Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics In Central Asia (original) (raw)
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Shaping an Islamic Identity: Religion, Islamism, and the State in Central Asia
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Slavic Review, 2018
Eren Tasar wants to upend our understanding of Islam in postwar Soviet Central Asia. Soviet policies toward Islam, he suggests in this book, were marked not by hostility and a will to eradicate it, but by "flexibility and accommodation" (3) and "freewheeling moderation" (10). It was the great moderate Iosif Stalin who, during the Second World War, "forever turned away from the anti-religious repression of earlier decades" (46). After that, Tasar finds "no evidence that Stalin or his immediate successors (Khrushchev excepted) cared about the anti-religious struggle" (84), and even Khrushchev's antireligious campaign of 1959-64 failed to alter realities on the ground. Stalin's policy shift "normalized" relations between the state and religion. "Pressure on religion all but disappeared" (142), Tasar asserts, and Islam became "a ubiquitous feature of social life, not an underground phenomenon" (312). The centerpiece of this arrangement was the Spiritual Administration for the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM), founded in 1943 and charged with managing permitted religious activity. It was answerable to the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC), a ministerial organization. CARC emerged as the moderate face of Soviet power. Its officials worked hard to ensure that local governments and party organizations respected the legal rights of religious communities and proved to be SADUM's biggest defenders. They also looked away from the persistence of religious activity that took place beyond the officially-sanctioned spaces. Numerous mosques continued to operate without registration and shrine visitation remained a prominent feature of rural life. Meanwhile, SADUM created a centralized structure of religious authority that, over the course of the 1950s, brought most functioning mosques, including many unregistered ones, under its control. There was a recognized space for Islam in Soviet life, and Central Asians could be Soviet and Muslim at the same time. The notion that Sovietness and Islam coexisted happily in the later Soviet period is not new. Others, including myself, have made this point, arguing that "Islam" itself was reshaped in many ways in Soviet conditions, with the observance of ritual taking second place to customs and traditions that came to valorized as the essence of "Muslimness" and firmly tied to new discourses of nationhood. Tasar does not cite this literature, for he wants to make a blunter argument. It was not just a confessional Muslim identity that survived, but also religious practice and the authority of religious elites. Central Asians remained pious, practicing Muslims through the thick and thin of the Soviet period. Under the guardianship of the ulama (classically trained scholars), SADUM became a key institution in Soviet life. It not only "stood at the center of major social change" (145) in Central Asia, but its leaders "functioned as senior Soviet statesmen on the international stage in all but name" (242), key figures in Soviet diplomacy with Muslim countries from the era of decolonization to the end of the Soviet regime.
Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam, Nation-State and (Post)Socialism (2009)
Europe-asia Studies, 2009
"This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different roles across the region since 1991. For the secular authorities, Islam may be valued as a source of nation building or it may be feared as a potentially destabilising force. The resulting attempts to co-opt, channel and control religious expression provide insights into the nature of secular power and raise questions concerning the applicability to this region of influential theories in the sociology of religion.
Islam and Politics in late Socialism in Central Asia
There have been considerable publications examining how the philosophy of religion, and Islam in particular, has developed in connection to political trajectories in the twentieth century and how we, as scholars, understand the dynamics of modern and contemporary religious politics. Following the post-modernist revision of construction of social knowledge, many authors reflected upon our usage of concepts of politics and religion. This article does not pursue a comprehensive review of this literature, but rather positions the existing debate on Islam in Soviet Central Asia within the broader discussion and approbates certain hypotheses on the available historical data. The vision of the interconnectivity in colonial and post-colonial history 1 and the nuanced approach of histoire croisée 2 yet exist in ambivalent form in the field of Central Asian studies. This article aims to contribute to the development of studies on Islam in relation to late socialism by applying certain methodology offered by the above-mentioned scholarly concepts.