This article is a collection of reflections on reading a 36-page booklet titled: “The Fate Of Muslims Under Soviet Rule” by Erich W Bethman (1958). The relationship between Islam and Communism particularly in times when Communists held formal state power isn’t discussed often in contemporary public socio-political discourse.

For example, Twitter is hailed as humanity’s public square by Elon Musk today, however, if one looks up this book title on Twitter search, there is barely any mention. This goes to show that this is one of those topics that is not fashionable.

It is appropriate to cite the line by Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet era in this context:
“[I]n the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.”

The aim of this article is to throw some light on this under-explored and clearly not-so-fashionable topic and also draw the attention of the Hindu mind to why Hindus need to be wary and cautious on this matter. These methods and machinations continue to stay very much valid in the present continuous tense as far as Hindus are concerned. Particularly so for Hindus in India, just that they are done in the garb of Secularism, Liberalism, Modernisation, etc.

There is some literature available to understand the relationship between Islam and Communism through the lens of the Soviet-Afghan war. Consider the poster below from the Soviet-Afghan War era showing the hammer and sickle being crushed by the green pestle of ‘Jihad’ inside the ‘Afghanistan’ mortar. So it is nobody’s claim that Islam and Communism are best pals. In fact, their antagonism is quite evident if one looks at the near absence or marginalisation of leftist ideologues within Islamic strongholds.

However, the focus of this article is limited to the scope covered in the booklet cited above which is related to the Soviet government rule in regions that had a significant population of practicing Muslims.

Other more scholarly and detailed sources may exist and this article is by no means a survey paper or a critical review of multiple sources on this topic. It is restricted to reflection on reading the said source alone.

Prior to the Bolshevist revolution, the old Russian empire wasn’t explicitly antagonistic to Islam; the book says.

“Although Imperial Russian rule was initially very severe, it soon became on the whole easy-going and tolerant and allowed the natives to follow pretty much their own way of life. Local customs were rarely interfered with and Muslims were treated with considerable respect. Pilgrimages to Mecca took place annually, and no Russian Orthodox missions were permitted to work or proselytize among Muslims.”

The qualifier on proselytizing is important to note. Things changed with the Bolshevist revolution as seen in the following paragraph.

“With the Bolshevist Revolution, a decisive change took place. As the Muslims constitute the largest non-Slavic minority in Russia, the Communists at first proceeded cautiously, and by a proclamation of December 7, 1917, promised all Muslim subjects complete religious freedom.”

“But events soon proved Moscow’s hypocrisy and revealed its determination to break the spirit and influence of Islam.”

What follows next in the book reminds one of how the revolutionaries and their government targeted Christianity, the Church, Church properties, and the Clergy in Soviet-era Russia. That part of the story is more popular and part of public memory in some form but this antagonism shared with Islam in Russian territory isn’t as popular or well-known.

“A long series of crude and blatant attacks on the prophet Muhammad was made, ridiculing him and all other religious leaders; literally hundreds of mosques were closed and many others razed to the ground; most of the religious schools were abolished; and thousands of mullahs were exiled, imprisoned, or executed.”

What follows next is of particular interest to Indian Hindus because this continues to play out to this day under the garb of secularism. This relationship between religion and communism is well documented not just with respect to Christianity and Communism but similar attitudes are seen with respect to Indigenous peoples in Siberia or folk religions in China etc. However, knowledge of this phenomenon is not something that has seeped much into Hindu consciousness.

“The Soviets, after having established their authority in Muslim territories, started their struggle in earnest against Islam as a religion which, like all other religions according to their credo, is nothing but a useless superstition dulling the minds of men.”

“They did it by all the means at their disposal, by legislation, by administrative action, by threats of force and force itself, and last but not least by propaganda”

“Communism, as the logical outcome of materialism, cannot but be hostile to religion in all its aspects. Thus from the very beginning, the Communists aimed at the destruction of religious belief and worship in Soviet Russia” 

While India was never under the reign of Communism as an ideology per se, certain dominant formulations of Secularism share some of this antagonism towards religion much like Communism. Prof A.K. Saran refers to this kinship between Secularism and Communism in his work:

“In modern times the most systematic, thoroughgoing and powerful formulation of secularism in this sense is to be found in Marx. All modern philosophy that is not grounded on transcendent metaphysics or Revelation has a fundamental kinship with Marx.”

Throughout this article, parallels are drawn between Secular India and Communist Russia because this writer believes in this fundamental kinship that Secularism (at least of the Independent India kind) has with Marx. The subsequent excerpts will make this antagonism clear and also show the parallels between Secularism and Communism.

“On January 23, 1918, the Law of Separation of Church from State was enacted; it contained thirteen articles and was signed by Lenin, among other people. Article 12 of this law radically deprives all religious leaders, churches, mosques, synagogues, etc., of the right of juridical personality, thus, in fact, placing all religious organizations outside the law.”

It is interesting to note here that depriving religion of the right of juridical personality referred to above has been accepted as a win by many Hindus in independent India. Particularly those Hindus with a reformist bent consider this as a non-negotiable part of the progress package. However, this wasn’t considered normal until recently in our civilizational memory. Religion-Law separation causes a huge schism in a Dharmic society such as ours where there is no distinction between the realm of Caesar and the realm of God. In that light, it is important to understand that depriving the right of juridical personality was one of the first chosen lines of attack back then.

Law and constitution continue to be the strongest instruments that communists (and secularists) weaponize to tame religion. This is quite evident as seen below:

“On April 8, 1929, a more detailed law containing sixty-five articles was decreed, dealing with all aspects of religion, in order to gain an even stricter control over the adherents of any religious faith.”

Our constitutional journey is no different in this aspect. This aspect is under-appreciated. This is how Constitutional morality and Secularism work even in the Indian context. It is a turf war of sorts that constitutional morality has with religion. Typically this manifests more with the majority religion of the people of the land which in the case of India happens to be Hinduism.

Continuing on the constitutional reforms from the Soviet era:
“The Soviet Constitution which was promulgated on December 5, 1936, contains in Article 124 the following statement: “In order to insure to citizens freedom of conscience, the Church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from the State, and the School from the Church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-religious propaganda is recognized for all citizens.””

Hindus don’t pay enough attention to the impact of both Church-State separation and School-Church separation in the Hindu context in independent India. It is assumed as the right thing to do and a rite of passage that every country has to go through as a part of the linear progress narrative. It is unclear whether any comprehensive cost-benefit analysis was done during this transition and whether any clarity existed on the destination of this journey.

The School-Church separation in the Hindu context meant that secular education translated into atheist education for Hindus in Independent India in so far as outcomes are concerned. Our schools routinely produce Atheists, Sceptics, Rationalists, etc. Any instances of children being devout or sharing allegiance to rituals or carrying traces of religiosity if any is usually despite school/college/university education and never because of education. 

The following lines show the draconian nature of the Soviet-era policies. This may not have exact parallels with the constitutional journey in Independent India but this sort of persecution has happened in the case of Hindus as well but under the garb of enforcing the rule of law.

“On the face of it, this seems fair and democratic; people who want to worship may do so, and others who refuse to recognize God are free to do so. However, another code, which is of greatest practical importance to every Soviet citizen, exists in Soviet Russia: this is the Criminal Code.”

“And here we find in Article 58, which has fourteen subdivisions, that worshippers are classed among counter-revolutionaries. Thus, the Secret Police have every opportunity, whenever they deem it advisable or whenever it is politically opportune, to deal with worshippers “extra legum,” labelling them as counter-revolutionaries – a procedure which has been followed constantly during the years of Soviet rule”

Furthermore, Article 122 of the Soviet Criminal Code in its 1953 edition states:

“The teaching of religious doctrines to children or minors in state or private schools or educational institutions or the violation of regulations established for that purpose carries with it the penalty of corrective forced labor for a period up to one year.”

We have similar provisions too in the garb of secularism particularly for government or public-funded entities in India to this day. Curiously enough we are a bit relaxed on this for minority institutions. India continues to follow a unique version of Secularism which is a bundle of contradictions.

