Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

1 5 2Islam i n World Cult u r e sin Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the expression of Islam has diversified as newsects have appeared, largely as a result of contacts with foreign Muslims. Theimpact of such contacts can easily be overstated, however. Not only are the governmentsnot happy, but there is also a general sentiment that deprecates foreignMuslims (whether Arabs, Pakistanis, or Turks) who preach rigorous obse rvance of Islam. Such approaches to Islam are seen as foreign and as notsuited to the temper of Central Asians.At the same time, the school system remains resolutely secular, with no religiousinstruction whatsoever in any country. This, again, is in marked contrastto Turkey, where the laicist regime nevertheless ensures that Islam, in an approvedand properly “nationalized” form, remains part of the moral educationof all pupils (Kaplan 1996). In Central Asia, religious instruction continuesin the private realm, although now it is not persecuted. A remarkablefeature of the cultural landscape since the 1990s has been the emergenceinto the open of o t i ns, women who teach children the basic tenets of faith,largely orally (Fathi 1998). Similarly, there has been a revival of Sufi orders,with shaykhs recruiting disciples openly. Yet it is clear that instead of being areturn to some kind of “pure” Sufism, this phenomenon is redefining Sufismitself. As an Uzbek scholar has pointed out, the adepts’ knowledge of the intricaciesof Sufi ritual is often superficial, while older practices about initiationare widely disregarded (Bobojonov 1998; see also Privratsky 2001). Contactswith Sufi fraternities abroad has been reestablished, and the renovatedshrine of Baha’uddin Naqshband outside Bukhara receives large numbers ofvisitors from far afield, but national differences and language barriers haveproved to be very real.The revival of Islamic vocabulary in a public sphere that remains de-Islamized often produces incongruous results. In 2001, the press secretary ofthe Türkmenbashï took adulation to a new level when he wrote, “SaparmuratTürkmenbashï is a national prophet, sent to the Turkmen people in the thirdmillennium” (quoted in Arzybov 2001). The statement is blasphemous for thevast majority of Muslims, but it is nevertheless amusing: Its combination of theStalinist rhetoric of Niyazov’s cult of personality with Soviet-style nationalismand Islam transforms an apparatchik into a n a t i o n a l prophet sent to the Tu r k-men people for the third millennium of the Christian era!The Politics of AntifundamentalismSuch (attempted) use of Islamic rhetoric remains unusual, however. Far moretypical today is the regimes’ use of “the Islamic threat” (usually glossed as“Muslim extremism” or “Wahhabism”) to justify authoritarian policies. Themost extreme case is that of Uzbekistan. While the government of Uzbekistan