Islam in Central Asia 30 years after independence: debates, controversies and the critique of a critique

ABSTRACT

The study of Islam in Central Asia has undergone enormous transformations in the 30 years since the Soviet era came to an end. Over the last three decades, a sizable corpus of literature on Islam in Central Asia has appeared across several disciplines. There has also been considerable debate over methods and approach: What questions are important to ask? Which kinds of sources are the most significant? Which voices from among Central Asians are the most important? This study has two main aims. First, it provides an overview of the various literatures on Islam in Central Asia, with a sense of their trajectories in the three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Second, and more importantly, it offers a critique of the critique mentioned above. The study does so by examining the ideological and methodological assumptions that underpin it and by articulating the stakes involved, a task that has not yet been undertaken.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• Central Asia
• Sovietology
• post-Soviet
• Orientalism
• historiography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In a complete mischaracterization, DeWeese (2007, 137) accuses me of ‘fall[ing] back on overly reified and essentialized notions of “religion” vs. “nationalism”’ (137). I do no such thing. My own argument has been that in the post-Second World War period, ‘Muslimness coexisted with ethnonational identities that had become quite meaningful to many people’ and that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, ‘Islam, nation, and tradition coexist[ed] happily in Uzbekistan’ (Khalid 2007, 107, 158).

2 See, for instance, the collection of Tajik memoirs curated and digitally published by Artemy Kalinovsky and Isaac Scarborough, ‘Central Asian Memoirs of the Soviet Era’ (https://islamperspectives.org/rpi/collections/show/18).