The subsequent lines are quite relevant to the Hindu context as well:

“The policy of the Soviet Government is inherently anti-religious, regardless of its disavowal of persecution and regardless of the constitutional right of the Soviet citizen to religious belief.”

“It is designed to facilitate the “dying out” of religion. Toward religion itself the State maintains an attitude of calculated neutrality; toward the privileges of religious societies, it adopts a course of prompt extinction. Thus, it maintains an outward fiction of religious tolerance.”

Independent India’s secularism is also geared towards facilitating the dying out of religion. Particularly religion of the majority kind i.e. Hinduism because that is where the power tussle manifests. Religiosity of the society, particularly of the Hindu kind doesn’t feature as a KPI for the secular state. This is a fundamental problem considering the inordinate amount of state power that is at play. For starters, some of our richest temples continue to be under the stranglehold of secular doctrines because it is aimed at attacking the privilege of religious entities.

Many Hindus do not want to acknowledge or are unable to understand the fact that the Indian version of secularism is also designed to facilitate the dying out of religion. One of the reasons for this is also because of a dominant narrative that there are no viable alternatives to Secularism as practiced by the liberal West. If not for this model of Secularism, India will risk becoming a Hindu Pakistan or a Taliban-like theocracy; the narrative goes. That India will become Homogeneous and less diverse or that Hindu(tva) ideologues with power would drive away minorities etc. is what we are told.

There is a task at hand for those with a Dharmic bent of mind to prove that alternative formulations of the Dharmic state can exist which aren’t anti-diversity by design and also at the same time they need not be geared towards facilitating the dying of religion or consider the marginalization of religion as a desirable end state. However, coming up with a detailed formulation on those lines is beyond the scope of the current article and needs a book-length treatment or more.

This is another important line from the book on the Church-School separation of the then-communist state. Yet again the parallels with Secularism are quite evident:

“But as religion leads irresistibly to one form or another of a religious society or community, and being unable to survive without teaching the axe is thereby laid at the root of the tree”

This is another aspect that Hindus don’t have a great grip on, per se. Atomic puja-room Hinduism or Weekend family temple visit won’t make the cut on this. Thriving Hinduism needs Hindu-ness in the public or community spheres and not just within the individual’s private spheres. Community or society needs teaching and praxis. Secularism at least as practiced in India is particularly antagonistic in so far as teaching Hinduism in education curriculum is concerned. So the axe is laid at the root of the tree in Hindu context as well.

“In a decree promulgated by the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan Republic on December 28, 1922, the right of religious institutions to own endowed properties and to utilize the revenue deriving from them was placed under the Commissariat of Education, and the management of the said properties was delegated to the local authorities, along with the power to appoint and dismiss waqf administrators”

Interestingly India has both the Waqf regime and the government control of the temple model. However, the latter is more draconian and the former seems to still retain some biases towards the parent faith owing to the advantages of the minority card. That is a topic for another day.

However, what is important to understand here again is that the way Communism sought to tame religion and religious endowments is similar to how Secularism operates in India. This isn’t the case with many other Secularisms in the West where the state doesn’t intervene as much in managing properties of religious entities. So clearly our version of Secularism is more akin to the Communist version above.

Interestingly the same story played out similarly in China as well:

“Forcible transformation of local temples into schools and other measures curtailed ostensibly malignant forms of religious practice, and reformers also discovered the fiscal advantages to be gained from confiscating real estate and other material resources.”

It is fascinating to see how close our Indian version of Secularism is to Communist China and Russia than to other Secularisms in the West where religious entities have a lot more freedom to manage their affairs.

Continuing from the book on this interplay between religion and state from the Soviet era:

“In other words, religious institutions were at the mercy of the State. By 1930 the Soviet Government had regulated the institution of waqf out of legal existence in Central Asia.”

“Religious institutions were at the mercy of the State” captures the Hindu reality well in independent India’s context. Secular state as a power center is perennially indulged in a turf war with religion and particularly with Hinduism as it is the majority faith of the land. This was never the case in the past in India. Even under Islamic rule, the conflict was between one religion and another religion which is a bit different from a state being explicitly irreligious in some areas and anti-religious in many others. Hindu Kings were of course abiding by a Dharmic compass and this conflict never even existed then. Hindu kings were pro-sampradaya diversity without being irreligious or anti-religious. Secularism upset this balance beyond repair.

