A sweeping history of Islamism in Central Asia from the Russian Revolution to the present through Soviet-era archival documents, oral histories, and a trove of interviews and focus groups.Few observers anticipated a surge of Islamism in Central Asia, after seventy years of forced communist atheism. Muslims do not inevitably support Islamism, a modern political ideology of Islam. Yet, Islamism became the dominant form of political opposition in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Politicizing Islam in Central Asia, Kathleen Collins explores the causes, dynamics, and variation in Islamist movements-first within the USSR, and then in the post-Soviet states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic and historical research on Islamist mobilization, she explains the strategies and relative success of each Central Asian Islamist movement. Collins argues that in each case, state repression of Islam, by Soviet and post-Soviet regimes, together with the diffusion of religious ideologies, motivated Islamist mobilization. Sweeping in scope, this book traces the dynamics of Central Asian Islamist movements from the Soviet era through the Tajik civil war, the Afghan jihad against the US, and the foreign fighter movement joining the Syrian jihad.

List of FiguresList of ImagesList of TablesList of MapsAcknowledgementsTechnical NoteList of AcronymsPART IIntroduction1: Secular Authoritarianism, Ideology, and Islamist MobilizationPART II: The USSR Politicizes Islam2: The Russian Revolution and Muslim Mobilization3: The Atheist State: Repressing and Politicizing Islam4: Muslim Belief and Everyday ResistancePART III: Tajikistan: From Moderate Islamists to Muslim Democrats5: The Islamic Revival Party Challenges Communism6: A Democratic Islamic Party Confronts An Extremist Secular State7: The Attraction and Limits of Islamist Ideas in TajikistanPART IV: Uzbekistan: From Salafists to Salafi-Jihadists8: Seeking Justice and Purity: Islamists against Communism and Karimov9: Making Extremists: The Uzbek Jihad Moves to Afghanistan10: The Attraction and Limits of Islamist Ideas in UzbekistanPART V: Kyrgyzstan: Civil Islam and Emergent Islamists11: Religious Liberalization and Civil Islam in Kyrgyzstan12: Emergent Islamism in Kyrgyzstan13: The Attraction and Limits of Islamist Ideas in KyrgyzstanPART VI: From Central Asia to Syria: Transnational Salafi-Jihadists14: Central Asians Join the Syrian Jihad15: From Central Asia to Afghanistan, Syria, and BeyondAppendixGlossaryIndex