Different Stans

Isolated Talking Kazakh Elephants Or the Controlling Hand of Registan

Kazakh postage stamp of Batyr, the talking elephant in Kazakhstan.

Michael Hancock-Parmer strikes again.  When we last heard from him, he was trashing the Russian journalist who covered the Zhanaozen massacre critically in an appalling post that earned a reprimand from his former professor, who was then "disciplined" by Registan dominatrix Sarah Kendzior into apologizing and admitting she had a lot to learn about becoming a better human being (!). Some people withdraw from conflicts with Registan because the price is very high -- in academia, there is great fear of losing scarce positions, and the Registanis are horribly vindictive and will complain to people's bosses if they don't like their criticism.

I got into a side convio with H-P in email which he begged me not to publish, so I won't, but needless to say, he proved himself to be an ass.

Now this contribution from Hancock-Parmer, urging the Kazakh people not to Latinize their alphabet but to use...Arabic script.

I'm giving this the "Batyr" award, for the poor "talking elephant" that "died from an overdose of soporifics" (like reading too much Registan!). Everyone convinced themselves that the elephant could really talk because he mastered a few memes and gestures on cue and was rewarded. It was convincing!

Born on July 23, 1969 at Almaty Zoo, Batyr lived his entire life in the Karaganda Zoo in Karaganda, of ex-USSR Kazakhstan. He died in 1993 having never seen or heard another elephant. Batyr was the offspring of once-wild Indian elephants (a subspecies of the Asian elephant). Batyr's mother "Palm" and father "Dubas"^[3] had been presented to Kazakhstan's Almaty Zoo by the then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Telling people in another country what kind of script they should use in their language -- that's bad enough, and ranks right up there with Katy Pearce screaming at people on Twitter to use a certain hashtag, and if they don't use it the way she likes -- even allowing for the fact that they may be regime tools -- she tells them to "get off the Internet".

But telling them not to use Latin and instead, to use Arabic, for pseudo-scholarly reasons has got to be even worse -- and it reminds me of the Batyr story because by mimicking humans on demand, Batyr in fact was isolated from other real elephants -- and the humans were fooled.

Batyr, whose name is a Turkic word meaning Dashing Equestrian, Man of Courage or Athlete, was first alleged to speak just before New Year's Day in the winter of 1977 when he was eight years old. Zoo employees were the first to notice his "speech", but he soon delighted zoo-goers at large by appearing to ask his attendants for water and regularly praising or (infrequently) chastising himself.

Language is a natural and organic thing, and people pretty much speak it as they wish, except for the French who police anglicisms. Chastising people into speaking language a certain way -- awful!

Kazakhstan of course has a long and troubled history with the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union and has a large Russian-speaking minority. So putting their Kazakh language into Cyrrilic script made a certain amount of sense but it was obviously coerced. What would the Kazakh language be if there had never been a Russia, or a kinder, gentler Russia? Well, there wasn't, so it is what it is...

But when Kazakhstan got its independence from the Soviet Union -- or more importantly, from Russia -- it gradually began to de-Russify and began to join the rest of the world and try to modernize. I don't buy the state's own propaganda about this at all, and it's a very rocky road.

Yet I do follow Kazakhstan sufficiently, including the various independent and state tweeters, to know that if they have to chose something besides Cyrrilic, it will be Latin, not Arabic letters. That's because the language of the Internet, like it or not, is English, and a lot of the computer and Internet terms borrowed in other languages come from English. God knows, for example, why Russians talk about "follovat'" on Twitter instead of "sledit'" which has less characters, but they do because it "feels right" to them as they'll tell you.

Kazakhstan is a secular Muslim nation where the regime controls religious expression brutally, and gets its hand on the Muslim communities in particular. So that means a turn to the Arabic world might not be for them.

But more to the point, just because they are Muslim doesn't mean they feel the need to turn toward Arabic. In doing so, they would isolate themselves further from Eurasia, Europe and the Internet lingua franca and I don't see any evidence that they want to do that.

Young people simply reply naturally that they use Latin because that's what English uses and they want to learn and use English.

This kind of prudish, controlling prescriptiveness for people's language has just got to go.

Only a fussy little Registani nerd like Michael Hancock-Parmer could have "concerns" about another nation writing their alphabet as they please (!):

I’m writing this post to share some concerns about the Latinization program for Kazakhstan announced by President Nazarbaev in connection with other progressive changes to the Republic.

The Too Long; Didn’t Read analysis of what I’m about to write is simple: I am not as excited for Latinization as I used to be. I am not forecasting doom or anything like it. Nor am I saying that this is all part of some conspiracy or weird power grab on the part of Nazarbaev. No. I am rather trying to share some concerns that might interest Registan’s readers.

I have reservations that it will adversely affect Kazakhstan’s citizens in their efforts to better understand their past and the formation of the their current situation.

I'm the first to say that Russian is still a lingua-franca more than English is in this region; it's the poor man's lingua-franca because not everyone can get a Soros grant and go to a Western course or conference and perfect their conversational English. There is that large minority as well. If anything, we should be concerned about these people being forced to leave their comfort level to use Latin  -- but then, they're being asked to do that for the Kazakh language, not the Russian language.

