COLUMN ONE : Tide of Islam Stirs Forces in Soviet Asia : A religious renaissance grows, with a particular appeal to the young. Some analysts fear it may transform itself into a full-fledged fundamentalist revolution.

Amid the chaos of the collapsing Soviet empire, a young Tadzhik man emerged from a crowd of pro-democracy protesters on the troubled streets of this Central Asian capital recently with a tattered poem in his hand.

It was titled “Tigris”--the work of an Iranian poet who wrote extensively against the Shah of Iran at the height of the fundamentalist Islamic revolution that changed the face of that country more than a decade ago.

“And the rebuilders build again,” the poem began. “Domes out of the murdered minarets, freedom out of skulls, humanity out of blood; through day and night, the building of the stature of freedom through the connection between the bullets in the alleys, the mosques, the classrooms and the streets.”

Munavar Munavar wanted only to know if his English translation of the hand-scribbled poem was grammatically correct when he shared it with a visiting American journalist that day. But the young man also wanted to stress the fact that so revolutionary a poem had made its way across borders and into his overwhelmingly Muslim republic of Tadzhikistan.

“This, you see, is a mirror of our lives today,” Munavar said. “It is taken from the selected works of Iranian poet Tahereh Saffordzadeh. It is about her country some years ago. But it is as if she wrote these words for us.”

Saffordzadeh’s violent images make up just one of the ominous religious signposts for the future of one of the world’s most strategic regions.

Munavar’s sentiment is common and appears to be growing exponentially these days in Dushanbe and elsewhere in four of the five Central Asian republics that have formed the soft underbelly of the Soviets’ Communist empire. The four are the southern buffer zone between the godless socialism imposed by Moscow more than 70 years ago and the burgeoning Muslim fundamentalism that in the last decade has taken firm hold in Iran, Pakistan and many parts of Afghanistan.

And it is the fervor of those such as Munavar that underlines the potential for Central Asia’s own mass movement of grass-roots Islamic revivalism, particularly among the young, as the fundamentalists ride the wave of independence and democracy sweeping these republics.

But in a region that for centuries has been a strategic linchpin for a broad stretch of Asia, many analysts fear that Central Asia’s Islamic “renaissance,” as the movement is now called, could easily transform itself into a full-scale Islamic revolution.

It is largely those fears that have kept Communist dictatorships in power in the Central Asian border republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadzhikistan--months after the hard-liners’ attempted coup in Moscow in August unleashed the forces of democracy throughout much of the Soviet Union.

The three republics, where Communists have stubbornly clung to more than 90% of the seats in the ruling parliaments, have declared their independence. Their leaders vow that none will ever become official Islamic states governed by Islamic law.

But the tide of Islam is swelling here, with campaigns to reconstruct ancient mosques adding new domes and minarets each day. And Central Asian analysts such as Lakim Kaioumov foresee a potentially devastating day of reckoning in a region that he ranks as the world’s most volatile.

“The Central Asian region is the most contradictory region--not only in the Soviet Union but in the whole world,” said Kaioumov, an ethnic Tadzhik who is the new republic’s foreign minister. “Objectively speaking, it is possible to organize any conceivable destabilization campaign, and all possibilities for it are there.”

Kaioumov noted that Soviet Central Asia--usually thought of as the five republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan (formerly Kirghizia), Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan--is among the world’s richest regions in such strategic resources as uranium and gold and that it is among the most ethnically and religiously diverse, with powerful Christian and Jewish minorities.

“The ideology of communism is here,” he said. “Islam is very much here. Pan-Islam also is present. Pan-Turkism is present. Pan-Iranianism is here.

“Even among the Muslims there are differences. We have mostly Sunni Muslims, but we also have Wahhabis (a Sunni sect) and Ismailis (a Shiite sect). Besides, we have the war in Afghanistan, a holy Islamic jihad in which a million people have been killed on our borders.

“Then there is talk of changing borders. It is the most dangerous of questions. And I do not want the Tadzhiks to be meat for guns.”

According to figures obtained during a 1987 census, the population of Soviet Central Asia is nearly 50 million, of which the vast majority is thought to be Muslim. It is believed that there are about 60 million Muslims throughout the Soviet Union.

The leaders of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadzhikistan are asking the United Nations for recognition as independent nations. Should the world community recognize such potentially unstable republics?

“If we really want to join the international community, let us first establish order within our own house,” Kaioumov answered.

Considering that the foreign minister’s principal assignment is to achieve that very recognition for his republic, his response was dramatic evidence of the depth of disorder now prevailing in the “house” of Central Asia.

In the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, for example, the senior Muslim cleric of Central Asia recently proposed dismantling borders and re-creating the larger Islamic nation of Turkestan, which existed before the Bolsheviks broke up the region into separate republics. The proposal brought a flood of angry protests from the region’s largely nationalist pro-democracy advocates.

“We will never allow him to force us from one empire right into another empire,” declared Tonchubek Turgjunaaly, leader of the democratic movement in Kyrgyzstan. Islam has a weaker hold there than in some of the neighboring republics, largely because the forefathers of the ethnic Kyrgyz resisted the Muslim invaders for centuries.

“There is a very great danger of pan-Islamism in this region now,” Turgjunaaly said. “And I would say this is the biggest threat to our new democratic ideals, which are very much in their infancy.”

During a recent heated debate in the Communist-dominated Parliament of Tadzhikistan, pro-democracy member Sahib Nazarov declared, “The real struggle in our republic today is the battle between two ideologies: Islam and communism.”

