For over two decades, the fate of Islam in Soviet Central Asia has been the subject of fierce debate. From Shoshana Keller’s To Moscow, Not Mecca (Praeger, 2001) and Adeeb Khalid’s Islam after Communism (University of California Press, 2007) to more recent works such as Eren Tasar’s Soviet and Muslim (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Jeff Eden’s God Save the USSR (Oxford University Press, 2021), scholars continue to dispute the effects of Soviet policies on Central Asians’ knowledge of and adherence to Islam. Did the Soviet government succeed in destroying or, at the very least, suppressing Islam in Central Asia? Did Islam persist despite Soviet efforts to undermine it? Or did the Soviet government become complicit in preserving, supporting, and regulating Islam through institutions such as the Council for Religious Affairs (CARC) and the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia (SADUM)?
The ways in which scholars choose to answer these questions hold implications for how we understand the current religious landscape of Central Asia. Does Central Asians’ growing interest in Islam in the post-Soviet era represent an effort to restore a system of Islamic institutions, beliefs, and practices rendered mostly defunct by Soviet anti-religion polices? Or does this growing interest represent a new phase in a process of revival, reinvention, and evolution that continued unabated across the Soviet era? Did Islam emerge from the Soviet era as the remnants of an obsolete faith subsumed into the national cultures of the Central Asian republics? Or did it emerge as a living tradition with a robust, distinct system of institutions, authority figures, and arcane knowledge?
Paolo Sartori offers his answers to these questions in his monograph’s title. He argues that Uzbekistan was a “Soviet sultanate,” a place in which Soviet citizens chose to embrace a complex of spiritual beliefs, communal rituals, sacred knowledge, moral sensibilities, and worldview that they identified as Muslim. He argues that, despite the disruptions of the 1930s, Muslim rituals, knowledge, and patterns of religious authority in Uzbekistan displayed strong continuities with those of the pre-Soviet era. Numerous Uzbekistanis not only self-identified as Muslims, but attended mosques, visited shrines, built mausolea, and took part in exorcisms, constructing through their actions a distinctly “Soviet” Islam. Participants in these activities ranged from farmers and petty tradesmen to university professors, collective farm chairmen, and republic-level bureaucrats. Their participation in Muslim rituals and knowledge transmission was so widespread that the Communist Party and Soviet officialdom proved unable to quell it. Indeed, Islamic practices (and debates over such practices) were carried out so widely and openly that the archives of CARC, SADUM, and Uzbekistan’s Academy of Sciences are littered with vivid descriptions of them. It is these archival documents, along with pre-Soviet and Soviet manuscript sources and interactions with Uzbekistani Muslim scholarly families, that inform Sartori’s study.
In contrast to Tasar’s Soviet and Muslim, which focuses primarily on the institutional history of Islam under Soviet rule, Sartori turns his attention to the ways in which Soviet citizens in Uzbekistan engaged with Islam. This focus on praxis dictates the organization of the book, with each chapter examining a different practice.
Chapter 1 places the contestations between Muslim believers and Soviet-appointed religious authorities over the activities of Sufi spiritual leaders (eshons) at shrines in relation to both the anti-Sufi strains in pre-Soviet Islamic reform movements and the puritanical sensibilities within the Soviet Muslim administration.
Chapter 2 asserts that Muslim believers accepted SADUM as a credible religious authority but also analyzes the rhetoric used by believers to push back against SADUM when they found its interpretations of “proper” Islam to be too narrow, scripturalist, or puritanical. In Chapter 3, the author explores the ongoing relationship of Uzbekistani Muslims to shrines and cemeteries that had been significant sacred spaces before the Soviet era. Chapter 4 details Uzbekistani Muslims’ perception of the world as a space populated by good and evil spirits and the way in which figures such as porkhons (exorcists) were called upon to mediate the relationship between Muslims and the spirits through exorcisms and other rituals.
Finally, Chapter 5 turns to the “bureaucratic anxiety” that the persistence of Muslim worship, knowledge, literature, shrine visitation, education, and spiritual practices inspired in Uzbekistan’s Soviet officials. For them, the continuing prevalence of all these things signaled a broader failure of the Soviet promotion of atheism. But by the late 1970s and the 1980s, Soviet officials chose the registration and legalization of mosques and shrines over pursuing an ongoing war against them. These officials seem to have concluded that fighting against Islam would only drive believers underground and out of sight of the Soviet government. Legalization at least brought the possibility of surveillance and regulation.
A Soviet Sultanate is filled with anecdotes and colorful descriptions of religious debates and practices that not only give readers a vivid sense of Uzbekistani Islam but make the book a joy to read. Sartori succeeds in walking a careful line through debates over Islam in the Soviet Union by, on the one hand, reminding his readers that Soviet Uzbekistanis, like Soviet citizens in the other republics, embraced a range of stances on spirituality, and on the other, demonstrating the prevalence of many manifestations of Islam across regions, ages, genders, and social classes. He also addresses the dissonance between documented expressions of Islam in the 1940s through the 1980s and Central Asian Muslims’ post-1991 narratives of the Soviet era as a time of severe religious repression. He suggests limitations of such narratives in helping scholars understand what it meant to be a Muslim in the USSR.
If there is a quibble to be had with Sartori’s book, it is that, like Tasar’s Soviet and Muslim, A Soviet Sultanate focuses primarily on the post-World War II era. This approach leaves readers to rely on other studies (of which there are still very few) to gain a grasp of the diverse, revolutionary Islamic discourses of 1917 to 1928, and the situation of Islam amid the Stalinist politics of the 1930s. In Sartori’s defense, these turbulent decades could by themselves fill a monograph-length study. Overall, A Soviet Sultanate is a welcome addition to the existing research on Islam in the Soviet Union. Any scholar or graduate student of modern Islamic studies or Soviet Central Asian studies will find much in it that is useful.
