9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Don't waste your time or money, April 30, 2009
This review is from: Oil, Islam, and Conflict: Central Asia since 1945 (Reaktion Books - Contemporary Worlds) (Paperback)
There are two types of books about Central Asia - those which try to accurately present the region's people and politics, and those which paint over-simplified and often incorrect pictures of this complex region, usually by focusing primarily on highly exaggerated regional "threats". Johnson's book is certainly in the later category, and anyone who wants a honest examination of religion and conflict in Central Asia would do well to avoid this sensationalist tripe.
Like most authors writing about contemporary Central Asia, Johnson feels the need to give a 'quick history' of the region. Unfortunately, his history is a dismal patchwork of fast facts from equally shoddy introductory chapters of other contemporary political works. Issues of great importance nowadays, such as the ethnic origins of Central Asia's people, are explained with the kind of half-accuracy you would expect from a last-minute undergraduate paper, not a published work (page 35, for example, on the Kazakhs). His understanding of Soviet history is equally shoddy, from his failure to understand the structure of Soviet-era Islamic organizations (page 26) to his incorrect explanation for the origins of the 1986 riots in Almaty (page 37).
Historical mistakes could perhaps be forgiven. Attacks which border on bigotry, however, are more difficult to ignore. For most of chapter 3 - "Islam and Islamism" - Johnson equates all regional Islamic groups with whabbi-style terrorists fresh across the border from Afghanistan. It should be noted that he is using the same language, logic, and wide brushstrokes that the regional regimes do to justify their imprisonment and torture of anyone who goes against their dictatorial rule. This is most evident in his treatment of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a religious organization supporting the overthrow of the regional dictators by non-violent means. Johnson dismisses their claims of non-violence out of hand, despite the fact that no evidence of a violent act by the group has ever been found (excluding the propaganda claims by the regional governments), so much so that the United States and the UK cannot justify putting the group on their ever-expanding list of terrorist organizations. The most shocking moment in the book, however, comes when he equates the establishment of an Islamic caliphate (a goal Hizb ut-Tahrir advocates achieving through non-violent means) with a global genocide against all "non-believers" (page 69) - he's basically envisioning Hitler with a Koran. Johnson's disgusting degree of Islamophobia, while perhaps exactly what policy makers in the old Bush administration wanted to hear, is an insult not just to Muslims, but to any educated person unlucky enough to have trudged this far through his work, and is highly inappropriate for a book examining countries populated by Muslims.
This book is shoddy history at best and blatant scare-mongering at worse. What it is certainly not is a well-balanced, accurate introduction to Islam in Central Asia. For such a book, see something like Adeeb Khalid's "Islam After Communism". His coverage of the oil industry in the region, which occurs primarily in only one chapter, is not as one-sided as his sections on religion, however better works do exist, such as Steve Levine's "The Oil and the Glory". In short, this book is a waste of time and money, unless you want to see an example of how to not write about Central Asia.
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