How Soviet ‘Ulama Made Sense of Communism

This paper will focus on one peculiar episode from the annals of anti-Islamic policies in Soviet Central Asia: Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-religious campaign of 1959-1964. The campaign’s primary manifestation in the region’s five Soviet Socialist Republics (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbek S.S.Rs) and elsewhere was a crackdown on shrine pilgrimage. For the Party, this was a response to the perception that Stalin had criminally neglected the struggle with religion after World War II. However, ‘Ulama (scholarly elites) employed by the legally recognized Muslim Spiritual Board, SADUM, did not interpret the campaign as anti-Islamic. Instead, they opted to present it as a defense of true, modern Islam. This paper will examine how SADUM's argument rested both on a selective interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence in the region as well as broader arguments resonating in Muslim countries such as Egypt and Turkey about the need to contain folk religion. I will conclude with some general observations about why the Soviet state, which had tried to destroy religion during the 1920s and 1930s, followed the same pattern as other postcolonial Islamic regimes of promoting “scriptural” Islamic institutions.