At the 2010 MESA Conference I propose to present the sixth chapter of my dissertation, "Muslim Life in Central Asia, 1943-1991", which focuses on social and religious history, as well as state policy towards religious communities and institutions, in the context of Soviet Central Asia. The chapter, "The Muftiate on the International Stage", discusses the international relations of the legally recognized Soviet Central Asian muftiate from 1944-1988. It covers the impressive scope of the organization's global ties during these four decades, with in-depth discussion of various aspects of its international project, such as the Hajj, its ties with the Central Asian diasporas in India and Saudi Arabia, its relations with religious, cultural and political figures in the decolonized nations of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and its surprisingly ambitious agenda in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s. The contribution also features an intensive focus on the muftiate's relations with the Soviet government, and the political justification for its engagement with overseas entities. Broadly speaking, the chapter argues that the Islamic scholars employed by the muftiate, as well as the Soviet bureaucrats monitoring them, justified the international project as an anti-colonial propaganda initiative targeting the influence of global capitalism, but, more substantively, used it as a way to justify the existence and even vibrance of Islam in what was meant to be an atheist society, the Communist-ruled Soviet Union. My chapter relies exhaustively on correspondence in state archives in the republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, that has not to my knowledge been used in any work of scholarship before, Western, Soviet, or post-Soviet. These materials are in the Persian/Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek languages. I hope to present this chapter to an interdisciplinary audience in Middle Eastern Studies, in particular because the sources present a rare opportunity for substantively exploring connections between Soviet Central Asia and the Arab world in the twentieth century. My discussion highlights educational ties and scholarly exchange between Central Asian 'ulama and their counterparts at institutions such as Al-Azhar and the Islamic University of Madina (among others), and also highlights the muftiate's engagement of the previously unknown and unstudied Turkestani diaspora in Saudi Arabia. This exploration of connections between the Middle East and Central Asia in modern times makes use of newly available archival collections unknown to prior scholarship, and makes an argument for bringing Soviet Central Asia back onto the stage of Islamic and world history.