Aurélie Biard – The Tablighi Revivalism and its Social and Political Implications in Kyrgyzstan

How are revivalist forms of Islam emanating from the Indian subcontinent, especially the ‘preaching group’ of the Tablighi Jama’at, impacting the construction of post-Soviet national identities and attitudes vis-à-vis society and politics? From its emergence in the early 1990s, Tablighi proselytization gradually drew a new universe of meaning that rejects the values of contemporary Kyrgyz society, supposedly hostile to ‘authentic’ Islam. The Tablighi strategy to establish ‘authentic’ Islam in local communities and to form new spaces of Islamization flirts with a political posture that radically questions the established social or political order.

Aurélie Biard is a researcher at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERI) in Paris and an associated researcher at the Centre for Turkish, Ottoman, Balkan, and Central Asian Studies (CETOBaC, CNRS). She is a Visiting Fellow at IERES and is currently teaching a class on “Islam and Ethnicity in Central Asia” with Professor Marlene Laruelle. She holds a Ph.D in Political Science from Sciences-Po Paris. Her research focuses on Islamic clientelist networks and power struggles between Islamic actors as well as on ethics and religion, business and Islam in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan) and in the Russian Federation (Tatarstan). Her main publications include “The Religious Factor in the Reifications of ‘Neo-ethnic’ Identities in Kyrgyzstan,” in Nationalities Papers and “Power, ‘Original Islam’, and the Reactivation of a Religious Utopia in Kara-Suu, Kyrgyzstan”, in Central Asian Affairs.

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