2000 wards

ISLAM AND THE LEGACY OF

SOVIETOLOGY: A REVIEW ESSAY

ON YAACOV RO’I’S ISLAM IN THE

SOVIET UNION

DEVIN DEWEESE Indiana University

Despite the collapse of the Soviet state, the study of religious life among the traditionally Muslim peoples of the former USSR has continued to be dominated by an academic ‘tradition’ that may be termed ‘Sovietological Islamology’. Rooted in attempts to understand the impact of the Soviet era on Islam in Central Asia, the Volga–Ural region, and western Siberia, Azerbaijan, and the North Caucasus, this tradition has rarely been well grounded in the broader world of Islamic studies, or in modes of analysing religious life beyond the framework of the political issues that dominated Sovietology. It is exemplified by the writings of Alexandre Bennigsen and his collaborators and students,1 which shaped an approach to Islam in the Soviet context informed more by scholarly expertise in the

1 The literature produced by the Sovietological school is extensive and cannot be reviewed here. Its key early product was Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1967), and the Sovietological approach dominated publications on Soviet Islam during the 1970s and 1980s; cf. Bennigsen’s ‘Islam in the Soviet Union: The Religious Factor and the Nationality Problem in the Soviet Union’, in Religion and Atheism in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, ed. Bohdan R. Bociurkiw and John W. Strong (London: Macmillan, 1975), 91–100; his ‘Modernization and Conservatism in Soviet Islam’, in Religion and Modernization in the Soviet Union, ed. Dennis J. Dunn (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1977), 239–79; his ‘Religion and Atheism among Soviet Muslims’, in Islam and the Contemporary World, ed. Cyriac K. Pullapilly (Notre Dame, Ind.: Cross Roads Books, 1980), 222–37; his ‘Official Islam and Sufi Brotherhoods in the Soviet Union Today’, in Islam and Power, ed. Alexander S. Cudsi and Ali E. Hillal Dessouki (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 95–106; and Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslims of the Soviet Empire: A Guide (London: C. Hurst, 1985). See also Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, ‘Islam in the Soviet Union: Attempts at Modernization’, Religion in Communist Lands, 2/4–5 (1974), 12–19; Michael Rywkin, Moscow’s Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982); Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, ‘Sufi Brotherhoods in the USSR: A Historical Survey’, Central Asian Survey, 2/4 (1983), 1–35; Azade-Ayse Rorlich, ‘Islam under Communist Rule: Volga–Ural Muslims’, Central Asian Survey,

Journal of Islamic Studies 13:3 (2002) pp. 298–330 # Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies 2002

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Soviet system, and in the twentieth-century development of the Soviet-defined ‘nations’ into which the Muslim communities of the USSR were grouped, than by training in the history or religious culture of the regions of ‘Soviet’ Islam, let alone of the broader Islamic world.

Plagued by inadequate data and problematical sources, and thus rife with methodological problems that have never been seriously explored either by Bennigsen’s disciples or by his school’s critics, the Bennigsen approach was in some respects pioneering in raising the profile of peoples, and issues, that were largely ignored by the wider community of Russocentric Sovietologists; yet, although its scholarly limitations should have been apparent, it has exerted a stultifying and even pernicious influence on the study of Islam in the Soviet environment, as its conclusions and approaches prompted repetition and imitation rather than serious critical discussion and challenge. Despite its weaknesses, the body of scholarship produced by ‘Sovietological Islamology’ has often been taken as the definitive word on ‘Soviet Islam’ both by specialists in other parts of the Soviet world, eager to have an accessible and under- standable ‘control’ over an aspect of Soviet life they could no longer ignore, and by specialists in other parts of the Islamic world, seeking to make sense out of the recent historical experience of long- isolated Muslim peoples as they rejoined the broader dialogue of the Muslim community.

The upshot is that discussion of Islam in the USSR has remained largely in the hands of specialists who, by training and disciplinary orientation, have been ill-equipped to deal with all but the most superficial aspects of religion and its place in Soviet life; regrettably (one might well say ominously) the same holds true for the current

1/1 (1982), 21– 42; id., ‘Sufism in Tatarstan: Deep Roots and New Concerns’, Central Asian Survey, 2/4 (1983), 37– 44; Marie Broxup, ‘Islam in Central Asia since Gorbachev’, Asian Affairs, 18/3 (1987), 283–93; and Martha Brill Olcott, ‘Islam and Fundamentalism in Independent Central Asia’, in Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies, ed. Yaacov Ro’i (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 21–39. As reflected already in Bennigsen’s work, the Sovietological school’s production included not only attempts, chiefly by political scientists, to describe then-contemporary trends among Soviet Muslims (typically on the basis of published materials, obviously problematical in the context of Soviet censorship, or on the basis of contacts with political, academic, or literary elites alone), but also historical surveys of Soviet policy towards Islam and towards the USSR’s Muslim peoples; more broadly, this school can be said to have encompassed the entire field of ‘nationality studies’, whose practitioners—whether historians or political scientists or economists or students of language and literature—were often quite competent and insightful in many respects, but tended to fare quite poorly when drawn into discussions, as they inevitably were, of religious issues, both contemporary and historical.

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discussion—whether in policy analysis or in the popular media —about Islam in Central Asia, where the Soviet legacy now com- mands world attention on both sides of the old Soviet border. It is ironic, of course, in view of the essentially religious terms in which the subject is typically framed, that those who have generated the small explosion of books and articles purporting to explore the historical ‘background’ or present status, or to predict the future, of Islam in the Soviet or post-Soviet environment have rarely seen fit to inform their comments and evaluations with any grounding in the field of religious studies. Students of contemporary Uzbek politics or literature or economics, for instance, freely venture to comment or write about ‘the religious question’ or ‘the problem of Islam’, without any serious training in ways of analysing or interpreting religious life, and without any serious historical understanding of Islam in Central Asia that might illuminate both continuities and discontinuities during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.

As a result, the profound conceptual and terminological problems that infest the literature on Islam in the USSR not only go unaddressed and unproblematized, but steadily increase, as mis- conception builds upon misconception and as constant repetition yields greater acceptance; by now a serious housecleaning is long overdue. The present article will not undertake that task; it will address, rather, a few of the most fundamental problems as they appear, seemingly with new support, in a recent product of the Sovietological approach to Islam in the USSR. The article began as a simple book review—an origin reflected still in its structure—but quickly grew well beyond the limits of that genre; its growth was curtailed by realization that a study twice the size of the monograph that prompted it would be necessary for a thorough and effective discussion of the many issues that need to be addressed (issues that arise on nearly every page of that monograph). It is hoped that the result will, at least, alert the constituency of the Sovietological envisioning of Islam in the USSR to some of the problems peculiar to that vision, and, at best, generate an expanded discussion and critique that may eventually reclaim the study of Islam in the Soviet world for religious studies, and for Islamic studies.

Yaacov Ro’i’s Islam in the Soviet Union2 is a big and densely packed book, prodigious in its data and documentation, but in many respects fundamentally flawed—like the enterprise of ‘Sovietological

2 Yaacov Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev (London: C. Hurst, 2000), 791 pp).

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Islamology’ of which it may be regarded as the culmination—by conceptual, methodological, analytical, and interpretative short- comings. The work is based on unparalleled archival research con- ducted since the breakup of the Soviet Union, chiefly in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, housing the archives of the Committee for Religious Affairs and its predecessor, as well as other collections in Moscow and Tashkent. It thus presents the data that, for obvious reasons, eluded the Bennigsen school, but fails to move significantly beyond the conceptual and analytical constraints that left the Bennigsen approach so unsatisfying, and unilluminating, for a readership versed in Islamic studies. What it presents is certain aspects of Islam in the USSR as viewed through the (often quite murky) lens of government documents prepared by those Soviet officials charged with finding the best means to curtail religious practice and hasten the disappearance of religious belief. When discussing the distinctively ‘Soviet’ aspects of Muslim life the author is at home, and his presentation is solid and informative. His work is much less satisfying, however, when he ventures into interpreting religious life, and especially into the many issues that are more often obscured than illuminated by the categorizations and analytical frameworks employed by the Soviets for ‘understanding’ religious life (with an aim to crush it). At best he misses much of the substance of Muslim religious life; at worst he parrots the stale questions and answers of the Bennigsen school and even of the stunted Soviet academic study of religion.

Overall, Ro’i is to be applauded for attempting to take stock of several important issues on the basis of data never before brought to light; the problem is that when there are such fundamental problems in the interpretation of the data, and especially in the terminological and analytical framework in which the authors of the Soviet archival reports and documents approached their subject, it is essential to handle those terms and that framework critically, and with a grounding in the basic vocabulary of Islamic studies, so as to allow a scholarly evaluation of the evidence rather than its simple repetition. Again and again, throughout Islam in the Soviet Union, we miss the author’s input in explaining Soviet misunder- standings of Islam, wrong-headed thinking about religious life, the specific inapplicability of Soviet categories to Islam, and so on. It is fundamentally misleading to pretend that simply adopting the Soviet categories and terms can truly illuminate the situation ‘on the ground’ in terms of Islamic religious life and practice, or lead to any deep understanding of the survival and adaptation of Muslim religious life in the Soviet environment.

