Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

1 4 0Islam i n World Cult u r e smany executed, others exiled to forced-labor camps across the Soviet Union,yet others deprived of their livelihood and driven underground (Keller 2001).These policies dealt a deathblow to older means of reproducing Islam. Moreov e r, as the Soviet Union receded into a paranoid isolationism, links with theoutside Muslim world were cut off. Central Asian Islam was forced into isolation,cut off from developments in the rest of the Muslim world.Soviet Islam was thus localized and rendered synonymous with tradition.With Muslim educational institutions abolished, the ranks of the carriers of Islamicknowledge denuded, and continuity with the past made difficult bychanges in script, the family became the only site for the transmission of Islam.At the same time, since no new religious texts could be published and sinceoral chains of transmission were often destroyed, the available religious knowledgewas vastly circumscribed. 1These developments coincided with another very significant phenomenon:the emergence and consolidation of strong ethno-national identities in CentralAsia. The Soviet Union presided over the largest project of nation-buildingin human history (Suny 1994; Slezkine 1994). From the very beginning, “nation”(and the related concepts of “nationality” and “the people,” all renderedby k h a l q in Central Asian languages) was a constitutive part of the Soviet politicalsystem. While “Soviet internationalism” and “the friendship of peoples” remainedconstants in official rhetoric, they were premised on the assumptionthat every individual belonged to a nation. Nations were created (or “recognized”)and equipped with territorial homelands, and policies of affirmativeaction were installed to promote native elites to positions of power within thepolitical system (Martin 2001; Edgar 1999). Throughout the Soviet Union,new national identities were created along a template that emphasized languageas the key marker of national identity. The old administrative boundariesof Central Asia were redrawn along ethno-national lines in 1924–1925,creating two (eventually five) national republics that entered the Union of SovietSocialist Republics as members of the federation.Each nation also had its own national history and its own national heritage,comprising of a pantheon of positive (that is, “progressive” and “secular”) culturalheroes, a national literature, national dress, and national customs. Thenotion that everyone belongs to a nation—defined by language, history, custom,heritage, and common descent—became a commonplace. The keeper ofthe national heritage was the national intelligentsia, which in Central Asia wasitself a creation of the Soviet regime. Its members found employment in an extensivenetwork of universities, institutes, and academies, generously fundedby the state. To be sure, nationalist chauvinism could not be expressed in officialdiscourse, which had to stay within fairly strict limits and had to emphasizethe “friendship of peoples,” “Soviet internationalism,” and “the leading role ofthe Great Russian people, the elder brother.” Nevertheless, in the last three