“The second pillar of Islamic society which the Soviets wished to undermine was the Shariat and the Shariat courts. While the Czarist Government had suppressed only those portions of Shariat justice which interfered with the functions of the Russian administration, the Soviet Government condemned the entire Muslim legal system to extinction.”

Yet again, it is fascinating how this played out very similarly in India under the garb of Secularism. This is the first major change that happened in Independent India. While Hinduism didn’t exactly have a Shariat court-like model, the intervention into the Hindu religion had more to do with the Secular government intruding into religious spaces. Some dissenting opinions on the Hindu code bill are elaborated on by this writer here. While Hindus can continue to indulge in endless hair-splitting on the content of the bills we need to pay more attention to the loss of agency of religious legal systems under a secular regime. It is there that the parallel with the attitude of the Soviet government towards the Muslim legal system is relevant for Hindus. In the Hindu context, it is about secularizing the sacred domains and the associated power shifts. As seen in the case of the Soviet government above, the idea is to drive the religious legal systems to extinction and show religion its place, and clearly call out who is the boss.

As always there are many Hindus who consider such interventions as a win not understanding the power transfer that is underway between the Secular state and religion. The secular state, much like the communist state will never be happy with religion holding sway in the legal arena. It is a turf war. And religion indeed weakens because of this. As mentioned early on in this article, the “My puja room, my rituals, and festivals, my weekly temple visit” model is woefully inadequate when the forces at work are explicitly oriented towards the “dying out” of religion. Also, Dharma is an all-expansive idea, and boycotting Dharmic discourse from important arenas of public life doesn’t augur well for the long-term prospects of the survival of Hinduism in the country that is the homeland for millions of Hindus.

Continuing on the Muslim legal system in the Soviet era:

 “For a time the Soviet Peoples’ Courts and the Shariat courts acted side by side. But decree after decree was issued which tightened the Soviet control over the canonical courts and placed stringent limitations on their competence”

This is a familiar story for us as well. There are parallels to this right from the Colonial era.

“During the last months of 1922, the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan Republic published a decree ordering the retrial in peoples’ courts of lawsuits which had been tried in canonical courts if one of the parties to a dispute petitioned for transfer of the case within one month of the decision. The effect of this decree was devastating to the prestige of the Shariat courts.”

“In 1923 the Government transferred the financial burden of maintaining these courts from the State budget directly to the shoulders of those local citizens who favored the continuation of these courts.”

“Further limitations were enacted, and by 1926 the last Shariat courts in the territory of the Turkestan Republic disappeared.”

“The coup de grace was delivered in 1927 by the Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R., which ordered the complete divorce of all existing Muslim courts from the Soviet State and forbade the creation of new ones.”

As mentioned above, there is no straight equivalence in Hindu terms as we don’t have Shariat courts in the same manner as Muslims (soviet territory and era or otherwise). However, there are strong parallels in terms of how Hinduism lost most of its currency in legal spaces in independent India. Hindu family/community level legal and grievance redressal mechanisms operate in shrunken spaces now.

Hindu-oriented scholarship in the legal arena is pretty much absent now. For example, major research departments on Dharmasastras are not in India anymore ( Check Cooperative Annotated Bibliography of Hindu Law and Dharmaśāstra on Hindu Law | Zotero for instance). There aren’t enough competing Hindu institutions that do this kind of work. They lack funding as well as people power. Hindus have pretty much vacated that space due to a lack of patronage and due to the anti-Hindu forces at work at large in centers of knowledge power.

Continuing further on the Soviet era story:

“The third stroke was directed against Muslim education. It must always be remembered that Czarist Russia erected very few secular schools for the education of her Muslim subjects, the burden of education falling upon the Muslims themselves.”

“For instance, only 97 schools run by the Czarist Government, with space for less than 3,000 children, were available to the native population of Turkestan, while 7,290 maktabs provided elementary education for 69,864 children and 375 madrassas had an enrollment of 9,627 students receiving instruction in the “Arab sciences.”

