Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 4 – Among the
factors promoting Islamic radicalization in Central Asia, Rakhimbek Bobokhonov
says, one of the most serious at present consist of the gastarbeiters from that
region now in Russia, what happens in their families while they are away, and
how they themselves behave after their return.
In the course of a major study of
the history of Islam in Central Asia, Bobokhonov, who is a senior scholar at
the Center for Civilizaitonal and Regional Research of the Moscow Institute of
Africa, says there are many indigenous reasons for Islamist radicalization but
that gastarbeiters are playing an ever-increasing role (centrasia.ru/news.php?st=1443906600).
At the end of Soviet times and the
beginning of the post-Soviet period, he argues, ignorance among the population
about Islam, the result of Soviet anti-religious policies, left the peoples of
Central Asia available for mobilization by radicals from abroad who came as
missionaries and who offered training in other countries.
Later, he says, the Islamists gained
in numbers and influence because of the lack of any other channels for
expressing their views or even solving personal problems like healthcare, given
the authoritarian nature and weak development of public institutions in
post-Soviet Central Asia.
Over the last decade of so,
outmigration from the region and especially from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan “also has an indirect relation to the process of Islamization of
contemporary Central Asian societies” given the specific features of the
gastarbeiter movement and its impact on members of migrant families left
behind.
In the summertime, Bobokhonov notes,
“when many mmigrants leave for work in Russia, the number of parishioners in
mosques throughout Central Asia is much reduced,” but that has consequences: “Many
migrants from the region are rural residents who earlier strictly observed
shariat norms at home.”
“When [such people] come to Russia
and find themselves in a secular urban milieu, they become even more religious.” There are several reasons for this, the
Moscow scholar says. Most of them work at large construction sites where Muslim
groups are already functioning, and they have to become part of these to get
along, especially “in the first months of their life abroad.”
And while the migrants consist of
many different nationalities, on arrival in Russian cities, they organize
themselves less on that basis than on the basis of religion. That reduces the
importance of ethnicity for them and increases that of religion, a trend that
plays into the hands of Islamist radicals who maintain that faith takes
precedence over national identity.
Other facts of life in Russia also
push Muslim gastarbeiters toward the Islam.
“Some migrants, while working in various cities of Russia and observing
unemployment, alcoholism and drug use among the local population, become as a
result more responsible themselves and more committed to their faith.”
And other migrants who work in
cities like Kazan, Ufa, and Yekaterinburg which have “major Muslim communities”
and Muslim infrastructure assimilate to that and in doing so see their
religious consciousness increase as a result, Bobokhonov continues.
But there are other ways in which
the gastarbeiter experience promotes Islamist radicalization, he says. Gastarbeiters earn more money and thus are
able to “acquire new communications technologies and use the Internet, video,
and satellite antennas.” As a result, they visit varioius social sites and are
drawn into Islamist conversations.
A second and perhaps even more
significant way in which gastarbeiters promote radicalization, he continues, is
the impact their departure has on gender roles in Central Asian families. With their husbands in Russia, Central Asian
women are forced to assume “many traditional male obligations.”
Among these are the religious education
of children, something the traditionally more religious female part of the
population may push even harder than did their husbands. And consequently, when
Central Asian governments try to restrict mosque attendance, these women take
their children to underground mosques whose mullahs are often far more radical.
As a result of all these factors, “the
Islamization of contemporary Central Asian society is consistently intensifying
the role of political Islam,” something new everywhere in that region except
Tajikistan and something the other governments have not yet figured out a way
to effectively oppose.
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