One of the United States’ close partners in Central Asia is seeking to manage Islamist strains in its society by coddling them.

This 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.

Uzbeks themselves have offered a more accurate picture of the country’s religious mood than any ministry statement. When a Taliban delegation visited Samarkand in 2023, hundreds, if not thousands, waited for hours in sweltering July heat outside the Namozgokhi mosque to greet it. Many took photos; some kissed the delegates’ hands. Around the same time, a “halal” taxi service offering female drivers for women passengers advertised itself with a video of a husband beating his veiled wife for riding in a car driven by a man. Neither episode provoked meaningful official pushback.

To understand how Uzbekistan arrived here, it helps to recall where it started. Islam Karimov, who ruled from independence in 1991 until he died in 2016, initially embraced Islam as a pillar of post-Soviet Uzbek identity—he swore his oath on the Koran and performed the Umrah pilgrimage in 1992. But the embrace was tactical. As independent analyst Rafael Sattarov noted, “Karimov was a real communist…He just used Islam for public support.” When the Salafi movement Adolat seized the city of Namangan in 1991 and imposed Sharia law, and when thousands of protesters demanded an Islamic state to Karimov’s face, his calculus changed permanently.

What followed was one of the most comprehensive campaigns of religious control in the post-Soviet space. Karimov outlawed Adolat, whose remnants evolved into the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. His police arrested worshippers for beards and niqabs; Muslims who prayed at unregistered mosques were labeled Wahhabis and jailed; Friday sermons required state approval. The insurgency answered with beheadings of policemen in the Fergana Valley, and the 1999 Tashkent bombings, and the state answered back with the 2005 Andijan massacre, in which troops killed hundreds of “mostly peaceful” protesters. Karimov’s other tool was export: radicals who wanted to partake in jihad were quietly allowed to leave for Afghanistan, and later Syria and Iraq, with no right of return.

Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who took power in 2016 promising Uzbeks “Yangi O’zbekiston” or “New Uzbekistan,” genuinely broke with this model—and deserves credit for parts of the break. He ended routine arrests of believers, released hundreds of religious prisoners, liberalized the currency, opened the country to investment, and repatriated over 530 citizens, mostly women and children, from Syrian detention camps under “Operation Compassion.” 

But where Karimov saw Islam as a threat to be crushed, Mirziyoyev sees it as a political resource to be harvested—and that is where the reform story curdles. The religious renaissance produced a new authority figure, the celebrity imam, and the government moved quickly to enlist him. “Mirziyoyev has allowed imams blacklisted by Karimov due to their radical ideas to spread radical Islam in return for support of the regime,” Sattarov argues—support for referendums and the constitutional changes that extended the president’s hold on power. The career of Rakhmatulo Saifiddinov is instructive: a minor Tashkent imam who campaigned against male gynecologists was elevated to the post of chief imam of Tashkent in 2021.

Two figures embody the bargain more completely. The first is Komil Rabbimov, a media analyst and one of the most prominent ideologues of the “New Uzbekistan” brand—officials promote his books, and his commentary is amplified across state-friendly media, as the Uzbek analyst Anvar Nazirov noted. Under Karimov, Rabbimov’s brand of politicized religiosity earned him exile in France. Under Mirziyoyev, it earns him a platform. 

After American strikes on Iran, Rabbimov declared that “as long as Israel exists, there will be no peace in the Muslim world,” described Washington as Israel’s puppet, and framed the confrontation as a “civilizational war” to subjugate Muslims. In the same post, he claimed that Jerusalem seeks to establish a “Jewish world order” and had designs on every Muslim country, including Uzbekistan and Indonesia. He has accused the United States and Israel of practicing “the crudest forms of terrorism” and openly roots for Tehran in its confrontation with Washington, arguing that the killing of Tehran’s leadership only “renews and strengthens the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.” 

In February, he published The Foundation of a Free Nation, a book that examines Karimov’s rule and Mirziyoyev’s reforms, and heavily praises the latter.

The second is Abror Abduazimov, also known as Abror Mukhtor Ali, a cleric who also spent the Karimov years in forced exile. In 2021, he was appointed deputy head of the Department for Teaching Qur’anic Tajwid at the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan and is employed by the state-backed Islamic Civilization Center in Tashkent. He commands 1.6 million Instagram followers—an audience most Uzbek officials could only envy. 

