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Islam and Nationalism in West Turkestan (Central Asia) on the EVE of October Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

M. Mobin Shorish
M. Mobin Shorish*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

On the eve of the October revolution most of Central Asia was a tsarist colony with the exception of the Amaret of Bukhara. Islam as a religion and a way of life had become more and more ibadah (religious ritual) and less and less as a program of action for the ummah. The tsarist functionaries deprived its religious and educational institutions from their major sources of income (the auqāf) and encouraged instead a program of russification through the schools, specially the Russian-Native schools (russkotuzamnaya shkola) and active conversion of the Muslims of Turkestan to Orthodox Christianity through organizations such as the Anti-Muslim Missionary Division (protivo-musul'manskoe missionerskoe otdelenie), of the Kazan Ecclesiastical Academy. Aside from these and settlements of the Slav immigrants on the Turkestanis lands by force and without compensation the Tsarist government interfered very little in the Central Asian way of life. Almost all of the religious laws (Shariah) dealing with the domestic matters, and the customary laws of the land (adāt) were kept intact.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , Fall 1984 , pp. 247 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the Study of Nationalities, 1984 

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References

1. Paper prepared for delivery at the Mid-West Slavic Conference, Chicago, May 6, 1983.Google Scholar

2. For a discussion of Russian-Soviet educational policies and the processes of acculturation of the minorities, especially the Muslims see the following by the writer: “Education of Ethnic Minorities in the Soviet Union,” in Altbach, P. and Kelly, G., Education and the Colonial Experience (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1984); pp. 205–225 “Planning by Decree: Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia,” Language Problems and Language Planning (Spring, 1984), pp. 35–49.Google Scholar

3. In reality, the recruitment order was the straw that broke the camel's back. There was already a whole range of grievances by the local population: discriminatory pricing of manufactured consumer goods and the relatively lower prices paid for cotton and local handicrafts; expropriation of land belonging to the local population by the European immigrants; and the allocation of responsible roles in the government almost exclusively to the immigrants.Google Scholar

4. The question which was in the minds of many of the Turkestani intellectuals at this time was the consequences of self-determination. To many, Turkestan consisted of several ethnic groups and nationalities, each having their own separate languages, traditions, and the degrees of ethnocentricities. In fact, the idea of self-determination of Turkestan got very heated discussions in the First All Russian Muslim Congress which took place in May 1917. The delegates from the Muslim nationalities of Russia found out (most for the first time) the high degree of heterogeneity which existed among Muslims. As a result, a resolution was passed which supported the national-territorial autonomy instead of autonomy for all of the Muslims in Russia based on large regions like Central Asia, Caucasus, and the Volga. This shows also the weakening strength of the Pan-Islamic and especially Pan-Turkism movements from their earlier peak right after the 1905 Russian revolution.Google Scholar

5. Pobeda velikoi oktiabr'skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii v Turkestane: sbornick dokumentov (Tashkent: 1947), p. 92. Quoted in R. Vaidyanath, Formation of the Soviet Central Asian Republics: A Study in Soviet Nationalities Policy 1917–1936 (New Delhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1967), p. 76.Google Scholar

6. Vaidyanath, , Formation of Soviet Central Asian Republics, op. cit., p. 78.Google Scholar

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11. Vaidyanath, R., Formation of Soveity Central Asian Republics, op. cit., p. 83. In reality the Basmachi harassed the Red Army until 1940s. These Turkestani who opposed the Soviets were called by the Russians Basmachi (a Turkic word with a Russian plural ending) or ambushers. They called themselves Beklar din Qozghaleshi, The Beks Revolts. It was a grass root opposition led by various persons including a Turkish hero, Anwar Pasha. Like the present day Afghan Mujahidin, who fight the Soviet invasion of their homeland, people of all ages, regardless of sex, ethnicity and social class took part in it. The movement of the Muslims was finally crushed when Mohammed Nadir who declared himself King of Afghanistan in 1930, and his successors settled Pushto speaking tribes (the Pushtoons) from the south on the lands of Tajiks and Uzbeks to check on the activities of these Basmachi sympathizers. The Pushtoons who were thought by the Kabul government to be more loyal than the non-Pushtoons did not hesitate in the oppression of the Uzbeks and the Tajiks and eventual destruction of the Basmachi Islamic resistance to the Soviets. I am grateful to Prof. M. Nazif Mohib Shahrani, and the men and women who participated in it and detailed their struggles to the writer, in Turkestan and Afghanistan.Google Scholar

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14. Based on Muraveiskii, S., Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Srednei Azii (Tashkent: 1926), p. 11. Quoted ibid, p. 88.Google Scholar

15. This was created in March 1919 by the Second Regional Congress of the Communist Party of Turkestan. The Muslim Bureau, as it was also known, took over many of the Turkomnats' responsibilities such as propaganda within the local population and publication of Soviet literature in the local languages. It was headed by former Jadidists many of whom left Bukhara to escape the Amir's wrath. It is worth nothing that the word “Muslim” is used to signify ethnicity, rather than in its usual sense of having religious connotations.Google Scholar

16. Vaidyanath, R., Formation of the Soviet Central Asian Republics, op. cit., p. 93. Quoted from Safarov, Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia, op. cit., note 6, p. 97. It is interesting that now similar statements would be interpreted by the officials as disguised anti-soviet sentiments. See M. Rywkin, “Soviet Central Asia and the State,” paper presented at the Conference on the Study of Central Asia, Washington, D.C., the Kannan Institute, March 10-11, 1983.Google Scholar

17. Quoted in Vaidyanath, , Formation of the Soviet Central Asian Republics, op. cit., p. 95. Emphasis in the original.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 98.Google Scholar

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20. Quoted in Lenin, and Stalin, , Stat'i i rechi o Srednei Azii i Uzbekistane, op. cit., pp. 91–92.Google Scholar

21. Frunze, M. V., Sobranie sochinenii, I (Moscow), 119-20. Quoted in Vaidyanath, Formation of Soviet Central Asian Republics, op. cit., p. 103. For the original document in English, see Xenia Joukoff Eudin and Robert North, Soviet Russia and the East 1920–1927: A Documentary Survey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 49.Google Scholar

22. Shorish, M. Mobin, “Dissent of the Muslims: Soviet Central Asia in the 1980's.” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Vaidyanath, , Formation of Soviet Central Asian Republics, op. cit., p. 116. According to Safarov, , Kolonial'naia revoliutsiia, note 8, p. 122, the Turkestan Bureau was composed of Skol'nikov, Georgi Safarov, Kaganovich, and Peters. Cited ibid., note 47, p. 116.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., p. 115.Google Scholar

25. In a telegram which Frunze sent to Lenin, he stated that “The fortress of old Bukhara was taken today by the Red Bukharans and our forces. The last pillar of Bukharan obscurantism … has fallen. The Red banner of world revolution is flying triumphantly over the Registan.” Ibid., p. 127.Google Scholar

26. This was the second purge in the series of purges which occurred in the Communist parties of Central Asia (the first being the Turkestan Jadidists and the Pan-Turkism followers). The Bukharan Communist Party which had about 16,000 members in 1922 lost all but 1,000 of its members by the end of 1923.Google Scholar

27. Azrael, Jeremy R., “Fifty Years of Soviet Education”. Survey, No. 64 (July 1967), p. 46.Google Scholar