10 Observations About Kyrgyzstan
Where Islam meets the West meets… Soviet nostalgia.
I first came to Bishkek as a college student trying to learn Russian and returned a few years later to report on an insurrection against the president. I don’t think I ever expected to actually live in Kyrgyzstan, but… life is funny sometimes, and for the past year and a half I’ve been living in Bishkek, teaching journalism and public relations at an international university. As a perk of being here, I get the opportunity to throw my kalpak into the ring with Yascha Mounk and Quico Toro in Persuasion’s “Observations About….” series.
I have yet to have a conversation with anybody in America who knows anything about Kyrgyzstan—it’s in a part of the world that, from a Western perspective, is completely off the radar—but that’s basically just parochialism. In the general doom-and-gloom of our moment, it’s easy to forget that there are countries that are doing perfectly well, developing and evolving in their distinct ways without being part of anybody’s imperium. In the 2000s, when I was first here, Kyrgyzstan suffered from several rounds of political unrest and from what seemed like endemic corruption. I remember in particular a cop sitting under a parasol eating watermelon as he waited to give motorists tickets for ridiculous violations when they came around a bend in a mountain road—but that kind of thing has largely gone away, or at least isn’t as visible in regular life. I don’t honestly know who gets credit for getting that sort of corruption under control, but it may be more of a collective achievement—a period of stability in which the economy has been able to steadily grow and civic life to sustain itself. Now Kyrgyzstan has become something that never shows up in the news: a livable country making steady, appreciable progress.
At a glance around Bishkek, America seems to be everywhere. The New York Yankees appear to be very popular, as are the Chicago Bulls and Miami Heat. Kyrgyzstan, at this moment of relative stability and smooth development, seems like a living embodiment of Thomas Friedman’s thesis in The World Is Flat. A great deal of trade moves through Bishkek. The city has a very international atmosphere. The younger urban generation speaks good English, and the only real flaw to Bishkek, from my perspective, is the tinny American pop music (a lot of Bruno Mars and Selena Gomez, that kind of thing) that’s piped into all the coffee shops. “It’s not really Kyrgyzstan,” somebody sniffed to me recently. “It’s like living in an airport.”
But appearances can be deceptive. When I first spent time in Bishkek in the mid-2000s, there was a U.S. Air Force base serving as a supply hub for Afghanistan. The city had a thriving expat scene—in part drunk contractors getting themselves into trouble and in part some really interesting and well-developed exercises of Western soft power, above all those run by the Soros Foundation. Returning to Bishkek many years later, the American influence seems like the monument to Ozymandias or something. The Air Force base was long ago shut down, with the Kyrgyz government bowing to Russian pressure. I live next door to the Soros Foundation building, which was recently closed due to a Putin-inspired “foreign agent” law. I know two Americans—one of whom I met at the somewhat-lonely synagogue; the other of whom met a Kyrgyz partner online and evinced surprise that there were roads, and cars, in Kyrgyzstan.
Putin Is Winning The Great Game. When I was first in Central Asia, there was a great deal of somewhat fanciful speculation about which external actor would emerge as the dominant power in the region. The United States had thrown its hat in with the air base, as well as, more broadly, the Afghanistan occupation. China was obviously a rising power. Turkey and India had a degree of influence in Central Asia that might be surprising to those who haven’t visited the region. But, 20 years later, it’s obvious that Russia is the winner. In my informal polling of cab drivers and passing acquaintances, there’s a general sense that Putin is the direction everybody wants to go in. That doesn’t necessarily mean wanting to be a part of a Russian imperium—nationalism is very strong here—but the perception is that Putin can get things done, and his model of a free-floating, willful executive has, at this moment in time, in this part of the world, won the war of ideas against Western institutionalism.
But from a cultural point of view, Dubai may be the real winner here. What first struck me on my return to Bishkek were the increased number of hijabs I was seeing compared to the somewhat hedonistic 2000s. But the hijabs, and the gleaming new mosques, do not necessarily translate to some sort of Islamic fundamentalism. Central Asia practices a light Islam, and I find myself reminded above all of a particular sense I had when I visited Dubai that it’s possible to have it all, that it’s possible to be a devout person and also live what was described in Dubai as “the luxury life.” In Bishkek, I have seen women in hijabs spend entire meals in restaurants taking selfies (they are far from the only women here to do so), and that, I would say, is the dominant vibe at the moment—hijabs and selfies, which is to say a unique accommodation between modern technology and a distinctly Muslim and Central Asian outlook on the world.
