"Islam has many faces, and there are many ways of being Muslim, and this is clearly visible in the history of the Muslim communities of the former Soviet Union," said Adeeb Khalid, professor of Asian studies and history at Carleton College. He spoke on "The Many Ways of Being Muslim in the Modern World: Episodes from the Soviet History of Islam" Oct. 6 as part of the College of Arts and Sciences Humanities Lecture series.

"In the Soviet Union, the state played a huge role in transforming the parameters of Islamic practice, Islamic observance and the contours by which people could be Muslim, by destroying the physical infrastructure, redefining the public space and so on," said Khalid, pointing out that the Muslim educated classes were severely damaged.

The Soviet project of state building also transformed the region's culture, Khalid said. Borders were drawn based on national identities and common languages; these national units didn't exist before the USSR. As a result, for most Muslims in post-Stalin USSR, Islam became a marker of national identity.

"When Muslims relate to Islam, they usually do so through the prism of their own communal experience, and that experience has increasingly in the 20th century become a national and an ethnic one," he said.

When the USSR disbanded in 1991, it contained more than 50 million Muslims, more than any Arabic-speaking country. Despite the significance of the region for better understanding Islam, Khalid is among the few scholars who have mastered the many languages (including Uzbek, Russian and Ottoman Turkish) required for serious research in Central Asia.

"Unfortunately, there's a long tradition of talking about Central Asia without knowing anything about it," said Khalid in an interview. "So if Muslims in the region don't act like we expect them to, then they're explained away as not really Muslim, instead of understanding that there are multiple ways to be Muslim."

"The Soviet experience helps us to see very important trends, not just of Soviet history but of 20th-century history of the world at large, because Muslims always relate to their common faith through their own locally situated prisms," Khalid told his audience. "Even when Muslims talk about the universality of their faith and the commonality of their community, they often invest that commonality with very different meanings."

Khalid explained that during the 20th century in much of the Muslim world, rising levels of education and literacy have given greater direct access to the original texts of Islam. As a result, the authority of tradition has been marginalized or undermined. "Rooting religious authority in the texts themselves undermines the authority of traditional modes of interpretation, which were often very flexible. This is perhaps the dark side of literacy," he said.

But the de-Islamization of public life in the Soviet Union meant that this process of universal access to the scriptural sources of Islam didn't really take place in Central Asia. "Instead, Islam became synonymous with custom and tradition," said Khalid. "Here is a paradox: In the midst of the greatest state-led campaign for modernization of the 20th century that produced real results in many social indicators of literacy and education, Soviet Islam in many ways became de-modernized."

The Arts and Sciences Humanities Lectures are presented with support from the Office of the President and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Linda Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.