Khalid, Adeeb. "A Secular Islam: Nation, State, and Religion in Uzbekistan." International Journal of Middle East Studies 35, no. 4 (2003): 573-598.

Sections: Islam as Nation; Islam as National Heritage; Islam and the Post-Soviet State; and Conclusion. 

Quotations
573: I argue that the experience of the 20th century has left popular understandings of Islam inter- twined with, and subordinate to, powerful discourses of nation and progress. As a result, Islam today is widely understood in Uzbekistan in ways that are profoundly secular. The revival of Islam, which began in the last years of the Soviet period, does not necessarily subvert the authority of the nation state, and indeed can even be made to further buttress it.

575: Instead of being simply vanquished by forces of nationalism, the ummat was transformed into the millat and nationalized.

577: The attack on Islam began in the mid-1920s, with waqf revenues being diverted to the commissariat for education and some madrasas being closed. By the end of the decade, it had turned into a frontal assault: mosques and madrasas were closed by the hundreds (some destroyed; most turned to other uses; and a few saved as "architectural monuments"); and countless ulama killed or sent off to labor camps as enemies of the people. In addition to bringing about physical destruction of institutions and personnel, Soviet xenophobia also cut off links with the outside Muslim world. Although the Soviet border with Afghanistan saw some movement back and forth of Turkmen nomads into the 1930s, Muslim intellectuals, modernist and traditionalist alike, lost contact with their peers abroad. If the Jadids were members of print-based communities that encompassed much of the Muslim world, now Central Asian Islam was forced into isolation and hence localized. The most important consequence of this isolation was that Islam was rendered synonymous with tradition.

578: Thus, every collective farm, it seems, had a mosque, which was officially registered as a storage room or community hall; the imam similarly received a salary as a tractor driver or a mechanic. Rituals were performed by men who claimed locally esteemed lineages, who transmitted the knowledge, usually quite slender, in the family.23 Other forms of observance also continued, while new forms of ritual arose to circumvent official restrictions. Visits to tombs and shrines had long been a part of Central Asian Islam; now, with hajj not a real possibility, they became a common expression of piety.

Subsidiary Topics: alcohol, customs, Jadids, radicalism, mazars