What this terrible affectation about Kazakhs needing to "better understand their past" isn't really about "richness of literature" in the Soviet era (?!) but about the fetishization of Islam that is common among the New Realists in Washington and New York in general and the Registanis in particular. There's an entire mindset and contrived narrative they have acquired which goes like this:

o There is this "they" out there who exaggerate the threat of Islam and hate Muslims -- be they neo-cons or traditional conservatives or Blue Dog Democrats or whatever -- and "we" have to counter them;

o We are the smart people surrounded by idiots, so we will embrace the vibrancy and diversity of Islam and show "them" up to be bigots and haters

o In fact, if we don't stop this criticism of Islamic countries (which we believe to be hatred) then we are actually harming our nation's security because the US will "bomb Iran" and we will be in WWIII;

o The enemy of our enemy is our friend -- conservatives and parts of the Obama Administration we don't like are too distrustful of theocratic states, so we'll be nice to them to show how cool we are.

I find this all very unscholarly, and I find that when there is this mindset, you can't get new facts and impressions to go through -- it's like trying to get the miniature golf ball through the rotating blades of the windmill -- very hard.

Sure, Latinization is contrived, like the very capital of Astana itself and lots of Nazarbayev state-building projects. Yet if people don't want to use it and want to stick with Cyrrilic, they will, and it will be hard to stop them.

There's another project lurking under Michael Hannover-Parmer's tender ministrations here -- it's sort of like pan-Turkism. He wants to prove how close the Central Asian peoples are to each other:

In essence, “Arabic-script Kazakh” is nearly a contradiction in terms. When written in Arabic script, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, and Karakalpak appear much more identical then then do in the current Cyrillic alphabets. Moreover, their close relationship with Uzbek, Uyghur, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Ottoman-Turkish was far more apparent. Though much ink has been spilled attacking the awkwardness of Arabic at correctly carrying Turkic language, the longevity of the alphabet must be re-considered rather than seen as a sign of backwardness or Oriental decadence. Rather, the very limitations of the Arabic script (i.e. writing of the various Turkic vowels) might be considered as its strength.

H-P tries to justify his own diktat in deciding what is "best" for a people and trying to back it up with tld;r "scholarship" by pointing out that Stalin was the one to manipulate languages and alphabets and narratives. Yes, we get all that. Yes, they are contrived. Yes, people will work their way out of it. But hardly with Arabic script. And...who says "integrationist processes" are really naturally occuring? They don't naturally occur in the EU, either...

H-P also has a touching concern for the "treasury of work written during the Soviet Union". Well, sure. No people should burn their books, even from discredited communist pasts. But, well, if there isn't a demand for them, there isn't. We don't all demand that even the classics be transcripted into the English of Beowulf or Shakespeare. Language is a dynamic and living thing, even if tyrants monkey with it.

Fortunately, nobody anywhere is likely to pay the slightest attention to this fussy fellow -- read the reply in the comments from a young man who simply points out that QWERTY is what is there to use, and that's what he is using. Oh, and there's this:

Uzbekistan moved from Arabic alphabet to Latin in 1920′s because Uzbekistan because a secular country and wanted to break with Islam. That move made most of the religious literature instantly inaccessible that helped to establish a secular society.

Whatever you want to say about Sovietization -- and I'm happy to criticize it all day long -- there's something to be said for secularism even of the Vladimir Posner/Soviet sort as compared to radical Islam. People shouldn't be cut off from their national religious literature, but there's no need to artificially crowbar it back into place, either.

But as I said, the fetishizing of Islam that this crowd indulges in brings them to this sort of untenable position.

I'd like Kazakhstan -- if it is getting all national and independent -- to a) come to a true independence which would mean independence of Nazarbayevism and even batyrism; and b) be tolerant of Russians and Russian-speakers in its own land even if it wants to distance itself from Moscow, generally a good thing. I think this process of Latinization might take so long that it is unlikely to harm the Russian population, but it bears watching.

 

Related articles

President: Passing from Cyrillic to Latin alphabet does not testify to Kazakhstan's geopolitical preferences

Jimmy Wales in: The Dictator and I

Kazakhstan to switch to Latin language by 2025

The Fundamental Fallacies of Katy Pearce's Machinopology in Azerbaijan

The Inherent Contradictions of Registan's Narrative

Twenty years of Russian-Kazakh friendship

Uzbek Suspects Acquitted in Muslim Cleric's Assassination Attempt Case

I have been hearing for some time that the suspect in the case of the attempted assassination of Obid-kori Nazarov, the Muslim cleric living in exile in Sweden, was a Russian who escaped from Sweden back to Russia via the Baltics, and/or Uzbeks who also managed to escape. I've heard different permutations of the story but not too much detail. I have written about the case in the past.

Now  this week comes the news from RFE/RL and uznews.net that a Swedish court has acquitted two Uzbek suspects, Bakhodyr Pulatov and Nodira Aminova, and they are free to leave Sweden if they wish. Apparently, while the suspects admitted that they told this third person, a Russian and Uzbek citizen, Yury Zhukovsky, where Nazarov could be located, they did this in innocence, i.e. as anyone in a community might do if asked about a public figure.

Hmm, that doesn't convince me, and I've finding some very odd things about the discrepancies between the way RFE/RL is covering this and uznews.net.

It's widely believed that the Uzbek secret police (the MNB) are behind this, and I would tend to agree, but there is no proof, and never would be for things like that. Now it seems the case has ground to a halt, despite the prosecutor's assertions that it was likely the Uzbek secret police.

