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Journal of Islamic Studies 13:3 (2002) pp.

298330
# Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies 2002

ISLAM AND THE LEGACY OF


SOVIETOLOGY: A REVIEW ESSAY
ON YAACOV ROIS ISLAM IN THE
SOVIET UNION

DEVIN DEWEESE
Indiana University

Despite the collapse of the Soviet state, the study of religious life
among the traditionally Muslim peoples of the former USSR has
continued to be dominated by an academic tradition that may be
termed Sovietological Islamology. Rooted in attempts to understand
the impact of the Soviet era on Islam in Central Asia, the VolgaUral
region, and western Siberia, Azerbaijan, and the North Caucasus,
this tradition has rarely been well grounded in the broader world
of Islamic studies, or in modes of analysing religious life beyond
the framework of the political issues that dominated Sovietology.
It is exemplified by the writings of Alexandre Bennigsen and his
collaborators and students,1 which shaped an approach to Islam in
the Soviet context informed more by scholarly expertise in the
1
The literature produced by the Sovietological school is extensive and cannot
be reviewed here. Its key early product was Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal
Lemercier Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1967), and the
Sovietological approach dominated publications on Soviet Islam during the 1970s
and 1980s; cf. Bennigsens Islam in the Soviet Union: The Religious Factor and the
Nationality Problem in the Soviet Union, in Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and
Eastern Europe, ed. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong (London: Macmillan,
1975), 91100; his Modernization and Conservatism in Soviet Islam, in Religion
and Modernization in the Soviet Union, ed. Dennis J. Dunn (Boulder, Col.: Westview
Press, 1977), 23979; his Religion and Atheism among Soviet Muslims, in Islam
and the Contemporary World, ed. Cyriac K. Pullapilly (Notre Dame, Ind.: Cross
Roads Books, 1980), 22237; his Official Islam and Sufi Brotherhoods in the Soviet
Union Today, in Islam and Power, ed. Alexander S. Cudsi and Ali E. Hillal Dessouki
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 95106; and Alexandre
Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide (London:
C. Hurst, 1985). See also Helene Carrere dEncausse, Islam in the Soviet Union:
Attempts at Modernization, Religion in Communist Lands, 2/45 (1974), 1219;
Michael Rywkin, Moscows Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (Armonk,
NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982); Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Sufi Brotherhoods in the
USSR: A Historical Survey, Central Asian Survey, 2/4 (1983), 135; Azade-Ayse
Rorlich, Islam under Communist Rule: VolgaUral Muslims, Central Asian Survey,
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 299
Soviet system, and in the twentieth-century development of the
Soviet-defined nations into which the Muslim communities of
the USSR were grouped, than by training in the history or religious
culture of the regions of Soviet Islam, let alone of the broader
Islamic world.
Plagued by inadequate data and problematical sources, and thus
rife with methodological problems that have never been seriously
explored either by Bennigsens disciples or by his schools critics, the
Bennigsen approach was in some respects pioneering in raising
the profile of peoples, and issues, that were largely ignored by the
wider community of Russocentric Sovietologists; yet, although its
scholarly limitations should have been apparent, it has exerted a
stultifying and even pernicious influence on the study of Islam in
the Soviet environment, as its conclusions and approaches prompted
repetition and imitation rather than serious critical discussion
and challenge. Despite its weaknesses, the body of scholarship
produced by Sovietological Islamology has often been taken as
the definitive word on Soviet Islam both by specialists in other
parts of the Soviet world, eager to have an accessible and under-
standable control over an aspect of Soviet life they could no longer
ignore, and by specialists in other parts of the Islamic world, seeking
to make sense out of the recent historical experience of long-
isolated Muslim peoples as they rejoined the broader dialogue of the
Muslim community.
The upshot is that discussion of Islam in the USSR has remained
largely in the hands of specialists who, by training and disciplinary
orientation, have been ill-equipped to deal with all but the most
superficial aspects of religion and its place in Soviet life; regrettably
(one might well say ominously) the same holds true for the current
1/1 (1982), 21 42; id., Sufism in Tatarstan: Deep Roots and New Concerns, Central
Asian Survey, 2/4 (1983), 37 44; Marie Broxup, Islam in Central Asia since
Gorbachev, Asian Affairs, 18/3 (1987), 28393; and Martha Brill Olcott, Islam and
Fundamentalism in Independent Central Asia, in Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting
Legacies, ed. Yaacov Roi (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 2139. As reflected already in
Bennigsens work, the Sovietological schools production included not only attempts,
chiefly by political scientists, to describe then-contemporary trends among Soviet
Muslims (typically on the basis of published materials, obviously problematical in the
context of Soviet censorship, or on the basis of contacts with political, academic, or
literary elites alone), but also historical surveys of Soviet policy towards Islam and
towards the USSRs Muslim peoples; more broadly, this school can be said to have
encompassed the entire field of nationality studies, whose practitionerswhether
historians or political scientists or economists or students of language and
literaturewere often quite competent and insightful in many respects, but tended
to fare quite poorly when drawn into discussions, as they inevitably were, of religious
issues, both contemporary and historical.
300 d ev in d ew e e se
discussionwhether in policy analysis or in the popular media
about Islam in Central Asia, where the Soviet legacy now com-
mands world attention on both sides of the old Soviet border. It is
ironic, of course, in view of the essentially religious terms in which the
subject is typically framed, that those who have generated the small
explosion of books and articles purporting to explore the historical
background or present status, or to predict the future, of Islam
in the Soviet or post-Soviet environment have rarely seen fit to inform
their comments and evaluations with any grounding in the field
of religious studies. Students of contemporary Uzbek politics or
literature or economics, for instance, freely venture to comment or
write about the religious question or the problem of Islam, without
any serious training in ways of analysing or interpreting religious life,
and without any serious historical understanding of Islam in Central
Asia that might illuminate both continuities and discontinuities
during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.
As a result, the profound conceptual and terminological
problems that infest the literature on Islam in the USSR not only
go unaddressed and unproblematized, but steadily increase, as mis-
conception builds upon misconception and as constant repetition
yields greater acceptance; by now a serious housecleaning is long
overdue. The present article will not undertake that task; it will
address, rather, a few of the most fundamental problems as they
appear, seemingly with new support, in a recent product of the
Sovietological approach to Islam in the USSR. The article began as
a simple book reviewan origin reflected still in its structurebut
quickly grew well beyond the limits of that genre; its growth was
curtailed by realization that a study twice the size of the monograph
that prompted it would be necessary for a thorough and effective
discussion of the many issues that need to be addressed (issues
that arise on nearly every page of that monograph). It is hoped that
the result will, at least, alert the constituency of the Sovietological
envisioning of Islam in the USSR to some of the problems peculiar to
that vision, and, at best, generate an expanded discussion and critique
that may eventually reclaim the study of Islam in the Soviet world
for religious studies, and for Islamic studies.

Yaacov Rois Islam in the Soviet Union2 is a big and densely


packed book, prodigious in its data and documentation, but in many
respects fundamentally flawedlike the enterprise of Sovietological

