Transforming Tajikistan

State-building and Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia

Hélène Thibault

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781784539214
• eBook ISBN: 9781786723123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Central Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Tajikistan is a key state in Central Asia, and will become crucial to the rHélène Thibault is assistant professor in Political Science at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan since 2016. Prior to that, she had been a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for the Study of Religious Pluralism and the Center for International Studies at the Université de Montréal. Apart from research activities, she also took part in multiple election observation missions with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in Ukraine.egional power balance as it transitions away from Soviet government systems and responds to the rise of Chinese financial power alongside the continuing presence of Russian military might. This book demonstrates how Soviet structures in Tajikistan have been transformed into state structures, and how national identities are formed. Helene Thibault focuses on the differences between secular nationhood in Tajikistan, and an increasingly popular and influential 'born-again' Muslim identity. Featuring extensive and original primary-source material, including 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, Thibault demonstrates the profound and lasting influence of Soviet power structures and attitudes, and how secular and religious identities clash when building a new state in the region.

CHAPTER 1

A NEO-INSTITUTIONALIST ETHNOGRAPHY OF RELIGIOUS REVIVAL

Long kept in the shadow of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian region¹ did not attract much attention outside the USSR until 1991, with some exceptions, such as the works of Carrère d'Encausse,² Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay,³ and Critchtlow.⁴ The breakup of the USSR has boosted scholarly interest in Central Asia, but the study of this region remains marginal within the body of literature in comparative politics. The difficulty of access for foreign researchers, its isolation from leading publication and research centres, language issues, as well as difficult economic and living conditions make the Central Asian region less attractive to researchers. The politicization of Islam in Central Asia has nourished the field of post-Soviet studies after the emergence of armed insurgencies such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and after the break-out of a protracted civil war in Tajikistan in 1991. Central Asia, and the Ferghana valley in particular, have often been labelled as a hotbed of radical Islam.⁵ Other studies focused on geostrategic issues, especially after the Western military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001. Since independence in the early 1990s, observers have been expecting and predicting some sort of destabilization that has never occurred. References to ‘The Great Game,’ in allusion to the British–Russian competition for the control of the region in the nineteenth century were also common and granted the region a geostrategic importance in world politics.⁶ In spite of the pessimistic prognosis, and with the exception of the Tajik civil war, the region has remained remarkably stable and both state institutions and political elites proved very resilient.

Among the Central Asian Republics, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan have received the least attention from the academic community. In the case of Turkmenistan, the dearth of scholarship can be explained by its exceptionally closed political system, limited freedom of movement within the country, and lack of access to people and documentation. In Tajikistan, the dangerous situation that prevailed in the country from 1991 to 1997 hampered the willingness of many scholars to conduct research there, but the country still receives far less scholarly attention than Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, for example. In fact, there are few scholarly articles, less so monographs, dedicated solely to Tajikistan. A recent monograph written by Nourzhanov and Bleuer, and published in 2012, offers a comprehensive and nuanced historical analysis, from antiquity to the civil war period. Among other influential research, many addressed the security situation in postwar Tajikistan. In particular, Driscoll,⁷ Markovitz,⁸ Nourzhanov,⁹ and Heathershaw¹⁰ have adroitly debunked the oversimplified common idea that the civil war opposed Islamists and secular forces. Instead, their work has shown that regional interests, which were defined and redefined throughout the conflict to suit the bidding of actors, superseded ideologies. Hence, the making of peace and the postwar equilibrium rested on the capacity of the winning elites to maintain patronage networks¹¹ as well as the manipulation of the peace narrative by elites.¹²

In the field of religion, many studies have provided useful and insightful accounts on the history and current status of the religious field in Tajikistan. Dudoignon, Epkenhans, Mullojonov, and Olimov and Olimova.¹³ They shed a new light on the debate on parallel and official Islam in Soviet times and in today's Tajikistan by highliting the connections between representatives of official institutions and unregistered clerics in patronage networks as well as discussing religious debates. Although this scholarly production testifies of a profound knowledge of the religious field in Tajikistan, they tend to neglect the social and individual dimension of the religious playing field. This book should be seen as the ethnographic complement of the above-mentioned studies on religion. It concurs with a recent wave of ethnographic research on everyday Islam in Central Asia that focuses on lived religious experiences such as Louw, McBrien, Zigon, Pelkmans, and Rasanayagam.¹⁴ However, this scholarship is coming to us from the field of anthropology and few studies have explored the political dimension of religious revival. Tajikistan is certainly worthy of greater consideration and, as I will argue throughout this book, scholars need to engage more actively in fieldwork to produce knowledge that is locally grounded. Yet, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, the current political conditions make the conduct of social science research very difficult, if not all together dangerous.