RFE/RL's correspondent Rikard Jozwiak reports:

However, Nazarov's son, Dovudkhon Nazarov, told RFE/RL by phone that Nazarov's relatives will appeal the court's verdict.

"We are planning to complain against this court decision," he said. "There is no doubt that we are not fully satisfied with the decision. And we want to push the case to higher courts."

But oddly, Jozwiak says that Nazarov "supported the secular opposition" -- which doesn't track with everything we've read from other sources, including uznews.net which has been courageous enough to talk about the critique the secular opposition has of the Muslim clerics who they fear would take away their rights if they came to power. I'm not seeing it.

Further, says Nazarov constituted some sort of rival to President Islam Karimov -- "He was seen in some circles as a potential rival to Uzbek President Islam Karimov". Really? A Muslim cleric? Well, maybe in "some circles" -- but where are they today? I could see that he might be popular, or was popular before he fled into emigration, and might have his following in some regions or towns and some social strata. But it's quite a stretch to say in a post-Soviet country that is fairly secularized as Uzbekistan is that a religious leader could attract enough of a popular following to become president -- assuming there were free conditions. Again, that doesn't track either.

In any event, what's more odd about Rikard Jozwiak's report is what he leaves out -- which we get from uznews.net. And they don't just speculate -- as emigre publications are always accused of doing -- they got the verdict from the prosecutor's office and read it, and summarize it:

The court admitted that the suspects, Pulatov and Aminova, gave confusing and contradicting evidence. For example, they did not manage to explain what brought them from the southern Swedish town of Malmo, where they lived, to the northern town of Stromsund. Their explanation that they got lost and therefore travelled a thousand kilometres to Stromsund where Nazarov lived was not cogent.

I'll say. Truly, why were they 1,000 miles away and just happen to be in this community and just happened to know where Nazarov was?! It's a quiet Swedish town.

There's more:

According to the prosecutor’s office, the attempt on Nazarov’s life was organised by the National Security Service (SNB) of Uzbekistan. A man who shot at the imam is Yuriy Zhukovskiy, a citizen of Uzbekistan and Russia. He was in Stromsund on the day of attempted murder.

The detained couple assisted Zhukovskiy by renting a car for him, booking a hotel room and a flat. After shooting at the imam, Zhukovskiy visited the married couple in Malmo, and then moved to another hotel and left for Russia shortly.

The prosecutor’s office paid attention to big amounts of money that had been transferred to the couple’s accounts in Malmo. Nodira Aminova first received $11,000, then $25,000, but after the attempt on of the imam’s life, she received another $43,000.

I suppose there are valid alibis for each of these things, as well as phone calls to Russia also mentioned but...what would they be? This sure sounds pretty suspicious!

"Trial truths" aren't the same as the truths that people know intuitively and instinctively. You have to provide evidence in court and you have to prove something "beyond a reasonable doubt"  -- and not everything that seems very suspicious like a phone call or a wire transfer can be proven as such.

Hopefully, with the appeal more will come out.

Meanwhile, sadly, the son described his father's condition as "hopeless."

I wonder if we are seeing these acquittals because Sweden is feeling pressured by the Uzbek government. On the one hand, the prosecutor seems to freely discuss the suspicion that it is the Uzbek security agency behind this; on the other hand, with two suspects that certainly seem to have a lot of relevant clues and a relationship to the alleged murderer being acquitted, maybe Sweden feels they need to get rid of this case for some reason.

 

What Will Be Tajikistan's Plan B?

Foreign Minister Zarifi at CACI SAIS in Washington, DC, May 17, 2012.

The NATO Summit in Chicago provided an opportunity to hear a number of Central Asian officials speak who stopped in Washington on their way to the summit.

I've blogged about the many challenges Tajikistan faces as US troops exit Afghanistan in 2014 and the issue of terrorism and related challenges to religious freedom.

Foreign Minister Hamrokhon Zarifi spoke at CACI SAIS May 17 on "Tajikistan and Central Asia in Light of 2014." Dr. S. Fred Starr opened the meeting. Zarifi worked for Tajik national security, i.e. the Soviet KGB from 1973-1993 and then in the 1990s served as ambassador to Austria, Switzerland, and Hungary and then came to the US from 2002-2006. So he is an important figure in terms of understanding the deep security issues of not only his own country but the region, and also understanding the thinking in Washington.

Like so many speakers today, he described the turning point for the world and his country in September 2001; Tajikistan of course was riven by civil war from 1992-1997, in which 50,000-100,000 were said to be killed; perhaps it says something about the world's indifference and the closed nature of the society that the estimates vary so wildly.

The first thing Zarifi mentioned was his 1,500 kilometer border with Afghanistan which is "very, very different" than our borders -- "it's not like Canada" he explained helpfully for people who know this but need to think about it more -- and even different than Mexico.  It's mainly mountainous rock, and it has very little electronic facilities; 70% of the border does not have any kind of electronic surveillance, electric fence or physical barrier or communications but just some dirt paths.

"I hope we will be well-prepared for 2014," he said -- and his schedule in recent months reflects the worry of the world -- he has been to Beijing, Moscow, and now Washington, and consulted with the SCO and CSTO; also Istanbul and Bonn  Zarifi described his border as "quite silent," i.e. generally without incident, although of course EurasiaNet and other sites do have a number of stories of border incidents, mainly with Uzbekistan. "Except for drug aggression," he added -- which, while not perhaps the precise English phrase he meant to say, conveyed something very important: the fierce determination of aggressive drug-smugglers against whom the world's various weak defense systems can't cope. There wouldn't be 30,000 illegal drug-related deaths in Russia otherwise.

