Islam in Central Asia (original) (raw)
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Between integration and resettlement: the Meskhetian Turks
2004
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THE ROLE OF WOMEN/MOTHERS IN THE FORMATION OF ETHNIC IDENTITY AMONG DEPORTED MESKHETIANS
THE ROLE OF WOMEN/MOTHERS IN THE FORMATION OF ETHNIC IDENTITY AMONG DEPORTED MESKHETIANS , 2024
Abstract This article explores the crucial role played by women, particularly mothers, in shaping and preserving ethnic identity among the deported Meskhetian population. Drawing upon feminist theories of nationalism and ethnographic field research conducted with deported Meskhetians, it argues that women have been instrumental in maintaining a connection to the group's roots and cultural heritage through memory, imagination, and emotion, especially during the mass deportation in 1944 when a significant number of Meskhetian men were away fighting in World War II. The article focuses on three key ways in which women participate in ethnic and national processes according to the framework proposed by Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis: 1) as reproducers of the boundaries between ethnic/national groups, 2) as transmitters of culture and participants in the reproduction of the collective's central ideology, and 3) as transformers and reproducers of ethnic/national categories. Marriage traditions among deported Meskhetians, in which Meskhetian men marry Meskhetian women, exemplify the role of women in reproducing ethnic boundaries. Mothers' identity and cultural outlook is often decisive in shaping their children's sense of ethnic belonging. Case studies reveal how the ethnic identity of younger generations can transform under the influence of their mothers.
Meskhetians Homeward Bound... (English version)
Meskhetians Homeward Bound..., 2011
Over the years a number of academic studies have been published on the issue of the Meskhetians: their tragic deportation from Georgia to Central Asia in 1944; their lives as deportees and émigrés in third countries; their later rehabilitation and resettlement, and, finally, their long-awaited repatriation to their homeland. As one of my predecessors, the first OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel, pointed out in his preface to a European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI) study conducted in 2007 on the Meskhetians, 1 Stalin's forced resettlements "was a tragedy of enormous dimensions and the human sufferings resulting from the deportations, unfortunately, are still felt among former deportees and their descendants." Van der Stoel also noted that the Meskhetian problem is still a much overlooked issue. I hope that this new book, Meskhetians: Homeward Bound..., by Tom Trier, George Tarkhan-Mouravi and Forrest Kilimnik, will help refocus attention on the Meskhetian issue, and position it at the center of internal and international repatriation and reintegration policy efforts in Georgia. The authors of the 2007 study, The Meskhetian Turks at a Crossroads: Integration, Repatriation or Resettlement?, provided x an extensive academic examination of the situation facing the Meskhetians in the nine main countries of their current residence: Kazakhstan,
Occasionally, despite our best intentions to control circumstances, life still experiences disruptions like natural disasters which send us knocking on our neighbor's door for help. Even if we manage to control all other critical situations, unpredictable disruptions will occur. We have a lot to learn from history about creative cooperation, and how to build a safe and better future. It's imperative to actively take steps to promote unity and understanding, because inertia is always in the other direction. Today it is obvious that societies need each other, and stagnate when they are isolated. It is time to break down the walls and learn to live together and help each other. Dr. Niyazov says, "My daughter was born in Moscow and grew up in Tashkent, UZ. She then went to college in Madrid, Spain, and now lives there with her husband and two daughters. She integrates traditions from all 3 cultures in her family life, and has created a new cosmopolitan culture of respect for her own heritage." Dr. Khan's daughter is a film producer who studied and lives in Seoul, S Korea, but her background draws her attention to making films about life in Central Asia.
