Leadership Quote by Nursultan Nazarbayev

A politician’s most revealing move is often linguistic triage: separate the crisis from the identity it threatens to contaminate. Nazarbayev’s line does that with blunt, almost bureaucratic certainty. “Whatever slogans they use” concedes a modern reality of terrorism: it is brand-savvy, fluent in religious language, and eager to launder violence through piety. By swatting slogans aside as mere packaging, he tries to deny extremists their most valuable asset - the claim to authentic Islam.

The intent is stabilization. In a multiethnic, Muslim-majority state like Kazakhstan that has long balanced post-Soviet secular governance with public religiosity, framing terrorism as external to Islam is a domestic safety measure: it protects ordinary believers from collective suspicion, and it protects the state from religious polarization. It also shores up legitimacy. If terror is “nothing in common with Islam,” then the government can position itself as the reasonable guardian of both security and faith, while casting radicals as impostors rather than dissidents with a constituency.

The subtext is also geopolitical. Post-9/11, Muslim leaders faced a brutal communications problem: condemn violence loudly enough for international partners, but avoid adopting a narrative that equates Islam with threat. Nazarbayev’s formulation is calibrated for both audiences. It rejects the extremist self-description, and it challenges the lazy shortcut many outsiders take when they hear Arabic slogans and assume theological causation. The line is less theology than strategy: a boundary drawn to keep a nation from being defined by its worst appropriators.