2
Yaacov Roi, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to
Gorbachev (London: C. Hurst, 2000), 791 pp).
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 301
Islamology of which it may be regarded as the culminationby
conceptual, methodological, analytical, and interpretative short-
comings. The work is based on unparalleled archival research con-
ducted since the breakup of the Soviet Union, chiefly in the State
Archive of the Russian Federation, housing the archives of the
Committee for Religious Affairs and its predecessor, as well as other
collections in Moscow and Tashkent. It thus presents the data that,
for obvious reasons, eluded the Bennigsen school, but fails to move
significantly beyond the conceptual and analytical constraints that
left the Bennigsen approach so unsatisfying, and unilluminating, for
a readership versed in Islamic studies. What it presents is certain
aspects of Islam in the USSR as viewed through the (often quite
murky) lens of government documents prepared by those Soviet
officials charged with finding the best means to curtail religious
practice and hasten the disappearance of religious belief. When
discussing the distinctively Soviet aspects of Muslim life the author is
at home, and his presentation is solid and informative. His work is
much less satisfying, however, when he ventures into interpreting
religious life, and especially into the many issues that are more often
obscured than illuminated by the categorizations and analytical
frameworks employed by the Soviets for understanding religious life
(with an aim to crush it). At best he misses much of the substance
of Muslim religious life; at worst he parrots the stale questions and
answers of the Bennigsen school and even of the stunted Soviet
academic study of religion.
Overall, Roi is to be applauded for attempting to take stock
of several important issues on the basis of data never before brought
to light; the problem is that when there are such fundamental
problems in the interpretation of the data, and especially in the
terminological and analytical framework in which the authors of
the Soviet archival reports and documents approached their subject,
it is essential to handle those terms and that framework critically,
and with a grounding in the basic vocabulary of Islamic studies, so
as to allow a scholarly evaluation of the evidence rather than its
simple repetition. Again and again, throughout Islam in the Soviet
Union, we miss the authors input in explaining Soviet misunder-
standings of Islam, wrong-headed thinking about religious life, the
specific inapplicability of Soviet categories to Islam, and so on. It is
fundamentally misleading to pretend that simply adopting the Soviet
categories and terms can truly illuminate the situation on the ground
in terms of Islamic religious life and practice, or lead to any deep
understanding of the survival and adaptation of Muslim religious life
in the Soviet environment.
302 d ev in d ew e e se
It may be worth noting that in the essentially fruitless debate
that has swirled in the past decade over the effects of the Soviet era
on Islambetween specialists more familiar with the Soviet and
Russian world, who seem surprised at the persistence of any Muslim
or national traditions and insist that Soviet policy failed in its efforts
to modernize or Russify, and those more familiar with the Islamic
world, who note the striking differences between Central Asia, for
example, and other parts of the Muslim world, and who insist that
the Soviet transformation succeeded all too wellRoi is squarely on
the side of the Sovietological camp. The quest for the reasons Soviet
policy did not succeed more thoroughly in eliminating Islam (reasons
presumed to lie more in the failures of Soviet institutions and ideology
than in the attachment of Soviet Muslims to their traditions) is one of
the undercurrents evident throughout the study.
On the whole Rois book is generally well written, and the
data well presented; there is considerable repetition, but the text is
admirably cross-referenced. Outside the main body of the book there
is some important material worth noting. In particular, the preface
outlines the authors chief archival sources and approach, while his
Note on Methodology (pp. 18) is a fine discussion of the problems
and pitfalls inherent in using and interpreting the Soviet archival
documents that are the overwhelming foundation of most of the book.
These few pages must be kept in mind throughout the rest of the
study, even when the author himself does not explicitly call attention
to the array of possible implications attendant upon the documentary
presentation of specific issues. Indeed, at points in the later body of
the work, one senses that the author himself has succumbed to a
kind of documentary naivete, assuming that measures described or
debates discussed in the sources were actual realities rather than the
products of bureaucratic obfuscation and evasion.
The introductory matter offers a list of acronyms and abbrevia-
tions, and four maps; it includes also a generally helpful, though
occasionally misleading, glossary (pp. xvxxi), covering terminology
both Islamic (of various languages) and Soviet Russian. The index
is admirably thorough, and will assist readers in locating information,
for example, on specific regions and towns. The bibliography, how-
ever, is extremely disappointing, and is revealing about the thrust
and orientation of the book as a whole. For some reason only works
in English and Russian are included (and even for such literature the
list is far from exhaustive, arguably not even representative, and
occasionally not properly classified). The extensive and important
literature in German and French is thus not included (nor is it cited
in the footnotes), and there is no representation whatsoever of
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 303
published or unpublished materials in the native languages of the
Muslim peoples of the former USSR. This is particularly lamentable
in connection with the large corpus of anti-religious literature in
the national languages: much of this is dull and less than illu-
minating, to be sure, but some offers essential material that not only
reveals important aspects of the substance of religious lifealbeit in
the context of ridicule and mockerybut also directly illustrates the
particular thrusts of the regimes tactical repertoire in the struggle
against religion during particular periods. The bibliography also
makes it clear that the vast body of ethnographic literature exploring
aspects of religious life among the Muslim peoples of the USSR
has not been utilized. That literature, while itself marred by the
stunted development, in the Soviet academic world, of analytical
strategies for understanding religion, is nevertheless an essential
resource for examining what religious life looked like on the ground,
beyond the governmental evaluations presented in the archival
documents.
It should go without saying that there are many other types of
sources that one day will have to be taken into account in presenting
a more balanced picture of Islam in the USSR. These include Soviet
anti-religious literature, Soviet ethnographic descriptions (more
scholarly in orientation but still fraught with analytical pitfalls),
accounts of emigres, andnowthe recollections of Soviet Muslims
themselves. Important insights will also be gleaned from the increased
religious publishing from the late Soviet period, occasional examples
of religious samizdat, evocations of Islam in national literature and
art, and study of the Islamic evocations in such cherished aspects
of national culture as the heroic epic traditions of the Kazaks,
Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Turkmens, and others. More broadly, it will be
important to ground such a presentation not only in Soviet legal and
institutional structures, but in a substratum of understanding of and
familiarity with Islamic religious practice elsewhere in the Muslim
world, in order to provide a basis for comparison and to distinguish
specifically Soviet aspects of the impact of modernity upon
Muslim religious life from other aspects, which are more broadly
attested and not attributable to the Soviet environment. Finally, a
much deeper knowledge of the history of Islam in each of the regions
that together comprised the Soviet Muslim world will be essential
to such a project.
Regrettably, Rois work may be said, at best, to provide abundant
(almost-) raw material for such a future re-evaluation of Islam in
the USSR. If the study of that phenomenon is to move forward, it is
essential to shift fundamentally the approach adopted, the sources
304 d ev in d ew e e se
consulted, and the questions asked, but Rois work, despite
the wealth of data it presentswhich makes the work indispensable
for any student of Islam in the USSRhas not yet addressed
those most basic needs.

