‘Ulama’ and Reforms of the 1920s in Central Asia

Abstract

Basing on archival sources from Uzbekistan Rinat Shigabdinov explores forms of in­teraction between representatives of Muslim spiritual elite ('ulamo') and the early Soviet state in Turkestan in the 1920s. The author argues that in the period of new economic pol­itics Soviet power succeeded in gaining the ear of a loyal part of 'ulama' appealing to slo­gans of all-world Muslim solidarity against imperialist expansion of the capitalist West. Muslim clerics took part in early stage of the Cultural Revolution and other Soviet reforms. In the second half of the 1920s socialist authorities took on the offensive against local Muslim societies. There happened gradual secularization of Islamic education and pious endowments (waqf) in the region.