Muslims in Central Asia Erased from Victories they Helped Win
By Nawal Ali
Sept/Oct 25
Every year on May 9, the streets of Bishkek fill with reverence and national pride as Kyrgyzstan joins other former Soviet countries in commemorating Victory Day, the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Soviet Union in 1945. Music, flowers, and military pageantry set the tone across the capital. It is a day steeped in pride and national identity, but also, for the reflective observer, one that reveals something deeper: a story of forgotten people, colonial systems, and memory selectively preserved.
Although it is a date often associated with European history, witnessing the celebrations in Kyrgyzstan revealed how strongly this day resonates in Central Asia, and how much of the region’s sacrifice remains underrecognized.
Kyrgyz and non-Kyrgyz alike gathered early at Victory Square for speeches, wreath-laying ceremonies, and the “Immortal Regiment” march. Residents carried photos of their veteran ancestors, proudly displaying their family histories. Brass bands played wartime songs as people lined the eternal flame with red carnations. The memory of the war was alive, not just as a forgotten past, but as part of family identity. Even without carrying a portrait myself, as a non-Kyrgyz, standing in the crowd felt like an invitation to share in a story that transcends borders.
Beneath these gestures lies a meaningful and rarely acknowledged truth: that Muslims and other colonized people played a vital role in securing victory for Europe, only to be later written out of the history books.
Colonialism Didn’t Just Take Land; It Took People
When we speak of colonialism, we often focus on territory or the extraction of wealth and resources. But one of the most overlooked aspects of imperial domination is the forced enlistment and exploitation of colonized peoples in wars that were not of their making.
In World War II, over 3.5 million Muslims from Central Asia and the Caucasus region fought for the Soviet Red Army. They came from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Their reward for a job well done? Marginalization, suspicion, and historical erasure.
This experience was synonymous with the experience of North Africans who fought under the French flag. Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians sent to the frontlines to die in battles they didn’t start, for a “homeland” that didn’t – and still doesn’t – recognize them as equals..
Colonization is not just about borders. It’s about power over the lives of those who have no value to the conqueror. Victory Day is a haunting reminder of how empires wield that power by recruiting and sacrificing colonized men for wars that glorify only the colonizer.
And yet, the exclusion goes beyond war. Muslims are rarely acknowledged as contributors to the foundations of European civilization itself. In textbooks across the West, Europe’s scientific and philosophical development is portrayed as self-realized — Newton without Ibn al-Haytham, algebra without Al-Jabr, The Golden Age without centuries of Muslim scholarship. Whether in math, science, or literature, Muslims are almost always cast as subjects rather than as central actors.
The Erasure of Muslim Soldiers from Western Memory
Despite their contributions to the defeat of Nazism, Central Asian Muslims are largely absent from global narratives of World War II. Museums in Western Europe and mainstream history books relate stories of American, British, and Soviet generals but not the Kazakh tank commander, the Uzbek infantryman, or the Tajik medic who pulled wounded comrades from burning fields in Belarus.
This erasure isn’t only limited to the West. It is also deeply rooted within the Muslim world itself. Most Muslim-majority countries, even those that sent troops to fight under Allied command, have erased the memories of their contributions during WWII. We have been conditioned to believe that it was not our war, that it was a conflict between white empires, fought over European soil, and that we have nothing to commemorate in its aftermath. But the truth is, we did fight. Our grandfathers died in battlefields from France to Burma. We were there. We just weren’t told we had a stake in this historical memory.
In Central Asia, where Victory Day is still marked as a national holiday, the legacy of Soviet rule continues to shape the narrative. The story told is one of Soviet unity, of the Great Patriotic War (Europe’s Eastern Front in World War II), and of brave Red Army soldiers. What remains unspoken is that many of those soldiers were Central Asian Muslims who fought in a war that did not recognize their faith, culture, or sovereignty. Even today, in Kyrgyzstan, the historical narrative largely mirrors the Soviet lens.
And yet, there is quiet resistance in the way people remember. Families tell stories that are absent from textbooks. Elders share memorabilia that will only ever be viewed by their grandchildren. In these national rituals – flowers laid by the eternal flame, shared meals, the procession – there is an effort to reclaim a history of the Kyrgyz people that dominant narratives leave out.
Forgotten Efforts
Central Asia’s contribution in World War II wasn’t confined to the battlefield. As the Nazi advance swallowed whole Soviet cities, entire industries were uprooted and transferred to Central Asia. Factories producing weapons, tanks, and military supplies were relocated to cities like Tashkent and Almaty where local Muslim workers, many of them untrained, underfed, and overworked, kept production alive. Fields in Uzbekistan were pushed to produce impossible amounts of cotton to supply the Red Army, often at great human cost. The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland lake in the world, began shrinking dramatically after the Soviet Union shifted its main water supply for cotton farming. This decision caused the sea to lose over 90% of its water, leading to devastating ecological, economic, and health impacts for surrounding communities. The exposed seabed created toxic dust storms, damaging agriculture of the region and causing disease. Men and women labored under brutal conditions, not as celebrated patriots, but as slaves forced into service.
And still, behind the frontlines, there was quiet compassion that defied the cruelty of the empire. When the Siege of Leningrad began and Soviet cities evacuated, thousands of Russian and Ukrainian children were sent to Central Asia for refuge. Despite their own hardships, Central Asian families opened their homes to these children, feeding, clothing, and raising them as their own. Some never returned to their original families. These acts of humanity are rarely acknowledged in Soviet mythology or Western narratives. But the truth is, while the empire took from them land, labor, and life, Central Asians embodied colonial resistance not with weapons, but with decency.
In a bitter twist of irony, the colonized extended more humanity to the colonizers than they themselves had ever received. It is not just battlefield heroism that was forgotten, but also the profound acts of dignity that challenged the logic of colonization itself.
Russian Colonization
The relationship between Russia and Central Asia is long and frayed. Kurmanjan Datka (d. 1907), a Kyrgyz tribal leader known as “The Queen,” tried to protect her people by cooperating with imperial powers. Under duress, she accepted the Russian annexation of Kyrgyz lands, only to see her people’s autonomy gradually stripped away. The Soviet Union may have industrialized the region, but it also silenced its languages, suppressed its religions, and centralized power in the hands of white Russian Muscovites. Central Asians became both part of the empire and alien to it — never fully inside, never fully outside.
This sense of estrangement was especially evident during WWII. They were needed but never honored. Visible, but never remembered.
And the pattern repeats. Europe, which once drew upon Muslims to defeat fascism, now turns away from suffering in Palestine. As entire neighborhoods are leveled, schools and universities are pulverized, hospitals bombed, and civilian lives extinguished, many of the same European powers that once vowed “never again” now stand silently by.
We defended their ideals when it mattered most to them, but those ideals were never meant to be extended to us.
Toward an Honest Reckoning
Victory Day in Kyrgyzstan is more than a holiday. It is a mirror that forces us to confront the way history is written and to evaluate who it includes and who it erases.
If the West is sincere in its commitment to the values it so loudly claims, then it must recognize this fact: colonized Muslim men bled for those values in forgotten trenches with no monuments and no parades
And if the Muslim world wants to claim its contributions, it must first recognize the extent to which it has internalized its own erasure. WWII is not just a Soviet or European story — it is ours, too. Our blood was shed. Our sacrifices were made. And our people were there.
History must stop being a story told only by the victors and start being a story that belongs to all who lived it.
Nawal Ali is a public health graduate from Chicago with a background in development. She is currently researching Islamic culture in Central Asia.
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