THE LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE


FRAMEWORK

The bulk of Rois book is divided into twelve chapters, grouped in


five large sections. In Part I, the first chapter offers an excellent survey
of Soviet religious policy and its historical shifts during the period
covered in the book, from the regimes rapprochement with religion
during the Great Patriotic War to the beginning of Gorbachevs
rule (thus roughly from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s).
This chronological range is significant: the books coverage begins
after the crisis era of the wholesale assault on the institutional
foundations of Islamic life, and ends before the upheavals of the late
Soviet period, which saw the virtual disappearance of overt pressures
on religious practice, and of the genre of antireligious literature.
Though somewhat duller, the interim period was nevertheless
crucialand one might say definitiveas the period of coexistence
between a regime committed to the disappearance of religion and
the officially recognized representatives of tolerated religious
communities. Chapter 1 thus outlines the basic legal division of
religious practice into registered (and thus tolerated, if not approved)
and unregistered (and hence subject to prosecution). It also introduces
the central Soviet governmental structuresthe Council for the
Affairs of Religious Cults (194465), and its successor, the Council
for Religious Affairs, for which Roi uses the anglicized acronyms
CARC and CRA, respectivelythat oversaw religious activity and
served as the avenue for the implementation of Soviet policy and for
feedback on the successes and failures of that policy. This chapter
is important for underscoring the multiplicity of official attitudes
towards religion, and towards the best way of facilitating its eventual
disappearance, as well as the many twists and turns of policy. Thus
it reminds us that, in this period at least, there was rarely any
consistent plan for anti-religious efforts, or any consensus on the best
way to deal with the continuing religious attachments of large
segments of Soviet society, behind the seemingly monolithic public
face of state-supported atheism.
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 305
Chapter 2, The Dimensions of Islam, attempts to give some idea
of the numerical data presumed to reflect religious attachment and
practice among Soviet Muslims. It begins with a statement that
signals a basic problem in the definition of the scope of Islamic
activity: that activity encompasses, we are told, registered and
unregistered mosques, communities, clergy, and other religious
activists , the size of mosque attendance, and the extent of
belief and religious practice. The subtext for this chapter should
be, of course, the essential meaninglessness of many of the categories
applied by the Soviet governmentand regrettably adopted by most
studies of Islam in the Soviet environmentfor understanding
and analysing Muslim religious life in the USSR. The statistical
data assembled on pp. 8991, for instance, show mostly how
hopelessly confused the thinking is that results from applying terms
such as clergy and cleric, whether registered or not, to Muslim
contexts, but a more fundamental problem is rooted in the tacit
acceptance of the Soviet understanding of religion as a matter of
belief and of religious people as believers. The field of religious
studies, and students of Islam in particular, have long recognized
the lack of explanatory power that a focus purely on belief and
doctrines entails with regard to the richness and complexity of
religious life, especially in connection with a religious system such
as Islam in which orthopraxy traditionally trumps orthodoxy. The
fact that the Soviet state and the Communist Party adhered to an
antiquated understanding of religious life, and hence to an often
self-defeating policy toward Islam (one that was, as Roi notes,
essentially obtuse (p. 319)), does not relieve students of religion
in the Soviet state of a responsibility to apply a broader understanding
of religious life to our analysis of Islam in that environment.
Part II covers Establishment Islam, with the third chapter
outlining the history and activities of the four Muslim Spiritual
Directorates (based, through most of the relevant period, in Tashkent,
Ufa, Makhach-Kala, and Baku), and the long fourth chapter detailing
the activities of officially registered mosques and clergy. Here the
book is at its strongest, dealing with the functions of Soviet-defined
institutions within Soviet society. Chapter 3 is particularly illuminat-
ing with regard to the separatist tendencies revealed within the
religious boards well before the tensions of the late Soviet and early
post-Soviet periods led to their fracturingmost notably in the case of
the one that served Central Asiaalong republican lines (a similar
fate befell the North Caucasian religious administration, while the
directorate based in Ufa underwent a somewhat different pattern
of splintering). This process, of course, occurred after the period
306 d ev in d ew e e se
covered in this book and so is not discussed, but in fact some reference
to these developments would have helped to underscore one of the
important points, often overlooked in other treatments of Islam in
the Soviet environment, that Roi deserves credit for arguing (and
admirably documenting): that however much the official boards were
creatures of the Soviet state, they were not merely stooges of the
government, but did indeed pursue their own agenda where possible,
and were regarded, moreover, as legitimate by many of the faithful
who sought to retain their self-respect as Muslims but who were
reluctant to get involved in officially prosecutable activities. Despite
the structural changes in three of the four Soviet-era religious boards,
the idea of having such a governmental board, now on a republican
basis, was not repudiated either in the more open atmosphere of
the last days of the Soviet state, or after the dissolution of the
USSR. The religious boards thus stand among the structures of
Soviet life that became indigenized and assimilated into Islamic
religious life, and not only as a means of controlthough they are
certainly used in that way by many of the post-Soviet governments
but as part of the local assumptions and expectations regarding
the ways in which religious affairs are to be recognized and regulated.
This clearly underscores the important insights Roi provides
regarding the origin, development, and inner workings of the
Soviet-era boards.
Chapter 3s discussion of the fatwas issued by the Soviet clergy
(pp. 14055) is quite valuable, and finally gives substance to an
aspect of official Islam that was often mentioned but never seriously
explored; together with the section on sermons (pp. 25362) in the
following chapter, it offers invaluable insights into the interpretative
and communicative functions of the official Islamic establishment.
Here again, however, Roi misses an opportunity to link, or even
compare, the specific positions taken in the sermons or fatwas issued
by Soviet clergy with the larger context of Muslim debates, whether
in history or at present, and to set the general pattern of interpreting
the Shara against the backdrop of traditional (or, for that matter,
modern) Muslim juridical discourse. While some of the positions
adopted in sermons and fatwas are clearly specific to the Soviet
context, the basic pattern of codifying exceptions to strict observance
of religious obligations reflects longstanding Muslim tradition. To
portray it as somehow peculiar to the Soviet period, or as a radical
departure from Muslim interpretative practice, distorts our under-
standing of the place of the Soviet-era religious boards in a broader
Islamic context, and obscures some of the continuities reflected in
those boards activities.
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 307
Parts of Chapter 4 seem repetitive after the discussion of mosque
openings and closings in Chapter 2, but the information presented
here on the financial dealings of the officially registered religious
communities (especially pp. 2709) is particularly valuable, and
sheds light on one of the persistent mysteries of official Islam in
the Soviet Union: the funding mechanisms for registered religious
communities. The scale of the offerings and collections that supported
the official religious establishment is quite remarkable, and in itself
attests to the vitality of Soviet Islam in a way that has not been
appreciated heretofore. More broadly, this chapter is revealing about
the inner workings of the officially registered religious communities,
and of the Councils that dealt with them. It shows how easily, even in
Soviet society and even in the context of such a sensitive ideological
and social issue as religion, a state organization (such as CARC/CRA)
could become something of an advocate for the constituency it
was designed to oversee and control, however hostile the regime
might remain towards religious life and practice. Such advocacy
was rooted, of course, in CARCs persistent argument that closing
registered mosques, or merely hindering the process of registration
itself, served to strengthen the hand of the unregistered groups, and
reflected differences over tactics, not basic sympathies; nevertheless,
Rois treatment is admirable for reminding us that Soviet officialdom
could and did debate the realities, and not merely the ideology, of
religions place in Soviet society. It is a pity, in this regard, that
here and elsewhere in the book we are rarely given any insight into
the personalities behind the positions and decisions. This would be
another story, and would require a different sort of research, but
the individuals involved in making and implementing religious
policy, and their careers and relationships to their local communities,
are no less a part of the history of Islam in the Soviet Union than
are the official reports they left behind.
For all its detail and its grounding in Soviet structures, Chapter 4
still overlooks other major issues that will one day be important to
include in a consideration of Soviet Islam. It would have been good
to include here, in the chapter on registered groups and clergy,
some discussion of the alien character of much of the terminology
employed by the Soviet state, from the standpoint of Islam, and of the
inapplicability, in an Islamic context, of many of the categories and
approaches to religious life that were developed with respect to the
Russian Orthodox Church. It goes without saying that the mosque is
not comparable, in ritual terms, to the church (beyond sharing the
Soviet categorization, based on purely external commonalities, as
a religious building or prayer-house), and that the Muslim cleric
308 d ev in d ew e e se
does not typically have the same ritual significance as a Christian
priest (every Muslim being, in theory, ritually self-sufficient); yet Roi
gives only perfunctory acknowledgment to the differential impact
of Soviet closures of prayer-houses on the Christian and Muslim
communities, and never really addresses the terminological problem
of the Muslim clergy at all. The role of the Soviet state, through
the institutional framework it devised (largely on Christian models)
for Muslim religious communities, in the crystallization of a
hierarchical structure that indeed took root among Muslims of the
former USSR, deserves at least some comment, beyond an accounting
of the functions the Soviet Muslim clergy performed. But Roi
never steps back from his data here to remind the reader what a
remarkable departure from traditional patterns the Sovietized clergy
represented.
There is also a real need to take stock of the impact of official Soviet
attitudes towards Islam, outside the framework of the day-to-day
workings of the official governmental bodies and registered religious
groups, but this question is not seriously addressed in Rois book
(despite the discussion of local governmental organs handling of
religious policy in Chapter 11). In particular, Roi underplays the
impact of Soviet anti-religious propaganda, and of the actual
measures (whether administrative or by law) taken to obstruct,
hinder, or forbid religious practice. Both of these enterprises were
no doubt far more often felt directly by broader segments of society
than were specific governmental acts affecting registered religious
communities. While the archival documents add a crucial dimension
to our understanding of policy and the problems of its implementa-
tion, they do not always give us a sense of the impact of actual
decisions, not to mention the extra-legal administrative measures,
on the average person, let alone the effects of the constant harping
against religion in virtually all cultural, educational, and political
venues. They naturally give the perspective of the government and
its officials, and cannot be expected to convey the experience of
ordinary Soviet Muslims and the atmosphere of harassment and
intimidation that could envelop anyone involved in religious practice.
In a way this is good: though quite real in many contexts, that
atmosphere was hardly pervasive, and there were indeed areas in
which religious communities of various stripes could virtually ignore
state policy and many aspects of its local implementation. But one can
read Rois book without ever sensing the palpable fear and even
paranoia that one frequently felt among the religiously inclined
(including even foreign Muslims studying in the USSR) in the
Soviet Union in the early 1980s, for examplelong after the supposed
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 309
institution of Soviet legality to safeguard the constitutional rights
of Soviet citizens.

