How the Soviet State Built the Islam It Feared: Religion, Control, and the Roots of Radicalism in Uzbekistan
July
28
2026
Illustration by Dinmukhamed Kairulla.
The standard account blames post-Soviet Uzbekistan's religious conservatism and radicalization on external forces — Gulf money, imported ideology, the collapse of the Soviet order. That account is incomplete. Today's radicalism cannot be explained by the Soviet past alone, but that past matters and is worth naming. The Soviet state did not merely repress Islam; it re-engineered it, dismantling the region's Sufi-Hanafi tradition while cultivating a puritan, anti-traditionalist current it could control — one that later became the raw material for salafism. The instrument was the official clerical apparatus the state itself built. The tragedy is that the most adaptive, moderate forms of Central Asian Islam were destroyed by the very power that claimed to modernize the region.
The Pre-Soviet Inheritance
For most of its history, Central Asian Islam was flexible, syncretic, and plural — which matters because the "traditional Islam of our ancestors" invoked today by both the Uzbek state and its salafi critics bears little resemblance to it. Islam acquired a genuine Turkic base only in the tenth century, when the Karakhanids became the first Turkic dynasty to adopt it, by integration rather than rupture: customary law (adat) survived, doctrine settled into the Hanafi madhhab and Maturidi theology, and Sufism carried the religion into daily life. Conversion required only the shahada; music, dance, figural art, and alcohol were not systematically suppressed, and women went unveiled in Turkic dress. The synthesis associated with al-Ghazali (d. 1111) later consolidated Sunni orthodoxy and folded Sufism into the mainstream while pushing philosophy to the margins — the region became one of the most "Ghazalian" in the Muslim world — yet it preserved the "useful sciences" of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine and never fully reached the villages, where saint cults, ziyarat, and pre-Islamic rites such as Navruz endured.
The decisive mass Islamization of the Turkic population came later still, in Golden Horde Khwarazm of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where Islam spread for the first time in the Turkic language — through Quran translations and a Turkic religious literature — within a strikingly plural environment of Hanafi Sunnism, Mu'tazilite rationalism, and local Sufi orders. This Khwarazmian phase, not the later Timurid court, was the true precursor of the region's cultural flowering. Orthodoxy monopolized public life only in the later eras. The Shaybanids of the sixteenth century still ran a dual legal order inherited from the Chinggisids — sharia governing urban, family, and property matters, the yasa and adatgoverning war, land, and political power — alongside a living court culture of miniature painting, music, and Turkic poetry, with local drinks such as musallas and buza an accepted part of life well into the nineteenth century. Even devout rulers built no theocracy.
This Turkic and Turko-Mongol inheritance — the Karakhanids, the Chinggisid states of Golden Horde Khwarazm and the Chagatai ulus, the Timurids who claimed Chinggisid legitimacy, and the direct Chinggisid descendants of the Shaybanids and Ashtarkhanids — is still not treated as the central engine of Islamization in Central Asia, neither under the Soviet system nor under Islam Karimov nor today. The erasure is not only official; Uzbekistan's radical "new Muslims" reduce the region's Islamic history to the Arab conquest and a cult of the Arab conquerors. The paradox is that in doing so they follow Soviet orientalism, which consistently minimized the Turkic and Turko-Mongol role while elevating the Perso-Arabic strand.
The rupture — religion as an instrument of closure, prohibition, and control — came with the Manghits, who seized real power in Bukhara after Nadir Shah's eighteenth-century invasions and built the region's first openly religious despotism. Through the office of the rais they compelled outward piety while secular learning decayed; the endowment documents of 1786–87 record donors explicitly barring funds from the "useless books" of philosophy, astronomy, and kalam. It was in this late period, not the medieval one, that heavy female seclusion and the urban spread of the paranja took hold.
Russian colonialism then hardened the tradition twice over. The conquest turned Islam into a form of cultural self-defense: the paranja spread further as a marker of separation from Orthodox settlers, everyday religiosity intensified, and preachers cast Russian rule as divine punishment for laxity — so that much of the region's modern strict religiosity dates from the colonial encounter, not the deep past. More consequentially, the empire pioneered the model of managed religion the Soviets would inherit. Its chief architect, the orientalist Nikolai Ostroumov, understood that crushing Islam outright would only provoke resistance, and built control through loyal ulema, mosques, and madrasas — even editing the khutbafor the Russian tsar into a form palatable to local sensibilities. Control through a co-opted clergy rather than outright ban, religious form retained while its content served the state: this became the template the Soviet state would inherit and refine, turning religion into a political tool for managing and mobilizing the population.
The Liberal Islam of the Jadids and Its Destruction by Stalinism
The Russian conquest produced not only conservatism. Its second, equally consequential response was an attempt to rethink Islam itself and adapt it to the modern world. This reform took the name jadidism (from the Arabic usul-i jadid, "new method"), but its content ran far beyond schooling. The jadids sought a modern Muslim society in which Islam coexisted with science, secular education, civil equality, national culture, and openness to the world — one of the first attempts to shape a liberal form of Islam compatible with a modern state and an industrial age.
