Family defends captured Uzbek cleric

[sonz]

Kazakh Oriental Studies Institute - Muminov :Charges agianst captured Uzbek Cleric Fabricated

BAGILA BUKHARBAYEVA

ALMATY, Kazakhstan - Late last month, after a nearly eight-year hunt, Uzbek authorities caught up with their most wanted fugitive: an alleged Islamic radical named Rukhitdin Fahrutdinov who had been hiding out in neighboring Kazakhstan.

The Uzbek government alleges that Fahrutdinov, 38, is a leader of the al-Qaida-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, at the center of a shadowy web of radicals blamed for a series of bombings and armed incursions.

His family and followers contend, however, that he is being persecuted for having become a popular religious leader who insisted on his independence from President Islam Karimov's repressive post-Soviet regime.

"There are imams who convey what the Quran says, and there are imams who say what the government wants them to say. Rukhitdin was independent," said his sister, Zukhra, who failed to prevent his extradition to an Uzbek prison.

Fahrutdinov's fate tells a bigger story, of the wrenching changes that have gripped Central Asia over the past two decades as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal reforms came into play, and then the Soviet Union collapsed. He was born into a secular, well-off family: His father was a government minister when Uzbekistan was a Soviet republic.

In 1989, as an exemplary student of Arabic at Tashkent State University in the Uzbek capital, he was sent on scholarship to Kuwait and completed a nine-month Arab-language course in just six months, his family said.

For the remaining three months he studied Islam, and returned to Uzbekistan transformed into a devout, bearded believer. He became imam of the Khoja Nuritdin mosque in Tashkent and soon made it one of the most popular in the city of 2 million.
As the Soviet Union headed for extinction, people in predominantly Muslim Central Asia were rediscovering their Islamic roots. New mosques mushroomed.

So did radical Islamic groups and outside influences - the Wahhabis, with their austere, Saudi-backed interpretation of Islam, and Hizb-ut-Tahrir, a group with Middle Eastern roots which advocates a worldwide Islamic state.

And next door was Afghanistan, which just two years earlier had thrown off Soviet occupation and would come to be ruled by the Taliban, which gave shelter to Osama bin Laden. He offered training to all Muslims ready to wage Jihad, or holy war, including the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU.

In the late 1990s, Karimov, a Soviet-era leader, launched a campaign against radical Islam. But, rights groups say, the campaign also targeted innocent believers who preferred to practice Islam outside state-controlled institutions and were critical of the president's iron-fisted rule.

Zukhra Fahrutdinova alleged that the Uzbek security service had repeatedly urged her brother to follow the line of the official Muslim Spiritual Board and inform on worshippers attending his mosque. He refused, she said.

Fearful of government repression, Fahrutdinov left home on Jan. 19, 1998, said one of his two wives, Mukhayo Ismailova. She said she didn't know his whereabouts, heard from him only every few months and saw him just twice, in the Kazakh city of Shymkent, before his arrest Nov. 24.

Thirteen months after he disappeared, a series of nearly simultaneous car-bomb blasts outside Uzbek government buildings killed 16 people. No one claimed responsibility, but Karimov's government blamed the IMU. Thousands of devout Muslims were thrown into prison, most unconnected with radicals, human rights groups say.

Fahrutdinov emerged as No. 1 on the wanted list, accused of heading operations in Tashkent, though the government never publicized its evidence. Unable to find Fahrutdinov, security forces went after his family. In 2001, authorities jailed Fahrutdinov's second wife, Rakhima Akhmadaliyeva, for alleged religious extremism. In an open letter in 2004, she said she was tortured in detention and her two young daughters threatened.

Meanwhile, Farrukh Khaidarov, an Arabic teacher married to Fahrutdinov's sister, disappeared in Tashkent in summer 2004. Authorities denied any involvement.

Ashirbek Muminov, a researcher on Islam at the Kazakh Oriental Studies Institute who lived in Uzbekistan until recently, said Fahrutdinov was one of a talented "new wave" of preachers who emerged in Uzbekistan after independence. Muminov said he doesn't rule out that Fahrutdinov and other imams had links with foreign fundamentalist groups and received funding from them, "But I cannot believe the charges that the government brings against them. All that is fabricated."

According to witnesses and rights groups, Fahrutdinov was detained in Shymkent with at least eight other Uzbek suspects. All were extradited secretly and forcibly, Human Rights Watch said.

Source: Associated Press

[Wahid]

salam
Slow down bro
its good that ur posting news from the ME for info but your also pushing back all the other threads down real fast and few pple get to discuss the threads(even urs)

[sonz]

lol ok

i will slow