Espousing atheism as part of its state ideology, the USSR aspired to eradicate the  religions of its people. In Central Asia, the Soviet state had destroyed most Islamic institutions  by the late 1930s, thereby profoundly transforming local forms of life. Millions of Soviet  Muslims, as a result, became alienated from some of the key aspects of the Islamic tradition,  including the basics of theology and regular practices of virtue cultivation such as the ritual  prayer (namaz). Consequently, mainstream Islam in Central Asia came to be centered around  life-cycle rituals (i.e., male circumcision, the marriage ceremony, and funeral prayer) and  occasional practices such as uttering blessings, reciting short Quranic verses for the souls of the  deceased, and visiting shrines. Although more than thirty years have passed since the collapse of  the USSR, this non-observant form of Islam remains widespread in the region. Reflecting on this  legacy of Soviet secularization, the present essay makes two interrelated interventions into  secularism studies and the anthropology of Islam. First, I theorize Soviet secularism through  attending to the modern state’s aspiration to transcend and transform the particularities of lived  traditions, which reveals significant overlaps between communist and liberal modes of statecraft  and subject formation. Second, reflecting on a non-observant form of Islam in contemporary  Kyrgyzstan, I ask the following question: What remains of a tradition of virtue ethics when its  ethical disciplines and modes of abstract reasoning have all but vanished? [secularism, tradition,  doubt, Islam, Soviet Union, Central Asia]