Islam in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

Eastern Europe

The development of Islam in Eastern Europe, where it has a relatively long history, once again owes much to the influence of the Turks and this time mostly as conquerers rather than migrant workers.

However, in comparison with Yugoslavia the difficulties encountered by Muslims in other Eastern European countries have been much greater. In Albania there has been a systematic attempt by the state to eradicate all traces of Islam. Under Ottoman control for almost five centuries (1431-1913), some two-thirds of this isolated country’s popula­tion were converted to Islam. And once again, as in Yugoslavia and also Bulgaria, being a Muslim came to be synonymous in people’s minds with being a Turk. This is an important point to remember when considering the energy devoted to the eradication of religion by the government in Albania since 1948. The attack on religion is both an attack on what is considered to be ‘unscientific, primitive superstition’, and at the same time it is part of a policy of nation-building in that it is an attempt to forge a new Albanian identity with Marxism-Leninism as its centre-piece.

After struggling to regain its independence from Turkey, Albania was forced into a union with Italy in 1939 and then at the end of the Second World War came under the political domination of Yugoslavia until 1948 when, with the rupture in Yugoslav—Soviet relations, it seized the opportunity to re-establish its independence. This is briefly the historical and political background to Albania’s isolationism and xenophobia since 1948 and goes some way to explaining its vigorous and even at times ruthless campaign against what it considers to be foreign or deviant ideologies, including religion, which is dismissed as one of the trappings of the ‘bourgeois-revisionist’ world. In order to ensure ideological purity in the form of Marxism-Leninism, through the Communist Party’s progress and domination over all spheres of life, traditional religious institutions, Catholic, Muslim and Orthodox, have been systematically displaced. How­ever, despite the imprisonments, the campaign against it in the media and attempts to ‘cleanse’ the education system of all traces of religion—it is true that in the past Christian and Muslim schools were established with conver­sion as one of their principal goals—religious beliefs and practices are still widespread in modern-day Albania.

It is this subtle influence that has counteracted gov­ernment campaigns in schools, universities, the media and the workplace to eradicate religion, particularly, although not exclusively, in the rural areas, where Islamic dress continues to be worn, purdah practised, prayers said in public and facing east, and marriages performed in the traditional Islamic way. Moreover, there is very little evidence where marriages are concerned of people marrying others of a different faith.

While the campaign against Catholicism in particu­lar as an anti-Albanian religion, an instrument of ‘foreign’ imperialism, continues unabated, both the current domestic and foreign policy objectives of the regime make a relentless, all-out offensive against either of these religions, and particularly Islam, unlikely. In fact, in recent years the Party has made relatively few, direct attacks on Islam, perhaps in order not to pre-empt the possibility of an improvement in relations with Arab states and out of recognition that certain Muslim practices and prohibitions, like certain Catholic ones, further some of its own objectives.

The Party, for example, would like to see a signifi­cant increase in the population which now stands at just over two and a half million, and for this reason gives strong support to the idea of the large family and resolutely opposes abortion, as do both Islam and Catholicism. How­ever, what ultimately protects Islam from an all-out attack by the regime, is the fact that Albanian society remains so strongly influenced at the grass­roots level by the Muslim way of life.

Bulgaria, like Albania, has attempted to eradicate the influence of religion among its people. Once a Christian kingdom, Bulgaria also came under Ottoman control from the second half of the fourteenth century until the Treaty of Berlin in July 1878 when it became an autonomous principality.

Even though thousands died or fled during the 1877-8 war of independence, a majority of the population of the new princi­pality were Muslims and were to experience serious economic set-backs under the new dispensation as a result of the upheavals and the land reforms introduced after 1878. No longer the majority, they were hit once again by the nationalisation of the land by the Communist regime between 1949 and 1955. Their Muslim way of life was further undermined by the regime’s policy of assimilation, or more accurately of enforced Bulgarisation, which coerced Muslims who previously had only very limited contacts with Bul­garians to leave their enclosed communities and integrate with the rest of society.

The Bulgarisation policy also insisted on inter­marriage between Muslims and non-Muslims, and in the 1950s on the nationalisation of all Turkish/Muslitn schools, incorporating them into the state system to create what are called ‘unified schools’. Subsequently no more than two hours a week was to be given to the teaching of Turkish while all religious education was ended. The closure of mosques by the government has also had a serious, adverse effect on the Muslim way of life. Each village or community is allowed only one mosque but even then services in the mosque are controlled in that Qur’anic teaching therein is prohibited. In addition, burial in Muslim cemeteries and the public celebration of Muslim festivals are not allowed. Further, the policy of Bulgarisation even extends to forcing Muslims to adopt Bulgarian names, and according to reports, some of those who refused to comply have either been imprisoned or put to death. In Bulgaria then, as in Albania, Islam is officially regarded as an enemy both of national integration and of the state ideology of Marxism-Leninism. And perhaps more so in Bulgaria than in any other Balkan state colonised by the Ottoman Turks the attack on Islam is bound up with nationalist sentiment, for it was the Bulgarians who bore the brunt of the battle against the Turks during the Balkan Wars (1912-14) for complete independence.