So what's his thinking about how to address the post-2014 challenges? Well, he has a lot of ideas. Building highways and railroads -- there are a number of projects in progress and coming on line later in the decade. Vocational training, investment, trade; regional disaster and risk monitoring, regional fiber optic networks. CASA-1000 is quite important for these plans as it is building cooperation in the electricity market -- Tajikistan suffers from such shortages of electricity that it impacts its press freedom because people literally can't print news or share news online if they are in the dark. "There are serious shortages in winter-time," added the minister.

There's the Turkmen-Tajik rail system of 500 km that will go through the northern part of Afghanistan -- these plans for more crossroads on the Silk Road are in play because Tajikistan does not have much ready gas and oil to export like other Central Asian nations -- the deposits are very deep and not accessible, so railroads for other countries' products become important -- of course, if relations with Uzbekistan ever improve enough (and Uzbekistan seems to exercise most of what we could call "transport aggression" here by simply blocking Tajikistan's passage due to disputes about the hydropower station that could deprive Tashkent of water for its cotton crops.)

Although not mentioned very often or tied up to human rights concerns in the way Uzbekistan is, Tajikistan is part of the Northern Distribution Network, with important trucking routes.

Different powers have their own idea of what the Silk Road should be, of course, and Zarifi indicates that it is not just a repeat of the old Central Asian Silk Road but draws in China, Iran, and Iraq, and connects the former Soviet Union to the Arab World.

Notably, as to future projects, particularly gas pipelines, Zarifi makes it clear that neither disputes and rivalries among Central Asian powers, or America's concerns about relations with Iran will not be factored in, to deter regional development.

"Nobody will be a resister or destroyer of these projects. Everybody will protect them." They all understand it will help their families, he added, as the economic cooperation will help the region be stable.

As for pipeline projects with Iran, "Why should we avoid participation of Iran in gas pipelines? I'm not seeing any obstacles. If Iran would be ready to discuss, we will discuss."

Zarifi also spoke optimistically about converting crops from opium to sweet potato, which Afghanistan exported 20 years ago. Obviously, the cash values of these crops differ wildly...

Dr. Starr pointed out that a lot of the projects, such as those related to CASA-1000, were due to come online in the future -- 2016, 2018, and so on. Meanwhile, 80% of the GDP of Afghanistan derives from the NATO countries. "A lot of bad things could start to happen" when that's withdrawn, he cautioned.

"First, we don't know, some will stay," said Zarifi hopefully about the troops. The Coalition should "finish his job," he said.

"Do you have a Plan B?" asked Starr. Indeed.

What sort of Plan B could Tajikistan, a small and poor country with 25% of its own GDP made up of remittances from labour migrants in Russia, have regarding this tremendous challenge on its border?

That's of course why the US military is in Tajikistan spending $1.5 million and more to train and equip troops particularly to make a more secure border.

I heard a discussion at this conference that encapsulated the problem of this region for me in a way that nothing I have heard in a decade has:  A stable Afghanistan is of interest to Iran and a stable Afghanistan is of interest to the United States.

Now, at first glance you might thing, "Can't we all get along, and a stable Afghanistan is in all our interests."

But it doesn't, because the way this is interpeted in military and political doctrine is that a stable Afghanistan encourages Iran to become more interested in it and in fact Iran would prefer Afghanistan to be stable its way -- thereby making both an increased threat to the US. A stable Afghanistan that is stable in the way the US would like it to be then becomes a threat to Iran.

I recall back in the early 1980s, analysts would comment that the real war in Afghanistan was between communism and the West, as liberals often described it -- a Soviet communist incursion that the West fought by proxy because it was interesetd in deterring the USSR -- but rather was a war between communism and Islam. Now, we've ensured that it is more about Islam and the West.

Tajikistan has a "strategic partnership" with Russia -- the labour migrants and the students in universities and of course Russia's largest military base in Central Asia is in Tajikistan. "We would like to continue this relationship," said Zarifi carefully, but of course it's not without its problems.

A stable Tajikistan is of interest to Iran as well, as they are from the same great Persian civilization. Many have concerns about a return to Islamic unrest and civil war as in the 1990s. Asked a bout a harsh new religious law, Zarifi responded:

"We all respect and love our religion, but would never have it as a diktat in our country," he said. He pointed out, however, that unlike some other Central Asian countries, Tajikistan legalized the Islamic Party. "The law is not against Muslims," he explained, "but about the responsibility of parents for raising their children."

Asked to explain why children were not allowed to attend mosques or obtain education in Islam, Zarifi said that several organizations abroad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran were fomenting radical Islam. "We're not blaming the countries, but some groups in them," he elaborated.

According to intelligence information -- and he'd be in a position to know, or for that matter, spin this information -- there were plans to train young children in suicide-bombing, a la Palestine.

"We have concrete facts that children as young as 8 and 11 were going to be used," Zarifi said.

Later I asked some Tajik journalists whether they found this information compelling. They didn't, because they had a basic journalistic question: what are the names of these children? Who are their families? What are the organizations? What countries were involved?