“Thus, whatever the shortcomings of Muslim education might have been, it constituted the very basis of education for the Islamic population and represented a valiant community effort.”

“Communist dogma of complete separation of church and state could not permit education to remain in the hands of the Muslim authorities.”

This is familiar to Hindus as well. Except that transfer of power from community to state happened under the garb of secularism as re-iterated multiple times during the course of this article. While the exact model of operating might have differed between Hinduism and Islam it is indeed true that loss of agency in the realm of education is a big factor in the decline of Hindu-ness in our society post-independence.

While communism stood to benefit in the Soviet era with this transition it is Secularism and the project of Secularisation of the Hindu mind that continues to benefit in Independent India. Yet again, several Hindus consider this as a win because a vast majority of them belong to what the “internet” Hindus call HINOs i.e., Hindu In Name Only.

The communists understand very well the role of religion in education and hence they continue to safeguard this territory like wolves guarding their prey. In true secular spirit, it will help if the state can also fund not just secular education but also Hindu education. After all, the tax monies that fund secular education also have some Hindu color in them. Even if they don’t fund it they need to at least relax constraints imposed by Article 30 and RTE etc on majority religion and give as much freedom as given to minority religions. However, because of the shared antagonism towards religion (Hinduism in particular in the Indian context) between the Communist dogma cited above and Secularism we are left in a peculiar “no man’s land” state in so far as Hindu autonomy in running education institutions is concerned.

Another aspect that strikes anyone who reads about the machinations of Marxists then and now is the stranglehold-like focus and control on knowledge production and dissemination in the intellectual realm. The impact of that is elucidated below:

Early in the war against religion two publishing houses were established in Moscow: Bezboshnik (Godless) and Ateist (Atheist). Their sole purpose was to undermine religion by any means available: ridicule, scorn, false accusations, and so-called scientific discoveries which seem to counter the claims of religion. This anti-religious propaganda was led by the “Society of Militant Atheists,” a Government controlled and financed organization. A good share of their activities was directed against Islam. 

This is familiar to Hindus as well. And this continues to be a faultline to this day. Seats of power in the intellectual arena and gate-keepers of knowledge with resources in their control to this day continue to be old war horses with an explicit leftist bent of mind. There aren’t enough intellectuals and knowledge power centers that can voice an authentic Hindu view on many matters to this day. This is the situation despite a good decade of a non-left (as some say) government being in power.

Continuing on how this propaganda machine runs, the author says the below:

The attack is directed especially against the young; children in the most elementary grades are included. Not so long ago the Leningrad branch of the “Society for Dissemination of Scientific and Technical Knowledge” issued a book, “How to Organize Atheist Propaganda Among Children.” This work contains instructions on how to implant atheistic ideas in the minds of children and how to avoid any possibility of the adoption of spiritual principles, ethical principles, and any concept of God. The desired educational goal is to make both intellect and sentiment wholly submissive to the objectives of Communism. It goes to show that the Communists are ruthlessly pushing toward their avowed goal and have no respect for parents and their right to bring up their children on a basis of religious conviction and ethics, if they so desire.

Our secular education model has similar shared goals. And it has been quite successful at least in so far as the Hindu mind is concerned because Hindus have never quite understood what secularism and secularization means and surrendered the education sphere in toto. This is particularly evident in the current generation of Hindu parents at least in Urban India. Many of us are sleepwalking unaware of all the anti-Hindu and anti-religious forces at work. Many Hindu children are growing up in households where parents and grandparents are thoroughly secularized with little to very little foundation on religion. The parents and grandparents themselves are products of the very same secularized education system that didn’t have Hindu interests in mind and in fact harbors anti-Hindu interests in the closet. It is about time more Hindus wake up and open their eyes to see what is happening.

