Page 319

REVISTA IEEE 9

http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee 321 Antonio Alonso Marcos Central Asians fighting in Syria: the danger of... THE JIHAD IN CENTRAL ASIA The jihadist threat is nothing new in Central Asia, where the process of Islamisation that started in the VIII century was halted by the advance of the Mongols in the XIII century and by their nomadic lifestyle and religious syncretism5. The Tsarist Empire brought a certain amount of modernity to these lands and, at the end of the XIX century, a group of modernist Muslim reformers emerged – similar to the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire – who sought to challenge both the traditional ulama6 as well as the Russian invaders, with limited success. Fruit of this activity, groups of revolutionaries emerged – the Basmachi – who rebelled against the Imperial Decree of 25 June 1916 which ordered the first non-voluntary recruitment of Central Asians into the army during the First World War7. Their protest was of nationalist origin and they were able to take advantage of the opportunity offered to them by the internationalist Bolcheviks who promised them they would be able to build an independent republic. Those lands once again enjoyed self-governance from 1917 until the end of the Russian civil war when they were definitively swallowed by the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. From that point on, any religious demonstration – public or private – was considered dangerous, anti-communist, subversive and reactionary, meaning that religion was persecuted for seven decades – to a greater or lesser extent depending on the period and the place – although Islam managed to stay alive in a pseudo-clandestine manner to fulfil funeral and wedding rituals. Only on several occasions was it fully brought back to life, such as on the occasion of the visit of the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, to Stalin in 1945 during which permission was granted for a haji (pilgrimage) to Mecca; or when the Indonesian president, Sukarno, visited the USSR in 1961 and requested permission to visit the mausoleum of Imam Al Bukhari, buried close to Samarkand, leading to the rapid restoration of the site. killed in drone strike -- but what is the Khorasan Group?”, CNN, 22 July 2015, under http://edition. cnn.com/2015/07/22/world/what-is-the-khorasan-group, consulted 19 April 2016. 5  NAUMKIN, Vitaly. Radical Islam in Central Asia: between Pen and Riffle, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005. 6  The reformers or supporters of the “new method” (oṣul-e jadid) or Jadids (jadidči) were generally younger than the defenders of the old school (qadim), also called qadimči. See KHALID, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 93. 7  ROY, Olivier. The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations, New York: New York University Press, 2000, pp. 46-49.

REVISTA IEEE 9
To see the actual publication please follow the link above