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Once, waiting in line at a cafeteria in Tashkent in 1991, in the last months of the Soviet era, I fell into a conversation with two men behind me. They were pleased to meet anyone from the outside world, to which access had been so difficult until then, but they were especially delighted by the fact that their in- terlocutor was Muslim. My turn eventually came, and I sat down in a corner to eat. A few minutes later, my new acquaintances joined me unbidden at my table, armed with a bottle of vodka, and proceeded to propose a toast to meet- ing a fellow Muslim from abroad. Their delight at meeting me was sincere, and they were completely un-self-conscious of the oddity of lubricating the cel- ebration of our acquaintance with copious quantities of alcohol.

This episode, unthinkable in the Muslim countries just a few hundred kilo- meters to the south, provides a very powerful insight into the place of Islam in Central Asian societies at the end of the Soviet period. What did it mean to be a Muslim after seventy years of Soviet rule? How have things changed in the decade of independence? The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and since then, Central Asia, like the rest of the former Soviet Union, has seen a consid- erable religious revival. Islam has become more visible in Central Asia, and in- deed, this visibility has given rise to alarmist visions of rampant fundamental- ism threatening the existing secular regimes. Nevertheless, the seemingly paradoxical combination of pride in being Muslim (and curiosity about the broader Muslim world) with scant disregard for the strictures of Islam as a re- ligion remains.

This chapter seeks to resolve this paradox. I will argue that the explanation of this paradox lies in the social, cultural, and political transformation of Cen- tral Asia during the seven decades of Soviet rule. During this period, the Mus- lim societies of Central Asia experienced sustained attempts by the Soviet state at secularization and the inculcation of ethno-national identities. As a result of

these policies, new meanings of Islam and of being Muslim emerged in Cen- tral Asia: Islam became a facet of national identity even as Islamic norms of be- havior lost their authority over the public realm. This represents a new chapter in the very long history of Islam’s presence in Central Asia. It also provides a v e ry important contrast to other traditionally Muslim societies, where Islam in- teracts with nationalism and modernity in different ways.

Islamization of Central Asia

Central Asia has long been an integral part of the Muslim world. Arab armies conquered the cities of Transoxiana in the early eighth century, turning the re- gion into the frontier of the Muslim world. Over the next two centuries, the urban population, mostly speakers of Persian, converted to Islam, and the cities very soon became connected to networks of Muslim culture and of Is- lamic learning. Indeed, some of the most important figures in Islamic civiliza- tion originated from Transoxiana. After the Qur’an, the second most impor- tant source of Islamic law are the h a d i t h , the written traditions of the Prophet. Sunni Muslims hold six compilations of h a d i t h to be authoritative. Two of the six compilers, Imam Abu Isma‘il al-Bukhari (810–870) and Abu Isa Muham- mad al-Tirmidhi (825–892), were from Transoxiana, as were the influential ju- rists Abu Mansur Muhammad al-Maturidi (d. circa 944) and Burhan al-Din Abu’l Hasan al-Marghinani (d. 1197). So too were the great scientist Abu Nasr al-Muhammad al-Farabi (d. circa 950), known as “the second teacher” (after Aristotle), and the rationalist philosopher Abu Ali Ibn Sina (known in the West as Avicenna, 980–1037)—all of them figures of central importance in the h i s t o ry of Islamic civilization in its so-called classical age. They were part of broader networks of travel and learning, which served to make the cities of Transoxiana part of the heartland of the Muslim world. This position was fur- ther cemented by the emergence, at the end of the tenth century, of Bukhara as the seat of the independent Samanid dynasty, which patronized the devel- opment of “new Persian” (written in the Arabic script) as a literary language ( F rye 1965).

