The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Central Asia

Adjoining China, South Asia, the Middle East, and Russia, the region of Central Asia has throughout its history maintained extensive ties with its neighbors, and its political thought has developed in dialogue with them. The Mongol conquests of the 13th century integrated Central Asia into the neighboring world regions and left an enduring political legacy. For many centuries after Chingiz Khan (ca. 1160s–1227), descent from the Mongol ruler was the key to political legitimacy. Apart from showing military prowess and political acumen, leaders who aspired to head the khanate were expected also to observe Chingizid customs and legal norms (known as the Yasa) in addition to Islamic law. The Yasa validated the rights of ruling clans, rather than individuals, and gave greater weight to those claiming seniority. This mode of distributing authority contributed, in turn, to the consolidation of regional polities, a phenomenon reinforced by a physical geography that favored human settlement in a few oasis settings separated by stretches of desert. In the early 17th century, these centered on the towns of Balkh and Bukhara. Chingizid sources of legitimacy faltered during political crises in the early 18th century, and the rulers of small states based in Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand employed a variety of strategies to legitimize their autocracies. Celebrating their roles as conquerors, scholars, and Sufis, some did continue to highlight their descent from Chingiz Khan, but others presented themselves as pious defenders of Sunnism and the shari‘a.

Russian conquest of the region between the 1860s and 1880s provoked a variety of political responses. Although some notables initially resisted or emigrated to China or Afghanistan (or were exiled by the tsarist military), most regional scholars, who were adherents of the Hanafi school of law, concluded that the tsarist regime’s latitude toward Islamic rites, personnel, and institutions allowed Muslims to regard the territory of the governor-generalship of Turkestan as dār al-islām (the abode of Islam). Thus a great number of scholars arrived at various kinds of accommodation with the regime. Calls for jihad, for example, by a Sufi leader in 1898 in Andijan were short-lived and widely criticized by the majority of scholars. Focused on educational and cultural reforms, the modernist Jadid movement was an irritant to tsarist authorities, but it was only during World War I and the introduction of a plan to conscript Central Asian Muslims for labor battalions that communities began to abandon their quietist approach to politics and oppose state power on a broad scale.

The revolutions of 1917 in the Russian Empire and the civil war that ensued inaugurated new waves of migration and political fragmentation as locally based militias battled the Bolsheviks and the nascent Soviet state. Not all Muslim elites were hostile to the new regime, however, and a number of modernists saw in socialism and the state’s commitment to national liberation aspirations that were compatible with their interpretations of Islam. For their part, the Bolsheviks sought out local partners to join the Communist Party and state apparatus. Central Asian elites participated in the delineation of the region into national republics (the Soviet socialist republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, which in turn belonged to the Union of Soviet Social Republics) and sought to shape policies aimed at consolidating national groups in the region. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, however, collectivization and antireligious campaigns, including an antiveiling campaign, mosque closures, censorship, and the arrest and assassination of clerics, spurred resistance and more emigration. Policies shifted again during World War II, opening up space for some kinds of Islamic practice. In 1943, the Soviets created the Central Asian Muslim Ecclesiastical Administration (Sredneaziatskoe dukhovnoe upravlenie musul’man). Staffed by clerics of the region and supported by voluntary donations, it encouraged obedience to Soviet authorities while calling for the reform of local ritual practices. Echoing the appeals of many modernist reformers, its fatwas (religious opinions) of the 1950s and 1960s condemned the veneration of local saints and shrines and the celebration of holidays such as the Prophet’s birthday, insisting that these were contrary to the shari‘a. They also targeted the payment of excessive bride-prices and dowries and criticized affiliation with Sufi groups or involvement in Sufi devotions.

In the late 1970s, some of these views overlapped with those of a group of young scholars known collectively as the Mujaddidi. Also hostile to many Sufi rituals, they criticized a number of influential but quietist Hanafi scholars who had taught clandestinely. Inspired in part by the Iranian Revolution (1978–79) and the Afghan jihad, they argued instead for the re-Islamization of society and the construction of an Islamic state. Some of these figures became politically active after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and supported an Islamic political party founded in 1989 in Russia: the Islamic Renaissance Party. Amid the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, young militants in the Ferghana Valley formed vigilante groups committed to administering Islamic justice, and in 1992 one of their leaders, Tohir Yo’ldoshev (1967–2009), openly challenged the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov (b. 1938), during a meeting in Namangan. When Tajikistan descended into civil war in 1992, a bloody conflict in which regional solidarity groups fought for control of the state and resources, a number of these activists, including Yo’ldoshev and Juma Namangoniy (1969–2001), escaped repression in Uzbekistan and joined the conflict in Tajikistan. In 1999, they founded the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and issued publications from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in which they lamented the oppression of the world’s Muslims and faulted the United States and a global Jewish conspiracy for preventing the faithful from living in accord with Islamic law. The focus of IMU agitation was nonetheless on the government of Uzbekistan, which it accused of imprisoning and torturing the faithful. In rejecting the Karimov government as a despotic and infidel regime, Yo’ldoshev called for armed struggle under his close direction to overthrow the government and replace it with one based on Islamic law. Although the movement’s leaders sought refuge in Afghanistan, they publically distanced themselves from Taliban rule and its association with Osama bin Laden (1957–2011). After American forces targeted IMU camps following September 11, 2001, however, IMU propaganda shifted. Despite the apparent death of the head of the group’s militant wing, Namangoniy, in 2001, IMU militants led by Yo’ldoshev continued to be active in Afghanistan and in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. IMU videos and other communications claimed that they had pledged loyalty to the head of the Taliban, Mulla Muhammad ‘Umar. The United States claimed to have killed Yo’ldoshev in an air strike in Pakistan in 2009. Nonetheless, other Uzbek militant groups, including the Islamic Jihad Union, which broke off from the IMU in 2002, continued to operate in the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderlands.

In addition to these jihadist groups, a transnational organization, Hizb ut-Tahrir, became active in Central Asia from the early to mid-1990s. Probably first established in Uzbekistan, the movement spread to neighboring states, recruiting young men and women, including students, though it largely operated underground. Though anti-Semitic and critical of existing states, its campaign for a single state to unify all Muslims did not use violence. Hostile state policies and propaganda apparently broadened its appeal, and prisons seemed to play a key role in the expansion of its membership. Despite severe repression in Uzbekistan as well as Tajikistan, Hizb ut-Tahrir attracted between 20 and 100,000 members in the region. Since 2001 authoritarianism throughout Central Asia has intensified, and there remain few legal venues for independent political activity.