ABSTRACT
Scholarship has long treated Muslim piety in the Soviet Union as something that could only manifest itself in the sequestrated spaces of the home and family, while viewing public manifestations of Islam through the prism of identity and especially nationalism. One way to move beyond the impasse presented by this public/private dichotomy is to treat the voluminous body of atheistic documentation concerning Islam in Soviet Central Asia as a “religious” source. The present contribution attempts to do just this by undertaking a source-based analysis of three atheistic vignettes. The insights about Muslim spirituality that emerge from this analysis point to Muslim piety’s constitutive role in shaping the “normalcy” of social life in the region during the Brezhnev era and beyond.