The surrounding steppe, with its largely Turkic-speaking nomadic popula- tion, remained a borderland. Conversion to Islam was a gradual process that lasted into the eighteenth century, although the fourteenth century was of cru- cial importance. Conversion to Islam on the steppe was the work of Sufi mas- ters who made Islam meaningful to the population by synthesizing Islamic themes with nomadic myths of origin. Observers have conventionally held this syncretism to be evidence that steppe nomads were only “superficially Is- lamized” or that they were Muslims in name only. This view has resurf a c e d forcefully after the collapse of the Soviet Union and is sometimes applied to all

Central Asians. At its base lies the questionable assumption that “real” Muslims are those who practice Islam in the same way as it is practiced in the Middle East. This argument has been convincingly dismantled by the recent work of Devin DeWeese (1994) and a number of other scholars, who have shown that the syncretism worked both ways and that the native worldviews and myths of origin were thoroughly Islamized. The evidence of steppe epic tradition, nar- rative history, and hagiography shows that for steppe Muslims, Islam became the ancestral religion, and conversion to Islam came to be seen as the found- ing moment of the community as such. Islamic, ethnic, and communal identi- ties were completely intertwined in local sacred history. Islam was thus ab- solutely central to nomadic conceptions of identity. If Islam was the ancestral religion, however, it followed that local customs (as the legacy of the ances- tors) were ipso facto Islamic. These customs were Islamized, to be sure, but their meaning was specifically local.

The dichotomy between the cities and the steppe should not be overdrawn. The same processes of Islamizing local culture by localizing Islam can be ob- s e rved among the sedentary population. The Turkic-language chronicle F i r-

daws ul-Iqbal (The Paradise of Fame), compiled in Khiva in the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries, also asserted that the people of Khorezm, as descendants of Japheth, the son of Noah, had been Muslim since creation. Along the way, various generations had lapsed into infidelity, but they had been brought back to the path of Islam by divinely guided ancestors, the last of whom was Oghuz Khan (a mythical figure). In dispensing with the historical narrative of the Arab conquest of Central Asia and the process of conversion, the F i rdaws ul-Iqbal asserted that the people of Khorezm were innately Muslim (Munis and Ogahiy 1999; see also Khalid 1999).

The difference between the cities and the steppe lay in the different forms the transmission of Islam took in each, and even here the two were intercon- nected. In the cities, the transmission of Islam revolved around m a d r a s as (insti- tutions of higher education roughly the equivalent of seminaries) or in Sufi lodges ( k h a n a q as) . Bukhara, in particular, was renowned for its m a d r a s as, whose proliferation after the sixteenth century gave the city legendary status as “Bukhara the Noble.” At the turn of the twentieth century, the city was sup- posed to have 300 m a d r a s as and 360 mosques, one for each day of the year. The actual numbers were much smaller (lectures were given in 22 m a d r a s as in those years), but the city attracted students from all over Central Asia and be- yond. For our purposes, the important thing to note is that m a d r a s as as well as

k h a n a q as were patronized by rulers and other benefactors through the use of

endowed property ( w a q f ) . This patronage created a large and influential group of scholars ( u l a m a ) as the authoritative interpreters of norms of Islam as it was locally understood. On the steppe, this group was absent. Religious authority was much more diffuse and was not connected to the interests of an influential

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group in society. These differences have had important consequences during the modern period.

Reform and Modernism

Practices associated with the transmission of Islam survived the Russian con- quest. Painfully aware of the thinness of Russian rule in the area and of its dis- tance from Saint Petersburg and supremely confident of the superiority of the European civilization they brought to Central Asia, Russian administrators em- barked on a policy of disregarding or ignoring Islam, assuming that without state support, it would simply decay. M a d r a s as continued to exist and even thrived; indeed, they extended their influence to the steppe, where more scripturalist forms of religiosity began to spread by the late nineteenth cen- t u ry. The Kazakh elites, however, early began sending their sons to Russian schools in substantial numbers, so that by the turn of the twentieth century, a sizable secular Kazakh intelligentsia existed. This group, fluent in Russian and comfortable in the political ideas of the Russian intelligentsia, began to formu- late a Kazakh national identity that had little place in it for Islam as anything but a marker of cultural identity.