Perhaps because of the influence of ‘Sovietology,’¹⁵ in general, the literature on Central Asian Islam has not been a field for great theoretical debates. However, historical institutionalism and its concept of path dependency have dominated most research done by both historians and political scientists on the development of post-Soviet Islam.¹⁶ Historical institutionalism is interested in discovering how past practices condition subsequent ones by encouraging societal forces to organize along some lines rather than others, to adopt particular identities, or to develop interests in policies that are costly to shift.¹⁷ Jones Luong writes that: ‘historical institutionalism depicts political identities as “investments” that individuals consciously make in response to their institutional surroundings and yet unconsciously maintain.’ For her, this theory has the particularity to draw our attention ‘to the structural incentives that make some identities more desirable and enduring than others.’¹⁸ In particular, scholars have discerned the continuation of Soviet practices in Central Asia in:

(1)the nationalization of religious administrative structures;

(2)the adoption of regular and Constitutional laws defining the parameters of religious life;

(3)the repression of religious opposition;

(4)the assimilation of Islamic forces.¹⁹

Besides historical institutionalism, scholars have used innovative approaches to assess the great changes taking place in the region, especially the religious economy school²⁰ and ethnographic perspectives.²¹ Both these approaches take into account agency in the redefinition of religious identities even though the latter looks at the way religious markets shape individual behaviour while the former focuses on personal interpretations and narratives to make sense of social and political dynamics. The religious economy school has the merit to move away from a state-centred perspective and consider a multiplicity of actors embedded in religious markets, and involved in the process of social change. If these studies incorporate the interests of political actors into the study of religious markets, they fail to contextualize the choices made and the attitudes adopted by actors. Two books by American scholars Paul Froese and Christopher Marsh illustrate how this is used for the study of post-Soviet religious revival. Both works demonstrate the failure of the forced secularization in the USSR as well as in China in the case of Marsh's comparative analysis of Russia and China. To explain the fact that the absence of religious market did not completely eradicate religious beliefs, Froese and Marsh rely on a common postulate: that the demand for religion or spirituality, as formulated by Stark and Finke, ‘is an essential aspect of human condition.’²² Yet, Marsh and Froese don't go very far in the exploration of personal motivations apart from the assumption that people are religious because they can. Ironically, tenants of the religious economy school who are the most interested in personal manifestations of faith and beliefs are those who neglect the personal dimension of research and investigation.

Overall, not much importance has been given to micro socio-political dynamics within the larger phenomenon of post-Soviet transformation. However, a new generation of ethnographic research proposes to dig deeper into local narratives and practices by using ethnography. Ethnographers attempt to provide accounts of local perceptions of politics ‘to analyze the gap between the idealized representation and actual apprehension of events, people and political orders’²³ and try to uncover the power relations that lie behind the making, dissemination, and understanding of certain narratives in a given society. As Jourde wrote: ‘when investigating Islam and politics, ethnography provides a sensibility that allows political scientists to “see” the large variation of meanings such a word [Islamism] can have across Muslim societies, as well as the complex struggles that are fought over this word.’²⁴ Also, as opposed to a certain literature, which claims that objectivity should be a guiding principle behind investigative social research,²⁵ ethnographers are usually conscious of their own subjectivity and the impact one's background (life experiences, values, and assumptions) has on the conduct of research. Reflexivity is seen as inevitable and useful.²⁶ Equally important is the subjects' reactions and interactions to and with the researcher. In their research on the former Soviet Union, anthropologists used ethnography to explore the overlapping of Soviet and post-Soviet periods and, most specifically, the connection between religious revival and Soviet legacies. Notably, Mathijs Pelkmans insists that scholars need ‘to acknowledge that Soviet rule did more than simply repress religions. It also influenced understandings of religion and modes of religiosity.’²⁷ The interpretivist stance offers two possibilities: (1) to explore social narratives that have not been significantly considered in previous research on Central Asia, (2) to revisit common dichotomies of state and society, religious and secular, and Soviet and post-Soviet by showing the blurred boundaries between them. Ethnography is especially well suited due to its ‘consideration of transtemporal and translocal effects.’²⁸

