A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

The Russian Revolution and Bolshevism
The Soviet period reveals a new and violent chapter in the complex evolution of
the Russian Muslim community. The new communist (Bolshevik) rulers could
not initially decide whether to recruit Islam to their side, crush it, or try to
subvert it through creation of ethnic rather than religiously based political
structures. They ultimately opted for an ethnic approach—with some success.
Meanwhile, a Muslim Turkic revolt of serious and long-term proportions had
broken out in Central Asia in 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution; the
uprising was in sharp reaction to new Tsarist policies that tried to force Muslims
into military service, and to other grievances linked to the war economy. This so-
called Basmachi Revolt would continue to smolder and periodically flare up for
another ten to fifteen years, primarily inside the Uzbek and Tajik areas of the
Soviet Union, driven by new nationalist and religious aspirations for
independence among many Muslim Central Asians, who had become fiercely
hostile to Soviet dictatorship and its militant atheism. While the revolt was
eventually crushed by the Red Army, it exposed deep grievances among Russian
Muslims. It was also abetted by support from renegade ex-military officers from
Turkey, and by British intelligence—tarring the Muslims with the issue of
questionable loyalty vis-à-vis foreign powers. The Basmachi movement offered
a clear indication that Moscow would have to handle its Muslim population with
great caution—in both its ethnic as well as religious aspects.
Indeed, in the early days of Soviet rule, the Communist Party engaged in
some fascinating efforts to exploit Islam to its own ends and to enlist its own
Muslim citizens to promote the agenda of worldwide communist revolution and
the overthrow of Western imperial rule across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
One of the key Soviet targets was British-ruled India, on the Russian doorstep, a
colony that had already witnessed earlier Muslim-sparked anti-British rebellions.
Thus, in an epic and colorful gathering in 1921, the Baku Congress of
Peoples of the East, the Soviets brought together nearly two thousand delegates
from colonial and semicolonial countries around the world to plan revolutionary
action against Western colonial powers. While carefully scripted by the
Bolshevik leadership in Moscow, the conclave nevertheless gave powerful voice
to the anticolonial struggle. Moscow perceived Muslim countries to be
potentially at the forefront of these revolutionary contests and sought to
capitalize on them to further Soviet foreign policy interests against the West.
Islam did not directly figure in the proceedings of the Baku conference;
Moscow was more intent upon aligning the distinct nationalisms of the Muslim

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peoples with communism as an anticolonial instrument. But as we have noted,
Islam is invariably allied in spirit to nationalist impulses when engaged against
non-Muslim forces. So Soviet strategists, particularly Lenin and Zinoviev, sought
ways in which to skirt the conservative elements of Islamic society and to
stimulate revolutionary forces within them. Even the term jihad was
appropriated for use, this time in a more secular sense, as speakers referred to
“holy war against imperialism,” and referred (blasphemously, in fact) to a new
kind of “pilgrimage” to the new center of world revolution in Moscow, which
would bring liberation to all the oppressed peoples of the East. Nonetheless,
Moscow was also well aware that Islam and nationalism represented perpetual
double-edged swords that could be turned equally against Soviet rule in the
Muslim areas of the empire, and had already been linked with the Basmachi
Rebellion.

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