Nine months after Stalin’s death (December 11), Khrushchev, the new leader of the Communist Party, issued a decree published in Pravda, which presented the future policy of the Soviet Government toward religion, including Islam. In this decree Khrushchev demanded not the relaxation but the intensification of Communist education of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. He proposed new methods for anti-religious teaching and insisted that religion must receive its death blow, and the influence of Islam and that of other faiths upon the peoples of the U.S.S.R. must be eradicated forever. Only then would the work be crowned with success. This decree has been in effect in Russia ever since.

Anti-religious work has been intensified in the Muslim republics. Atheistic ideas and concepts are disseminated among all strata of the population, their poison is spread among old and young, men and women. Not even children of kindergarten age are spared. To give a few examples: Pravda stated on November 17, 1954, that in all regions of the U.S.S.R. inhabited by Muslims, additional cadres 25 of lecturers had been organized to propagate anti-religious subjects. These lecturers are drawn from the intellectual professions — teachers, engineers, students. Their work is directed by special departments for anti-religious propaganda existing in the different Soviet Administrations. The majority of these lecturers are either Komsomol or full-fledged Communist Party members. A brigade of lecturers is sent out to work in every district, town, and village. They are to visit the homes of workers and employees, schools, offices, and collective farms and are even to go out into the fields where the peasants labor, to lecture them on the evils of religion.

The same line is pursued by the newspapers. In the Bakinsky Rabochy of May 10, 1956, a paper published for Azerbaijan readers, appeared an article entitled “To Strengthen Anti-Religious Work and Education in the Spirit of Communism,” in which a definite appeal was made to overcome and uproot the influence of Islam. In the issue of April 6, 1956, of the Kommunist Tadzhikistana, an article described how numerous lectures were being organized in the towns and villages of Tadjikistan, during which the speakers would attack Islam and tear down its philosophy. The article demanded that younger people should be obliged to attend these talks.

In May, 1956, a book was published in the Turkmen language entitled Atheist Education of Children which gives special directions on how to organize anti-religious activities among Muslim children. In the January issue of Molodoi Kommunist in 1957, an article called for the intensification of anti-religious work among children, praising this kind of activity as “important government work.”

There may not be exact parallels to this above in the Indian context where the state explicitly targets Hinduism. These kinds of activities do happen in India and a lot of them are biased against Hinduism and don’t target other faiths in particular. In fact, there are born Hindu atheists who openly target Hinduism alone as they claim it is their specialization area and they are not specialists of other religions. Criticizing Hinduism alone selectively is their job, some say. There are non-Indian actors too who take this line and target Hinduism alone under the garb of being academics (historians, sociologists, etc). So this modus operandi is familiar to Hindus. This relentless pursuit to eliminate traces of religion from public memory needs to be understood better. The machinations of communists of the yore cited above where no one is spared as targets of intellectual warfare are very much alive to this day in India as well.

And in February, 1957, a resolution was adopted by the Central Committee of the Komsomols of the U.S.S.R. in Moscow, calling for intensification of anti-religious activities among children, requesting the Komsomol youth organizations to publish and to distribute more anti-religious literature, to organize more frequent lectures on anti-religious subjects, and to increase their influence upon young people in preventing them from attending religious services. And as recently as May 22, 1958, Professor L. I. Klimovitch attacked the Muslim faith over Radio Moscow, condemning its basic concepts and its sacred rites. He said:
“These remnants of the distant past must not exist in our socialist state. It is clear, comrades, that under our conditions Islam, like any other religion, is a remnant of a society which the Soviet people have left far behind.”

A rather clear indication that the state will not rest until this “remnant” also is extinct. These few examples, which could be increased by hundreds, will suffice to show that the Communists have not changed their attitude towards religion. They may change tactics, they may at times be more harsh and ruthless and at times more lenient, but their basic attitude has not changed, their goal has remained the same—the complete elimination of religion. Whatever they disseminate over the radio about freedom of religion or freedom of conscience, especially to the uncommitted part of the Muslim world is nothing but propaganda.

This is another area that Hindus have thoroughly neglected and surrendered allegiance fully to the secular state and its affiliates to run the show. There is no Hindu-rooted humanities discourse worth its name in the country despite 75 years of independence. Isolated individual efforts or lone war horses may exist. However, the arena at large both in academia and media houses of all forms continues to be a leftist bastion.

