ISLAM IN THE FERGHANA VALLEY 297
in spite of the fact that the shuttle trade in which these merchants engage did not
exist then. Among younger traders these barriers generate interest in transnational
parties like Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT; Party of Liberation), which claim that in a single
Islamic state such problems would not exist.
The existence of multiple nuances of this sort, many of them based on differences
within the valley, prompted the authors to present their findings on each national
region as independent studies, at the same time acknowledging the interactions and
commonalities among all three sectors, especially in border areas of the Ferghana
Valley. All three parts of the valley were once part of a single Kokand Khanate,
and later of the Russian colony of Turkestan. In Soviet times the Ferghana Valley,
despite being divided among three republics, nonetheless remained a cohesive
region in which the suppression of religion and its subsequent revival occurred
through region-wide processes. Because of these, the region must be taken as a
whole, even while bearing in mind the political, economic, and even ideological
circumstances specific to each of the countries.
On this basis, the authors came to appreciate the degree to which the distinctive
elements of the religious situation in each of their respective countries have led in
two opposite directions. Some tendencies led to the partial disintegration of old
relationships among the religious elite of the three countries and in the Ferghana
Valley as a whole; others encouraged the assimilation of radical and extremist
political parties and Islamist groups whose rhetoric sought to discredit national
governments. Members of the religious elites insisted that the leaders who emerged
after 1991 were utterly incapable of re-establishing the pre-colonial Muslim inte-
gration that they believed once existed in Central Asia.
The authors do not pretend to offer solutions to these pressing problems, or
even a definitive analysis of them. Their goal is more modest. They recognize, of
course, that the artificial division of the Ferghana Valley and the region as a whole
that took place in the Soviet period, and which is now criticized in all countries,
had both negative and positive consequences. However, with respect to religion,
the new state divisions and borders clearly aggravated the situation by not allow-
ing the populace to address and solve the various challenges they face together. At
the same time they make it more difficult to coordinate efforts against religiously
motivated terrorism, and they discourage the kinds of rational cooperation among
the three regional countries that will in the long run remove the factors that give
rise to such terrorism in the first place.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: