Central Asian Encounters in the Middle East: Nationalism, Islam and Postcoloniality in Al-Azhar

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes There is a tradition in Kazakhstan of reading the Quran (‘Quran oqutu’) for the sake of deceased relatives. In the Soviet Union, after the initial phase of outright repression in the 1920s – 1930s, the Soviet government returned to the Russian imperial tradition of regulating Muslim activities through muftiates (Muslim Spiritual Boards). Four muftiates covering four regions were created in 1943: one based in Baku for Azerbaidzhan, one in Dagestan for the Northern Caucasus, one in Ufa for European Russia and Siberia and one in Tashkent for the whole of Central Asia. After declaring independence in 1991, Kazakhstan established its own muftiate, independent of the muftiate in Tashkent. Its structure follows the country's administrative divisions, i.e. it also has district-region-centre subordination. In 1989 there were only 69 functioning mosques in Kazakhstan; in 2001 the Muslim Spiritual Board reported that it had registered more than 1500 newly built mosques. In modern day Egypt, Al-Azhar is not just a university, but a whole system of religious education, which exists alongside the secular education system. As such it includes not only colleges but also secondary and high schools over the country, where people who lack access to secular education can study. Indeed, I would argue that students who came from Medina to Kazakhstan are looked upon suspiciously even in religious circles as having adopted Salafiyya or Wahhabi ways. There are many more Kazakh students who come to Al-Azhar independently beyond the quota. Education at Al-Azhar is free, and several religious trusts and foundations from the Gulf, such as the Al-Baptin foundation in Kuwait, help students to cover their living expenses. A teacher of Arabic at the Eurasian University in Kazakhstan told me that he was in the group of 140 students sent by the Kazakh Ministry of Education to Egypt in 1994; he said that only eight of them graduated. Despite the fact that Al-Azhar was chosen as an official site of religious education, today it is not Al-Azhar but the Islamic University of Medina which holds the lead in the number of graduates from Kazakhstan. Eight people have graduated from Medina versus four from Al-Azhar. Medina is the second most popular destination for Kazakh students to travel to in order to study religion privately. The University of Medina has a much better material base than Al-Azhar. The education at the Medinan University is also free and admitted students are provided with a stipend of $220. According to information from the Kazakh graduates of the Islamic University in Medina, the application process there is more selective while the education system is more effective than in Al-Azhar. Nur-Mubarak University, named after presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev and Hosni Mubarak, was founded in 2001 by a Kazakhstani-Egyptian intergovernmental agreement. It is considered to be an affiliate of Al-Azhar. Kazakh students are studying at the colleges of Usul-ud-Din, Sharia, Sharia wa Qanun, Dawa and Lughat-al-Arabiyya. There is a widely acknowledged division within Kazakhstan (as indeed there is in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) between the industrially developed north and the traditional agrarian south. It is in fact something of an oversimplification, as there are pockets of greater and lesser development in both north and south. Most of the male students who are over 25 (which is about the half of all the Kazakh students in Al-Azhar) are married. At Al-Azhar foreign students are not now required to know the whole of the Quran by heart even at college level. For more information about the Nurcu movement see Balcı, 2003 Balcı, B. 2003. Fetullah Gülen's missionary schools in Central Asia and their role in the spreading of Turkism and Islam. Religion, State and Society, 31, 2: pp. 151 – 77 [Google Scholar]. Somewhere between 20 and 30 students from Kazakhstan identify with the Nurcu movement. According to accounts by non-Nurcu students, Turks are very selective in choosing Central Asian students and inviting them to live with them. Reportedly, they recruit the most bright and promising students; this is reminiscent of Turkish (Nurcu) schools' recruitment practices in Kazakhstan. I might initially have gained a somewhat idealised view of the ‘helping hand’ of the Kazakh community at Al-Azhar. Apparently, relations between the community and single female Kazakh students are not always smooth. Gulnar once complained, for instance, that she was receiving some persistent marriage proposals. It seems that some of the Kazakh males help the females out of more than simple ‘national’ solidarity. Kazakhstan has a very liberal law on religious associations, adopted in 1992, which allows all religious associations which have been through a rather simple registration procedure to engage in missionary activity. Since then quite a competitive religious market has been created, and many so-called ‘sects’, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Krishnaites, the Baha'i and the Ahmadiyya, are freely operating in Kazakhstan; this has caused considerable anxiety among nationalists and ‘Islamists’ about the potential conversion of Kazakhs to other religions. In this context I heard students talking about the largest holding in Kazakhstan, the ‘Eurasian Group’ run by Mashkevich, a Jew born in Kyrgyzstan, who is also head of the Jewish Eurasian Congress, a part of the World Jewish Congress. There is growing concern about ‘scandalous’ and ‘morally degenerate’ Russian talk shows such as ‘Windows’ (‘Okna’) and ‘Laundry’ (‘Stirka’) in which celebrities or ordinary people discuss their private lives and ‘issues’ in public. These shows are aired during the evening prime-time in Kazakhstan and attract huge audiences. This positive assessment of some aspects of the socialist past by the students of Islam might also be a manifestation of a certain ideological affinity between communism and Islam, noted by many scholars (Maxime Rodinson as quoted in Rywkin, 1990 Rywkin M 1990 Moscow's Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (New York/London, M. E. Sharpe) [Google Scholar], p. 87). Both Islam and communism have a certain moral vision of society, the achievement of which requires restrictions on individual freedom. In this sense, both of them are antiliberal.