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It may be worth noting that in the essentially fruitless debate that has swirled in the past decade over the effects of the Soviet era on Islam—between specialists more familiar with the Soviet and Russian world, who seem surprised at the persistence of any Muslim or ‘national’ traditions and insist that Soviet policy failed in its efforts to modernize or Russify, and those more familiar with the Islamic world, who note the striking differences between Central Asia, for example, and other parts of the Muslim world, and who insist that the Soviet transformation succeeded all too well—Ro’i is squarely on the side of the Sovietological camp. The quest for the reasons Soviet policy did not succeed more thoroughly in eliminating Islam (reasons presumed to lie more in the failures of Soviet institutions and ideology than in the attachment of Soviet Muslims to their traditions) is one of the undercurrents evident throughout the study.

On the whole Ro’i’s book is generally well written, and the data well presented; there is considerable repetition, but the text is admirably cross-referenced. Outside the main body of the book there is some important material worth noting. In particular, the preface outlines the author’s chief archival sources and approach, while his ‘Note on Methodology’ (pp. 1–8) is a fine discussion of the problems and pitfalls inherent in using and interpreting the Soviet archival documents that are the overwhelming foundation of most of the book. These few pages must be kept in mind throughout the rest of the study, even when the author himself does not explicitly call attention to the array of possible implications attendant upon the documentary presentation of specific issues. Indeed, at points in the later body of the work, one senses that the author himself has succumbed to a kind of ‘documentary naiveté’, assuming that measures described or debates discussed in the sources were actual realities rather than the products of bureaucratic obfuscation and evasion.

The introductory matter offers a list of acronyms and abbrevia- tions, and four maps; it includes also a generally helpful, though occasionally misleading, glossary (pp. xv–xxi), covering terminology both Islamic (of various languages) and Soviet Russian. The index is admirably thorough, and will assist readers in locating information, for example, on specific regions and towns. The bibliography, how- ever, is extremely disappointing, and is revealing about the thrust and orientation of the book as a whole. For some reason only works in English and Russian are included (and even for such literature the list is far from exhaustive, arguably not even representative, and occasionally not properly classified). The extensive and important literature in German and French is thus not included (nor is it cited in the footnotes), and there is no representation whatsoever of

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published or unpublished materials in the native languages of the Muslim peoples of the former USSR. This is particularly lamentable in connection with the large corpus of anti-religious literature in the ‘national’ languages: much of this is dull and less than illu- minating, to be sure, but some offers essential material that not only reveals important aspects of the substance of religious life—albeit in the context of ridicule and mockery—but also directly illustrates the particular thrusts of the regime’s tactical repertoire in the struggle against religion during particular periods. The bibliography also makes it clear that the vast body of ethnographic literature exploring aspects of religious life among the Muslim peoples of the USSR has not been utilized. That literature, while itself marred by the stunted development, in the Soviet academic world, of analytical strategies for understanding religion, is nevertheless an essential resource for examining what religious life looked like ‘on the ground’, beyond the governmental evaluations presented in the archival documents.

It should go without saying that there are many other types of sources that one day will have to be taken into account in presenting a more balanced picture of Islam in the USSR. These include Soviet anti-religious literature, Soviet ethnographic descriptions (more scholarly in orientation but still fraught with analytical pitfalls), accounts of émigrés, and—now—the recollections of ‘Soviet’ Muslims themselves. Important insights will also be gleaned from the increased religious publishing from the late Soviet period, occasional examples of religious samizdat, evocations of Islam in ‘national’ literature and art, and study of the Islamic evocations in such cherished aspects of ‘national’ culture as the heroic epic traditions of the Kazaks, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, Turkmens, and others. More broadly, it will be important to ground such a presentation not only in Soviet legal and institutional structures, but in a substratum of understanding of and familiarity with Islamic religious practice elsewhere in the Muslim world, in order to provide a basis for comparison and to distinguish specifically ‘Soviet’ aspects of the impact of modernity upon Muslim religious life from other aspects, which are more broadly attested and not attributable to the Soviet environment. Finally, a much deeper knowledge of the history of Islam in each of the regions that together comprised the ‘Soviet’ Muslim world will be essential to such a project.

Regrettably, Ro’i’s work may be said, at best, to provide abundant (almost-) raw material for such a future re-evaluation of Islam in the USSR. If the study of that phenomenon is to move forward, it is essential to shift fundamentally the approach adopted, the sources

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consulted, and the questions asked, but Ro’i’s work, despite the wealth of data it presents—which makes the work indispensable for any student of Islam in the USSR—has not yet addressed those most basic needs.

THE LEGAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE FRAMEWORK

The bulk of Ro’i’s book is divided into twelve chapters, grouped in five large sections. In Part I, the first chapter offers an excellent survey of Soviet religious policy and its historical shifts during the period covered in the book, from the regime’s rapprochement with religion during the ‘Great Patriotic War’ to the beginning of Gorbachev’s rule (thus roughly from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s). This chronological range is significant: the book’s coverage begins after the ‘crisis’ era of the wholesale assault on the institutional foundations of Islamic life, and ends before the upheavals of the late Soviet period, which saw the virtual disappearance of overt pressures on religious practice, and of the genre of antireligious literature. Though somewhat duller, the interim period was nevertheless crucial—and one might say definitive—as the period of ‘coexistence’ between a regime committed to the disappearance of religion and the officially recognized representatives of ‘tolerated’ religious communities. Chapter 1 thus outlines the basic legal division of religious practice into registered (and thus tolerated, if not ‘approved’) and unregistered (and hence subject to prosecution). It also introduces the central Soviet governmental structures—the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults (1944–65), and its successor, the Council for Religious Affairs, for which Ro’i uses the anglicized acronyms CARC and CRA, respectively—that oversaw religious activity and served as the avenue for the implementation of Soviet policy and for ‘feedback’ on the successes and failures of that policy. This chapter is important for underscoring the multiplicity of official attitudes towards religion, and towards the best way of facilitating its eventual disappearance, as well as the many twists and turns of policy. Thus it reminds us that, in this period at least, there was rarely any consistent plan for anti-religious efforts, or any consensus on the best way to deal with the continuing religious attachments of large segments of Soviet society, behind the seemingly monolithic public face of state-supported atheism.

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Chapter 2, ‘The Dimensions of Islam,’ attempts to give some idea of the numerical data presumed to reflect religious attachment and practice among Soviet Muslims. It begins with a statement that signals a basic problem in the definition of ‘the scope of Islamic activity’: that activity encompasses, we are told, registered and unregistered mosques, communities, clergy, and ‘other religious ‘‘activists’’ ’, the ‘size of mosque attendance’, and ‘the extent of belief and religious practice’. The subtext for this chapter should be, of course, the essential meaninglessness of many of the categories applied by the Soviet government—and regrettably adopted by most studies of Islam in the Soviet environment—for understanding and analysing Muslim religious life in the USSR. The statistical data assembled on pp. 89–91, for instance, show mostly how hopelessly confused the thinking is that results from applying terms such as ‘clergy’ and ‘cleric’, whether registered or not, to Muslim contexts, but a more fundamental problem is rooted in the tacit acceptance of the Soviet understanding of religion as a matter of ‘belief’ and of religious people as ‘believers’. The field of religious studies, and students of Islam in particular, have long recognized the lack of explanatory power that a focus purely on ‘belief’ and doctrines entails with regard to the richness and complexity of religious life, especially in connection with a religious system such as Islam in which ‘orthopraxy’ traditionally trumps ‘orthodoxy’. The fact that the Soviet state and the Communist Party adhered to an antiquated understanding of religious life, and hence to an often self-defeating policy toward Islam (one that was, as Ro’i notes, essentially ‘obtuse’ (p. 319)), does not relieve students of religion in the Soviet state of a responsibility to apply a broader understanding of religious life to our analysis of Islam in that environment.

Part II covers ‘Establishment Islam,’ with the third chapter outlining the history and activities of the four Muslim Spiritual Directorates (based, through most of the relevant period, in Tashkent, Ufa, Makhach-Kala, and Baku), and the long fourth chapter detailing the activities of officially registered mosques and clergy. Here the book is at its strongest, dealing with the functions of Soviet-defined institutions within Soviet society. Chapter 3 is particularly illuminat- ing with regard to the separatist tendencies revealed within the religious boards well before the tensions of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods led to their fracturing—most notably in the case of the one that served Central Asia—along republican lines (a similar fate befell the North Caucasian religious administration, while the directorate based in Ufa underwent a somewhat different pattern of splintering). This process, of course, occurred after the period

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covered in this book and so is not discussed, but in fact some reference to these developments would have helped to underscore one of the important points, often overlooked in other treatments of Islam in the Soviet environment, that Ro’i deserves credit for arguing (and admirably documenting): that however much the official boards were creatures of the Soviet state, they were not merely stooges of the government, but did indeed pursue their own agenda where possible, and were regarded, moreover, as legitimate by many of the faithful who sought to retain their self-respect as Muslims but who were reluctant to get involved in officially prosecutable activities. Despite the structural changes in three of the four Soviet-era religious boards, the idea of having such a governmental board, now on a republican basis, was not repudiated either in the more open atmosphere of the last days of the Soviet state, or after the dissolution of the USSR. The religious boards thus stand among the structures of Soviet life that became ‘indigenized’ and assimilated into Islamic religious life, and not only as a means of control—though they are certainly used in that way by many of the post-Soviet governments— but as part of the local assumptions and expectations regarding the ways in which religious affairs are to be recognized and regulated. This clearly underscores the important insights Ro’i provides regarding the origin, development, and inner workings of the Soviet-era boards.

