A Soviet Sultanate - Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan (1943‒1991)

By building on my most recent book, A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, in this lecture I set out to offer an overview of what I have termed the "archives of Muslimness," that is a body of records documenting life stories of Soviet citizens who pursued a path to attain self-perfection, a trajectory in pursuit of belief, temperance, and dignity, which was deeply informed by Islamic discursive practices. Taken together, these stories can be read as an epic narrative of resilience, resistance and subversion. Equally, they open up a new field of historical research for those who are interested in peeling away the layers of the Soviet civilization and discovering the various ways in which Soviet citizens fashioned themselves as Muslims. How and why did they commit themselves to uphold Islam in a violently secularist environment? And how did the Soviet state cope with Muslims' forceful articulation of their faith? The notion that in the eyes of many Soviet citizens the USSR was an abode of Islam forms the framing device of A Soviet Sultanate - a device that helps us to think about how the atheist project of the Soviet empire ultimately failed, but also how it simultaneously helped shape the range of meanings of Muslimness under Soviet rule and in the first decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Dr. Sartori is a Senior Research Associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. There he is a fellow at their Institute of Iranian Studies and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, the Journal of Central Asian History (Brill) and as the Chairman of the Committee for the Study of Islam in Central Eurasia (https://www.oeaw.ac.at/sice).