The Survival of Central Asia's Religious Culture

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This past term, I was teaching a course on the politics of Russia and the other 14 successor states of the old Soviet Union, including the five Central Asian countries known collectively as the “stans.”

Independent since 1991, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have seen a revival of their Muslim cultures, which in the past were viciously suppressed by the Communist authorities in Moscow.

But forcibly trying to eradicate religion never works. That’s why one of our texts, written by historian Adeeb Khalid of Carleton College in Minnesota, is titled Islam After Communism, not Communism After Islam.

Islam arrived in Central Asia with Arab armies at the start of the eighth century and produced a number of renowned states and cities, including Bokhara, Tashkent and Samarkand. They were centres of learning and culture known throughout much of Asia and the Middle East.

Weakened by Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century, the Muslim entities were eventually conquered by the expanding tsarist Russian Empire.

In 1865, Russian troops occupied Tashkent, followed by the rapid subjugation of the rest of the khanate of Kokand, as well as the emirate of Bokhara and the khanate of Kiva.

Russia was now the paramount colonial power in central Asia. However, the peoples of the region were allowed to retain their faith.

Things changed following the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power. This new regime was far more intrusive and ideologically driven.

As atheists, the Communists viewed religion of any sort as an impediment to progress and modernization, and were determined to eradicate all forms of “backwardness” and “superstition.”

During the seven decades of Soviet rule in the Central Asian lands, all forms of Islamic expression came under sustained assault, and Islam was driven from the public realm.

Books written in Arabic were burned, and Muslims weren’t allowed to hold office. Religious tribunals and seminaries were closed, and conducting Muslim rituals became almost impossible.

In 1912, there were about 26,000 mosques in Central Asia. By 1941, there were just 1,000.

Meanwhile, new secular elites were fostered by the authorities.

The region was intentionally cut off from the rest of the Islamic world, including neighbouring states such as Iran and Afghanistan.

The Arabic scripts in use were eventually replaced by the Cyrillic alphabet. In an atheistic state that realized the power of symbols, such a potential rallying point for pan-Islamism could not be permitted to remain.

Under the harsh dictatorial regime of Joseph Stalin, the Muslim religious authorities, known as the ulema, were by the mid-1920s portrayed as the counter-revolutionary instruments of feudalism and bourgeois nationalism, standing in the way of building a new socialist society.

A particularly brutal attempt at challenging religion began in March 1927 in Uzbekistan, considered by the Soviets the most dangerously devout region of Turkestan. Known as the hujum, or assault, it involved the forcible unveiling of Muslim women.

Women were seen as a massive, but dormant, group of potential allies for the Communist Party that could be mobilized by propagating the party’s message of gender equality and liberation. It became the central priority for the Zhenotdel (The Party’s Women's Department).

However, the hujum was seen by many Muslims as an outside foreign force attacking their culture and so wearing that veil became an act of religious and political defiance.

Before it was called off two years later, women were assaulted, often raped, and even killed. The regime’s attack on Islam was unprecedented and the population’s continuity with the past was virtually decimated.

Today, Islam is back in public life in a way that would have been inconceivable in Soviet times, even though repression had become less severe after the 1960s and holidays could be celebrated publically.

Islamic observance is now widespread and Islamic knowledge has returned to the region. The religion also serves as a marker of national identity against the formerly dominant Russians.

For example, in the Hazrat Sultan Mosque (the largest in Central Asia) in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, detailed instructions on how to pray are written in Kazakh -- though not Russian -- for people still learning the religion.

That Islam survived even the murderous assaults by Stalin’s regime is a testament to its deep-seated strength among its adherents in Central Asia.