Islamic Theology: In Etsy Form

I'll be updating this blog and Scribd with all of the papers I've written in the past semester. None of them are particularly well-written, but there is enough good information out there that I feel ought to be shared.

One of the courses I took was Islamic Theology. It was lots and lots of things I did not know. Now it is just lots of things I am unsure if I know or not. I'll be posting about the paper I wrote later on. It was on Islamic Liberation Theology. There's lots of cool stuff there.

I also made a chart of the first few centuries of Islamic Theology. I did not have the time or patience to make one as an Illustrator or Prezi file, so instead I did it the old fashioned way. This means the sole copy of it is already turned in to the professor. But at least there's pictures!

Overview

Proto-Shi'i

Mu'tazali

So, you know, there's that.

Law School, White Privilege, and 21st Century Taxonomy

What follows is a moderately-edited version of a short essay I wrote for a Critical Jurisprudence class. One of these days I'm gonna write a 4,000 word essay on what it is to be hairy and American, aiming to Take Back the Swart. Until then, here's this.      

      A legal education is a factory of privilege. In the same way an English commoner could turn unwieldy gains into a baronetcy or lordship in the 18^th Century, Americans today can choose to give large sums of money to a school in exchange for a title. Imperialism of any sort requires a cocky bureaucracy. Hopefully a job as well, but the past few years have given promise to an excuse to hold one's head high, not an expansive house full of down pillows on which to rest it. The legal education system exists not just to train us but to transform us, to form a corporate bureaucracy of middle-aged white men, in thought if not in features. As the son of a lawyer who has met many a leery and leering firm partner, I thought I would be prepared. I was not.

            Intersession is home to the most overt of the indoctrination. Not home of classes per se, but rather home to auditorium talks on topics such as “Professionalism in the Law” and “Ethics in Daily Life.” Prim and overeager guides explain to the moon-faced masses on how to pass. One must drink. One must talk sports or shopping, depending on target's gender. I recall my relief at avoiding and shame in recognizing a woman's tightrope between slut-shaming and enforced enthusiastic attractiveness. The rules of the game are long and arcane, but I'd have been much better at remembering them if I knew my identity within the system. I'll admit that unfortunately, I knew no such thing.

            I realized not long after the category was reified in the fall of 2001 that I fell into the raggedly-determined class of Swarthy-American. With olive skin and a nose like a scimitar (even our hypocatastases get shipped out to the Far East), a stranger would seem to need to engage in conversation to get to know me. The polite Tennessean wanted to make sure that didn't have to happen.

            “Keep your hair short, and make sure you never have a beard.” Okay, this is easy enough. “Do you drink?” Well, from time to time... “Then great! Keep a beer in your hand. Wouldn't want people to jump to conclusions!” Wait, who wouldn't? What people? Which conclusions? The kicker, however, was the clincher. “Never do anything in front of a client you wouldn't do at an airport.” Ah, so I figured it out. I must assuage their guilt of association while letting them brag about meeting an Exotic.

            Was this a bad time to mention that I avoid ties, as they are symbols of Western Masculine Imperialism? Of course it was, but at least I got to leave the conversation with my head up high, observing the letter of the first law while violating all of its assumed prescriptions. I was late to the realization, much to my eventual depression, that I wasn't being interviewed for what made me unique. I was being taxonomized, with the passive tense construction very much emphasized. The interviewing process was not to learn about my taste in music or self-styled skill in the kitchen, it was done to pin me on the wall as Juris swarthica, to prove my worth on the right collector's tableau and to emphasize my harmlessness in the tap room as opposed to my prowess in the courtroom.

            Ian Haney Lopez is a professor of race and constitutional law at Boalt Hall. Haney Lopez wrote “The Social Construction of Race” in 1994, before the political creation of the Swarthy-American. Back then, my grandmother said I looked Mexican instead of making the airport security jokes she would a decade later. Haney Lopez would certainly enjoy the further vivisection of race that the new century has given us. Lebanese Christians are welcome into the fold and can become mayors of major midwestern metropolises without a thought. Lebanese Shi'a will receive more references to Khomeini and Nasrallah in their profiles than Daley or Giuliani, politics be damned. In re: Halladjian, from 1909, is telling. It’s the story of Armenians trying to circumvent the United States’ race-based immigration quotas of the early 20^th century by asserting that they are white and European, not swarthy and Asiatic. They succeeded. Hailing from the Caucasus, which we now know to most emphatically not be the homeland of the white race, they would seem to be a shoo-in case in 1909. Would they be the same in 2014? Many will tell you the difference between an Armenian or an Iranian, a Georgian or a Turk, an Azeri or a Kurd isn't biological but theological. If those immigrants had the wrong God, would they have the right race?

            The taxonomy I experienced was at the heart of the practice of scientific racism that gave a veil of approbation to last century's imperialism. Haney Lopez' historical discussion of the formation and perception of a Mexican race is telling; they were only formed negatively and construed in relation to their peers in subservience. La Raza Cosmica only came later. His social construction theory still relies on an extrinsic force, a need for sorting through a rainbow of rank-and-file to allow the lily-white cream to rise to the top. Haney Lopez would probably be curious to hear a good friend of mine who works at a church nearby. She looks eerily like me but has never, for whatever reason, been subject to this century's imperialism and its racial profiling. In a similar setting to mine, would she be told to show some arm and to live her life hat-free? Or would the very act of earning her bread at a house of Jesus act as a get-out-of-Guantanamo card? She admittedly has a better smile than I. Is my scowl a shot across the majoritarian bow?

            The very fact that I must ask these questions, that I am discomfited by the orders given to me in school show the cracks in the square-peg system. Haney Lopez’s article discusses the failures of a race-based system in dealing with shades of grey. He talks of passing, of the ability to go between races via a Clark Kent phonebooth. He hints of the shame that this brings, of the moment one realizes that the true self is not going to get the job.  The New York that Haney Lopez grew up in is not the city it is today. He would likely cackle with glee if he of Dosa Hunt. If he knew that a South Asian Musician-led tour of the city's South Asian food would include a Mexican collaborator solely because Alan Palomo's band is named Neon Indian. I would like to tell Haney Lopez that within the Swarthy community, we light the racial barriers on fire. He would likely reply that unfortunately, we are still kept in the barn made for us by the folks like the aforementioned Tennessean, who haven't yet decided if they can trust us.

            Peggy McIntosh’s famous “White Privilege and Male Privilege” explicitly describes what is received by the individuals fortunate enough to be beyond race and past gender. The article is in many ways a laundry list of what we students hope to earn by completing JD coursework. McIntosh might say that the intersession classes were not there to only tell us what to do and say for promotion and acceptance, but also in order for us to ascend to our roles as Privileged White People with grace and aplomb. We may not be the Landed Class of centuries before, but we aspire to act like them, to be the Privileged Class of today.

            Admittedly, I have no need of ascension, I came here from the suburban land, where I played lacrosse and rowed crew. From my perspective, McIntosh's article is a clarification of my feelings of shame and hints on how I could use these feelings for an appropriate cause. It is more interesting to use McIntosh's article to study the Tennessean's perspective.

            The taxonomist saw me and saw a stubbly-faced man in an ill-fitting jacket. She believed that when she was telling me to act White, she was doing me a favor.  She wanted to aid me in dressing for success, for the job I want to have, and all the such and sundry delimitations of action. The Tennessean, McIntosh could say, was giving me a glimpse through the keyhole of the Secret Garden that lay ahead of me if I could keep up the act. Maybe she had read some pop literature, she may have intoned that perhaps Rhonda Byrne's true Secret is that if I act white, people will treat me as if I am white and I will be able to accrue privilege. It is a privilege, not a right, to avoid security hassles, to not be asked where I'm really from. And if I act like I “deserve” whiteness, McIntosh would say, then I might just “earn” it. All of these scare quotes are sadly necessary.