Chapter 3’s discussion of the fatwās issued by the Soviet clergy (pp. 140–55) is quite valuable, and finally gives substance to an aspect of ‘official Islam’ that was often mentioned but never seriously explored; together with the section on sermons (pp. 253–62) in the following chapter, it offers invaluable insights into the interpretative and communicative functions of the official Islamic establishment. Here again, however, Ro’i misses an opportunity to link, or even compare, the specific positions taken in the sermons or fatwās issued by Soviet clergy with the larger context of Muslim debates, whether in history or at present, and to set the general pattern of interpreting the Sharı̄‘a against the backdrop of traditional (or, for that matter, modern) Muslim juridical discourse. While some of the positions adopted in sermons and fatwās are clearly specific to the Soviet context, the basic pattern of codifying exceptions to strict observance of religious obligations reflects longstanding Muslim tradition. To portray it as somehow peculiar to the Soviet period, or as a radical departure from Muslim interpretative practice, distorts our under- standing of the place of the Soviet-era religious boards in a broader Islamic context, and obscures some of the continuities reflected in those boards’ activities.

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Parts of Chapter 4 seem repetitive after the discussion of mosque openings and closings in Chapter 2, but the information presented here on the financial dealings of the officially registered religious communities (especially pp. 270–9) is particularly valuable, and sheds light on one of the persistent mysteries of ‘official Islam’ in the Soviet Union: the funding mechanisms for registered religious communities. The scale of the offerings and collections that supported the official religious establishment is quite remarkable, and in itself attests to the vitality of Soviet Islam in a way that has not been appreciated heretofore. More broadly, this chapter is revealing about the inner workings of the officially registered religious communities, and of the Councils that dealt with them. It shows how easily, even in Soviet society and even in the context of such a sensitive ideological and social issue as religion, a state organization (such as CARC/CRA) could become something of an advocate for the constituency it was designed to oversee and control, however hostile the regime might remain towards religious life and practice. Such ‘advocacy’ was rooted, of course, in CARC’s persistent argument that closing registered mosques, or merely hindering the process of registration itself, served to strengthen the hand of the unregistered groups, and reflected differences over tactics, not basic sympathies; nevertheless, Ro’i’s treatment is admirable for reminding us that Soviet officialdom could and did debate the realities, and not merely the ideology, of religion’s place in Soviet society. It is a pity, in this regard, that here and elsewhere in the book we are rarely given any insight into the personalities behind the positions and decisions. This would be another story, and would require a different sort of research, but the individuals involved in making and implementing religious policy, and their careers and relationships to their local communities, are no less a part of the history of Islam in the Soviet Union than are the official reports they left behind.

For all its detail and its grounding in Soviet structures, Chapter 4 still overlooks other major issues that will one day be important to include in a consideration of Soviet Islam. It would have been good to include here, in the chapter on registered groups and clergy, some discussion of the alien character of much of the terminology employed by the Soviet state, from the standpoint of Islam, and of the inapplicability, in an Islamic context, of many of the categories and approaches to religious life that were developed with respect to the Russian Orthodox Church. It goes without saying that the mosque is not comparable, in ritual terms, to the church (beyond sharing the Soviet categorization, based on purely external commonalities, as a ‘religious building’ or ‘prayer-house’), and that the Muslim ‘cleric’

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does not typically have the same ritual significance as a Christian priest (every Muslim being, in theory, ritually self-sufficient); yet Ro’i gives only perfunctory acknowledgment to the differential impact of Soviet closures of ‘prayer-houses’ on the Christian and Muslim communities, and never really addresses the terminological problem of the Muslim ‘clergy’ at all. The role of the Soviet state, through the institutional framework it devised (largely on Christian models) for Muslim religious communities, in the crystallization of a hierarchical structure that indeed took root among Muslims of the former USSR, deserves at least some comment, beyond an accounting of the functions the Soviet Muslim ‘clergy’ performed. But Ro’i never steps back from his data here to remind the reader what a remarkable departure from traditional patterns the Sovietized ‘clergy’ represented.

There is also a real need to take stock of the impact of official Soviet attitudes towards Islam, outside the framework of the day-to-day workings of the official governmental bodies and registered religious groups, but this question is not seriously addressed in Ro’i’s book (despite the discussion of local governmental organs’ handling of religious policy in Chapter 11). In particular, Ro’i underplays the impact of Soviet anti-religious propaganda, and of the actual measures (whether ‘administrative’ or by law) taken to obstruct, hinder, or forbid religious practice. Both of these enterprises were no doubt far more often felt directly by broader segments of society than were specific governmental acts affecting registered religious communities. While the archival documents add a crucial dimension to our understanding of policy and the problems of its implementa- tion, they do not always give us a sense of the impact of actual decisions, not to mention the extra-legal ‘administrative’ measures, on the average person, let alone the effects of the constant harping against religion in virtually all cultural, educational, and political venues. They naturally give the perspective of the government and its officials, and cannot be expected to convey the experience of ordinary Soviet Muslims and the atmosphere of harassment and intimidation that could envelop anyone involved in religious practice. In a way this is good: though quite real in many contexts, that atmosphere was hardly pervasive, and there were indeed areas in which religious communities of various stripes could virtually ignore state policy and many aspects of its local implementation. But one can read Ro’i’s book without ever sensing the palpable fear and even paranoia that one frequently felt among the religiously inclined (including even foreign Muslims studying in the USSR) in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, for example—long after the supposed

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institution of ‘Soviet legality’ to safeguard the ‘constitutional rights’ of Soviet citizens.

‘PARALLEL ISLAM’ AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE

Part III, devoted to what was typically called, in Soviet times, ‘unofficial’ or ‘parallel’ Islam, is in many respects the most unsatis- fying section of the book. Chapter 5 attempts to cover the major elements of unregistered religious activity, while Chapter 6 focuses on ‘The Sufi Orders and the Sects’ (the Ismā[ı̄lı̄s of Badakhshān are relegated to the latter category). It goes without saying that much has been missed in attempting to document unregistered religious activity through the archives of organizations focused on the regis- tered groups; it is clearly an important contribution to lay out the information from those archives, but what has been missed in the process is perhaps less troublesome than what has been misinterpreted or ‘miscontextualized’.

Much of the data adduced in Chapter 5 is instructive with regard to the range of religious activity, both registered and unregistered, even in areas typically dismissed as having been less influenced by Islam. It also reminds us that ‘unregistered’ did not necessarily mean ‘underground’, and shows the extent to which the aims of Soviet laws on religion were ill-served by the limits on registering mosques and religious communities, thus driving believers into unregistered groups beyond regulation and control. (See especially pp. 322–3 for the kinds of activities of unregistered groups deemed deleterious by the state, which could have been controlled and stopped had the groups been registered.)

The basic problem here is the author’s unwillingness to offer the reader anything but the Soviet analysis of religion, and his persistence in measuring the reality of Islamic religious life in the Soviet Union not against actual Islamic religious life in the pre-Soviet Russian empire, for instance, or in Central Asia before the Russian conquest, or even elsewhere in the Muslim world in the twentieth century, but against an essentially abstract ideal of Islam defined in quite narrow terms that would exclude much of the daily substance of religious life in most traditional Muslim societies. To restrict what is ‘Islamic’ to the Qur’ān and a limited body of Hadith may be the business of contemporary Muslim fundamentalists and the medieval jurists they cite, but it was never the business of the majority of self-defined Muslims over the centuries, or even of most medieval

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jurists, and it is certainly not the business of scholars who would analyse and interpret Muslim religious life historically or at present. That such a restrictive vision of Islam became part of European colonial discourse about the ‘decay’ of the Islamic world, and then became part of the Soviet academic and political characterization of Islam, can hardly justify its adoption as definitive by those who study Islam in the Soviet context or anywhere else.

The basic Soviet analysis of religious life, indeed, deserves discussion, but unfortunately receives none. Such a discussion would go a long way towards dispelling the impression that Ro’i, while acknowledging the caution that must be exercised in interpreting the archival reports he adduces, has followed the Sovietological school in uncritically adopting the approach of Soviet academics (and the anti-religious literature to which they often contributed) towards defining and understanding religious life. That approach, rooted in positivist scholarship on religion developed in the late nineteenth century but going back to Enlightenment-era disdain both for ‘excess- ive’ ritual and for superstitious ‘folk religion’, served the purpose of fragmenting the traditional life of Muslims into components that could be labelled ‘real Islam’, and others that could be relegated to various categories ranging from ‘survivals from paganism’ (of multiple brands, often depending on the republic and the pre-Islamic religion or religions highlighted as the real autochthonous ‘faith’ of the republic before the arrival of an ‘alien’ Islam) to ‘degenerate’ or ‘popular’ Islam. This analytical fragmentation was, of course, often joined by the official clergy, and it is one of the strange ironies of Soviet history that the Communist Party and the Soviet academic establishment were essentially allied with the official Islamic clergy (not to mention fundamentalists abroad) in adopting a ‘rigorist’ inter- pretation of what constituted ‘real’ Islam; herein lies another attrac- tion of some of the unregistered mullās, who were usually less inclined than the official groups to condemn as ‘un-Islamic’ a practice as central to traditional life as, for example, the visitation to saints’ shrines. In any event, this analytical stance was inevitably influential among the educated elites of the various Muslim nationalities, who learned to dissociate ‘Islam’ from many of the traditional practices of the peoples whose spokesmen they claimed to be; but this, too, is no reason for scholars to adopt this mode of analysis, or to refrain from critical comment upon it.

