“Secular religion”: Islam in Kazakhstan’s nation-building

The article explores the concept of “Kazakh Islam” in the socio-political rhetoric of modern Kazakhstan. The change in the state’s policy regarding Islam, which is gradually acquiring new meanings in the changing contexts of national construction is noticed. Four strategies for the construction of “Kazakh Islam” are identified and analyzed: state, political, theological, scientific-journalistic, each of which has its own language and logic of argumentation. The state strategy is focused on the elimination of religious topics from public discourse. The political one is actualized during the election period and serves as the basis for discussion of Kazakh identity. The theological one is focused on including a new concept in a wide ideological Islamic context. The scientific-journalistic one seeks to fill the traditional form of Kazakh Islam with modernization meanings. The separation of religious and secular areas in the daily, routine activities of the state and the church is fully consistent with the concept of secularization. But everything changes when it comes to the most generalized political categories, especially the nation. In the space of nationalism, secularization is losing its power, giving rise to semantic constructions that look absurd, both from the standpoint of religion and from the point of view of the state. The described definitions of “Kazakh Islam” show that it is impossible to consider religious and secular ideology as competitors pursuing diametrically opposite goals within the framework of national building practices. The ideology of “Kazakh Islam” cannot be strictly fixed, since in this way it would lose all of its consolidating potential. As a result, we are dealing with a set of contradictory rhetoric, which is united by the legitimizing force of “nation” and “god”. The organic complementarity and interchangeability of these concepts reveals the complex and dynamic connection of religion and nationalism in promoting and legitimizing the meaning of the existence of the Kazakh state.

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