            While reading her article, I took my usual frenetic and navel-gazing notes. These included my name in four different scripts, part of my frantic investigation on what is appropriate for me. Haney Lopez says that it doesn't matter which, that it is all up to chance anyways. McIntosh might agree, but she'd emphasize how much it darn matters to everyone who looks at me. It’s hardly a rough-and-tumble world out there for a young man with a law degree. I will not make any pretensions towards the contrary. The bottom has dropped out of the markets of legal employ, however, and we are all careening towards the abyss. The only ones who disagree with this are our Career Services offices. As we tumble down, our White Privileges can do as much to save us as our class rank or legal aptitude. Today we have to choose between resignation to the Empire or a prison of debt. A beard and open collar is the garb of only the most honorable of fools.

The Fethullahci (Gulen) Movement and Moral Panic

Back-to-back articles on the impending scariness of the Gulen Movement. It'd almost be enough to make you think it's a trend if the stories were keyed by a common event. The only real shared storyline, however, is white women discovering with trepiduous fear that such a thing exists. Sharon Higgins remarks on Gulen schools in the United States, Margaret Speigelbaum on the same in Istanbul, Turkey. Neither have anything new to say, and neither have anything to share besides dog-whistle Islamophobia.

I'll be the first to admit I'm an utterly disinterested party. I don't have much to say about any education debate, in the US or in Turkey. It's not that I don't care, it's that I don't have any background knowledge and can't say much more than my gut opinion. So I won't.

I do know about about the Fethullahcilar. I never heard the Americanized name until a contact at the US State Department came up to me and gushed, "Ooooh! Tell me about the Gulenists!" I said the same thing to that person as I'd say right now; they're basically Jesuits in Muslim form. They've been very good at getting very good education to historically underserved areas. There's lots of them, and in any group numbering in the thousands, there will be some dummies involved. This all deserves a shrug and a blog post.

But why are they so much fun to pick on? Because they're connected with the two things the whitefolk who write for the Beast and the Post are afraid of most: Class and Islam.

Starting with class, quick history: Turkey's been ruled by the White Turks since 1923, there's never been any debate about that. The military elite, the people at the Right Schools in Istanbul and Ankara, those are the ones that do the necessary deeds. The millions of others should be left to their goat-killing and I dunno, whatever else they do.

In 1980, Turgut Ozal changed all of that. I've written about this before:

One of [Erdogan's] better political masterstrokes was taking on the suit of American-based neoliberalism. Taking Ozal’s Kucuk Amerika one step further, he promoted business and worked closely with chambers of commerce, particularly in the “Anatolian Tiger” cities east of Izmir and Istanbul. These cities, not so coincidentally, were full of more religiously conservative folks in their business communities and were not controlled by the traditionally secular monopolies. AKP created a new Nouveau Riche class distinct from the White Turks and used them to move their agenda forward, culminating in their political takeover in 2002.

Erdogan turned the class system of Turkey on its head. I compared him to Michael Jordan in that, but perhaps a similar argument could be made for a Toussaint L'Ouverture comparison. His partnership with Gulen came from this; AKP needed technical bureaucrats and Gulen was happy to fund their educations.

The conspiracy theories, the journalist-mugging, and much of the theatrics of the past couple of years have been a bit rich. But what Erdogan imagined and Gulen bankrolled was nothing short of class warfare.

It's been successful, and from a certain perspective, dangit, those hilljacks Gulen educated haven't gotten around to thinking like White Turks. This is where the Islam comes to play and the Moral Panic sets in.

If Speigelman writes her piece from a Jesuit school, it's laughed away at everything but the fringest of fringey internets. If I heard "Nonetheless, my oldest classes (fourth grade) invariably were dominated by loud, aggressive boys, while girls rarely spoke up. I was discouraged by how often teachers had to shout to be heard, and by the way quieter students (mostly girls) were generally left out" from a Teach for America friend of mine, I would not compare it to Iran. I would compare it to my fourth grade. Gender roles and their general fucked-up-itiness are no stranger to any of our lives.

