Our Uzbek Friends

...The few Americans who think about Uzbekistan have tended to write it off as an impoverished backwater of the former Soviet empire...

...their instruction comes from independent rather than institutional sources, and these are foreign, not Uzbek...

...The report complains that the Uzbek authorities' "respect for the rights of unauthorized Muslim groups worsened, as its harsh campaign against such groups, which it perceives as terrorist security threats, intensified...

...Unfortunately, the State Department failed entirely to note the parallels with the Taliban—another once-innocuous group of suspected terrorists and students, who left Afghanistan to study at madrassas in Pakistan...

...their ideology is only loosely defined...

...In particular, the country should forthwith end surveillance of religious students and reinstate any fired or demoted teachers or administrators...

...But until now, the IMU did an amazing job of conning Westerners—both human rights groups and governments—into believing its followers were innocent victims of outrageous persecution by the Uzbek regime...

...Subsequent media reporting has revealed that IMU militants are also fighting in Afghanistan alongside the Taliban and bin Laden's forces...

...Boucher called the IMU, which declared war on the Uzbek government in 1999, "responsible for criminal acts of terrorism" and noted its involvement in the kidnapping of foreigners, bombings, bus hijackings, and the murder of ordinary citizens as well as police officers...

...He condemned the dismissed students as Wahhabis and as provocative, undisciplined subversives...

...consider the 2000 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom, issued by the State Department only a year before Boucher's denunciation of the IMU...

...But we should cease interfering with their resistance to Wahhabism...

...We should help its people complete their transition to democracy and capitalism...

...First, some facts...

...The 2000 report describes groups like the IMU as "suspected of being 'Wahhabist,' a term used loosely to encompass both suspected terrorists and . . . former students of certain independent imams or foreign madrassas (Islamic schools...

...But Uzbekistan is also dealing with another, more urgent problem: terrorism...

...Undeterred, Human Rights Watch composed a list of peremptory demands, which it presented to the Uzbek state...

...The students denied being Wahhabis (as Wahhabis generally do) and alleged arbitrary persecution...

...But even this country is, in the aftermath of September 11, being forced to find ways to identify, isolate, and defeat Wahhabi fascists within our society as well as around the world—while maintaining, to the maximum extent possible, our traditions of human rights...

...Undeniably, after decades of tsarist and Soviet Russian imperialist rule, Uzbekistan has its share of problems...

...The mistakes our government—and supposedly friendly "non-governmental organizations"— have made in the past in relating to the Uzbeks are a foretaste of challenges ahead...

...Uzbek president Islam Karimov has been widely condemned as a post-communist authoritarian—there is evidence of abuses in his justice system, including allegations of torture and deaths in police custody—and the transition away from a statist economy has been slow...

...The country must contend with a particularly difficult aspect of the Soviet legacy: Moscow long treated it as a monocrop colony, producing mainly cotton...

...The expelled women students had come to him repeatedly, weeping and seeking his help in getting readmitted to their schools...

...Indeed, it is the traditional Sufi Islam for which Uzbekistan is famous that is truly independent, based as it is on autonomous, transnational spiritual orders...

...On September 15, four days after the horrors in New York and Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher announced that the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) would be designated a foreign terrorist organization under U.S...

...But the Uzbeks possess distinctive resources, especially in the area of Islamic culture...

...Of the 23 million citizens of Uzbekistan, 70 percent are Uzbeks, speaking a Turkic language...

...The suggestion that Central Asian Sufi Muslims are less pious than the Wahhabis is a slander comparable to calling Irish Catholics less pious than Pentecostals...

...The IMU thus appears on Washington's list of 28 entities supporting Osama bin Laden and his network...

...The report describes the bearded and covered students as "adherents of independent Islam or particularly pious...

...The government of Uzbekistan shares our commitment to the war on terrorism more than most Muslim countries...

...Human Rights Watch heavies Jonathan Fanton, the organization's chairman, and Holly Cartner, its executive director for Europe and Central Asia, questioned the internationally respected head of the Uzbek Islamic clergy, Mufti Abdurashid Qori Bahro-mov, about the expulsion of the allegedly Wahhabi students...

...A number of teachers and administrators were fired for the same or similar offenses...

...Mufti Bahromov, who presumably knows a bit more about the situation of his country and Islam generally than these humanitarian tourists, was unsympathetic...

...Descendants of the rulers of Samarkand established Muslim power in india...

...The mufti had refused to help them, as is his right given that he holds a religious rather than a political function...

...Meanwhile, in October 1999, Human Rights Watch issued a book-length report, "Uzbekistan: Class Dismissed: Discriminatory Expulsions of Muslim Students," that is a classic of liberal accommodation to terrorism...

...indeed, we should find ways to strengthen them in that valiant cause...

...But this clear evidence of the terrorist threat to Uzbekistan is getting an airing only after a long period of utter obliviousness on the part of Westerners to the reality of Islamic fundamentalism in central Asia...

...The Uzbek government sensibly ignored the demands...

...theology, mathematics, poetry, and spirituality...

...In a two-year period beginning in 1997, 28 students were expelled from schools in Uzbekistan at various levels, primary through university, for growing Wahhabi-style beards or, in the case of women, covering themselves...

...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ WITH THE COMING of the war on terrorism, the United States acquired an ally about which most Americans know very little: the central Asian nation of Uzbekistan...

...There was a time, from the 8th to the 15th century, when their fabled cities of Bukhara and Samarkand led the Muslim world in the development of Stephen Schwartz is working on a book tentatively titled The Two Faces of Islam...

...Wahhabi Islam, whether in Uzbekistan or Union City, California, is no more "independent" than was the Uzbek Communist party: Wahhabi Islam in Central Asia is yet another arm of Gulf-promoted religious colonialism...

...The world is learning the hard way that toleration of expansionist Wah-habism is collective suicide...

...Naturally, human rights advocates cherish such illusions as the idea that Uzbekistan should be as constitutionally open as the United States...

...Thus is the problem of Wahhabi terrorism in Uzbekistan framed in the euphemisms typically employed at State: The groups' terrorist identity is a matter of suspicion rather than evident fact...

...This issue, although it affected a minute portion of Uzbekistan's population, compelled Human Rights Watch to carry out an investigation...

...The IMU is a classic Wahhabi combat organization—a murderous gang of fanatics bent on imposing the fascist style of Islam fostered by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and emulated by the Taliban...

...Such terminology represents a double falsehood...