Politicizing Islam in Central Asia : From the Russian Revolution to the Afghan and Syrian Jihads

A sweeping history of Islamism in Central Asia from the Russian Revolution to the present through Soviet-era archival documents, oral histories, and a trove of interviews and focus groups. Few observers anticipated a surge of Islamism in Central Asia, after seventy years of forced communist atheism. Muslims do not inevitably support Islamism, a modern political ideology of Islam. Yet, Islamism became the dominant form of political opposition in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Politicizing Islam in Central Asia , Kathleen Collins explores the causes, dynamics, and variation in Islamist movements-first within the USSR, and then in the post-Soviet states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic and historical research on Islamist mobilization, she explains the strategies and relative success of each Central Asian Islamist movement. Collins argues that in each case, state repression of Islam, by Soviet and post-Soviet regimes, together with the diffusion of religious ideologies, motivated Islamist mobilization. Sweeping in scope, this book traces the dynamics of Central Asian Islamist movements from the Soviet era through the Tajik civil war, the Afghan jihad against the US, and the foreign fighter movement joining the Syrian jihad. "The introduction sets forth the two sets of questions that motivate this book. First, under what conditions does Islam become the language and the defining character of political opposition movements? Why has this Islamist mobilization taken place in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, whereas in Kyrgyzstan, civil Islam-rather than Islamism-has predominated? And why have three distinct waves of Islamist organizations and movements emerged and mobilized from the 1980s through the 2010s? Second, why do some Islamist organizations achieve relatively high mobilization, attracting a mass following, whereas many others remain fringe groups, or disappear altogether? What strategies do Islamists employ to win a social base? Are ordinary people attracted to any of the multiple Islamist movements that have surfaced? The chapter also reviews the book's country cases and the Islamist movements within each country, as well as the research methodology"-- Provided by publisher