Romania, also for centuries under Ottoman control until gaining a measure of autonomy in 1878 and complete independence during the Balkan Wars just mentioned, has an estimated quarter of a million Muslims, the vast majority of whom are also of Turkish origin and subject to certain restrictions.

Elsewhere in Eastern Europe Muslim communities tend to be much smaller. For example, in present-day Poland there are only 3,000 or so Muslims, almost all of whom are of Tartar origin and whose presence in the country dates back to the fourteenth century. These Muslims are to be found in the main in the district of Bialystok, north-east of Warsaw, where they have two mosques, while the foundation stone for another in Gdansk has already been laid. Hungary, likewise, has a small Muslim popula­tion of around 2,000 and there are probably even fewer in Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

In most of Eastern Europe there is little if any evi­dence of a growth in Islam. In fact, in most instances the contrary is the case and this is due in part to the restrictive and in some instances repressive measures of the state, to the upsurge of Slav nationalism in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century which involved a determination to eradicate all trace of Ottoman rule, and to the fact that during the past hundred years or so significant numbers of Turks have emigrated from Bulgaria and other Balkan states. The situation of Muslims in the Soviet Union both resembles and differs from that of their co-religionists in Eastern Europe, and it is to a brief discussion of this that we now turn.

Islam in the Soviet Union

The percentage of professing Muslims in the Soviet Union has increased steadily throughout this century and now stands at over 11 per cent of the total population, which makes for a Muslim community today of between thirty and thirty-five million members. And if the birth-rate indicators showing a decline in births among Russians and a rapid rise among the Muslims of Central Asia are reliable, then the inevitable outcome will be a shift in the relative weight and influence of nationalities in the USSR.

Most Muslims are Sunnis or orthodox and are con­centrated in the Caucasian and the Central Asian republics, some of which were wrested from Ottoman control by Russia in the nineteenth century. In one of these, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan, which at one time belonged to Iran, there is an important minority of Shi‘ites of the Twelver or Ithnashariya sect, the majority Muslim group in Iran (see pp. 354-67). There is also an Ismaili or Sevener Shi‘ite community of around 100,000 members in Pamir.

Since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 the Soviet attitude to Islam has varied greatly, periods of severe repression and the wholesale closure of mosques and educational establishments alternating with a degree of toleration. Before 1917 there were, according to observers, over 27,000 mosques in the whole of Russia and this number had been reduced to less than 1,000 by 1970. Moreover, during the same period all institutions for the training of Muslim clerics were closed except for one, the Mir-i-Arab Madresah in the ancient Uzbek town of Bukhara, first founded in 1535, closed after the Revolution and reopened in 1948. Further, by the early 1970s there was only a very limited number of editions of the Qur’an in Arabic in circulation.

Media treatment of Islam has frequently presented it as an anti-scientific ideology which gives people a false approach to life and destroys initiative and creativity, and has very often attacked such practices as the payment of dowry and the Muslim attitude to women. In Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, there is an important symbolic statue of a Muslim woman casting off the chadour.

Moreover, observances such as the fast during Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca, while they are performed are restricted, as is Muslim education and the activities of the Sufi brotherhoods. Even the role of the Muslim family in perpetuating what is referred to as a backward ‘ideology’ has come in for strong criticism. However, for some time now the Soviet Communist Party has sought to counter Islam’s consid­erable and growing influence without, at the same time, alienating the Muslim nations of the Third World whom it seeks to influence and from whom it seeks support, and some of whom have been inspired by the ideas, zeal and commitment of the well-known Muslim socialist Sultan Galiev. Generally, however, the response of Muslim leaders in the Soviet Union to Communist ideology and practice has also been ambiguous, appearing anxi­ous on the one hand to demonstrate the compatibility between Islam and Communism, while on the other preaching the supremacy and eventual triumph of Islam over all other systems and ideologies.

But, whatever the public stance of Muslim leaders and Party officials on the compatibility or otherwise of the two systems, there is very little intermingling between Muslim and non-Muslim in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage, for example, is rare and where it does take place it is almost always between Muslim men and Slav women with the children being brought up Muslims. The vast majority of Muslims in the Soviet Union continue to find in Islam the basic framework of their identity. Meanwhile, the Soviet government, while faced in its dealings with Muslims with many of the same problems as those confronting governments in Western Europe, has the added difficulty of being perceived to be and in fact of being in the position of a colonial power.

One is left, finally, with a picture of Soviet Islam as a restricted but none the less vigorous and active community set against the background of a modernising state which grants limited toleration to national traditions, customs and languages, providing always that Soviet ideology is not openly questioned.