Being Muslim in Central Asia pdf download

Being Muslim in Central Asia. Practices, Politics, and Identities

BEING MUSLIM IN CENTRAL ASIA – Book Sample

How ‘Muslim’ are Central Asian Muslims? A Historical and Comparative Enquiry

Central Asia1—defined here as the post-Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan—remains rather poorly known and understood in the West. At the policy level, the region has received attention for its abundant energy resources, especially on the territory of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and its precarious neighborhood with war-stricken Afghanistan and unpredictable Shi’a Iran.

 In cultural terms, Central Asian states have been largely perceived as part of the Muslim world, comparable to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other “stans” in terms of their economic development, social order, ethno-linguistics, and the Islamic religiosity of its population. Such a narrow and functional approach to Central Asia among Western policymakers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and journal-ists has been complemented by the relative thinness and patchiness of the region’s scholarly coverage.

 Thus, English-language Central Asian studies have primarily focused on contemporary issues, especially related to regime transition, energy politics and security, drug trafficking, and the so-called Islamic revival and Islamic radicalization.

The insufficient Western academic understanding of Central Asia, particularly the role of Islam, has been due to a number of factors. One has been the domination of regional studies in general, and Central Asian studies in particular, by social and political scientists who favor theoretical robustness over “messy” empirics, an approach that tends to dissect selective and often policy-driven phenomena by means of established and intrinsically Eurocentric theoretical models and paradigms.2 Accordingly, they largely employ deductive, quantitative research methods and rely extensively on secondary, rather than primary, sources in English and, to a lesser extent, in Russian.

This is not to say that there have been no in-depth and primary-source-based studies on Islam in Central Asia by a relatively small number of Islamic studies scholars, historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and sociologists.3 However, those have often had a narrow geographical, temporal, or thematic focus that obscured the wider picture.

A second reason has been the post-Cold War influx into Central Asian stud-ies of ex-Sovietologists and Kremlinologists and their disciples, who consciously or unconsciously continue to view the Central Asian region and its constituent states as objects of powerful external political and religious impulses, rather than self-defined and self-contained entities with unique characteristics and dynamics.

A third reason has been the general decline of funding for interdisciplinary area studies (despite the rhetorical trumpeting of inter- and multi disciplinarianism), leading to a reduction in the number of Western scholars fluent enough in Central Asian and other languages of the various peoples of the ex-USSR to conduct in-depth empirical research in the region. The arrival in Western universities of a notable number of students from Central Asia has not significantly altered this trend due to their largely uncritical acceptance of Eurocentric political/social science theoretical models.

Finally, there is the practical, logistical, and political difficulties, bordering on impossibility, of conducting both historical and contemporary empirical research on Islam in present-day Central Asia—especially in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan but increasingly in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan—due to the authorities’ tight control over the religious sphere and the local people’s apprehension about any form of engagement in externally funded research on Islam-related topics.

These four epistemological difficulties and inadequacies have contributed to the emergence and recycling of a series of problematic perceptions and expectations regarding the social, political, and religious development of Central Asia. Thus, in the early 1990s it was expected that the region would suc-cumb to the political, economic, and religious influence of its main Muslim neighbors (Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan).4 Later on, as the Taliban emerged in neighboring Afghanistan, the region was expected to succumb to radical Islam, including jihadism.5 In the second decade of the 2000s, some observers pre-dicted that the region would join the “Arab Spring” uprising and undergo violent regime change.6

This chapter attempts to counter the prevailing compartmentalization of various cultural and socio-political phenomena of Central Asia through an integrated, interdisciplinary framework. It treats Central Asia as a historically and culturally self-sufficient region with intrinsic characteristics and dynamics.

 At the same time, it locates Central Asia within the spatial and cultural Eurasian context7 and assesses the legacy of the Soviet transformation for its relations with some other parts of the post-Soviet space and the Middle East. It argues that historically, the culture and identities of various peoples of Central Asia have been shaped by four major influences.

One is associated with the ancient Sogdians, who, long before the arrival of Islam in Central Asia, created a distinctive Central Asian cultural blueprint that has persisted throughout history. The second relates to the lengthy domination of Central Asia and wider Eurasia by Turco-Mongol nomads. The third relates to the arrival of Islam in Central Asia in the seventh century AD and the region’s subsequent Persianized Islamization. The fourth is linked to the late nineteenth century Russian con-quest, followed by Sovietization in the twentieth century.

Since the dis integration of the USSR in 1991, the Islamic dynamic in Central Asia has been marginally affected by the partial re-integration of the region within the wider Muslim world and the advancing globalization and digitalization of Islam.

The Silk Road and the Sogdians

The Sogdians were an eastern Iranian people who originated from Sogdiana, an urbanized and highly developed state, which in the ancient period and the Middle Ages existed on the territory corresponding to the Samarqand- and Bukhara-centered regions of modern Uzbekistan and the Sughd region of modern Tajikistan. Later on, the Arabs named this region Mawarannahr (“what is beyond the river,” i.e., the Amu Darya), while the Romans called it Transoxania (“land beyond Oxus”). Throughout their 1,500-year history, the Sogdians, not the Chinese, acted as the main agents for luxury goods along the Silk Road8 connecting China to Balkh (Bactria), India, Iran, and the Byzantine and the Hellenized Middle East, on one side, and to the steppes of Eurasia, on the other.