PARALLEL ISLAM AND THE PROBLEM OF


RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

Part III, devoted to what was typically called, in Soviet times,


unofficial or parallel Islam, is in many respects the most unsatis-
fying section of the book. Chapter 5 attempts to cover the major
elements of unregistered religious activity, while Chapter 6 focuses
on The Sufi Orders and the Sects (the Isma[ls of Badakhshan are
relegated to the latter category). It goes without saying that much
has been missed in attempting to document unregistered religious
activity through the archives of organizations focused on the regis-
tered groups; it is clearly an important contribution to lay out the
information from those archives, but what has been missed in the
process is perhaps less troublesome than what has been misinterpreted
or miscontextualized.
Much of the data adduced in Chapter 5 is instructive with regard
to the range of religious activity, both registered and unregistered,
even in areas typically dismissed as having been less influenced by
Islam. It also reminds us that unregistered did not necessarily mean
underground, and shows the extent to which the aims of Soviet laws
on religion were ill-served by the limits on registering mosques and
religious communities, thus driving believers into unregistered groups
beyond regulation and control. (See especially pp. 3223 for the kinds
of activities of unregistered groups deemed deleterious by the state,
which could have been controlled and stopped had the groups been
registered.)
The basic problem here is the authors unwillingness to offer the
reader anything but the Soviet analysis of religion, and his persistence
in measuring the reality of Islamic religious life in the Soviet Union
not against actual Islamic religious life in the pre-Soviet Russian
empire, for instance, or in Central Asia before the Russian conquest,
or even elsewhere in the Muslim world in the twentieth century,
but against an essentially abstract ideal of Islam defined in quite
narrow terms that would exclude much of the daily substance
of religious life in most traditional Muslim societies. To restrict
what is Islamic to the Quran and a limited body of Hadith may
be the business of contemporary Muslim fundamentalists and the
medieval jurists they cite, but it was never the business of the majority
of self-defined Muslims over the centuries, or even of most medieval
310 d ev in d ew e e se
jurists, and it is certainly not the business of scholars who would
analyse and interpret Muslim religious life historically or at present.
That such a restrictive vision of Islam became part of European
colonial discourse about the decay of the Islamic world, and then
became part of the Soviet academic and political characterization
of Islam, can hardly justify its adoption as definitive by those who
study Islam in the Soviet context or anywhere else.
The basic Soviet analysis of religious life, indeed, deserves
discussion, but unfortunately receives none. Such a discussion would
go a long way towards dispelling the impression that Roi, while
acknowledging the caution that must be exercised in interpreting
the archival reports he adduces, has followed the Sovietological
school in uncritically adopting the approach of Soviet academics (and
the anti-religious literature to which they often contributed) towards
defining and understanding religious life. That approach, rooted in
positivist scholarship on religion developed in the late nineteenth
century but going back to Enlightenment-era disdain both for excess-
ive ritual and for superstitious folk religion, served the purpose
of fragmenting the traditional life of Muslims into components
that could be labelled real Islam, and others that could be relegated
to various categories ranging from survivals from paganism (of
multiple brands, often depending on the republic and the pre-Islamic
religion or religions highlighted as the real autochthonous faith
of the republic before the arrival of an alien Islam) to degenerate or
popular Islam. This analytical fragmentation was, of course, often
joined by the official clergy, and it is one of the strange ironies of
Soviet history that the Communist Party and the Soviet academic
establishment were essentially allied with the official Islamic clergy
(not to mention fundamentalists abroad) in adopting a rigorist inter-
pretation of what constituted real Islam; herein lies another attrac-
tion of some of the unregistered mullas, who were usually less inclined
than the official groups to condemn as un-Islamic a practice as
central to traditional life as, for example, the visitation to saints
shrines. In any event, this analytical stance was inevitably influential
among the educated elites of the various Muslim nationalities, who
learned to dissociate Islam from many of the traditional practices of
the peoples whose spokesmen they claimed to be; but this, too, is
no reason for scholars to adopt this mode of analysis, or to refrain
from critical comment upon it.
There are, moreover, fundamental issues of knowledge and
meaning in religious life that ought to be explored in this context,
but Roi typically opts simply to repeat some Soviet officials
characterization, without comment or elucidation. Take, for example,
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 311
Rois claim (p. 324) that even in pre-Soviet times, those who per-
formed religious rites in Central Asia _ knew very little about Islam
apart from being able to recite a few prayers [italics mine], and that
this patchy knowledge was further diminished under Soviet rule,
despite the marked improvement in general education (as if Soviet
education could be expected to improve religious knowledge). One
naturally wonders who, exactly, serves as the standard for knowing
a great deal about Islam, and where such extensive knowledge is to
be found; but of course the claim that Muslimsor for that matter
adherents of other traditionsdo not even know what they are
doing and are ignorant of the teachings or practices of their own
religion was, naturally, a central part of Soviet anti-religious rhetoric,
designed to show the folly of religion in general. A condescending
attitude towards Muslims knowledge of their own traditions and
practices is finding new life, to be sure, in characterizations of post-
Soviet Islam by would-be reformers from elsewhere in the Muslim
world (who may indeed not realize that such rhetoric was a regular
feature of Soviet dismissals of the integrity and coherence of Muslim
religious life). Nevertheless, it is disturbing to find such an attitude
creep into Rois study, whether it is rooted in the Soviet-trained
students of Islam (e.g. N. Ashirov, T. S. Saidbaev, or M. G. Vagabov)
whose works are so often cited in the book (many of whom were
regular contributors to the Soviet anti-religious enterprise before its
collapse in the late 1980s), or in Rois own understanding of Islam.
Whatever its origin, the attitude pervades the book, as when Roi
reports a CARC officials derisive comments, from the late 1940s,
about the religious knowledge of unofficial mullas in Kazakstan:
most of them were unable to translate the Quran into their native
tongue; some could not even read it at all (p. 328). What would
have been useful, and interesting, here, is for Roi to have noted
the absurdity of such a claim as a defining marker of religiosity;
literacy in a traditions sacred language, or in general, has hardly
been a historical prerequisite for religious devotion, practice, or
identification, whether among Muslims or in nearly any other
religious tradition, and there is indeed a curiously Protestant, and
even fundamentalistor is it merely modernist?subtext to the
insistence that the Arabic Quran be understood or its meanings
translated into a local language in order for it to retain religious
significance. As is often pointed out, the Quran is apprehended most
definitively in its oral recitation, regardless of understanding, and
Muslim tradition ascribes illiteracy to the Prophet himself; if anyone
is deserving of derision here it is not the unofficial mulla of the story,
but the CARC official who undoubtedly developed his textual fetish
312 d ev in d ew e e se
through some academic training, and who fundamentally missed
the point about the roles played by the unofficial mullas he was
attempting to monitor.
Yet Roi seems to accept this characterization as significant, and
goes on to speak of the general ignorance of Islamic law or even
custom as a pervasive feature of most, if not all, areas inhabited
by Muslim nationalities, where the unofficial clergy would make
mistakes in the actual conduct of ritual and thereby give their
rivals in the official organizations ammunition against them. Here
we arrive at a perfect opportunity to illuminate the reader by com-
menting on the internal dynamic of contention among differing
visions of Islam and differing ritual expectations in Muslim societies,
a dynamic hardly restricted to the Soviet context, but one whose
distinctive reflection in the Soviet environment, through the partisan
activity of an external force in the form of the Soviet government,
deserves comment and serious discussion in a work on Islam in the
Soviet Union. None of this is broached, however, and we are left
to assume that Roi essentially agrees with the assessment of Muslim
ignorance and ritual incompetence that he finds in the Soviet
archives and among Soviet academic interpreters of Islam. The
Soviet era did, indeed, have a tremendous impact on certain aspects of
religious knowledge among the Muslim peoples of the USSR, through
the elimination of virtually all state-sanctioned institutions for
religious education, through disruptions of long-established patterns
in the transmission of traditional lore, and through the creation and
cultivation of national elites who were severed, by Soviet education
and the demands of their career paths if not by ideology, from
any organic connection (beyond what might be reinforced in the
home) with religious training or with a religious understanding of
their peoples heritage. To understand the impact of the Soviet era,
however, will require serious research into the sources and styles of
religious knowledge on the local and regional scale, and much greater
sensitivity to the different forms of local traditional knowledge (not to
mention a much deeper familiarity with pre-Soviet, and pre-jaddist,
patterns of Islamic education in the various regions that became part
of Soviet Islam) than Rois workor any Soviet studyreflects.
It will also require the abandonment of the facile dichotomies
implied by the caricatures of real Islam versus ignorant Islam, and,
it is hoped, the simultaneous abandonment of disdainful and
disparaging attitudes toward the level, and modes, of religious
knowledge that retained meaning for many Soviet Muslims.
As it stands, by contrast, an integral part of the Soviet-style
analysis that Roi appears to adopt is a disparaging attitude towards
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 313
local traditional knowledge (as opposed to a learned canon pre-
sumed to exist on some larger or even international scale). Female
religious specialists, for example, are described as not qualified for
religious instruction or guidance, since they had no official training
(p. 342), and are dismissed for employing only prayers and rites
they had learned by heart and recited without understanding (p. 343).
In the same vein, Roi later describes a specialist who knew how to
recite the requisite elegies, but probably had no religious training
and was not really a cleric in any sense (p. 659, italics mine); here
again essentially meaningless Soviet terminology has utterly defeated
genuine understanding. Elsewhere the Kazaks, as a nation, are
spoken of as somehow distinctive or anomalous for having never
known a centralised clerical authority (p. 293); one wonders where
in the Muslim world such a thing has ever been known. Here again
the characterization is that of Rois archival source, but time after
time Roi himself misses the opportunity such occasions offer to point
out how off the mark Soviet understandings of Islam often were.
It is perhaps a reality of disciplinary divisions in academic life that
the task of considering Islam as understood and lived by Muslims
themselves is regarded as the responsibility of anthropologists or
sociologists, but not of document-bound historians; if so, the latter
cannot claim to offer anything more than a very limited, and often
distorted, picture of actual Muslim religious life in the Soviet Union.
Rois discussion of the unregistered clergy (pp. 32463) especially
highlights the terminological problem noted above. If we can
accept the use of the term clergy to refer to the officially registered
representatives of essentially Sovietized institutions, what are we to
make of the catch-all phrase unregistered clergy? In this case the
problem is not so much with the term clergy itselfit can still be