When they find Tajik students are brought home from study in Egypt from Al Azhar, the top university, because supposedly they are being trained in suicide bombing, the Tajik journalists just aren't buying the story.  It's not a sophisticated notion, they feel.

If there were children brought abroad and prepared for suicide missions, as claimed, shouldn't we get more facts about them? Where are they now?

Zarifi also points out to those worried that Islam is suppressed that in the Soviet era, there were 15-17 mosques; today, there are 5,000-7,000 -- although we do hear of some being shut down.

"Nowadays, some are led by extremists who came back from the war in 1994, and nobody knows what they are teaching," the foreign minister complained. "We need to prepare our own imams."

There's a vicious circle here, however, if the belief of foreign training in Islam is accompanied with so much suspicion; 800 persons were brought back home from studies abroad due to concerns about spread of the Arab Spring.

Registan may not believe we can ever talk about the Arab Spring and Central Asia in the same breath; officials in charge in Tajikistan not only talk about it, but act on it.

"There are some in Saudi Arabia, some in Iraq, and they try to teach our children a different way." Again, we need details ultimately to be persuaded, and it doesn't seem to reflect the lion's share of Islamic activity in Tajikistan. Zarifi indicated a vision of a "modern Islam, a peaceful Islam" with people studying Islam in Tajikistan -- when sufficient numbers of domestic (i.e. state-controlled) imams are prepared, "maybe we will change our laws," he indicated.

Children have to stay in the state's school, and study -- they cannot be studying in religious schools. It is not that they are instructed not to go to the mosque at all; the idea is not to train them there, although for any religion, worship and instruction are hard to separate.

Ultimately, Zarifi's attitude toward religion was sort of summed up with this off-handed remark:

"If we pray five times a day, who will work?!"

Asked a number of times about his advice or his "lessons learned" from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Tajik civil war regarding NATO, Zarifi replied:

"Don't hurry. Be patient."

Can the Arab Spring reach Tajikistan? Recently, Zarifi heard a report from his chief of telecommunications in the government who quipped that they had "7 million people on the Internet." Of course they don't, in a country of 7.5 million -- it's a small fraction of penetration.

But they all have mobile phones, and increasingly, the phones are getting the capacity to connect to the Internet.

Starr batted away in irritation several Russian-speakers who wanted to speak to Zarifi in the language he likely spoke better than English, insisting that English remain as the language of the meeting. Russia looms over Tajikistan, of course.

But an "extraordinary painful transition" is coming to Tajikistan with the wrenching changes in Afghanistan, "and the terms are created in Washington and not in Dushanbe, and it presents extreme dangers."

The US does have a chance in concert with other NATO members and even Russia to mitigate this if it keeps a focus and a meaningful budget on the region.

Authorities in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan Install Video Surveillance Cameras in Mosques

Largest mosque in Central Asia near Kipchak, Turkmenistan, can hold 20,000. Photo by Carpetblogger, 2005, who said it was empty at mid-day.

This is disturbing news -- citing Radio Ozodlik, fergananews.com reports that video surveillance cameras have been installed in all the mosques in Namagan.

"There are 30 mosques in Namagan, and cameras have been installed in all of them, and not just one camera but several in various parts of the buildings and in the courtyards," a source told Radio Ozodlik in Uzbekistan. "Imams say that this is done in order to protect believers from thieves, of which there are simply too many."

Thieves? Really? What do they steal, shoes?

Ozodlik asked the local Muslim administration about the cameras, but they didn't have any explanation. Another imam had a more plausible idea:

According to the famous imam Rashod-kori Kamolov, the reason is the intent by the local authorities to watch what is going on during prayers, to follow what imams are saying to believers, and see whether young people are attending prayers.

Uzbekistan has the largest population of Muslims in the former Soviet Union and Namangan is the third-largest city.

Says Wikipedia, while noting everywhere that "citations are needed," 

At the time of the Russian occupation, Namangan was a center of Islamic learning, with 20 madrassahs and over 600 mosques...Since Uzbekistan independence in 1991, Namangan has gained a reputation for Islamic awakening, with many mosques and schools funded by charity organizations from Middle Eastern countries, including the conservative Wahabi sect from Saudi Arabia. This has also translated into political opposition against the secular government of Uzbekistan.

Kazakh authorities are doing the same thing, says fergananews.com.

Authorities in Alma-Aty have placed surveillance cameras in all the mosques there. Here's what the mayor says, tengrinews.kz reports:

"We place great attention on the struggle against the propaganda of terrorism and extremism. In some mosques, video surveillance camers have been installed. The akim of the Medeus district has taken the initiative into his own hands. Together with businessmen, he is placing surveillance cameras in public places. We also call for them. In 2012, about 2,000 video surveillance camers will be put throughout the city," Esimov explains.

Do the Chinese help them with this?

Recently, the Kremlin made a big fetish of placing video cameras in all the polling stations. Far from ensuring transparency against fraud, this was a dodge by a tyrant to in fact put pressure on voters -- and actually accomplish nothing, as voting fraud doesn't always take place literally in front of a camera placed by an "urn," as the Russians aptly call their ballot boxes where their votes are thrown away and turned to ash.

It seems like a bad idea to put cameras in mosques and intrude on people's privacy and it likely won't really stop any terrorist plots anyway. What terrorist is going to plot in front of a camera? And if the imam is giving an incendiary homily that attracts young people, haven't you already lost those young people if they found it attractive and you didn't educate them in peace and tolerance long before that?

