Muslim Atheism in Central Asia: Consolidation

• In Event: Atheism and Secular Spirituality in the Soviet Union

Abstract

My paper will be a draft of the third chapter of my book, which is a study of atheist literature in Islamic (mostly Central Asian) languages spoken by Muslims in the USSR from World War II until the Soviet collapse. The book's first chapter describes the 1950s as a chaotic period of experimentation with genre and argument, while the second chapter surveys this literature's dramatic expansion in the 1960s, and its status as an increasingly massive archive of doctrinal and contemporary information about Central Asian Islam. The third chapter looks to new processes taking place in this literature in the 1970s. That decade, the chapter argues, saw a process of consolidation, in which the former flexibility and relatively informal writing of previous decades gave room to more formalized modes of expression, e.g., a growing concern with clearly defined genres, methodologies, and arguments, as well as new attention to ideas being promoted by central atheistic institutions in Moscow such as new socialist byt. This was a result of the growing institutionalization and professionalization of atheist writing in the region; yet, as in the past, Muslim atheist literature continued to amass an archive of Muslim religiosity, while engaging with the nodes of hostility, texture, and silence within which Muslim atheism crystallized, as a site of atheist expression and religious meaning.

Author

• Eren Murat Tasar, UNC at Chapel Hill