Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam, Nation-State and (Post)Socialism

Abstract

This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different roles across the region since 1991. For the secular authorities, Islam may be valued as a source of nation building or it may be feared as a potentially destabilising force. The resulting attempts to co-opt, channel and control religious expression provide insights into the nature of secular power and raise questions concerning the applicability to this region of influential theories in the sociology of religion.

Notes

This paper derives from a team project on ‘Religion and Civil Society’ carried out at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology between 2003 and 2006. Alongside Central Asia, the second regional cluster in these projects was East-Central Europe. The projects addressed many aspects of religion, including some not touched upon at all in this article. (Further details can be found in Hann et al. 2006.) We thank our Central Asianist colleagues, Ildikó Bellér-Hann, the late Irene Hilgers, Paweł Jessa, Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, Julie McBrien, Johan Rasanayagam and Manja Stephan for their continuous stimulus, though we alone are responsible for the arguments put forward here. We dedicate the article to the memory of Irene Hilgers.

For example, for the case of evangelical Christianity see Coleman (2000) and Robbins (2004).

Definitions of Central Asia vary. Our case materials in this article are taken from the Muslim Turkic zone between Turkmenistan and Xinjiang. Not all of the indigenous Muslim populations are Turkic (the Tajiks are the most significant non-Turkic group). Afghanistan's encounter with Soviet socialism was far from insignificant but will not be considered here. Similarly, although Buddhist traditions in adjacent zones of Inner Asia raise some comparable issues, we cannot pursue them in this article.

The influential model of the ‘marketplace’ is driven primarily by the experiences of North America, in much the same way that traditional secularisation theory has been driven by the experiences of Western Europe. In North America, Islam may now be following the path trodden by Judaism and Catholicism. In other words, despite the furor of the present ‘war against terrorism’, it appears to be on the way to becoming fully accepted as one further denomination on the marketplace. But the United States is a country populated largely by increasingly diverse waves of immigrants and therefore quite unlike the Turkic-speaking Islamic populations of Central Asia that form the subject of this article. Islam has dominated this region for rather longer than Protestantism has been the dominant religion in the United States.

This is not to deny the importance of local structures, especially where kin groups played a central role in social organisation (Lemercier-Quelquejay 1984). The universal faith everywhere acquired a local colour or context (Privratsky 2001). The point is that the religion as such transcended the local group (the neighbours were Muslim too) and even in the most remote tribal groups, at least some members were aware of the wider connections.

Even today, few Central Asian Muslims are aware of the Sunni–Shiite divide; nor are they aware of their common affiliation to the Hanafi school of law (madhhab).

It is estimated that in the Turkestan guberniya in 1913 only 6.3% of the population were Russians (Matley 1994, p. 105).

Researchers found that some 80% of the total non-Russian population were ‘believers’, whereas among the former Christians in the USSR about 80% were identified as atheists (Bennigsen & Bryan 2002, p. 252).

Slezkine provides a telling example of this paradoxical development in his description of the 1934 Congress of Soviet writers, which saw ‘a curiously solemn parade of old-fashioned romantic nationalisms’ (1994, p. 334). The new political entities were by no means fully congruent with the distribution of linguistic groups, and it was not possible to assign every nationality to a territorial ‘homeland’.

Rudelson (1997) emphasises the continued significance of local identities in Xinjiang, but we follow Gladney (2004) in stressing the degree to which the policies of the socialist state have succeeded in overcoming both the oasis-based fragmentation of the sedentary Turkic-speaking population in the Tarim Basin and also the geographical and cultural boundary with Dzungaria in the north. Hoppe (1998) emphasises the ‘cellular’ diversity of inter-ethnic relations across the region; but he too notes that Han domination has led to an increased salience of ethnic allegiance among the minority nationalities.

See Dillon (1994); MacInnis (1989); Waite (forthcoming); Zarcone 2001. Survey evidence from the 1980s confirmed the continuing ‘profound social and ideological foundation’ of religion in rural Xinjiang (MacInnis 1989, pp. 248–54).

Hann was able to observe them at close quarters in 1986 during his first fieldwork in Xinjiang, which was confined to the regional capital, Urumchi. Later field trips took him to urban Kashgar in 1996 and rural Qumul (Chinese: Hami) in 2006–2007. All fieldwork has been carried out together with Ildikó Bellér-Hann, in cooperation with local academic institutions; these projects had diverse priorities, but for obvious reasons religion was never one of them; the average duration of these field trips was a little over six months.

