Khalid - Islam after Communism

Waiting in line at a cafeteria in Tashkent one day in 1991, in the last months of the Soviet era, I fell into conversation with two men behind me. They were pleased to meet someone from the outside world, to which access had been so difficult until then, but they were especially delighted by the fact that their interlocutor was Muslim. My turn in line eventually came, and I sat down in a corner to eat. A few minutes later, my new acquaintances joined me unbidden at my table, armed with a bottle of vodka, and proceeded to propose a toast to meeting a fellow Muslim from abroad. Their delight at meeting me was sincere, and they were completely unself-conscious about the oddity of lubricating the celebration of our acquaintance with copious quantities of alcohol.

This episode, unthinkable in the Muslim countries just a few hundred kilometers to the south, provides a powerful insight into the place of Islam in Central Asian societies at the end of the Soviet period. Clearly, being Muslim meant something very specific to my friends. Seven decades of Soviet rule had given Central Asians a unique understanding of Islam and of being Muslim. Islam after Communism had its peculiarities.

A few months after my encounter, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the republics of Central Asia became independent states. As old barrierspolitical, ideological, personalcame down, the region experienced a considerable Islamic revival. Mosques were reopened, new ones built, links with Muslims outside the Soviet Union revived. Islam has indeed experienced a rebirth in the region.

For many, especially in the West, this return of Islam boded ill. According to this view, Central Asia would become another hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, a breeding ground of terrorismessentially a natural extension of Afghanistan and other anti-Western regimes in the Middle East. Westerners had reasons enough to fear this outcome. In November 1991, demonstrators in the Uzbek city of Namangan besieged the countrys president and demanded that he declare Uzbekistan an Islamic republic. In neighboring Tajikistan, independence degenerated into a bloody civil war that was widely seen as pitting resurgent Islamists against the incumbent Communists. By the late 1990s, militant organizations had emerged in Uzbekistan that sought the overthrow of the regime there and its replacement by an Islamic state. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), the most prominent of these organizations, developed links with militant groups in war-torn Afghanistan, and its members fought alongside the Taliban during the American invasion in the autumn of 2001. For many observers, the IMU represents the future of Islam in the regiona natural culmination of the rebirth of Islam. This view is based on certain assumptions, often unstated by its proponents, about Islam itself. According to this view, Islam is inherently political and naturally leads to anti-Western militancy. For this reason, the seventy years of Soviet rule were of no consequence, for once Islam reemerged, the paths to its politicization and militarization were foretold.