This chapter examines how Soviet secularism shaped the political and moral foundations of the Uzbek state’s relationship with Islam. It traces the genealogy of religious control from early Bolshevik anti-religious campaigns to the creation of the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) in 1943, which institutionalized a state-managed form of “official Islam.” This system allowed limited religious expression under strict state supervision while suppressing independent, or “unofficial,” religious practices that persisted underground. This chapter argues that this dual structure of religious governance—between sanctioned conformity and clandestine resistance—became the blueprint for Uzbekistan’s post-independence religious policy. Drawing on archival materials and interview data with clerics, policymakers, and former religious detainees, this chapter provides an empirical reconstruction of how Soviet mechanisms of control evolved into post-Soviet modes of moral governance. Figures such as Domla Hindustani, Sheikh Muhammad Sodiq Muhammad Yusuf, and the disappeared Sheikh Abduvali Qori Mirzaev illustrate the tension between accommodation and defiance that continues to define Uzbek Islam. By historicizing this continuum, this chapter reveals that contemporary paradoxes of state–religion relations in Uzbekistan are not ruptures from the Soviet past but its reformulations—where secularism, surveillance, and spirituality remain deeply entangled.