useful in Islamic contexts even if we first invoke the caveat about
the differing roles of Christian priests and those classed as Muslim
clericsbut rather with the vagueness of its use. Roi (like others
in the field of Sovietological Islamology before him) has lumped
into the category all sorts of religious specialists and practitioners
ranging from imams of unregistered mosques to the many kinds of
healers, unofficial custodians of shrines, purveyors of amulets, and
representatives of saintly lineages of various sortswithout making
clear the differences among them, thereby implying that all such
figures do indeed fall into an indigenously Islamic category of clergy.
Roi does allude to the variety of figures he treats as unofficial clergy
(p. 337), but he does so without any reference whatsoever to the
large Soviet ethnographic corpus describing many figures of this
sorta body of literature quite problematical, certainly, but hardly
314 d ev in d ew e e se
discountable simply for the sheer mass of data it makes available
and offers no serious discussion of the nature of these religious
specialists. Instead of a description, or case study, for example, of
even an individual faith-healer, we find merely a Soviet-style list
of some of the activities undertaken by unregistered clergy who,
we are told, went by a variety of names. We have the sense here of
looking through Soviet categories wrongly (or just unilluminatingly)
imposed upon a reality the terms do not fit. Roi then shows usall
too oftenjust the Soviet terms, without the reality below them;
thus, like other Sovietological students of Islam in the Soviet context,
he not only reifies the Soviet categories in the process, but legitimizes
the Soviet approach to religion. Indeed, at one point, Roi himself
creates a new category, it would seem, of authentic itinerant
mullas, who indeed, went from place to place; how these are to
be distinguished from inauthentic itinerant mullas is not explained.
(Presumably the criterion is not their travels, as his phrasing implies,
but one wonders if Roi means to distinguish mullas who perform
certain rites as authentic, as opposed to other mullas or healers,
who could not be.)
Rois discussion, moreover, of the relationssometimes hostile,
but often co-operativebetween registered and unregistered clergy
relations that immediately render the phrase parallel Islam, with
its implication of non-intersecting paths, inappropriateought to
raise the question of whether this is the proper dichotomy through
which these individuals, and the religious constituencies they rep-
resented, can best be categorized. Perhaps the style of religious
practice ought to be the focus, or the attitude towards the Soviet
government. For example, did only normative mullas seek ties with
registered clergy, or did thaumaturgical, shamanizing, faith-healing
clerics do so as well? Is it not a confusion or misrepresentation to
lump these types of unregistered religious specialists together with
those who just happened not to get registered? Here again these
Soviet legal categorizations were both arbitrary and simplistic (not
to mention counterproductive, even from the standpoint of Soviet
policy), and while there is certainly merit in framing them for the
reader, it is hardly helpful to adopt, or merely tacitly accept, them as
if they represent some objective reality or indigenous category.
The treatment of shrines in Chapter 5 (pp. 36382), finally, is
especially poor, as it reflects little appreciation of the roles and
functions of holy placeseither throughout the Muslim world or
in the particular areas of Soviet Islamoutside the Soviet and
Sovietological framework. Once again we are faced with an
exclusivist vision of what constitutes Islam: though acknowledging
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 315
how widespread the phenomenon of pilgrimage to saints shrines is in
the Muslim world, Roi essentially adheres to the Soviet evaluation,
stressing that the cult of holy men or saints was extrinsic to Quranic
Islam (p. 364). Here, though, the sources Roi uses to supplement
his archival documents are revealing. For general information and
background on the phenomenon of shrines and pilgrimage he cites,
alongside the grand old man of anti-Muslim propaganda, Liutsian
Klimovich, a few of the well-known Soviet ethnographers who
doubled as producers of anti-religious literature. These include some
who now, in post-Soviet times, have switched to becoming purveyors
of expert information on Islam in Central Asia (not only during
the time when they and their colleagues were attempting to suppress
it, but both before and after the Soviet period as well). They have
thereby gained an even broader audience (especially through English
translations sponsored by Western academics who ought to know
better, such as the disturbingly ethnocentric example of prescriptive
ethnography published by S. P. Poliakov, Everyday Islam),3 for an
essentially unreconstructed Soviet view of religious lifehardly a
field in which Soviet scholarship was leading the way, for obvious
reasons.
For the locations of specific shrines, moreover, Roi simply refers
readers to the woefully incomplete and undocumented maps and
lists of shrines found in the 1985 work, Mystics and Commissars
(from the same London firm that published Rois study), by
Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush.4 This is particularly dismaying
precisely because Rois use of archival materials put him in a
position to add substantively to our data on shrine-related religious
activity in the Soviet era. Yet despite the centrality of the archival
data in nearly all sections of the book, there is often a frustrating
reluctance to lay out the full detail that was undoubtedly given in the
original archival source. For example, when the closure, or opening,
or registration of five shrines in a given locality is mentioned, one
wonders why readers who have stuck with the author through the
mass of data he marshals must remain forever ignorant of which
shrines were thus affected unless and until they travel to Moscow to
check the archival reference. It is possible that the sources themselves
are this vague, but this seems unlikely: to travel this far, but not the
3
Sergei P. Poliakov, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia,
ed. Martha Brill Olcott, trans. Anthony Olcott (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992);
cf. Ludmila Polonskaya and Alexei Malashenko, Islam in Central Asia (Reading:
Ithaca Press, 1994).
4
Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism
in the Soviet Union (London: C. Hurst, 1985).
316 d ev in d ew e e se
final few inches, into the specificity of the archival data on Soviet
Islam, leaves the journey incomplete, and providing that additional
detail would have raised the informationalif not the analytical
value of the study immeasurably.
It is, once again, precisely the Sovietological audience that is
likely to be led astray by the handling of shrines here; when we
are told, for example, that around 1960 Kazakstan had twenty-
three mazars, ten of which came under the jurisdiction of an archi-
tectural agency (p. 379), anyone familiar with even a small region in
Kazakstan or any other republic in Central Asia will immediately
know that the figure of twenty-three shrines for the entire republic
is essentially meaningless, but its specificity will undoubtedly lend
it credence in some circles. And when we read that the cult of holy
places had been perpetuated in particular by women as an integral
component of the syncretistic religion that had taken root among
them, the entire ritual conducted at these sites being permeated
with animistic ideas and magical elements associated with the
cult of nature (p. 365, italics mine), anyone familiar with Edward
Westermarcks Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation5 will
recognize the intellectual milieu reflected in this sort of approach,
as well as the scholarly stagnation of the Soviet academic establish-
ment that continued to use it. (It is worth noting that Soviet-trained
ethnographers have been quite slow to abandon it since the collapse
of the USSR.) But Sovietologists, though alert to the perils of
Soviet misinformation in some fields, and trained to read between
the lines of Soviet sources, may well not realize that they have been
led, by Roi, into the clutches of the typical, antiquated Soviet
analytical framework for interpreting popular religioncomplete
with the rhetoric of religious relics and survivals, and of
various cults and -ismsor that this sort of approach is now
itself something of a relic, surviving chiefly, if not yet exclusively,
in Soviet-trained scholarship.
Rois discussion of Sufism in Chapter 6 continues the dual track
of important archival data alongside a frustratingly inadequate
conceptual framework. In this case, the data will be useful for building
our understanding of the profile of Sufism in the Soviet environment,
though it is a terminological minefield, filled (perhaps in the original
documents, certainly in Rois presentation) with imprecisions and
assumptions that will hamper its interpretation; as for the conceptual
5
Edward Westermarck, Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation: Lectures
on the Traces of Pagan Beliefs, Customs, Folklore, Practices and Rituals Surviving
in the Popular Religion and Magic of Islamic Peoples (London: Macmillan, 1933;
repr. Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1973).
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 317
framework, this is clearly a low point in the book as a whole. The
presentation of Sufisms history in the Muslim regions that came
under Russian and Soviet rule is simply embarrassing; this is not
surprising, insofar as Rois chief source on the history of Sufism is
again Mystics and Commissars by Bennigsen and Wimbush, whose
presentation of the history of Sufism in Central Asia and the Volga
Ural region, at least, is best ignored altogether. From this work,
Roi adopts not only the irredeemably flawed historical survey, but
specific misinterpretations relevant to the Soviet era as well, such as
the ridiculous assignment of localities in which particular orders
were supposedly strong (e.g. pp. 386, 402), or the oft-repeated
but baseless claims that the so-called Hairy Ishans of Kyrgyzstan
were an offshoot of the Yasav order (p. 398). One wonders whether
the continuators of the Sovietological approach to Soviet Islam
ever look at scholarship produced outside their own school, or
outside the circle of Soviet anti-religious propagandists now refor-
med for the post-Soviet age. Certainly Rois bibliography gives
no indication that he has taken stock, for instance, of the important
work done in recent years on the history of Sufi communities in
Central Asia, the VolgaUral region, and the North Caucasus by
such specialists as Jurgen Paul, Jo-Ann Gross, Robert McChesney,
Bakhtiyar Babajanov, Ashirbek Muminov, Anke von Kugelgen,
Florian Schwarz, Hamid Algar, Allen Frank, or Michael Kemper.
More troubling, however, than the historical misrepresentations
(though in part rooted in them) is the repeated characterization
of Sufism as non-conformist Islam, as an opposition current, as
extremist and hostile (p. 385), and as a force of validation for non-
establishment Islam (p. 393). Roi is clearly out of his element
here, relying by turns on Western Sovietologists and Soviet (anti-
religious) specialists even for basic doctrinal information on Sufism.
In part this continues the pattern evident elsewhere in the book, of
adopting an arbitrary standard for labelling what is Islamic and
what is not. Roi declares, for instance, that Sufism supported the cult
of holy men, which is again characterized as not consistent with
the teachings of the Quran (p. 393). One senses here that Roi
is simply adopting the analysis of his Soviet interpreters of Islam, not
of any specific articulated Muslim position, but in either case he
is ignoring the reality that Islamic literature alone, not to mention
actual practice over the centuries, is replete with defences of pilgrim-
age to saints shrines. The pre-eminence in certain vocal Muslim
circles today of Wahhab-style opposition to shrine visitation hardly
makes such a characterization definitive for the entire Muslim
world or for all of Muslim history, let alone for any particular
318 d ev in d ew e e se
region of the USSR or for Soviet Islam as a whole. To his credit, he
takes issue here (p. 387, n. 5) with the insistence, typical in Soviet
ethnographic scholarship, that many Sufi and Muslim practices in
the Soviet context were derived from shamanism. Nevertheless he
lapses into a presentation of a stereotyped Sufism based in the false
dichotomies of Soviet and Sovietological treatment, which are left
uncorrected and unmitigated by more sober assessments of the history
of Sufi communities in what became Soviet territories, or indeed
anywhere else in the world.

