A PRAYER FOR RAIN: PRACTISING BEING SOVIET AND MUSLIM SERGEI ABASHIN* European University, St. Petersburg The transformation of religious identities and practices during the twentieth century was labeled ‘secularization’, which implied ‘driving religion out’ of the social and political domain to the point, many hoped, of its extinction. Religiosity, whether Muslim or other, was portrayed as ‘outdated’ and ‘defunct’, and was marginalized and confined to the sphere of private life. Yet the sudden return of religion to political life at the close of the century requires us to reassess the question of what exactly was happening to it during the era of secularization, where and how religiosity was surviving, adapting to changes, and getting ready for its comeback to the political arena. In this paper I explore the history of Islam in what was the most explicitly and systematically antireligious polity, namely the USSR. I argue however, that, even in this case, there was a certain religious recognition built into the structures of behaviour and administration. The part that ‘Muslimness’—that is, ‘a specific cultural experience’, shared by Soviet Muslims 1 —has played in Soviet Central Asia looks rather ambiguous two decades after the breakdown of the Soviet state. On the one hand, one could gather certain facts and tell a story of * Author’s note: I am grateful to Paolo Sartori for useful comments on an initial draft, which in many ways determined the final design and content of this paper. I am also thankful to Bahtiyor Babajanov for valuable guidance on a number of questions that I had in preparing this work. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my debt to this Journal’s anonymous reviewers for their comments and advice on the manuscript, as well as to Alexei Elfimov and Madeleine Reeves who helped with the translation of the article. 1 Paolo Sartori, ‘Towards a History of the Muslim’s Soviet Union: A View from Central Asia’ in Die Welt des Islams, 50 (2010): 315–34, at 322. I will go along with the understanding of this term offered by Paolo Sartori ‘to identify the culture of ‘‘being Muslim’’ under Soviet rule. Within this cultural framework, Islam, although challenged by the discourse of an unabashedly antireligious state, remained a source of knowledge, ethics, morality, and spirituality for many (but by no means all) Muslims in the USSR’. ß The Author (2014). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Published online 13 March 2014 Journal of Islamic Studies 25:2 (2014) pp. 178–200 doi:10.1093/jis/etu020 at European University in St Petersburg on May 20, 2014 http://jis.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from