The movement's intellectual founder was the Crimean Tatar reformer Ismail Gasprinsky, whose ideas spread quickly among the Muslims of the Russian Empire. In Turkestan its leaders were, tellingly, religious figures — imams, mullahs, and theologians — among them Mahmudhoja Behbudi, Munavvar Qari Abdurashidkhanov, Musa Saidjanov, Abduqodir Shakuri, and Ishaqhon Tura Ibrat. Most jadid leaders were not secular intellectuals but clerics trying to reform Islam from within rather than abandon it. Their reforms outran their time. In place of rote memorization they introduced comprehension-based teaching, the natural sciences, history, geography, mathematics, and foreign languages. Shakuri, well before the revolution, opened a girls' school in Samarkand — taught by his wife, Razia — and then merged it with his boys' school into coeducation, to the fury of the local clergy. Munavvar Qari proposed a radical reform of the waqf system, redirecting much of its income to secular education, science, and public need, and organized youth associations modeled on European scouting for civic formation.
One method of jadid reform was to recharge religious vocabulary with secular meaning. Ma'rifat, in Sufi usage the inner knowledge of God, became a byword for education, science, enlightenment, and social modernization. Even inside the region's traditional Muslim states, reform was attempted: in the Khanate of Khiva, the vizier Islam-Khoja built a modern administration, opened secular schools, and pushed broad reforms before conservative clergy and the Russian colonial administration — which saw a modernized Turkestan as a threat to imperial control — combined against him. He was assassinated in 1913, his reforms unfinished. His opponents were the kadimists (from qadim, "old"), traditional clergy who defended the classical madrasa and rejected the new methods; the alliance of conservative clergy and colonial administration repeatedly checked the jadid project.
After Soviet power was established, the jadids treated cooperation with the new regime as a temporary, forced alliance — a way of using the modernization the Soviets promised to prepare Uzbekistan for an eventual independent, secular future of its own. The central figure in preserving the jadid legacy through this period was Faizulla Khojaev, chairman of the government of the Uzbek SSR and himself a student of the jadids. Around him, for a time, the remaining jadid elite and their modernizing project found shelter. Khojaev was arguably the most talented and accomplished statesman in Uzbekistan's modern history, and he might well have become, for Uzbekistan, a figure of the stature of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Stalin's purges cut that path short: he was shot in 1938, and with him the political tradition of jadidism was extinguished for good.
The jadids' influence was nonetheless vast: they stood at the very origins of the modern Uzbek, Tatar, Bashkir, Uyghur, Crimean Tatar, and Kazakh nations. After 1917, many took part in fighting illiteracy, building education, advancing women's rights, and creating a modern national culture — achievements the Soviet state later claimed as its own. Under Stalin, jadidism was almost entirely destroyed: its leaders were shot or died in the camps, and the reform tradition was severed by force. The blow fell not only on the national intelligentsia but on the modernist current within Islam itself. Had that tradition survived, it might have become the natural alternative to both religious fundamentalism and state authoritarianism; the consequences of its destruction are felt across Central Asia still. Today the jadids are officially honored in Uzbekistan, but largely as national heroes — while their central idea, a deep religious reform and the building of an open, secular society, remains underappreciated and, in public memory, largely lost.
Destroying the Compromise
The region's answer to the fall of the Romanov order and the revolution in the metropole was the first secular, democratic state in its history: the Turkestan (Kokand) Autonomy, proclaimed in November 1917 with its capital at Kokand and suppressed after roughly seventy-two days in February 1918. For the first time not only in the region but arguably in world history, a state was formed jointly by Muslim parties, the secular jadid parties, Jewish parties, and with the participation of the Christian church and other non-Muslim peoples. In debate the autonomists advanced laws granting women the vote, guaranteeing private property across all classes, establishing independent secular and religious courts, and introducing parliamentarism, a multiparty system, and quotas for ethnic and religious minorities; a parliament was planned with roughly two-thirds Muslim and one-third guaranteed non-Muslim seats, and five official languages. Separation of church and state was proclaimed. The Bolshevik authorities in Tashkent, meanwhile, barred Muslims from the Tashkent Soviet — the governing body they had created — on the theory that "Muslims are not ready for political activity." The autonomists sought compromise and a treaty with Petrograd; Lenin's Bolsheviks refused, and Stalin, then People's Commissar for Nationalities, organized the bloody suppression — carried out in part by Armenian Dashnak detachments — whose memory scarred the Ferghana Valley and helped drive the region's later radicalization.
The defeat of the Autonomy did not kill the idea of a peaceful, secular coexistence. In 1919 the Provisional Ferghana (or Provisional Turkestan) Government emerged — one of the most forgotten yet most telling attempts at a multi-ethnic political space in Central Asia, and one built by the very "Basmachi" whom Soviet historiography painted as pure religious fanatics. Its composition demolishes the myth. The prime minister and commander-in-chief was Madaminbek; his deputy was the Ural Cossack colonel Konstantin Monstrov; the war minister was General Mukhanov; finance went to the jadid and merchant Khakimzhan Azizkhanov; interior and justice to the jurist Nansberg, of the Jewish community. Muslims, Russians, Tatars, and Jews sat in the cabinet, and the constitution they drafted proclaimed the equality of all Turkestan's inhabitants regardless of religion, origin, ethnicity, or sex — a strikingly modern program for the early twentieth century.
The movement drew not only on Muslim forces but on former tsarist officers, Turkish instructors, urban elites, and peasant associations, and it built a war ministry, an arms-supply system, and a propaganda apparatus; by October 1919 foreign representatives were visiting Madaminbek's residence and some 150-armed detachments operated under its authority. This was not spontaneous partisan activity but an attempt at alternative statehood — which is why the Bolsheviks treated it as mortally dangerous. It destroyed their claim that only Soviet power could unite disparate peoples and lead the "backward East" to modernity. Soviet power then reduced the whole phenomenon to "basmachestvo," folding secular jadids, peasants revolting against requisitioning, national forces, and criminal bands into one label. The substitution concealed an inconvenient fact: Turkestan had produced its own projects of modernization, secular statehood, and interfaith coexistence, against the Bolsheviks rather than thanks to them. Nansberg is again telling: in negotiations with the Red Army he declared that the rebels had nothing to repent, since the rising was caused by the abuses of Soviet officials — words entered into the protocols that amounted to an indictment of the early regime. The Bolsheviks used the talks as a tactical pause; after promises of compromise, Madaminbek was killed and the blame shifted to other commanders, deliberately stoking war within the resistance.
