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October 13, 2006

Uzbekistan: Christian Charities Shut-down

The regime of Islom Karimov has launched a brutal crackdown on Christianity in Uzbekistan, a country that Freedom House classified as ``the Worse of the Worse: the World's Most Repressive Societies'' in 2005.

The Norwegian human rights group, Forum 18, reports that several hundred foreign Protestants have been forced to leave this Central Asian country, and only small-scale Orthodox and Catholic charity is allowed. Forum 18 said that the the Missionaries of Charity, the Catholic order founded by Mother Teresa, survived a Justice Ministry inspection.

To Karimov's credit he has taken a hard line against radical Islamic groups, best exemplified by sending the troops to Andijan province in May 2005 to crush an Islamist insurrection. (The U.S. government and the European Union were so kind to spend their taxpayers money and airlift some of the surviving Islamists and their relatives to safety. And so, today, they might just be living in a neighbourhood near you.)

Karimov, however, promotes his own state-supported version of Islam, and has done much to strengthen the hold of the Mohammedan cult on this country of 27 million, most of whom are culturally Sunni Muslim.

Before Islam came to Central Asia in the second half of the 7th century, the region was populated by city-states where art and trade flourished. In 663, the Arabs launched their first attacks on Bactria in southwest Asia, which today includes north Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Soon after, the Arabs sacked the cities of Sogdia, the most advanced civilization in the region, and conquered Bukhara in their effort to control the Silk Road.

The local population was forced to accept Arab rule and submit to Islam. Resistance meant either death, or onerous taxation and other discriminatory measures that reduced those who didn''t convert to second-class citizens.

While the majority of the population eventually accepted Islam, the region continued to face invasion and conquest. It took only three years for Genghiz Khan and his Mongol juggernaut to conquer the region by 1221.

Starting in about 1370, Timur, a devout Sufi Muslim, ruthlessly united most of the Muslim lands of Central Asia and the Middle East, and made his capital in Samarkand in what is today Uzbekistan. By building the Ahmed Yasawi mausoleum, Timur was trying to venerate the Sufi mystic's legacy and to secure the support of the independent and fierce nomadic clans of the steppe, most of whom were Sufis.

While Sufi Islam is mostly known for encouraging believers to embark on an inner spiritual journey of self-discovery, spreading the faith through conquest was also sanctioned, as evidenced by the teachings of Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), a philosopher who helped to reconcile Sufism with the hard-line of Orthodox Islam.

The next major invasion of Central Asia was in the mid 19th century when the technologically superior Russian armies established the rule of the Romanov tsars in the region, also bringing Russian Orthodoxy. Islam, however, retained its position as the dominant religion, and continued to be the most important factor shaping politics and society in the region.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1918, religion throughout the newly proclaimed Soviet Union was banned, and most Islamic institutions in Central Asia were closed.

A resurgence of Islam in the last years of the Soviet Union was in part due to a desire to break with the failed communist system. Today, mosques and religious schools are opening across the region, and studying Islamic law and Arabic -- mainly in Turkey and Saudi Arabia -- is popular among young people.

Posted by Jean de la Valette at October 13, 2006 11:19 AM

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Posted by: Archimedes at October 13, 2006 2:53 PM

Posted by: Archimedes at October 13, 2006 2:58 PM

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