If you genuinely believe that Islam is the reason behind lackadaisical education, lack of rights for women, and every single social ill you can imagine then congrats! You're racist slim and you should probably x-out of this page and go google Pamela Geller. Hang out with her. You'll like it more over there.

If you think that development is tough, that countries don't turn on dimes and that things are certainly better for Turks and for Turkey then they were ten, twenty, thirty years ago, then you have to wonder why we're getting so upset over education. Are the Fethullahcilar perfect? Of course not. I don't think any individual in the movement would call themselves that.

The Movement, like any movement, wants more power. I haven't yet read Sik's or Sener's books and I'm not going to comment on them because of that. You will not find a more stringent believer in press freedom, in political checks-and-balances, then me. But placing the Movement at the center of conspiracy because of some ugly stuff isn't reportage, its Dan Brown conspiracy, and it doesn't belong.

The stubbly hordes of Islam are not knocking down the doors of America, acting in concert. They aren't even knocking down the doors of Turkey, they're merely standing up where they sat down ten years ago. It's heart-breaking to see people using the sort of Class Talk and God Talk that would be mocked in America to cast aspersions on something they're afraid of. Any discourse that sounds closer to Jim Crow senators then to factual reporting should be treated as such, even if we're just talking about a new demographic to feel strong emotions towards. Don't bark up to the Daily Beast or Washington Post. Don't express concern about baroque machinations of state. Think, "dang, did I really just get angry at these people for being uppity?"

And don't say "Gulenist." It's like a password for "US Foreign Service Officer or cross-eyed fear mongerer" and odds are you ain't the former.

On Turkish Soccer (or: Being a Treatise on the Footballing Sport in the Far Realms of the Mother Continent)

Run of Play has a new look and a new home on the internet. It still has Brian Phillips and the rest of the aesthete crew, though. They were kind enough to allow me to write an awful lot about soccer in Turkey, and if this seems like something you're in to, you can have your way with it.

Football was bestowed here, as it was in so many other places around the world, by bored Britishers. In 1904, the Istanbul Sunday League was formed between four teams, unsurprisingly named after an English ship, the dockyard neighborhood, the expatriate neighborhood, and a Greek mythological being, respectively. By the 1910’s the familiars Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe would take up trading the championship in their intercontinental derby, save for a two-year period where the wonderfully named Altinordu Idman Yurdu — literally “The Golden Horde’s House of Exercise” — would take the crown. They par would be joined by Beşiktaş in the 1930s and thus, the Turkish league was born.

They didn't hyperlink everything I would've wanted hyperlinked, but there's a decent enough start to get you well on your way to "alt" cred as the guy on your street who knows a lot about the sixth, maybe seventh best league in Europe.

Legalistic Aspirations and Realities in Kyrgyzstan

I'm going to use this blog in conjunction with Scribd to start posting some of my work. It allows you open access to valuable (or at least interesting (or at least legible)) information and it allows me some critique on my writing and presenting.

The first will be a paper I wrote last semester on Kyrgyzstan's new constitution. The constitution, I argue, is deliberately out of touch with some realities of life in Kyrgyzstan as it is written for a double audience; the international community and local elites. It leans heavily on Weapons of the Wealthy, Registan.net, Eurasianet and I'm sure others. Let me know what you think, or use it to further your own research.

An excerpt:

