RECLAIMING ISLAM IN UZBEKISTAN: SOVIET LEGACIES AND POST-SOVIET REALITIES

Abstract

Though the Soviet empire has long since collapsed and been dismantled, its countless legacies (technological, institutional, philosophical, and political, among others) remain powerfully real, alive and well, and they do so perhaps nowhere more than in the newly independent states of Muslim Central Asia and Uzbekistan in particular. An especially influential component of these legacies is the persistence and potency of a political culture of scientific atheism affecting the perceptions, attitudes, policies and practices of the old communist leaders of these states not only toward religion, especially Islam and Muslim religious activism, but toward freedom of thought and action in general. Another dimension of the same legacy has been the apparent expectation of the rise of militant Islamic movements against the successor state regimes as voiced by the media, most Russian and Western “experts” and Central Asia’s current power elites.

Keywords

• RECLAIMING ISLAM
• UZBEKISTAN
• SOVIET LEGACIES
• POST-SOVIET REALITIES

ÖZBEKİSTAN'DA İSLAM'IN İDDİASI: SOVYET MİRASI VE SOVYET SONRASI GERÇEKLER

Abstract

Though the Soviet empire has long since collapsed and been dismantled, its countless legacies (technological, institutional, philosophical, and political, among others) remain powerfully real, alive and well, and they do so perhaps nowhere more than in the newly independent states of Muslim Central Asia and Uzbekistan in particular. An especially influential component of these legacies is the persistence and potency of a political culture of scientific atheism affecting the perceptions, attitudes, policies and practices of the old communist leaders of these states not only toward religion, especially Islam and Muslim religious activism, but toward freedom of thought and action in general. Another dimension of the same legacy has been the apparent expectation of the rise of militant Islamic movements against the successor state regimes as voiced by the media, most Russian and Western “experts” and Central Asia’s current power elites.

Keywords

• İSLAM
• ÖZBEKİSTAN
• SOVYET MİRASI
• SOVYET SONRASI GERÇEKLER

References

1. For a critique of “Sovietlogical Islamology” see Devin Deweese’s “Islam and the Legacy of Sovietology: A Review Essay on Yaacov Roi’s Islam in the Soviet Union” in Journal of Islamic Studies, 13(3):298-330. Also see Rumer 2002, 1993, and Critchlow 1989, and reports prepared for RAND Corporation by Cheryl Benard 2004, 2003; and for Policy Planning Unit of the Finish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by Zeyno Baran, S. Fredrick Starr and Svante E. Cornell 2006 of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, Johns Hopkins University.
2. 2 For a useful review of the reports on these events and the role of Uzbek government policies and practices, see Alisher Ilkhamov 2006, and Sarah Kendzior 2006.