Official Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia: A Study of the Fatwās by Tajikistan’s ᶜUlamāʾ Council (2015-2017)

Although Islam has been part of the Central Asia’s identity for centuries, Islam as a religion and as a cultural identity has been subjected to tremendous repression since the mid-nineteenth century. The emergence of an official Islam comprising a set of actors and institutions took place in the mid-twentieth century under Soviet domination. The newly independent states of Central Asia inherited the structures of official Islam from the Soviet period. In Tajikistan, as in other Central Asian states, state-appointed fatwā bodies partly represent the continuation of the Soviet legacy in their structure, policy, and ambition. The Tajikistani Council of ʿUlamā has the complex task of managing state-religion relations through the accommodation of state secularism and the promotion of the now official Ḥanafī doctrine. This thesis examines how this task is accomplished by the Council of ʿUlamā. Drawing on a corpus of one thousand fatwās in Tajiki language, the thesis explores how the Council’s fatwās on ritual, society and politics help to shape a distinctive form of Tajik Islam in contemporary Tajikistan. It highlights the various ways in which the Council departs from Ḥanafī doctrine in order to secure state interests in some fields, while confronting state policies in order to advance Islamic law and preserve the authority of the Ḥanafī madhhab in others.