What do we make of a president who renamed some months of the year after himself, built an enormous revolving statue of himself, held an international symposium on melons — although his country is largely desert — and who is now demanding that words from his book be inscribed next to verses of the Qur’an on a mosque? What, in short, do we make of Mr. Saparmyrat Atayevich Niyazov, president of Turkmenistan, who, as president for life, sits atop of a considerable amount of oil and the fifth largest reserves of natural gas in the world?  
  
In the competition for bizarre despots, Mr. Niyazov rivals Kim Jong-il, and in his most recent display of unchecked authority, he has decreed that the walls of a mosque currently under construction in the capital Ashgabat be inscribed not only with verses from the Qur’an but also with his own words of wisdom that he recorded in the Ruhnama (translated as The Book of the Soul), which was published in 2001 and is already required reading in schools in Turkmenistan. Even without Mr. Niyazov’s self-aggrandizing architectural flourishes, the mosque in Ashgabat will likely be a decadent affair — it may become the largest mosque in Asia, with a capacity for 10,000 faithful and a dome that staggers 50 meters tall, which has already been installed by helicopter.

Turkmenistan is tucked in the Central Asian region between Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The BBC reported in March of 2003 that the Central Asia division’s director of the International Crisis Group, Robert Templer, warned that Turkmenistan could “become the next Afghanistan — and it certainly could become a danger to the rest of the world.”

The government has an absolute stranglehold on all of the media in Turkmenistan. According to the International Freedom of Expression exchange forum, Turkmenistan can only boast of having “one of the worst media climates in the world.”

Determined to quash any independent religious voice, in addition to stifling all independent, secular outlets for discourse, in March of 2004, the Turkmen authorities imprisoned the chief Mufti, Nasrullah Ibn Ibadullah, who had been heading the board of Islamic scholars who lead the religious affairs of Turkmenistan. Nasrullah Ibn Ibadullah has been sentenced to over 20 years in prison, and yet the BBC reports that the Mufti’s crime and reason for arrest are still unclear.

When the leader of a government that is ostensibly not a theocracy begins to consolidate secular and religious authority in a curious but unquestionable move towards a contemporary, bizarre, and Islamic version of Ceasaropapism, all of those who advocate a coherent civil society should cast a wary gaze on Mr. Niyazov and his unchecked power in Turkmenistan.  

Mimi Hanaoka