Radicalization accelerated only after the moderates were destroyed. War communism and forced requisitions hit the rural majority hardest, and many later risings were social and economic rather than religious, though Soviet historiography absorbed them into the "Basmachi" image. The regime leaned on the most brutal former field commanders: Hamrakul Tursunkulov, once in the anti-Soviet forces, became a pillar of the system and a three-time Hero of Socialist Labor whose collective farm ran on semi-feudal violence — farmers whipped over poor cotton harvests — while he took part in destroying the national intelligentsia. The state that manufactured the image of "religious fanatics" relied on the most radical elements when they were willing to serve.
The destruction of the moderates was the catalyst for a catastrophe later hidden behind the "Basmachi" label. Most of the armed risings of the early 1920s were driven by famine and war communism, and they turned savage. By 1919 Turkestan's grain deficit reached nearly 100 million poods. Where in 1916 the inner Russian provinces had supplied 22 million poods of grain in exchange for cotton, in 1917 they sent only 1.9 million, and by 1919 deliveries had all but ceased; Turkestan procured only 5.3 million poods — a few kilograms per person per year. The resulting famine killed on the order of a million people. The regime went on treating Turkestan as a raw-material and military base. Up to 100,000 Red Army soldiers were fed locally, and crops were destroyed in combat; a TurkCIK commission found that in September–October 1921 more than 80,000 farms were ruined and over 227,000 people were starving. Amid a fuel shortage the authorities burned food — hundreds of thousands of poods of vegetable oil as locomotive fuel, and in the Aral region even dried fish and oilcake — while a starving Turkestan hosted some 500,000 famine refugees from Russia in 1921–22, Moscow exported grain and fish to the Volga, and a special "hunger tax" was levied. A region on the edge of collapse was made a resource for the center.
Even parts of the Bolshevik leadership grasped the damage. In 1922, Sergo Ordzhonikidze wrote to Stalin that the violent breaking of the local order had brought Turkestan to a "real crisis," rejected the myth of the Basmachi as bandits cut off from the people, and demanded a full revision of policy (RGASPI f. 2, op. 1, d. 23181). More striking still, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, then chief of staff of the Red Army, acknowledged in his 1926 article that cotton confiscation and the food crisis had doomed Ferghana to famine, forced the population back from cotton to grain, produced unemployment he put at nearly 700,000, and created "a broad base for feeding the Basmachi detachments." Even Soviet commanders had to concede that mass resistance was fed above all by an economic catastrophe of the regime's own making.
Stalin's Cynical Neo-Imperial Islamization
By the start of the Second World War the regime had crushed the traditional religious elite, the heaviest blow falling on Sufi networks — ishans, sheikhs, dervishes, brotherhoods — seen as the most dangerous part of Muslim society. The dervishes drew particular hatred: many still wandered the towns and villages reciting the medieval poet Mashrab, reinterpreted against Soviet power. Mashrab himself was effectively banned, then "Sovietized," his image torn from its religious and Sufi context. The regime destroyed not only individual clerics but the social fabric of Sufism as a mass phenomenon.
The war forced a reversal. The German invasion was a political and moral shock as much as a military one; the leadership knew that much of the population felt no loyalty to a regime that had just delivered collectivization, famine, and terror, and for Central Asians the memory of the red terror, the destruction of the Autonomy, and the anti-religious campaign was fresh. Stalin turned to religion as a mobilizing tool. Pressure from the Western allies to soften religious policy is sometimes cited, though its weight is disputed; the pivot itself was unmistakable. In 1943 the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) was created — largely a revival of the tsarist model of controlling Islam, a Stalinist reincarnation of the imperial system. Islam was not freed but harnessed: SADUM issued fatwas calling on Muslims to defend the "Soviet motherland," abandoning in practice the separation of religion and state that Soviet law proclaimed. Soon the state ran the hajj under full control and at its own expense as foreign-policy propaganda; pilgrims were to project "free Soviet Islam" and even distributed the works of Stalin, Lenin, and Marx in Arabic.
This fit the broader postwar Stalinist turn toward state conservatism, great-power ideology, and neo-imperial forms. The regime was retreating from many early-Soviet social experiments — reintroducing single-sex schooling, muting the old rhetoric of women's emancipation, elevating the traditional family and "family values" — and its Islamic policy moved in the same direction, ever more closely resembling the pre-revolutionary imperial system. After the war SADUM's significance grew as decolonization produced new states across Asia and the Middle East. Understanding that direct export of communist ideology to the Muslim world would be difficult, the leadership treated SADUM as an instrument of soft power — an Islamic shell for Soviet interests — and turned Uzbekistan into a "showcase of the Soviet East," displayed to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Shah of Iran, King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan, and Indonesian president Sukarno, among others, as proof that Islam could coexist with socialism. Under Khrushchev, the Cold War contest in Asia and Africa widened this use of Islam. Whole fields of scholarship were bent to foreign policy: "Baburology" grew out of the contest for influence in India and Pakistan, recasting Babur as a bridge to South Asia, while the official concept of "Tajik civilization" formed around Bobojon Gafurov and Boris Litvinsky. The Mir-i Arab madrasa, reopened under Stalin, was kept deliberately weak; the aim was a controlled clergy, not a strong Muslim elite. After the Twentieth Party Congress, the thaw brought more mosques and tolerance of folk rites — hatmi Quran, circumcision, beshik-toy — presented as proof of freedom, while suspicion of Sufism and independent networks persisted.
