Routledge Revivals
The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State
First published in 1983, this book traces the historical and cultural development of the Soviet Muslim population. Going back to the Mongol Empire and the Russian conquest of Muslim lands under the Tsars, it demonstrates how the present Soviet Islamic culture has emerged. It also examines how Soviet Muslims interact with the Muslim world abroad and how Soviet Muftis have been used as ambassadors of the USSR in Muslim countries.
The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State
Alexandre Bennigsen
and
Marie Broxup
First published 1983
by Routledge
This edition first published in 2011 by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
1983 Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but
points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.
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A Library of Congress record exists under LC Control Number: 82016826
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-60906-7 (hbk)
The Islamic Threat to the Soviet State
Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup
1983 Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Broxup
Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row, Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bennigsen, Alexandre
The Islamic threat to the Soviet state. (Croom Helm series on the Arab world
1. Islam Europe, Eastern History
2. Soviet Union History
I. Title II. Broxup, Marie
947 BP65
ISBN 0-7099-0619-6
Typeset by Mayhew Typesetting, Bristol
Printed and bound in Great Britain
CONTENTS
Ever since the conversion of the Khan zbek of the Golden Horde to Islam in the early fourteenth century, marking as it does the beginning of regular and close contacts between Russians and Muslim Turks, the Muslim factor has dominated Russian history. The first period was that of Muslim pre-eminence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the Golden Horde Khans ruled over their Russian vassals. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a certain equilibrium was achieved: the Russians captured Kazan in 1552 and in 1556 conquered Astrakhan, but in 1571 Crimean Tartars burned Moscow and in 1604 the Russians were badly defeated by the Daghestanis and the Ottomans on the banks of the river Terek. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of Russian supremacy. In the twentieth century, the attempt by the same Russians turned Soviet to consolidate their position and at the same time to solve, once and for all, the problem of the coexistence of two different civilisations in the same state seems set to fail. The mosaic of nationalities which makes up the USSR remains as hostile perhaps even more so to one another as it has ever been and the emergence of a Soviet nation becomes more and more difficult to achieve. Only Soviet agitprop proclaims the advent of a mythical Homo sovieticus (Sovetskiy chelovek), but few people in the USSR believe in this dream. A Soviet Russian remains a Russian, a Soviet Muslim simply a Muslim, not a Homo Islamicus, another mythical monster born out of the minds of some Western political scientists.
This book is an attempt to place the current problem of Soviet Islam in its historical perspective. We believe that the roots of this problem go back to the time of the Golden Horde, the conquest of Kazan, and also to the revolt of the Basmachis in 1920 and the Holy War of Shamil. The history of Soviet Islam is long, glorious and tragic, dominated as it has been by seven centuries of conflict with Muscovy and later Russia and the USSR. This inheritance could never be annihilated by the Socialist Revolution. The past has not been forgotten, but on the contrary is still present, continuing to mould the Weltanschauung of the Soviet Muslims as well as that of the Soviet Russians, from the most sophisticated intelligentsia to the rural and urban masses.
We believe that a thousand years of history is crucially important to a proper understanding of the complex relationship between Russians and Muslims and outweighs the Marxist-Leninist Nationalities Policy which has been tried out for fifty years and which now shows unmistakable signs of failing.
The authors would like to express their thanks to Madame Marianne Dumont for her sterling work in preparing the manuscript of this book and for her valuable advice, to Michael Broxup, a long-suffering husband who provided much support, as well as their good friends Robert and Caroline Scallon, who struggled to interpret the authors' foreign syntax and helped turn it into acceptable English.
When this book is published, the Muslim population of the USSR will be between 45 and 50 million, making it the fifth largest in the world after Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, far ahead of Egypt, Turkey or Iran.
In the USSR, the term Muslim is generally used to describe a people who before the 1917 Revolution belonged to the Muslim religion and culture. It has, therefore, a national and cultural significance beyond the purely religious one. A religious culture fourteen centuries old which is as deeply rooted in the popular lore as Islam, penetrating all aspects of everyday private and public life, could not and has not been destroyed in fifty years by massive anti-religious propaganda. It still permeates the psychology, the character and the behaviour of Soviet Muslims including those who are officially considered as non-believers and it makes them significantly different from the average Soviet Russian citizen.
Several sociological surveys conducted in recent years in the Muslim territories of the USSR have revealed the proportion of atheists among Soviet Muslims to be around 20 per cent of the population (among the Russians the figure is 80 per cent), with the remaining 80 per cent divided between various categories of believers: by personal conviction, by tradition or under the pressure of the family milieu. But even those officially listed as atheists, such as members of the Communist Party, or the Komsomol, or high-level intelligentsia who are obliged professionally to fight obnoxious religious survival, maintain certain ties with the religion. In particular, the majority observe the three basic religious rites which mark the private life of every Muslim and which make his behaviour so different from that of his Russian or other non-Muslim comrades: circumcision, religious marriage and religious burial in a special Muslim cemetery. According to all recent surveys, these family rites are performed by 95 to 99 per cent of the Muslim population. The surveys revealing this curious phenomenon lend support to the theory that absolute atheists do not exist in Muslim lands.