Dharma-oriented people don’t see it as a lucrative field to pursue a career. For whatever reasons Hindu worldview revolves a lot around money and livelihood security today and humanities is not seen as an aspirational career line. There is neither prestige value nor money value associated with humanities today in the minds of a vast majority of Hindus. Outside of academia, we lack patronage and orientation to establish Hindu think tanks that can support armies of intellectuals who can produce content that can counter these forces that continue to produce anti-Hindu literature and influence young minds. They won’t rest until this “remnant” called Hinduism also goes extinct. We need to be more vigilant and prepared.

The Soviet Union has made Tashkent the center of Islamic studies, and at its university, the Qur’an and theology are studied for one day a week. On the other days political science, especially Marxism and dialectical materialism, are taught intensively, as well as scientific and technical 30 subjects. The hope of the Communists, of course, is that the intensive preoccupation with scientific subjects will, in the end, completely dominate interest in the religious teachings of Islam and that finally Islam will be referred to only as ancient, petrified folklore.

Many intellectuals harbor similar notions about Hinduism as well that we refer to it only as an ancient and petrified i.e., ossified museumized folklore. Less said about the modern Hindu(tva) mind’s preoccupation with discovering modern science in the ancient past the better. At least on this aspect, it appears that the potent secular education potion is working wonders much like the communist era potion cited above. A lot of Hindus by default are adopting a scientific lens in trying to understand their tradition and hence we end up in a neither here nor there state of affairs.

Continuing the reading from Soviet era, this section is titled “How Well Did the Communists Succeed?” 

“Despite these manifold efforts of the Communists a large number of the Muslims in the U.S.S.R. have remained believers. The Communists have not yet been able to destroy Islam. Not only has Islam been preserved in the hearts of the older generation, but it has deep roots among the young, even though they have been exposed during their whole lifetime to atheistic propaganda.” 

One can say the same about Hinduism under the reign of Secularism as well. It continues to be a wonder that despite a whole lifetime of atheistic orientation in entities of power we have continued to stay put to Hinduism. Do note this is not a commentary on the people in power. It is about the seats of power, associated bureaucracy structure, constitutional, legal machinery, and associated paraphernalia. Most of them owe their allegiance to constitutional morality, secularism, etc, and not to the long-standing civilizational traditions of this land.

This excerpt from the book is particularly useful because of the emphasis on family and clan bonds:

“From October 29 to November 4, 1956, a conference was held in Stalinabad, the capital of Tadjikistan, under the aegis of the Institutes of Ethnography and Material History of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Among other subjects, the problem of “religious survivals in the mores of the peoples of Central Asia” was taken up. Several papers by eminent Soviet scholars were read. G. P. Snesarev’s report (Institute of Ethnography) was published in full in Sovyetskaya Etnografiya (1957, No. 2, pp. 60-72). All papers acknowledged the extraordinary vitality of Muslim religious beliefs and admitted the failure of more than twenty years of intensified anti-Muslim propaganda. Although, as Snesarev writes, orthodox Islam has become rapidly debilitated and the number of persons observing the fast and the other festivals as well as those with a knowledge of Arabic diminishes from year to year, nevertheless, “a religious movement is being born before our very eyes in the regions where Islam was once widespread. This movement strives to adapt the religion to present conditions; it accepts every compromise and attempts to modernize Muslim dogmas.” He sees the reason for the survival of Islam in the strong bonds of the family and the clan system, and therefore he proposes that the traditional structure of Muslim society must be destroyed, the clans must be disbanded and dispersed before the last traces of Islam are eradicated. This must be accomplished even at the cost of destroying all the old villages and erecting new ones with a completely different social structure.”

It is interesting to read this from a Hindu perspective because some of our founding fathers of Independent India harbored similar notions towards “old” Hinduism and its way of life. To this day there are forces at play to weaken the bonds of family and clan system-like arrangements that are crucial for Hindu survival. This anti-Muslim attitude seen above is pretty much a template of sorts that gets replicated in any society towards the majority faith of the land whenever Communists or their allies hold political power. It is basically an anti-religious attitude of the most potent kind. In India, this cleverly runs under the cloak of Secularism to this day.

