A thread(🧵) on the unusual shift towards women’s participation and visibility in religious activities during the Wartime period in the Soviet Union -
The most significant wartime change , was an unusual shift toward women’s participation and visibility in the mosques. In Moscow’s Cathedral Mosque, for the first time ever, a significant portion of regular attendees were women.
The phenomenon of women leading or attending women-only prayer groups in private homes during wartime.
Women hosting large-scale religious gatherings as well as smaller, more secretive ones.
Stranger than fiction: a petition from Uzbek Muslim women requesting that the Soviet government order men to engage in religiously sanctioned polygamy-
Sometimes, in cases of particular urgency, local Communist authorities took the issue of satisfying religious norms into their own hands as in this case where a circumcision specialist was dispatched to satisfy the request of a Bakshir girl
The chairman of the Ulianovsk Regional Party Committee, reported to superiors in 1947 that performing “religious rites” had become common in the postwar years among Party members and their families
When it comes to collective religious activity in wartime among women specifically, perhaps the most remarkable single example is the work undertaken by the Muslim women of the village of Koianovo, in Perm’ oblast’, to save their local mosque.
In Moscow , women began—as they had never done before—to participate in funeral rites for their relatives.
Population transfer”—whether of individuals or of larger populations—was another major driver of religious change
In Dagestan, meanwhile, where isolated mountain communities were forcibly resettled in the plains, partly in hopes of exposing the mountaineers to the alleged “secularizing” influence of lowland populations, the result for both communities was not secularization,
but rather religious cross-pollination between the older methods of religious instruction popular in the mountains and the more recently developed “new method” (or usul-i jadīd) curricula popular in the plains.
As the activities of shuttered mosques moved into domestic homes, domestic architecture became a viable inspiration for “sacred” architecture replacing classical Caucasian mosque designs.
In Moscow, in 1954, a group of women sent a letter of complaint to the Commissioner of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults—a petition that would have been unfathomable in the pre-war years.
These women wanted to hear their imam, and they appealed to Soviet religious tolerance, feminism, patriotism, and the spirit of the Bolshevik Revolution to make it happen:
End 🧵Source - God save the USSR by Jeff Eden.
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