The Russian conquest also brought in its wake printing, the telegraph, and the railway, which together began to change patterns of intellectual authority and cultural transmission. One result of this was the emergence of a move- ment for cultural reform built around the advocacy of the usul-i jadid, the new (that is, phonetic) method of teaching the Arabic alphabet. Called Jadidism, this movement shared a great deal in common with other modernist move- ments in the Muslim world at that time (Khalid 1998). Faced with the chal- lenge posed by the loss of sovereignty to Russian rule and with the perceived threat of cultural and economic marginalization, proponents of reform called upon their compatriots to acquire modern knowledge. Not only was such knowledge completely congruent with the “true” teachings of Islam, it alone could allow Muslims to meet the demands of the age and thus ensure their sur- vival. However the Jadids believed that the “true” teachings of Islam had been obfuscated by centuries of interpretations that had led Muslims astray. Al- though many of the most prominent Jadids (as the proponents of reform came to be called) came from learned families, Jadidism rejected the authority of traditional u l a m a to interpret Islam. Instead, the Jadids argued for a return to the textual sources of Islam.

This was a radically new way of understanding Islam, since it pulled Islam away from its moorings in local customs and traditions. Indeed, the Jadids de- nounced many local customs as un-Islamic. However, the Jadids’ emphasis on meeting the “demands of the age” and on progress and enlightenment shifted

the focus back to the community: Islam could be safeguarded (against both theological and geopolitical incursions) only if Muslims achieved success in this world. Islam thus became the defining characteristic of the nation; in- deed, it b e c a m e a nation. “Muslims” were now a community located in history and geography and existing alongside other communities. “Islam” became a commonly used term, denoting not just a religion but also the community and its members.

As with any other nation, the Muslim nation of Central Asia existed along- side many others; its essence was political rather than religious. In many Jadid writings, the distinction between Islam as a faith and Muslims as a community disappeared entirely. Thus, Mahmud Xo’ja Behbudiy, the leading Jadid author of Samarqand, could urge his compatriots to educate their children to be- come “judges, lawyers, engineers, teachers, the supporters and servants of the nation” so that they “would work for the true faith of Islam” (Behbudiy 1913, 155). The true faith, the nation, and progress blended very easily to produce what could be called a secular Muslim nationalism (Zürcher 1999). Islam was still connected to a communal identity, but the relationship had been re- versed. The automatic connection between Islam and local custom was ques- tioned, while the Jadids’ fascination with progress undermined respect for cus- tom. At the same time, the Jadids’ fascination with progress allowed them to find all modern innovations completely congruent with Islam (and indeed de- manded by it). Although the Jadids disconnected Islam from local custom, they tied it back to the community through its political and economic inter- ests. The implications were of fundamental importance: If Islam were con- ceived as a community, it could exist without explicit reference to Islamic be- h a v i o r. The implementation of Islamic law was never an issue in the politics of the Muslim nation (the question of the Islamization of law belongs to a later generation of Islamic thought). In Central Asia (as indeed in much of the Ot- toman world), it was thus possible in the early twentieth century to be agnostic or even an atheist and yet retain a strong Muslim national identity. Recent crises in the Balkans have forced us to recognize that such forms of identity continue to exist among Balkan Muslims; we need to remember how wide- spread the phenomenon was in the early parts of this century.

Islam under Soviet Rule

The Russian Revolution and the resulting conquest of power by the Bolsheviks transformed the political and social context in which Islam was reproduced and transmitted. The new regime had an agenda completely different from that of its imperial predecessor, which had been content to ensure order through minimal interference in society. The Bolsheviks were committed to a

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utopian program of radical social and cultural change to remake society and the individual, a program that flowed directly from certain basic premises of M a rxist thought as interpreted by the Bolsheviks. Socialism could be built in an “advanced” society that had experienced fully developed capitalism and the cultural achievements associated with it (universal literacy, secularization, and the like). However, Russia did not fit this description; its “backwardness” had to be overcome, and since a socialist government already held power, the bat- tle with backwardness could not be left to capitalism but was to be the assigned task of the state. If Russia was backward, Central Asia, with low levels of literacy and an economy entirely dependent on agriculture, was especially so. Indeed, in the Bolsheviks’ Eurocentric scheme of things, Islam itself was a sign of back- wardness. In Central Asia, therefore, the cultural revolution of the 1920s in- volved an attack on Muslim education and its replacement by a network of modern schools, campaigns against illiteracy, an orthographic revolution that resulted in the adoption of a Latin alphabet for all Turkic languages of the So- viet Union in 1928 (the same year as in Turkey), and attacks on traditional practices in general.

