ABSTRACT
The inclusion of a chapter on Islam in a book devoted to subregionalism and regional relations in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) may appear incongruous. It must discuss sets of issues that differ from those in the chapters on emerging subregional initiatives, and it is also distinct from the chapters on the economic and security dimensions of subregional cooperation: those dimensions do at least form a major objective of existing subregional initiatives, even if, as Friedemann Muller and Roy Allison argue, concrete achievements have been modest. By contrast, none of the existing subregional initiatives among CIS member states are oriented towards Islam (other than several cooperative efforts to check or combat radical Islamism, discussed below), nor does Islam figure prominently in the bilateral or multilateral relations of the Muslim CIS states with other Muslim states. I
The chapter is justified, therefore, not on the basis of existing subregional initiatives or dense interactions with a specific Islamic content or context, but rather because discussions of regionalism and subregional cooperation often refer to shared cultural and historic heritage and to common ethnic, linguistic, or religious identities as factors encouraging cooperation.2 An aim of this chapter is to examine whether Islam has served this function in the subregional relations of the Muslim republics and peoples of the former Soviet Union. Moreover, specialist and policy debate, both in the post-Soviet states and in the West, has consistently stressed the importance of the "Islamic factor" in developments in the
Muslim CIS states and in those parts of the Russian Federation with concentrated Muslim populations. There exists, however, a wide variety of opinions on the nature and strength of the Islamic factor. Two areas of the debate are of special relevance to the concerns of this volume.
