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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia

Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia

Tasar, Eren

Hardcover

Series: Religion and Global Politics

IslamCentral Asian HistoryGeneral Political Science

ISBN10: 0190652101
ISBN13: 9780190652104
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Dec 1 2017
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.54
Height: 1.40 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.40
Language: English
Central Asia was the sole Muslim region of the former Russian Empire that lacked a centralized Islamic organization, or muftiate. When Soviet leader Joseph Stalin created such a body for the region as part of his religious reforms during World War II, he acknowledged that the Muslim faith could enjoy some legal protection under Communist rule. From a skeletal and disorganized body run by one family of Islamic scholars out of a modest house in Tashkent's old city, this muftiate acquired great political importance in the eyes of Soviet policymakers and equally significant symbolic significance for many Muslims.

Relying on recently declassified Central Asian archival sources, most of them never seen before by historians, Eren Tasar argues that Islam did not merely survive the decades from World War II until the Soviet collapse in 1991, but actively shaped the political and social context of Soviet Central Asia. Muslim figures, institutions, and practices evolved in response to the social and political reality of Communist rule. Through an analysis that spans all aspects of Islam under Soviet rule-from debates about religion inside the Communist Party, to the muftiate's efforts to acquire control over mosques across Central Asia, changes in Islamic practices and dogma, and overseas propaganda targeting the Islamic World-Soviet and Muslim offers a radical new reading of Islam's resilience and evolution under atheism.

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