Why Soviet Islam Matters

Abstract

In this essay I offer several reflections addressing the significance of Islam and its socio-cultural embodiments (i. e., Muslimness) for Soviet history. I argue that religiously-minded people -from earnest seekers to would-be self-improvers to believers of various stripes -were an integral part of the population of the USSR. Furthermore, I posit that the population included even larger numbers of people who perhaps were not seriously engaged in perfecting themselves in religion or even thinking consciously about the sacred, but who simply kept in reserve stories, practices and prescriptions derived from an Islamic episteme, which they could deploy in times of need. To rescue the voices of all these historical actors is key to understanding how, despite pursuing one of the most transformative projects of social engineering in human history, the atheist Soviet state failed to make its subjects less religious and, by extension, less human.