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No group is more delighted with the new religious liberty than the mullahs who nurtured the Islamic faith during decades of persecution. "They used to shoot us," says a mullah at Tashkent's Tokhta Baitvacha mosque, which was closed in 1937 on Stalin's orders and reopened a year ago. "Now they don't interfere with us. A lot of young people come here these days."
At a major mosque just opposite the Tashkent headquarters of the Muslim Religious Board for Central Asia and Kazakhstan, a gaggle of Uzbek teenagers fidget through 2 p.m. prayers while their elders scowl at a visiting photographer. At an elegant medieval-era mosque just outside town, young construction volunteers stop for a farewell word from mullah Kasemi Bey after a Saturday morning of restoration work. Says Kasemi Bey: "The number of believers is growing. Everybody wants to go to Mecca."
In all five Central Asian republics, Muslim officials are emboldened enough to show a certain coolness toward Gorbachev, who was not always so favorably disposed to freedom of religion. Less than four years ago, the Soviet leader described Islam as the "enemy of progress and socialism." Allahshukur Pasha- zada, head of the Baku-based Muslim Religious Board for Transcaucasia, still resents the Soviet President's claim that Islamic fundamentalism played a role in Azerbaijan's upheaval. He led the Muslim ceremony in honor of the dead when 1.5 million people gathered at the Cemetery of the Martyrs above Baku to mourn the people killed in Azerbaijan during January's Soviet army attack -- more than 300, claim Popular Front officials. "It's a sin when the head of the country uses religion in politics," Allahshukur says. "I didn't expect Gorbachev to play with the souls and religious feelings of Muslims."
A visiting delegation of Azerbaijanis from Soviet Georgia sat across the table, expressing condolences over the Baku violence as Allahshukur spoke. Their pilgrimage suggested that the Islamic religious establishment will be considered a source of political as well as spiritual inspiration for the Islamic minority in the future.
For most of the few thousand full-time mullahs in the Soviet Union, their new sense of authority is a sharp break with the past. Despite assurances from Lenin and later Stalin of religious and cultural freedom for Soviet Muslims, the group suffered as much as Soviet Christians did during communist crackdowns, especially under Stalin. In 1932 the dictator announced a Five- Year Plan to eliminate religious belief. All but a tiny handful of the 26,000 mosques that flourished before 1917 were closed, destroyed or turned into nightclubs and warehouses. Thousands of mullahs were shot or sent to the Gulag.
The mullahs who survived the purges and won permission to exercise religious functions were often viewed with suspicion by the Muslim laity. As a result, a network of "parallel" mosques sprang up across the Asian republics, where Muslim believers practiced their religion without official imprimatur. In Uzbekistan an undetermined number of Muslims have joined mystical Sufi sects. In Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan authorities have recently become concerned about the spread of groups espousing Wahhabism, the puritanical sect of the Sunni branch of Islam that first emerged in Saudi Arabia in the 18th century.