PSCRP-BESA Reports No 238 (October 14, 2026)
by Gershon Kogan
More than three decades after the Soviet collapse, analysts still ask whether Central Asia is “Islamizing.” The question assumes a single Islam and a single direction of travel, and it casts the region’s future as a contest between faith and secular statehood. The evidence points elsewhere. Central Asia is becoming more Islamic and more nationalist at the same time, and the real struggle is over which Islam will define its future.
Islamization is real, if uneven. Andrea Schmitz’s study of Uzbekistan concludes that the liberalization of religious policy under President Mirziyoyev has produced a growing Islamization of the population, even as the state tightens its grip on religious education. (Schmitz, 2023) A recent sociological study of Kazakhstan identifies Islamization as the most pronounced recent trend in society, while cautioning that for many Kazakhs Islam remains a cultural and traditional marker rather than a feature of daily life. (Zabirova et al., 2025)
Nationalization runs in parallel. The region’s governments do not try to suppress Islam; they try to own it. Schmitz calls Uzbek religious policy paradigmatic of the attempt to use religion as a state power resource. (Schmitz, 2023) This fits the broader pattern of post-Soviet nation-building, in which states assemble national narratives from inherited cultural material. (Laruelle, 2021) Religion is part of that material. The result is an officially sanctioned “traditional Islam”: mosques are built, imams are trained, and local scholars become national heroes, while any actor claiming religious authority from outside the state’s control is treated as a security problem.
This is why the language of a “return of Islam” misleads. Soviet rule did not freeze Islam in place to be thawed in 1991; it transformed Muslim societies, so post-Soviet revival draws on a reshaped inheritance, not an intact one. (Khalid, 2007) The revival proceeds through both national specificities and global networks. (Peyrouse, 2007)
What emerges is not one Islam but several, each with its own patron and its own idea of legitimate authority: the state’s national “traditional Islam,” an autonomous Hanafi-Maturidi revival, Turkish institutional Islam, and transnational Salafi and Tablighi currents. One competitor is conspicuously missing. Despite geographic proximity and a shared Persianate heritage in parts of the region, Iran’s revolutionary model, with its doctrine of velayat-e faqih, has found almost no foothold. Explaining that absence, and what it means for Israel and the wider region, is the purpose of this paper.
The State’s Islam and Its Limits
The first Islam in the contest is the state’s own. Across the region, governments promote a “traditional Islam” that is national in character, historically rooted, and administratively manageable. In Kazakhstan, the Muftiate’s “official Islam” holds up figures such as Ahmad Yasavi as symbols of this tradition. (Karimov et al., 2024) The implicit message is that Kazakh Muslims already possess a local faith and need no foreign teachers.
Uzbekistan has built the most elaborate version. The newly opened Center of Islamic Civilization in Tashkent, a museum, research and educational complex, presents the region as one of the historic centers of Islamic learning, and the government is elevating the theologians Bukhari, Tirmidhi and Maturidi as national scholars. (IntelliNews, 2026) Islam thus becomes a source of national identity and of international influence at once. Andrea Schmitz describes the domestic side of this policy. Under the motto “enlightenment against ignorance,” the state has tightened its influence over the religious knowledge taught in schools and research institutions, effectively “secularizing” Islam through scientific study and museum display. (Schmitz, 2023)
The same logic extends to Islamic modernism. In December 2023, President Mirziyoyev’s message to a Tashkent conference on the Jadids, the Muslim reformers of the early twentieth century, presented their legacy as a foundation for “New Uzbekistan” and its “Third Renaissance,” and tied it to the goal of building a secular, legal and democratic society. (Kun.uz, 2023) This reading is selective. Adeeb Khalid’s classic study shows the Jadids as Muslim cultural reformers whose project was to renew Muslim society through education, not simply as forerunners of secular statehood. (Khalid, 1998) The state does not merely sponsor a safe Islam; it retrospectively nationalizes the one Muslim modernist tradition that Central Asia produced itself.
The other side of this policy is security. Scholars have described the securitization of Islam in Central Asia as a vicious circle in which counter-terrorism policy and restrictions on religious freedom reinforce each other. (Lenz-Raymann, 2014) Preachers, networks and schools outside state structures are treated first as security questions and only then as religious ones. Intervention is not uniform, however. Schmitz notes that the Uzbek state acts only selectively against the abundant religious advice now available in the media, in order to keep the religious field in view rather than to close it. (Schmitz, 2023)
Here the limits of the state’s Islam become visible. Schmitz concludes that the “secularization” of Islam through study and display does not reach large sections of Uzbek society, and that the liberalization of religious policy has resulted in a growing Islamization of the population. (Schmitz, 2023) For many believers Islam is not a heritage to be exhibited but a system of rules and convictions that guides a pious life. In Kazakhstan, by contrast, a recent survey finds that for many Muslims Islam functions more as a cultural and traditional marker than as daily practice. (Zabirova et al., 2025) Between these two findings lies the real picture. The state’s Islam coexists with a religious field that it cannot fully shape.
