JALAL-ABAD, Kyrgyzstan -- It was after midnight when Yudgoroi Yuldasheva's husband shook her awake.
"Sweetie! I've finished the manuscript," she recalled Akram Yuldashev whispering that spring night in 1991. "I think if people read this, the world will become a better place!"
Yudgoroi Yuldasheva, in Kyrgyzstan, described Uzbek charges against her husband as false.
(Graeme Smith For The Washington Post)
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His eyes were moist with emotion, Yuldasheva recalled, a sight that filled her with a mix of admiration and pity for this thin, balding man she had loved since grade school.
So Yuldasheva sat up in bed and read through all 44 handwritten pages of the text Yuldashev had taken nearly two years to complete. Titled "The Path to Faith," the manuscript was, in her view, essentially a religious self-help pamphlet exhorting readers to place spiritual values ahead of material desires, in accordance with the Koran.
The government of Uzbekistan sees it differently. Two weeks ago, Uzbek troops killed hundreds of demonstrators and an unknown number of armed rebels in the country's Fergana Valley region to suppress an anti-government revolt. Officials in the capital, Tashkent, lay ultimate blame for the uprising on Yuldashev, now 41 and serving a 17-year sentence in a Tashkent prison, and his tract. They contend that the rebellion was launched by gun-toting followers bent on establishing an Islamic state based on his teachings.
But Yuldashev's wife and many of his relatives and admirers, interviewed in the tent camp in Kyrgyzstan where they took refuge after escaping the crackdown, say he is anything but political. According to them, he is a self-taught spiritual leader, a humble man who found God. His teachings, they say, inspired local businessmen to try to create a peaceful economic utopia, a cluster of companies operating on Islamic principles, offering religious instruction to employees and funding charities.
Many Western scholars who specialize in the region echo that characterization. "Maybe he's pulling the wool over my eyes, but Yuldashev seems so introspective and innocuous," said Scott Horton, a lecturer at Columbia Law School who has monitored trials of Uzbeks accused of Islamic militancy. "There's nothing that involves a challenge to government."
Rather, these analysts suggest, the fierce response to Yuldashev stems from the government's deep fear of any religious group that operates without official sanction in the Central Asian republic, which was born from the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and has been ruled since then by a former communist functionary, Islam Karimov.
"The government perceives any grass-roots movement with hostility, whether it's Islamic or not," said Alisher Ilkhamov, an Uzbek sociologist and resident fellow at the University of London. Labeling groups as terrorist resonates in a region where several bona fide armed groups emerged in the 1990s, Ilkhamov and other experts say.
Yuldashev's experience "is not a story about an Islamic militant threat," said Barnett R. Rubin, a Central Asia expert at New York University. "It is a story about a corrupt, authoritarian government raising the specter of Islamic militancy to get the support of the United States." Uzbekistan hosts a major U.S. airbase, which was used in the war in Afghanistan, and is to receive $21 million in U.S. military aid this year.
By repressing moderate Islamic movements, Rubin and others say, Karimov may actually push them toward militancy.
With the country sealed off, there has been no independent account of who organized the rebellion in the eastern city of Andijon on May 13, in which armed men freed hundreds of people from a prison, including 23 local businessmen charged with being followers of Yuldashev.
In Kyrgyzstan, Yuldashev's followers say they have no idea who those attackers were, but declare that they certainly were not controlled by the imprisoned teacher. Yuldashev "would never even really talk about religion with you," said Shamsutdin Atamatov, 29, one of the freed businessmen, who fled to Kyrgyzstan. "He would just talk to you about life and how precious it was."
Changing Faiths
In a blue house on a quiet street in a suburb of Andijon, a phone rang.
It was 19-year-old Akram Yuldashev, calling from bustling Tashkent in the summer of 1982 to tell his parents he had received excellent marks on his entrance exam for one of the city's top universities, his older sister Kadyrova Kibriio recalled.
Their father, a local police official, and mother, a homemaker who wrote poetry, were pleased but not surprised, said Kibriio, now 48. In a family of math and chess whizzes, Yuldashev was considered the smartest.
But a few weeks after returning from the capital, the committed young communist learned that his slot at the university would be taken by a lower-scoring applicant who had paid a bribe, Kibriio said.
It would take two more tries before he was finally admitted in 1985 to an engineering program at a university in Andijon. But there again, he found a system where good grades were routinely bought instead of earned.
The experience dealt the final blow to his eroding faith in communism. "It's so unfair," his wife recalled him saying. "It's not the best system. It's insane."
As the Kremlin's grip on Central Asia began weakening in the late 1980s, so did the effect of decades-old social policies designed to suppress Islam in favor of secular devotion to the communist state. A growing number of citizens began looking to their Islamic roots for an alternative identity and political system.
