Central Asia’s Muslim Challenge

In a 1982 text, revised in 1990, noted professor of Russian Area Studies Michael Rywkin identified Soviet Muslims, whose population was rapidly growing, as “one of the biggest question marks in the country’s future.”

The Soviet Union, of course, did not have much of a future, but its legacy lives on. As the cover story of this issue illustrates, the Soviet legacy is evident across Asia; but nowhere is it as tightly woven into the tapestry of modern politics as in Central Asia.

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Muslim-majority states of Central Asia remain deeply affected by its legacy. Echoes of the Soviet Union are evident not just in still-standing monuments to Vladimir Lenin (in central Bishkek, for example, though moved from the front of the State History Museum to behind it in 2003), but more importantly in the ways the region’s governments rule and the ways its people view government. The modern independent states of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – were founded by Soviet-trained elites, working with Soviet-style governance structures, and they still look to Moscow for guidance and support. It’s important not to overstate this influence, and frequent readers of The Diplomat will know well my personal avoidance of the lazy trope of tying every development in the region to the Soviet past. But this is a special occasion.

In Rywkin’s book, titled “Moscow’s Muslim Challenge,” the author cites the titual problem as dealing with the ethnically and religiously distinct republics in Central Asia. “Practically unassimilable and indifferent to most official Soviet values, the growing masses of Soviet Muslims present an inescapable challenge to the Russian-dominated Soviet social order,” he argued.

The book is a Cold War artifact, of course, and should be read as such. There are racist echos of its core supposition in contemporary Europe, where right-wing politicians challenge whether Muslims, from anywhere, can truly assimilate to European life. In a strange way, Central Asia attests largely to the opposite. In fact, the region struggles with its own modern “Muslim Challenge.” Tension between stridently secular governments and a Muslim-majority population reconnected with the wider Muslim world has resulted in shockingly strict rules surrounding religion (bordering on the absurd) and perpetual paranoia about extremism.

Rather than being “indifferent to most official Soviet values,” the reality is that contemporary Central Asian political structures are rooted in the Soviet past. This is most evident in the awkward relationship between the state and religion.

A prevailing assumption of the Cold War era was that Islam and communism were at their core mutually exclusive. Communism was, after all, an athetistic ideology.

Rywkin put it like this:

Of the two dogmas, the communist and the Islamic – both collectivist and authoritarian, both encompassing the temporal as well as the spiritual, both competing for Soviet Muslims’ allegiance – the communist one, being a Russian import, appears to be the weaker. In the nationalist-Muslim-communist triad, therefore, the communist element seems the only one potentially discardable.

This assumption extended to the West, too.

As scholar Adeeb Khalid explained in his 2007 book “Islam After Communism,” U.S. engagement with the Islamic forces opposed to the Soviet 1979 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was undeprined by “doctrinal principles long held sacred” that viewed Islam as an antidone to communism and “U.S. government agencies spent considerable effort drawing attention to Soviet hostility to religion.” But, he went on:

The problem is that many Muslims did not see socialism and Islam to be so starkly opposed. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, a substantial current of opinion in Muslim societies held that Islam's message was one of social justice and that socialism was inherent in Islam.

Seventy years of Soviet rule could not undo more than a thousand years of Islam in Central Asia; nor has 30 years of independence undone the influence of the Soviet Union. Instead of one or the other being discarded – as Rywkin suggested communism would eventually be in Central Asia –  the result was a melding of ideologies under the pressures of momentous, and sudden, political change.

Most of the modern states of Central Asia are criticized by the West for failing to achieve sufficient freedom of religion, and while some Christian denominations – such as Jehovah’s Witnesses – have been targeted, the region saves its harshest repression for Muslim groups deemed to be outside the state-sanctioned “moderate” iteration. The 2021 country reports by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, for example, cited mass arrests of Sufi and other Muslims in Tajikistan ahead of elections in 2020 and government systems of appointing senior Islamic leaders and providing state-approved sermons in Turkmen mosques. Uzbekistan only recently rescinded a de facto ban on children being allowed to attend mosques with their parents, but continues to ban new religious texts and “devoted comparatively less effort to easing restrictions on Muslim religious practice” in comparison to efforts to lift restrictions on Christian groups.

Central Asia’s difficulties with religion are perhaps best illustrated by Tajikistan, and Tajikistan’s experience is deeply colored by the civil war that broke out shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soviet rule in Tajikistan, as elsewhere, had co-opted some local elites at the expense of others. When the union collapsed, Tajikistan’s myriad nodes of potential power fought over the right to rule the newly independent state. The Soviet apparatchiks won; the Islamists, aligned with democrats and Pamiris, lost. The peace that settled the Tajik Civil War in 1997, however, carved out a space, officially, for the opposition. It took Tajik President Emomali Rahmon nearly two decades to erode the peace agreement, pushing the nascent Islamist opposition – holding just two of 60 seats in parliament – out of government in 2015, followed swiftly by labeling the group an extremist outfit and detaining its leaders.

Islam for the autocrats of Central Asia poses much the same threat that it did for the Soviet Union. It is a rival and attractive organizing force outside the control of the state; unless, of course, the state maintains close control of religion. Each of Central Asia’s states, while enshrining freedom of religion in their constitutions, maintains either official bodies overseeing the practice of Islam in the country, or extremely close ties to nominally non-governmental bodies doing the same. These bodies – for example, the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, which sits under the Committee on Religious Affairs within the Cabinet of Ministers – either directly or indirectly inherited the functions of their Soviet predecessor, the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia (SADUM).

Central Asia’s relations with Islam continue to evolve. Central Asians have greater ability to explore religion, though not necessarily complete freedom to do so. The region’s governments have not yet sorted out how to balance growing demand for religious freedom by more conservative and fundamentalist Muslims with the risks of allowing dangerous extremist ideology to take root and the protection of other groups.

This was illustrated earlier this year when a crowd of men chanting “Allahu Akbar” in central Tashkent were allowed by the Uzbek police to assault a group of K-pop fans whom they’d been told were LGBTQ supporters. In a sense, it was the operationalization of fundamentalist Islam to combat other forces the state deems even more threatening, with so-called “Western” gay rights campaigning the sharpest example. A blogger at the center of the furor, Miraziz Bazarov, was shortly after assaulted and then arrested (his assailants were never found), with officials and other high-profile Uzbek political figures blaming him for his own assault given his support of the LGBTQ community.

Uzbekistan “does not tolerate unnatural men and women (LGBT)! Our holy religion, Islam, does not allow it,” Komil Allamjonov, the chairman of the board of trustees of the Public Foundation for Support and Development of the National Mass Media, and a former government official infamously proclaimed on Twitter after the incident.

Thirty years after independence, one of the Soviet Union’s lasting legacies in Central Asia is the awkward relationship between predominantly Muslim societies and their devoutly secular governments. What had been Moscow’s Muslim challenge has morphed into Central Asia’s own challenge: How to embrace the region’s history, culture and religion – inextricably intertwined – without upsetting the balance of power between the people and the state?