“Religious Revival, Nationalism and the ‘Invention of Tradition’: Political Tengrism in Central Asia and Tatarstan,” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 2 (2007): 203-216.

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Religious revival, nationalism and the ‘invention of tradition’: political Tengrism in Central Asia and Tatarstan

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Religious revival, nationalism and the ‘invention of tradition’: political Tengrism in Central Asia and Tatarstan

MARLÈNE LARUELLE

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the birth of a new ideological movement called ‘Tengrism’. According to its theoreticians, Tengrism represents a key element in the identity renewal of Turkic-Mongol peoples and should be adopted as the official religion by the new states of the region. This paper enquires into the ways in which Tengrism is being politically deployed in the service of post-Soviet nationalisms in Kyrgyzstan and Tatarstan and to a lesser extent, in Kazakhstan, Bashkortostan and Buryatia. Although the ideologues of Tengrism may be marginal to the political mainstream, it is nonetheless important to analyse the role of ‘ethnicized’ forms of religious expression and their relationship with the search for post-Soviet national identities.

This article aims to analyse the birth of a new ideological movement called ‘Tengrism’. Political Tengrism makes reference to the ancient religion and philosophy of the Turkish-Mongol peoples, but does not bear a real connection to it. Many people who see themselves as ‘Tengrists’ are not politically committed and do not find their bearings in this political doctrine. Political Tengrism claims, however, a desire to rehabilitate the ancient cult of the god Tengri and, in regions of Muslim tradition, presents Islam as a faith foreign to local populations. According to its theoreticians, Tengrism represents a key element in the identity renewal of Turkic-Mongol peoples and should be adopted as the official religion by the new states of the region. It, thus, occupies an extremely ambiguous position in the public life of these republics. It is extremely controversial because it presents itself as syncretic and assumes a discourse of defence of the nation.

This is not an ethnographic study that attempts to analyse and describe Tengrism as understood and practised at the grassroots but rather an enquiry into the ways in which it is being politically deployed in the service of post-Soviet nationalisms in Kyrgyzstan and Tatarstan, and to a lesser extent, in Kazakhstan, Bashkortostan and

^[1]

Buryatia. Although the ideologues of Tengrism may be marginal to the political mainstream, it is nonetheless important to analyse the role of ‘ethnicized’ forms of religious expression and their relationship with the search for post-Soviet national identities.

After presenting the main organized forces playing a part in this political construction, this article questions the nature of Tengrism as a ‘new Age’ movement and tries to analyse its conception of national identity as well as its high degree of politicization and ethnic identification. This work is based on interviews with the theorists of the movement ${ }^{1}$ and on the study of several written sources: the Tengrist newspaper Beznen-Yul, published since 1997 in Tatarstan; the book written by one of the main ideologists, Raphael Bezertinov, a Tatar who now also works for Beznen-Yul; several brochures of the Tengir-Ordo centre founded by Dastan Sarygulov in Kyrgyzstan; and other scattered documents written by the followers of Tengrism in Kazakhstan. If political Tengrism cannot be considered a mass phenomenon-because it concerns only certain nationalist intellectual elites-it is nonetheless an important object of study, insofar as it reveals the actual ideological recompositions of the post-Soviet space and is part of the global phenomenon of a modernity that defines itself by its ‘invention of traditions’. ${ }^{2}$

The meaning of Tengri

The word tengr or tergir (tänri in old Turkic) means ‘sky’ in the Turkic-Mongol languages. The cult of the sky or of deities linked to it is confirmed by many written and archaeological sources dating from the time of the Turkic kingdoms of Siberia in the 6th-8th centuries. These sources also confirm that Tengrism was one of the syncretic religions practised in the Turkic khaganate before the peoples of the region converted to Buddhism, to Manichaeism, or to Islam. Certain ancient Muslim texts written in the Turkic language associate tänri with Allah, confirming its use as a synonym for God. ${ }^{3}$ It was introduced into the Russian language in the 19th century when the Orkhon steles were discovered (1893) and Danish historian Wilhem Thomson (1842-1927) deciphered runic writing. The Russian word took on the suffix ‘ism’, tengrism, in order to designate the religious system of the ancient Turks, as for instance in the works of Kazakh ethnographer Chokan Valikhanov (1835-1865).

In the Soviet era, the eulogist of the Kazakh national identity, the writer Olzhas Suleymanov (born in 1936), introduced the word tengrianstvo in his famous book Az i Ya (1975), presenting Tengrism as 'the most ancient religion in the world, elaborated as a philosophical teaching four thousand years ago. ${ }^{4}$ Since the 1990s, the neologism tengrism is increasingly in competition with the word tengrianstvo, whose final suffix no longer signals its conceptual nature but its possible practical implementation. However, in practice, the tengrist nationalist militants use the Kyrgyz term of ‘tengrichilik’ to speak of their faith. All the contemporary followers of political Tengrism present it as monotheistic, in so far as the existence of a pantheon of divinities would not contradict belief in a superior abstract force. Some followers such as Kazakh philosopher Nigmet Ayupov denounce the

Eurocentric vision of the phenomenon, according to which it would only be a form of paganism or shamanism. To him, Tengrism is a complex phenomenon, which offers a complete cosmogony of the world and gives its disciples a system that is all at once religious, philosophical, mystical and practical. ${ }^{5}$