These issues can be complicated -- there is a debate raging about the New York Police Department running surveillance on Muslim believers even outside their jurisdiction, in neighboring states. They didn't do this through cameras, but through police informants and spies going to prayers and even going on a youth rafting trip. It seems to me the Muslim communities who have been invaded in this fashion are right to be indignant and even demand justice for the violation of their rights.

On the other hand, there are some mosques  terrorists have attended and gotten their "spiritual guidance" there, or have been "talent-spotted" by extremists frequenting the mosque, like the Brixton Mosque in the UK, attended by the "shoe bomber". But if this is a mosque attended by 500 people, why should the fact that one of them turned violent justify video camera surveillance or police spies?

I don't think ensuring "happy childhoods" and "ending poverty" are going to fix terrorism, nor will the violation of basic civil rights. There does need to be a debate on this.  I think rather than having Muslim indoctrination films and police spies, probably the police have to hire Muslims from new immigrant communities just like the police has always done from time immemorial from immigrant communities, and put them in charge of community affairs so that they deal with issues in an appropriate manner.

We always have a police van outside our church during Mass on Sundays. Maybe the police show up for every large gathering of hundreds of people? Or maybe they are just there to handle the inevitable old person fainting from a heart attack or stroke? Since everyone knows the policemen and they are members of the parish themselves no one seems to think anything of it.

But it's vexsome that just because of one incident that occurred last year, our church now has to be locked up promptly after the 12:00 so that no visits can be made during the afternoon. The reason is that a homeless man attacked an usher with a stick one day when he was asked to leave. The church fathers had been fairly lenient allowing homeless to sit in church, but once once of them lunges at someone with a stick they stopped their leniency.

Another thing that both Central Asian tyrants do (like southern preachers?) is build giant mega-places of worship. Mega-churches are a time-honoured American tradition and I'm all for them, it's freedom of religion. More than anything, they seem to go with the doctrine of "prosperity," i.e. that Jesus will help you get rich.

In Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, they seem to be borrowing both a page of "Soviet gigantism" as well as hoping to drive believers all in to one big place where they can keep tabs on them better.

"Soviet gigantism," for those who don't keep up with dictator chic, are these giant elaborate buildings in the former Soviet Union designed to dwarf the individual and make him seem insignificant. They're especially effective if they have huge avenues and squares all around them to dwarf him even further.  They were also part of a concept of "building communism" by having large edifices to symbolize the communist state's might.

Recently, Berdymukhamedov announced he would build mosques to hold 3,000 in the cities of Turkmenbashi and Konye-Urgench, AP reported. And there are plans for one in Balkanabat, says turkmenistan.ru and even an international tender. (Qatar helped Tajikistan build its big mosque.)

Actually, these aren't so mega -- the largest mosque in Central Asia is part of the Turkmenbashi complex where past dictator Saparmurat Niyazov is buried, in Kipchak, outside of Ashgabat. That's funny, given that he once said there were "too many" mosques.

Another photo of the Turkmenbashi mosque by Nathan Groth, 2010.

Muslim Populations in CIS

Regnum.ru published the statistics on the population of Muslims in the post-Soviet countries, citing the Turkish site HaberVaktim.

Uzbekistan leads the CIS in the largest number of Muslims, with Russia in second place; Tajikistan leads with the highest percentage of Muslims in the population, with Azerbaijan in second place.

Uzbekistan -- 23 897 563 -- 89%

Russia  -- 21 513 046 -- 15%

Azerbaijan -- 7 584 311 -- 93.4%

Kazakhstan -- 7 131 346 -- 47%

Tajikistan -- 6 805 330 -- 95%

Turkmenistan -- 4 407 352 -- 89%

Kyrgyzstan -- 4 117 02 -- 80%

This isn't exactly "Arab Spring by the numbers," because there are very different variables at work in the Soviet-style countries -- chief of which is that there is no Al-Jazeera (Russian TV is no Al Jazeera although it's banned sometimes or restricted because it's freer than domestic TV in Central Asia.)

Internet penetration is low in all these countries, Russia is big and growing but still only 30 percent.

Registan, EurasiaNet, and others in the International Relations school of thought that obsesses about the Central Asian region as a special snowflake vehemently reject "the Arab Spring frame" for discussing this region. The way to indicate that you're a cool kid, and even cooler than Blake Hounsell, is to roll your eyes if anybody compares Central Asia and MENA and starts talking about the Arab Spring (and why it "doesn't work" or "might work" in these countries.)

Of course, they've now simply created another frame which is "the frame about how this isn't the Arab Spring frame" -- which dumbs down thought and artificially restricts discussion.

Atambayev just invoked the Arab Spring in his interview with Kommersant, discussing how trust in the leadership is more important than this or that constitution (hmm, constitutions are pretty important, too, especially to establish separation of powers and the rule of law, although as we know, Stalin's Constitution even had separation of powers, and look how that worked out.)

I'm fine with discussing the Arab Spring and Central Asia together in the same sentence. If you don't, you're never ready for the unexpected.  Registan can't have it both ways. On the one hand, they snort at Stratfor for the blooper of describing Central Asia as "buffers from the Islamic world" -- Sarah Kendzior triumphantly explains that Central Asia *is* a part of the Muslim world".

