169 6 The Past as Prologue? Challenging the Myth of the Subordinated, Docile Woman in Muslim Central Eurasia Timur Kocaoglu The most oppressed of the oppressed and the most enslaved of the enslaved. —Lenin W ith the demise of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Central Eurasian states, like many other post-Soviet regimes, have sought to establish new national identities; 1 they have had to reconsider many of the old guiding principles and ideologies of the Soviet era and to articulate normative bases for social and political life. Some have called for a return to tradition, to an imagined pre-Soviet national past as the basis for national identity. The Soviet mythology of the emancipation of women, discussed in other chapters in this volume, has been among these old ideologies that have been questioned. As new states have undertaken the arduous tasks of nation building, some politicians have invoked “traditional” patriarchal gender relations as a more authentic alternative to the Soviet version of women’s emancipation. In Central Eurasia, such an imagined reconstruction has oſten been linked to Islam and its social and political role. Of course, debates about Islam and national identity and political development have a long history in the region. This chapter does not, however, focus on contemporary debates about gender politics and Islam or the gender politics of nation building, which are taken up in other chapters in this volume. Rather, it examines the transition to Soviet rule and the activism for women’s equality that had developed in Muslim