Paper short abstract:

This thesis is devoted to the process of Soviet secularization of Uzbekistan and its consequences in the modern period. This analysis reveals the fact that the Soviet government, under the guise of secularization, pursued a completely opposite policy in relation to the trend that was in the world.

Paper long abstract:

Secularism as an element of European civilization was introduced into the life of Turkestan during the course of colonial policy.

In the interest of the colonial countries in relation to Turkestan, the factor of Islam has always been a difficult task requiring special experience, knowledge and a policy on which the entire content of colonization depended. Secularism as a process in the practice of Western countries is understood as a balancing process of rapprochement of religion and the construction of the state in the name of combining common interests, in the name of the nation and nation-building. Or rather, according to J. Habermas, the “two-way and complementary learning process” between the religious and secular part of society, sometimes even through mutual self-restraint". Because secularism was not initially understood as atheism as it was in the Soviet ideology. On the contrary, "Secularity is not atheism and not the dominance of only secular discourse, but the equality of the religious and secular sides of society" (Dialectics of Secularization. About Mind and religion, 2006).

The Soviet type secularism, which was accompanied by the Russification of the indigenous system of education, culture, collectivization, repression, starvation, through the system of atheism, strangled not only the spiritual values that lay on the basis of religious identity, but also the national elements of this identity.

This analysis reveals the fact that the Soviet government, under the guise of secularization, conducted a completely opposite policy in relation to the trend that was happening around the world. For the secularization of the West did not contradict the self-improvement of the qualitative religious identity of the builders of nation states. It is this approach that answers the question most of all, why is the state building process very difficult in independent Uzbekistan today.