Places and players of political Tengrism

The ‘return’ of Tengrism is cultivated by certain post-Soviet intellectual circles in some autonomous republics of the Russian Federation, for instance in Buryatia, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. In the community of the Krymtchaks, close to the Karaites-the only Jews who do not recognize the Talmud but only the Torah-some intellectuals also insist on their Turkic identity rather than on their Jewishness: because they are Turkic-speaking, their ‘true’ religion could not be Judaism but Tengrism. ${ }^{6}$ The movement is also developing in the independent republics of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Committed publications are appearing more and more frequently on that issue in the scientific journals of these two republics. In Kazakhstan, Rukh-Miras, ${ }^{7}$ a quarterly journal created in 2004, offers several articles on Tengrism. The journal, edited by the orientalist Murat Auezov, advocates a culturological approach-especially popular in the former Soviet Union-premised on the idea that the world is divided into cultures or civilizations, which are conceptualized in an essentialist mode; and the unique originality of Kazakh civilization would lie in the Tengrist conception of the world. ${ }^{8}$

The only entirely Tengrist newspaper currently in existence, Beznen-Yul (Our Path), has published about six issues annually in Tatarstan since November 1997. It is published in the town of Naberezhnye Chelny, which was known in the 1990s for its strong Tatar nationalism and the constant clashes between Russian and Tatar radicals there. The newspaper is edited by D. Shaykhetdin and Z. Agliullin, the latter being one of the former leaders of the Public Pan-Tatar Center (Vsetatarskii obshchestvennyi tsentr or VTOTs), the major institution working for the renewal of Tatar identity in the first half of the 1990s. After losing the support of a great part of public opinion in the second half of the decade, the Tatar movement has become more radical and has endeavoured to associate nationalism and Islamism more and more explicitly. According to its theorists, and particularly those of the Ittifak party, Islam must act to preserve Tatar society against its main enemy, Judeo-Christian civilization. Only two forces are able to oppose this civilization: radical Islam and genuine nationalism. ${ }^{9}$ However, while the majority of members of the VTOTs now claim the jihad as the main force to preserve Tatar identity, certain personalities like Z. Agliullin have preferred to call for an anti-Muslim Tatar nationalism based on the rehabilitation of Tengrism.

The followers of political Tengrism try to influence the political elite with the hope of gaining official status for the new religion and they have sometimes managed to spread their conceptions within the governing bodies. The Tatar president, Mintimer Shaymiev, never seems to have been interested in opting for Tengrism and has always insisted on both the Muslim and Orthodox nature of

his republic. The situation seems to be quite different in other republics. In Buryatia, the hero of the national epic, Geser, was set up as the nation’s symbol as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed. The republic’s political authorities as well as academic circles have institutionalized this mythic figure and organized many official celebrations that combine shamanist and Buddhist referents. ${ }^{10}$ In Ufa, Bashkortostan, Talgat Tadzhuddin, the supreme mufti of the Spiritual Board of the Muslims of Russia (of Tatar origin), drew attention to himself several times by speaking in favour of Tengrism. He presents it as the first monotheistic religion and asserts that the Tatars already prayed to Allah under the name of Tengri well before the birth of the Prophet. He claims that ‘popular Islam’ is a type of syncretism between Tengrism and classic Islam through the maintenance of some proto-Islamic rituals and traditions. He defends for instance the idea of pilgrimages to places such as Bulgary and Biliar, a practice strongly condemned by the muftiat of Kazan, which refuses to acknowledge their status as a ‘small hadj’. ${ }^{11}$ The Spiritual Board of Kazakhstan too renewed its refusal of any syncretic bringing together of Islam and Tengrism, an attempt apparently initiated by Sufi movements that hoped for the assertion of a specific ‘Kazakh Islam’. ${ }^{12}$

In Kyrgyzstan, the movement has passed through a first phase of institutionalization, with the founding of the ‘Tengir-Ordo Association for the Preservation of the National Heritage’. This association is run by Dastan Sarygulov, a Member of Parliament and businessman with a nefarious reputation. A former secretary of the regional Communist party leadership, Sarygulov continued his political career as governor of the Talas region after Kyrgyzstan’s independence. It is surely not a coincidence that Sarygulov is from Talas, which is considered as one of the regions where tengrist practices are the most developed, even if the local inhabitants do not acknowledge his leadership. He is especially known for having run Kyrgyzaltyn, the State company in charge of exploiting the gold reserves of the country, and he allegedly became rich quickly as a result of his illegal trafficking of this resource. Dismissed from office in 1999 by president Askar Akev, whom he accused of having ruined him, he then joined the opposition. Despite their political disagreements, Akayev has on several occasions mentioned Tengrism as the original religion of the Kyrgyz. During his 2002 trip to Khakassia, he even alleged that a visit to the Yenisei and the runic steles constituted a pilgrimage to a holy place for the Kyrgyz just as the pilgrimage to Mecca. ${ }^{13}$

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Sarygulov has made a name for himself with several brochures on Tengrism inspired by the philosopher Choiun Omuraly uulu, who published Tengirchilik: uluttuk filosofiianyn unggusuna chalgyn. ${ }^{14}$ Sarygulov’s Tengir-Ordo Association organized an international symposium in order to advocate Tengrism in 2003, publishes a Tengrist calendar every year and grandly claims 500,000 followers. Although Sarygulov may have seemed to be just a marginal personality with esoteric concerns, the March 2005 ‘tulip revolution’ and the overthrow of Akayev have signalled the Tengrist theorist’s entry in politics. Close to new President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, he had himself appointed to the prestigious office of State Secretary and quickly denounced the absence of a national ideology to put the country back on its feet again. On 30 December

2005, Bakiyev signed a decree establishing the creation of a working group with the mission of elaborating a ‘Conception of the state and national ideology of Kyrgyzstan’, a commission chaired by Sarygulov. This commission includes members of the presidential administration charged with strategic issues, Minister of Culture Sultan Rayev and Minister of National Education Nur Dosbol, parliamentary deputies, and members of the Academy of Science.

The Commission says it led investigations among several thousand people and asked them to answer several questions on the theme of national ideology. The pupils of the last classes of secondary school also had to hand in an essay on 'what should be the ideology of the state of Kyrgyzstan? ${ }^{15}$ The swift reappearance of Sarygulov on the Kyrgyz public stage, his job as State Secretary and as president of the commission on ideology have provoked virulent criticisms in the press among those who denounce his dubious past and who worry about a possible sanctioning of Tengrism. ${ }^{16}$ The Spiritual Board of the Muslims of Kyrgyzstan, which does not take part, as such, in the commission, has also complained several times about this willingness to rehabilitate anti-Muslim sentiment in the country. The followers of Tengrism as well as their opponents-each of them questioning Sarygulov’s capacity to integrate Tengrist patterns into the report-feverishly awaited the final report of the commission, which was supposed to present an outline of the new state ideology and be submitted to a referendum. Sarygulov, however, was dismissed from his post as Secretary of State in May 2006 and the text defining the national ideology seems to have been left out by the authorities.

Tengrism: a ‘new Age’ movement?

The rhetorical elements put forward in favour of Tengrism make it partly similar to some new religious movements, especially the ‘New Age’ one. New Age, which appeared as a specific phenomenon since the 1960s, has no structured doctrine, but those who find their bearings in this vision of the world attach themselves to certain principles, in particular the idea that the world knows different levels of reality. Thus its followers do not feel the eclecticism of its religious inspirations as contradictory or paradoxical. This loose, religious conglomeration, which is difficult to define, consists of three main poles: alternative spiritualities interested in oriental religions, esotericism, occultism, astrology and UFO researches; alternative therapies advocating holistic and psychological medicine; and alternative political or social organizations. ${ }^{17}$

The followers of Tengrism claim that it puts forward a cosmology that is perfectly adapted to the contemporary world: it would be a sort of natural religion for mankind. ${ }^{18}$ The absence of a personification of God would confirm that it represents a dynamic vision of the world and one open to the future, and not the fixed expression of the past. Tengrism combines eclectic references inspired by different religious traditions: the questioning of rational knowledge, theosophical allusions, an affinity for certain Buddhist and Hindu premises, the sentiment that mankind has entered a new era, the anticipation of world peace, etc. In Beznen-Yul, spiritual

and occultist references are numerous, whereas they are more discreet in Sarygulov’s remarks. As for the Kazakh newspaper Rukh-Miras, it puts forward traditionalist referents: its editor Zira Nauryzbaeva conceives of Tengrism as an initiation in the Guenonian sense of the word and also mentions Frithjof Schuon, one of the main traditionalist thinkers who converted to Sufism, in addition to the founder of traditionalism, René Guénon (1886-1951). ${ }^{19}$

One of the first arguments put forward by the followers of political Tengrism concerns its fundamentally ecological nature. According to Sarygulov, the development of technology and of knowledge in matters of natural science has given men the illusory idea of controlling nature. The West has thus embarked on a dead-end path that would lead the whole of mankind to its downfall, while the Soviet experience confirmed the impossibility of men dominating nature. This denunciation of industrial modernity represents a recurring element of Tengrist discourse, in which what is at stake is not material comfort but the meaning given to life. ${ }^{20}$ The origin of this technological madness could be found in the great historical religions. As a result, Sarygulov condemns Christianity and Islam as anthropomorphic religions: by asserting that man was created in the likeness of God, and by suggesting that the latter could have been incarnated as a man (Christianity), or could have transmitted his message through a man (Islam), these religions distorted the place of mankind within nature. Only nature could be considered as representative of the divine on earth, with man occupying a more modest position in this hierarchy. ${ }^{21}$

Tengrism would thus constitute the religious expression of an ‘ecocentrism’, ${ }^{22}$ also presented as the incarnation of a post-modernity trying to rehabilitate the spiritual to the detriment of the material: institutionalized religions grant too much importance to their ritual and theological aspects, while Tengrism would put morality, ethics and spirituality at the centre of its message. ${ }^{23}$ From this post-industrial modernity stems the paradoxical relationship of Tengrism to globalization. The Tatar movement of Naberezhnye Chelny and the Kazakh articles on the subject remain extremely critical toward any standardization of the ways of life and claim the right for ‘ethnic characteristics’ to be preserved. Globalization is seen as synonymous with Americanization or at least with a disparaged Westernization. The Kyrgyz followers seem more nuanced, and Sarygulov is a eulogist of a Tengrism in line with globalization precisely by its acceptance of it. According to him, globalization calls for solutions on a worldwide scale and creates an embryonic ‘mega-society’ in which Tengrism will quite naturally find its place. He claims that Tengrism advocates a worldwide moral doctrine, membership in the international community, rejection of the selfish interests of the state and the dehumanization of values, features that he regards as being precisely the ones of the globalized world emerging today.

This post-modern demand cannot come without an assertion of the so-called ‘democratic nature’ of political Tengrism. Its followers insist, indeed, on the direct link, with no interference, between man and the divine-Tengrism is a faith without a prophet, without a holy text, without any institutionalized place of worship, without a clergy, without dogma and interdicts, without rites and

prayers. One of the main Tatar theorists, Raphael Bezertinov, author of the book, Tengrism: the Religion of the Turks and Mongols (Tengrianstvo - religiya tyurkov i mongolov), published in Kazan but distributed widely among Tengrist circles in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan (even finding a place in their national libraries), also claims that Tengrists refuse any institutionalization of their faith for Tengrism would be ‘life itself’. ${ }^{24}$ He defines it as a religion devoid of any social exploitation, without power relations, without any financial and institutional reality. Human freedom is thus expressed through the equality of men in their access to the divine. Sarygulov even claims that in the word Tengir, ‘teng’ means equality. ${ }^{25}$ The natural democratic character of Tengrism nonetheless only becomes meaningful by being connected with the ethnic identity of the population that practices it: its political qualities, then, are those granted to Turkic-Mongol peoples.

Nationalism: the matrix of political Tengrism

For its followers, Tengrism is called to play a major part in contemporary nation building and in the search for new state identities, regardless of whether these states obtained their independence in 1991 or benefited from the status of an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation. Tengrism is part of today’s culturological trends, which seek to claim the originality of a people, its existence on the same territory for millennia, its ethnic continuity since Ancient times and its specific religious conceptions. The quest for an ancient prestigious past is thus at the heart of the rehabilitation of the ethnic sentiment advocated by Tengrism. As Sarygulov claims, the individual can only go back to his roots by evaluating the ethnic past, and by liberating it from the colonialist presuppositions born of Russian domination. The solution for the young Kyrgyz state would thus be the search for a model of development that would be ‘organic and would turn out to be the logical continuation of the previous historical experience’. ${ }^{26}$ However, Political Tengrism plays different roles in different national contexts. For a Tatarstan that does not have political independence, it permits the development of pan-Turkic solidarity, while in independent Kyrgyzstan, Tengrist discourses focus on praise of the state and on its eminently Kyrgyz character.

In Tatarstan, Raphael Bezertinov insists on the fact that Tengrism was the official religion of several states that shaped the ancient history of the Eurasian steppes. Beznen-Yul, focused on praising ‘the traditional vision of the Turkic world’, quite regularly publishes historical articles presenting the great state references considered to be national ones: the Scythians, the Huns, the Bulgars of the Volga, the empire of Genghis Khan, the Golden Horde, the khanates of Astrakhan and Crimea, but also the short-lived republic of Idel-Ural in 1918. The claim that Tengrism was the official religion of powerful states such as those of the Huns and the Mongols aims to retroactively justify the legitimacy of Tengrism as an ethnic religion. In the Tatar newspaper, one of the matrices of this discourse consists in the claim that the existence of pre-Islamic Turkic states was at the origin of Russia. This claim represents a classic element of all the nationalisms of non-native peoples in Russia, and the Tatars do not depart from this tradition: their presence in the historical heartland of Russia and the

intimate links between Muscovy and the Golden Horde allow them to assert a prestigious role in the founding of the Russian state.

Unlike the Tatar movement, Sarygulov is not interested in the role of the Turkic peoples in Russia. He thus repeats that, if the Kyrgyz were able to survive in spite of the invaders, whether Arabs, Mongols, Djungars, Chinese and Russians, it is precisely because ‘the Tengrist vision of the world was the ideological, spiritual, and moral basis of the people and supported the state in all stages of its existence’. ${ }^{27}$ According to him, Tengrism represents the natural religion of the nomads and most specifically of the mountain people: unlike sedentary people, the nomads would have never become slaves to material well-being and would have experience neither feudalism, nor monarchy, nor despotism. The Kyrgyz state would have differentiated itself from its neighbours by its democratic nature: power would have always been elective and not dynastic, the country would have experienced neither revolution, nor uprising, nor civil war, and would have been marked by the absence of any institutionalized coercive force. The ‘original’ Kyrgyz man was thus economically and spiritually free until the coming of the Russians brought the ‘decline of the national spirit, the loss of the national pride’. ${ }^{28}$ The existence of referents to Tengri in geography (the Khan-tengri peak and the Tengri-Too mountains) is understood as proving the naturalness of the Tengrist faith for the Kyrgyz and of their political status as ‘genuine’ autochthonous people on Kyrgyz territory.

If Buryatia seems to have managed to give Geser, the hero of the national epic, a central role in the post-Soviet identity of the republic, in Kyrgyzstan, the junction between Tengrism and the Kyrgyz epic hero, Manas, turned out to be more problematic. Though the Kyrgyz authorities have, indeed, institutionalized Manas as the founding father of the people and the republic (the jubilee of Manas’s millennium was organized in 1996), Sarygulov has almost never made any reference to him. In a 2006 interview, he maintained that if Manas had not managed to become the ideological figurehead of independent Kyrgyzstan, it was because he was monopolized by a political group, around former president Akayev, which would have used him in the service of current political goals. ${ }^{29}$ The competition for political legitimacy has thus prevented the cross-checking between a mythical figure and a religious reference.

Tengrism is also an integral part of Kazakh historical discourse. For instance, Murad Adzhi, who has become the eulogist of an alternative nationalist history centred on the rehabilitation of the steppe peoples, devoted one of his articles to Tengrism. In it, the essayist tried to demonstrate that ancient Russia was strongly influenced by Turkic Tengrism before Byzantine Christianity arrived, as well as Western Europe during the barbarous invasions from the East. He also claims that Tengrism influenced Buddhism as well as certain Orthodox old-believer movements present in Cossack circles. For him, Tengrism was born in the Altai and the Desht-i-Kipchak, whose legal heir would be contemporary Kazakhstan, and he thus invites the Kazakh authorities to revive the religion of their ancestors. ${ }^{30}$

Tengrism not only constitutes a discourse centred on the nation-whether the Tatar, Kyrgyz or Kazakh nation-it is also a pan-Turkic ideology. The Tatar

newspaper, most strikingly, is full of Pan-Turkic allusions, and the runic symbols displayed on its first page symbolize this hope for a reference shared by all the peoples of the region. Beznen-Yul has insisted, in several articles, on the links between the Finno-Ugric and Turkic-Mongol peoples: the search for an ancient Tatar identity supposes the rehabilitation of the Volga Bulgars. ${ }^{31}$ The claim for an original unity with the Finno-Ugrian world offers a better foothold in the current Volga territory. Even if, for his part, Sarygulov seems less influenced by the myth of Turkic unity, he has claimed, however, on several occasions, that Tengrism is a phenomenon common to all Turkic-Mongol peoples. This phenomenon would have taken form at the Mesolithic era and at the beginning of the Neolithic era, between the 9th and 5th millenniums BC, before what he dates as the differentiation of the Altaic languages. ${ }^{32}$ All the followers of TengrismKyrgyz, Kazakh, as well as Tatar-also regularly refer to Shintoism as the only religion that managed to preserve its so-called ‘ethnic feature’ over the centuries. The essayist Raphael Bezertinov considers the religious proximity between Shintoism and Tengrism, and claims it could be explained by the common ethnic origin of the Turkic peoples with the Japanese. He supports this by claiming that several centuries before our era, a Hunnic tribe crossed the Pacific ocean and settled on the Japanese islands. ${ }^{33}$

The two movements, Tatar and Kyrgyz, as well as Kazakh intellectuals of Tengrist sympathies such as Suleymanov and Auezov, share another common reference: Sumer. ${ }^{34}$ This comparison of the Turkic-Mongol languages with Sumerian and Etruscan languages, and the assertion of close cultural links between these worlds represent an old argument dating from Orientalist discoveries and the uncertainties of philology in the 19th century. This parallel continued to be present in Turkic national discourses of the Soviet era, for instance in the $A z i$ Ya by Suleymanov. The newspaper Beznen-Yul now claims that Sumerians spoke a Turkic language and that their writing would be close to the runic alphabet discovered in Siberia. The Kazakh philosopher Nigmet Ayupov also thinks that Tengrism was the ancient religion of Sumer. ${ }^{35}$ According to Sarygulov, the kings of Sumer were called Tengir and all the great ethical teachings were born in the Orient because Tengrism was dominant there until the 8th-6th millennia BC. ${ }^{36}$ The importance of this allusion to Sumer can be explained by the need for a reference to a prestigious state-the search for what is called ‘stateness’ (gosudarstvennost’) across the whole post-Soviet space. This requires resurrecting state and cultural affiliations, in order to assert the unique antiquity of the presentday state. It can nonetheless be noted that certain followers of political Tengrism present this Sumerian parallel as an ‘extrapolation’. ${ }^{37}$

Politicization and ethnicization of the Tengrist discourse

By condemning the universality of the great religions and by asserting that Islam is serving foreign interests, political Tengrism constitutes one of the possible versions of Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Tatar nationalism. In Kyrgyzstan, Sarygulov favours a ‘cleansing’ of the country from any foreign influence, whether from

Russia, the Middle East or the USA. The Tatar movement violently criticizes Vladimir Putin, who is accused of aiming for the total Russification of the country, and demands the autochthonism of Eurasian peoples as a legitimization of the right to independence. Early in 2006, the newspaper Beznen-Yul received a warning from the Ministry of Justice for ‘incitement to interethnic hatred’. An article published in January, headlined ‘Catechism for the non-Russians’ and signed by the ‘movement against the Russification of Tatarstan’, called for defending the autochthonous peoples of the Volga-Ural against Russian domination and insisted on the flaws of the Russian people. ${ }^{38}$ The newspaper nonetheless remains, paradoxically, marked with Russian references. The descriptions of ancient Shamanist or Tengrist rites are systematically based on 19th century Russian ethnological sources. The classical authors of Russian nationalism are also referred to, such as, for instance, V. I. Vernadsky (1863-1945) and his theories concerning the ‘bioenergy’ of the peoples, or even Alexander Dugin (1962), the well-known theorist of the neo-Eurasianist ideology. ${ }^{39}$

Tengrist discourses are dominated by the idea that the West, whether it be Russia or the USA, is trying to prevent the religious revival of Turkic peoples: ‘the upholders of and the partisans of Eurocentrism refuse to allow a powerful civilization founded on Tengrism to be created again, and they will oppose it’ ${ }^{40}$ Although the Soviet era is condemned for its Marxist ideology and its forced Russification, the post-Soviet era is not experienced as a national rebirth: the Westernization of society is disparaged as an ‘ideological expansion’, ${ }^{41}$ in which Islam, paradoxically, is one of the driving forces. According to Sarygulov, the current poverty of post-Soviet societies, the deterioration of the world ecological situation, and US unipolarity is the result of one and the same process’neocolonialism and the distorted process of globalization’. ${ }^{42}$ For Beznen-Yul too, the deep transformations experienced by Tatar society since the 19th century cannot be divided into several eras, for “globalism” is the policy of colonizers’. ${ }^{43}$ In reply to this policy, the newspaper openly advocates a return to runic writing, claiming that ‘writing . . . carries the genetic code of the nation’. For him, the alphabets are not born out of chance, but reveal the profound ‘essence’ of each people. The loss of the alphabet thus signals the loss of identity and cuts the people off from the rest of the universe: as long as the Tatars continue to use the Cyrillic alphabet, no national rebirth can really take place.

The nationalist sensibility of the Tengrists can be pushed to its extremes and the promotion of national identity can be compounded by the rejection of otherness in all its forms through the refusal of any idea of cultural borrowing, ethnicist or even racialized definitions of the nation and virulent anti-Semitism. In Kazakhstan for instance, A. I. Mukhambetova, speaking about the existence of a ‘Tengrist superethnos’, links religious and ethnic references as if it were logical. ${ }^{44}$ Biological metaphors are also recurrent in Sarygulov’s remarks: with the disappearance of traditions, the people would be losing their ‘genetic code’. ${ }^{45}$ Nevertheless, the Tatar movement is distinctly more committed than the Kyrgyz theorist. This situation can partly be explained by the differences in the political and cultural contexts between the Tatar and Kyrgyz Tengrisms. The Tatar movement is a minority

inside the Russian Federation, which it considers a colonial power, while the Kyrgyz movement enjoys independence, which allows for identification with the state. The arguments developed by Beznen-Yul, however, remain paradoxical for they borrow most of the ideological features of Russian nationalist movements.

Bezertinov also mirrors the discourse of the most radical movements of Russian nationalism, particularly those of the neo-pagan groups. ${ }^{46}$ His anti-Semitism is accompanied by a strong fear of and hostility to mixing and a biological determinism based on genetic arguments. 'On the face of it, all the Semitic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are opposed to each other. But in fact, their representatives in high places live peacefully with one another. ${ }^{47}$ Bezertinov indeed denounces the existence of an Institute of Blood Transfusion in the USSR, which, according to him, was aimed at weakening the patriotism of each people by decreasing its ‘biological’ defences. As for Beznen-Yul, it has claimed on several occasions to be opposed to mixed marriages, which would cause hazardous genetic combinations. ${ }^{48}$

The newspaper is particularly virulent in its attacks against Islam and does not conceal its strong anti-Semitism. Indeed, in a long article, Aron Atabek, a contributor to Beznen-Yul in Kazakhstan, tries to explain the link between Tengrist theories and racialist doctrines. For him, the Creator is a neutral cosmic force and only the racial identity of the people praying for him orients this force towards men. What he calls ‘the universal law of the energetic of the Milky Way’ thus means the ethnicization of the divine: ‘a man, finding himself in his ethnos (nation) and in his ethnic religion, prays in his ethnic language to his ethnic, natural, and genetic god’ ${ }^{49}$ That is why, according to him, Jews would have founded three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in order to receive the force of the peoples praying for these gods. By praying to the god of Islam, a Semitic religion, the Turkic peoples would give their energy to the Jews and not to themselves. This ethnicization or racialization can be found in Bezertinov’s Tengrism, the Religion of the Turks and the Mongols, which claims that ‘the spirit of a nation is oriented along three main lines: the unity of blood, language, and religion’ ${ }^{50}$ For him, the ‘genetic code’ alone carries the racial reality of the Turkic-Mongol peoples, which is drowned under cultural, linguistic and religious features that are foreign to them. ${ }^{51}$ The Tatar essayist condemns the current Westernization of society, which he describes as coming in the form of alcohol and tobacco, but also in homosexuality, monogamy and the elevated status given to women, and claims the ‘return’ to a patriarchal and polygamist conception of the family.

Conclusion

The followers of political Tengrism claim they condemn Christianity and Islam and believe in the need for an ethnic religion, one rooted in the territory, traditions and history of a people. They simultaneously seek to elaborate a faith which could be put on the same level as these religions and compete with them in their universality. Their discourse also remains ambiguous as regards the regional character of

Tengrism: as it is not devoid of an underlying pan-Turkic referent, Tengrism’s definition wavers between a strictly national faith-which would suppose a competition between the movements existing in each state-and a regional faith specific to the Turkic peoples. Indeed, political Tengrism is also an attempt to justify the existence of a Turkic community in religious terms. The movement presents itself as eminently modern, as being in the forefront of individualism and ecological sentiment, full of anti-globalization stereotypes and of an awareness of having entered ‘post-modernity’. At the same time, however, its followers demand a ‘return’ to a tradition that would have been marginalized by Russian-Soviet modernity, and they display their quest for a cultural and religious ‘authenticity’ that could be rediscovered by purely and simply erasing the last 150 years, if not the last millennium.

The spread of Tengrism can probably be partly explained by the legacy of Soviet atheism. Certain arguments against the established religions are borrowed from Soviet anti-religious propaganda: that Islam and Christianity justified the exploitation of the lower classes and the wars between nations, for example. ${ }^{52}$ Some of the post-Soviet national intellectuals seem to be searching for a strictly national faith: they find it hard to commit themselves to the Muslim or Christian message and identify more easily with a quasi-religion, which does not demand any regular ritual observance, nor any theological background, and which is limited to the praising of the earth-mother.