During the drafting process, Nurlan Sadykov stated that in the new Constitution, “[t]he prime minister will be accountable to the parliament and the parliament will be accountable to the electorate, the people.” This paper will demonstrate how the aspirational Constitution of Kyrgyzstan is not quite able to answer Sadykov‟s proposition. The paper begins by looking at the construction of civil society in order to display the vibrancy of non-governmental life in the country. Then, this paper will briefly survey the elite class of Kyrgyzstan, demonstrating that the same actors in power at the fall of the USSR are still in power today through an explicit combination of cooperative measures and exclusionary tactics. Finally, this paper will look at governmental accountability in two parts, as posited in Sadykov‟s above quote. First, it will examine the legal and illegal means through which parliament keeps a check on the head of state. Second, it will examine the relationship between parliament (called “Jogorku Kenesh” in Kyrgyz, a term that will be used interchangeably with “Parliament” in this paper) and the Kyrgyzstani people, showing how repression interplays with binding ties to create something well short of pure accountability.
Simply put, the legal norms in Kyrgyzstan are not quite level with its Constitution. By exhibiting the difference between civil society‟s and the elite players‟ methods of self governance, this paper will demonstrate the carrying conceptions and selective enforcement of rule of law. By testing intra-governmental and intra-state accountability, this paper hopes to show that though the underpinnings of a parliamentary democracy exist, the finished product is not quite where it purports to be. The Constitution is used throughout the paper to reflect and diverge from the range of anthropological, sociological, journalistic, and analytical accounts collated to construct an image of Kyrgyzstani life. By comparing Constitutional articles to the Kyrgyzstani reality, the gap between the two can be more accurately defined.


Another link.

Internetting While Muslim: The Jamshid Muhtorov Case is Unsurprisingly Weak.

Joshua Kucera over at the Bug Pit cited me, Registan, and Central Asia analyst extraordinaire Eric McGlinchy in a somewhat incredulous look at Jamshid Muhtorov's arrest and any possible links to Karimov, NDN, and what have you. He seems to agree with me for the most part; it's very difficult to prove or disprove a link, but it's something interesting to postulate and keep an eye on.

It seems that  Catherine Fitzpatrick disagrees, though, with one post with a title replete with exclamation marks and then another which very helpfully includes .pdf copies of the criminal complaint and indictment for "Material Support of a Designated Terrorist Organization and Attempt to do the Same." I appreciate the legwork because hey, this is just a blogspot blog and I hold myself to no journalistic standards of doing research. I'm just typing stuff before going on a Saturday run. I would wish she spelled the blog name right, though. I think our main cleavage is that I approach this from a legal background whereas she's approaching it from a regional writer perspective. I'm going to naturally lean towards my current state's motto and say "Show Me." And the complaint definitely doesn't.

The prosecution has some perfectly acceptable yet kind of skeevy tactics, like calling Muhtorov "Abumumin Turkistony" to make him sound more Muzzleem. The complaint is made up wholly of an FBI agent's statement that is literally exactly what you'd expect some FBI bro who couldn't find Uzbekistan on a map if you spotted him the Caspian. The background is mostly cribbed from the NCTC (ah, law, where you have to cite for journals but not for criminal matters) and talks about all the terrible things that the IJU has done. Well, at least both of them. Well, at least one attempted attack by two German guys and one attack that the only one who says they did it is the Government of Uzbekistan, which wanted counter-terrorism goodies from the US. But that's a different blog post.

There is some more smelly stuff in graf 9: A) Turkey seized weapons of IJU operatives in Turkey, B) The group claimed responsibility for attacks, and C) LINKS TO AL-QAEDA OMG BIN LADEN BIN LADEN PAGEVIEWS

At least the IJU has a website. And Muhtorov was a big fan of this website, Sodiqlar. He made internet friends with the webmaster, and talked about politics with other friends. There is also a claim of Bay'ah by Muhtorov. Bay'ah is a weird word used often to align with Sufi orders and others. Much like how a wed couple says "death do we part," Muhtorov said "any task, even with the risk of dying." But ok.

Then more talk, some arguments between Muhtorov and his wife, and my personal favorites: the presupposition of IJU used in a passive voice throughout the complaint. Muhtorov books a flight to Turkey, says goodbye to his family, and gets into an internet slapfight over some people, using real internet-dude words like "we have the best antivirus, the Koran" which is like the nerdiest thing I've ever heard. I suppose the whole graf 27 is the crux, that Muhtorov was going to go out and kill these two commentors on Sodiqlar because they disagreed about some things. The rest of the complaint is why they need warrants to go through the rest of Muhtorov's files.

