Tablighi Jamaat Worries Kyrgyz Public, Officials Say

Little-studied missionary movement not banned in Kyrgyzstan

By Bakyt Ibraimov

OSH – The activities of Davaatist missionaries in southern Kyrgyzstan have raised the eyebrows of the general public and the government.

Yodgorbek, 23, a fifth-year university student from a family of Kyrgyz intellectuals, was surprised when strangers knocked on his door in October.

“I opened the door and was stunned to see two men in white robes and cheap Chinese slippers standing in front of me,” he said. “They greeted me and invited me to go along to the nearest mosque; I told them I would later.”

They came again twice, but he would not open the door fearing they would rebuke him for not going to the mosque to perform namaz prayers, he said.

“Believing in Allah is everyone’s private affair, but we must call on people to attend religious services because it’s everyone’s duty to resist the forces of religious extremism and terrorism,” Zhusupzhan Kadyrbekov, 33, a Davaatist from Osh, told Central Asia Online.

Together with his “brethren” from Tabligh Jamaat, he said, he preaches knowledge of true Islam among Muslims and those who still do not believe in Allah.

No one has looked closely enough at Davaatist activities, said Timur Kozukulov, an instructor in the history of religion and law in the theology department of Osh State University.

“It’s still not clear what specifically they preach or what kind of knowledge they are conveying,” he said. “Scholars have held discussions and round-table debates to analyse different religious movements, among them Tabligh Jamaat, and their potentially negative effects on people’s conscience.”

It is important to understand to what extent Davaatism matches the Kyrgyz people’s mindset, Kozukulov said, adding that only after considering Davaatist traditions, habits and faith can one decide how acceptable their approach is to Kyrgyz Muslims.

Ideology from Pakistan

The religious ideology that Davaatists disseminate comes from Pakistan, Kurbanaly Uzakov, southern spokesman for the State Commission on Religious Affairs, said.

“The Tabligh Jamaat leadership has its headquarters in Pakistan,” he said. “Those preachers’ activities in Kyrgyzstan are not officially banned, so they operate fully legally here, while being considered an extremist organisation in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.”

According to several sources, the Tabligh Jamaat began in India in the 1920s to preserve Islam in India, and throughout the years has refused to affiliate itself with any political or juridical philosophy.

Full-scale monitoring of their preaching is impossible and no guarantee against their dissemination of religious extremism exists, Uzakov noted.

“Nobody blocks Tabligh Jamaat in Kyrgyzstan, so the number of followers of this foreign ideology has grown day by day to reach at least 10,000 in the south alone,” he said. “As a rule, poorer people ... trust the Davaatists.”

The itinerant preachers can be irritating to those with less commitment to Islam, said Buzeinep Iskhakova, a teacher at High School No. 18 in Osh.

“Davaatists kept coming to our home to take along my husband, and then my son, to some sort of religious discussions and to the mosque to pray; now my own family members themselves are going around the neighbourhood and preaching,” she said.

Neighbours in her apartment building have complained about her husband making other men pray and read the Koran, she said, adding his activities already have ruined her relationships with quite a few neighbours.

Not a direct threat to Kyrgyzstan, some say

Tabligh Jamaat poses no direct threat (to Kyrgyzstan), Kadyr Malikov, director of the Religion, Law and Politics Centre in Bishkek, told Central Asia Online.

“This religious movement is apolitical,” he said. “It doesn’t interfere in the country’s internal affairs, doesn’t call on Muslims to commit extremism or terrorism, and unlike Hizb-ut Tahrir ... it doesn’t attempt to establish its own version of an Islamic caliphate here.”

But not all of the Davaatists are sufficiently educated, and their religious ignorance and proselytising irritate some, while their non-Kyrgyz clothing strikes the public as odd, he noted.

He did not support an outright ban, however.

“Outlawing Tabligh Jamaat in Kyrgyzstan as neighbouring countries have done may cause its followers to go underground, with some of them joining extremist movements,” he said.--- Central Asia Online