There are, moreover, fundamental issues of ‘knowledge’ and ‘meaning’ in religious life that ought to be explored in this context, but Ro’i typically opts simply to repeat some Soviet official’s characterization, without comment or elucidation. Take, for example,

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Ro’i’s claim (p. 324) that even in pre-Soviet times, ‘those who per- formed religious rites in Central Asia _ knew very little about Islam apart from being able to recite a few prayers’ [italics mine], and that ‘this patchy knowledge’ was further diminished under Soviet rule, despite ‘the marked improvement in general education’ (as if Soviet education could be expected to improve ‘religious’ knowledge). One naturally wonders who, exactly, serves as the standard for knowing a great deal about Islam, and where such extensive knowledge is to be found; but of course the claim that Muslims—or for that matter adherents of other traditions—‘do not even know what they are doing’ and are ‘ignorant’ of the ‘teachings’ or practices of their own religion was, naturally, a central part of Soviet anti-religious rhetoric, designed to show the folly of religion in general. A condescending attitude towards Muslims’ knowledge of their own traditions and practices is finding new life, to be sure, in characterizations of post- Soviet Islam by would-be ‘reformers’ from elsewhere in the Muslim world (who may indeed not realize that such rhetoric was a regular feature of Soviet dismissals of the integrity and coherence of Muslim religious life). Nevertheless, it is disturbing to find such an attitude creep into Ro’i’s study, whether it is rooted in the Soviet-trained students of Islam (e.g. N. Ashirov, T. S. Saidbaev, or M. G. Vagabov) whose works are so often cited in the book (many of whom were regular contributors to the Soviet anti-religious enterprise before its collapse in the late 1980s), or in Ro’i’s own understanding of Islam.

Whatever its origin, the attitude pervades the book, as when Ro’i reports a CARC official’s derisive comments, from the late 1940s, about the religious knowledge of unofficial mullās in Kazakstan: most of them ‘were unable to translate the Qur’an into their native tongue; some could not even read it at all’ (p. 328). What would have been useful, and interesting, here, is for Ro’i to have noted the absurdity of such a claim as a defining marker of religiosity; literacy in a tradition’s sacred language, or in general, has hardly been a historical prerequisite for religious devotion, practice, or identification, whether among Muslims or in nearly any other religious tradition, and there is indeed a curiously ‘Protestant,’ and even ‘fundamentalist’—or is it merely modernist?—subtext to the insistence that the Arabic Qur’ān be ‘understood’ or its meanings ‘translated’ into a local language in order for it to retain religious significance. As is often pointed out, the Qur’ān is apprehended most definitively in its oral recitation, regardless of ‘understanding’, and Muslim tradition ascribes illiteracy to the Prophet himself; if anyone is deserving of derision here it is not the unofficial mullā of the story, but the CARC official who undoubtedly developed his textual fetish

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through some academic training, and who fundamentally missed the point about the roles played by the unofficial mullās he was attempting to monitor.

Yet Ro’i seems to accept this characterization as significant, and goes on to speak of the ‘general ignorance of Islamic law or even custom’ as a pervasive feature of ‘most, if not all, areas inhabited by Muslim nationalities’, where the unofficial ‘clergy’ would make ‘mistakes in the actual conduct of ritual’ and thereby give their rivals in the official organizations ammunition against them. Here we arrive at a perfect opportunity to illuminate the reader by com- menting on the internal dynamic of contention among differing visions of Islam and differing ritual expectations in Muslim societies, a dynamic hardly restricted to the Soviet context, but one whose distinctive reflection in the Soviet environment, through the ‘partisan’ activity of an ‘external’ force in the form of the Soviet government, deserves comment and serious discussion in a work on ‘Islam in the Soviet Union’. None of this is broached, however, and we are left to assume that Ro’i essentially agrees with the assessment of Muslim ignorance and ritual incompetence that he finds in the Soviet archives and among Soviet academic interpreters of Islam. The Soviet era did, indeed, have a tremendous impact on certain aspects of religious knowledge among the Muslim peoples of the USSR, through the elimination of virtually all state-sanctioned institutions for religious education, through disruptions of long-established patterns in the transmission of traditional lore, and through the creation and cultivation of ‘national’ elites who were severed, by Soviet education and the demands of their career paths if not by ideology, from any organic connection (beyond what might be reinforced in the home) with religious training or with a religious understanding of their people’s heritage. To understand the impact of the Soviet era, however, will require serious research into the sources and styles of religious knowledge on the local and regional scale, and much greater sensitivity to the different forms of local traditional knowledge (not to mention a much deeper familiarity with pre-Soviet, and pre-jadı̄dist, patterns of Islamic education in the various regions that became part of ‘Soviet Islam’) than Ro’i’s work—or any Soviet study—reflects. It will also require the abandonment of the facile dichotomies implied by the caricatures of ‘real Islam’ versus ‘ignorant’ Islam, and, it is hoped, the simultaneous abandonment of disdainful and disparaging attitudes toward the level, and modes, of religious knowledge that retained meaning for many Soviet Muslims.

As it stands, by contrast, an integral part of the Soviet-style analysis that Ro’i appears to adopt is a disparaging attitude towards

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local traditional knowledge (as opposed to a learned ‘canon’ pre- sumed to exist on some larger or even international scale). Female religious specialists, for example, are described as ‘not qualified’ for religious instruction or guidance, since they had no ‘official training’ (p. 342), and are dismissed for employing only ‘prayers and rites they had learned by heart and recited without understanding’ (p. 343). In the same vein, Ro’i later describes a specialist who ‘knew how to recite the requisite elegies, but probably had no religious training and was not really a cleric in any sense’ (p. 659, italics mine); here again essentially meaningless Soviet terminology has utterly defeated genuine understanding. Elsewhere the Kazaks, as a ‘nation’, are spoken of as somehow distinctive or anomalous for having ‘never known a centralised clerical authority’ (p. 293); one wonders where in the Muslim world such a thing has ever been known. Here again the characterization is that of Ro’i’s archival source, but time after time Ro’i himself misses the opportunity such occasions offer to point out how off the mark Soviet understandings of Islam often were. It is perhaps a reality of disciplinary divisions in academic life that the task of considering Islam as understood and lived by Muslims themselves is regarded as the responsibility of anthropologists or sociologists, but not of document-bound historians; if so, the latter cannot claim to offer anything more than a very limited, and often distorted, picture of actual Muslim religious life in the Soviet Union.

Ro’i’s discussion of the unregistered ‘clergy’ (pp. 324–63) especially highlights the terminological problem noted above. If we can accept the use of the term ‘clergy’ to refer to the officially registered representatives of essentially Sovietized institutions, what are we to make of the catch-all phrase ‘unregistered clergy’? In this case the problem is not so much with the term ‘clergy’ itself—it can still be useful in Islamic contexts even if we first invoke the caveat about the differing roles of Christian priests and those classed as Muslim ‘clerics’—but rather with the vagueness of its use. Ro’i (like others in the field of ‘Sovietological Islamology’ before him) has lumped into the category all sorts of religious specialists and practitioners— ranging from imāms of unregistered mosques to the many kinds of healers, unofficial custodians of shrines, purveyors of amulets, and representatives of saintly lineages of various sorts—without making clear the differences among them, thereby implying that all such figures do indeed fall into an indigenously Islamic category of ‘clergy’. Ro’i does allude to the variety of figures he treats as ‘unofficial clergy’ (p. 337), but he does so without any reference whatsoever to the large Soviet ethnographic corpus describing many figures of this sort—a body of literature quite problematical, certainly, but hardly

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discountable simply for the sheer mass of data it makes available —and offers no serious discussion of the nature of these religious specialists. Instead of a description, or case study, for example, of even an individual ‘faith-healer’, we find merely a Soviet-style list of some of the activities undertaken by unregistered ‘clergy’ who, we are told, ‘went by a variety of names’. We have the sense here of looking through Soviet categories wrongly (or just unilluminatingly) imposed upon a reality the terms do not fit. Ro’i then shows us—all too often—just the Soviet terms, without the reality below them; thus, like other Sovietological students of Islam in the Soviet context, he not only reifies the Soviet categories in the process, but legitimizes the Soviet approach to religion. Indeed, at one point, Ro’i himself creates a new category, it would seem, of ‘authentic itinerant mullas’, who ‘indeed, went from place to place’; how these are to be distinguished from inauthentic itinerant ‘mullās’ is not explained. (Presumably the criterion is not their travels, as his phrasing implies, but one wonders if Ro’i means to distinguish ‘mullās’ who perform certain rites as ‘authentic’, as opposed to other ‘mullās’ or healers, who could not be.)

