With Dr. Martha Brill Olcott, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

AUDIO OF EVENT ONLINE - CLICK HERE

Event Summary:

A discussion hosted by the Central Asia Caucasus Institute (CACI) at SAIS on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 in the Rome Auditorium.

The event featured Dr. Martha Brill Olcott, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Dr. S. Frederick Starr, Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, introduced Dr. Olcott to the audience.

The evening’s presentation discussed the ongoing struggle for representation and power between the Salafi and Hanafi schools of Islam in Central Asia.  Dr. Olcott’s main thesis seemed to state that the rise of Salafists to positions of influence in government bureaucracy and business should not be regarded with alarm.  Rather, the debate of the nature of Islam in Central Asia as well as the struggle for influence over the believers should be seen as a natural process in an emerging pluralistic society.  The fact that Islamists from both schools of Islam are entering their respective national bureaucracies prompted the title “White Collar Islamists.”

Before launching into the body of her presentation Dr. Olcott highlighted the fact that she draws on roughly 30 years of experience conducting field research on the topic of Islam in Central Asia.  However, until only recently she has not published the bulk of the research materials that she has collected, but now is completing a book that offers a synthetic account of the evolution of Islam in Central Asia in general, and in Uzbekistan in particularly, placing developments in the region in a global context.
 
Dr. Olcott’s presentation was clearly targeted for those who are intimately familiar with the history of Islam and specifically, the history of Islam in Central Asia.  Nevertheless, before describing Islam’s current situation in Central Asia, she first provided some historical perspective on her topic.  Noting the difficulties of finding a neutral vocabulary to discuss Islam’s role in the region, she maintained that the presence of “Salafists” in Central Asian is not a recent phenomenon.  In fact, it has its roots in the late years of the Russian Empire when Muslims of the region had relatively free interactions with the Islamic world through travel and trade.  In this regard Dr. Olcott rejected the common view of Central Asia as the periphery of Islam.  Rather, she suggested that the region should be viewed as the edge of the center, an area that will be greatly influenced by developments in the Islamic world in years to come.

Continuing with the historical background, Dr. Olcott noted that Salafism’s debate with the Hanafis were present in the first decades of the Soviet Union.  The issue at hand was how best to preserve and defend Islam against the onslaught of the secular Soviet society.  In general, the Hanafis took the moderate approach, seeking to preserve what they termed the tolerant indigenous form of Islam as traditionally practiced through ritual and custom by the ancestors.  In contrast, the Salafis sought to preserve a “pure” form of Islam, stripped of empty ritual, which they interpreted as a destructive force in the religion.

In the 1970s the debate was sharpened when it became possible, albeit very difficulty, to gain access to Salafi literature, materials, brought to the region by foreign students and scholars as well as Central Asians returning from stints in the Middle East.  Dr. Olcott underscored that these ideas gained much greater prominence following the collapse of the Soviet Union and renewed Central Asian interaction with the Islamic world beginning in the 1990s.

Bringing the presentation to the present day, Dr. Olcott noted the continuation of the debate between the Salafists, who hold that the so-called excesses of ritual based  worship is destroying Islam, and the Hanafis, who want to preserve Islam as practiced by their ancestors.  While the debate in the early decades of the Soviet Union disputed the best way to preserve Islam the current debate has become a struggle over the control of the character of Islam.

Dr. Olcott noted that the stakes are very high in this competition.  Not only is there a struggle to purify Islam, but control over Uzbekistan’s Islamic institutions, with financial and political benefits was at stake. 

While describing the current Salafi-Hanafi debate Dr. Olcott was careful to remind the audience that the competition should not be linked to the war on terror.  In the question and answer session following her presentation she stated that she does not foresee any of the Central Asian countries moving toward radical fundamentalist forms of Islamic government or any regimes becoming sponsors of terrorism.

However, she notes that there is a tendency to make the connection to terrorism due to elements within the two sides of the debate.  She noted that as the Salafis gain ground, representatives of the Hanafi school are prone to make alarmist arguments in order to gain support for the traditional religious practices and beliefs.  Likewise, elements of society seeking to preserve the secular order at all costs see the Salafi-Hanafi struggle as a threat.  Dr. Olcott advises against associating a rise in the prominence of advocates of  a “purer” form of Islam with the radicalization of an entire country.  Rather, she sees the ongoing debate as a healthy exchange of ideas that are naturally present in societies undergoing the process of expanded social and political debate.

Dr. Olcott ended the evening with a question and answer session in which she addressed the queries of the audience.

The Central Asia-Caucasus Institute was founded in 1996 and has grown to be the primary institution in the Washington area for the study of the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Caspian Region. The Institute forms part of a Joint Center with the Silk Road Studies Program at the Institute for Security and Development, Stockholm. The Institute sponsors impartial research on the region, acts as a forum for policymakers both in Washington and abroad, shares information concerning the region and provides access for its sponsors in business to relevant expertise on the region. Additional information about the Institute is available at www.silkroadstudies.org.