This section is based primarily on 14 months of fieldwork by Pelkmans in 2003–2004, and a one-month follow-up trip in 2008. Another member of the ‘Religion and Civil Society group’ at the Max Planck Institute, Julie McBrien, also conducted fieldwork in a different location in Kyrgyzstan in 2003–2004 (McBrien 2006a; 2006b), during which period Hann made two short visits to the country; special thanks are due to Julie McBrien for her comments on this section.

These dreamlike images were explicitly used by a number of Pentecostal churches preaching a variant of the ‘Gospel of Prosperity’. For a more elaborate analysis, see Pelkmans (2009).

See for example an interview with then President Akaev by R. Sagdeev, 24 June 1997, available at: www.eisenhowerinstitute.org, accessed 6 January 2008.

Van der Heide (2008, p. 279) similarly observed that Manas—as the symbol of national unity—quickly lost stature after the late 1990s.

For details on the survey, see Pelkmans (2009).

The government's latest attempt to reassert control includes a more restrictive religion law, signed by President Bakiev on 12 January 2009. This requires re-registration of all religious communities and bans unregistered religious activity, the involvement of children in religious activities, and ‘persistent action aimed at converting followers from one faith to another’. The law has triggered a wave of protests from religious leaders and has not yet been implemented. As of May 2009, Government officials were claiming that they were still trying to resolve the major controversial issues. See http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1301, accessed on 9 June 2009.

Fieldwork in Turkmenistan was almost impossible during the first 15 years after independence. This section is based largely on a brief one-week visit by Pelkmans in 2006, when he attended an academic conference in the capital Ashkhabad, conducted interviews and visited several mosques. He was accompanied by our colleague Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi, who has been able to make other short trips and kindly shared her impressions with us on numerous occasions. See in particular Kehl-Bodrogi (2006).

Attitudes towards Turkmenbashi's ideology have been difficult to ascertain. Several scholars have pointed out that, despite widespread scepticism among the general population, the level of ‘belief’ appeared to be significantly higher among the youth (Denison 2007; Lewis 2008, p. 81, 92; Mills 2005, p. 196). During his visit in 2006, Pelkmans was struck by the comment of a cynical high school student who complained about her schoolmates talking about the Ruhnama as if it reflected reality.

See Forum 18 ‘Turkmenistan: Religious Freedom Survey, August 2008’, available at: http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1167&pdf=Y, accessed 9 June 2009.

Uzbekistan, the largest state of the region, fits the pattern very well. Extreme pressure is applied to dissuade Uzbeks from conversion to Christianity, on the grounds that this religion is incompatible with their national identity (Hilgers 2006). Kazakhstan enjoys a more liberal reputation internationally (not unlike Kyrgyzstan); but here too, as in Uzbekistan, the president has regularly intervened in religious matters in a very personal way, for example in order to claim as a saint a celebrated Sufi scholar and mystic who embodies the best of the Kazakh people (Jessa 2006). The Tajik case is exceptional in numerous ways: it is the only post-Soviet state in the region where the dominant ethno-linguistic group is not Turkic, the only one to possess a substantial Islamic minority, and the only one which experienced civil war in the 1990s. Nonetheless Manja Stephan (2006) reports that here, too, the present powerholders are deploying notions of Tajik Islam and the Wahhabi threat in much the same way as their counterparts in the neighbouring ex-Soviet republics.

Some Uyghurs in other regions imagine that controls in the far south are overwhelmingly oppressive. This perception renders them grateful for the relative laxity, as they see it, shown by their own local authorities. Hann's personal observations (including a month spent touring the south in summer 2005) suggest, however, that the authorities maintain a high degree of uniformity in their policies towards religion. Regional variation is much greater in rural economic policy; constraints on the peasantry are much greater in the south.

Thus, while it is generally conceded that local religious leaders can play a valuable role in personal moral education (tärbiyiläş), they are not allowed to organise formal religious instruction for children. This therefore persists clandestinely; a young person wishing to proceed to higher education is taking a big risk if he or she attends such classes. Fieldwork by Hann in early 2007 was adversely affected by an incident which had taken place some 12 months earlier in a neighbouring community, when an imam was invited into a school to give classes in morality (äxlaq). This transgression of the line between the religious and the secular led to a series of corrective ‘ideological instruction’ campaigns at all levels of local society; the effect of these was to make many, especially junior officials, wary of all contacts with a foreign researcher, even to discuss topics unrelated to religion.

In 2006 Hann found that the missionary presence had declined substantially; it was now confined to a few families in Urumchi, the provincial capital.

During fieldwork in Xinjiang in August 2009, when this article was in press, Hann found that discontent over the government's religious policies remained strong among Uyghurs. However, no one considered religion to have been a major factor in causing the violence which on 5 July had left almost 200 dead in Urumchi.