Politicizing Islam in Central Asia: from the Russian Revolution to the Afghan and Syrian Jihads. By Kathleen Collins
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Unusually for a work of political science, this ambitious book aspires to be a work of history. Its author, Kathleen Collins, has indeed assembled historical sources sufficiently breathtaking to leave this historian drooling, the product of decades of research: 79 focus groups with people from all walks of life, more than 500 interviews, 150 Islamist propaganda videos, archival and published sources, and more still. The book’s main argument is that “Islamist movements are a response to state secularization and repression of religion, which entails the state’s threats to, oppression of, or exclusion of religious institutions, leaders, and followers, and restriction and control of their practices and beliefs” (p. 36). Applied to Central Asia, a framework so angular leaves the author little choice but to force a century of relations between Islam and the state into categories of repression and resistance too narrow to do justice to the subject. Collins’s informants, especially those we get to know by name, tradein binaries—believer versus atheist, religious versus secular, freedom versus oppression—the binaries of Sovietology. Spanning nearly a third of the book, the account of the communist period follows an unreconstructed late Sovietological schema: Stalin presided over the “decimation of Islamic institutions” (p. 81). Central Asians were “almost wholly cut off from the Muslim world” (p. 16). Public displays of piety declined: “Performing namaz…was a particularly risky and uncommon practice” (p. 112). For the bulk of the population, “Islam became relegated to tradition” and “life-cycle practices” (this claim is a relic of Soviet social science), while Middle Eastern books exposed young Muslims to Hanbalism (pp. 28, 91). Elsewhere, Collins credits Tsarist-era Tatars with introducing Ibn Taymiyyah to Turkestan. While sensibly rejecting “orthopraxy-centered idea[s] of being Muslim,” Collins nevertheless states that “although a tradition of textual learning was uncommon among the nomadic peoples, they nevertheless considered themselves Muslim” (p. 53). More remarkably, “performing namaz and attending mosque had been relatively uncommon in Kyrgyzstan even before the Soviet era… [and] proficiency in Arabic had been almost nonexistent, so few knew how to pray or attend mosque” (p. 367). These assertions have all been debunked or called into serious question by works of scholarship that are either mentioned in passing or not mentioned at all.
Source: Journal of Church and State
DOI: 10.1093/jcs/csae032
Author: Eren Tasar
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Topic: Soviet and Russian History
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4398764567