RELIGIOSITY AND PRACTICE:


WHO OWNS ISLAM?

Part IV purports to deal with Muslim religious practice in its social


context. Chapter 7, The Sociology of Islam, attempts to explore
the familial and communal setting for Muslim religious practice. Once
again, it brings forth useful data, but never truly comes to grip with
the basic issue of the relationship of lived Islam with the abstract
norms adopted by the Soviets and by Roi as the standard for Muslim
religious observance. Similarly, it never exploresbeyond those
Soviet categoriesthe markers of Islamic religiosity and religious
identity that are more appropriate, and more instructive, to consider
from an indigenous perspective. As a result, Rois account never quite
grasps the crucial intersection of religiosity with the social context
that this chapter promises to explore. There is, of course, a specific
problem at work here, namely the inherent unreliability of the data
sought after in the Soviet (and post-Soviet) contextfor instance, as
a means for the categorization of people as confirmed or profound
believers, or as moderate believers, etc.but there is again a broader
deficiency not only in the measuring, but in the basic understanding,
of religiosity.
True, Roi does note the centrality of practice over belief in
Islam, and he takes issue with the numbers on mosque attendance
as a reliable indicator of religiosity or religious identification
(p. 453). But having acknowledged the meaninglessness of measuring
religiosity in terms of the performance of what he calls the stipulated
rites (p. 460), he not only proceeds to do just that, but goes
further and loads his discussion of religious practice with a host of
assumptions about the suitably religious motivations and standards
for ritual observance, and even the mindset deemed proper for the
practitioner.
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 319
For instance, his discussion of the presumed motivations under-
lying religious practice is again unable to transcend the boundaries
of Soviet analysis. When he cites a survey from Uzbekistan showing
that 36 per cent of those who performed Muslim rites did so under
the influence of parents, relatives, or their surroundings, 35 per cent
out of habit, 19 per cent out of a lack of a worthy alternative,
and only 10 per cent out of religious motivation (p. 462), it is
disturbing that Roi is unwilling to step back and note, for his reader,
the absurdity of such a formulation. The basic language of distin-
guishing religious from non-religious motives for the performance
of religious rites obviously begs the question of what a religious
motive is. Is it one based somehow in theology, for example in hope
of heaven or fear of hell? Is it one rooted in altruism or selflessness?
Is it a motive that is solely spiritual in its understanding? If so,
then we have implicitly cut off the social component that was sup-
posedly our focus. If we so etherealize religiosity that we exclude
a desire for health, economic success, fertility, or social harmony
and camaraderie from the range of motivations that can be labelled
religious, we have demolished or devalued much of what makes
religious practice interesting throughout the world. Is it religious
when a Muslim seeks consciously to keep the Prophets example
before him in modelling his own behaviour, but not religious when
he merely conforms to societal norms that were themselves con-
structed and regularly reinforced on the basis of presumed imitation
of the Prophet? Why should scholars be bound to accept the antiseptic
vision of religiosity as a purely intellectual or spiritual affair that
is instantly sullied and debased if ordinary human needs are felt to
be addressed through it?
The very act of presenting a survey framed in such terms, of
course, was part of the project of undermining religion, since it served
to remind those who performed Muslim rites that the state (or at
least the academics who represented it), and not the informants,
served as the arbiter of what was religious and what was not. Yet one
inevitably wonders if the range of those who performed Muslim
rites envisioned in the survey included those, for example, who
uttered the bismillah before stepping onto a bus. If, as seems likely,
it did not, why was this injection of a religious formula into the
most mundane parts of everyday life deemed less revealing about
religiosity than the performance of the Friday noon prayer at a
mosque? What manner of insight did the framers of the survey have
into the motivation and spiritual state of a statistically significant
sample of the Muslim population, allowing them to determine that
religiosity would be better revealed by those who participated in
320 d ev in d ew e e se
rites that were officially discouraged (and who were thus
potentially subject to guilt or embarrassment in the presence of
the surveyor and a corresponding tendency to explain away their
participation) than by those who persisted in essentially private
religious performance outside the purview of the state?
Even when discussing practice, moreover, Roi slips back into
a focus on belief, and specifically on the theological component
whose depreciation he notes in the Soviet context (p. 462). One
could argue, of course, that the depreciation of the theological
component in Islam was the rule, not the exception, and hardly
unique to the Soviet environment: when did theology or theological
sophistication, or even paying any attention to what counts in
Islamic tradition as theology, become the benchmark for judging
religiosity? Yet even when a Soviet assessment from 1983 speaks of
the theological components depreciation, alongside the complex
of Islamic traditions and rituals that was proving to be the most
dynamic element of believers daily lives (p. 462), Roi adopts the
accounts evaluation of this purported shift as a fall in religiosity. If
it is true that a gradual curtailing of the fundamentals of Islam
was taking place, or that mosque attendance was becoming a social
event, as the Soviet assessment concludes, then perhaps it is time to
acknowledge that we have possibly misidentified the fundamentals,
and to shift our focus away from theology and towards the social
context for religious practice. In counting only the explicitly
theological as religious, not only the Soviets, but Roi and other
Sovietological students of Islam in the USSR as well, participate
in divorcing religion from the skein of lifeways that in fact stands as
the more legitimate marker of religiosity in the social environment.
Certainly, some religious people, especially in the modern world,
like their religion strained and filtered and distilled in this way, but
that does not make it a suitable standpoint from which to assess
religious life in other times or places.
Elsewhere in Chapter 7 we are told, for example, that disdaining
pork is hardly a sign of religiosity (p. 464). But that is exactly what
it is, if we cease strangling religiosity to the verge of lifelessness.
Indeed, familiarity with even a few epic traditions, or popular tales
of Islamization and of struggles to establish and defend Islam (as
opposed to the recent writings of clergy alone) should suffice to
remind us that aversion to pork has for centuries been a central
marker of religiously defined communal identity, and remains so
today, often becoming (along with circumcision) the pre-eminent
divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, whether the latter are
Kalmyks, Chinese, or Russians. Is it the chief concern of the most
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 321
deeply spiritual? Perhaps not. Is it the cultural inheritance of
many who never perform other religious rites and would not
profess any level of belief in religion? Of course. But to label it on
that basis as hardly a sign of religiosity once again evidences such
a crippled notion of what religion entails as to strip the category
of any possible meaning in a social context. The fact that Soviet
specialists on religious affairs or on Islam adopted such a notion
is not surprising, but merely to present their analysis without calling
attention to its inadequacies does a disservice to the reader, especially
the Sovietological reader, who may be all too easily lulled into
acquiescence.
Essentially the same approach is continued in Chapter 8, which
deals with the broader social rites of the month of fasting, and the
two major [ds or bayrams coinciding, respectively, with the end
of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Makka. Here, as in Chapter 7,
we again find the themes of implying a peculiarly Soviet venue for
developments actually evidenced in other contexts as well, and of
applying irrelevant standards to religious practice. Roi refers, for
example, to the curtailing of the length of the evening prayers during
the month of fasting as a compromise between Islamic tradition
and Soviet reality (p. 473), overlooking the Muslim reality that
Islamic tradition itself was full of such compromises. Similarly, he
implies that excusing the imperfect performance of rites (e.g. p. 454,
n. 100), or giving dispensations from fasting during Ramadan
(p. 479), was again solely a Soviet phenomenon, rather than a
leitmotif of juridical theory and practice for centuries. Ironically, on
one of the rare occasions when he notes that the concessions to the
strict performance of religious obligations he describes during the
Soviet era were observable in earlier times as well, Roi hastens to
reaffirm the artificial standard by which, he implies, we should judge
Islam in the Soviet context: Roi cites a Russian article explaining that
the pattern of proxy Islam, whereby the more observant older
generation in effect represented younger kinsmen who were not
expected to be rigorous in religious practice (a phenomenon more
recently described among the Kazaks in Bruce Privratskys important
new book, Muslim Turkistan)6 was reported already in the late
nineteenth century, but adds, It should be stressed that Muslim law
made no distinction between the obligation to pray of different age
6
Bruce G. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory
(Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001), esp. 7493. Privratskys book offers an
alternative to both the Soviet and Sovietological approaches, and shows what can be
achieved, in terms of understanding the impact of the Soviet era on Muslim religious
life, by abandoning both.
322 d ev in d ew e e se
groups (p. 441, n. 50). The lesson we are apparently intended to
draw here is that whatever actual practice in a given region might
be, religiosity ought to be measured not against that customary
practice, but always against an ideal of Muslim law. While such
a lesson makes good sense from within a particular religious pers-
pectivethough not a prominent one in the area under discussionit
is unfortunately unilluminating with regard to a scholarly under-
standing of the reality of religion in the Soviet (or pre-Soviet)
environment.
Elsewhere in Chapter 8 there is a fine example of the kind of
misunderstanding that can result from a narrow focus on the Soviet
period even when attempting to account for developments in Soviet
Islam. In line with the theme of the ignorance of Muslim clerics,
Roi notes (p. 474) that special clerics, known as qaris, would
sometimes be enlisted to recite the Qur]an because many of the
registered imams were unable to do so. It will immediately be
obvious to some that the qar as a specialized cleric who recites
the Qur]an predates the Soviet era, but it is worth pointing out the
peculiarly Soviet development that is obscured by Rois treatment
here:
1. Traditional society involves many individuals in the functioning
of mosques, ranging from those who oversee mosque finances or
groundskeeping, to the imams who lead the prayer and the many
potential khatbs who give the Friday sermon, to the specialists
who recite the Qur]an or summon people to prayers, etc.
2. Then the Soviets severely reduce this staff, assigning only one
figure to supervise a registered mosques functions and labelling
him the imam, and expecting him also to give the Friday sermon
(hence adjusting his title to imam-khatb, functions not typically
joined in other contexts, though indeed combined, tellingly, in a
similar context of restrictions on religion in the name of forced
modernization, i.e. Kemalist Turkey).
3. In the course of this reduction of official staff, the Soviets also
apply their inapt terminology of clergy to the context of the
mosque, including the new imam-khatb as its basic clerical
staff, but excluding the many others, such as the qar, from
the ranks of the clergy (though as Roi notes, there was some
debate over whether the mu]adhdhin should hold clerical status
or not).
4. Then Roi, taking the Sovietized imam-khatb as the norm,