Yuldashev fell in with a religious study group that clustered around a local man Yuldasheva remembers only as Abdurashid. He was suave and charming, and had a mastery of Arabic that deeply impressed her cerebral husband. Soon Yuldashev was praying five times a day and fasting for the holy month of Ramadan.
He began pestering Yuldasheva to cover her hair and quit her job as an assistant school principal to take care of their children. When she refused, he suggested a divorce. It was a tough decision. "I wasn't raised this way. It felt so strange to me at first," recalled Yuldasheva, a short woman with a round face and a genial smile.
Meanwhile, Yuldashev began to have doubts about Abdurashid, his wife said. His friend's initial focus on moral teachings had given way to a broad political goal: uniting the entire Muslim world under an Islamic state, or caliphate. Yuldashev rejected that idea, his wife said. "Under a caliphate, people would be forced to practice Islam," she explained. But she said her husband believes that "you cannot force people to accept God. They must come to it by themselves."
In 1988 he broke with Abdurashid, Yuldasheva said. According to her, Abdurashid went on to become a leading figure in Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami, an outlawed Islamic party estimated to have thousands of followers in Central Asia. Although the group has renounced violence, its radical aims have raised concerns among Western governments and Uzbek officials.
Spreading the Word
Abdusalam Karimov stumbled across "The Path to Faith" on his brother's shelf. It moved him to tears, recalled Karimov, then a 25-year-old construction laborer. "I felt like I was reading about something deep inside myself," he said. "Until then . . . I was always struggling with people. I didn't know about God and the Koran."
It was a common response to Yuldashev's new pamphlet during that summer of 1991.
Perhaps Yuldashev's most important admirer was a wealthy entrepreneur named Bakhrom Shakirov, who stopped by Yuldashev's house to thank him for straightening out a wayward son and ended up staying for hours.
One of Shakirov's sons, Hussan Shakirov, a 27-year-old architect, recalled the transformation in his father over the ensuing weeks. A "rough" man who slapped his employees if they made mistakes and preferred gambling to spending time with his family, Shakirov suddenly began speaking of trading his material wealth for "wealth in my soul," Hussan said.
Around 1993, Shakirov donated a large tract of land in Andijon so that others who were moved by Yuldashev's teachings could establish businesses there that would be run according to the principles laid out in the pamphlet.
As many as 10 enterprises eventually opened on Shakirov's land, Yuldasheva said, including a bakery, a hair salon, a cafeteria and a shoe factory. All the owners agreed to contribute a fifth of their profits to a charitable fund. Once a week Yuldashev held voluntary classes for them and their 100 to 200 employees.
It was, Yuldasheva said, one of the happiest periods of her husband's life.
It did not last long.
The Crackdown
Yuldashev walked into the house with a grim look on his face. "We have to burn all the pamphlets," Yuldasheva remembered him announcing.
The year was 1997, and he had just come from another meeting with security officials, who had been paying attention to him for the past two years, calling him in for questioning, telling him to stop his religious teaching. Each time, he complied, his wife said.
She dared not ask him what had happened in the latest encounter. Tears streaming down her face, Yuldasheva fetched the dozen or so copies they kept in the house while her husband prepared a fire in the clay bread oven in the yard. But she secretly put one aside.
Even after he burned his books, the harassment continued.
In 1998, a stranger picked a fight with Yuldashev in Andijon's market and insisted on settling it at the police station. There, officers found a small quantity of heroin that had been planted in Yuldashev's pockets, Yuldasheva said. He was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison but released in a general amnesty later that year.
In February 1999, he was re-arrested after a series of bombings rocked Tashkent. This time he was charged with terrorism for organizing the bombings. The trial lasted about an hour, Yuldasheva said, and the prosecution presented no evidence of his guilt.
Yuldashev was sentenced to 17 years. "Don't cry in front of these terrible people!" Yuldasheva remembered him shouting to her as they hauled him from the courtroom.
Other business leaders, including Shakirov and a son named Sharif, were sentenced to shorter terms around this time as well.
Yuldasheva claims she lost track of her husband's followers after his imprisonment, and his admirers at the refugee camp were wary of discussing their activities.
But Atamatov, the freed businessman who had started a bakery in 1997, said he and other businessmen maintained a loose version of the original network. "I put in a Ping-Pong table and showers" for his employees, he said, "and I provided them with uniforms. . . . I was trying to show them the beauty of life" in hopes of inspiring piety.
In the spring of last year, authorities arrested Atamatov, two more of Shakirov's sons and the rest of the 23 businessmen. They were awaiting a verdict when they were unexpectedly sprung from prison.
Now the refugees spend their days worrying about friends and family members who disappeared in the chaos of the government's crackdown.
Yuldasheva, at least, knows where her husband is: a top-security prison in Tashkent. But it has been years since she has received any word from him. "Please," she asked a correspondent, with a pained look, "if you hear any news at all about him, will you pass it on to me?"
