Some 55 Million

By DAVID AIKMAN TASHKENT

"Sit down!" hissed members of the agitated crowd in front of Communist Party Central Committee headquarters in Dushanbe, capital of Tadzhikistan. Humiliated, the group of veteran Soviet combat officers and their men sank awkwardly to the ground when ordered to do so by the throng of 10,000 militant Tadzhiks. The troops then listened grimly as a mullah recited the Islamic call to prayer from atop one of their armored vehicles.

The startling display of religious assertiveness took place at the height of the revolt against Moscow's rule that broke out three weeks ago in Tadzhikistan, perhaps the most ardently Islamic of the 15 Soviet republics. For the Tadzhiks who forced the soldiers to observe their demonstration of piety, the moment represented a vindication of their faith, long suppressed under the official Soviet policy of atheism. But for Soviet journalists who took in the scene, the moment may have confirmed a nightmare.

Under glasnost, ordinary Soviets are only now learning how deeply Islam is rooted in their federation, which contains some 55 million Muslims, overwhelmingly located in the five Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan. Among some anxious citizens, the discovery has touched off premonitions of disaster, as republic after republic is shaken by unrest, often with religious overtones. After Soviet troops were called in last January to quell bloody rioting in Azerbaijan, Igor Belyaev, a prominent Soviet commentator on Muslim affairs, warned that "Iran has threatened the Soviet Union with an Islamic conflagration." President Mikhail Gorbachev argued that "Islamic fundamentalism" was a major factor in the rioting against minority Armenians in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku.

Neither Gorbachev nor Belyaev is exactly on target in Azerbaijan. Fundamentalist Islam had very little to do with the rapid growth of the republic's Popular Front before the crushing intervention of the Soviet army in mid-January; the main issues were autonomy from Moscow and an end to the Communist Party monopoly of power. But elsewhere, profound Islamic forces -- some of them violent -- have begun to shake up the status quo in response to Gorbachev's decision to allow freedom of conscience throughout the Soviet Empire. Examples:

-- In Dushanbe protesters last month demanded that Islam be declared the official religion of Tadzhikistan.

-- Mullahs in Tashkent are now permitted to conduct proselytizing meetings on the street, in factories, even in prisons.

-- In Samarkand last summer gangs of young Tadzhik thugs roamed the local marketplace, slashing the faces of women who wore makeup.

-- To compensate for a chronic lack of Islamic holy books, Saudi Arabia has printed 1 million copies of the Koran for Soviet Muslims -- and Aeroflot has agreed to deliver them.

-- Primarily in Uzbekistan but also in other Central Asian republics, Muslim TV and radio programs are now a regular feature. Some Muslim prayer gatherings are televised along with readings from the Koran.

-- Across the Soviet Union's Central Asian region, a construction and restoration program is under way that has tripled the number of functioning mosques to 250 since the beginning of 1989.

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.

Alongside freedom of worship, Muslim citizens of the Central Asian republics are becoming more assertive about culture. Many are demanding a return to the original Arabic script of their respective languages. The Cyrillic alphabet was forced on the Central Asian republics by Stalin in 1939 to cut Muslims off from their rich cultural heritage and to exacerbate relatively minor linguistic differences among the four main Turkic groups of the area. Today, privately run Arabic-language schools are flourishing in Tashkent and other major cities, while Tashkent's five Arabic-language middle schools are crammed to capacity. At the Tashkent No. 22 Middle School, 2,200 students from Grades 2 through 11 -- the highest -- attend Arabic-language classes taught by 24 ( full-time instructors. Says teacher Asia Ismarava: "It's a good idea to read the old script because then they can read the old books."

Soviet Muslim leaders hope to steer growing Islamic consciousness in the direction of tolerance, to allay Russian suspicions of Islam and to preserve a coherent structure of religious authority and order in the country. But they may be racing against time. Demographics are having their own influence on Soviet Islam. Though the Muslim nationalities make up just 19.2% of the Soviet population, they accounted for half the total population increase of the past decade. They are still growing at five times the rate of the remaining population.

The population pressures, coupled with the floundering Soviet economy, have added greatly to impoverishment, joblessness and stinging resentment of the better-educated European Soviet nationalities -- and particularly of the well- to-do elite. Last month in Dushanbe these resentments exploded in several days of looting, burning and pogroms against non-Tadzhiks, especially against ethnic Russians. Yet next to the violence, the most striking aspect of the uprising was its trenchantly Islamic character. The insurgents demanded that Islam be declared the republic's official religion and that Arabic script be reinstated. Some of their supporters terrorized Tadzhik women who did not wear head scarves in public.

A more sinister view of the riots was provided by a Russian intellectual resident in Tadzhikistan. He told TIME last week that the violence was deliberately fomented by a group of young radicals within the republic's government who want to give the area an Islamic character. Some extreme elements, he says, have been calling bluntly for the establishment of an Islamic republic. The intellectual reported that all non-Tadzhiks in the republic are anxious to leave and, as he put it, "everyone is terrified" of what will happen with the departure of some 7,000 Soviet soldiers who arrived in Tadzhikistan after the disturbances began.

Such fears buttress suspicions among non-Muslim Soviets elsewhere that their country, tied with Turkey as the fifth largest Muslim community in the world (after Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India), is in fact on the brink of the Islamic conflagration that commentator Belyaev feared. Those suspicions are unfair to the vast majority of Soviet Muslims, who may be nationalistic but do not embrace any brand of vengeful fundamentalism. As Ilios Ibragimov, a Tadzhik truck driver in Dushanbe, put it, "Those people who caused the damage and looted, they were fools, bad people." The question is whether Mikhail Gorbachev will also recognize the distinction and avoid further polarization of the restive Muslims along volatile religious lines.

With reporting by Paul Hofheinz/Moscow