This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Islam is suppressed across Central Asia through a sustained campaign of Soviet anti religious policy that ran from the years after the Bolshevik revolution through the early 1940s and shaped Islamic institutions across the region for decades afterward. Soviet authorities closed or destroyed the great majority of Central Asia's mosques, madrasas and Sufi lodges over these two decades, reducing what had been a prerevolutionary network of roughly 25,000 mosques across the whole Soviet Union to only a few hundred still functioning by the eve of the Second World War.
The campaign was carried by the Soviet state itself, acting through its anti religious apparatus rather than through any single Central Asian actor, and it targeted the infrastructure of Islamic life directly, buildings, schools and the teaching lodges through which Sufi orders had long transmitted the faith, rather than belief alone. Its effect reached beyond the campaign's own active years, since the institutions it dismantled were not rebuilt, and Central Asia's network of Islamic learning and transmission stayed suppressed across the decades of Soviet rule that followed.
What this changed for Islam's spread was the near total loss, for most of the twentieth century, of the organized institutional life through which the faith had previously been taught and sustained across Central Asia, a suppression this atlas records as the first half of a suppressed to revived pair completed only when Soviet rule itself ended.