Islam after Communism

Independence has not meant the evaporation of these identities, nor of the elites that shaped them.

he Soviet period was one of enormous transformation in society and culture—transformation, moreover, in a mold that set Central Asia apart from much of the rest of the Muslim world. All forms of Islamic expression came under sustained assault in the Soviet period: patterns of the transmission of Islamic knowledge were damaged, if not destroyed; Islam was driven from the public realm; the physical markings of Islam, such as mosques and seminaries, disappeared. The Soviet period also saw the emergence of strong secular, ethnonational identities among Central Asians, as well as the creation of new political and cultural elites firmly committed to such identities.

For many, especially in the West, this return of Islam boded ill. According to this view, Central Asia would become another hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, a breeding ground of terrorism—essentially a natural extension of Afghanistan and other anti-Western regimes in the Middle East.

place our august genealogy on a throne in the divan [chancery] of words and to set the names of our glorious ancestors into the seal of history.”

Eltüzer Khan, the reigning khan of Khwarazm

If Islam or traditional culture or patriarchy or authoritarianism is strong today, it is strong because such is the region’s tradition. One is left to wonder, how strong can a tradition be to survive even the murderous assault of the Stalinist regime unscathed?

stead of a neat transition, in which the people and their rulers jettison their past, we have “postsocialist” forms of society and politics that are new in that they combine aspects of Soviet authoritarianism with those of the neoliberal order into which they have emerged

Seven decades of Soviet rule had given Central Asians a unique understanding of Islam and of being Muslim. Islam after Communism had its peculiarities.