So I perhaps should add full disclosure at this point: I'm an internet nerd myself, I spend way too much time on a Cincinnati Reds blog. I've said awful things about players, coaches, and other commentors on the blog. I've shared e-mails with friends I've made on the blog written entirely in inside jokes that sound weird/awful out of context.

Look, maybe Muhtorov was really going to fly to Istanbul and kill a couple guys for disagreeing on matters of Istihan. Maybe he was going there for a wedding. Maybe he was going to be in a medrese. Maybe he fell in love with a woman online and was leaving his family. There are thousands of Uzbeks living in Turkey; as workers, as refugees, whatever. The Emniyet in Istanbul is always full of them. Whatever it is, it's not outlined in the complaint. The criminal complaint is being used as leverage to go through the rest of his internet life in hopes of finding something that actually looks like support of a terrorist organization.

If there was actually good grounds, well, remember that graf 9 about Turkey being involved in investigating IJU? If he was going to Turkey to be involved with the IJU, you can bet that MIT would've been involved in it. Instead, this is the equivalent of frisking a dude in a black neighborhood and hoping that you find a pipe.

I'm hardly going to use this as a pedestal to complain about internet security. But I made an offhand joke earlier this week about "Internetting while Muslim being the new Driving While Black" and I think it absolutely holds.

What I'm most curious about is how Muhtorov was singled out. I honestly don't think there's anything as sinister as the Uzbek Foreign Minister saying to Ms. Clinton, "You want to use our country for a highway? Here's a list of people you have to arrest." What I do think is that "closer security ties" are a requirement for anything the US does nowadays, and that Uzbekistan gave a list of people in the US they were interested in. Muhtorov was on this list, and his internet persona got him a lot more interest than he may have expected.

A little bit of skepticism goes a long way when dealing with the Uzbek government's list of baddies. The IJU as a paper tiger is not a new or novel thought. Ambassador Murray has called them a hoax (whatever you think of Amb. Murray) and Joshua Foust was writing about them back in 2009, saying:

...when you take into account the Uzbek’s history of inventing phantom Islamic resistance movements to justify its police state, the lack of sources actually discussing the group (the sources in that Jihadica post and paper are all secondary and tertiary, and even reposted Wikipedia entries, except for the one website which isn’t even written in Uzbek), and everyone’s inability to name a single member aside from that one guy in the videos who wasn’t around in 2002 when the group was invented… well, it just doesn’t add up.

 The entire experience reminds me of XKCD's citogenesis. There are fake facts repeated until they're true. This, combined with the spectre of al-Qaeda, really conceptually awful insinuations about Islam, and a few snippets of conversation with friends and family are the backbone of this case.

Even if they eventually find something, like maybe a bomb-making .doc on his computer that will get him arrested, isn't an absolution of the conduct here. The procedurally-correct and jurisprudentially-awful judicial system, spoken to at length by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker allows for these sorts of abuses. That is a different story, and besides, I won't write it better than Mr. Gopnik.

There's no actual proof anywhere yet, just the same few aspersions cast over and over. I would just be casting aspersions of my own over the US Government if I was to claim that the arrest of Muhtorov is quid-pro-quo for the opening of the NDN, I admit. But at this point, that's all the case deserves, a black mark and lots of tut-tutting.

Was the Uzbek Opposition Sold Out for the NDN? Jamshid Muhtorov as a Case Study

Approximately two months ago, the United States chose to re-engage with Uzbekistan after Pakistan decided to shut down US military transit into Afghanistan. There was lots of teeth-gnashing about this; how to/if it was fair to equivocate "engagement" with "legitimizing"and whether not engaging was actually an effective strategy. My take was that emphasizing the NDN through Uzbekistan would 1) increase costs and create massive opportunities for corruption and 2) make US interests in Uzbekistan (human rights, increased openness, etc.) subservient to US interests in Afghanistan.

