A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

jihadists were to proclaim that “Islam had defeated a superpower.” The message
did not go unnoted among unhappy Russian Muslims.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 was a turning point for Muslims of the
Soviet Empire. Quite quickly, five Muslim republics—all but one Turkic—
achieved full independence as new “nations,” now on a nominal ethnic basis—
most of them were varieties of Turks, after all. The remaining Muslim peoples,
who still lived within the borders of the new and much-diminished Russian state,
were granted greater autonomy—again along strict ethnic lines. Unrest in several
of these areas, particularly in Chechnya, demonstrated that the nearly 150-year-
old struggle for independence of the Chechens—who regularly fought in the
name of Islam—had hardly been extinguished. While most Muslims remaining
in Russia realize that separation from Russia is not practical—they represent
large, ethnically distinct Muslim islands in the middle of a Russian sea—they are
restoring Islam to a prominent place in their national identity, while celebrating
their separate ethnic distinctiveness as well. These various Muslim ethnic groups
are not, in fact, united on an Islamic basis, even though some Islamists wish it to
be so.

---

And the perennial question about tiers of identity remains: Are these peoples
first of all Muslims, or are they ethnic/national groups of Tatars, Uzbeks,
Kakaks, Tajiks, and so forth? Or are they part of a larger pan-Turkic group? Or
citizens of Russia? The reality is that they can be any and all of these things
depending on circumstances. They are not mutually exclusive. Which identity
will dominate at any given time depends upon circumstances.
Muslims around the world have been generally aware that the Soviet Union
itself severely persecuted Islam. At the same time, they valued the vital role of
the USSR in providing a geostrategic balance against the colonial and imperial
forces of the West. The mere existence of the USSR and a bipolar world
provided maneuvering room for small states, preventing formerly Western
imperial states from extending total domination over them. The subsequent
collapse of the USSR dismayed the Muslim world and most neutral nations—not
because they favored communism, but because it spelled the end of a bipolar
world and rendered small states more vulnerable to the remaining single global
superpower’s will.

---