| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday, January 27, 2009 | 1:00PM - 3:00PM | Seminar Room 108N, Munk Centre For International Studies 1 Devonshire Place |
Central Asia Lecture Series
The terms by which scholars and government officials alike most often seek to characterize the religious orientations of Muslims in Central Asia are proving to be quite inadequate and misleading. Generally, these efforts to characterize Central Asian Islam aim at predicting the political behavior of Muslims — either fulfilling fears that “Fundamentalism” will lead to radicalization and instability, or providing reassurance that Soviet secularism or the “moderate” traditions of Central Asian Islam will prevail. This talk will explore the much more complicated picture of emerging motivations and orientations by which Central Asian Muslims appeal to Islam. This is a picture of intertwined strands of secularism and various ideas of Islam that developed during Soviet and pre-Soviet times as well as that have appeared in the region in the region in post-Soviet times. From an ethnographic perspective on how these concepts are interacting in communities of ordinary Muslims, the talk will derive conclusions on how policy-makers might better address the political challenges of changing Central Asian Islam.
John Schoeberlein (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1994) is Director of the Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus under the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, which he was instrumental in founding in 1993. The program coordinates activities at Harvard related to the study of “Greater” Central Asia/Eurasia, extending from the Crimea and Caucasus to the Volga Basin, Mongolia, Western China, Afghanistan and the former Soviet Central Asian republics. His research focuses on identity, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, and community organization among the Islamic peoples of Central Eurasia and his current projects focus on Cultural Nationalist Ideology in Post-Soviet Central Asian Nation-Building, the Contested Islamic Terrain in Post-Soviet Central Asia, Islam in Secularizing Societies, and Central Asian Security.
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