Apolitical Sufis at Peace in Uzbekistan

May 2006 by By Igor Rotar, Forum 18 News Service. This is an excerpt from a longer article on Religion in Uzbekistan.

In Kokand (in the Uzbek section of the Fergana [Farghona] valley) there is an unregistered kanaka (Sufi monastery), where the leader of the Sufi Nakshbandi tarikat in Uzbekistan, Sheikh Ibrahim, teaches his murids (Sufi pupils). "We don't have any problems with the authorities," Sheikh Ibrahim told Forum 18 last November. "We are poets and mystics and are quite uninterested in political issues. Anyone who is interested in politics is not a Sufi follower. The state understands that we don't represent any danger to it, and doesn't touch us."

Forum 18 has established that the authorities generally do not prevent Sufi believers from meeting in private apartments to perform the zikr (a ritual dance). "After the terrorist attacks in March and April, many Sufi believers were called in to the NSS offices and asked about our meetings. But we were left in peace once they understood that we are removed from politics," Sabir Tokhirov, a surgeon and a Sufi follower, told Forum 18 on 28 March in the southern town of Karshi [Qarshi]. One explanation for the authorities' tolerant attitude towards Sufism is that this movement, in which regional customs are quite closely intertwined, is a reasonably effective alternative to fundamentalism – the main "enemy" of the authorities.