Muslims in Soviet Central Asia Seek Sovereignty, Form an Islamic Party : Ethnic issues: The new organization would weld together regional republics and impose Islamic law. But it won’t demand that women wear veils.

Muslim militants from the Soviet Union’s southern republics announced the formation of an Islamic Democratic Party on Sunday, and the chairman said he considers the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran a “great leader.”

“Khomeini was very good for us,” said the party’s provisional leader, Dadakhan Hassanov, a composer and performer of traditional Uzbek music. “He opened windows for us.”

Despite such admiration, however, the new party’s program eschews some of the practices of fundamentalist Iran, including the compulsory wearing of the veil by women. Nevertheless, its goals--including the imposition of Muslim law across a huge sweep of Soviet territory--are nothing short of revolutionary and pose an additional ethnic headache for Moscow.

“We want freedom, independence and Islam,” said the 50-year-old Hassanov. “When we say independent, we mean a completely sovereign state, politically, economically and culturally.”

The formation of the new party, announced at a meeting in the city of Namangan, 140 miles east of Tashkent, Uzbekistan’s capital, was the latest and most ambitious expression of the growing political militancy among the Soviet Union’s 55 million ethnic Muslims.

Traditionally, Muslim groups make up an estimated 19% of the country’s population, and their share is expected to grow to as much as 25% by the end of the century.

Despite such demographic weight, the Central Asian republics traditionally have been excluded from top policy-making circles in Moscow, and local leaders were moved recently to act in unison to loosen the grip of the Soviet government on their vast region, almost half the size of the United States.

Other Muslim groups, including an Islamic Revival Party founded largely by Tatar residents of the Volga basin this summer, have demanded greater autonomy before, but the Islamic Democratic Party of Turkestan is the first party to explicitly seek a coordinated, nonviolent Islamic “revolution” in all Muslim areas.

Hakim Khan, a member of the party’s founding committee, said several thousand militants gathered in a mosque in Namangan and chanted “Allahu akbar!” or “God is great!” when a noted clergymen, Mohammed Qadi, formally announced the party’s founding.

Despite the group’s potentially explosive message, Khan said local authorities did not interfere with the meeting and even allowed a local radio station to broadcast the proceedings. “They knew we were going to hold our meeting in a peaceful manner,” he said in a telephone interview from Namangan.

Local opposition politicians said they could not measure the likely strength of popular support for the militant Muslim movement.

“They are strong in the Fergana Valley, which has always been a traditionally religious area,” said Abdul Rahim Pultov, chairman of Uzbekistan’s grass-roots political movement Birlik (Unity). “No one knows whether they are strong in other places.”

The Fergana Valley, where Namangan is located, is the Soviet Union’s largest cotton-growing area and the most fertile region of Central Asia. It has also been the scene of bloody violence between neighboring Muslim ethnic groups that shows how difficult achieving a Soviet Islamic union would be.

Last summer, Uzbeks in the Fergana Valley went on a rampage against Meskhetian Turk migrants, burning down their homes and roaming the countryside to hunt down and kill the owners. Scores died. This summer, murderous ethnic feuds raged between land-hungry Uzbeks and Kirghiz in the mountain city of Osh.

The new party, however, has set as its goal the welding together of all Muslims in “Turkestan,” the old name for the Central Asian region that embraces present-day Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan, Kirghizia, Turkmenia and Uzbekistan. Khan and Hassanov said that Sunday’s meeting included more than 3,000 delegates from all of those republics, but their claim could not be verified.

Hassanov, interviewed at his home in Tashkent before the meeting, said the party hopes to gain power by peaceful, democratic means. He recognized that its most immediate problem will be “making peace among our own people.”

“We will not attempt to seize power by force,” he said. “Our strategy first is to unite all our Muslims . . . and then to educate the new generation in the spirit of Islam.”

He said the party will nominate candidates for local office on a platform of replacing Soviet law with Islamic religious law. The platform will include outlawing vodka and other alcoholic beverages, he said, but will not demand that women wear veils in public, as under Iranian law.

“Women may dress as they like,” Hassanov said. “What they need is pure souls. . . . What they wear is of no importance.”

The fledgling party also hopes for support from Saudi Arabia as well as Iran, another indication that it is not strictly following a Khomeini-like approach. Unlike Iran, the majority of Soviet Muslims are Sunnis, not Shiites, and many have regarded the fanatical excesses of the Iranian Revolution with dismay.

Once little more than prefects appointed to carry out the Kremlin’s bidding, the leaders of Central Asia are now working together to win more home rule. The heads of the five republics recently agreed on an economic alliance to short-circuit Moscow-based planners, and they propose to retain and barter the consumer goods that they make rather than following government guidelines about where to ship them.

Initial signs are that the new Muslim party starts out with a high profile--a newspaper poll in Tashkent, Central Asia’s largest city with a population of more than 2 million, named Hassanov one of Uzbekistan’s 10 most admired men, along with several other democratic activists.

After the youth newspaper, Young Leninist, published the poll, its editor, Kulman Akhilov, was fired by Communist authorities, according to activists here.

Times staff writer John-Thor Dahlburg, in Moscow, contributed to this story.