Part-I: Islam in the Pre-Soviet Central Asia |
Central Asia, currently constituting five independent republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, is also called the Mā Warāʾ Al-Nahr or Transoxiana. Historically, it experienced the political rule by diverse Muslim dynasties including the Khanates and Emirates. The given political transition was always accompanied by the confession of the peoples in various faith models to which Islam was one popular faith.
Islam arrived in the region around the seventh-eighth centuries. However, until the sixteenth century, it did not exhibit a fully orthodox character couched in the Qur’an, Hadith, and related scriptures, as it remained intertwined with local traditions. These indigenous traditions often predominated the faith, owing to the enduring influence of the region’s longstanding ancestral heritage of hero and saint veneration.
Islam assumed a more orthodox character during the reign of the Khans of Khiva (1511–1920) and Kokand (1709–1876), and the Emirs of Bukhara (1785–1920). It was so owing to two fundamental factors: first, the Khans and Emirs themselves were well grounded in Islamic scriptures; and second, they received primary education in Islamic institutions from an early age. They employed the Sharia’h (Islamic canonical law) in governance, the administration of justice, and the regulation of kinship, inheritance, and other community affairs. They strictly ensured that the pre-Islamic local traditions don’t transgress the basics of scriptural, original, puritan or faith Islam.
Indeed, Muslim clergy, muftis, qazis, and imams, nurtured and sustained it to varying degrees. They were held in high esteem for their knowledge, expertise, and devotion to Islam, although states occasionally employed them as instruments of “legitimacy” in support of their policies. The ulema (theologians) were widely regarded as “a source of divine pleasure and a means to attain good fortune in both this world and the hereafter.” Saints, Sufis, and Sada’t (descendants of the Prophet’s daughter, Hazrat Fatimah) were deeply revered for their piety and holiness; however, their shrines were more often visited for offering prayers than for seeking their intercession in the afterlife.
The khojas or khwajas (descendants of the Qadria Sufi order of Ahmad Kasani) were recognised by the Khans and Emirs as their “religio-spiritual” guides, establishing thereby matrimonial alliances with them, seeking their blessings for military success, and relying on their support while levying taxes on their subjects. In return, they granted the khojas charitable endowments, gifts, and tax-free land grants, milk and suyurghal, for their personal and institutional maintenance. Eventually, the khwajas grew quite powerful and resourceful; however, most of them resisted worldly temptations, preferring the hereafter to the temporal world. Similarly, the ulema had two broad categories: one that remained averse to power, and another that was aligned with power, prestige, and politics. Nonetheless, the clergy was generally regarded as altruistic, learned, and devoted to the cause of original Islam.
The religious institutions, mosques, maktabs (elementary religious schools), and madrassas (secondary religious schools), were free to preach, disseminate, and teach the Islamic faith, including its jihadi interpretations. The state did not interfere in their functioning. Mosques regularly organized congregational prayers, while maktabs and madrassas provided instruction in the Arabic language and Islamic studies, teaching male and female students separately.
Ordinary Muslims embraced the same Islamic format out of personal conviction rather than through any coercion from above. Islam was a deeply personal matter between them and God, and the main raison d’être of their lives. Guided by the Shariah in all walks of their daily life, they diligently observed Islamic practices, rites, rituals, signs, and symbols, and regularly engaged in supplication and remembrance of God. To them, religious dress, food, symbols and good conduct and behaviour symbolized their community and Islamic identity. They revered the holy men and visited their shrines but for mere prayers than for invoking their help in the resolution of their mundane and spiritual ends. They also celebrated with fervour all Islamic festivals, Eid-ul Fitr, Eid-ul Adha, Prophet Muhammad’s birth anniversary and the Night of Ascension. They valued the local customs but ensured that these don’t transgress the basics of real Islam. To them, therefore, the faith was primary and tradition only secondary.
The said Islamic model obtained in Central Asia under the Russian Tsars (1850s–1920) too. Although the Tsars vainly endeavoured subsuming it within the Russian culture through the “Russification” and the Jadidi (reformist) movements, no structural transformation occurred in it. True, during this period, a notable tension existed between “Jadidism” (reformism) and “Qadimism” (traditionalism). But neither it overturned the Khanate and Emirate version of Islam, nor dented the existing relationship between Islamic and the Russian cultures.
However, a tectonic shift occurred in it only with the establishment of Soviet rule in Central Asia. The Soviets, upholding an explicitly atheist ideology, termed Islam as an ideological adversary to the Leninist-Marxist model of socio-economic development. Islamic clerics, institutions, practices, and life-cycle rituals associated with birth, death, and marriage were systematically delegitimized by the Soviets. By the turn of the twentieth century, therefore, Soviet Central Asian Muslims had turned irreligious and ignorant of Islam as a lived faith.
Prior to the rule of the Khans and Emirs in Central Asia, Islam represented a syncretic blend of Islamic faith and centuries-old pre-Islamic local traditions of hero and saint veneration. A more orthodox Islamic faith model grounded in the Qur’an and Hadith pronounced only under the Khanates and Emirates from the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. This model continued during the Tsarist period, but underwent a profound reversal under Soviet rule in the region.
Prof. Mushtaq Kaw, Former Director, Centre of Central asian Studies, University of Kashmir, Srinagar.