ABSTRACT
Islamic "fundamentalism" has become the bugbear of choice of the New World Order. In the successor states of the Soviet Union, this was illustrated by interpretations of the political power struggle in Tajikistan between those who wanted to perpetuate as much as possible of the old Soviet order and the diverse coalition of advocates of change. Defenders of the old order largely succeeded in portraying themselves to their Central Asian neighbors, Moscow, and Washington as the sole hope for secularism and stability confronting the onslaught of Islamic extremists. For example, the speaker of Tajikistan's Supreme Soviet, Imomali Rahmonov, in an interview on Russian television, described the power struggle from which the communist hardliners emerged victorious as a clash between medieval "obscurantism, represented by Islamic fundamentalism, and the idea ofprogress and the democratic development ofsociety."1 This exaggerated notion of an Islamic menace led the Russian government to support in Tajikistan the same kind of old-guard forces President Yeltsin sought to crush within Russia. Some in the West accepted that interpretation and the Russian response. For hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Tajikistan, the politics of Islamophobia brought persecution and the hardships of exile.
