SUMMARY:

The article traces manifestations of continuity among Islamic, mostly puritanically oriented, intellectual practices in Central Asia from the period immediately preceding the October Revolution to the 1950s. This continuity revealed itself in the declarations of Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM, est. 1943) and, more specifically, its critique of what was perceived as popular religiosity connected to the cult of saints. The argument of the article is twofold. First, it shows that rigorist approaches to Islam, which are notable in the various activities of SADUM, are a later product of Muslim reformist thinking, which had currency within a group of Central Asian Muslim jurists. Second, the article corrects the dominant narrative that posits SADUM’s direct continuity with Muslim modernism (Jadidism) and distinguishes the latter from fundamentalist and rigorist approaches to Islam. Since SADUM’s position on important religious problems reproduced fundamentalist approaches to religiosity, the nature of its Jadidism origins should be revisited. What today is understood as Jadidism was in fact part and parcel of a broader reformist trend, which combined rationalist and rigorist understandings of Islam.