Contesting and negotiating religion and ethnic identity in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

Post-Soviet Central Asia has inherited a set of circumstances conducive to the revitalization of religion. The renewal of Muslim awareness and identity in Central Asia may not be surprising, but the growth of Christianity is, especially in its Protestant form within indigenous Muslim communities. This article, based on qualitative field research, reviews one example of this development: the process of conversion to Protestant Christianity among Muslim Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan. A prominent aspect of this social movement has been the ways in which Kyrgyz Christians have entered into a dynamic process of engaging with issues of identity and what it means to be Kyrgyz – a process that has sought to locate their new Christian religious identity within, rather than on the margins of, familial and ethnic identity, and one that challenges the normative understanding of Kyrgyz identity: that to be Kyrgyz is to be Muslim. While providing the context for Kyrgyz conversion, this discussion primarily focuses on the way Kyrgyz Christians utilize a number of different discursive strategies to contest normative Kyrgyz identity constructs and to legitimize a Kyrgyz Christian identity.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• Islam
• Kyrgyzstan
• identity
• religious conversion
• ethnicity

Notes

1. The interviews were coded using thematic analysis from which these discourse strategies unfold.

2. These terms denote the everyday belief and practice of Islam lived out by many Muslims in their cultural context, which does not necessarily follow orthodox belief and practice (Omelicheva 2011; Privatsky 2001) but includes various levels of syncretism with pre-Islamic religious or spiritual traditions. This is by no means an attempt to simplify Islam but only recognizes the diversity in how Islam is understood and lived.

3. There was a fledgling Kyrgyz church in the eastern Kyrgyzstan town of Naryn, started by a ‘Central Asian ethnic German’ during the mid-to-late 1980s.

4. Rumours about ‘Baptists’ abounded throughout the former Soviet Union (Riga 1994).

5. Some Muslims use similar methods with Christians – using the Bible to support Islam (see e.g. Jamal A. Badawai's 2012 e-book, Muhammad in the Bible).

6. Muslim missionaries or tablighi, foreign or local, also seek to convert nominal Kyrgyz Muslims to become ‘true’, ‘scripturalist’, or religious/moral abiding Muslims.

7. For an in-depth discussion of the importance of ancestors, see Privatsky (2001). While Privatsky's research was based on his experience in Kazakhstan, much of it is relevant to the Kyrgyz.

8. Nestorian Christianity existed within Kyrgyzstan (up to the fourteenth century) and other regions of Central Asia (Baumer 2006).

9. Mazar is a sacred place or places understood to be a site of spiritual power and blessing associated with the burial place of Sufi Muslim saints or with particular geographical features such as streams, waterfalls, trees and rocks.