The Russians, from Stalin to Gorbachev, had combined a policy of brutal repression of traditional elites, of Islam and its teachers, with long-term attempts at coopting new leaders. With what success? ‘We were here in the seventh century, and I can assure you that there will be more of us on the day after tomorrow,’ said Sheikh Abdullah, deputy chair of the government-sponsored Council of Central Asian Republics and Kazakhstan, in January 1989.[7]
This awakening was, after the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, not merely the result of tradition and remembrance. When a thousand years of Russian Orthodoxy celebrated in 1987, of 1100 years of Islam on the Volga, with Kazan as its capital, and 200 years of the Muslim Spiritual Council of Orenburg coincided, a religious renaissance was in the making. The rehabilitation of the Orthodox Church under Gorbachev and, even more so, under Boris Yeltsin, had strong reverberations not only among traditional Russians and closet Christians, but also among the Muslim population throughout the Soviet Union. All of a sudden, the Muslims within the Soviet Empire discovered their history, their identity and their potential strength. In those years Shafaq Stanizai, a member of the Writers’ Union of Free Afghanistan, who had lived in Central Asia for many years, cited the 70 million Muslims throughout the Soviet dominions, with no more than two institutions to educate and train future imams, both administered by the Muslim Council of the Central Asian republics and Kazakhstan. Both were on a short ideological leash, and the curriculum followed more or less the dogmas of Soviet ideology, including no small amount of anti-capitalist and anti-religious routine. Altogether, no more than eighty students were enlisted. The graduates were employed not to look after their religious flock but to cultivate relations between the Soviet Union and emerging Islamic countries as much as for Soviet peace propaganda in international bodies.
Under Stalin Islam had been seen, not unlike the Christian churches, as outright reactionary and anti-Soviet, ‘opium for the masses’ in true Marxist fashion. In the 1960s, as a response to the Algerian uprising against the French and various other anti-Western liberation movements throughout Islamic countries, and as an offer to the non-aligned movement, a Soviet-impregnated Islam was seen by Moscow as a useful tool. In the 1970s Soviet rulers were slowly recognizing Islam as an element of social improvement. Stanizai estimated that between 95 and 99 per cent of ethnic Uzbeks, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Tajiks and Kyrgyz kept Islamic ritual in their family and communal life, entertaining little sympathy for Soviet domination. Their xenophobia was directed mostly against their Russian masters. The Afghan war thoughout the 1980s accentuated the bitterness. The Soviet high command had committed the strategic blunder of sending mostly soldiers from Islamic republics as cannon fodder into Afghanistan. Their bitterness, frustration and contempt for their Russian masters became an important force in the splitting apart of the Soviet Union.
Six of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union counted a majority of Muslims. The most important centres were Tashkent, Kazan, Boynaks, the centre of Bashkiria, the city of Boynyaks, Baku on the Caspian Sea, and Daghestan – the latter bordering on Chechnya. The Islamic revolution effected in Iran after the return of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978 had enormous international implications, nowhere more so than throughout the southern republics of the Soviet Union. It was in response to the dramatic reversal of the Shah’s fortunes and the humiliation of the USA that an Islamic reawakening began, with no separation between religious and political motives. For the Muslim population in the Caucasus area the Islamic revolution was a fascinating experience, inviting imitation. Those little cassettes carrying the spiteful sermons of Khomeini throughout Iran and the neighbouring countries were smuggled across Iran’s northern border into the Islamic republics under Soviet rule. Meanwhile, the Iranian communists, emerging from the underground, offered their collaboration to the mullah regime but were rejected and persecuted. North of the border, many young Muslims asked for permission to emigrate to Iran. Baku, oil rich and strategically situated on the banks of the Caspian Sea, is only 300 kilometres away from the other Azerbaijan – the one behind the Iranian border. During Soviet times half of the population (1.5 million) was Muslim, mostly Shia.
From 1928 on a kind of Iron Curtain had been put up by the Soviet occupiers along the southern border and maintained for the next four decades. It ended only when in the 1960s Moscow saw the chance of world revolution through the Third World, imagined future allies and wanted to demonstrate its socialist achievements. But this was a kind of KGB-produced mirage, and proved to be short-lived. The Iranian revolution, the defeat of Soviet military might in Afghanistan by Islamic resistance fighters (with some electronic high-tech help from their US sponsors), and the revival of Russian orthodoxy had powerful and long-lasting implications. Long before the end of the Soviet Union the Moscow-controlled media tended to refer to ‘the Islamic problem’, meaning those tectonic shifts happening on both sides of the southern border. All of a sudden, but not out of the blue, religion, held in official contempt and persecuted throughout Soviet times, became a force to reckon with, while Soviet ideology was, to all intents and purposes, a spent force without spiritual promise, economic success or deterrent military potential. In addition, throughout the Islamic republics of the Soviet Empire, communist ideology never overcame the opprobrium of being the veneer of foreign, white, northern oppression. But Soviet defeat in Afghanistan held the promise that the power of Moscow over the lands of Islam was not permanent. During the last years of Soviet rule the authorities noted that the main organizations of Afghan resistance had even managed to have their propaganda translated into Russian and were able to circulate the texts throughout the southern republics, notably Kyrgyzstan, but also in Samarkand, Tashkent and Bukhara.
The Soviet authorities, in their turn, started their own anti-Islamic campaign in the early 1980s, reminding the locals in no uncertain terms that in the past the Tsar’s armies had conquered the Caucasus and that, in the twentieth century, the Red Army had smashed the Basmachi – the southern rebels or ‘bandits’ who had put up their own short-lived statelets at the time of the civil war between the Whites and the Reds. Foreign diplomats saw this as an undisguised warning for those Muslims dreaming of independence.
Today, throughout the lands from the Caspian Sea to the borders of China mosques are being refurbished or built anew. Before the revolution the number of mosques in those parts of Russia was estimated to be close to 25,000, plus another 100 in the Emirate of Bukhara and in the Khanate of Khiva. In 1942, the total number had gone down to 2000, and in 1966 only 400 mosques were – in Soviet speak – ‘working’. Obviously, the KGB took what was the result of severe repression as a sign of voluntary conversion to the Soviet religion. In May 1976 comrade F. Furov, chairman of the Council for Religious Affairs with the Ministerial Council of the USSR, listed 300 ‘registered’ mosques as well as 700 ‘non-registered’ ones. At the same time, an official in Tashkent was quoted by diplomats who cited 143 mosques as ‘working’ for all of Soviet Central Asia. There was, on average, one mosque for a quarter of a million Muslims. In the last years of the Soviet Union Igor Beliaev, reputed to be the number one authority on Islam, wrote in Literaturnaya Gazeta about ‘365 mosques, filled with worshippers’. Today, throughout the Central Asian republics but also across the Muslim provinces of Russia – or, for that matter, the Muslim parts of ex-Yugoslavia – mosques are being built in great numbers with both local money and generous support from petrol-states like Saudi Arabia.