Early Marxists and Russian revolutionaries were well-disposed to Muslims, but viewed them differently than the lumpen proletariat. Under Lenin and Trotsky the Bolshevik leadership was true to its Marxist understanding that the revolutionary party must be atheist primarily in word, not deed, while the state must be non-religious but not anti-religious. Religious communities were given remarkable freedoms under the revolution, except the Orthodox Church because of its strong links to the former ruling class. Religious believers, ie Muslims, who considered themselves revolutionaries were welcomed into the Bolshevik ranks. Non-Communist believers who backed the revolution occupied leading positions in the state apparatus. Some major Muslim organisations joined the Communist parties in their entirety or joined with the Bolsheviks to defend the revolution.
Sultan Galiev was the leader of a group of Central Asian Marxists and was allied with Lenin, who used him as an intermediary between the government and the peoples of Central Asia. Galiev had controversial ideas within the communist party about creating an autonomous communist state in the Muslim areas of Central Asia that would be called Turkestan. The Party though though differently and chose instead to create the ‘stans’. Soviet Muslim leaders generally took the view that the Communists were a better bet than the Czar, and fought for the Revolution all over Asia and European Russia. Lenin purged Orthodox Christians from his party, but not the Muslims. As part of this purge, party policy in Central Asia stated that ‘freedom from religious prejudice’ was a requirement for Russians only: in 1922, more than 1,500 Russians were kicked out of the party in Turkestan because of their Orthodox religious convictions, but not a single Muslim.
Lenin also allowed Sharia courts to operate and set up lots of Islamic schools. Sharia law had been a central demand of Muslims during the February Revolution of 1917 and, as the civil war drew to a close in 1920-1921, a parallel court system was created in Central Asia and the Caucasus, with Islamic courts administering justice in accordance with sharia law side by side with Soviet legal institutions. The aim was for people to have a choice between religious and revolutionary justice. A Sharia Commission was established in the Soviet Commissariat of Justice to oversee the system. In 1921 a series of commissions were attached to regional units of the Soviet administration with the purpose of adapting the Russian legal code to the conditions of Central Asia, allowing for compromise between the two systems on questions such as under-age marriage and polygamy.
Some sharia sentences, such as stoning or cutting hands off, were outlawed. Decisions of the sharia courts that concerned these matters had to be confirmed by higher organs of justice. Some sharia courts flouted the Soviet law, refusing to award divorces upon the petition of a wife, or equating the testimony of two women to that of one man. So in December 1922 a decree introduced retrials in Soviet courts if requested by one of the parties. All the same, 30 to 50 percent of court cases were resolved by sharia courts, and in Chechnya the figure was as high as 80 percent. Moreover, the influence was not all one way: there were instances in which Soviet officials were swayed by sharia law, convicting men for drinking alcohol or entering a house with an unveiled woman.
After Lenin’s death Stalin took a different tack and could see where all this was leading and replaced the Islamic courts with Soviet ones and Islamic studies were removed from education, along with other religious teaching throughout the country. About 8000 Islamic schools existed in Central Asia prior to the revolution, and by 1928, all of them had been shut down. The language and alphabet reforms also cut off the people of Central Asia from Arabic literature.
The Stalinists then began planning an all-out attack on Islam under the banner of combating ‘crimes based on custom’, focusing on ‘women’s rights’ and, in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, on the veil in particular. The slogan of the campaign was ‘Hujum’, which meant ‘storming’ or ‘assault’ in the languages of Central Asia. After two years of largely ineffective propaganda, the hujum entered its mass-action phase on 8 March 1927—International Women’s Day.
The European Left, being pro-Lenin and anti-Stalin see Stalin’s move as an assault on women and an assault on female liberation. The Left disapprove of of Stalin’s general resurrection of the traditional family across Russia and see families as a backwards step. Attempts to integrate Muslims into society are seen as Islamophobic, and Muslims are seen as oppressed because of this Islamophobia.
As it sought to centralise and strengthen its control, the growing Stalinist bureaucracy found that Russian nationalism, stressing the continuity between Stalinism and the tsars, could be a powerful tool for cementing workers of the main national group—the Russians—to the regime. For this reason Stalin increasingly attacked ‘nationalist deviations’ in the non-Russian republics and encouraged a rebirth of Russian chauvinism. He found support for this among the large numbers of former tsarist officials upon whom the Bolsheviks had been forced to rely in the army and throughout the state and economy. Muslims in Asia were not too keen on becoming less Muslim and it was reported that “By far the most frequently reported act of symbolic violence, however, was Russians rubbing pork fat on the lips of Muslims or forcing them to eat pork.
The Muslim backlash was often violent. Unveiled women were subjected to growing harassment and shaming in the streets. In some villages women were raped by gangs of youths and a growing number were murdered, often by their own kin. By mid-1928 the violence was full-blown and targeted anyone, male or female, even distantly connected with the ‘cultural revolution’. Thousands perished. Not until the 1950s or 1960s did veils become rare on Central Asian streets. When Uzbekistan broke away from the USSR in 1991, veiling swiftly came back into fashion, without state sanction or encouragement, as a symbol of national independence.
“In standing up for the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab in Europe today, marching alongside Muslims against the occupations of Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, defending the right of Muslims to oppose those occupations by force, and joining with left wing Muslims in united front coalitions such as Respect, socialists are upholding a tradition that goes back to Lenin and Trotsky.” – Is how the left today justifies linking up with Islamists again