His teachings include the claims that “women like husbands who beat them” and that children who learn English are on the path to becoming spies. Like Rabbimov, he claims that Jews are trying to take power in Uzbekistan and “come from the devil.” Neighboring Kazakhstan has shown that another approach exists: when Mukhtor Ali attempted to deliver a sermon at a mosque in southern Kazakhstan, officers interrupted him mid-sermon. They escorted him out—a deliberate signal that his extremist ideology is not welcome there. Yet in Uzbekistan, he preaches from a government institution.

Officials counter that the New Uzbekistan has also expanded freedom of expression. The record suggests otherwise—the tolerance extends to radical preachers, not to critics. Lazizkhon Omilov, known as Aziz Nur, a journalist with the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, saw the Uzbek government strip him of citizenship in retaliation for his investigations, rendering him stateless. He was fortunate to be abroad. 

Those inside the country have fared worse: since 2020, authorities have prosecuted and imprisoned dozens of prominent bloggers—among them Fazilkhoja Arifkhodjaev, Otabek Sattoriy, Olimjon Khaidarov, Abdugadir Mominov, and Khurshid Daliev—on charges of extortion, fraud, or defamation, with sentences of up to seven-and-a-half years. Sattoriy, who criticized local officials on his YouTube channel “People’s Opinion,” received six and a half years; the blogger Miraziz Bazarov got three for “slander.” The pattern is legible: promote domestic violence or mock the West or the Jews from a pulpit with a million followers, and the state looks away. Investigate a governor, and the state finds a statute.

The mainstreaming has begun to spill beyond Uzbekistan’s borders. Yulduz Usmonova, one of the country’s biggest pop stars, has recast herself as a champion of the Palestinian cause—a persona that has included declaring “may the almighty rain all misfortunes upon your heads, Jews.” A planned US concert was canceled after protests from New York’s Jewish community. On her return home, the Iranian embassy in Tashkent publicly congratulated her and the pro-government website Kun.uz framed the cancellation as led by “Zionists” for her “criticism of Israel’s actions in Palestine” without mentioning the content of her statements. 

Rabbimov previously said that Usmonova’s views represented an “absolute majority of Uzbeks.” To be sure, her conviction is likely opportunistic—as the blogger Umid Gafurov noted, she toured Israel happily for years—but that is precisely the point. Entertainers are weathervanes. When antisemitism becomes the shrewd career move for Uzbekistan’s most bankable star, the wind has shifted.

Washington should read that weathervane carefully. Relations between the United States and Central Asia have warmed considerably under President Donald Trump, and Mirziyoyev has invested heavily in the relationship—committing investment to the United States, spending lavishly on public relations in Washington, and joining the Board of Peace. There is nothing wrong with the courtship. But the ideology his government simultaneously indulges at home is reliably, structurally anti-American. When the regime’s own ideologists call the United States a puppet of Israel, and a state-employed cleric tells 1.6 million followers that learning English breeds spies, the charm offensive abroad and the incubation at home cannot both be sustained indefinitely. Sooner or later, the population being shaped by the second will constrain the first.

None of this makes Mirziyoyev an Islamist. He is a Soviet-formed apparatchik who wants a legacy as reformer and peacemaker, and his government has occasionally tapped the brakes—Saifiddinov was demoted to a minor mosque. A Fergana Valley imam was removed for berating schoolgirls for dancing with boys at high school graduations. But these are personnel corrections, not policy changes. Mirziyoyev manages; he does not lead. 

Lacking a vision of his own, he lets the country be carried by whatever global winds blow strongest, and the strongest wind in Uzbekistan today is politicized religion. For a state wedged between Russia, Iran, and Afghanistan—three neighbors with every interest in shaping its trajectory—passivity is itself a policy, and a dangerous one. Karimov proved that repression radicalizes. Mirziyoyev may yet prove that opportunism does too. The New Uzbekistan its president promises could still be one of growth and liberty. But on the current path, it risks resembling a different new order altogether—one that looks like Afghanistan after August 2021. 

About the Author: Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in outlets including Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.

The post Uzbekistan’s Indulgence of Islamism appeared first on The National Interest.