The challenge that unfolds thoughout the book is to demonstrate the relevance of using an approach that insists on path dependency and the persistence of old patterns, while also focusing ‘on the ways in which Islam is lived and experienced in practice.’²⁹ I combine a neo-institutionalist approach with ethnographic research to make sense of the religious revival in independent Tajikistan. The use of such a hybrid approach to study a phenomenon that departs from Soviet realities can appear to be incongruous. Per contra, I make use of historical institutionalism's central concept – path dependency – and a broad definition of institutions that includes ideas and norms to argue that the phenomenon of religious revival is subsidiary of Soviet legacies of understanding the social and political order. I demonstrate that Tajik state institutions and laws responsible for regulating religion have been greatly modelled upon Soviet institutions. On the other hand, I argue that the path dependency argument is also useful in decoding the behaviour of ordinary citizens as well as strict believers in their understanding of the place of religion in the society. I orient my interpretation along two critical axes: ontological and epistemological.

Ontologically speaking, I will seek equilibrium between the impact of the structure (Soviet legacy) on the individual (life and moral choices). I address religious revival, an ontological object subjected to diverse interpretations and debates. Indeed, many scholars refuse to frame post-Soviet Islam in Central Asia as a ‘revival’ given that religion did not disappear in Soviet times but was merely lived and practised differently and more or less secretly. My intention is to nuance the notion of revival in order to support the idea that there is continuity between Soviet and post-Soviet orders such that, against all odds, religious sentiments may even have their origin in Soviet values. By using the path-dependency argument, I aim to reconcile Soviet and post-Soviet orders by interpreting them not as antagonistic, but as overlapping.

Epistemologically speaking, it seems important to find a balance between what is a finding, a universalizable truth, and an observation. Seeking to grasp the significance of religious revival rather than to look for a sociological explanation reflects an epistemological supposition that reality is not made of causal relations waiting to be discovered by scholars. In this, I follow Davie, who renounces universalizable truths and refers instead to socio-political patterns which reflect the ‘non-randomness of human living.’³⁰ Ethnography's emphasis on subjects' narratives makes available competing discourses on religion and illuminates ‘the large variation of meanings and complex struggles’³¹ that the interaction of religion and society typically entails. The theoretical perspective that I adopt supplements interpretivist and positivist epistemologies with concepts borrowed from historical institutionalism and political ethnography.

Both journalists and scholars often invoked the ideological vacuum to explain the resurgence of religion in the former Soviet space. Used and overused, this concept is both controversial and challenging. As Louw suggested, referring to the ideological vacuum argument is risky because it is used as a tactic by incumbent governments to legitimate authoritarianism.³² Beyond such instrumental narratives, material from my own interviews iterates the experience of ideological vacuum after the dissolution of the USSR. Yet, I don't limit the definition of the concept of ideological vacuum to the disappearance of the Soviet ideological framework. Instead, the meaning I give to it encompasses both the ideological and material deliquescence that followed the break-up, which was particularly painful in war-torn Tajikistan. The dynamics I explore take place in a political context within which the post-Soviet ideological vacuum is coupled with failed attempts to construct new national histories.³³ The concept of ideological vacuum is also contentious because there is no clear boundary between Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The USSR collapse surely created a destabilizing and uncertain environment, but Soviet values were not suddenly discarded and forgotten. In accordance with the overall objective of the book, the concept of ideological vacuum has to be nuanced in order to avoid marking a definite line between Soviet and post-Soviet orders. The absence of delimitation between these two historical periods can be explained by the affinities of religious and Soviet moral codes.³⁴ Luehrmann's fascinating piece on religious education in rural Russia proposes to see the secular (Soviet) and post-secular periods not as opposed to each other but as ‘sites of engagement that alternate and overlap in the lives of both societies and individuals.’³⁵

In sum, the combination of neo-institutionalism and political ethnography produces a hybrid theoretical position that acknowledges structure, agency, and reflexivity. On the one hand, the concept of path dependency, more specifically the resilience of Soviet values, will be used to assess both state and individual orientations. For this, I abide by Smith and Grahame's evocation that ‘the social organizat...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Glossary
• Note on Transliteration
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Religious Revival in Tajikistan
• 1. A Neo-Institutionalist Ethnography of Religious Revival
• 2. The Soviet Secularization Project
• 3. Tajikistan's Political Landscape in the Aftermath of the Civil War
• 4. State Policies and Discourses in Independent Tajikistan
• 5. Of Being Muslim in Tajikistan
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography