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Gold/Mining/Energy : Petrokazakhstan Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hickory who wrote (990)	4/10/2000 12:07:00 PM
From: a_player_2001	Respond to of 2357

I really must take exception with your " the sky is falling" comments about radical Islam in Kazakstan. There has never been any evidence of it and indeed Kazakstan is a secular state. Christian and other religions form the majority of the population. Kazaks until the Soviet era were nomads and hence moved around a lot as such their Islamic identity was not deeply ingrained. They drink, eat pork and as a rule do not fast seriously, much to the chagrin of those countries that have spent a fortune building mosques. Do not confuse the Kazaks with the Uzbeks to the south, the Uzbeks were not nomads and Islamic tradition is more deeply implanted. Yet even in Uzbekistan there is firm separation of state and religion. Kazak opposition tends to highlight nationalist and ecological causes as Islam has little appeal. The Russians on the other hand have not been averse to agitating the Kazaks to enhance their position during the Kazak Russian oil negotiations. Do not confuse nationalism and Islam. True the Kazak authorities have accepted funds from Islamic states to build and or reopen mosques and have revived Moslem holidays, this was done to replace the soviet holidays which were no longer appropriate. Kazakstan is a multiethnic society and it is firm government policy that the country is a multiethnic and a multi-confessional state. Quite simply the government cannot afford to alienate the large and geographically compact Russian population along the Russian border, since they are the major source of skills. The government is notoriously paranoid about indigenous Russian nationalism as well as aggressive religion. The Iranian model is very unattractive to them. These are the views of Oxford Analytica and a former (recent) western ambassador to Kazakstan and the other Stans. Their respective jobs are to study the impact of Islam on the political legal and social life of countries as well as the implications for trade and investment ties among Islamic countries and between Islam and the global economy. It is this kind of unrealistic fear that Islam = terrorism that must stop. I would rather believe those whose job it is to follow the Islamic world rather than the subjective caricatural views of those with a political spin or cultural prejudice.