The starkest illustration of that battle began in the Tadzhik capital of Dushanbe late in September, when a hard-line Communist takeover that mirrored the August coup in Moscow triggered a popular backlash in the streets.

The marathon protest, which grew up around a tent city largely populated by Islamic revivalists in downtown Dushanbe, ultimately forced the regime to back down, suspending the leadership and the Communist Party until popular elections are held later this year.

For a time, the clear front-runner in the presidential campaign was the republic’s senior Muslim leader, Qasi Akhbar Turadzhonzada, a moderate cleric who withdrew his name from the slate in a speech denouncing those who favor religious rule in Tadzhikistan.

But most analysts said the republic’s more fundamentalist religious leaders will remain in check only as long as Turadzhonzada maintains his credibility among the region’s increasingly conservative Muslim majority.

And in a month of interviews with Uzbeks and Tadzhiks, Kyrgyz and Turkmen, the overwhelming majority appeared to favor the re-establishment of the rule of Islam that predominated in the region for centuries before Lenin’s Bolshevik Red Army sealed and crushed thousands of mosques, plowed over the ancient tombs of holy men and defeated the fierce Islamic guerrillas called the basmachi.

In a rural mosque outside Dushanbe, for example, in the small Tadzhik village of Rohati, 23-year-old Haidarkhon Khudzhiyev made no secret of his life’s mission to reconvert to strict Islam as many of his friends as possible. He is a full-time student in the religious school in the ancient Uzbek city of Bukhara, which served as the regional center for Islam for more than a century until Lenin’s army stormed the emirate and forced its ruler into exile in Afghanistan.

“When I was a small boy, my father brought me here to this mosque in Rohati and told me, ‘This is the place where people are taught not to do bad things,’ ” the young man said. “So of course I think it would be better to have sharia (Islamic law) here in Tadzhikistan now that we are independent.”

Asked if his friends feel the same way, Khudzhiyev said: “Ten years ago, only one in 10 of my friends were real believers. Now, five in 10 regularly go to the mosque. In fact, there are right now 12 Tadzhik students studying in Pakistan.”

Hundreds of miles away, in Turkmenistan, a similar grass-roots Islamic revival is taking place. Three new border crossings with neighboring Iran are being opened and hundreds of Iranian businessmen have won lucrative government contracts.

Among the republic’s small, intellectual elite, few believe that Iran ever could succeed in exporting its fundamentalist revolution across the long border between the two states. “We think that Islam will never gain political power in Turkmenistan, and there will never be very close relations with Iran,” said Turdymurat Khodjza Mukhammedov, chairman of the republic’s still-outlawed Democratic Party of Turkmenistan.

“But Islam clearly will make some gains. And Pakistan, I believe, is the country that will try to introduce more Islam in all of Central Asia. They, like us, are Sunni Muslims. They are nearby, and already they are making inroads throughout the region. The reason why I am afraid of Pakistan’s influence is because, from our perspective, they haven’t had any taste of democracy--real democracy.

“And of course, Pakistan is even nearer to Tadzhikistan, where Islam is very strong. In all of Central Asia, it is the strongest there. They have an Islamic political party that is almost legal. And it is very popular among the youth and the peasants.”

Just beneath Turkmenistan’s still-secular veneer, though, fundamentalism is almost as popular. Echoing underground pro-democracy leaders such as Mukhammedov, many of those interviewed flatly rejected the idea of Iranian-style fundamentalist rule.

But when asked specific questions about the system of government they most prefer to guide their lives now that their republic has declared independence from Moscow, men such as Oraz Oveza painted a far different picture.

Oveza, 45, is in his own words “just a small man, a common man who wants only to live with enough food for my family.” He drives an ambulance for the state in the capital of Ashkhabad and lives in a traditional mud house with no furniture but with dozens of Turkmen rugs on the floors and walls.

During a long lunch of meat and rice, fruit, camel’s milk and shots of local vodka on his thickly carpeted living room floor, Oveza expressed the opinion that the expanding new economic and cultural ties between his republic and neighboring Iran are merely an attempt to establish good neighborly relations--not religious ones.

But then he was asked his opinion about the strict religious laws laid down by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after Iran’s Islamic revolution swept Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi out of power in 1979.

“I think that is the best upbringing for our children--the religious upbringing, a strict upbringing, a devout and pious upbringing,” he said. “If I steal something from somebody, I should be punished by Allah.”

“Even if that means having one’s hand cut off, as required under sharia? “ he was asked.

“Yes, I agree.”

“What about ordering that women cover themselves up in public?”

“I agree with this too.”

Oveza was then asked whether he has ever attended prayers in the mosque.

“No, we are so Russified now. We were brought up by a foreign system. For 74 years we were prohibited from building our mosque, from praying to our God. So now, man is like a computer here. The data is just placed in his brain by the state.”

Oveza’s 19-year-old son, Bairam, then interrupted, saying that he plans to raise his children in strict accordance with Islam and with regular attendance at the mosque.

Finally, as Oveza gulped another shot of vodka, he was asked how he would react if a future Islamic government banned all alcohol in Turkmenistan, as it has in Iran.

“Ha!” he said. “Yes, the vodka. We have become so Russified now. But about this alcohol, there is no benefit for the human being from drinking this stuff. It will hurt at first to live without it, I suppose. But it was this that was used to keep us from our God, from our freedom, from our past.

“And I think that now, it is high time for all of us to find that past and live it once again.”