A document of 25 March, 1954 lays the function bare. Bylined to Mufti Eshon Babakhan and titled "On the Situation of the Muslim Religion and Muslims in the Soviet Union," it was in fact prepared along the Sovinformbureau line for the foreign press, cleared by the Central Committee of the Uzbek Communist Party, and routed through the commissioner of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults. Its very routing — Moscow, the religious-affairs council, the Uzbek leadership — shows the mufti functioning not as an independent authority but as a legitimating figure through whom the state addressed the Muslim world. Its structure is pure Cold War propaganda: persecution claims dismissed as the slander of "warmongers"; Article 124 of the constitution cited; the four spiritual administrations, the mosques, Mir-i Arab, the hajj, and foreign delegations listed as proof of freedom — a catalogue that in fact documents a strictly controlled "official Islam." The hajj section contrasts a 1912 tsarist pilgrimage with a 1945 Soviet one. The second half becomes an apologia for the Soviet order — industry, irrigation, literacy, schools, medicine — voiced through the mufti and backed with hadith, while erasing the red terror, the destruction of the Autonomy, and the repression of jadids, ulema, and Sufis. It closes with a "struggle for peace" appeal against the West. Freedom of conscience here is a slogan; the aim was to make Islam a managed instrument of Soviet foreign policy.
In 1963 the line hardened. At a plenum of the Uzbek Communist Party Central Committee, Sharaf Rashidov, then the republic's leader, announced the end of the Khrushchev thaw on religion and national culture, casting religious revival — open mosques, the return of nikah, hatmi Quran, folk rites, occasional wearing of the paranja — as a threat, and lumping it with Baptists, Orthodox believers, "Western influence," and the strengthening of Uzbek language and national consciousness. The reality was more complex. This was largely everyday folk Islam, not a revanche, and the paranja had effectively vanished after the war for demographic and economic reasons — wartime male losses and the need for women's labor — so late demonstrative wearing was symbolic. The deeper problem was that rejection of reforms was not necessarily fanaticism: even useful, secular reforms carried a colonial taint because they came from a regime associated in popular memory with terror and collectivization. What in Kemal's Turkey or Bourguiba's Tunisia read as a national modernizing project read in Soviet Central Asia as an alien will imposed from above. The 1963 plenum closed the opening created by the Twentieth Congress and recast national feeling as a political danger, preparing the conflicts of the later 1960s.
Those conflicts were sharpened by the 1966 Tashkent earthquake. Many locals lost their homes while Russian construction workers — a large share of them convicts, in an economy that ran on prison labor — stayed on in apartments they had built. Tension rose. The imam and intellectual Alikhantura Soguni, formerly a leader of the East Turkestan Republic and then living in Tashkent, held majlises on history and religion that drew wide, unofficial audiences. The state tried to meet the demand: the academician Buribay Akhmedov began a limited rehabilitation of the Shaybanids, and Ibrahim Muminov — from the jadid milieu, a student of Fitrat and Rashidov's father-in-law — fitted Timur into the Soviet frame with the durable myth that Timur freed Maverannahr from the Horde, a story built to fold Russian and Uzbek history into one anti-Mongol-yoke narrative. In 1969 came the film O'tkan kunlar, the first screen adaptation of jadid literature, from Qodiriy's novel; the same year a brawl between Russian workers and Uzbeks at the Pakhtakor stadium escalated into street protests in which Soguni's sons were prominent. Russian accounts spin conspiracy theories around Rashidov's rivals or "foreign forces," but this was social protest — anger after the thaw's freedoms were granted and then crudely withdrawn — with the earthquake and housing redistribution as catalysts, and the Soguni family voicing national rather than religious feeling.
Interest in religion surged all the same. Partial liberalization, SADUM, and the reopened Mir-i Arab raised expectations the system could neither satisfy nor control: Mir-i Arab's instruction was limited and weak, admission narrow, demand rising. Unofficial and semi-official hujras sprang up teaching Quran and the basics of the faith, most densely in the Ferghana Valley, and modern scholars note they often taught better than Mir-i Arab. Crucially, most of these 1960s hujras were Sufi — the decisive contrast with the Karimov era and the post-2016 period, when comparable circles are often salafi.
The Lost Future of Central Asian Islam
After the war, surviving Muslim intellectuals faced the question of how to preserve religion in a world where the state had again weaponized it. Their answer was neither armed struggle nor radicalism but a "parallel Islam" — a religious life outside politics that preserved identity, morality, and cultural memory. This was not mere survival or fear of the regime; it was a model of how Islam might coexist with a secular state without destabilizing it, which is why the legacy still matters. It appears most vividly in three different but kindred figures: Alikhantura Soguni, Domla Mavlana Hindustani, and Gulam-ata Normat. All three sought an Islam parallel to the state, neither dissolving into it nor colliding with it — a search now unexpectedly relevant to Muslim communities in Europe and the United States. The tragedy is that both Soviet and later post-Soviet Uzbek policy destroyed precisely these moderate, adaptive forms, treating almost any independent Islamic activity as a threat and weakening the milieus that tried to reconcile Islam with modernity — a lost opportunity now visible as young Central Asians turn to imported, more radical, and culturally alien models.