The development of political Tengrism can thus be put in parallel with the rehabilitation of the so-called ‘ethnic’ religions in other post-Soviet states. It can be analysed for instance as the Turkic version of Russian neo-paganism, which is already well established in the region’s intellectual circles. A Slavic neo-paganism can also be found in Ukraine and exists in a Baltic form in the Baltic States, particularly in Lithuania. As such, Beznen-Yul published the declaration of the Estonian neo-pagans at the 'World Congress of Ethnic Religions, ${ }^{53}$ and seems to support the effort to found an ‘International’ of neo-Paganisms or ‘natural religions’. The rehabilitation of Zoroastrianism in Tajikistan is also part of that tradition. Certain academic circles there called for an abandonment of Islam-which they considered responsible for the civil war that struck the country from 1992 to 1996-and a return to Zoroastrianism. In his official texts, Tajik president E. Rakhmonov even mentioned Zoroaster as the ‘first prophet of the Tajiks’ and hoped that he ‘will be the spiritual master and guide of the Tajik people’. ${ }^{54}$

Through their claim to an ethnic faith, political Tengrists also display the difficulty they have had in accepting the Westernization of post-Soviet societies following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although denounced for its militant atheism, the Soviet Union had institutionalized a retroactively appreciated form of nationalism. All in all, political Tengrism can be thought of as a narrative mode of decolonization and de-Westernization, as it attempts to territorialize ethnicity through the cult of nature, but also to assert the adaptability of Turkic societies to modernity by using arguments borrowed from the anti-globalization movement. Thus, the example of political Tengrism reminds us how much modernity is based on the invention of tradition and on a constant reorganization of

meaning. While there cannot be any ‘stateness’ without a transcendent principle, the need for an abstract superior being in relation to heaven is all the more important when the societies in question experience a profound adaptation to new political and economic circumstances. The paradoxical conjunction between a religious millenarianism in no way specific to the post-Soviet space and a process of an ethnicization of the divine with ambiguous political consequences reveals the deep ideological changes and the process of social recompositions, which are being experienced by post-Soviet societies.

Notes and references

1. Interviews carried out with D. Sarygulov, R. Bezertinov, N. Ayupov, Z. Nauryzbaeva during the conference ‘Tengrism as a new factor for the identity construction in Central Asia’, organized by the French Institute for Central Asia Studies, Almaty, Kazakhstan, 25 February 2005.
2. E. J. Hobsbawn and T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995).
3. See the headword ‘tänri’, M. Th. Houtsma, A. J. Wensinck, E. Levi-Provencal, H.A.R. Gibb and W. Heffening (eds), Encyclopédie de l’Islam, Vol IV (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1934), p 685.
4. O. Suleymanov, Az i Ya (Alma-Ata: Zhazushy, 1975), p 271.
5. N. G. Ayupov, Tengrianstvo kak religioznaya sistema drevnikh tyurkov (Almaty, 1998).
6. E. Moroz, ‘Ot iudaizma k tengrianstvu. Eshche raz o dukhovnykh poiskakh sovremennykh krymchakov i krymskikh karaitov’, Narod Knigi v mire knig, No 52, 2004, pp 1-6.
7. T. Mukanov, ‘Svetlaya vera rodiny tyurkov. K 100-letiyu restavratsii tengrianskoi very na Altae’, RukhMiras, Astana, No 2, 2004, pp 73-80.
8. See M. Laruelle, ‘The discipline of culturology: a new “Ready-made Thought” for Russia?’, Diogenes, Vol 204, 2004, pp $21-36$.
9. See R. Mukhametchin, ‘Les composants islamiques de la politique confessionnelle en république du Tatarstan’, in M. Laruelle and S. Peyrouse (eds), Islam et politique en ex-URSS. Russie d’Europe et Asie centrale (Paris: L’Harmattan, IFEAC, 2005), pp 41-59.
10. See R. Hamayon, ‘Construction of a national emblem, recomposition of identities and “Heroic” millenarianism in post-Soviet Buryatia. A reappraisal’, in Takashi Irimoto and Takako Yamada (eds), Circumpolar Ethnicity and Identity (Osaka: Senri Ethnological Studies 66, 2004), pp 293-305; R. Hamayon, ‘Shamanism, Buddhism and epic heroism: which supports the identity of the post-Soviet Buryats?’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 17, No 1, 1998, pp 51-67.
11. See M. Laruelle, ‘L’appartenance à l’islam comme critère politique? La politisation des Directions spirituelles et la constitution de partis musulmans en Russie’, in M. Laruelle and S. Peyrouse (eds), op cit, Ref 9 , pp $85-115$.
12. A. Atabek, ‘Tengrianstvo—osnova natsional’nogo samosoznaniya kazakhov’, Beznen-Yul, No 1, 2006, http://www.beznen-yul.narod.ru/arhiv/2006/1san/tengri.htm (accessed 15 October 2006).
13. A. Akayev, Kyrgyzskaya gosudarstvennost’ i narodnyi epos Manas (Bishkek: Uchkun, 2002), p 83.
14. I thank my proofreader who shared this reference with me.
15. See on that issue Vechernyi Bishkek, 21 February 2006, www.centrasia.org/newsA.php4?st=1140514860 (accessed 12 September 2006).
16. D. Karimov, ‘Kirgiziya-ne obshchii dom?’, Vechernyi Bishkek, 24 February 2006 www.vb.kg/2006/02/ 24/protiv/1_print.html (accessed 12 November 2006); N. Mulladzhanov, ‘Sumeet-li Dastan Sarygulov sdelat’ tengrianstvo natsional’noi ideologiei?', www.parohod.kg/news3/print.php?subaction=showfull& $\mathrm{id}=1137465840 \&$ archive $=($ accessed 12 November 2006).
17. M. Introvigne, Le New Age des origines à nos jours. Courants, mouvements, personnalités (Paris: Dervy, 2005).
18. N. G. Ayupov, ‘Naturfilosofiya tengrianstva’, Evraziya. Obshchestvenno-politicheskii i literaturnokhudozhestvennyi zhurnal, No 6, 2004, pp 66-71.
19. René Guénon (1886-1951) formalized the main concepts of Traditionalism in the 1920s. Traditionalism believes in the Tradition, that is, in the existence of a world that was steady in its religious, philosophical, and social principles and started disappearing with the advent of modernity in the 16th century. For Guénon, all religions and esoteric traditions-regardless of their concrete practice-reveal the existence of a now-extinct original sacred Tradition. He then urges the modern world to regain an awareness of this unity in the face of the desacralization and secularization of the modern world. Through this appeal, he