Two aspects of this program were of particular importance to our concerns here: first, a radical transformation of society, attacking the property and status of old elites (many of whom had already suffered huge blows by the economic crisis of the civil war) and creating new elites; and, second, a frontal assault on religion in all its manifestations. In 1927, the Communist Party launched the

h u j u m , or assault, on the traditional way of life. Its main focus was the veil—

thousands of women unveiled in public acts of defiance of tradition—but it was a basic metaphor for the state’s relationship to local customs and tradi- tions, which it sought to recreate on a “more rational” plane. In the short run, the hujum, with its excesses, was unsuccessful and indeed counterproductive: The very customs it attacked became highly valued markers of local identity against an aggressive and oppressive state (Massell 1974; Kamp 1998; Northrop 1999). But in the long run, many of its goals were achieved; the veil disappeared, allowing large numbers of women to join the labor force, espe- cially in the brutal cotton sector of the economy (Tokhtakhodjaeva 1995).

The assault on religion was motivated by a number of factors. At the politi- cal level, the Bolsheviks feared any axis of loyalty and mobilization beyond their control. But the ideological motivation, rooted in Enlightenment ration- alism, of freeing the human mind from all dependence on the supernatural and all forms of “superstition” should not be lost from sight. Beginning in the late 1920s and continuing through the 1930s, hundreds of m a d r a s as and Sufi lodges were closed down (some destroyed, most turned to other uses, a few saved as “architectural monuments”); mosques were closed and in many cases destroyed; endowed property was confiscated; and the u l a m a , who became the enemies both of reason and of “the people,” were mercilessly persecuted:

many executed, others exiled to forced-labor camps across the Soviet Union, yet others deprived of their livelihood and driven underground (Keller 2001). These policies dealt a deathblow to older means of reproducing Islam. More- o v e r, as the Soviet Union receded into a paranoid isolationism, links with the outside Muslim world were cut off. Central Asian Islam was forced into isola- tion, cut off from developments in the rest of the Muslim world.

Soviet Islam was thus localized and rendered synonymous with tradition. With Muslim educational institutions abolished, the ranks of the carriers of Is- lamic knowledge denuded, and continuity with the past made difficult by changes in script, the family became the only site for the transmission of Islam. At the same time, since no new religious texts could be published and since oral chains of transmission were often destroyed, the available religious knowl- edge was vastly circumscribed.1

These developments coincided with another very significant phenomenon: the emergence and consolidation of strong ethno-national identities in Cen- tral Asia. The Soviet Union presided over the largest project of nation-building in human history (Suny 1994; Slezkine 1994). From the very beginning, “na- tion” (and the related concepts of “nationality” and “the people,” all rendered by k h a l q in Central Asian languages) was a constitutive part of the Soviet politi- cal system. While “Soviet internationalism” and “the friendship of peoples” re- mained constants in official rhetoric, they were premised on the assumption that every individual belonged to a nation. Nations were created (or “recog- nized”) and equipped with territorial homelands, and policies of affirmative action were installed to promote native elites to positions of power within the political system (Martin 2001; Edgar 1999). Throughout the Soviet Union, new national identities were created along a template that emphasized lan- guage as the key marker of national identity. The old administrative bound- aries of Central Asia were redrawn along ethno-national lines in 1924–1925, creating two (eventually five) national republics that entered the Union of So- viet Socialist Republics as members of the federation.

Each nation also had its own national history and its own national heritage, comprising of a pantheon of positive (that is, “progressive” and “secular”) cul- tural heroes, a national literature, national dress, and national customs. The