Soguni's Tarihi Muhammadiya is among the most unusual Islamic works produced in Soviet Central Asia. Often read merely as a biography of the Prophet, it is in fact a modern Islamic narrative for a reader living in an industrial, secular world. Soguni abandoned the heavy medieval form, the complex isnads, and the scholastic language for an accessible moral-historical account aimed at a mass audience — a choice that mattered because decades of Soviet policy had cut the region off from its own intellectual tradition, Arabic literacy gone and classical texts increasingly opaque. He preserved Islam not by returning to the medieval model but by creating a new, more rational idiom, shifting the emphasis from early political history to the Prophet as moral exemplar — justice, ethics, patience, conduct, inner religiosity — which let Islam survive without direct confrontation with the state. He continued the jadid line of religion through national languages: a Central Asian Muslim could understand his faith in his mother tongue without obligatory Arabization, a quiet marker of Islamic secularity. In this the work anticipated twenty-first-century debates about an Islam that keeps its identity outside political radicalism.
Gulam-ata Normatov was one of the most distinctive religious figures of late-Soviet and early post-Soviet Ferghana — a war veteran said to have lived past a hundred, dying around 2000 — whose authority came not from official structures but from the living folk milieu of the valley: the personal authority of the teacher, the memory of the community, the veneration of the pir, and a link to the local Sufi tradition. His line ran back to the Yasawiyya, an old Turkic Sufi tradition thought by the twentieth century to be nearly extinct, which makes him significant not as a village saint but as a possible last bearer of the old Turkic Islamic culture rooted in Ferghana — local, folk, Sufi, tolerant, neither imported nor politicized. After the war the valley could still have grown its own organic, moderate tradition, and figures like Gulam-ata showed it might have become a center of rooted, moderate Islam rather than a hotbed of tension. Soviet policy, including the de facto encouragement of salafist tendencies discussed below, struck precisely this tradition.
Mavlavi Hindustani (Muhammadjan Rustamov, 1892–1989) was among the major Central Asian theologians of the century, preserving the classical Hanafi tradition through arrests and exile; educated in Kokand, Bukhara, and Kashmir, he had a depth of scholarship rare in Soviet Central Asia. His Quran tafsir — the unique original held by the Islamic-studies scholar Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, one of the few researchers of Hindustani's legacy — is, in the account of Hindustani's students in the region, a near-unique case in which the ideas of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian ideologue and leading theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, received a full theological answer not through fatwas or pamphlets but through a complete Quran commentary, on the same plane Qutb used. The Iron Curtain, Soviet isolation, and the absence of Arabic and English translations kept the work almost unknown; the world came to know Qutb but not his deepest opponent. Without naming his adversary, Hindustani in effect refuted Qutb point by point. Where Qutb turned the Quran into an ideology of political transformation, Hindustani returned it to classical theology. On jahiliyya, Qutb extended it to modern societies as a whole, opening the path to delegitimizing existing states, while Hindustani kept it a specific pre-Islamic historical condition, so that an imperfect or sinful society did not thereby fall outside Islam. On takfir, Qutbism widened the charge of unbelief to whole societies and states, while Hindustani held the classical line that a person becomes an unbeliever only by conscious denial of the faith's foundations, not by sin — blocking the conversion of religion into a mechanism of civil war. On Quran 5:44 — "whoever does not judge by what God has revealed, they are the unbelievers" — Qutb read a universal principle delegitimizing non-sharia systems, while Hindustani, following classical tafsir, attended to the occasion of revelation and the sequence 5:44–47, where the same act is also called zulm (injustice) and fisq (transgression), so that the Quran itself distinguishes unbelief from sin. On jihad, Qutb pushed it beyond defense into a tool of political change, while Hindustani kept the classical, condition-bound reading, showing through asbab an-nuzul that the "sword verse" (9:5) concerned a specific conflict with treaty-breaking tribes, not an eternal command. From inside the tradition rather than from secularism or liberalism, he built a theological system limiting the politicization of the Quran, expansive takfir, and ideologized jihad — decades before the global radical wave. Today his legacy is deliberately sidelined in Uzbekistan; some attribute this to the influence of the late Sheikh Muhammad Sodiq Muhammad Yusuf and his students and the "new Muslims" promoting their own political Islam — a claim addressed in the companion article.
From the 1960s and 1970s Hindustani built a network of unofficial hujras that became the only independent center of Islamic education in the whole Soviet Union, drawing students from the Volga, the North and South Caucasus, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan who came for classical theology, fiqh, and Sufi ethics, not political Islam. Yet the system treated Hindustani as a problem and, tellingly, favored salafism over the Sufism he taught, judging the latter more dangerous and less controllable. He was the first in the region to polemicize openly against wahhabism, and effectively put the term into wide religious circulation, but the state did not back him. Some now cast him as a founder of Central Asian political Islam — an obvious absurdity, since he was its most consistent theological opponent. His tafsir and his anti-salafi polemics, including surviving audio recordings, remain untranslated into English and unknown to global Islamic debate, though amid Europe's integration crises and the rise of political Islam they could ground a serious platform for training imams and community leaders — an internal Islamic mechanism against extremism rather than an imposed secular answer.
