You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled as “Understanding the First Muslim Communists of Central Asia: Anticolonialism and the Politics of Muslim Solidarity in the Age of the Russian Revolution” organized by the Department of History and the Department of International Relations.
Date: 10 April 2025, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130 FEASS Seminar Room
Title: Understanding the First Muslim Communists of Central Asia: Anticolonialism and the Politics of Muslim Solidarity in the Age of the Russian Revolution
Speaker: Adeeb Khalid, Carleton College
Abstract:
In 1917, Muslim politics in Turkestan was dominated by Muslim modernists and the ulema. The following year, a number of Muslims emerged within the Communist Party. Who were these men and what was their route to Communism? This talk will present a group portrait of the first cohort of Muslim Communists in Turkestan and discuss their politics. They were opposed by Russians within the party and by many groups in Muslim society, so it is important to ask what they stood for. I will argue that their vision combined an anticolonial reading of revolution with an emphasis on Muslim solidarity across Eurasia, and that it emerged in geopolitical conjuncture of the end of the Great War and the collapse of the Russian Empire.
Bio:
Adeeb Khalid is Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College. He is the author of multiple prize-winning books on the history of Central Asia, including Central Asia: A New History from the Imperial Conquests to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2021); Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Revolution, and Empire in the Early USSR (Cornell University Press, 2015); Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press, 2007); and The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press, 1998).