TheMaking of Militants: The State and Islam in Central Asia

I n Central Asia, as in other regions of the world with large Muslim populations, opposition groups are increasingly turning to the ideas of militant Islam in their efforts to challenge authoritarian rule. Activists fromKokand to Kabul have learned that political Islam provides an unusually potent language of opposition. In Central Asia, a wide array of opposition movements—the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic Renaissance Party, and Hizb ut-Tahrir—have, with varying degrees of militancy, applied the banner of Islam to their struggle with local authoritarian rule. TheMarch 2004 suicide bombings and gun battles in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in which more than forty people died and dozens were injured are only the most recent reminder that, despite seven decades of Soviet rule, Islam remains a powerful mobilizing force in Central Asia. That Islamist movements have reemerged in Central Asia in the wake of the Soviet collapse is clear. What is less clear, however, is why tensions between the state and Islam have been significantly more pronounced in some Central Asian regions than in others. Variations in the extent, militancy, and intensity of Islamist movements, much like the many different and markedly varied authoritarian states these movements oppose, are rarely differentiated in the social science literature. Thus, while scholars have helpfully devised theories to explain the recent upsurge in Islamist political mobilization, few of these theories explain why Islamist movements are more pronounced and more militant in some authoritarian states than in others. Seeing these differences in Islamist mobilization to be of both theoretical interest to social science theory and immediate import to state-society conflicts not only in Central Asia but also in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and, more and more, in the Western world, I seek to explain the root causes of variations in political Islam. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the question of political Islam. Historian Bernard Lewis and political scientist Samuel Huntington, for example, write that the globalization of Western culture has sparked an Islamist backlash. Central Asian political leaders, for their part, have argued that the Islamist opposition has been artificially crafted