Salafism Under the Red Flag
The Soviet transformation of Islam was not merely repressive but structurally engineering. Having destroyed the traditional centers of learning, the state created in Tashkent a new "laboratory" where, amid a vacuum of authority, a line of religious purism took hold around Shami-damulla at-Tarabulusi — a native of Tripoli, al-Azhar–educated, expelled from the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abd al-Hamid II for "Wahhabi" views, who reached Tashkent in 1919 with the backing of the Russian consul in Kashgar. His program was radical for the local context: rejection of Hanafi taqlid, denial of Sufi literature and practice, exclusive appeal to Quran and hadith (Bukhari, Muslim), and the formation of underground Ahl-i hadith circles as an alternative education system. This anti-traditionalist Islam proved functionally useful to Soviet power: under the banner of fighting "superstition," his followers joined campaigns against the region's sacred infrastructure, including the documented participation of Shami-damulla and his students in destroying mazars such as the Shaykh Khovendi Tahur complex in Tashkent. The rupture was institutional as much as architectural — the fabric of local religious legitimacy, built on shrines, ziyarats, and Sufi chains of transmission, was dismantled.
With the classical ulema suppressed or driven into exile, Shami-damulla's aggressive style won rapid influence, and his followers were tagged "wahhabilar." The key channel of institutionalization was his student Ziyauddin Babakhan, later mufti of SADUM, through whom Quran-hadith minimalism entered official Islam: SADUM fatwas leaned on the texts of revelation while displacing the local Hanafi tradition. Under the "Soviet Islam" label, the institutionalized model moved ever closer to salafi-wahhabi purism — rejecting urf and adat, criticizing Sufism, "purifying" religion of later accretions — which suited Soviet ideology, since it let the state strike at the most resilient forms of religiosity through delegitimating from within rather than outright ban. Currents such as Ahl-i Quran ("uzun soqollilar") emerged and survived to perestroika, and a new generation of ulema began politicizing the agenda, moving from "purifying Islam" toward ideas of Islamic order and even proto-state models such as "Musulmonobod." Traditionalists like Hindustani were squeezed out, unable to resist effectively, above all in the Ferghana Valley.
The official campaign against "non-Islamic customs" reproduced the classical salafi-wahhabi agenda almost verbatim, targeting Sufism, the cult of saints, ziyarats, funeral rites, Quran reading at graves, mawlids, ritual meals, folk medicine, and amulets — the whole layer of local Hanafi everyday Islam. Presented as a fight against "survivals," it was a deep attempt to dismantle the traditional order; SADUM fatwas declared many local practices bid'a, arguing not from the Maverannahr Hanafi tradition but mainly from salafi authors such as Ibn Taymiyya, though without acknowledging that these were the sources. The fatwas issued from the official, state-controlled muftiate, and research shows many SADUM decisions reflected the demands of Soviet religious-affairs and party bodies. The paradox is stark: an atheist state used religious purism to destroy traditional Islam from within, physically eliminating madrasas, waqfs, and independent ulema while SADUM supplied the theological "proof" that much of the local culture was un-Islamic. Soviet pseudo-secularization and salafi purism became temporary allies against the Sufi-Hanafi majority.
Mufti Ziyauddin Babakhan — Shami-damulla's student turned head of SADUM — made his teacher's ideas the official line; many researchers effectively treat him as the region's first official wahhabi. Under him, anti-Sufi and puritan positions spread through madrasas, fatwas, Friday sermons, and religious literature, and his intellectual heirs took key posts in the religious apparatus, continuing the displacement of local tradition in the name of "official Islam." Babakhan embodied the paradox of Soviet Islam: a fully embedded official used for international diplomacy and population control, who simultaneously used his administrative position to advance his own theological program. The state got a manageable mufti; the mufti got the resource to push out Sufi and traditional culture.
By the end of the Soviet period the purist milieu cultivated inside SADUM began moving from theology into politics. These were not "reformers" in the jadid sense; they did not seek to reconcile Islam with modern education, science, and a secular state but demanded a maximally literal, "purified" Islam, rejecting the local Hanafi-Maturidi tradition, the cult of saints, and Sufism. Studies of Hizb ut-Tahrir in Uzbekistan show this environment became the ideological bridge between late-Soviet "official Islam" and the openly political Islamism of the 1990s; much of the new religious intelligentsia came from the followers of salafi-oriented ulema formed inside Soviet religious infrastructure, and they prepared the ground for foreign Islamic parties and caliphate concepts. Hizb ut-Tahrir's ideologues, like other radicals inside Uzbek society, built on the same logic earlier promoted in the Ahl-i hadith circles and parts of SADUM's fatwas — rejecting local tradition and Hanafi flexibility for literalism — but during perestroika, once freedom of conscience became real, they went further, raising not only the "purity of Islam" but the question of the state, political power, and a caliphate. The spread of these ideas owed something to the Middle East, but the Soviet system had prepared the ground by destroying local Islam, discrediting traditional ulema, and backing the harshest forms of purism as a weapon against Sufism and folk Islam. Late-Soviet SADUM history was thus not an "Islamic revival" but the beginning of a deep erosion of the region's own tradition whose effects persist.
This was the essence of the cynical imperial Islamization. The state sought to make religion a managed instrument — at home to police religious life and fight independent tradition, abroad to display "religious freedom" in the Soviet Union. After 2016, amid the Mirziyoyev reforms, came a partial rehabilitation of late-Soviet official-Islam figures, including Shamsiddin Babakhan — whose ties to salafism and to Soviet structures were the reason his name was passed over in silence under Karimov — with a registered memorial fund and an image as a "distinguished religious figure". The approach is dangerous because it refuses to diagnose the disease. Today's radicalism has many roots — social, economic, political, international — but one of the most important remains Soviet policy toward Islam, the work of SADUM, and the systematic promotion of anti-Sufi, salafi-oriented purism inside official Islam. Many of today's problems are not a sudden import from outside but a direct continuation of processes begun in the Soviet era.
