Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam

Soviet Orientalist studies in Islam are academic discourses by Soviet Marxist theoreticians about Islam, its origins and development based on Historical materialism and Muslims. The central question of this discourse was how Muslim society would fit into the general development of human history. Prominent Soviet orientalists include Mikhail A. Reisner, Evgenii Beliaev, Liutsian I. Klimovich, Mikhail L. Tomara, V. Ditiakin and Sandzhar D. Asfendiarov.

The October Revolution brought the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to power. The Soviet Union had a large Muslim population of various ethnicities. Therefore, there was a pressing need for original research as Marx,Engels only dealt with the subject superficially. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks created new institutions and organizations intended to produce devoted Marxist scholars of Oriental studies. Foremost among them was the Moscow Institute for Oriental Studies, a party school created in 1920 mainly for the requirements of the Soviet foreign service. Its counterpart for educating party workers and administrators from the Eastern regions and republics of Russia and the USSR, as well as for training communists from abroad, was the Communist University of the Toilers of the Orient, a school founded in 1921. The new Marxist discourse on Islam was dominated by scholars from these political teaching and research institutions.

In 1923, Zinatullah Navshirvanov (a Volga Tatar communist who was also active in the formation of a communist party in Atatürk’s new Republic of Turkey) in the journal Novyi Vostok proposed that there were several forms of communism in Islamic history. The authors detected a “primitive communism” already in the activities of some of Muhammad’s companions, but they found that communism was even more prominent in the tradition of Islamic Sufism. Under the cover of Sufism communist ideas and movements emerged that had nothing to do with Islam and religion whatsoever. These movements were driven by Muslims—poor nomads as well as peasants and urban craftsmen—longing to overthrow the feudal order of their times, i.e., the Abbasid, Seljukid, and Ottoman dynasties in the Near East. As examples the Navshirvanovs mentioned the Shiʿi Ismailites, the Anatolian Futūwa and Akhī organizations, and the Bektashi order of dervishes. The climax of this supposed anti-feudal Sufi communist movement was Sheikh Bedreddin of Simavna who was executed by the Ottomans in 1416 as a heretic; his disciples led peasant rebellions against Ottoman rule and set up what the Navshirvanov called the “first revolutionary government of Anatolia”.

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