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“Islam Says We Are All Equal”: The Islamic Turn in Soviet Propaganda in Iran, 1921–25

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2022

Alisa Shablovskaia
Alisa Shablovskaia*
Affiliation:
Oriental Studies, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris, Paris, France
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The early 1920s witnessed an upsurge in Soviet interest in Islam on an international scale. This interest was to a large extent guided by Great Game logic, at a time when the idea of Islamic jihad against the British was extremely popular all over the Middle East. Contrary to the common assumption that the Marxist rationale of the Bolsheviks excluded any possibility of integrating religion into Soviet policy, the highest authorities in Moscow adopted a rather opportunistic position with regard to Islam both at home and abroad. Drawing mainly on Russian archival sources, this study questions the origins and nature of the Islamic turn in Soviet discourse, diplomacy, and propaganda in Iran. The article concludes that although the Soviet rapprochement with some members of the Iranian clergy and the integration of religious elements into communist propaganda were carried out for the sake of short-term geopolitical goals, these maneuvers were much conditioned by Soviet domestic policy and post–World War I regional interdependencies.

Keywords

anti-imperialismIranian Communist PartyIslamic nationalismnational communismShiʿi clergySoviet foreign policy
Type
Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 973 - 992
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Iranian Studies

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