Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Islam in Contemporary Central Asia 1 5 5have been instrumental in establishing political Islam as a transnational phenomenon.Censorship has not disappeared, and governments closely monitorcontacts with Muslim organizations in the Middle East.Nevertheless, these campaigns have placed the struggle against “extremism”at the forefront of the political agenda in Uzbekistan. The Karimov regimelong ago borrowed the term “Wahhabi” to denote undesirable Muslims fromlate Soviet discourse (there are similarities with nineteenth-century British Indianuses of the term as a blanket condemnation of a regime’s opponents). Inindependent Uzbekistan, the accusation of Wahhabism situates the accusedbeyond the scope of the national tradition and insinuates unhealthy Saudi influence.It is thus a nativist gesture. But more is at stake. In the post–cold warworld order, “antifundamentalism” provides a universal language that allowsregimes—liberal democratic as much as authoritarian—to position themselveson the right side of the fence, on the side of reason, enlightenment, and secularism,and against fanaticism, obscurantism, and reaction. Central Asianregimes have used this language with great liberality. They are not simply cynicallymanipulating world public opinion, however, for it would be idle to denythat the fears embodied in this rhetoric do resonate among the public. Manyin Uzbekistan are wary of what has happened in Afghanistan since the 1980s,and the urban intelligentsia in particular is sympathetic to Karimov’s antifundamentalistposture.ConclusionIt is not simply state repression that will guarantee that Islam remains apoliticalin Central Asia. Islam, nation, and tradition coexist happily in Central Asiatoday, in 2004. A “return” to Islam today is widely seen as a way of reclaimingthe national cultural patrimony and of decolonization, but little more. Islamis deeply intertwined with powerful national myths. For the same reason, unlikein much of the Middle East, there is little interest on university campusesfor a return to “true Islam.” An opinion survey carried out in 1993 found only11 percent of respondents in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan expressing a preferencefor “an Islamic state” as the best possible future for Central Asia, andmost of those seemed to associate the Islamic state with “fairness, goodnessand other traditional or cultural values related to Islam” (Lubin 1995, 62) 4 —in short, an idealized version of an authentic Central Asian past set against Soviet-eracorruption, rather than an idealized future based on the sovereigntyof God and the Islamization of life. Official repression notwithstanding, wehave little evidence that the carriers of Islam seek to transform their religiousauthority into political power.Indeed, the problem for carriers of Islam is the opposite: For the majority of