The Sogdian merchants were genuine “middle men” who introduced Central Asia to a diversity of music, cuisine, religions and belief systems, including Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity. They also facilitated the exchange and transfer of practical and scientific knowledge and administrative skills.9

In the sixth century AD, the Sogdians introduced Turkic nomads of the steppes to their first alphabet, as well as their administrative system.10 In the eighth century AD they brought paper production technology to the Middle East, and subsequently to Europe, by optimizing the paper-making process that they had learned from Chinese prisoners, who were brought to Samarqand in the wake of the Chinese Tan Dynasty’s defeat by the Arab Abbasid Caliphate in 751 AD in Talas (in modern Kyrgyzstan). Sogdian paper-making skills created the basis for the world’s largest library of the Middle Ages—Bayt al-Hikma/Dar al-Hikma (House of Wisdom)—in Baghdad.11

Thus, through centuries of multi-vector trade, as well as other economic and cultural activities, the Sogdians laid the foundation for the culture of religious and ethnic pluralism and adapt-ability to rapidly changing political environments.

The Sogdian cultural input formed the cornerstone of Central Asian identity, which persisted long after the demise of Sogdiana in the eighth century AD in the face of the Abbasid advance and the drastic changes in the Chinese imperial economy, which were triggered by the An Lu-shan rebellion in China in 755 AD.12 In the ninth and tenth centuries most Sogdians, as well as the Khorezmians, Baktrians, and some other of Central Asia’s sedentary people who spoke eastern Iranian dialects, were included within the Persian-dominated part of the Abbasid Caliphate and subsequently became culturally and linguistically Persianized (i.e., switched from an eastern Iranian to a west-ern Iranian language).13

The Sogdian legacy shaped the political culture of the Islamized Samanids who in 819–999 AD created their state in Mawarannahr, which also encom-passed the territories of present-day Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The Samanid state soon acquired de facto independence from its Abbasid suzerains in Baghdad. Thus, while the Samanid ruling elite was Persian-speaking and affiliated with Sunni Islam, their subjects included sedentary and nomadic peoples of Persian, Turkic, and other ethnic origins, who adhered to Sunni or Shi’a Islam, as well as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity.

The Samanids, like their Sogdian predecessors, encouraged the development of sciences and arts and their capital cities of Samarqand (819–892 AD) and Bukhara (892–999 AD) rivaled Baghdad in terms of their advances in philoso-phy, science, art, and Islamic theology. They produced such great thinkers of the Middle Ages as Rudaki (858–941), Al-Farabi (872–950), Ferdowsi (940– 1020), Al-Biruni (973–1048), and Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037), who made major contributions to the development of medicine, pharmacology, geogra-phy, astronomy, physics, mathematics, political philosophy and Islamic theology. A powerful reminder of the historical role of the Sogdians and Samanids has been the incorporation of the Samanid lineage into the nation-building project of post-Soviet Tajikistan.14

The Steppe Factor and the Turkic–Persian Fusion

Another constituent part of the Central Asian culture and identity developed as a result of over five centuries of nomadic Turco-Mongol domination.15 In 999 AD the Samanids were defeated by the Turkic-speaking Qarakhanids, who had arrived from present-day southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and western Xinjiang and established the Qarakhanid Khanate (999–1211) in Mawarannahr.

In the eleventh century the western part of Central Asia was conquered by the Seljuks, the Oghuz Turks who came from the Aral Sea, and became part of the vast Seljukid empire (1037–1194), which stretched from the Hindu Kush to eastern Anatolia and the Persian Gulf (1037–1194). The Seljuk linguistic imprint is present in Central Asia’s Oghuz-speaking Turkmen, as well as contemporary Turks and Azerbaijanis. In the early thirteenth century, Central Asia, along with most of Eurasia, was included within the enormous multi-ethnic and multi-confessional Mongol empire (1206–1368), created by Genghiz Khan (1162–1227). In the fourteenth century the region became part of the Timurid empire (1370–1507), created by Timur (1336–1405), a Mongol chieftain who modelled himself on Genghiz Khan.

The lengthy Genghizid and Timurid domination emphasized the Eurasian dimension of Central Asia by creating considerable structural and cultural affinities between it and other Eurasian polities under extended Genghizid/Timurid control. In the political sphere, the Genghizid/Timurid legacy manifested itself in the extreme concentration of power at the center, the merger of the ruling clan with the state, and the supremacy of personal relations between a ruler and a subject over any other relations, defined by institutional, social, or ethno-national affiliation.16

It accounted for the rulers’ reliance on genealogi-cal and kinship, rather than Islamic mechanisms to legitimize their authority and for people’s acceptance of the authority of rulers, irrespective of their poli-cies, personal qualities, and their conformity with Islamic requirements for a

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