Further Progress for Gorbachev Program : Soviet Reforms Give Rise to Islamic Resurgence

Central Asia, an arid land historically at the crossroads of caravans and conquerors, is being buffeted by resurgent Islam from the Middle East and political reforms from Moscow.

With new freedoms under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, residents of the broad band separating the Soviet Union’s Slavic heartland from Iran and Afghanistan are expressing their religious, ethnic and political concerns.

That represents further progress for Gorbachev, whose program already has stirred other areas of the Soviet Union. But it also sets the stage for a possible race between secular communist reform and revitalized Islam for the future of a land awakening from decades of complacent cronyism.

Much depends on the abilities of new civil and religious leaders to persuade people that more freedom can help solve their problems and not just offer a vent for their frustration. Such frustration has sparked bloodshed in other southern Soviet republics--Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Success is vital to the Kremlin, faced across its southern frontier with Iran’s Islamic fundamentalism and Afghan rebels who fought the Soviet Army to a standstill. Both inspire some radicals.

In an interview after being chosen the new spiritual leader of Central Asia’s Muslims recently, 36-year-old Mohammadsadyk Mamayusupov indicated he would follow previous religious leaders in cooperating with the government, but would use the reforms broadly to improve religious life.

“We intend to use this moment very judiciously for the development of our religion and the renewal of its spiritual life,” he said.

Mamayusupov has moved quickly where he can. Between Feb. 6 and mid-March authorities gave permission for the opening of about 35 new mosques, and he pledged that “we will continue to open mosques until all the requests of our Muslims are satisfied.”

Only about 200 mosques are sprinkled across the five Central Asian republics: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Turkmenia and Tadzhikistan, which occupy an area half the size of the continental United States.

The number of students in Islamic academies is being doubled and the number of Korans and other religious books being published will be greatly increased. The Kremlin is removing a Stalin-era ban on group religious education and plans to allow believers to organize charities.

But radicals predict that the increased attention to religious needs will lead more people to embrace Islamic fundamentalism.

“We need to raise the people up,” said one Muslim radical who favors establishment of an Iranian-style Islamic republic. “It won’t be in two, three or four years. It has to be done very quietly.” He spoke on condition of anonymity.

The stakes are considerable. The population of the five Central Asian republics is booming. From 1970 to 1987, it increased 26%, to 47.5 million, and now makes up about 18% of the Soviet population.

At the center of much of the region’s activity are Uzbekistan and its capital, Tashkent. The historic cities of Bukhara and Samarkand along the Silk Route are centers of religious culture.

What is now Soviet Central Asia accepted Islam in the first century after Mohammed and was a crossroads for Mongols, Turks, Persians and Slavs until it was absorbed in Czarist Russia’s drive south in the 19th Century.

Although officially atheist, the Soviet Union nevertheless has maintained relations with Iran, and Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze held a rare meeting with the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini last winter.

The Soviet Union has supported Arab causes in the Middle East diplomatically and militarily for more than two decades, but now is trying to improve relations with Israel to play a bigger role in any Middle East peace settlement.

Mamayusupov, rector of the Higher Islamic Institute in Tashkent, owes his selection in part to the resurgence of religious feelings.

In early February, Mufti Shamsuddinkhan Babakhan was ousted by a series of protests in which radicals accused him of corruption and lacking sufficient religious knowledge. A council of religious leaders elected Mamayusupov to replace him.

Six weeks after ousting Babakhan, believers were demonstrating again. But this time they were praising God for the return of a 7th-Century Koran, a gift from the Uzbekistan government.

The new openness also has sparked protests of a more political or ethnic character.

On April 9, Tashkent sources said, several thousand people rallied to support Belik, an informal political group seeking to establish Uzbek as the republic’s official language and calling for drastic measures to improve the environment. Belik means “unity” in the Uzbek language.

In Central Asia, as in the Baltic republics and Armenia, the deteriorating environment has become a rallying point that has opened up broader issues such as economic reform and demands for more local control.

Gafkha Namatova, a Belik spokeswoman, said the group claims 100,000 members. It supports Gorbachev’s reforms, she said, but “we see a lot that we like” in the programs of the People’s Front grass-roots organizations that have sprung up in the Baltics and elsewhere.

National policies demanding cotton production in Central Asia have led to food shortages, she said. Abuse of farm chemicals on those same cotton fields has increased infant mortality, she charged.

In an interview with the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia in March, the republic’s new president, Mirzaolim Izragimov, said cotton-growing must be de-emphasized.

The policy of pushing marginal land into production ruined 1.73 million acres of pasture, he said.

Drainage of rivers that flow into the Aral Sea, on the border of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, has lowered the level of the sea and made it one of the Soviet Union’s top environmental concerns.

Many of the policies and practices now being repudiated in Central Asia are associated with former President Leonid I. Brezhnev and his supporters.

But experience has shown the danger of replacing local officials and ignoring ethnic feelings.

In 1986, riots broke out in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, after the replacement of the republic’s party leader Dinmukhamed Kunaev by Gennady Kolbin. Kunaev, an ethnic Kazakh, was a Politburo member and a close associate of Brezhnev. Kolbin is a Russian.

Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov, was sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp last December after being convicted of accepting more than $145,000 from Uzbekistan officials.

Mamayusupov pledged that religious leaders would become more socially active, fighting bribery, alcoholism and prostitution.

Attacks on those social ills are not likely to bring him into conflict with the Kremlin, but Muslim leaders could run into difficulty with local authorities if they launch a serious anti-corruption campaign.

“Muslims intend to struggle very actively in the social sphere,” he said, adding that environment is the first target.

Although some civil discontent is organized openly through Belik and similar organizations, the religious discontent remains largely hidden.

An underground group calling itself Islam and Democracy claimed credit for the protests that ousted Babakhan, but it since has splintered.

Almaz Yestekov, the 33-year-old chairman, preaches the need for a strengthening of Islam as well as establishment of Western-style civil liberties.