Sure, Kazakhstan even chaired the Organization of Islamic Community last year after it chaired the OSCE -- who even noticed? But while we "get it" that these countries are all part of the OIC and the Muslim world, let's face it, their Soviet past really makes them different and gives them a history of oppression, secularism, and isolation that meant for decades they *weren't* part of the Muslim world.

And we get it that "Muslimness" doesn't confer some rhizomatic revolutionary tendency, but come on, Hizb-ut-Tahir, founded in Palestine, spread to the Central Asian countries, as did other sects -- it's not that people are jailed only for their own home-grown Muslim groups. It's ok to point this out and study what it means. Muslim prophets and prayers jump really quickly from cell phone to cell phone -- this made the Uzbek authorities crazy and religious sites are among those they suppress most diligently.

As I noted about the more moderate imam who is still clinging to life after a horrible assassination attempt, "more moderate" doesn't necessarily impress these Soviet-style regimes of Central Asia. The Turkish Nurchilar (Nursi) schools are said to be more moderate, but both Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have been very busy kicking them out in the last years, after first welcoming their educational services.

Some 76 million or so people described nominally as Muslim believers -- we don't really know what that means without more breakdowns. Perhaps someone will come along and say this Turkish source isn't accurate. But it's still important to look at the numbers, the percentages of the population, and think about what it is people want and need and what they would be prepared to protest about.

Why Does the #Uzbekistan Government Hate St. Valentine's Day?

Photo by CoCreatr.

Nothing sounds grumpier than the annual blast against St. Valentine's Day we get from Uzbekistan and some of the other stans, and for that matter, Russia. It's not just about Muslim clerics seeking to eradicate dubious Christian cultural traditions that undermine their authority; it's about the Russian Orthodox Church also seeing something particularly loathsome about this particular Western Christian feast-day -- a holiday that is just about shorn of all its religious connotation in the West, as it has been absolutely commercialized and monetarized.  (And it's a good thing, too, or recession-hounded merchants would have nothing to bring in revenue between Black Friday, which has now spawned even Black Thursday Night at Thanksgiving time, Christmas of course, and Easter -- another chocolatified monetarized bonanza).

So what bothers the Uzbek government so much about this particular holiday? If you read the supposed history of this holiday, it was a pagan festival to start with on the (pre?)-Roman holiday of Lupercalia, which the Catholic Church worked overtime to convert because of its undesirable activities -- described sedately by that source as young men picking the names of young women randomly out of an urn for sexual couplings, but explained in Wikipedia as being more about wolves and sacrificing goats and dogs, then running around naked and beating with thongs any women willingly coming out to meet them.

I'm having trouble believing the claim that Emperor Claudius II completely outlawed marriage in the 3rd century (!) on the grounds that single men made better soldiers than married men, helping St. Valentine to get his start, because he then secretly wed young lovers. I can't help thinking there would never even have been a 4th century if Emperor Claudius II was even slightly successful with this venture, but whatever the origins, St. Valentine himself, associated with lovers and love himself (falling in love despite being destined for sainthood) was used to overlay a precious culture's undesirable features.

So here we all are now with the holiday largely serving as a retail stimulus, mainly for chocolate, cards and flowers, and yet the Uzbek government (not the spiritual authorities, although they may have been pressed into service) getting all mad at this. Why?

Perhaps it symbolizes all the worst features of Christian holidays -- promotion of the individual's romantic love for no particular purpose, in defiance of state plans; promotion of love despite the emperor's tendency to throw people in jail they don't like; promotion of the couple's desires in defiance of the state's military imperatives.

None of these features may be particularly "Christian" in their notion but certainly are Western (and since "Rome" is part of the West, it would be interesting to follow how we got, by way of St. Valentine, from a world in which the Emperor could even stop human pro-creation supposedly in the name of military exigency to a world in which people could have a great excuse to buy -- and eat -- lots of boxes of chocolate.

I couldn't help wondering if what the Russian, Uzbek and other post-Soviet governments hate about St. Valentin's Day is that it so glibly popularizes and monetarizes a religious holiday. Everybody remembers the "saint' part of it and that this saint had something vaguely to do with love, but they don't really recall the religious context and the Catholic Church or other Christian churches don't promote any special St. Valentine's Day masses or festivals.

I recall the Uzbek government and spiritual authorities were particularly exercised in recent years about what they saw as the commercialization of Ramadan, or at least, the ostentatious celebration of the nightly breaking of fast in lavish public dinners where people treated their friends. That seems awfully surly, given that such social occasions loosely based around a religious custom seem to be the heart of the community -- and this year, the Uzbek government relented on discouraging the feast day altogether, and limited themselves simply to cautioning the faithful to refrain from excesses.

Interestingly, now Uzbek authorities aren't going to stop at just banning St. Valentine and his dubious romantic, individualist, anti-state threats, they are going to substitute him -- much like the Church authorities of another century did with Valentine himself -- with Moghul Emperor Babur, as the BBC reports. Fortunately for them, Babur's birthday was on February 14, which is why he has come in so handy.

I turned to Flickr to see what visuals were available for Emperor Babur, and of course found that he had built some delightful gardens in Kabul. And among the delightful photo streams comes one from the US Embassy in Kabul, which contrived to put on this interesting cultural exchange in October 2011:

Thousands of Kabul school children will have the opportunity to learn about the history of Babur's Garden, Babur's tomb, and the Queen's Palace through an education initiative funded by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and conducted by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The students receive printed materials about these cultural heritage sites, school supplies, and snacks as part of the tour. More than 10,000 local school children have received tours as part of this initiative. (Department of State)

I wonder if there are any chocolates in those goody bags.

