Jadid Movement and its collaboration with Soviets against Muslims

 

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

الحمد لله رب العلمين

الصلاة والسلام عليك يا سيدى يا رسول الله

In the Name of Allah, the Rahman, the Merciful

Communists claim they seek to liberate society from the exploitative capitalists—the bourgeoisie. However, it has been witnessed in history that whenever and wherever there is a Communist revolution the first victims of their insatiable bloodlust are the clergy—the men of religion. Between 1928-1941, right up until Nazi Germany double crossed the Soviets with Operation Barbarossa, the Soviet Union had been waging its “anti-religious campaign” headed by Stalin. The latter was a fanatical atheist who sought to stamp out religion altogether from the Soviet Union and transform it into a totally godless nation. Hundreds of thousands of priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were brutally executed. In 1929, the Soviets dissolved all Islamic Shari’ah courts. In 1917, there were over twenty five thousand Mosques in all of Central Asia, but by the 1970s the number was drastically reduced to only a few hundred. During the “anti-religious campaign” throughout the 1930s, the Islamic clergy (ulama and imams) and the Sufis were ferociously persecuted. The aftershock of Stalin’s anti-religious campaign can still be felt today in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, despite them having now been independent for three and a half decades. It is perhaps the most culturally and politically secular part of the Muslim world today. Yet the Turkic Muslims who were subject to the Russians and Soviets are not free from blame for having unwittingly facilitated such a state of affairs through their support of the Jadid movement. This movement was particularly colored by anti-clericalism, viewing the traditional Islamic clergy and the Sufis as the greatest obstacle to their vision of a modernized and culturally Europeanized society. Like any other modernist and reformist Muslim movement that may be traced back to the nineteenth century, the Jadid movement emphasized a radical reform of gender roles, calling for women’s liberation and equal participation in the public sphere. They were thus averse to Islamic practices like polygamy, veiling and seclusion of women. The Jadid movement sought to distance Muslims from the Arabic language, traditionally taught and learned in the Madrassah or Maktab, instead replacing it with the vernacular Turkic languages. So with the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Jadidists allied with them and began filling the ranks of Communist Party chapters in Central Asia. A faction of Jadidists known as the Young Bukharans actively collaborated with the Soviet Red Army to capture Bukhara and put an end to the Emirate of Bukhara, replacing it with the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic. In subsequent years, the central Soviet government under Stalin became increasingly tyrannical, with countless purges in which many of these Jadidists were ironically liquidated. On International Women’s Day, 8 March 1927, Stalin launched a campaign called the Hujum, in which Muslim ladies burnt their veils. Though employing the slogan of women’s liberation, it was nothing more than blatant European and Slavic cultural imperialism. Today, Muslims must understand that the feminist movement, led by White women, is a tool of Western imperialists to target Islam and Muslims. Events like International Women’s Day (8 March) must be understood in this light. It is not a coincidence that Stalin used that day to begin his anti-Islam Hujum campaign. The supposedly Muslim feminists who are increasingly having their voices amplified in the Muslim community are merely instruments of Western cultural imperialism and even White supremacism. Only the naive and ignorant from our ranks will fall for their deception. These so-called Muslim feminists are no different than the Jadidists of Central Asia, who facilitated the brutal Soviet takeover which devastated the culture and identity of that region, subjecting it to thinly-veiled Russian imperialism. The naked aggression of the Soviets against Islam and Muslims sparked the noble Basmachi revolt. Habibullah Kalakani, an Islamic leader who briefly ruled Afghanistan in 1929, allowed the Basmachi forces to operate in northern Afghanistan during their insurgency and cross border raids against the evil Soviets. It is noteworthy that the Soviets sought to defeat the Basmachi by supporting the modernist King Amanullah Khan, who ended up fleeing Kalakani in 1929. This unholy alliance between the Communists and the Muslim modernists has been exposed as being completely antagonistic to the interests and faith of the Muslim Ummah.