The Cultural Foundations of Religious Conservatism
Beyond religious policy, the Soviet model built a conservative cultural substrate through language policy, an agrarian economy, urbanization, and a specific humanities environment. The linguist and orientalist Evgeny Polivanov, on the authorities' commission, built literary Uzbek on an urban dialect he himself called "Iranized," nullifying the jadids' language policy of the 1920s and 1930s and branding them pan-Turkists — before becoming a victim of Stalin's terror himself. The 1956 orthographic norms entrenched a bookish, Perso-Arabized model, fixing the Arabic-Persian lexical layer as the standard. Two paths had been possible — radical Turkicization of vocabulary, as in Turkey, or fixing the existing literary layer — and the second was chosen. The language of high culture became bookish and elitist rather than colloquial, tilting toward poetry, since archaisms and high style suit verse while prose needs simplicity and social concreteness. The system pushed literature toward poetry and toward medieval, often religiously rooted classics, the religious now recoded as "folk." The gap between spoken and literary language widened into cultural distance, and the difficulty of the literary language inflated the role of philology over philosophy and sociology — a double blow, since the humanities were already smothered by Marxism-Leninism. The reason a secular regime chose this is plain: an inherited fear of pan-Turkism, traceable to the Russo-Turkish wars, that under Stalin became policy. Uzbeks — the most numerous Turkic people and the backbone of the jadid movement and anti-Soviet resistance — were thereby separated from other Turkic peoples through linguistic distinctiveness.
The agrarian structure reinforced this. Built into the Soviet economy as a cotton producer, Uzbekistan stayed overwhelmingly rural; schoolchildren and students were pulled into cotton campaigns, degrading education, and rural schools, where most Uzbeks studied, were funded far below urban Russian-language ones. The era's spirit was captured by the academician Erkin Yusupov's notorious "city-kishlak" project, which held that Uzbeks were suited to a special cotton-bound urbanization — apartment blocks beside the fields — an ideological justification of a monoculture that perestroika would call "cotton slavery." A literature-centric intelligentsia followed. Uzbek stood below Russian, treated not as the language of modern knowledge but of the past or of marginal journalism, so philologists often doubled as journalists. Philology was considered ideologically safe while philosophy, sociology, and political theory were watched, so the humanities intelligentsia formed mainly from philologists, poets, and literature teachers, reinforcing the Arabo-Persian poetic tradition and the canon over modernization; literary studies was also the only field one could pursue in Uzbek without switching to Russian. The propiska system and administrative limits kept Tashkent, Ferghana, and Samarkand relatively closed, Russian-oriented (and in Samarkand also Tajik-oriented) spaces, blocking a broad Uzbek-language urban intelligentsia. The result favored preservation over innovation — and this intelligentsia became a pillar of the Karimov regime.
The contrast with Turkey is instructive. Atatürk's radical reform — Latinization and the large-scale purging of Arabo-Persian vocabulary — broke with the Ottoman poetic tradition, built a new literature on colloquial language, and made the novel and urban prose central, opening a platform for social and political debate and a secular intelligentsia. In Uzbekistan, the literary language kept its tie to classical poetry while the agrarian structure limited a broad urban intelligentsia. Only under perestroika and glasnost did natural scientists — not the literature-centric humanities intelligentsia — come to the fore, leading the Aral Committee and the Birlik movement, while the humanities and arts produced only a handful of dissidents against hundreds who worked within the official system. The managed counter-party Erk, created with Party involvement, then split the intelligentsia and weakened its modernizing wing. The Soviet social model in the republic functioned as an anti-liberal conservative project that slowed the development the jadids had once accelerated, and the conservative environment it produced became one factor in the rise of traditionalist and religious-conservative ideas in independent Uzbekistan.
How the Future Explosion Was Prepared
In the 1980s the system began destroying itself. Under Andropov, Moscow sought scapegoats rather than reform; corruption was Soviet-wide, but Uzbekistan was chosen as the showcase culprit in the "cotton affair" and "Uzbek affair," and with it came renewed pressure on Uzbek culture, Islamic tradition, and national identity. Against the backdrop of Afghanistan, Iran's revolution, and fear of an "Islamic awakening," the leadership returned to the old line in a new form: suppress traditional Islam, Sufism, and local culture while cultivating a loyal, fully controlled Islam. Three secret decrees followed — on isolating "reactionary" Muslim clergy, strengthening atheist education, and intensifying the fight against anti-Soviet sentiment among clergy — extending the SADUM line but striking wider, so that Navruz, folk holidays, traditional dress such as the do'ppi and khan-atlas, Uzbek theater, the classical Shashmaqom, the bakhshi tradition, traditional dance, and even the literary Uzbek language fell under suspicion.
