the root causes of variations in political Islam.

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the question of political Islam. Historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Samuel Huntington, for example, write that the globalization of Western culture has sparked an Islamist backlash.2 Central Asian political leaders, for their part, have argued that the Islamist opposition has been artificially crafted [End Page 554] through the meddling of foreign “extremists” from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan. Rashid Kadyrov, the Uzbek prosecutor general, said of the 29–30 March 2004 Tashkent bombings, for example, “The character and method of this act is not common to our people … It was probably exported from abroad.”3 Problematically, however, while these clash of civilizations and foreign intervention arguments may capture part of the cause, they nevertheless treat Islamist opposition as an undifferentiated whole. That is, they provide few insights into why some Islamist movements are more militant and why conflict between the state and Islam is greater in some countries than in others. In this essay I directly address this variation. More specifically, I seek to explain why tensions between the state and Islam have proven greater—and considerably more violent—in Uzbekistan than they have in Kyrgyzstan. Through a comparison of Islamist movements in these two countries, I find that international variables, be they the encroachment of foreign cultures or foreign missionaries and foreign financial support, indeed are important to the spread of political Islam in Central Asia. The varying strength of the Islamist movements, however, is a result of decidedly local politics. Political Islam in Central Asia is a response to autocratic rule. And, problematically for the West and its newfound allies among the Central Asian leadership, the more autocratic this rule is, the greater resonance and popular support militant Islamist movements gain.

This article, in sum, provides an explanation for local-level variations in political Islam. To achieve this, I proceed in four steps. In section one I discuss the literature on political Islam and outline the insights this literature holds for the current spread...

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