The author of the booklet concludes with these lines below:

“The fact that newspapers and scientific conferences are evidently deeply concerned about the tenacity of Islam is proof that the spirit of the Muslim peoples is not broken. Islam is deeply rooted in the hearts of the Muslims of Russia, and as long as it stays alive, the Muslims will never become uskodels (confirmed Communists). At present the Communist leaders show a certain amount of tolerance towards Islam in order to influence the Muslims outside the Soviet Union. The moment they feel that they have reached this goal in convincing foreign Muslims, or if they should discover that their present policy is of no avail, it seems obvious from past experience that they would not hesitate to use the old strong-arm methods of suppression, torture, and murder against the Muslims.”

There are some takeaways to Hindus from this optimism from 1958. Despite the hyperbole and alarmist tones here and there around Hinduism in this article, it isn’t “game over” yet for Hinduism for India. Thankfully we aren’t under the reign of a decidedly anti-religious communist-era government that we need to worry about suppression, torture, and murder. The philosophical system that underpins the prevailing idea of India is definitely not like that of the communist era as mentioned by Solzhenitsyn below:

“Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.”

Hindus are perhaps confused, unaware, under-prepared, ignorant, or a combination of all four (or more such traits) on this topic. But we aren’t a “hatred of God” people. Of course, needless to say, some of us are. But in general, the vast majority of Hindus don’t harbor hate for their Gods. At least at the moment in contemporary India. Or so this writer thinks. Hindus perhaps need some serious study, introspection, and a leap of faith to understand the influence of Secularism and Secularisation. My hope is that this reading of the interaction between Communism and Islam helps in that direction.

The booklet ends with these lines:

“The fate of the Muslims in the Soviet Union and the sacrifices they have made in the defense of Islam should serve as a stern warning for all Muslims living in free countries. The sufferings they endure are the sufferings of all Muslims and will be the lot of all those who are neglectful of their duties as Muslims, allowing thereby the Communists with their Godless philosophy to infiltrate their society and their country. The Muslims in the free countries must understand that Communism not only brings them the most terrifying form of colonialism but also destroys their religious and cultural life and aims at the complete extermination of Islam.”

As is familiar in such texts there is an appeal to “all” Muslims and imploring them not to neglect their duties as Muslims. Labeling communism as a harbinger of the most terrifying form of colonialism may upset many an ideologue in contemporary times. Decoloniality discourse is particularly used by a prominent faction of scholars with leftist bias in academia and some of them may be particularly upset to see communism itself to be termed as a form of colonialism. It is an interesting coinage nevertheless and shows a sense of clarity at least as far as the incompatibility between godless philosophy and god-aware philosophy is concerned. Hindus have much to learn from this assertion here given that we continue to put godless Secularism on a high pedestal assuming that somehow it will give us different results as Hindus.

Author’s note:

I wrote this article just to bring some attention to an under-appreciated aspect of the relationship between Communism and Islam. This topic isn’t discussed much in our times today at least in Hindu circles on social media. I don’t claim to be objective on any of this. In fact, I don’t understand the usage of being unbiased, being objective, being neutral, etc. I write as a “trad” Hindu (to use an internet moniker). So I see the world from those eyes.

It is quite possible that someone else reads this small booklet and sees a parallel with how a Hindutva government might terrorize Islamic minority in the future. Another alpha Hindu may actually think that this is a playbook to tame Islam and take notes. Someone else may read this book and much like the communists of that era feel that the communist methodology is justified because religion is evil and needs to be shown its place. Yet another may see this friction between state and religion as a natural course in the grand march of progress considering what all other countries went through in the past 3-4 centuries. To each his own.

Also, the claim of this article is to not give a clean chit to Islam either. How Islam came to be and how it treats pre-Islamic and non-Islamic faiths when it holds state power or power of any sort is a topic for a different day. Enough literature exists on that topic and there are better people to elaborate on that matter. The purpose here is to specifically understand how communism fared with respect to Islam (and religion in general) when it held state power in territories where there was a significant percentage of practicing Muslims.