Islam in Central Asia: Historical Scholarship

Registan’s critique of scholarship on Islam in Central Asia got me thinking. The writer, Nathan, focuses on Soviet scholarship, but I am more familiar with Central Asia under tsarist rule. Either way, Nathan critiques the scholarship Islam in Central Asia because it typically starts from the postulate that Muslims are inherently violent fanatics. He is right for the most part, but misses some major and popular recent works that have enhanced our understanding of the historical meaning of Islam in the region. 

First of all, there is Adeeb Khalid’s The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, which aside from being written exceptionally well, as far as academic books go, links together debates in the Muslim world in the late 19th century with discourse elsewhere. He shows how modernity fundamentally shaped Muslims under Russian rule, and in all the other places Muslims lived. He locates Muslim discourse in the possibilities opened up by modern forms of sociability and transportation and communication networks.

In addition, Bruce Privratsky’s anthropological work Turkestan is a sophisticated analysis of Islam among the Kazakhs and gets away from standard portrayals of Kazakhs being either weakly Islamicized or only recently so. Nathan mentions DeWeese’s work, but Privratsky is much more readable and discusses the contemporary as well as historical role of Islam among the steppe nomads.

Another work that deserves credit is Robert Crews’ book, For Prophet or Tsar, especially the chapter on the Kazakhs. While it has serious methodological problems, it also examines Islam in a non-hateful or dialectical manner. Muslims in Central Asia were cast as less than perfectly Islamic for specific historical reasons and Crews outlines how that came about. I recommend these books for a nuanced view of the history of Islam in Central Asia.