ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of radical socio-economic and political reform touched virtually all spheres of Soviet life and resulted in a climate of near-permanent crisis in a country that once boasted of its social and political stability. One did not need to be a Sovietologist to recognize the depth and scope of the transformations that had taken place in the Soviet Union by the end of the 1980s. Western scholarship on Islam in the Soviet Union originated with the work of historians concerned with the fate of Muslim peoples in the Russian Empire. Although more recently some political scientists have contributed to the formation of this specialized field of knowledge, the production of a scholarly literature on Soviet Islam is dominated mostly by historians who are at times openly hostile to the conceptual methods of social sciences. At the foundation of Soviet and Western thinking on Islam lies a nineteenth-century tradition of social thought on implications of social change for religion.
