Islam and the Soviet Union

Abstract

Russia's relations with, and in consequence her attitude towards, Islam have differed greatly from those of the Western European powers. In the first place, the state of Muscovy was for over two hundred years under the domination of the islamised Mongols, and the subsequent Russian conquest and colonisation of the Muslim territories of the Volga region, the Caucasus and Central Asia was accompanied, although not actually induced, by a sense of retaliation. Secondly, from the sixteenth century onwards the frontiers of Russia marched with those of Turkey and Iran, part of whose territories in the Crimea and the Caucasus was later absorbed into the Tsarist empire. Finally, the at once contemptuous and suspicious, albeit tolerant, attitude towards Islam adopted by Tsarist Russia has developed under the Soviet regime into one of active hostility. Ostensibly, Soviet hostility to Islam stems from the conviction that it is, in the words of Professor Klimovich, one of its principal detractors, 'an anti-scientific, reactionary world concept, alien and inimical to the scientific Marxist-Leninist concept. Islam is in opposition to optimistic and stimulating materialistic teaching; it is incompatible with the fundamental interest of the Soviet peoples; it prevents believers from being active and conscientious builders of Communist society'.' But although the materialistic objections to Islam voiced by Klimovich are much the same as those taken to other religions, Islam is also opposed on cultural and political grounds which are peculiar to it. These relate to the proximity of the Soviet Muslim territories to those of the Islamic countries of the Middle East, South Asia and China, as well as to the Soviet obsession with the idea of Islam as a continuing bond of union among the various Muslim nationalities of the USSR and as a barrier separating them from the other nationalities and particularly from the Russians. The Muslim world as a whole has displayed very little concern with the situation of the thirty-odd million Muslims living under Soviet rule during the past half-century. So far as can be ascertained, in no Muslim state is any government or academic research conducted on the subject, and sources of information are largely confined to proand anti-Soviet propaganda, little of which can be regarded as in any way objective. For reasons on which I touched in an earlier article,2 the matter has been generally ignored in the British academic world, and by far the most comprehensive and objective work in English on the state of Islam in Russia both before and after the Revolution of 1917 is an English translation of a French study compiled in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes