TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031290/0312993.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.5 KB | 207 lines

                ô                                                            SPECIALT SECTION: THE SOVIET EMPIRE, Page 44

Karl Marx Mades Room for Muhammad


Some 55 million Soviet Muslims enjoy the fruits of the new
religious tolerance, but demographics and pent-up resentment add
new pressures of their own to the frayed Union

By DAVID AIKMAN TASHKENT -- With reporting by Paul
Hofheinz/Moscow


    "Sit down!" hissed members of the agitated crowd in front
of Communist Party Central Committee headquarters in Dushanbe,
capital of Tadzhikistan. Humiliated, the group of veteran Soviet
combat officers and their men sank awkwardly to the ground when
ordered to do so by the throng of 10,000 militant Tadzhiks. The
troops then listened grimly as a mullah recited the Islamic call
to prayer from atop one of their armored vehicles.

    The startling display of religious assertiveness took place
at the height of the revolt against Moscow's rule that broke out
three weeks ago in Tadzhikistan, perhaps the most ardently
Islamic of the 15 Soviet republics. For the Tadzhiks who forced
the soldiers to observe their demonstration of piety, the moment
represented a vindication of their faith, long suppressed under
the official Soviet policy of atheism. But for Soviet
journalists who took in the scene, the moment may have confirmed
a nightmare.

    Under glasnost, ordinary Soviets are only now learning how
deeply Islam is rooted in their federation, which contains some
55 million Muslims, overwhelmingly located in the five Central
Asian republics and Azerbaijan. Among some anxious citizens, the
discovery has touched off premonitions of disaster, as republic
after republic is shaken by unrest, often with religious
overtones. After Soviet troops were called in last January to
quell bloody rioting in Azerbaijan, Igor Belyaev, a prominent
Soviet commentator on Muslim affairs, warned that "Iran has
threatened the Soviet Union with an Islamic conflagration."
President Mikhail Gorbachev argued that "Islamic
fundamentalism" was a major factor in the rioting against
minority Armenians in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku.

    Neither Gorbachev nor Belyaev is exactly on target in
Azerbaijan. Fundamentalist Islam had very little to do with the
rapid growth of the republic's Popular Front before the crushing
intervention of the Soviet army in mid-January; the main issues
were autonomy from Moscow and an end to the Communist Party
monopoly of power. But elsewhere, profound Islamic forces --
some of them violent -- have begun to shake up the status quo
in response to Gorbachev's decision to allow freedom of
conscience throughout the Soviet Empire. Examples:

    -- In Dushanbe protesters last month demanded that Islam be
declared the official religion of Tadzhikistan.

    -- Mullahs in Tashkent are now permitted to conduct
proselytizing meetings on the street, in factories, even in
prisons.

    -- In Samarkand last summer gangs of young Tadzhik thugs
roamed the local marketplace, slashing the faces of women who
wore makeup.

    -- To compensate for a chronic lack of Islamic holy books,
Saudi Arabia has printed 1 million copies of the Koran for
Soviet Muslims -- and Aeroflot has agreed to deliver them.

    -- Primarily in Uzbekistan but also in other Central Asian
republics, Muslim TV and radio programs are now a regular
feature. Some Muslim prayer gatherings are televised along with
readings from the Koran.

    -- Across the Soviet Union's Central Asian region, a
construction and restoration program is under way that has
tripled the number of functioning mosques to 250 since the
beginning of 1989.

    No group is more delighted with the new religious liberty
than the mullahs who nurtured the Islamic faith during decades
of persecution. "They used to shoot us," says a mullah at
Tashkent's Tokhta Baitvacha mosque, which was closed in 1937 on
Stalin's orders and reopened a year ago. "Now they don't
interfere with us. A lot of young people come here these days."

    At a major mosque just opposite the Tashkent headquarters
of the Muslim Religious Board for Central Asia and Kazakhstan,
a gaggle of Uzbek teenagers fidget through 2 p.m. prayers while
their elders scowl at a visiting photographer. At an elegant
medieval-era mosque just outside town, young construction
volunteers stop for a farewell word from mullah Kasemi Bey after
a Saturday morning of restoration work. Says Kasemi Bey: "The
number of believers is growing. Everybody wants to go to Mecca."

    In all five Central Asian republics, Muslim officials are
emboldened enough to show a certain coolness toward Gorbachev,
who was not always so favorably disposed to freedom of religion.
Less than four years ago, the Soviet leader described Islam as
the "enemy of progress and socialism." Allahshukur Pasha-zada,
head of the Baku-based Muslim Religious Board for Transcaucasia,
still resents the Soviet President's claim that Islamic
fundamentalism played a role in Azerbaijan's upheaval. He led
the Muslim ceremony in honor of the dead when 1.5 million people
gathered at the Cemetery of the Martyrs above Baku to mourn the
people killed in Azerbaijan during January's Soviet army attack
-- more than 300, claim Popular Front officials. "It's a sin
when the head of the country uses religion in politics,"
Allahshukur says. "I didn't expect Gorbachev to play with the
souls and religious feelings of Muslims."

    A visiting delegation of Azerbaijanis from Soviet Georgia
sat across the table, expressing condolences over the Baku
violence as Allahshukur spoke. Their pilgrimage suggested that
the Islamic religious establishment will be considered a source
of political as well as spiritual inspiration for the Islamic
minority in the future.

    For most of the few thousand full-time mullahs in the Soviet
Union, their new sense of authority is a sharp break with the
past. Despite assurances from Lenin and later Stalin of
religious and cultural freedom for Soviet Muslims, the group
suffered as much as Soviet Christians did during communist
crackdowns, especially under Stalin. In 1932 the dictator
announced a Five-Year Plan to eliminate religious belief. All
but a tiny handful of the 26,000 mosques that flourished before
1917 were closed, destroyed or turned into nightclubs and
warehouses. Thousands of mullahs were shot or sent to the Gulag.

    The mullahs who survived the purges and won permission to
exercise religious functions were often viewed with suspicion
by the Muslim laity. As a result, a network of "parallel"
mosques sprang up across the Asian republics, where Muslim
believers practiced their religion without official imprimatur.
In Uzbekistan an undetermined number of Muslims have joined
mystical Sufi sects. In Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan authorities
have recently become concerned about the spread of groups
espousing Wahhabism, the puritanical sect of the Sunni branch
of Islam that first emerged in Saudi Arabia in the 18th century.

    Alongside freedom of worship, Muslim citizens of the Central
Asian republics are becoming more assertive about culture. Many
are demanding a return to the original Arabic script of their
respective languages. The Cyrillic alphabet was forced on the
Central Asian republics by Stalin in 1939 to cut Muslims off
from their rich cultural heritage and to exacerbate relatively
minor linguistic differences among the four main Turkic groups
of the area. Today, privately run Arabic-language schools are
flourishing in Tashkent and other major cities, while Tashkent's
five Arabic-language middle schools are crammed to capacity. At
the Tashkent No. 22 Middle School, 2,200 students from Grades 2
through 11 -- the highest -- attend Arabic-language classes
taught by 24 full-time instructors. Says teacher Asia Ismarava:
"It's a good idea to read the old script because then they can
read the old books."

    Soviet Muslim leaders hope to steer growing Islamic
consciousness in the direction of tolerance, to allay Russian
suspicions of Islam and to preserve a coherent structure of
religious authority and order in the country. But they may be
racing against time. Demographics are having their own influence
on Soviet Islam. Though the Muslim nationalities make up just
19.2% of the Soviet population, they accounted for half the
total population increase of the past decade. They are still
growing at five times the rate of the remaining population.

    The population pressures, coupled with the floundering
Soviet economy, have added greatly to impoverishment,
joblessness and stinging resentment of the better-educated
European Soviet nationalities -- and particularly of the
well-to-do elite. Last month in Dushanbe these resentments
exploded in several days of looting, burning and pogroms
against non-Tadzhiks, especially against ethnic Russians. Yet
next to the violence, the most striking aspect of the uprising
was its trenchantly Islamic character. The insurgents demanded
that Islam be declared the republic's official religion and that
Arabic script be reinstated. Some of their supporters terrorized
Tadzhik women who did not wear head scarves in public.

    A more sinister view of the riots was provided by a Russian
intellectual resident in Tadzhikistan. He told TIME last week
that the violence was deliberately fomented by a group of young
radicals within the republic's government who want to give the
area an Islamic character. Some extreme elements, he says, have
been calling bluntly for the establishment of an Islamic
republic. The intellectual reported that all non-Tadzhiks in the
republic are anxious to leave and, as he put it, "everyone is
terrified" of what will happen with the departure of some 7,000
Soviet soldiers who arrived in Tadzhikistan after the
disturbances began.

    Such fears buttress suspicions among non-Muslim Soviets
elsewhere that their country, tied with Turkey as the fifth
largest Muslim community in the world (after Indonesia,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and India), is in fact on the brink of the
Islamic conflagration that commentator Belyaev feared. Those
suspicions are unfair to the vast majority of Soviet Muslims,
who may be nationalistic but do not embrace any brand of
vengeful fundamentalism. As Ilios Ibragimov, a Tadzhik truck
driver in Dushanbe, put it, "Those people who caused the damage
and looted, they were fools, bad people." The question is
whether Mikhail Gorbachev will also recognize the distinction
and avoid further polarization of the restive Muslims along
volatile religious lines.