This is the first and least visible contest. The state’s “traditional Islam” and the Islam of ordinary believers often claim the same inheritance: the Hanafi legal school, the Maturidi theology of the Samarkand scholar, the Sufi brotherhoods of Bukhara and Turkestan. The difference lies in who has the authority to interpret that inheritance and to decide where tradition ends and deviation begins. A believer who takes the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition seriously may become more observant than the state wishes without ever becoming a Salafi, and this is precisely why such a believer is harder to manage than a foreign preacher. The region’s governments have thus nationalized Islam without making it their own.
External Islams and Their Limits
Beyond the state, a second set of Islams arrives with outside patrons. They fall into two groups: those that work through governments, and those that work around them.
Turkey belongs to the first. Its Directorate of Religious Affairs, the Diyanet, builds mosques, delivers humanitarian aid, religious instruction and scholarships, and has become a primary instrument of Ankara’s regional influence. Its largest project in Central Asia is the Bishkek Central Mosque, financed in 2018 to hold 30,000 worshippers. (Jamestown Foundation, 2025) After the 2016 coup attempt, Ankara also used the Diyanet to press Islamic organizations in Eurasia to cut ties with the Gülen movement. (Jamestown Foundation, 2025)
The Turkic frame has since been institutionalized. In April 2022, the heads of religious institutions of the Organization of Turkic States met in Istanbul and stressed the preservation of “Turkic-Islamic values,” while standing united against Islamophobia and radicalism. They later signed a regulation establishing a Council of Heads of Muslim Religious Administrations and committed to joint scientific and religious centers. (Organization of Turkic States, n.d.) The heads of the Muslim religious administrations of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan took part in the Istanbul meeting. (Diyanet, 2022)
Turkey’s offer does not challenge the state’s Islam; it mirrors it. The Diyanet is itself a state body, and the Turkic-Islamic frame gives Central Asian governments a supranational identity in which religion remains subordinate to nation and administration. This is why Ankara’s Islam is welcome where others are not. Its reach still has limits. Toni Alaranta argues that Turkey’s presence grows where its interests converge with those of the Central Asian governments, and that Moscow tolerates it as long as it stays limited. (Alaranta, 2024)
The second group is treated very differently. Tablighi Jamaat is banned as extremist in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan remains the only country in the region where it and the Nurcular movement can operate legally. (Times of Central Asia, 2026) What unites the targets of these bans is not a shared doctrine. It is the location of authority, which lies outside the capital. The same logic applies to Salafism. Aurélie Biard’s study of Kazakhstan shows that the government, media and experts portray Salafism as an agent of Saudi influence, yet it has adapted locally, including among the urban middle class and entrepreneurs, and the state answers harshly even to its quietist forms. (Biard, 2019) In practice “foreign” is a label the state attaches to religiosity that it does not control, whatever its origin.
A third external actor offers no Islam at all. At the Astana summit in June 2025, China and the five Central Asian states signed a treaty of permanent good-neighborliness and agreed to jointly combat terrorism, separatism and extremism. (Xinhua, 2025) Beijing also called for efforts to prevent the spread of extreme ideologies. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC, 2025) China competes with no one in the field of religion, but its security language is the one the region’s governments already use, and it reinforces their treatment of independent religious activity as a security question.
Russia occupies a similar position, with one difference: it has long defined the Islamic factor in Central Asia as a security question rather than a religious one. Alexey Malashenko argued as early as 2008 that the “Islamist threat” served as a convenient justification for strengthening Russia’s military and political presence in the region, that the Collective Security Treaty Organization was created to fight extremism, and that counter-terrorism had become an obligatory part of Russia’s agreements with regional states. (Malashenko, 2008) In his reading, Moscow accepts the “semi-traditional” character of the post-Soviet Muslim regimes, does not much care whether they are secular, and prefers partners who respect the rules it sets. (Malashenko, 2008) He also expected Moscow to talk to Islamists if they joined a ruling coalition in Central Asia, pointing to the 1997 Tajik peace agreement that Russia helped broker. (Malashenko, 2008) What Russia could not do was shape the region’s religious future. By 2013 he described Russian influence in Central Asia as waning, with Moscow still viewing the region through a Soviet lens. (Malashenko, 2013) Russia is thus less the patron of an Islam than a guarantor of the security frame within which the region’s governments manage their own.
Taken together, the outside patrons divide the field. Ankara supplies a frame that governments can absorb. Beijing and Moscow supply security cooperation that strengthens their hand. Transnational currents supply a source of authority that governments cannot absorb, and therefore fight. One would expect a fourth patron: a neighbor with a religious establishment, a revolutionary ideology and a long common history with part of the region. Yet Tehran appears in none of these arrangements.