Ro’i’s discussion, moreover, of the relations—sometimes hostile, but often co-operative—between registered and unregistered clergy— relations that immediately render the phrase ‘parallel Islam’, with its implication of non-intersecting paths, inappropriate—ought to raise the question of whether this is the proper dichotomy through which these individuals, and the religious constituencies they rep- resented, can best be categorized. Perhaps the style of religious practice ought to be the focus, or the attitude towards the Soviet government. For example, did only ‘normative’ mullās seek ties with registered clergy, or did thaumaturgical, ‘shamanizing’, faith-healing ‘clerics’ do so as well? Is it not a confusion or misrepresentation to lump these types of unregistered religious specialists together with those who just happened not to get registered? Here again these Soviet ‘legal’ categorizations were both arbitrary and simplistic (not to mention counterproductive, even from the standpoint of Soviet policy), and while there is certainly merit in framing them for the reader, it is hardly helpful to adopt, or merely tacitly accept, them as if they represent some objective reality or indigenous category.

The treatment of shrines in Chapter 5 (pp. 363–82), finally, is especially poor, as it reflects little appreciation of the roles and functions of holy places—either throughout the Muslim world or in the particular areas of Soviet Islam—outside the Soviet and Sovietological framework. Once again we are faced with an exclusivist vision of what constitutes Islam: though acknowledging

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how widespread the phenomenon of pilgrimage to saints’ shrines is in the Muslim world, Ro’i essentially adheres to the Soviet evaluation, stressing that the ‘cult of holy men or saints was extrinsic to Qur’anic Islam’ (p. 364). Here, though, the sources Ro’i uses to supplement his archival documents are revealing. For general information and background on the phenomenon of shrines and pilgrimage he cites, alongside the grand old man of anti-Muslim propaganda, Liutsian Klimovich, a few of the well-known Soviet ethnographers who ‘doubled’ as producers of anti-religious literature. These include some who now, in post-Soviet times, have switched to becoming purveyors of ‘expert’ information on Islam in Central Asia (not only during the time when they and their colleagues were attempting to suppress it, but both before and after the Soviet period as well). They have thereby gained an even broader audience (especially through English translations sponsored by Western academics who ought to know better, such as the disturbingly ethnocentric example of prescriptive ethnography published by S. P. Poliakov, Everyday Islam),3 for an essentially unreconstructed Soviet view of religious life—hardly a field in which Soviet scholarship was leading the way, for obvious reasons.

For the locations of specific shrines, moreover, Ro’i simply refers readers to the woefully incomplete and undocumented maps and lists of shrines found in the 1985 work, Mystics and Commissars (from the same London firm that published Ro’i’s study), by Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush.4 This is particularly dismaying precisely because Ro’i’s use of archival materials put him in a position to add substantively to our data on shrine-related religious activity in the Soviet era. Yet despite the centrality of the archival data in nearly all sections of the book, there is often a frustrating reluctance to lay out the full detail that was undoubtedly given in the original archival source. For example, when the closure, or opening, or registration of ‘five shrines’ in a given locality is mentioned, one wonders why readers who have stuck with the author through the mass of data he marshals must remain forever ignorant of which shrines were thus affected unless and until they travel to Moscow to check the archival reference. It is possible that the sources themselves are this vague, but this seems unlikely: to travel this far, but not the

3 Sergei P. Poliakov, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia, ed. Martha Brill Olcott, trans. Anthony Olcott (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992); cf. Ludmila Polonskaya and Alexei Malashenko, Islam in Central Asia (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1994).

4 Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union (London: C. Hurst, 1985).

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final few inches, into the specificity of the archival data on Soviet Islam, leaves the journey incomplete, and providing that additional detail would have raised the informational—if not the analytical —value of the study immeasurably.

It is, once again, precisely the Sovietological audience that is likely to be led astray by the handling of shrines here; when we are told, for example, that around 1960 Kazakstan had twenty- three mazārs, ten of which came under the jurisdiction of an archi- tectural agency (p. 379), anyone familiar with even a small region in Kazakstan or any other republic in Central Asia will immediately know that the figure of twenty-three shrines for the entire republic is essentially meaningless, but its specificity will undoubtedly lend it credence in some circles. And when we read that the ‘cult’ of holy places ‘had been perpetuated in particular by women as an integral component of the syncretistic religion that had taken root among them, the entire ritual conducted at these sites being permeated with animistic ideas and magical elements associated with the cult of nature’ (p. 365, italics mine), anyone familiar with Edward Westermarck’s Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation5 will recognize the intellectual milieu reflected in this sort of approach, as well as the scholarly stagnation of the Soviet academic establish- ment that continued to use it. (It is worth noting that Soviet-trained ethnographers have been quite slow to abandon it since the collapse of the USSR.) But Sovietologists, though alert to the perils of Soviet misinformation in some fields, and trained to read between the lines of Soviet sources, may well not realize that they have been led, by Ro’i, into the clutches of the typical, antiquated Soviet analytical framework for interpreting ‘popular’ religion—complete with the rhetoric of religious ‘relics’ and ‘survivals’, and of various ‘cults’ and ‘-isms’—or that this sort of approach is now itself something of a relic, surviving chiefly, if not yet exclusively, in Soviet-trained scholarship.

Ro’i’s discussion of Sufism in Chapter 6 continues the dual track of important archival data alongside a frustratingly inadequate conceptual framework. In this case, the data will be useful for building our understanding of the profile of Sufism in the Soviet environment, though it is a terminological minefield, filled (perhaps in the original documents, certainly in Ro’i’s presentation) with imprecisions and assumptions that will hamper its interpretation; as for the conceptual

5 Edward Westermarck, Pagan Survivals in Mohammedan Civilisation: Lectures on the Traces of Pagan Beliefs, Customs, Folklore, Practices and Rituals Surviving in the Popular Religion and Magic of Islamic Peoples (London: Macmillan, 1933; repr. Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1973).

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framework, this is clearly a low point in the book as a whole. The presentation of Sufism’s history in the Muslim regions that came under Russian and Soviet rule is simply embarrassing; this is not surprising, insofar as Ro’i’s chief source on the history of Sufism is again Mystics and Commissars by Bennigsen and Wimbush, whose presentation of the history of Sufism in Central Asia and the Volga– Ural region, at least, is best ignored altogether. From this work, Ro’i adopts not only the irredeemably flawed historical survey, but specific misinterpretations relevant to the Soviet era as well, such as the ridiculous assignment of localities in which particular orders were supposedly strong (e.g. pp. 386, 402), or the oft-repeated but baseless claims that the so-called ‘Hairy Ishans’ of Kyrgyzstan were an offshoot of the Yasavı̄ order (p. 398). One wonders whether the continuators of the Sovietological approach to Soviet Islam ever look at scholarship produced outside their own ‘school’, or outside the circle of Soviet anti-religious propagandists now ‘refor- med’ for the post-Soviet age. Certainly Ro’i’s bibliography gives no indication that he has taken stock, for instance, of the important work done in recent years on the history of Sufi communities in Central Asia, the Volga–Ural region, and the North Caucasus by such specialists as Jürgen Paul, Jo-Ann Gross, Robert McChesney, Bakhtiyar Babajanov, Ashirbek Muminov, Anke von Kügelgen, Florian Schwarz, Hamid Algar, Allen Frank, or Michael Kemper.

More troubling, however, than the historical misrepresentations (though in part rooted in them) is the repeated characterization of Sufism as ‘non-conformist Islam’, as an ‘opposition current’, as ‘extremist’ and ‘hostile’ (p. 385), and as a force of validation for ‘non- establishment Islam’ (p. 393). Ro’i is clearly out of his element here, relying by turns on Western Sovietologists and Soviet (anti- religious) specialists even for basic doctrinal information on Sufism. In part this continues the pattern evident elsewhere in the book, of adopting an arbitrary standard for labelling what is Islamic and what is not. Ro’i declares, for instance, that Sufism supported the ‘cult of holy men’, which is again characterized as ‘not consistent with the teachings of the Qur’an’ (p. 393). One senses here that Ro’i is simply adopting the analysis of his Soviet interpreters of Islam, not of any specific articulated Muslim position, but in either case he is ignoring the reality that Islamic literature alone, not to mention actual practice over the centuries, is replete with defences of pilgrim- age to saints’ shrines. The pre-eminence in certain vocal Muslim circles today of Wahhābı̄-style opposition to shrine visitation hardly makes such a characterization definitive for the entire Muslim world or for all of Muslim history, let alone for any particular

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region of the USSR or for ‘Soviet Islam’ as a whole. To his credit, he takes issue here (p. 387, n. 5) with the insistence, typical in Soviet ethnographic scholarship, that many Sufi and Muslim practices in the Soviet context were derived from ‘shamanism’. Nevertheless he lapses into a presentation of a stereotyped Sufism based in the false dichotomies of Soviet and Sovietological treatment, which are left uncorrected and unmitigated by more sober assessments of the history of Sufi communities in what became Soviet territories, or indeed anywhere else in the world.

RELIGIOSITY AND PRACTICE: WHO OWNS ISLAM?

