Central Asia's Identity Crisis

Until the Soviet period, Central Asia had never been possessed by Czarist Russia. The various states and entities of the region had long consisted of loose and shifting alliances of tribal groupings. The names attached to them did not represent nations but rather were drawn from several key tribal designations like Uzbek, Kirghiz, etc. Only a rough effort was made to include a major part of each tribal grouping within the boundaries of each new republic. In fact, they were created primarily as a mechanism of divide and rule. The boundaries were not clearly fixed and all of Central Asia was divisible into two primary culture types, namely a nomadic culture, which comprises particularly the Turkoman, Kazakhs and Kirghiz, and the urban culture, based on twin pillars of Turkic governmental administrative and military institutions and the Persian literary and artistic culture.

Today, with the collapse of the empire, the question of identity ranks high on the list of critical questions the Central Asian Republics (CARs) are facing. The vast majority of CARs is, of course, Muslim and the Muslim identity has been paramount for well over a millennium. Ethnically, they are Turks, i.e. members of a broader ethnic group that stretches from Yugoslavia to Mongolia, dominated today by the dynamic state of Turkey.