Last month, a senior Afghan Taliban official managed to insult one of the few governments actively courting his regime. Sheikh Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, Kabul’s acting minister for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, was reported to have declared that Islam in Uzbekistan—the land of Imam al-Bukhari and Imam al-Tirmidhi—exists “only on people’s lips.” Both capitals scrambled to contain the damage. Tashkent’s foreign ministry dismissed the reports as “disinformation”; the Taliban ministry sent a letter praising Uzbekistan’s Islamic heritage, though it never quite explained why excerpts of the speech had appeared on its own channels before being deleted.
The row was brief, but it was revealing: less for what Hanafi said than for how little he apparently knows about his northern neighbor. Far from existing in name only, Islam in Uzbekistan is undergoing its most dramatic revival since independence. And an increasingly ultraconservative, politicized strain of it has moved from the repressed margins into the mainstream—tolerated, and at times cultivated, by the very government now protesting its piety to Kabul.
Read the full article on The National Interest.
Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.