Islamic Peoples Of The Soviet Union

Shirin Akiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136142741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

First published in 1987. The aim of this historical and statistical handbook is to answer three basic questions about the Islamic peoples of the USSR: who they are, where they are and how many of them there are. It is convenient to speak of them as 'Soviet Muslims', grouping them all together under a single, collective heading, but they are in fact quite disparate. For this reason it was decided to treat each ethnic group individually here.

1

Introduction

Before speaking of the Muslim or Islamic peoples of the Soviet Union it is important to define the sense in which these terms are used. Any commentary on Islam will explain that being a Muslim means submission to the will of God; further, that there are certain articles of faith, the ‘roots’ of religion, which must be accepted, and certain actions, the ‘branches’ of religion, which must be performed. The former include belief in God, His Scriptures and His Apostles. The latter are: bearing witness to the oneness of God and the prophethood of Muhammed; performing the daily prayers; giving alms; keeping the fast of Ramadan; making the pilgrimage to Mecca. What such an explanation omits is the essential reasonableness of Islam. It is not, as the above might suggest, a strait jacket of rules, but rather a religion of the possible. It presents an ideal (‘azimah), but accepts that it may not always be feasible to realize this; it recognizes, therefore, a doctrine of the ‘permissible’ (rukhsah), which in effect means that people should do the best they can under the prevailing circumstances. It is acknowledged that the reasons for not performing any or all of the prescribed duties may be inner weakness just as much as external pressures, but this is purely a matter for the individual's conscience.

The question of whether or not a person is a Muslim does not depend, ultimately, on the way he lives, but on the way he perceives himself in relation to the world. Consequently, a wide range of commitment is accommodated within Islam and this tolerance is one of the religion's great strengths, taking account as it does of the natural ebb and flow of piety in the lives of individuals and of societies. Non-Muslims frequently overlook this factor and, basing themselves on a single, strict interpretation of the term ‘Muslim’, find it incomprehensible that so many people who do not observe the ‘rules’ should nevertheless vehemently refute the charge that they are not Muslims.

In fact, the only way in which a Muslim can sever himself from his community is by a conscious and voluntary rejection of Islam. Even then, the decision is not irreversible. Shi'i Muslims actually have a doctrine (taqiyah ‘guarding oneself), for which they claim the authority of the shari'at, which permits them to deny their faith in order to escape persecution. It may be true that ‘generalizations are plateaux for tired minds’, but if any useful general comparison could be made between Christianity and Islam, it would be that a definite decision is required to become a Christian, while a definite decision is required to cease being a Muslim. It is for this reason that in the Soviet Union today only those who are firmly committed to a Christian way of life will identify themselves as Christians, whereas virtually every member of a traditionally Muslim society will still claim to be a Muslim, no matter how loosely he adheres to Islamic precepts. Nationalism certainly plays a part in this, but it would be wrong to exaggerate its influence, for precisely the same phenomenon can be observed in parts of the world where nationalism is not an issue in the way that it is in the Soviet Union. In an effort to gauge the vitality of Islam, Soviet commentators sometimes resort to quantifying the numbers of ‘firm believers’, ‘believers by tradition’, ‘hesitant believers’ and so on. Such information is valuable, because it gives a profile of the situation at a particular moment, but its importance must not be overestimated: no religion, and least of all Islam, is an army whose strength can be judged by the number of men on active service. The present work eschews vain attempts to limit the definition of the term ‘Muslim’ to a specific formula and instead uses it in its widest sense to indicate a community's traditional perception of itself.

There are some forty-five and a half million Muslims in the USSR, one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, in size second only to those of such countries as Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia and Pakistan. It is a population of quite exceptional ethnic, cultural and regional diversity. Soviet Muslims are found as far west as the borders of Poland, as far east as the borders of China; they are found in Siberia to the north and Central Asia and Transcaucasia to the south. In the ensuing pages it will be seen that they present a vast spectrum of ethnic groups: Turkic peoples, such as the Tatars, Azerbaidzhanis, Uzbeks and Uighurs; Iranians, such as the Tadzhiks, Ossetians, Kurds and Baluchis; Caucasians, such as the Avars, Lezghis and Tabasarans; and several other small groups, such as the Arabs, the Armenian Khemshils, the Chinese Dungans, the Central Asian Gypsies, the Mongol Sart Kalmyks and the Finno-Ugrian Mordvinians and Udmurts.

Their linguistic heritage is as varied, including some fifteen Turkic, ten Iranian and thirty Caucasian languages, not to mention Chinese, Mongol and an obscure form of Arabic. In the past they had no common medium of communication. Arabic was taught in all the mektebs and medresses (religious schools and colleges), but, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, the principal purpose of this was to make possible the reading and comprehension of the Qur'an. Only the best educated reached the stage of being able to write and converse in it. The situation was similar with Persian, the other great language of Muslim scholarship, and also with the Turkic literary languages Chagatai, Azeri (Azerbaidzhani), Tatar and Crimean Tatar, all of which were remote from the speech of the masses. The ordinary Muslims of the Russian Empire would have found it as difficult to communicate with their fellow-believers from other parts of the country as would, say, a Kashmiri with a Bengali. Russian is now beginning to provide them with a lingua franca, but even after a century or more of contact with this language, the incidence of bi-lingualism...