Doctor of Philosophy

RICE UNIVERSITY "Poor Religious Understanding": Peacebuilding , Secular Islam, and Approaches to Countering VIolent Extremism in Kyrgyzstan By Ethan Wilensky-Lanford A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE James Faubion James Faubion (Aug 26, 2020 14:45 CDT) James D. Faubion Tsanoff Chair Professor, Department of Anthropology Faculty Affiliate, Departments of Religious Studies and English Rice University Dominic Boyer Professor, Department of Anthropology Rice University David Cook David Cook (Aug 22, 2020 08:11 CDT) David Cook Professor, Department of Religion Rice University HOUSTON, TEXAS August 2020 Abstract This dissertation considers the intersections of Islam and secularism in the post-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, as well as how international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have worked to promote peace and counter violent extremism in the country. By introducing two intertwined concepts – Islamic secularism and secular Islam – the author describes the spaces where state policy, development goals, individual freedoms, and religious practice meet. Through analysis of interviews with friends and associates of some Kyrgyzstani nationals who became foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, the piece also identifies certain contextual push factors for violence. Ultimately, using Saba Mahmood's critique, this dissertation rejects the liberal motive of promoting secularism within Islam for civilizing purposes, in favor of six concrete considerations for practically countering violent extremism in the Kyrgyzstani context. Acknowledgments This dissertation would not have been possible without many open and sometimes difficult conversations with countless friends and interlocutors in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia, who shared with me their thoughts and perspectives, as well as advice and interpretation. Many must rename anonymous. Edil Baisalov, Aizatbek Beshov, Farhod Yuldashev, Kevin Gash, Dan Malinovich, Peter Sondergaard, and Kristel Maasen have been wonderful friends over the years with strong Kyrgyzstan ties who introduced me to a number of helpful people during my research. Keneshbek Sainazarov, William Farrell, Makhabat Alymkulova, and Garrett Hubbard made much of this work possible. All my fellow graduate students in the Rice Anthropology Department have been much appreciated friends and advocates. My advisor throughout this process, James Faubion, gave me a wealth of insight and encouragement. Dominic Boyer asked many illuminating questions and pointed me in the direction of some very helpful resources. David Cook gave me important context for this project, and my work is much better for it. My sister, Brook Wilensky-Lanford, coaxed me ever onward with many words of encouragement and confidence, as did a great friend a few years ahead of me in the program, Ian Lowrie. I wish to thank my parents, Sheila Wilensky and Henry Lanford, and stepmother Ann Davis Lanford, for always encouraging me to pursue an advanced degree and believing that I could complete it. I had many chats with my brothers-in-law, Gianmarco Leoncavallo, Craig Opitz, and Scott Opitz, who always encouraged me to finish. Thanks very much to my father-in-law, Lyn Opitz, whose generous support these past few years has made life much easier while I completed this undertaking. My mother-in-law, Kay Martin, and her husband Jerry Martin, supported me tremendously by helping to care for my children during several extended writing retreats. Those sweet kids, Foss and Shay, constantly inspire me to try and make the world a better place. Most of all, I wish to thank my incredible wife Steph, for her full faith in me and my ability to complete this project, her unending love, her deep reserves of patience, as well as her many sacrifices of time and energy these past nine years of graduate school. She is an awesome person whom I could not have done this without, and I dedicate this dissertation to her. 1 Introduction – Inspiration, Methodology, and Investments I first arrived in Kyrgyzstan in June of 2001, three months before the world as I knew it would change dramatically, forever. I had just finished a year hiatus from my studies at Reed College, where I had taken a year of Russian language my sophomore year. Kyrgyzstan was attractive to me, because it was in a part of the world that, before I went there, I knew very little about. I remember talking one night with friends at Reed over a map of the former Soviet Union. My two friends were Russophiles – even more than me at the time, despite the fact that I had ancestral roots in the region. I remember talking with one of them, Ben Eder, about this large swath of territory I thought of then as the ‘Stans’ – those five countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union in Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. I was perhaps a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know as much as Ben did about the place, and I wanted to change that. From that moment of young male geographic insecurity emerged within me a curiosity and commitment that has lasted the past twenty years, and shows no sign of abating. And so, there I was, my first moments in the country, meeting with a family that would host me for the next month and a half as I taught English to kids while living in a yurt on the shores of the majestic Issyk-Kul, a massive lake in the middle of a desert basin, high in the mountains in the eastern part of the country. I had taken the train into the country, all the way from Moscow. It was a three-day ride, back when people in the region were truly interested and excited to meet Americans. I was regaled with vodka, food, and song by my cabinmates, those down the hall, and even the lady attendant whose job it was to stoke the samovar and sell tea to the passengers. The communal apartment blocks interspersed with trees and then forest southeast of Moscow unfolded into a steppe, and then desert, before farmland again in Kazakhstan. I remember the feeling of excitement as we rolled into Bishkek at around 4 in the morning. 2 The country would become my home for a total of more than four years out of the next twenty, longer than I would live in one place consecutively even to this day. It became something of an obsession – a place so seemingly different and, at times, challenging, that only by spending time there would I, could I, learn what kind of life I wanted to lead. That first summer, out at the lake, I was literally the first American many had seen, and this felt like both a privilege and an obligation. It was all new to me, and I was new to the people I met. There was a palpable pride of place there, particularly evident in terms of the way my hosts talked about the yurt, but also the lake, the mountains, the small farm there. Although I was living mostly with urban people who had family ties to the village where we ran a makeshift school for the summer, near Tyup, on the northeast corner of the lake, there were some local people amongst our group that lived there year-round. The landscape was like nothing I had seen before, or since. Towering mountains, with glaciers and snow visible even at the height of summer, deep ravines with churning rivers, grassy slopes spotted with wildflowers and free- grazing horses and sheep. It felt incredibly rustic and romantic, untouched by the complications of life in a city or anywhere else I had known. I probably knew I wanted to come back pretty soon after I got there. One evening, while I was walking with two young women about my age from the yurt camp to a village well to fill up the jerry cans we would use the next day, I learned about a practice that felt so foreign, shocking, and strange to me that I would spend the next two years researching it. Bride kidnapping. One of the young women made a comment to the other, presumably for my benefit, I thought at the moment, that they were lucky I was walking with them. I asked what she meant, and she explained to me that young women like them walking without a man at night were at risk of being taken violently to be married, often to a complete stranger. What had seemed like innocent 3 flirtation suddenly took on a whole new level of meaning. I was aghast, and felt a drive to better understand this terrible practice. To make things more complicated, as I soon learned, many women were also involved in the kidnapping, and it was the potential bride’s soon-to-be mother- in-law who would often play the defining role in forcing the young woman to stay with her new family after a kidnapping. What’s more is that many women – not only men – spoke to me about how this practice spelled a distinction for the Kyrgyz people. It was a tradition that many were proud of, which might have meant one thing during nomadic times, when the marriages that transpired from the kidnappings were planned ahead of times, I was told, and served to unite families and even competing clans, but now meant something very different. In the chaos of post-Soviet life (Nazpary 2002), the bride kidnapping motif became a lens through which I could tell a story about the way that society was changing, which I eventually did in my thesis at Reed (Wilensky-Lanford 2003). I became interested in what I term secular Islam---and, relatedly, Islamic secularism--- with this work in mind, but largely through and as a result of my experiences as a journalist in the region.

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