accepts the Soviet criticism about the regular imams inability to
recite the Qur]an as evidencing his inadequacy or ignorance, and
presents the introduction of the qar, as a specialized cleric, as if
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 323
it were a concession necessitated by the ineptitude of so many
imam-khatbs.
Chapter 9 is focused on ritual practice at the personal level of
the family and individual, examining the data on rites of passage, and
discussing also the status of women in Soviet Islam. It is here that
the absence of any discussion, or even a brief digest, of ethnographic
accounts of how Islam was lived in the Soviet context is especially
deplorable. Instead we have only a skewed presentation based
overwhelmingly on reports of those whose duty it was to limit,
control, obstruct, and reduce religiosity and religious behaviour.
There is no effort to set the discussion in the context of scholarly
literature on specific issues for comparative purposes (i.e. on the status
of women), and a mass of data set in the framework of Soviet
interpretation substitutes for any broader analytical or conceptual
framework.

ISLAM, STATE, AND NATION

Part V, finally, looks at Islam and the Regime. Chapter 10 examines


the policy of the central government with regard to Islam, and
its implementation, focusing on the role of ideology and of questions
of internal security and foreign policy in shaping regime policy. While
interesting, the discussion of ideologys role (pp. 56372) deals
only with the impact of ideology on policy, not on the analytical
paradigms noted above, which divorced religion from much of life
(and certainly from political and national life). In many respects
those analytical paradigms are arguably of greater long-term con-
sequence than Soviet policy, because of their appropriation by
the Soviet Muslim elites through their education and corporate
culture.
Chapter 11 explores the different ways in which local
governmental organs related to the stated policy of the central
government, ranging from hostility towards practitioners of Islam
to active assistance of and co-operation with such practitioners in
thwarting official policy. This is one of the most interesting chapters
in the book, and several of the incidents recounted on the basis of
archival material provide revealing vignettes of the governmental
quandaries entailed by Muslim religious practice (e.g. the saga of
the battle over official registration of a religious association in the
Tatar town of Bugulma (pp. 6546)). In accounts of such incidents
may well lie the chief value of Rois study, as exemplified by the
telling comment, referring to the Tatar ASSR from 1946, that local
324 d ev in d ew e e se
government and party organs were said neither to know anything
about Islamic life nor to be interested in hearing about it (p. 626).
Rois discussion of administrative measures (pp. 6638) employed
to curtail religious activity is likewise informative, and reminds
us that however much CARC was willing to cite constitutional
guarantees of freedom of conscience in bureaucratic support of its
own approach (cf. p. 555), its opposition to administrative measures
was limited to internal memos, and in public it inevitably backed the
often harsh measures of local officials (p. 673).
Chapter 12, lastly, explores the conundrum of Islam and
Nationalism, adding some useful data, but again asking the same
questions that occupied the debate of the 1970s and 1980s (when
the flawed dichotomy of Islam versus nationalism was framed) and
persisted even in the altered political landscape of the 1990s. It
perhaps goes without saying that this book, like nearly all Sovieto-
logical treatments of the Muslim peoples of the USSR, effectively
essentializes the ethnic and national divisions of those peoples
as reified by the Soviet regime itself. (See, for instance, Rois list
of Muslim nationalities at pp. 567.) Such essentializations of
ethnic identifications appear already in the preface, along with
their supposed religious implications, as with Rois repetition (p. xii)
of the persistent but unfounded claim that the Kazaks were
Islamized only in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. (Rois
own material in fact demonstrates the meaninglessness of placing
Soviet-defined nations on a scale of being more Muslim or less
Muslim, but the topos is too deeply embedded in the literature to
be easily abandoned.) We cannot explore here the full range of
misguided interpretations rooted in the breathtaking myopia of
Sovietological assumptions about national identity among Soviet
Muslims. Suffice it to say that Central Asians, as well as other
Muslims in the USSR, had a much broader repertoire of communal
self-conceptions, rooted in understandings of collective origins and
of definitive lifeways that were thoroughly infused with religious
symbolism (and not merely attached to a parallel religious identity)
than has been realized, or matched, either by most Sovietological
scholars or by most of the indigenous elites who have declared
themselves the formulators and preservers of their peoples collective
identities, beginning with the jaddists.
The heart of the problem, it would appear, lies in a basic
misapprehension of the possibilities inherent in the relationship
between religion and nationalism, and in the unilluminating
questions that arise therefrom. Most of the literature on religion
versus nationalism tends to consider the religious element in
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 325
nationalism as something secondary, a possible attribute of the
essential reality of national or ethnic self-consciousness; the
image conveyed is one of loading up (or in some historical contexts,
unloading) a set of beliefs and practices deemed religiousa
category understood as narrowly as possible, in line with the min-
imalist definitions of religiosity noted earlier, and typically relegated
to the realm of cultureonto a basic core of individual and
collective identity that is almost invariably, in such approaches,
assumed to be ethnic or national in focus. The point is not just
that religious affiliation was a prime marker of communal identity,
but that basic communal identities, including familial and local
and even so-called ethnic and national, were themselves framed in
terms whose fundamental meanings could not be understood without
recourse to religious worldviews and practices.
Roi is in general more sanguine than I believe is warranted
with regard to the interest in and attachment to Islam on the part
of the Soviet-era elites among Muslim peoples, but even if we allow
his conclusion, his phrasing is revealing: he writes, for instance, of
the intelligentsia becoming aware of national distinctiveness and
displaying a growing interest in an Islamic heritage (p. 711). Insofar
as Islam was a central and definitive feature of the national heritage
of these elites, and was a key elementas late as the early twentieth
century in some quartersin pre-modern notions of communal
identity, Rois comments imply that something significant succeeded
in splitting the intelligentsia away from an organic link to the
religious distinctiveness and heritage of their community, which
the elites then had to rediscover. Herein, indeed, lie signs of the
fundamental misconception in the Islam versus nationalism dicho-
tomy: the division makes sense only from the standpoint of elites
who first learned to divorce religion from communal identity (and,
often, to look back to the pre-Islamic traditions of what they, attached
to an ethnic rather than religious focus of identity, understood as
their peopleswhether Turks, or Zoroastrian Iranians, etc.as
their real national spiritual heritage), and who subsequently had
to rediscover and re-understand their nations connection with
Islam. This, of course, reflects the Soviet view of historynot only
the simple presentation of Islam as an alien force, brought by the
Arabs who (unlike the Russians) could be spoken of as invaders
and conquerors, but also the whole view of a nation as an ethnically
and linguistically based unit that moves coherently through history.
But it was clearly not the Soviet regime alone that cut off the
local elites (or at least those local elements most inclined to regard
the Soviet experiment as potentially responsive to their newly defined
326 d ev in d ew e e se
national aspirations) from that organic link with earlier notions
of communal identity. Elements of the local intelligentsia had already
been weaned away from an organic connection with traditional
life, not just by the economic and cultural dislocations brought on by
colonial experience under Russian rule, but by the fundamental shifts
in outlook and worldview that marked their precursors among the
jaddist elements, who were hungry for modernism, increasingly
estranged from the structures and meaning of traditional religious
life, and inclined towards formulating a rational religion suitable
for their new lifestyle and cultural orientation. However extensive
the rediscovery of Islam by the national elites may have been, it was
rarely deep, since it could not move beyond the national mode of
communal identity whose reification was perhaps the Soviet eras
most important, if ironic, contribution.
As for the role of the Soviet-era clergy in this regard, Roi writes,
By the early 1980s the clergy were impressing upon believers that
their Islamic affiliation was in fact tantamount to their national
definition (pp. 43940). Here Roi lays the identification of Islamic
observance with respect for national customs at the feet of the
Muslim clergy, and presents this as something innovative (and
even subversive, culturally if not politically). In this interpretation
he apparently agrees with Soviet writers, though we may rightly
suspect that it was in fact the Soviet government that began linking
religion with nationalism as such, precisely by explaining religions
continued appeal not through the human needs met by religion
something Soviet ideology could not admitbut through the clergys
success in linking religion with honour for traditions and customs
located within the sort of denatured nationalism for which Soviet
ideology could find a more respectable, if still only temporary, place.
In a sense, of course, this linking of religion with nationalism was
innovative, given the relative novelty of nationalism itself, but it
would be disingenuous not to point out that Islamas a focus of
communal affiliation, as a lifestyle and set of practices, and as a
worldviewhad been an integral part of the lives of Central Asian
peoples long before they were divided into nations in the 1920s.
But it was hardly a profound departure from tradition; it was only
natural for the clergy to present religious rites as national rites,
since religion had been at the core of pre-national communal
identities, and remained so outside the elites.
The problem in analysis, then, lies not in identifying which rites
are religious or Islamic and which are national; the problem lies
in framing the question in terms of assumptions of a national
identity free of, or independent of, a religious identity (assumptions
i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 327
that are themselves a Soviet construct), or of framing national identity
as the larger and obviously more crucial focus, of which religious
identity might or might not be a component. To pretend, first, that
Islam lay as a veneer over a firmer foundation of national traditions
that not only predated Islam but survived alongside it, supposedly
untouched, and, second, that this Islamic veneer was then exploited
and manipulated by the Soviet-era clergy in an attempt to let
Islamic religious practices ride on the back of those national
foundations, is not only to misread badly the historical cultural
heritage of Central Asia and the other Muslim regions of the USSR,
but to continue the essentially Soviet enterprise of attempting to
remove religion from communal identity (in which enterprise the very
creation of nations played a crucial role).