The Uzbek Communist Party ideology secretary Rano Abdullaeva played a central role. Recent attempts — mainly by pro-Russian Uzbek activists and some journalists — to cast her as a fighter against extremism invert the record. In practice, she continued the strategy of managed Islamization, turning already-formed salafist circles against traditional Islam and Sufism, and in closed memos to Moscow declaring war on Sufi practice and much of Uzbekistan's historical culture — provoking protest from both traditional Muslims and the secular national intelligentsia and turning even apolitical people into national protesters. Young imams formed in the milieu of Mufti Shamsiddin Babakhan — above all Abduvali qori Mirzaev and his students, such as Obid qori — openly backed the campaign against bid'a, Sufism, and folk Islam. Mirzaev had himself studied under Hindustani, but under the influence of the milieu that Babakhan and his circle had built, he drifted from Hindustani's teaching, and the break between the two men eventually became final. Abdullaeva gave Mirzaev's circle a wide public platform, especially in the Ferghana Valley, including the Andijan Friday mosque. The blow fell on the legacy of Mavlana Hindustani and the moderate Ferghana tradition. This atmosphere, created by the ideological structures of the CPSU and Uzbek Party Central Committees, later helped produce the region's radical groups, and Abduvali qori Mirzaev is considered by a number of researchers one of the key figures shaping the radical and terrorist currents that became the basis of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
A parallel campaign targeted the Sufi heritage. The archaeologist Akhmadali Askarov, on party instruction and personally from Abdullaeva, worked to "expose false shrines" and destroy Sufi mazars, seeking to erase the symbols of folk Islam and the society's historical memory. The policy largely backfired: people did not support the war on ziyarats, and destroyed graves were often quickly rebuilt. But the long-term effect was heavy — traditional, tolerant Islam weakened while harsher, politicized currents gained organizational experience, publicity, and a sense of historic mission. As perestroika began and Soviet institutions — Komsomol, party, police — lost authority, new informal organizations arose. The first in Uzbekistan was Adolat, at the outset a sports-and-street youth group formed by ex-athletes to keep order amid the collapse of the police; in the Ferghana Valley such protest increasingly fused with religious rhetoric and the search for "Islamic justice." These groups did not begin religious. Abduvali qori Mirzaev's influence drove their salafization and radicalization, and through them that of much of the region's youth.
The Birth of Post-Soviet Islam
In the late 1980s Soviet Islamic policy entered a new phase. Perestroika did not mean abandoning control; the KGB tried to rebuild it for new conditions. After the events of 1989, Mufti Shamsiddin Babakhanov — third generation of a dynasty tied to the security services and foreign-trained under state control — was removed. Around this network, after the war, Bahrom Ibragimov trained clergy for work in the Middle East under cover of religious education and international Islamic contacts; after 2016, Russian propaganda and pro-Russian circles tried to make him a "hero," though by this account his role was to build an intelligence network drawn from the clergy, capable of operating across Asia and the Middle East and of monitoring the secular national intelligentsia.
By the late 1980s the model was consuming itself: the very milieu SADUM had cultivated turned on the Babakhanovs, accusing the mufti of corruption and moral decay — a sign both of SADUM's internal crisis and of the breakdown of "controlled Islam." Tellingly, he was removed but not repressed; the system had lost the Stalinist capacity to solve such problems by terror. In 1989 the young and politically ambitious Muhammad Sodiq Muhammad Yusuf was advanced — ambitious in the sense of a man maneuvering for power and position, not a judgment on his ability. Often presented as a symbol of "Islamic revival," his rise was in fact part of a late-Soviet political strategy: the KGB and union leadership saw a convenient figure to manage a rapidly radicalizing milieu, calm religious circles, and counterbalance the secular national-democratic opposition, above all Birlik. To the end the system treated secular ideas, national democracy, and pan-Turkism — not religious radicalism — as the main threat, and again used religion against the secular opposition. Muhammad Sodiq himself was formed within the gradual salafization of the official clergy under the Babakhanovs; a Ferghana native, he set himself against Hindustani's moderate model, and around his generation the new post-Soviet religious milieu would form. The claim that he or Karimov initiated the late-1980s liberalization — the return of Navruz, the first free hajjs, the easing of restrictions — is false; these were part of Gorbachev's perestroika, decided in Moscow. But within that liberalization the consequences of all prior policy surfaced: by the USSR's end Uzbekistan had a generation of religious figures raised amid ideological crisis, hidden salafization, and decades of security-service experiments with Islam — and that generation would define the country's religious life after 1991.
Conclusion
The history of Islam in Central Asia has, in effect, still not been written. Existing accounts either mythologize the past or reduce it to an "eternal Islamic tradition," ignoring the region's internal complexity and change. Against civilizational theories, including Huntington's, there is no single monolithic "Islamic civilization": the Islam of Central Asia differed radically from that of the Gulf, the Gulf from North Africa, North Africa from the Volga, the Caucasus, or the Ottoman world — and Central Asia itself wore very different Islamic faces across the centuries. Even in the medieval period sharia long held no monopoly; the region knew secular culture, religious plurality, coexisting legal systems, and relatively moderate forms of Islamic life. Only later — after Nadir Shah's invasion, and especially under the Manghits and then under tsarist Russia — did orthodoxy monopolize public life. This matters for today's Uzbekistan, where the dispute over whether the constitution or sharia stands higher grows more frequent: the historical record is far more complex than the claim that "establishing sharia rule is a return to our roots."
The Soviet period was decisive. The state not only fought religion but made Islam an instrument of political control, geopolitics, and ideological management, seeding the very processes — the spread of salafist tendencies, the destruction of local moderate traditions — that still shape the region's religious life. Without grasping them, neither modern Uzbekistan nor the wider region's religious dynamics can be understood. Hence the renewed relevance of the jadid legacy, the Turkestan Autonomy, and Hindustani's theological model — each an attempt to build a modern, moderate, intellectual Islamic tradition compatible with a modern state and an open society. Ideas once unwanted in Central Asia may now matter not only for the region but for Europe and the United States, where the integration of Muslim communities grows more pressing. This work is both a reinterpretation and a warning: many mistakes of Soviet Islamic policy are being repeated in Uzbekistan today, which makes the historical record a question not of scholarship but of the region's future.
Anvar Nazirov is an Uzbek historian, professor, and political commentator. He has appeared on and written for various international outlets including RFE/RL, The Moscow Times, and Voice of America.
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