Lecture in Gavin Helf’s course, “Looking for Trouble in Central Asia.”

Week 5:  Secularism and the State, Islam, and Radicalization  

All the Central Asian states transformed Soviet “scientific atheism” into what seemed like reasonable, modern, and tolerant “secularism.”  In the generation since independence, however, the region has become much more religious and in particular much more Muslim.  States have flirted with ignoring, suppressing, and then trying to coopt Islam.  We will also look at the very surprisingly outsized role Central Asian fighters played in the conflicts in Iraq and Syria under ISIS and the implications of return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Israel/Hamas conflict on radicalization in central Asia.