The six broad questions framed by Roi in the Afterword (pp. 71330)
as the backdrop to his study show clearly that an exploration of
religious life is not what was envisaged here, and that religion was
only regarded as significant if and when it could be linked with the
history of political structures, bureaucracy, and policy. Here we see
most clearly the legacy of the Sovietological approach, and the way it
has consistently served to muddle, rather than clarify, the essentially
religious phenomenon of Islam in the Soviet Union.
One of those six issuescan one legitimately talk of Soviet Islam,
or were the differences between the areas of Muslim concentration
in that vast country so great that they lacked any common features?
(p. 714)is resolved to Rois satisfaction as revealing a single
Islam which existed throughout the Soviet Union, within a single
body politic that ensured a shared political framework with which
Islam had constantly to contend (p. 723). Roi phrases the question
in such a way as to tilt the response towards acknowledging
a coherent phenomenon of Union-wide Soviet Islam; who would
deny that the different regions lacked any common features, after
all? But it is noteworthy, first, that the common features he stresses
are rooted not in Islam, but in the Soviet polity; and second, one
may rightly observe that such a conclusion is indeed predetermined
by the body of sources Roi has used, namely Soviet government
documents, to the exclusion of other perspectives that might have
conveyed more of the regional particularism and local flavour of
Soviet Islam. The regions were indeed different, despite the common
experience of Soviet rule, certainly with regard to patterns of religious
life, and even with regard to the issues that Rois book addresses.
One should beware, then, of generalizing from one region to the
others, or to a whole, without clear evidence.
328 d ev in d ew e e se

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

A word is in order about the handling of religious terminology,


both in the glossary and in the book as a whole, which will dismay
readers familiar with Islamic studies. The variety of local forms of
this terminology presents problems, to be sure, but the reliance on
Anglicized forms of Russianized versions of Islamic terms, without
offering an Arabic standard equivalent when appropriate, is lam-
entable, and occasionally the treatment of important terms is simply
bizarre.
For instance, Roi tells us that the fast of Ramadan is known in
468; cf. p. xxi),
the Soviet Union as uraz (from Turkish uruc fast) (p.
and indeed he uses the nonsensical form uraz to refer to the fast
throughout his work. The Turkish term he refers to, however (more
properly oruc in modern Turkish), is generally recognized as an
early borrowing into Turkic, with a prothetic vowel, from an Iranian
(possibly Sogdian) form that underlies also the Persian term for
fasting, ruzah, and clearly is not the source of the term used for the
fast in the modern languages of Soviet Muslims. The Persian form
is reflected directly in the modern Tajik term for the fast (ruza), as
well as in the Uzbek form (roza), and also underlies the forms in
other Turkic languages in which the prothetic vowel does appear
(i.e. Turkmen oraza, Kazak oraza, Kyrgyz orozo, Bashkir uradha,
Tatar uraza), while the Russians use uraza as their equivalent of
the indigenous term, undoubtedly borrowed from Tatar. If in
fact the documents Roi has explored use the term uraz for the fast,
this calls for discussion, perhaps highlighting the cultural illiteracy
it signals on the part of the officials who wrote them. While we can
hardly fault Roi for refraining from etymological and derivational
explorations in this case, certainly even a tangential familiarity with
any of the indigenous terms for such a central facet of Muslim
religious life as the fast of Ramadan (to which Roi devotes some
twenty pages) would have prevented the adoption of the form uraz
throughout the book. (Did Roi somehow read the actual form as
including a Russian genitive ending, or just borrow the usage from
others? That the former was the case is suggested by his parallel use
of the form jinaz throughout the work to refer to the Muslim funeral
prayer, i.e. Arabic jinaza/janaza, for which the forms in Soviet
Muslim languages (e.g. Tajik janoza var. jinoza, Uzbek janaza,
Turkmen jnaza, Kazak zhanaza, Kyrgyz janaza, Karakalpak zhinaza,
Bashkir ynaza) bespeak a different rendering.) To compound
the problem, Roi repeatedly refers to the celebration marking the
end of Ramadan using the Russianized compound form uraz-bayram,

i s l a m a n d t h e l e g a c y o f s o vi e t o l o g y 329
instead of a form recognizable in any of the Soviet Muslim languages,
(for example with the Turkic possessive suffix, as in Turkmen oraza
bayram).
It is likewise not clear, for example, why the term for the night-time
supererogatory prayer during Ramadan, tarawh, becomes tarawa
throughout the book (though tarawh does appear in the glossary).

There are a host of other inconsistencies in transliteration as well.
Why do we find qalym, for instance, but kaitarma instead of qaytarma
or qaitarma; why do we find namaz for namaz, and mazar for mazar,
but nikoh for nikah; why is haftiaq used for haft-i yak or haftiyak;
or why instead of gul-i surkh or the like do we find guli-surh,
especially when the Russianized khujum is used (p. 543) instead of
hujum (i.e. hujum)?

In sum, one wishes that the authors deep and pioneering explora-
tion into the archival material on many of the day-to-day issues
affecting Islam in the Soviet Union could have been accom-
panied by, and indeed could have itself inspired, a more profound
re-examination of the basic approaches, questions, and conceptual
frameworks that have stood for so long at the foundation of this
field of study, with some positive but many negative effects. We have
clearly not yet reached that point, and while we may lament that
this book does not take us there, it will nevertheless provide essential
information, and archival guidance, for the next stage. Rois
study is, in some respects, very much like the corpus of Soviet-era
ethnographic and anti-religious literature: no one interested in the
phenomenon can legitimately ignore the tremendous body of data
assembled and presented in such works, but we must find ways of
utilizing and digesting and interpreting the data while suspending
not just the overtly ideological rhetoric and prescriptive evaluations,
but the entire analytical and interpretative framework employed by
the authors in approaching their subject. In the case of Rois
book, the ideological factor is absent, but the more insidious inter-
pretative problems abound, and we face a similar task: looking
beyond the analytical frameworkso heavily shaped by the Sovieto-
logical enterprisethat pervades the work, while utilizing and
reinterpreting the enormous body of data the work makes available,
and adding to it both specific data and a basic understanding drawn
from many other sources.
At one point in his discussion of Soviet religious policy and its
implementation, Roi attributes the lack of effective and specific
measures affecting Muslim communities in part to an institutional
holdover, in effect, from the Tsarist period. He refers to the Tsarist
330 d ev in d ew e e se
administrations generally lackadaisical perception of its Muslim
borderlands, particularly Turkistan, and affirms that it somehow
affected the bureaucracy of the Soviet period, which made use
first of the experts of the former regime and then, when they
disappeared, of their books and reports, inheriting and internalising
many, if not all, of their axioms and conclusions (p. 563, italics
mine). Much the same can be said, regrettably, about Rois reliance
upon the Sovietological enterprise, and even former Soviet academics,
for the interpretative setting in which he places the impressive data
he has assembled. While we must not lose sight of the fact that the
data itself is thoroughly imbued with the Soviet mindset, it could
have been employed to more illuminating, and satisfying, effect had
the author not inherited or internalized the stultifying intellectual
legacy of Sovietological Islamology.

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