Following the break-up of the USSR in 1991 the Muslim peoples of the Caucasus – corresponding to present-day Azerbaijan and the Russian North Caucasus – have been in a continuous process of renegotiating their Islamic identity and the role of Islam in the processes of nation-building. This has involved a complex set of factors, including the correlation between the rise of Islam and socio-economic well-being (or the lack of it), the level and longevity of Islamic heritage, the relationship between Islam and the nature of the ruling post-Soviet Caucasian regimes, and the degree of susceptibility to the region’s exposure to foreign influences, Islamic and Western. This article examines some of these factors from an historical perspective, concentrating on how the political elites and the populace variously dealt with essentially external influences in the course of their centuries-long incorporation within successive political empires. From the seventh century AD these were Islamic, emanating from the Umayyad, Abbasid, Timurid, Ottoman and Safavid empires; and from the nineteenth century, Russian Orthodox and Soviet atheist. An analysis of the dynamics set up by these influences and the distinctively Caucasian Muslim responses to them is crucial in understanding how current elites and their antagonists in the region embrace, reject and otherwise instrumentalise Islam.