Abstract:

Since its independence, people of Kyrgyzstan experience different ways of their religious expression in public. Artificially constructed through a system of social and political institutions Soviet national religiosity presumed embedding of religious experiences into national traditions assumed congruence with Soviet ideals and values, perception of which meant familiarization with the modern world, rejection of the atavisms of the past, emancipation of individual and was supported by the evidence of social welfare. Due to the Muslim majority, academic interest in Kyrgyzstan is generally focused on either the essence of these transformations from the standpoint of subjective search by believers for true Islamic religiosity or on risks of violent extremism under the banner of Islam in the era Islamic revival.

The goal of this paper is to reveal the link between state institutional transformations and varieties of experiences of Islamic religiosity. Drawn upon Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, it is argued that internalized by Muslims of Kyrgyzstan lack of state potential to deal with social problems, on the one hand, and absence of Soviet-era state religiosity-assignment, on the other hand, has generated two main types of experiences of Islamic religiosity respectively. The first one is “atheist Muslimness,” representatives of which have strengthened their confidence in the truthfulness of the constructed Soviet national religiosity in the circumstances of the post-Soviet socio-economic crisis. The second type is “reinterpreted Muslimness,” followers of which prioritize freedom of public religious manifestation to state social guarantees elaborating coping strategies through their religious practices either emphasizing the Soviet period national-religious link and thus strengthening national belonging or focusing on morally conditioned experience of Islamic religiosity and thus concentrating on personal transformation in the process of observing prescribed moral norms.

The paper rests on conducted study of a number of secondary academic sources on experiences of Islamic religiosity and atheism in the USSR and in the independent Central Asian in general and Kyrgyzstan in particular. The results of the research can provide the evidence of prospects of using structural constructivism for understanding the link between changes in the external institutional environment and ways of their internalization by believers manifested in different experiences of their religiosity through generalizing personal experiences that still reflect the complexity of religious field.