MARLĖNE LARUELLE

has influenced numerous Gnostic and Masonic currents, as well as several Sufi orders. M. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World. Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
20. D. Sarygulov, XXI vek v sud’be kochevnikov (Bishkek: Fond Tengir-Ordo, 2001), 146 pp.
21. D. Sarygulov, XXI vek: chelovek i obshchestvo (Bishkek: Fond Tengir-Ordo, 2003), p 48.
22. D. Sarygulov, Tengrianstvo i global’nye problemy sovremennosti (Bishkek: Fond Tengir-Ordo, 2002), p 35.
23. Ibid, p 38.
24. Interview with Raphaël Bezertinov, Almaty, 25 February 2005.
25. Sarygulov, op cit, Ref 22, p 35.
26. Ibid, p 13.
27. D. Sarygulov. Kyrgyzy: proshloe, nastoyashchee i budushchee (Bishkek, 2005), p 31.
28. Ibid, p 24
29. D. Sarygulov, ‘Ideologiya dolzhna byt’ uslyshana serdtsem i vostrebovana dushoi’, Slovo Kyrgyzstana, 3 December 2005, www.sk.kg/2005/n119/6.html (accessed 20 November 2006).
30. M. Adzhi, ‘Tengrianstvo v kontekste mirovoi kul’tury’, Evrazijskoe soobshchestvo, No 1, 1998, pp 78-92.
31. Bolgars represented the ancient Turkic population of Volga-Kama region, which was subjected to the Mongol empire, and then assimilated, little by little, under the ethnonym of Tatar. The Bolgarist movement nowadays tries to bring back this historical and ethnic reference in order to assert Tatar autochthonism and to refuse any assimilation to the Mongols. See V. Shnirelman, Who Gets the Past? Competition for Ancestors among Non-Russian Intellectuals in Russia (Washington D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp 40-45; V. Shnirelman, ‘Ot konfessional’nogo k etnicheskomu: bulgarskaya ideya v natsional’nom samosoznanii kazanskikh tatar v XX veke’, Vestnik Evrazii, Nos 1-2, 1999, pp 137-159.
32. Sarygulov, op cit, Ref 27, p 14.
33. R. N. Bezertinov, Tengrianstvo-religiya tyurkov i mongolov (Kazan: Slovo, 2004), p 10.
34. Ibid, p 14.
35. N. G. Ayupov, ‘Tengrianstvo’, Izvestiya Akademii nauk respubliki Tadzhikistan, Nos 3-4, 2002, p 86.
36. Ibid, p 92.
37. N. Ospanuly, ‘Tyurkskaya ontologiya: metafizicheskie osnovaniya tengrianstva’, Evrazijskoe soobshchestvo, No 1, 1998, p 184.
38. Anon, ‘Katekhizis dlya nerusskikh’, Beznen-Yul, No 1, 2006, http://www.beznen-yul.narod.ru/arhiv/2006/ 1san/KATEHIZIS.htm (accessed 24 September 2006).
39. On Dugin, see M. Laruelle, ‘Aleksandr Dugin: a russian version of the European radical right?’, Kennan Institute Occasional Papers No 294, 2006, 32 pp, http://www.wilsoncenter.org/topics/pubs/OP294.pdf.
40. Sarygulov, op cit, Ref 27, p 92.
41. Ibid, p 54.
42. Ibid, p 8 .
43. R. Birdib, ‘Globalizm—politika kolonizatorov’, Beznen-Yul, No 1, 2006, http://www.beznen-yul.narod.ru/ arhiv/2006/1san/global.htm (accessed 24 September 2006).
44. A. I. Mukhambetova, ‘Tengrianskii kalendar’ i vremya kazakhskoi kul’tury’, Evraziya. Obshchestvennopoliticheskii i literaturno-khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, No 2, 2001, p 13.
45. Sarygulov, op cit, Ref 27, p 27.
46. Bezertinov, op cit, Ref 33, p 229.
47. Ibid, p 337.
48. Anon, ‘O smeshannikh brakakh’, Beznen-Yul, No 3, 2005, http://beznen-yul.narod.ru/arhiv/2005/3san/ smeshan.htm (accessed 25 September 2006).
49. A. Atabek, ‘Lyudi i bogi ili kak vybirat’ religiyu’, Beznen-Yul, No 2, 2005, p 2.
50. Bezertinov, op cit, Ref 33, p 34.
51. Ibid, p 4.
52. V. Shnirelman, ‘Nazad k yazychestvu? Triumfal’noe shestvie neoyazychestva po prostoram Evrazii’, in V. Shnirelman (ed), Neoyazychestvo na prostorakh Evrazii (Moscow: Bibleysko-bogoslovskii Institut, 2001), pp 162-164.
53. ‘Privyz k priverzhentsam etnicheskikh religii ural’skikh narodov’, Beznen-Yul, No 12, 2002, http:// www.beznen-yul.narod.ru/arhiv/2002/12san/prizyv.htm (accessed 25 September 2006).
54. On that issue, see M. Laruelle, ‘The return of the Aryan myth: Tajikistan in search for a secularized national ideology’, Nationalities Papers, Vol 35, No 1, 2007, pp 51-70.