Believing Like a State: Official Islam and Public Opinion in Kyrgyzstan

• In Event: Religious Institutions, the State, and Society in Muslim-Majority Countries

Abstract

Over the past two decades, scholars and analysts of Muslim-majority countries (MMCs) have paid renewed attention to government efforts to exercise greater influence over the religious sphere by co-opting religious institutions and demarcating acceptable beliefs and practices – often characterizing these efforts as creating an “official Islam.” The literature to date has focused mostly on the macro-level processes behind the creation of an official Islam, such as countering the influence of Islamist parties and the threat of Islamic extremism, in MMCs in the Arab world. We focus instead on the micro-level processes – namely, the extent to which these efforts have impacted public opinion on religious matters – in the case of Kyrgyzstan, an MMC outside the Arab world. In the 2000s, the Kyrgyzstan’s government began to propagate an official Islam to counter extremism and homogenize Islamic beliefs and practices among the populace. Specifically, in the 2014 State Concept on Religion it outlined three main pillars of its approach to religion: 1) justifying state regulation of religion; 2) preserving traditional Kyrgyz Islam; and 3) fighting radicalism through education. Based on an original survey with an embedded experiment, we evaluate the extent to which these pillars resonate with the public. Our preliminary findings suggest that there is close alignment between the state narrative and public opinion, contingent on the level of religiosity, suggesting that this is a potentially powerful tool of statecraft.

Authors

• Pauline Jones, University of Michigan

• Hasher Nisar