Iran: The Missing Competitor
Iran should have been the strongest contender. It has a Persian-speaking neighbor in Tajikistan, an old shared cultural world, and a state ideology that claims universal religious authority. Iranian scholars have long assumed as much. Mirfakhraei and Firouzmandi Bandpey argue that Iran’s cultural diplomacy in Central Asia and the South Caucasus has opportunities in the religious, linguistic and civilizational fields, and faces obstacles in the ideological sphere and from foreign interference. (Mirfakhraei and Firouzmandi Bandpey, 2018) Outside observers saw it differently. Sébastien Peyrouse concluded that Iran’s religious and political influence has been largely overestimated, that Tehran did not play the card of religious one-upmanship it played in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, and that it never mobilized the region’s small Shia minority. (Peyrouse, 2014)
Persian-language analysis now arrives at a similar diagnosis from the inside. A study in Central Eurasia Studies names the securitization of Iran’s own cultural agenda as its central obstacle in the region and judges three decades of Iranian cultural activity a relative failure. (Koolaee and Zangeneh, 2023) Tabnak, reporting on interviews with Western specialists, writes that Iran was not seeking to export political or Shia Islam, yet fear of an “Islamic threat” still limited its relations. (Tabnak, 2025) An Iranian think tank concedes that even the moderate religious readings Tehran promotes among the region’s Tajiks can provoke the sensitivities of other powers. (Institute for Strategic Studies of the East, 2025)
Three factors explain the gap. The first is demography. The region is overwhelmingly Sunni Hanafi, almost no Iranian group seeks conversion, and only in Tajikistan’s Khatlon and Kulyab regions has a small trend toward Shiism appeared. (Peyrouse, 2014) The second is Tehran’s own choice. Vladimir Mesamed writes that the pragmatic wing’s rise around 1990 replaced “violent ideological export” with political dialogue, and that Tehran views the spread of revolutionary Islam as destabilizing for the Islamic Republic itself. (Mesamed, 2024) The third is the Tajik civil war. Peyrouse judges it likely that Iran at least initially funded the Islamic Revival Party, which Tehran denies, and the episode taught the region’s governments to treat Iranian kinship as a risk. (Peyrouse, 2014)
When Tehran used pan-Islamic platforms, the region declined. Central Asian states blocked its anti-Israel initiatives at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 1997–2000, and again did not support its call after October 2023 to sever ties with Israel. (Peyrouse, 2014; Mesamed, 2024)
The latest episode follows the same pattern. On October 9, 2026, at the CIS summit in Avaza, President Pezeshkian, invited as the first Iranian special guest, proposed a flexible “CIS+1” mechanism for cooperation in transit, energy, trade, mining, investment, technology, water and environment, tourism, and scientific and cultural ties. (Eghtesad Online, 2026) He grounded Iran’s claim to belong to the region in history, culture and civilization, and summed up his offer in a sentence about routes: “Our shared interests lie not in competition between routes but in connecting them.” (Tabnak, 2026) Religion was not among the areas he listed. (ANA, 2026) The proposal remains only a proposal. Iran has not lost the contest among Islams; it has opted out of it, and the region’s governments have no reason to invite it back.
Implications: Stable Governments, Contested Interpretation
At the level of governments, Israel’s position in Central Asia looks secure. Kazakhstan formally joined the Abraham Accords in November 2025, and Uzbek airlines kept flying to Israel throughout two years of war. (Jerusalem Post, 2025) Astana buys Israeli drones and rockets and, by one estimate, supplies between 10 and 25 percent of Israel’s oil. (The Diplomat, 2023) The region’s governments also declined to follow Tehran when it demanded that Muslim states cut ties with Israel. (Mesamed, 2024) The fragmentation described in this paper helps explain why: no single religious center in Central Asia can dictate foreign policy to the state.
But this stability belongs to governments, not to societies. The state’s “traditional Islam” does not reach large parts of the population, the autonomous religious field is only partly under control, and transnational currents operate beyond the state’s reach. (Schmitz, 2023) Gaza showed what that means. An analysis by the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies found that Central Asian publics’ attitudes to the war differ fundamentally from those of their governments, and that the governments of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan suppress protest and treat calls for Islamic unity as a threat. (Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, 2024) The Times of Central Asia reports that most Kazakhstanis consider the conflict “not our war,” yet anti-Israeli sentiment surged, and rising religiosity made public discourse more emotional. (Times of Central Asia, 2025) Reliable survey data on real opinion remain scarce. (Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, 2024) Silence under repression is not the same as consent.
Three implications follow for Israel. First, pro-Israel decisions by governments should not be read as societal consensus. Their durability depends on the ability of those governments to keep the issue out of the street. Second, the relevant risk is not the spread of Iran’s revolutionary model, which has failed, but the state’s incomplete monopoly over religious interpretation, which lets other actors frame the conflict. Third, Israeli engagement is more durable when it benefits societies and not only elites, through practical cooperation such as the training of Uzbek nursing staff, (The Diplomat, 2023) and when it avoids public steps that force governments to choose against their own publics.
Central Asia’s Islams compete for the right to interpret the region’s inheritance. Israel’s partners govern the state, but not that inheritance, at least not alone.
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