I'm going to focus on #2 here. My worry was - and still is - that Uzbekistan is a tricky enough country as it is. The US won't ever be all do-rah regime change about it and likely shouldn't be. But to view the country as a highway that requires protection is the mother of conflation. The new interest (NDN) is now the first and foremost interest, and protecting it and Afghanistan are more important than understanding what avenues forward exist in Uzbekistan. It gives an excuse to not care about Uzbekistan other than as a way to get out of Afghanistan successfully.

"Assessing the human rights situation in Uzbekistan is a tricky business." Joshua Foust writes,  "No one argues with the very basic fact that the Karimov regime is one of the most horrific rights abusers on the planet." Now I'm not sure what the US would do without the NDN, but ever since the new rapprochement there has certainly been no formal complaints about human rights issues, even when real and/or fake people were being punished for Facebook activism. But this week it's gotten far worse.

Three Germans (or people who temporarily lived in Germany, it's all a bit unclear) have been charged with being members of terrorism groups. Two for IMU, one for IJU. That's weird, but hey, people become terrorists, it happens.

Weirder still is the story of Jamshid Muhtorov. Immediately after the story of "man arrested for hanging out on the wrong side of the internet," Sarah Kendzior noted that a man of the same name was a refugee from Uzbekistan for his work as a human rights activist. Her and many others are questioning the FBI's assertions here, and for full disclosure, I'm one of them.

The further reading one does, the more it seems like Muhtorov was arrested for having a beard and an internet connection. The subtitle for the local story is ""Jamshid Muhtorov Grew Beard, Stopped Wearing Western Clothes"and quotes a federal complaint (a legal document purporting evidence required to arrest) saying "'wedding' is code for terrorist event or attack." Muhtorov was on his way to Turkey.

Let it be known that there are far more Uzbeks in Turkey (some of which happen to get married) then terrorists in Turkey. If there was strong enough evidence to arrest Muhtorov in the US, I am very surprised that the US didn't want to follow him up the string to see who he met with in Turkey. The MIT after all is probably very interested in pursuing nasty folk in its territory, as they were victim to al-Qaeda bombings more recently than the US has been. It's more likely that the evidence wasn't strong enough to get Turkey to act or to give more names to pursue, so they just kept him in the US.

The FBI is claiming that Muhtorov gave material support to the Islamic Jihad Union mentioned above, but there's a slight problem. The IJU may not exist. I've written about them before, how the Uzbek government initially blamed them for the Andijon massacre before word got out that this is a terrible thing to say. My nutshell version is:

So all in all, we still don't know what the IJU is about after looking into assertions on what the IJU is about. It's certainly possible that they want to turn the entire Dar al-Islam into a caliphate capitaled at Samarkand. It's also entirely possible that they only exist in the failed state between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that any pan-Turanian branding is just that, branding. 

Everything in the entire Muhtorov story is ill-defined, and instead of pursuing the man to give shape to it and to see just precisely what sort of crimes we're talking about, we're just going to arrest a man for internet perusal and un-American fashion activities.

Muhtorov is certainly the prime - and most widely-covered - example. But since ratcheting ties with Uzbekistan, the US government has arrested one and put the hit out on three others for being anti-Karimov. This is not enough to make a pattern, I admit. But it is absolutely frightening to think that as part of the NDN bargain , the US has decided to begin rolling up on anti-Karimov individuals.

Who is Muhtorov likely to know? Other dissident Uzbeks, to be sure. Any implication by him suddenly cracks into the entire Uzbek opposition in exile and links them to a terrorist group. Any communication, exchange of money, or organization with Muhtorov will be considered liaising with a terrorist in the eyes of the United States if Muhtorov is found guilty. These arrests are worth being followed skeptically. The US counter-terrorism establishment could be given carte-blanche to destroy or at least de-legitamize an opposition movement against a man and an apparatus that "...is one of the most horrific rights abusers on the planet."

It's not there yet but it's worth keeping an eye on. And it's a hell of a bargain for the rights to use a highway.