US Embassy Kabul

 UPDATE:  On cue, David Trilling has a piece on EurasiaNet in which he decides the anti-Valentine's Day spasm in Central Asia is all about Muslims:

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders?

A menace of the heart must grip Registan.net's Nathan Hamm, who then grumps about Trilling and the Western media obsessing about this hate on Valentine's Day for weeks. In doing so, he reveals something funny -- somebody -- David himself or Justin Burke, the managing editor, trimmed Trilling's fulmination (bold added):

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders? Could it be, since governments around the region already maintain a monopoly on people’s voices, they also expect control over their hearts? Without more than empty “national values” on offer, they’re unlikely to succeed.

Good Lord, that's hilarious, not the first, and not the last such perlustration to occur on EurasiaNet!

Actually, both Trilling and Hamm are wrong, because it's not about Muslims, it's about Soviet state culture persisting and taking this form to this day.

A Russian mayor of a region, Belgorod, neither of which is distinguished by being Muslim, also banned the holiday -- and in the past, going all the way back to the Soviet era, this was always a holiday the commissars discouraged.

But don't let those sorts of facts get in the way of having a good hate on "ignorant Westerners" who once again are saying something unfair about the "Mooooslims" as Jillian York would put it.

I think it's fine that the Western press obsessed about it, because it helps the mass public think about what these societies are about and how they respond to the West, which is something you have to understand.

Hamm sounds as fussy and controlling as the authorities in these Eurasian countries, scolding us for caring about this story:

Yes, the way that not only Uzbekistan’s government, but also others in the region, attacks rock music, modern incarnations of western holidays like Valentine’s Day or Halloween, etc. make them look silly. It’s not even clear if the constituencies that are generally in support of the amorphous collection of culturally conservative linguistic nationalist beliefs that are the content of “national values” even care about things like Valentine’s Day all that much. (If Tata Ulan or the self-described intellectual quoted in the BBC story are any indication, there are in fact such constituencies — the governments are not entirely out of touch with the public.) But the explanation for the attacks, which sadly was lacking in most of the western coverage, needn’t be overblown.

Well, it's Valentine's Day, and the story is fairly light-weight, so no need to write a treatise about every single holiday and every sort of prescriptive morals code the Uzbeks or other Central Asians come up with to control culture. What it's all about is not only alient cultures but commerce, and it's commerce that helped propel the cultural memes throughout the world

Kyrgyzstan: When Two Hundred or More are Gathered...

While everyone obsesses about the American base at Manas in Kyrgyzstan, and the potential for an Islamic uprising in this Muslim country, it's important to remember what's been happening for ordinary believers.

Forum News 18, the religious rights news service, reports:

16 January 2012

KYRGYZSTAN: "AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND DISCRIMINATORY"

Officials continue to enforce Kyrgyzstan's repressive Bakiev-era Religion
Law, Forum 18 News Service has found. No progress has been made in dealing with registration applications from - among others - hundreds of mosques, unregistered Protestant churches, and the Hare Krishna community.

Unregistered religious activity is - against human rights standards
Kyrgyzstan has agreed to implement - banned. One major obstacle to gaining
legal status is the Religion Law's requirement that those wishing to found
a religious organisation - at least 200 adult permanent resident citizens
as founders under the Law - must identify themselves to national and local
authorities, which many are afraid to do - even if their community is that
large. Human rights defenders Valentina Gritsenko of Justice, a human
rights group in Jalalabad, and Dmitri Kabak of Open Viewpoint in Bishkek,
both describe the Law as "against the Constitution and discriminatory".
"Why should communities have to collect 200 signatures to worship or pray
together?" Gritsenko asked Forum 18.

Every religious group has a way that it defines its own membership and how it defines what a religious community is. For example, for Jews, there is the concept of a minyan, a group of ten males, 13 years or older, required for conducting Jewish public worship. Christians have the saying of Jesus, "when two or more are gathered in My name, there I am in the midst of them" and so on through many permutations of all kinds. It would be unfathomable for an American religious organization to have to invade the privacy of its adherents and gather their signatures before being allowed to put on a religious service.

Reading this story, I couldn't help thinking how every year in our church, the school-children put on the Twelve Days of Christmas song as a pageant. The smallest boy with the clearest voice is recruited to sing "And a partridge in a pear tree!" The whole congregation assembles to watch, and a child will first read a legend that the song was a form of code, sung by Catholics when practicing Catholicism was criminalized in England (1558 until 1829).

Of course, Snopes and Wikipedia tell us this legend was only recently created in the 1970s, and doesn't have a historical basis. But that doesn't stop the congregations in many places from reciting the idea anyway, because it's part of an oral tradition they use to pass on the values of their faith. The criminalization of the faith was true, even if no one can prove that the two turtle doves are the Old and New Testament and the partridge is Jesus Christ.

And that's just it -- people will disagree about what is true and not true, what is right and not right, and in a religious context, if there isn't some actual imminent incitement to violence, and no actual crime such as fraud or harm of minors, the international religious rights stands require that the community should be able to decide its beliefs and its membership criteria itself.