A Tangled Web: Islam in Central Asia

On June 25, the Turkey Diyanet Foundation (TDV) announced it had finished construction on Central Asia’s largest mosque in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

The New Central mosque – done in the Ottoman style, with multiple domes and thin minarets – covers 1,300 square meters and has an adjacent lot for 500 cars. The four minarets are 70 meters tall. The builders claim that, between the mosque and the gardens, up to 20,000 people could worship at the same time.

The new mega-mosque in Bishkek was built on the site of an old cinema and sits down the street from the city’s UFO-shaped circus. Plans for the mosque emerged in 2009, and construction began began in 2012, with an initial price tag of $10 million – $8 million funded by TDV and the remaining $2 million provided by Jordanian donors. The Daily Sabah, a pro-government Turkish daily newspaper, listed the cost as $25 million in reporting the completion of construction.

The Turks and the Kyrgyz, however, may be beaten eventually by the Qataris and the Tajiks. In Dushanbe, the Qatar-funded Grand Mosque is still, reportedly, a work in progress.

Last July, Tajik media reported that the mosque was only a month from completion, but travelers querying a Lonely Planet forum in March 2017 were told by Dushanbe residents that the mosque remains under construction. “Don't hold your breath,” one commented.

Construction began in 2009, only to begin again in 2011; each time Tajik President Emomali Rahmon attended the groundbreaking, laying a block in 2009 and climbing into a mechanical digger in 2011. The mosque – which has a price tag estimated at more than $100 million – is being financed primarily by Qatar. Originally, in 2009, reports from the BBC noted that Doha was financing the entire project: “The government of Qatar has agreed to foot the bill as part of what it calls its commitment to Islam.” But 2011 reports cited the Qataris as fronting only $70 million of the full $100 million.

Dushanbe, which boasts the world’s tallest flagpole already, bragged that the mosque would be one of the world’s largest – and certainly Central Asia’s largest. The earliest estimates pegged the mosque’s capacity at 150,000 worshippers and subsequent reports repeat the aim.

Islam After Communism

In Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, as in the rest of Central Asia’s states, Islam is the primary religion. Islam came to Central Asia with a wave of Arab conquerors in the 8th century. When the Mongols arrived in the late 12th century they brought total war to the steppe. They burned Bukhara, destroyed Gurganj, and sacked Samarkand, the capital of the Khwarezmid empire, which at the time ruled all of Persia. But as the Mongol empire itself disintegrated, the leaders of the various constituent hordes began converting. As Rafis Abazov notes in his collection of historical maps of Central Asia, “Through conversion, the Mongols were transformed from political and cultural outsiders to political and cultural insiders.” Later rulers in the region would claim both divine Islamic right and a direct line to Genghis Khan to root their power.

The Soviets tried and failed to weed Islam out of the peoples of Central Asia, eventually settling for its relegation to private, rather than public, life.

With independence in 1991, Islam began to reemerge into public life in Central Asia. At independence, for example, Kyrgyzstan reportedly had fewer than 40 mosques; today, there are more than 2,000. Many of the mosques throughout Central Asia – like the two mentioned above  – are built with funding from abroad. The Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are major sources of donor organizations and funding aimed at fulfilling the rising demand for mosques in Central Asia. Critics worry, however, that with outside funding comes outside interpretations of Islam. The Saudis, for example, are associated with Wahhabism – Riyadh’s own brand of ultra-conservative Islam. Central Asia’s take on Islam is notably different.

In the introduction to his seminal text Islam after Communism, Adeeb Khalid, recounts waiting in line at a cafeteria in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1991 in the dying months of the Soviet Union. He began talking to two men also in line who were happy to meet an outsider and “delighted by the fact their interlocutor was Muslim.” The two joined him at his table, bringing along a bottle of vodka and proposing a toast.

“Their delight at meeting me was sincere,” he continued “and they were completely unself-conscious about the oddity of lubricating the celebration of our acquaintance with copious quantities of alcohol.”

I have a similar story about shots of vodka at sunset in a village outside Bishkek with a pair of babushkas as the call to prayer sounded from a nearby mosque.

Khalid summed up the quandary like this: “Seven decades of Soviet rule had given Central Asians a unique understanding of Islam and of being Muslim. Islam after Communism had its peculiarities.”

These peculiarities have persisted, not the least because Soviet systems of secular government and Soviet-era leaders have remain largely in place. The natural tension between secularity and reemerging religiosity has become strained further by the rise of Islamic terrorism and the resulting Global War on Terror.

Tajikistan provides the clearest example of this tension – elevated to sheer hypocrisy – but it exists to varying degrees throughout the region. On one hand, Emomali Rahmon recognizes that his people are religious, that Islam is a fundamental part of what it means to be Tajik – thus mega-mosques are built and hajj to Mecca is permitted. But on the other hand, Rahmon, like his Soviet predecessors, wants to prevent Islam from becoming an organizing force in society – thus children under 18 cannot attend mosque, those under 40 cannot go on hajj, all imams are on the state payroll and their sermons state-approved. Rahmon, whose first name is derived from Imam Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and the fourth caliph (or first, according to the Shia), has spoken repeatedly and fervently against the pollution of Tajik culture with Arab culture – black robes, beards, names.

In the end, the laws of supply and demand will prevail. The people of Central Asia have become, over 25 years, more religious and more publically so. They are shaped by an array of outside influences (as much as they are shaped by their Soviet and pre-Soviet heritage): Saudi-built mosques, Gulen-funded schools, Iranian films, Dubai’s skyline, and Qatar’s fashion. As I wrote in a piece recently on culture wars in Central Asia, “There’s no unweaving history’s tapestry” in the region. In that same vein, the tapestry will continue to unfurl and the strands of Islam will feature prominently.