Please join the East Asia Research Forum as they host a Zoom (online) book talk with Eren Tasar.
Muslim Atheism in Central Asia (Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2025) examines the encounter between Soviet atheistic methods and assumptions—largely developed in Russian—and the institutions, values, and cosmologies of Central Asian Islamic culture. Drawing on a wide body of atheistic literature produced in ten languages spoken by Soviet Muslims, the book argues that, in the decades following World War II, scientific atheism was reshaped and effectively “Islamized” in the Central Asian republics. It charts the rise and eventual decline of this phenomenon over roughly four decades after World War II.
About the Speaker: Eren Tasar is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His publications include Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a forthcoming textbook, Central Asia from Antiquity to the Present, which will be published by Oxford later this year.
Please register for this online event.
Peter Carroll
(847) 491-2753
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