While Islam as a lived religion offers a common starting point to understand the experiences of Muslims in Central Eurasia, ideologies such as Islamism, positivism, nationalism, and socialism have informed the various powers that attempted to regiment their lives according to various blueprints for a future society since the nineteenth century. Thus, the minds and bodies of Central Eurasia's Muslims have been the subject of intense intellectual debates and social engineering interventions, and in their experiences, this course explores the modern interplays of religion and ideology as they have been mediated by individual or group interests, power dynamics, and mundane realities.
