Continuities and Complexities of the Islamic Discourse in Daghestan from the 1920s to the 1980s What the Soviets Did Not Know about Their Own Islam

Over the last decades Russian journalists and scholars of religious, political, and Islamic studies have been discussing what makes “good” and “bad” Islam, what kind of Islam is useful, correct and “traditional” for Russia, and what Islam is harmful, wrong and “not traditional.” Also government officials, religious functionaries, and the leaders of the Islamic communities in the Russian Federation participate in this debate. The various contributors to this debate often ignore the heterogeneity of Islam, including the multitude of Islamic trends and movements that developed in the various regions of Russia. Equally ignored are the historical conditions under which these trends emerged and developed, as well as the historical polemics and debates among various Muslim elites themselves.
In the North Caucasus, debates about “correct“ and “wrong” forms of Islam have been unfolding from the late Russian imperial period and throughout the Soviet eraAlready during the long jihad in Daghestan and Chechnya (ca. 1828-1859), Muslim scholars engaged in heated discussions and polemics about the legitimacy, from the point of view of shari’a, of Imam Shamil’s Islamic state project, of his jihad against Russia, as well as of his call to hijra, meaning his demand that Muslims living under non-Islamic rule should move to the regions he controlled to support the jihad. Equally heated were debates about the relationship between Sufism and jihad, that is, whether the Naqshbandiyya Sufi brotherhood indeed served as an instrument, or even as an ideology, of Shamil’s struggle against Russian rule. In Daghestan, these discussions continued after the end of the Great Caucasus War in 1864 in the polemical writings of pre-revolutionary scholars.
The aim of this article is not to give a survey of these historical and contemporary debates; neither is it an attempt to answer the question of which Islam is “right” and which is “wrong.” Rather, this paper will study the Soviet pre-history of the current Islamic discourse in the region by focusing on Daghestani writings from the 1920s to the 1980s. I am specifically interested in how the discourse about “traditional” Islam came up in this period, and how different fractions of the religious elite presented their various positions on this issue after it had been legalized (with important limitations) in the USSR in the mid-1940s.