Regional and Religious Politics in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan: Some Preliminary Notes
نویسنده
چکیده
his study is dedicated to an examination of factors shaping religious and regional politics in Central Asia, and more specifically in the states of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The particular geographic focus is on the Ferghana Valley, the most densely populated area in Central Asia and home to 20 percent of its total population, but the implications of the eventual findings will be much broader, relating the study of contemporary Central Asia to the study of the Middle East and South Asia. The question itself is one that is clearly very important to both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as to other states: In countries with significant regional (sub-national) differences, such as where regional elites compete for power at the national level, do these regional political cleavages have any impact on the development of Islamic political movements? Interestingly, while this is a new question in the study of post-Soviet politics, it is also one that is often studied and analyzed in the Middle Eastern context and in the study of other Muslim states as diverse as Indonesia and Nigeria. This, then, represents the secondary focus of this study: to explore the possibility of building analytical bridges between the study of Central Asia and analyses of other Muslim societies, particularly those in the Middle East. As will be seen in detail below, the time for building these bridges is ripe—while the “Soviet” parameters for studying the region remain crucially important, there is also a clear need to redefine how students of Central Asian societies look at the region. It should be noted that this article represents merely an introduction to the question and does not propose to offer extensive empirical evidence. I have conducted extensive interviews with members of the Tajikistani and Uzbekistani
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