Pious lives of Soviet Muslims

“And I Believe in Signs”: Soviet Secularity and Islamic Tradition in Kyrgyzstan

“… 6 I use “pietistic” as a heuristic to describe dimensions or forms of Islam that focus on cultivating principal Islamic virtues such as khushu‘ , taqwa , ihsan , and others. For a different, more abstract, notion of piety used to analyze Central Asian Islam, see Tasar (2021). Following Devin DeWeese, Tasar advocates for expanding the concept of religion to focus on practices such as parent-child conversations about God, wearing amulets, and venerating the deceased as aspects of Soviet Muslim piety.…”

“…Understood as such, “religion” and Muslim piety, as Tasar rightly observes, permeated the everyday lives of Soviet Muslims. A disadvantage of this approach is that it flattens out differences between, say, wearing amulets in hope of recovering from an illness (Tasar 2021: 304–5) and inducing tears during the salat ( namaz ) prayer (Mahmood 2005: 129–30), venerating a deceased out of fear of their anger (Tasar 2021: 305–7) and practicing what al-Ghazali called the remembrance of death ( dhikr al-mawt ) to free the self from worldly desires (Pandolfo 2007: 345). My purpose is not to suggest that the practices analyzed by Tasar are unrelated to Muslim piety but to heuristically highlight the key performative ends of Islamic modes of ethical discipline.…”

“…He acknowledges, however, that performing Islamic rituals in spaces which were not, strictly speaking, “private” was more prevalent in the countryside and during the perestroika years (2014). See also Tasar (2021).…”

“…See also Tasar (2021). 22 For similar conversations about God recorded by Soviet scholars, see Tasar (2021). and many were simply uninterested in, practices of virtue cultivation such as the namaz prayer, zikr (dhikr, remembrance of God), extended recitations of the Qur'an, and the like.…”