A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Independent Central Asian Republics 291
whose present leaders rose to power through the antithetical (or at least
superficially so) doctrines of godless Communism and theocratic Islam,
have now discovered a common ground for economic, technical, and
even cultural cooperation.On the other hand, more distant Saudi
Arabia has endeavored to further the spiritual renaissance of the Central
Asians; besides assisting with such specific measures as distribution of
the Koran, the Saudi government attempted to finance the foundation
of an Islamic university in Uzbekistan’s Fergana province, until the
project was abandoned after the republic’s Supreme Court ruled that
religiously slanted education is unconstitutional.Islam as propagated by
Saudi representatives and money has received in Uzbekistan the label of
Wahhabism and its adepts are called Wahhabis, so named after the fundamentalist
religious movement that toward the end of the eighteenth
century brought the Saudi dynasty to power.It is these missionaries and
their adepts who seem to worry the Uzbeks, rather than any threat from
an ever more pragmatic Iran.
Quite naturally, relations between Central Asia’s four Turkic republics
and Turkey occupy a place of exceptional importance.They range
from the romantic reminiscences of a common past in the Altai mountains
and the Orkhon valley to hard-headed questions of improved air
links, economic development, and a switch, by the Central Asian Turks,
to a Roman alphabet based on the one used in Turkey.Above all, the
volume of personal contacts, ranging from a tour of the Turkic republics
by President Turgut Özal in 1992 and five “summits” of Turkic
republics (Ankara 1992, Istanbul 1994, Bishkek 1995, Tashkent 1997,
Astana 1998), to rising numbers of Turkish businessmen active in
Central Asia and of young Central Asian Turks studying at Turkish universities,
is tantamount to the dream of pan-Turkism that had inspired
earlier generations of nationalists and frightened Moscow.The effects of
this community of feeling and planning have been positive, and they
promise even more for the future, if the present realism of Central Asian
leaders holds fast; they have invariably emphasized the fact that the new
trend should not be exclusionary or directed against any outsider – a
somewhat contradictory claim, but a far cry from the calls for a Greater
Turkestan voiced by some nationalists in the early decades of the twentieth
century.It is significant that the word “Turkestan” appears to have
lost its former political connotation, and is used only as a geographical
or cultural concept.It is a sense of common ties and interests that
appears almost to force itself upon them, based as it is on the reality of
ethnolinguistic and cultural identity, geopolitics, history, and economics.