PART I

So there's a few different strands to this question I'd like to tackle.

First, and here I must admit I'm not a resident expert, but if we're specifically talking about "Islamic terrorism", or using similar/related terms (like Islamist terrorism, Salafist jihadism, takfirism), then it should be noted that we're talking about a movement that drew inspiration from the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, and had its beginnings in the late 1960s. Ironically enough, a lot of Islamist groups that have pursued militant tactics have been directly or indirectly influenced by Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organizations that came before them. I won't really get much into the history of such groups, but it's worth pointing this out, because it's a bit of an anachronism to look that all sorts of groups that have proliferated since 1979 (al-Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah) and wonder why no one was doing that in 1917, 1937, or even 1957. Even those groups I just named really trace their own origins to the late 1980s at earliest.

So that's the first point. Now a second point is around the relationship of Soviet Muslims to the Soviet state from 1917 or so to 1991. The Soviet state veered quite a bit between different policies vis-a-vis Muslims. Local Bolsheviks in Central Asia, for example, tended to be European settlers, and as such warred pretty heavily with Muslim locals (despite efforts by Moscow to court them through such events as the 1920 Baku Congress of Peoples of the East). From 1928 to 1942 there was an official anti-religion campaign in Central Asia that sought to close mosques, but from 1942 the Soviet government reversed course (and adopted a tsarist policy) of permitting officially-regulated and sanctioned mosques, imams and schools, as I describe here. Khrushchev attempted to revive the anti-religion campaign, but this ended very quickly after his removal from power, and the official regulation method continued to 1991 (and beyond, in many ways).

As for how Soviet Muslims responded to these policies. They in fact resisted quite a deal. Perhaps most notably was the basmachi movement, which was a broad yet decentralized insurgency that affected much of Soviet Central Asia.

The basmachi movement had its origins in the turbulence that actually preceded the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The Central Asian Revolt of 1916 began, mostly among Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, as a form of resistance to attempts by the tsarist state to enforce conscription for service in the First World War. Order across the empire broke down in 1917, and Central Asian Muslims (like much of the rest of the Empire) organized themselves into a number of different councils and local authorities. Two major strands of Muslim organization in Central Asia were among the jadids, who generally advocated for programs of educational and social reform, and their more traditionalist ulama opponents among Muslim jurists and clergy. I'm intentionally trying to eschew terms like "progressive" or "conservative" here, even though those terms have been used by contemporaries and historians alike. The reason I'm doing so is that while, for example, we would in general see the Jadids as reformist and progressive, much of their program was inspired by such movements elsewhere such as the Salafists, and in many ways their educational program was "fundamentalist", in the sense that traditional Islamic education in Central Asia put very little emphasis on deep learning of texts like the Quran or Hadiths, and the very name of the Jadids came from the new "method" they advocated for learning Arabic and deeply studying this Islamic source material instead of the centuries-worth of later commentaries that more traditional jurists and imams favored. I talk a bit more about these differences here.

Anyway, that's a bit of a tangent. In any case, these two strands of Islamic scholars generally organized with local groups for self-defense, and at the beginning of the Russian Civil War came into conflict with Bolshevik forces, which as noted were largely based among European settlers in the region (and in the form of the Tashkent Soviet were isolated from the rest of Bolshevik forces for much of the war). I should emphasize that while defense of Islam could occasionally be cited as a motivation for the insurgents, it was but one of a mix of motives, including ethnic tensions, national determination, anti-colonialism, and plain local defense. The Tashkent Soviet in particular aroused a lot of local hostility through its attack of Kokand in February 1918, which resulted in a massacre of thousands of inhabitants - from this point insurgency against the Bolsheviks spread, notably in Ferghana Valley. These forces were very decentralized, and often in conflict with each other as much as with the Bolsheviks. Khiva and Bukhara, which had been semi-independent tsarist protectorates, saw traditionalist forces oust the local versions of the Jadids, the Young Khivans and Young Bukharans, before the latter were restored to power (in the form of the Khorezm and Bukharan People's Soviet Republics) with the assistance of the Red Army in 1920.

The basmachi movement received something of an usual boost of support in the form of Enver Pasha, the former Ottoman Minister of War (and one of the architects of the Armenian Genocide), who traveled to Central Asia and allied himself with the basmachi in an effort to win a Pan-Turkic state in Central Asia and the Caucasus. He was active in the region from 1921 before being killed by Red Army forces in 1922. From this time, the Red Army and internal troops continued their counterinsurgency war, and the basmachi movement mostly died down.