Part IV purports to deal with Muslim religious practice in its social context. Chapter 7, ‘The Sociology of Islam’, attempts to explore the familial and communal setting for Muslim religious practice. Once again, it brings forth useful data, but never truly comes to grip with the basic issue of the relationship of ‘lived’ Islam with the abstract norms adopted by the Soviets and by Ro’i as the standard for Muslim religious observance. Similarly, it never explores—beyond those Soviet categories—the markers of Islamic religiosity and religious identity that are more appropriate, and more instructive, to consider from an indigenous perspective. As a result, Ro’i’s account never quite grasps the crucial intersection of religiosity with the social context that this chapter promises to explore. There is, of course, a specific problem at work here, namely the inherent unreliability of the ‘data’ sought after in the Soviet (and post-Soviet) context—for instance, as a means for the categorization of people as ‘confirmed’ or ‘profound’ believers, or as ‘moderate’ believers, etc.—but there is again a broader deficiency not only in the measuring, but in the basic understanding, of ‘religiosity’.

True, Ro’i does note the centrality of practice over belief in Islam, and he takes issue with the numbers on mosque attendance as a reliable indicator of religiosity or ‘religious’ identification (p. 453). But having acknowledged the meaninglessness of measuring religiosity in terms of the performance of what he calls the ‘stipulated’ rites (p. 460), he not only proceeds to do just that, but goes further and loads his discussion of religious practice with a host of assumptions about the suitably ‘religious’ motivations and standards for ritual observance, and even the mindset deemed proper for the practitioner.

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For instance, his discussion of the presumed motivations under- lying religious practice is again unable to transcend the boundaries of Soviet analysis. When he cites a survey from Uzbekistan showing that 36 per cent of ‘those who performed Muslim rites’ did so ‘under the influence of parents, relatives, or their surroundings’, 35 per cent ‘out of habit’, 19 per cent ‘out of a lack of ‘‘a worthy alternative’’, and only 10 per cent out of ‘religious motivation’ (p. 462), it is disturbing that Ro’i is unwilling to step back and note, for his reader, the absurdity of such a formulation. The basic language of distin- guishing ‘religious’ from ‘non-religious’ motives for the performance of religious rites obviously begs the question of what a ‘religious’ motive is. Is it one based somehow in theology, for example in hope of heaven or fear of hell? Is it one rooted in altruism or selflessness? Is it a motive that is solely ‘spiritual’ in its understanding? If so, then we have implicitly cut off the social component that was sup- posedly our focus. If we so etherealize religiosity that we exclude a desire for health, economic success, fertility, or social harmony and camaraderie from the range of motivations that can be labelled ‘religious’, we have demolished or devalued much of what makes religious practice interesting throughout the world. Is it ‘religious’ when a Muslim seeks consciously to keep the Prophet’s example before him in modelling his own behaviour, but not ‘religious’ when he merely conforms to societal norms that were themselves con- structed and regularly reinforced on the basis of presumed imitation of the Prophet? Why should scholars be bound to accept the antiseptic vision of religiosity as a purely intellectual or ‘spiritual’ affair that is instantly sullied and debased if ordinary human needs are felt to be addressed through it?

The very act of presenting a survey framed in such terms, of course, was part of the project of undermining religion, since it served to remind ‘those who performed Muslim rites’ that the state (or at least the academics who represented it), and not the informants, served as the arbiter of what was religious and what was not. Yet one inevitably wonders if the range of ‘those who performed Muslim rites’ envisioned in the survey included those, for example, who uttered the bismillāh before stepping onto a bus. If, as seems likely, it did not, why was this injection of a religious formula into the most mundane parts of everyday life deemed less revealing about religiosity than the performance of the Friday noon prayer at a mosque? What manner of insight did the framers of the survey have into the motivation and spiritual state of a statistically significant sample of the Muslim population, allowing them to determine that ‘religiosity’ would be better revealed by those who participated in

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rites that were officially discouraged (and who were thus potentially subject to guilt or embarrassment in the presence of the surveyor and a corresponding tendency to explain away their participation) than by those who persisted in essentially ‘private’ religious performance outside the purview of the state?

Even when discussing practice, moreover, Ro’i slips back into a focus on belief, and specifically on the ‘theological component’ whose ‘depreciation’ he notes in the Soviet context (p. 462). One could argue, of course, that the depreciation of the ‘theological component’ in Islam was the rule, not the exception, and hardly unique to the Soviet environment: when did ‘theology’ or theological sophistication, or even paying any attention to what counts in Islamic tradition as ‘theology’, become the benchmark for judging religiosity? Yet even when a Soviet assessment from 1983 speaks of the theological component’s depreciation, alongside the ‘complex of Islamic traditions and rituals’ that ‘was proving to be the most dynamic element of believers’ daily lives’ (p. 462), Ro’i adopts the account’s evaluation of this purported shift as a ‘fall in religiosity’. If it is true that ‘a gradual curtailing of the fundamentals of Islam’ was taking place, or that ‘mosque attendance was becoming a social event’, as the Soviet assessment concludes, then perhaps it is time to acknowledge that we have possibly misidentified the ‘fundamentals’, and to shift our focus away from theology and towards the social context for religious practice. In counting only the explicitly theological as ‘religious’, not only the Soviets, but Ro’i and other Sovietological students of Islam in the USSR as well, participate in divorcing ‘religion’ from the skein of lifeways that in fact stands as the more legitimate marker of ‘religiosity’ in the social environment. Certainly, some religious people, especially in the modern world, like their religion strained and filtered and distilled in this way, but that does not make it a suitable standpoint from which to assess religious life in other times or places.

Elsewhere in Chapter 7 we are told, for example, that ‘disdaining pork’ is ‘hardly a sign of religiosity’ (p. 464). But that is exactly what it is, if we cease strangling ‘religiosity’ to the verge of lifelessness. Indeed, familiarity with even a few epic traditions, or popular tales of Islamization and of struggles to establish and defend Islam (as opposed to the recent writings of ‘clergy’ alone) should suffice to remind us that aversion to pork has for centuries been a central marker of religiously defined communal identity, and remains so today, often becoming (along with circumcision) the pre-eminent divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, whether the latter are Kalmyks, Chinese, or Russians. Is it the chief concern of the most

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deeply spiritual? Perhaps not. Is it the cultural inheritance of many who never perform other ‘religious’ rites and would not profess any level of ‘belief’ in religion? Of course. But to label it on that basis as ‘hardly a sign of religiosity’ once again evidences such a crippled notion of what ‘religion’ entails as to strip the category of any possible meaning in a social context. The fact that Soviet ‘specialists’ on religious affairs or on Islam adopted such a notion is not surprising, but merely to present their analysis without calling attention to its inadequacies does a disservice to the reader, especially the Sovietological reader, who may be all too easily lulled into acquiescence.

Essentially the same approach is continued in Chapter 8, which deals with the broader social rites of the month of fasting, and the two major [ı̄ds or bayrāms coinciding, respectively, with the end of Ramad

˙ ān and the pilgrimage to Makka. Here, as in Chapter 7,

we again find the themes of implying a peculiarly Soviet venue for developments actually evidenced in other contexts as well, and of applying irrelevant standards to religious practice. Ro’i refers, for example, to the ‘curtailing’ of the length of the evening prayers during the month of fasting as ‘a compromise between Islamic tradition and Soviet reality’ (p. 473), overlooking the Muslim reality that ‘Islamic tradition’ itself was full of such compromises. Similarly, he implies that excusing the imperfect performance of rites (e.g. p. 454, n. 100), or giving ‘dispensations’ from fasting during Ramad

˙ ān

(p. 479), was again solely a Soviet phenomenon, rather than a leitmotif of juridical theory and practice for centuries. Ironically, on one of the rare occasions when he notes that the ‘concessions’ to the strict performance of religious obligations he describes during the Soviet era were observable in earlier times as well, Ro’i hastens to reaffirm the artificial standard by which, he implies, we should judge Islam in the Soviet context: Ro’i cites a Russian article explaining that the pattern of ‘proxy’ Islam, whereby the more observant older generation in effect ‘represented’ younger kinsmen who were not expected to be rigorous in religious practice (a phenomenon more recently described among the Kazaks in Bruce Privratsky’s important new book, Muslim Turkistan)6 was reported already in the late nineteenth century, but adds, ‘It should be stressed that Muslim law made no distinction between the obligation to pray of different age

6 Bruce G. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001), esp. 74–93. Privratsky’s book offers an alternative to both the Soviet and Sovietological approaches, and shows what can be achieved, in terms of understanding the impact of the Soviet era on Muslim religious life, by abandoning both.

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groups’ (p. 441, n. 50). The lesson we are apparently intended to draw here is that whatever actual practice in a given region might be, religiosity ought to be measured not against that customary practice, but always against an ideal of ‘Muslim law’. While such a lesson makes good sense from within a particular religious pers- pective—though not a prominent one in the area under discussion—it is unfortunately unilluminating with regard to a scholarly under- standing of the reality of religion in the Soviet (or pre-Soviet) environment.

