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Soviet Muslims: Seeking Reform, Not Revolution
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19627 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
3,335 Words |
| Author
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Marat Akchurin
Marat Akchurin is a Soviet writer and publisher. His
forthcoming book, Lost Empire: A Tartar's Tour through Soviet
Ethnic Republics, will be published in January 1992
(HarperCollins). In the Soviet Union, Akchurin supervised the
editing of more than fifty volumes of Asian ethnic literature. |
Not long ago people in the West were accustomed to calling the Soviet empire Russia, and they considered all of its population Russian. By now even nonspecialists have discovered that the Soviet Union consists of approximately 100 ethnic groups and nationalities who do not consider themselves one nation, and the relationships among them are, alas, far from idyllic. However, while Americans are aware of Lithuania (1 percent of the Soviet population) and Armenia (2 percent of the population), few people here know even the names of the rest of the Soviet republics. But there is bloodshed and violence there as well.
It appears that westerners have only hazy notions about the so-called Muslim republics of the USSR. This is not particularly surprising since even in the Soviet Union the central government sees the Capital Asian colonies in much the same light as Americans imagined Khomeini's Iran in the early 1980s. Later we will discuss who in the Soviet Union benefits most from this image. Meanwhile we will turn our attention to a very strange issue. How is it that the Muslim republics of the USSR have turned out to be Moscow's only non-Slavic allies within its crumbling empire? Why are the small Christian nations of Georgia, Armenia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Moldavia violently breaking away, while the leaders of mysterious Muslim republics, with a total population of more than 50 million people, have never so much as mentioned seceding from the Soviet Union? And why does the Bolshevik Kremlin frighten the West with talk about the growth of pan-Islamism in the southern USSR and bend over backward to look like some kind of bulwark in the eyes of the Western world, shielding Christian civilization from the Muslim threat coming from the East!
Nevertheless, you must judge for yourself: of the 14 union republics, all formally part of the USSR, only 9 have confirmed their intention or remaining a part of it. On the one hand, there are the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, and Belorussia, all three populated primarily by Russian Orthodox Slavs. On the other hand there are Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Tadzhikistan, Kirghizia, and Turkmenia, the majority of whose populations (with the exception of Tadzhikistan) are Turkic peoples and traditionally consider themselves Muslims.
The Islamic View
First, we must precisely define the term Muslims. Most people in the United States are probably not aware that the concept of "Muslim" as applied to the majority of the Central Asian and Transcaucasian peoples of the USSR, fundamentally
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