PRESIDENT BUSH’S schedule this week includes a visit to Washington by his counterpart from Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. The strategically located ex-Soviet republic has become an important American ally in the anti-terror war, assuring our military of the availability of bases for operations in Central Asia. Uzbekistan’s enthusiasm for its new friendship with Washington reflects the urgency of its own domestic struggle against Islamofascism–a struggle that, oddly enough given its parallels to ours against al Qaeda, Washington still seems not fully to grasp. The State Department contributes to confusion over the political situation in Uzbekistan by its facile deployment of paint-by-numbers human rights criticism against Karimov’s regime. The department’s latest report on human rights abuses around the world was released on March 4. It includes numerous allegations against Uzbekistan, many involving the government’s struggle to suppress Hizb-ut-Tahrir–a clandestine movement originating in the religious extremism of the Middle East. This is a battle in which the United States should probably be cheering Karimov on, rather than condemning him. Getting it right in the fight against Islamofascism is all about making distinctions, not blurring them. In the Uzbek case, the State Department, parroting the Western human rights profession, accuses Karimov of seeing evil Arab subversives where there are merely pious Muslims. But the rights monitors suffer from the opposite blindness. They see only innocent, faithful Muslims where there are, in fact, terrorists. The issue is not religious devotion, but radicalism. The human rights lobby refuses to recognize the difference between traditional Uzbek Muslims and Arab-subsidized infiltrators whose “piety” is a cover for terrorist recruitment. This latter group is referred to in the Uzbek country report as “independent” and “particularly devout” Muslims. And the U.S. government takes the position that they are being abused by Uzbekistan for “their religious beliefs.” This vocabulary is bogus. Islamic extremists in Uzbekistan may be “independent” of local tradition, but they are by no means independent of manipulation by Wahhabis–the fanatics who want to impose on Muslims worldwide the fascist style of Islam fostered by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Karimov’s government has taken no actions against pious or devout Muslims following the country’s Sufi traditions. Those who condemn Karimov’s suppression of groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir adhere to an ideology of human rights that does not distinguish between aggressors and victims, and thus between extremists and traditional Muslims. But these distinctions are a matter of life and death for Uzbekistan. Like the other Russified republics of Central Asia, Uzbekistan became a testing ground a decade ago both for the transition away from communism, and for the rise of radical Islam. The fall of the Communist party-state abruptly opened up societies that had been closed to religion, as well as to capitalism, for 70 years. Coincidentally, the Gulf War had reinforced the military dependence of Saudi Arabia on the United States. The Wahhabi religious leadership that rules in Riyadh along with the royal family was left uneasy by the outcome of the battle against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Increased cooperation with the West undermined the Islamic credibility of the Saudi regime, which already had to contend with the flamboyant corruption of its aristocracy. Both the Wahhabi clerics and the Saudi royals were committed to bridging the gap between their Islamist claims and their opportunistic and decadent reality. To do this, they would use their oil wealth to subsidize Islamist extremism outside the Arabian Peninsula. Uzbekistan and its neighbors were the first places aside from Afghanistan to “benefit” from the Wahhabi outreach. Arab Islam had no roots there–Uzbeks are Turkic in culture. Islam there was and remains mainstream and tolerant, traditionalist rather than fundamentalist. A testimony to the pluralist nature of Central Asian Islam is the untroubled, 2,500-year history of the Jews of Bukhara, the fabled Uzbek city–a presence that the Wahhabi “missionaries” who have come to the region over the last decade now seek to destroy. According to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of the recent book “Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia” (Yale University Press), Wahhabi Pakistani and Saudi “missionaries” arrived in Uzbekistan, flush with cash, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They soon set up an armed auxiliary, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which fought in Afghanistan alongside the Taliban and al Qaeda. Propaganda on the IMU’s behalf, distributed by Wahhabi websites, targets the Bukharan Jews for violence, and denounces president Islam Karimov as “a Zionist Jew.” This bizarre claim seems based on Uzbekistan’s record of voting with Israel in the United Nations. But traditional Uzbek Muslims believe the Bukharan Jews have a better claim to be considered neighbors and friends than imperialist Arabs posing as Muslim reformers. The U.S. government had the good sense to realize after September 11 that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is a terrorist group. (Earlier State Department human rights reports had faulted Uzbekistan for its crackdown on the group.) But confusion persists about the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT), an extremist tendency in Uzbekistan that splintered from the Wahhabis. This movement claims to favor nothing but religious study and peaceful preparation of the masses for an eventual revolution. It is savvy enough to have mounted a campaign portraying itself as the victim of human rights abuses under the Uzbek and other post-Communist governments in Central Asia. This is paradoxical, because the HT is strikingly similar to a Communist organization. Hizb-ut-Tahrir is a conspiratorial movement. It has cells among younger Muslims in the West, including in the United States. The HT claims to defend the legacy of the Ottoman caliphate, which was the sole religious authority for the world’s Muslims for centuries. However, the HT’s antecedents are Arab, and its doctrines would have been rejected outright by the Turkish sultans. Indeed, the Ottoman caliphate, which zealously protected its Jewish subjects, would have dealt with the HT even more harshly than the Uzbeks have. The HT seeks the physical liquidation of spiritualist Muslims or Sufis, Shiite Muslims, and Jews, and has been outlawed in many Arab states. Nonetheless, an Uzbek adherent of the movement, quoted by Rashid in “Jihad,” insists its program is peaceful and complains that “the Wahhabis . . . wanted guerrilla war and the creation of an Islamic army.” (The group has published an account of Wahhabism and the end of the Ottoman caliphate, “How the Khilafah Was Destroyed,” at www.khilafah.com.) The most interesting aspect of the HT, however, is the resemblance between its vocabulary and argumentation and the rhetoric of Soviet communism. It denounces capitalism in identical terms, and attacks the United States for hegemonism in the wake of the Soviet collapse, as if nostalgic for the latter. The HT also agitates against the World Trade Organization and globalization in a manner indistinguishable from that of Western radicals. Indeed, it sometimes sounds like a Communist group attempting to recruit Muslims, or a Muslim group seeking influence with Communists, rather than a religious movement. Which makes it all the odder that the State Department persists in seeing the HT as the victim of religious repression by the Uzbek government. Ahmed Rashid, it should be noted, echoes Hizb-ut-Tahrir itself, as well as Western human rights experts, in asserting that President Karimov’s government has engaged in “crude labeling of all Islamic militants Wahhabis,” which “fails to acknowledge the differences between the HT” and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. But Rashid also acknowledges the historical continuity between Wahhabism and the other radical Islamist movements. While one should
not ignore the differences between the Saudi Wahhabis and less extreme forms of Islamism, one should also not exaggerate the disparities between Wahhabism and groups, like HT, that may be described as “Wahhabized.” There is no need to sugarcoat the nature of our new Central Asian ally. Uzbekistan is a transitional, post-Communist society in which many democratic institutions are new and undeveloped. President Bush will certainly want to encourage his guest to protect independent media and to improve the functioning of the political and justice system. But Uzbekistan cannot afford to assure liberty for the enemies of liberty. In the struggle to liberate Islam from the grip of the Wahhabi-Saudi mafia, Karimov should have our backing. Stephen Schwartz’s book, “Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror,” will be published this summer.