Meskhetian Turks Exploring Identity Through Connections of Culture
2012
This project explores the cultural identity of a refugee group named Meskhetian Turks, an ethnic group forced to relocate multiple times in their long history. Driven from their original homeland and scattered around Central Asia and Eastern Europe for decades, approximately 15,000 Meskhetian Turks have been granted refugee status by the American government in recent years. The focus of this study is a group of Meskhetian Turkish refugees in the Phoenix metropolitan area. This is a narrative study conducted through twelve open-ended in-depth interviews and researcher's observations within the community. The interview questions revolved around three aspects of Meskhetian cultural identity, which were represented in each research question. These aspects were: how Meskhetian Turks define their own culture; how they define their connection to Turkey and Turks; and how they define Americans, American culture and their place within the American society. The first research question resulted in three themes: history, preservation of culture, and sense of community. The second research question revealed two themes: Meskhetian Turk's ties to Turkey, and the group's relationship with and perception of Turks in the area. The final research question provided two themes: the group's adaptation to United States, and interviewees' observations regarding the American culture. Exploring these themes, and examining the connection between these aspects provided a complex and intertwined web of connections, which explain Meskhetian Turkish cultural identity. Meskhetian Turks' cultural self-definition, v
Seasonal migration and symbolic power: The case of Muslim Meskhetians from Nasakirali
Nationalities Papers, 2018
The repatriation and inclusion of Muslim Meskhetians, forcefully displaced by the Soviet government from Georgia to Central Asia during the 1940s, is still ongoing. In 1977, some Meskhetian families settled in the village of Nasakirali in western Georgia. The Soviet Georgian government built houses for the repatriates in a separate district, referred to as the “Island.” The location acquired a symbolic meaning for Meskhetians. After 40 years of repatriation, Meskhetians still remain “islanders:” isolated from the majority population, speaking a different language, practicing a different religion, and facing different employment opportunities. This study explores the coping mechanisms used by Muslim Meskhetians to sustain themselves and their families and improve their social conditions in a strictly Christian post-socialist country where “Islam is taken as a historical other.” The study primarily asks how employment/seasonal migration in Turkey changed the lives of Meskhetians by ad...
Life in Samarkand: Caucasus and Central Asia vis-à-vis Russia, the West, and Islam
… Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of …, 2006
This paper aims at defining the specific negotiating subjectivity of a trickster that can be found in such bordering locales as the Caucasus and Central Asia, positioned in-between Europe and Asia on the one hand and Western modernity and Islam on the other hand. Being multiply colonized in an epistemic as well as economic and political sense, these regions have developed their specific strategies of survival, resistance to various regimes and, created hybrid, trans-cultural border models of thinking, that are still alive today and can constitute a way out of the contemporary dilemma-the Christian West versus Islam. The article traces the complex history of both locales in modernity, trying to understand the influence of those factors that turned them into the threatening images of paradigmatic anti-spaces, fallen out of time, for the West, and how Western modernization brought such foreign concepts to these territories as ethnic and linguistic nationalism, religious and linguistic purism and intolerance, that are the real threats today for the trans-cultural continuum of Central Asia and the Caucasus. A complicating factor in this case is that they were not directly colonized by the Western capitalist empires, but by the so called subaltern empires, like Russia, which was itself epistemically and culturally colonized by the West. Both the Caucasus and Central Asia were and are torn between the influences of the modernization via the Russian empire, via the Ottoman empire and sporadically directly by the West, but also both refuse(d) to make a final choice-instead they resort to the age-old tactic of balancing, of mediation, of a trans-cultural trickster type sensibility that gives them a lot of potential for the future. Another problem that is addressed in the article is that of Islam in the Caucasus and Central Asia (vis-à-vis ethnicity and nationalism) and the evolution of its interpretation by the Russian and Soviet imperial ideologues from relative tolerance to ethnicization, politicization and often demonization of Islam. The revival of specific forms of ethnic and territorial nationalism and in many cases Islamism in Central Asian or the newly independent states of the Southern Caucasus after the collapse of the Soviet Union are also addressed. In addition, there is the opposition of official cultural and political models of ethnic "etatism," and the specific mediating border subjectivity of the people themselves which unexpectedly echoes the globalization flows of a rootless work force around the world, but which also presents a way out of the dead end of fundamentalism vs. neo-liberalism or the "clash of civilizations" model. These trans-cultural subjectivities and epistemologies can be expressed in many ways-from the "theology of liberation" to the 'progressive Muslims project', from other thinking to border thinking, but is always based on questioning the neo-liberal modernity from an in-between position. The Caucasus and Central Asia are close to this in the prevailing sensibility, being part of this global yet non-unified and lose movement of alternative critical and border thinking. What is needed is the development of coalitions and dialogue between such various border thinkers and trans-cultural multiply colonized locales on a global scale that would enable us to oppose both ethnic and religious fundamentalism and extremism of all shades and Western neo-liberal globalization as well.