Islamic Revival Said Threatening Kazakh Identity

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 3 – The relationship between Islam and national identity among Turkic peoples like the Kazakhs has always been fraught, one both reinforcing and competitive. The upsurge in Islamic ideas from the Arab would has intensified the competitive side of the equation with Kazakh writer Yerbolat Baytuly sayng it’s more important to be Kazakh than Muslim.

            For many Kazakhs, commentator Madi Alimov argues, making a choice between national or religious is unthinkable, but that doesn’t mean, he continues, that the relationship between the two is easy or should not be the subject of continuing discussion especially because of recent changes (camonitor.kz/33110-nacionalnoe-ili-religioznoe-chto-dlya-kazaha-vazhnee.html).

                On the one hand, he says, both of these elements are and must be part of the “organic” whole of self-identification of Kazakhs. But “on the other,” it is increasingly obvious to ever more Kazakhs that there are real contradictions “between existing national traditions and reviving religious appeals.”

            Kazakh traditions reflect an indigenous set of values, Alimov says, ones that have arisen as a result of the nation’s nomadic traditions, while Islamic ones “have been brought in from outside” from what is in fact, as Chokan Valilkhanov noted, a sedentary urban and Arabic culture.”

            Consequently, the commentator says, Islamic values “cannot be considered optimal” for Kazakhs, even though they have long become “customary.”

            After the collapse of the Soviet Union, an ideological vacuum arose in Kazakhstan as in other post-Soviet states. Both national values and religious ones sought to fill it. The growth of the former was entirely appropriate and welcome, but the expansion of the latter often entailed not simply the revival of traditional Islam but the influx of its “radical” Arabic forms.

            This competition became especially dangerous, Alimov suggests, because it occurred along generational lines. Most older Kazakhs, who were less religious because of the Soviet anti-religious traditions, plumped for national revival. But many younger ones viewed those traditions as frail and faulty and turned to radical and universalist Islamist ones.

            This rise of Islamist values has led some Kazakh writers like Yerbolat Bayatuly to express concern, especially in posts on the Arasha.kz portal, that Islam in these forms has become a threat to Kazakh national identity and to say that “for me, it is more important that you remain Kazakhs than remain Muslims.”

            It is fine that many new mosques have opened and that ever more Kazakhs are going to them, but it is anything but a good thing that many are accepting values there from the outside that threaten the Turkic and Kazakh aspects of Kazakh mentality that are or at least should be the basis of identity.

            The Islamists are not shy about attacking anything in Kazakh society they feel is at odds with their version of Islam, but many Kazakhs are not equally willing to say that there are many things in this new version of Islam which threaten Kazakh identity and thus the Kazakh nation and state. That needs to change.

            The Islamists argue their points with such certainty that they do not see the limits that exist on religion among Kazakhs, Alimov continues. “Consider the tragic events we experienced in Soviet times, we have the right to ask: what gives anyone the right to absolutize truth in religious dress?”

            Many have commented on the sharp divide and the discussions it has produced between urban culture and traditional rural Kazakh culture, he says; “but in recent years, there has emerged another divide within the Kazakh community, between the traditionalists and the Orthodox followers of Islam.” That has in fact become more important.

            It is dividing families both in the cities and in rural areas and thus becoming a serious social and even political problem. “The combination of the national and the religious in the past, present and future is for such a multi-national and poly-confessional society as ours a most important problem which requires constant attention and close analysis,” Alimov says.

            In such discussions what is important is that both nationality and Islam be accepted but that neither make any “absolutist” claims lest they lead some to reject the other or even subvert its meaning.