In his excellent 2000 book, The New Central Asia, which may still be the best geopolitical work on the region, Olivier Roy argues that the main political force in Central Asia is a clan-based nationalism—which, in the aftermath of the Cold War, took most observers by surprise. It’s a truism of Central Asia to note that the national divisions here don’t have much to do with anything—they are largely the artifact of lines drawn on a map by the Soviet Union in the 1920s in an effort to divide and rule—but the nationalities have held more than might have been expected in the independence period. What that translates to is a pretty robust sense of national identity—kalpaks (the traditional hats) have become a fashion statement in Kyrgyzstan; Manas, the folk hero who inspired the world’s longest epic poem, is everywhere as a badge of Kyrgyz national pride. There is also a certain amount of ill will towards neighboring countries—with a long-running border dispute between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and tensions with Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
One of the first surprises for Westerners visiting Kyrgyzstan is the discovery that the Soviet Union is far from loathed. One feature of the Soviet state was to redistribute a great deal of resources to the periphery of the empire, and older Kyrgyz may fondly remember the Soviet doctors helicoptered out to remote rural areas. The Soviets really did industrialize the region at a rapid clip, and Stalinist repressions didn’t fall as hard here as they did elsewhere in the USSR. I have heard an old woman complaining that “in Soviet times” children were always in bed by 9pm. I have heard appreciation for the playgrounds that are everywhere in the city, and how well designed a city like Bishkek really is. On the other hand, a certain amount of Soviet nostalgia doesn’t interfere with the rise of nationalism or the influx of Islamic sentiment. It’s all part of the distinctive Central Asian balancing-out of different influences. The hot-button word at the moment is “decolonization,” including the question of whether the experience of Central Asia during the Soviet period should be regarded through the lens of colonialism. But the fact that this is highly controversial only speaks to how deep Soviet nostalgia runs.
The next surprise for Westerners is how light Islam can be and how drastically it can differ from “Arabian Islam”—how, for instance, a drinking culture can co-exist with a Muslim identity. Living in Bishkek has compelled me to shed a number of preconceptions about Islam and to recognize that there need not be any particular conflict between Islam and rapid development.
Where Islam has its most direct impact, as far as I can tell, is in a certain ethic of cleanliness (“taharah” in Arabic). I don’t always know where the line is between Islamic taharah and an even older Central Asian tradition of cleanliness. What I do know is that, here, I am a very slovenly American, and—along with my loathing for Bruno Mars and Harry Styles—it is this de-emphasis on comport that makes me most at odds with the culture. I tend to eat sandwiches with my bare hands as opposed to with the plastic gloves that are always provided. I tend to just toss my jacket on the back of a chair and my bag, horror of horrors, on the ground, as opposed to putting my jacket on one of the portable hangers that are distributed around cafés and my bag on the special bag ottoman. I also have a tendency to tramp into doctors’ offices, etc., without putting on the plastic shoe wraps that are always at the entrance and, once, when I went into my apartment to fetch the rent and hand it to the landlady’s daughter who was waiting by the door, the daughter told her mother who texted the contact at my university who had set up the apartment rental who then texted me to inform me that, here, people “don’t wear shoes at home” and it would be better if I wore home slippers.
I would totally recommend moving here! My university students all seem very eager to move to the West, which, from the TV shows they watch, seems like a pretty good deal—and there is a general impatience with the slowness of development in the region, and, with that, a widespread interest in shortcuts: in AI, for instance, which is perceived as a useful instrument for closing the gaps between Central Asia and the West. But, as much as I see it as my job to try to give my students skills that they can use in the “global marketplace,” I find myself being much less bullish on “development” than they are. Yes, I understand that the economy needs to continue growing and that, as it stands, very many Kyrgyz struggle to make ends meet. But there is a kind of entrenched pessimism that many Kyrgyz have—combined with a reflexive envy for the West—that I find perplexing. My experience is that the country seems to be in something like a sweet spot, very livable, politically stable, and with a growing economy. I’m not actually so sure which aspects of the over-corporatized and often over-bureaucratized West a country like Kyrgyzstan needs to adopt.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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There's a lot here to celebrate, especially your open-minded celebration of the ways in which most if not all cultures have made 'foreign imports' like Islam responsive to their home-grown views of what makes a good life. I have been a nominal muslim since my twenties when I married a muslim (long since dead of cancer). Because it was then considered necessary to convert I said 'yes' when the mullah asked something in Arabic during our wedding, and presto, I joined the other billion plus muslims worldwide. And thought nothing of it, but over the years, intrigued by the art, the poetry, the music and the sense of the sacred inherent in the faith I began to study it in depth. And it's nothing like the heavily Saudi-influenced version of it in most places. Rather than being the Islamic version of Christian Fundamentalism it's an easy and accessible faith to embrace, and even the hijab (which I personally never wear) can be worn with flair, as evidenced by the ways they rock it in cities like London. And Central Asia, which has long enjoyed commerce with India btw, developed a Sufi interpretation of the faith that is now practiced all across Europe, in Asia, in Australia and the US, not to mention in those middle eastern countries less repressive than Iran and Saudi Arabia. So kudos for the inspiring travelogue. I hope more folks begin to travel to the region to see for themselves what 'different,' non-Anglo cultures have come up with by just being themselves.
As a product of the cold war (parents fled a Soviet invasion), I am always fascinated hearing about what was once obscured by iron curtains. Thank you for this! With respect to the theme of nostalgia, perhaps there is some Baader-Meinhof / frequency illusion going on for me, but this seems to be a rising trend globally. I know "the good ole days" is as time immemorial as the good ole days, but are we in/heading for a particularly acute period of "the past was better" ? Maga Trump certainly seems dominated by this as well as did the illiberal left during the racial reconning of 2020 where somehow 2020 was the most racist period ever in America.