Islam Regains Its Voice

By Richard N. Ostling

Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" The call to prayer echoes forth from a minaret in Tashkent, as it has from mosques throughout the 13 centuries of Islam. "Was it loud enough?" asks the mullah who will lead the prayers. That is an eminently reasonable question, since in the Soviet Union no muezzin is allowed to use a loudspeaker. The inquiry is also metaphorical. In the U.S.S.R.'s fourth largest city and leading Islamic center, as elsewhere across the nation, believers are cautiously regaining their public voice after an oppressively enforced silence.

All faiths are affected by a growing accommodation between church and state in the officially atheistic nation. Last year's 1,000th-anniversary celebrations greatly enhanced the privileges of the Russian Orthodox Church. This year the long-suffering Jewish community opened its first school for rabbis in 60 years, and Lithuania's Roman Catholics got their first full lineup of bishops in 40 years. A similar renewal is taking place among the 55 million Muslims, who constitute the world's fifth largest Islamic population (after Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India). By some estimates, ^ Muslims will make up one-fourth of Soviet citizens by the turn of the century.

At the Tashkent-based Muslim board for Central Asia, the most important of the four government-imposed bureaucracies for Soviet Islam, Deputy Chairman Abdulgani Abdulla recalls that "almost nobody was interested in religion" in the 1960s. Now, he reports, large numbers are becoming active believers, many of them young people. "None of the philosophies except the religious ones are able to satisfy men's needs," he maintains. The leader of the Muslim board for Transcaucasia, Allahshukur Pasha-zada, declares that until recently "freedom of conscience was on paper only." The pre-Gorbachev regimes, he says, "destroyed all the values of the people." Just a few years ago, no officials would have dared utter such words except in intimate conversations with friends.

As they learn to speak out more freely, Muslims are trying to regain some control of religious affairs. Popular pressures led to last month's installation, with great fanfare, of a new leader for the Central Asia board. The previous head, reputed to be more adept at drinking (forbidden by Islam) and politics than study of the Koran, was ousted after an unprecedented protest march in Tashkent. His successor is Mukhammadsadyk Mamayusupov, 36, a modest and dignified scholar. At the same time as Mamayusupov's elevation, the Uzbek Republic gave his board a precious Koran dictated by Caliph Osman, one of Muhammad's earliest followers. Thousands cheered and wept as the invaluable holy book was moved from a museum to the new headquarters mosque, which has just been returned to the board.

Only weeks after the Communists took over in 1917, Lenin soothingly announced to the nation's Muslims, "Your religion and customs, your national and cultural institutions are proclaimed free and inviolable." But the Communists' suspicion of religion quickly made a mockery of Lenin's promises. Eventually, most of the country's 26,000 mosques and 24,000 religious schools were shut down. The vast majority of Islamic teachers were either killed or imprisoned. During World War II, Stalin forcibly deported to Siberia entire populations of Muslims who were suspected of disloyalty. "Those were difficult years for the believers," recalls Achin-Oka Akhmedov, who as a farm worker outside Tashkent lived through the worst of it.

By most accounts, religious marriages, funerals and circumcisions remain near universal practices in Muslim regions, even among Communist functionaries. Yet only a small proportion of the Muslim population attends services at government-authorized mosques. This is partly because there are so few official mosques in relation to the Muslim population and partly because interruptions in the Soviet workday are frowned upon. Another reason, perhaps the most important, is that many believers frequent the estimated 1,800 unregistered mosques, some led by secretive Sufi mystics.

Despite its resurgence, Islam still faces obstacles. The country has perhaps 1,400 legal mosques, a sizable increase since Gorbachev came to power but still only 5% of the number that existed before the revolution. The major Muslim cities of Baku and Samarkand have just two functioning mosques apiece. The U.S.S.R. has only one secondary and one higher-level school, which can accommodate just 300 students each year. Both are reportedly scheduled to expand, however, and a third institute to serve Transcaucasia is due to open in September.

Since the mosques are still not allowed to teach Arabic, few believers are able to read the language of the Koran. No translation of the holy book is available in the modern script of any Soviet Muslim nationality. Such handicaps foster the underground network and force believers to listen to broadcasts from Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for religious instruction. A mere 25 to 30 Muslims a year manage to make the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, and the regime continually propagandizes against the month-long Ramadan fast as a threat to health and worker efficiency.

One area of conflict is Soviet concern for the status of women. The regime long ago outlawed polygamy and veil wearing. It also frowns upon such practices in Muslim areas as assigning women the most difficult labors, giving daughters away to suitors who offer the highest price, and self-immolation of women distressed over such treatment (270 took their lives or attempted to in 1986 and 1987). These old Asian folkways are not part of Islam as such and are regularly denounced by Muslim officialdom.

Yet the government is more tolerant of Islam these days. Besides opening new mosques, the regime has virtually ended official anti-Muslim propaganda. What accounts for the turnabout? Reasons include the need for cooperation from Muslim countries and for popular support along the potentially troublesome southern Asia flank. (In Azerbaidzhan, a few Muslims have been waving photos of the Ayatullah Khomeini or sprouting Iranian-style beards. However, there is sparse evidence of religious fanaticism, either inspired by neighboring Iran and Afghanistan or encouraged by the Soviets' own tolerance.) The crucial factor is awareness inside the Kremlin that economic and cultural stagnation stems largely from the Communists' dogged policy of repressing religion and other forms of independent thought. Islam, like the country's other religions, is a major beneficiary of "new thinking."

With reporting by David Aikman/Tashkent