Elsewhere in Chapter 8 there is a fine example of the kind of misunderstanding that can result from a narrow focus on the Soviet period even when attempting to account for developments in ‘Soviet’ Islam. In line with the theme of the ignorance of Muslim clerics, Ro’i notes (p. 474) that ‘special clerics, known as qaris, would sometimes be enlisted’ to recite the Qur]ān because ‘many of the registered imams were unable’ to do so. It will immediately be obvious to some that the qārı̄ as a ‘specialized cleric’ who recites the Qur]ān predates the Soviet era, but it is worth pointing out the peculiarly ‘Soviet’ development that is obscured by Ro’i’s treatment here: 1. Traditional society involves many individuals in the functioning

of mosques, ranging from those who oversee mosque finances or groundskeeping, to the imāms who lead the prayer and the many potential khat

˙ ı̄bs who give the Friday sermon, to the specialists

who recite the Qur]ān or summon people to prayers, etc. 2. Then the Soviets severely reduce this ‘staff,’ assigning only one

figure to supervise a registered mosque’s functions and labelling him the imām, and expecting him also to give the Friday sermon (hence adjusting his title to imām-khat

˙ ı̄b, functions not typically

joined in other contexts, though indeed combined, tellingly, in a similar context of restrictions on religion in the name of forced modernization, i.e. Kemalist Turkey).

3. In the course of this reduction of ‘official’ staff, the Soviets also apply their inapt terminology of ‘clergy’ to the context of the mosque, including the new imām-khat

˙ ı̄b as its basic ‘clerical’

staff, but excluding the many others, such as the qārı̄, from the ranks of the clergy (though as Ro’i notes, there was some debate over whether the mu]adhdhin should hold clerical status or not).

4. Then Ro’i, taking the Sovietized imām-khat ˙ ı̄b as the norm,

accepts the Soviet criticism about the ‘regular’ imām’s inability to recite the Qur]ān as evidencing his inadequacy or ignorance, and presents the introduction of the qārı̄, as a ‘specialized cleric’, as if

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it were a concession necessitated by the ineptitude of so many imām-khat

˙ ı̄bs.

Chapter 9 is focused on ritual practice at the personal level of the family and individual, examining the data on rites of passage, and discussing also the status of women in Soviet Islam. It is here that the absence of any discussion, or even a brief digest, of ethnographic accounts of how Islam was lived in the Soviet context is especially deplorable. Instead we have only a skewed presentation based overwhelmingly on reports of those whose duty it was to limit, control, obstruct, and reduce religiosity and religious behaviour. There is no effort to set the discussion in the context of scholarly literature on specific issues for comparative purposes (i.e. on the status of women), and a mass of data set in the framework of Soviet interpretation substitutes for any broader analytical or conceptual framework.

ISLAM, STATE, AND NATION

Part V, finally, looks at ‘Islam and the Regime’. Chapter 10 examines the policy of the central government with regard to Islam, and its implementation, focusing on the role of ideology and of questions of internal security and foreign policy in shaping regime policy. While interesting, the discussion of ideology’s role (pp. 563–72) deals only with the impact of ideology on policy, not on the analytical paradigms noted above, which divorced religion from much of life (and certainly from political and ‘national’ life). In many respects those analytical paradigms are arguably of greater long-term con- sequence than Soviet policy, because of their appropriation by the Soviet Muslim elites through their education and ‘corporate culture’.

Chapter 11 explores the different ways in which local governmental organs related to the stated policy of the central government, ranging from hostility towards ‘practitioners’ of Islam to active assistance of and co-operation with such practitioners in thwarting official policy. This is one of the most interesting chapters in the book, and several of the incidents recounted on the basis of archival material provide revealing vignettes of the governmental quandaries entailed by Muslim religious practice (e.g. the saga of the battle over official registration of a religious association in the Tatar town of Bugul’ma (pp. 654–6)). In accounts of such incidents may well lie the chief value of Ro’i’s study, as exemplified by the telling comment, referring to the Tatar ASSR from 1946, that ‘local

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government and party organs were said neither to know anything about Islamic life nor to be interested in hearing about it’ (p. 626). Ro’i’s discussion of ‘administrative measures’ (pp. 663–8) employed to curtail religious activity is likewise informative, and reminds us that however much CARC was willing to cite constitutional guarantees of freedom of conscience in bureaucratic support of its own approach (cf. p. 555), its opposition to ‘administrative measures’ was limited to internal memos, and in public it inevitably backed the often harsh measures of local officials (p. 673).

Chapter 12, lastly, explores the conundrum of ‘Islam and Nationalism,’ adding some useful data, but again asking the same questions that occupied the debate of the 1970s and 1980s (when the flawed dichotomy of ‘Islam versus nationalism’ was framed) and persisted even in the altered political landscape of the 1990s. It perhaps goes without saying that this book, like nearly all Sovieto- logical treatments of the Muslim peoples of the USSR, effectively essentializes the ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ divisions of those peoples as reified by the Soviet regime itself. (See, for instance, Ro’i’s list of Muslim ‘nationalities’ at pp. 56–7.) Such essentializations of ‘ethnic’ identifications appear already in the preface, along with their supposed religious implications, as with Ro’i’s repetition (p. xii) of the persistent but unfounded claim that the Kazaks were Islamized only ‘in the eighteenth or nineteenth century’. (Ro’i’s own material in fact demonstrates the meaninglessness of placing Soviet-defined ‘nations’ on a scale of being more Muslim or less Muslim, but the topos is too deeply embedded in the literature to be easily abandoned.) We cannot explore here the full range of misguided interpretations rooted in the breathtaking myopia of Sovietological assumptions about ‘national’ identity among Soviet Muslims. Suffice it to say that Central Asians, as well as other Muslims in the USSR, had a much broader repertoire of communal self-conceptions, rooted in understandings of collective origins and of definitive lifeways that were thoroughly infused with religious symbolism (and not merely ‘attached’ to a parallel religious identity) than has been realized, or matched, either by most Sovietological scholars or by most of the indigenous elites who have declared themselves the formulators and preservers of their peoples’ collective identities, beginning with the jadı̄dists.

The heart of the problem, it would appear, lies in a basic misapprehension of the possibilities inherent in the relationship between religion and nationalism, and in the unilluminating questions that arise therefrom. Most of the literature on ‘religion versus nationalism’ tends to consider the ‘religious element’ in

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nationalism as something secondary, a possible attribute of the essential reality of national or ethnic self-consciousness; the image conveyed is one of loading up (or in some historical contexts, unloading) a set of beliefs and practices deemed ‘religious’—a category understood as narrowly as possible, in line with the min- imalist definitions of religiosity noted earlier, and typically relegated to the realm of ‘culture’—onto a basic core of individual and collective identity that is almost invariably, in such approaches, assumed to be ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ in focus. The point is not just that religious affiliation was a prime marker of communal identity, but that basic communal identities, including familial and local and even so-called ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’, were themselves framed in terms whose fundamental meanings could not be understood without recourse to ‘religious’ worldviews and practices.

Ro’i is in general more sanguine than I believe is warranted with regard to the interest in and attachment to Islam on the part of the Soviet-era elites among Muslim peoples, but even if we allow his conclusion, his phrasing is revealing: he writes, for instance, of the intelligentsia ‘becoming aware’ of ‘national distinctiveness’ and displaying a ‘growing interest’ in an Islamic heritage (p. 711). Insofar as Islam was a central and definitive feature of the ‘national’ heritage of these elites, and was a key element—as late as the early twentieth century in some quarters—in pre-modern notions of communal identity, Ro’i’s comments imply that something significant succeeded in splitting the intelligentsia away from an organic link to the religious distinctiveness and heritage of their community, which the elites then had to rediscover. Herein, indeed, lie signs of the fundamental misconception in the ‘Islam versus nationalism’ dicho- tomy: the division makes sense only from the standpoint of elites who first learned to divorce religion from communal identity (and, often, to look back to the pre-Islamic traditions of what they, attached to an ethnic rather than religious focus of identity, understood as ‘their’ peoples—whether Turks, or Zoroastrian Iranians, etc.—as their real ‘national’ spiritual heritage), and who subsequently had to ‘rediscover’ and re-understand their ‘nation’s’ connection with Islam. This, of course, reflects the Soviet view of history—not only the simple presentation of Islam as an alien force, brought by the Arabs who (unlike the Russians) could be spoken of as invaders and conquerors, but also the whole view of a nation as an ethnically and linguistically based unit that moves coherently through history. But it was clearly not the Soviet regime alone that cut off the local elites (or at least those local elements most inclined to regard the Soviet experiment as potentially responsive to their newly defined

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‘national’ aspirations) from that organic link with earlier notions of communal identity. Elements of the local intelligentsia had already been weaned away from an organic connection with traditional life, not just by the economic and cultural dislocations brought on by colonial experience under Russian rule, but by the fundamental shifts in outlook and worldview that marked their precursors among the jadı̄dist elements, who were hungry for modernism, increasingly estranged from the structures and meaning of traditional religious life, and inclined towards formulating a ‘rational’ religion suitable for their new lifestyle and cultural orientation. However extensive the ‘rediscovery’ of Islam by the ‘national’ elites may have been, it was rarely deep, since it could not move beyond the ‘national’ mode of communal identity whose reification was perhaps the Soviet era’s most important, if ironic, contribution.

