Introduction

The Sovietization of Central Asia and Kazakhstan posed the biggest challenge to the Bolshevik leadership because of the size of both the region and its Muslim population and the particularly strong position there of Islam. Unlike Muslims of the Volga-Urals and Transcaucasia, who, prior to the Bolshevik takeover, were included in the imperial Russian system of state–Muslim relations based on the state-controlled muftīate, most Muslims of Central Asia, alongside the North Caucasus, remained outside it. St. Petersburg's focus on military control over the region also meant that Russian social and cultural interference in the region, with the exception of Tashkent and a handful of other areas in Russian Turkestan, was negligible, and the social and legal order, as well as the ethics of the bulk of the sedentary population, was defined by Islam. Consequently, ‘ulamā’, imāms, Ṣūfī sheikhs and other traditional Muslim authorities maintained high religious and moral authority, especially in the Ferghana valley. In the case of Kazakhs and other Muslim nomads, some of whom had been subjected to direct imperial Russian governance, their lifestyle and value system were shaped by a combination of nomadism, Genghizid genealogical tribalism, shamanism and Islam. Among them, authority rested with tribal biys and itinerant Ṣūfī sheikhs – khojahs. From the late nineteenth century the region witnessed the limited proliferation of Islamic reformism – jadīdism – which, however, differed significantly from Russia-centred jadīdism among the Tatars, many of whom were involved in the all-Russia political and cultural debate. The thinking of Central Asian jadīds, on the other hand, was shaped by the Islamic reformist movement in the Middle East and South Asia which developed in reactive opposition to the modernity emanating from outside.

It took the Bolsheviks over five years to assert their control over most of Central Asia and the Kazakh Steppe. Subsequently, because of the greater role of Islam in the region, the Bolsheviks allowed for the considerably longer preservation there of sharī‘ah courts and Islamic infrastructure compared to other Muslim-majority regions of the USSR. It was only towards the end of the 1920s that the Stalin leadership changed policy and ushered in an indiscriminate attack on Islam and the Muslim authorities of Central Asia.