In Central Asia, the Soviet state had destroyed most Islamic institutions by the late 1930s, which gradually alienated millions of Soviet Muslims from the basics of Islamic theology and key Islamic practices of virtue cultivation, including the five daily prayers (namaz), Islamic ethics of dressing (like covering certain parts of the body), and certain lifestyle prescriptions (such as the avoidance of alcohol, gambling, and premarital sex). As a result, mainstream Islam in Central Asia came to revolve around the main Islamic life-cycle rites (i.e., male circumcision, the marriage ceremony, and funeral prayer) and occasional practices of uttering blessings, reciting short Qur’anic verses for the souls of the deceased, and visiting shrines, among others. Although more than thirty years have passed since the fall of the USSR, this non-observant form of Islam remains widespread in the region. Inquiring into the conceptual and affective aspects of Soviet forced secularization in Central Asia, I make two interrelated interventions into secularism studies and the anthropology of Islam. First, I theorize Soviet secularism through attending to the modern state’s aspiration to transcend and transform the particularities of lived traditions, which reveals significant overlaps between communist and liberal modes of statecraft and subject formation. Second, reflecting on a non-observant form of Islam in contemporary Kyrgyzstan, I ask: what remains of a tradition of virtue ethics when its modes of abstract reasoning and virtue cultivation have all but vanished?

Some people display a general attitude towards God which does not fulfil the criteria of full-blown faith but also does not amount to lack of faith. I argue that in some cases such an attitude, best described as partial faith, is likely to be the all-things-considered best option – even if God exists and the best possible relationship with God is the greatest possible good. This is because, in a universe as religiously ambiguous as ours, some people seem unable to have full-blown faith, and for some others such faith is likely to be possible only at the cost of contradicting some values relevant for the relationship to God. Somehow paradoxically, God-related worries and doubts leading to spiritual struggles and enquiries can improve one's relationship with God, so that, for some people at some times, the advantages of partial faith may override those of full-blown faith. If I am right, it offers some reason to think that partial faith does not deserve the criticism which has traditionally been directed at it. In addition to that, I argue that, independently of the normative assessment, partial faith is a useful descriptive concept, which can throw light on many issues surrounding faith in general and make it easier to describe some themes belonging to continental philosophy of religion in analytic terms.

The reasons for the historian Samuel Rawson Gardiner's departure from the Catholic Apostolic Church in the mid-1860s are speculated upon but not generally known. This essay makes use of letters, hitherto in family hands and unknown to researchers, from Gardiner and his wife Isabella to her brother Martin Irving in order to trace the growth of Gardiner's doubts and his alienation from the Catholic Apostolic Church. In particular, the letters show how Gardiner felt the Church was mishandling the intellectual challenges exercising contemporary churchmen. The aim is to shed light on an aspect of Gardiner's biography which has not previously been explained adequately, and so to illuminate the response of one conservative religious movement – the Catholic Apostolic Church – towards the challenges presented by developments in the disciplines of geology and Biblical studies. It is argued that for Gardiner doubt was a necessary function of the quest for truth.