As for the role of the Soviet-era ‘clergy’ in this regard, Ro’i writes, ‘By the early 1980s the clergy were impressing upon believers that their Islamic affiliation was in fact tantamount to their national definition’ (pp. 439–40). Here Ro’i lays the identification of Islamic observance with respect for national customs at the feet of the Muslim clergy, and presents this as something innovative (and even subversive, culturally if not politically). In this interpretation he apparently agrees with Soviet writers, though we may rightly suspect that it was in fact the Soviet government that began linking religion with nationalism as such, precisely by ‘explaining’ religion’s continued appeal not through the human needs met by religion— something Soviet ideology could not admit—but through the clergy’s success in linking religion with honour for traditions and customs located within the sort of denatured nationalism for which Soviet ideology could find a more respectable, if still only temporary, place. In a sense, of course, this linking of religion with nationalism was innovative, given the relative novelty of nationalism itself, but it would be disingenuous not to point out that Islam—as a focus of communal affiliation, as a lifestyle and set of practices, and as a worldview—had been an integral part of the lives of Central Asian peoples long before they were divided into ‘nations’ in the 1920s. But it was hardly a profound departure from tradition; it was only natural for the ‘clergy’ to present religious rites as ‘national rites’, since religion had been at the core of pre-national communal identities, and remained so outside the elites.

The problem in analysis, then, lies not in identifying which rites are ‘religious’ or ‘Islamic’ and which are ‘national’; the problem lies in framing the question in terms of assumptions of a national identity free of, or independent of, a religious identity (assumptions

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that are themselves a Soviet construct), or of framing national identity as the larger and obviously more crucial focus, of which religious identity might or might not be a component. To pretend, first, that Islam lay as a veneer over a firmer foundation of ‘national’ traditions that not only predated Islam but survived alongside it, supposedly untouched, and, second, that this Islamic veneer was then exploited and manipulated by the Soviet-era clergy in an attempt to let Islamic religious practices ride on the back of those ‘national’ foundations, is not only to misread badly the historical cultural heritage of Central Asia and the other Muslim regions of the USSR, but to continue the essentially Soviet enterprise of attempting to remove religion from communal identity (in which enterprise the very creation of ‘nations’ played a crucial role).

The six broad questions framed by Ro’i in the Afterword (pp. 713–30) as the backdrop to his study show clearly that an exploration of religious life is not what was envisaged here, and that ‘religion’ was only regarded as significant if and when it could be linked with the history of political structures, bureaucracy, and policy. Here we see most clearly the legacy of the Sovietological approach, and the way it has consistently served to muddle, rather than clarify, the essentially religious phenomenon of ‘Islam in the Soviet Union’.

One of those six issues—‘can one legitimately talk of Soviet Islam, or were the differences between the areas of Muslim concentration in that vast country so great that they lacked any common features?’ (p. 714)—is resolved to Ro’i’s satisfaction as revealing ‘a single Islam which existed throughout the Soviet Union’, within ‘a single body politic’ that ensured a shared ‘political framework with which Islam had constantly to contend’ (p. 723). Ro’i phrases the question in such a way as to tilt the response towards acknowledging a coherent phenomenon of Union-wide ‘Soviet’ Islam; who would deny that the different regions ‘lacked any common features,’ after all? But it is noteworthy, first, that the common features he stresses are rooted not in Islam, but in the Soviet polity; and second, one may rightly observe that such a conclusion is indeed predetermined by the body of sources Ro’i has used, namely Soviet government documents, to the exclusion of other perspectives that might have conveyed more of the regional particularism and local flavour of ‘Soviet’ Islam. The regions were indeed different, despite the common experience of Soviet rule, certainly with regard to patterns of religious life, and even with regard to the issues that Ro’i’s book addresses. One should beware, then, of generalizing from one region to the others, or to a whole, without clear evidence.

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A NOTE ON TERMINOLOG Y

A word is in order about the handling of religious terminology, both in the glossary and in the book as a whole, which will dismay readers familiar with Islamic studies. The variety of local forms of this terminology presents problems, to be sure, but the reliance on Anglicized forms of Russianized versions of Islamic terms, without offering an Arabic ‘standard’ equivalent when appropriate, is lam- entable, and occasionally the treatment of important terms is simply bizarre.

For instance, Ro’i tells us that the fast of Ramad ˙ ān is ‘known in

the Soviet Union as uraz (from Turkish uruç ‘fast’)’ (p. 468; cf. p. xxi), and indeed he uses the nonsensical form uraz to refer to the fast throughout his work. The ‘Turkish’ term he refers to, however (more properly oruç in modern Turkish), is generally recognized as an early borrowing into Turkic, with a prothetic vowel, from an Iranian (possibly Sogdian) form that underlies also the Persian term for fasting, rūzah, and clearly is not the source of the term used for the fast in the modern languages of Soviet Muslims. The Persian form is reflected directly in the modern Tajik term for the fast (rūza), as well as in the Uzbek form (rozä), and also underlies the forms in other Turkic languages in which the prothetic vowel does appear (i.e. Turkmen oraza, Kazak oraza, Kyrgyz orozo, Bashkir uradha, Tatar uraza), while the Russians use uraza as their equivalent of the indigenous term, undoubtedly borrowed from Tatar. If in fact the documents Ro’i has explored use the term uraz for the fast, this calls for discussion, perhaps highlighting the ‘cultural illiteracy’ it signals on the part of the officials who wrote them. While we can hardly fault Ro’i for refraining from etymological and derivational explorations in this case, certainly even a tangential familiarity with any of the indigenous terms for such a central facet of Muslim religious life as the fast of Ramad

˙ ān (to which Ro’i devotes some

twenty pages) would have prevented the adoption of the form uraz throughout the book. (Did Ro’i somehow read the actual form as including a Russian genitive ending, or just borrow the usage from others? That the former was the case is suggested by his parallel use of the form jinaz throughout the work to refer to the Muslim funeral prayer, i.e. Arabic jināza/janāza, for which the forms in ‘Soviet’ Muslim languages (e.g. Tajik janoza var. jinoza, Uzbek jänazä, Turkmen jı̈naza, Kazak zhanaza, Kyrgyz janaza, Karakalpak zhinaza, Bashkir yı̈naza) bespeak a different rendering.) To compound the problem, Ro’i repeatedly refers to the celebration marking the end of Ramad

˙ ān using the Russianized compound form uraz-bayram,

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instead of a form recognizable in any of the Soviet Muslim languages, (for example with the Turkic possessive suffix, as in Turkmen oraza bayramı̈ ).

It is likewise not clear, for example, why the term for the night-time supererogatory prayer during Ramad

˙ ān, tarāwı̄h

˙ , becomes tarawa

throughout the book (though tarāwı̄h ˙

does appear in the glossary). There are a host of other inconsistencies in transliteration as well. Why do we find qalym, for instance, but kaitarma instead of qaytarma or qaitarma; why do we find namaz for namāz, and mazar for mazār, but nikoh for nikāh; why is haftiaq used for haft-i yak or haftiyak; or why instead of gul-i surkh or the like do we find guli-surh, especially when the Russianized khujum is used (p. 543) instead of hujum (i.e. hujūm)?

In sum, one wishes that the author’s deep and pioneering explora- tion into the archival material on many of the day-to-day issues affecting Islam in the Soviet Union could have been accom- panied by, and indeed could have itself inspired, a more profound re-examination of the basic approaches, questions, and conceptual frameworks that have stood for so long at the foundation of this field of study, with some positive but many negative effects. We have clearly not yet reached that point, and while we may lament that this book does not take us there, it will nevertheless provide essential information, and archival guidance, for the next stage. Ro’i’s study is, in some respects, very much like the corpus of Soviet-era ethnographic and anti-religious literature: no one interested in the phenomenon can legitimately ignore the tremendous body of data assembled and presented in such works, but we must find ways of utilizing and digesting and interpreting the data while suspending not just the overtly ideological rhetoric and prescriptive evaluations, but the entire analytical and interpretative framework employed by the authors in approaching their subject. In the case of Ro’i’s book, the ideological factor is absent, but the more insidious inter- pretative problems abound, and we face a similar task: looking beyond the analytical framework—so heavily shaped by the Sovieto- logical enterprise—that pervades the work, while utilizing and reinterpreting the enormous body of data the work makes available, and adding to it both specific data and a basic understanding drawn from many other sources.

At one point in his discussion of Soviet religious policy and its implementation, Ro’i attributes the lack of effective and specific measures affecting Muslim communities in part to an ‘institutional holdover’, in effect, from the Tsarist period. He refers to the Tsarist

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administration’s ‘generally lackadaisical perception of its Muslim borderlands, particularly Turkistan’, and affirms that it ‘somehow affected the bureaucracy of the Soviet period, which made use first of the experts of the former regime and then, when they disappeared, of their books and reports, inheriting and internalising many, if not all, of their axioms and conclusions’ (p. 563, italics mine). Much the same can be said, regrettably, about Ro’i’s reliance upon the Sovietological enterprise, and even former Soviet academics, for the interpretative setting in which he places the impressive data he has assembled. While we must not lose sight of the fact that the data itself is thoroughly imbued with the Soviet mindset, it could have been employed to more illuminating, and satisfying, effect had the author not inherited or internalized the stultifying intellectual legacy of ‘Sovietological Islamology’.

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