How to correctly analyze the democratic shortages in the former Muslim republics of the USSR?

The former Muslim republics of the USSR are a tough nut to crack for political science analyses of democratization processes. They do not rank high in any rankings of transparency of the political system, openess of public life, freedom of the media, etc. On the one hand, this is explained by the pervasive "clannishness" of local social structures, which is a duplication of the orientalizing clichés used in the Soviet era and a manifestation of the mixing of ethnographic and political science terminology. On the other hand, a conceptual grid taken vividly from the Western value system and social world is used, which is absolutely incompatible with the local reality. What is the fundamental mistake in this case? First of all, we should deeply bury Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu and Voltaire, along with their concepts, such as the notion of freedom growing out of the notion of duty and the entire Enlightenment individualist tradition forming the ideological foundation for the modern democratic states of the Western world. Consequently, we should abandon in our analyses of the socio-political systems of the "Muslim underbelly" of the former USSR such research assumptions as the autotelic character of human freedom, the priority of individual rights, the separation of the private and public spheres, or the determination of the conditions and methods of legitimizing power. Meanwhile – as you can see from reading ethnographic works – in the traditional cultures of Central Asia you will find none of the ideas that allow the (human) individual in Western culture to think of himself as being independent of the group, which according to Steven Lukes is the basis of individualism. The traditional cultures of Central Asia did not know the concept of "inner life", subjectivity, or the human self as the sphere of an individual's personal and spiritual life. This has consequences for the regulation of an individual's moral behavior: he is guided not by abstract religious norms, but by their interpretation presented by ancestral, tribal or community authorities who embody morality. Significantly, the Soviet persecution of Islam effectively eliminated from local social life any reformist and modernizing currents within Islam, which distinguishes the post-Soviet area from other Muslim countries. And the so-called "popular" Islam that survived the Soviet period as the dominant cultural form did not provide the intellectual tools to conceive of the individual as an individual entity, existing independently of the ancestral group. All this makes it impossible for post-Soviet Muslim societies to know democracy as a system based on individual political choices based on the conscious beliefs of the individual (though, of course, shaped by external factors).