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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

The Instrumentalisation of Tradition

Since independence, the government of President Islam Karimov has

instrumentalised Islam as part of its nation-building strategies. Islam has

been incorporated within the ideology of National Independence that

the government has developed to replace the Marxist Leninism of the

Soviet era. Religious expression continues to be closely monitored, and

like the governments of many Muslim majority states, the government in

Uzbekistan attempts to shape the way Islam is interpreted and expressed

by citizens. This chapter extends the previous discussion of the efforts of

the Soviet state to shape the consciousness of citizens and explores the

nature of the citizen-subject and of Islam that is constructed within post-

Soviet state discourse. In this discourse, Islam is not treated as a universal

Truth that transcends cultural and national boundaries but is localised

within the government’s conception of an authentic, indigenous culture.

It is constructed as an element of a Central Asian ‘Golden Heritage’ (oltin

meros) to which the nation is returning after decades of Soviet rule. ‘Good’

Islam is portrayed as culturally authentic, tolerant of other religious

traditions in the region, and nonpolitical. ‘Bad’ Islam is characterised as

alien in origin, antithetical to Central Asian spiritual values, intolerant

in that it espouses a narrow version of Islam that excludes many Central

Asian practices, and politically motivated. Interpretations of Islam not

endorsed within state discourse are labelled as extremist and ‘Wahhabi’,

with links to international networks of terror. Any religious practice not

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conforming to the preferred version of Islam is actively suppressed, and

the Soviet structures for monitoring and regulating religious activities

have been retained and modified for this purpose.

The chapter goes on to discuss how the postindependence government

uses the idea of an authentic, national tradition as a tactic of governance.

In their efforts to shape the subjectivities of citizens, Soviet political elites

and ideologues at the centre had at their disposal the state provision

of jobs, housing, and social welfare. However, with the withdrawal of

the state after independence from comprehensive provision, these tools

are no longer available. Instead, the government has made use of the

concepts of tradition and cultural authenticity. Chapter 4 explores the

practical workings of the state structures for the regulation of religion. In

this chapter, I describe the government’s functionalisation of tradition

through a discussion of the mahalla.

Secularism and the State Construction of Religion

In official ideological pronouncements, Uzbekistan is presented as a

secular state.1 Article 31 of the constitution guarantees the freedom of the

individual to profess any religious faith, while article 61 underlines the

separation of religious organisations from the state and prohibits state

interference in their affairs. Although, in light of actual state intervention,

these guarantees remain ‘on paper’, they are not meaningless or merely

intended to present an acceptable face of liberal democratic governance

to foreign observers. Nor is the discourse of good and bad Islam solely

a defensive reaction to the political challenge posed by Islamist groups.

These are no doubt important considerations, but this chapter argues

that state discourses on Islam and secularism extend beyond immediate

tactical concerns. They are part of a broader project to shape society and

the subjectivities of citizens in a particular way – a project that in many

respects has been influenced by Soviet attempts at social reconstruction

discussed in Chapter 2.

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

A useful frame for understanding this project is secularism itself.

Following a number of recent studies on secularism that use Muslim

societies as a reference (Asad 2003; Mahmood 2005, 2006; Navaro-Yashin

2002), I approach this as a practice through which the state seeks to

classify and regulate all aspects of society, including what constitutes the

religious. As such, it is not sufficient simply to speak of the government’s

using Islam to legitimate its rule, or of its co-opting or functionalising

Islam for its own purposes. The ambition is no less than to shape the

conditions of possibility within which citizens in Uzbekistan are able

to relate to Islam and fashion their own Muslim selves. This secularist

project, as I describe it here, is in fact shared by all modern nation-

states, whether in the context of Muslim majority societies or otherwise,

which everywhere seek to define the boundaries of the religious and the

political, public and private spheres, and which entail particular visions

of citizen subjectivities. I do not claim that authoritative state discourse

in Uzbekistan succeeds in determining the subjectivities of citizens. In

Chapter 2, I argue that this is not a productive way to understand its

operation in the Soviet context. Its actual effects – the practical hegemony

of state discourse – are discussed in Chapter 4.

Secularism is not simply the exclusion of religion from the conduct

of government or the confinement of religion to a ‘private’ sphere sep-

arate from the ‘public’ political and economic spheres. A number of

commentators have argued that this conception of the secular is an his-

torically rooted construction, a normative ideology that is the product of

the European enlightenment critique of religion (Casanova 1994; Nandy

1998). It is tied up with teleological assumptions about the progress of

rational scientific thought and modernity, whereby religion is assumed

either to decline or to become marginalised within a sphere of private

belief and morality. However, it is difficult to ignore the fact that reli-

gion has continued to thrive in the modern world. The high levels of

religious affiliation in the United States cannot be viewed as a perplex-

ing exception to a general decline in religious faith in the modern West

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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

(Casanova 1994). In addition, a number of studies have pointed to the

popularity of religious movements, such as charismatic Pentecostalism,

in societies that are fully part of the ‘modern world’, bound up within

networks of global capitalism (Maxwell 2005; Meyer 2004; Robbins 2004).

Talal Asad (2003) has argued that religion, and by extension the sec-

ular, are not natural, objective categories. Rather, they are produced

within discourses and technologies of power that act upon the subject to

make certain kinds of knowledge, action, and desire possible and others

not. He traces the emergence of separate secular and religious spaces

in colonial Egypt, where a new legal code based on a European model

was introduced. These reforms established a distinction between private

morality and public law, which previously had not existed. Asad argues

that the medieval Islamic conception of fiqh (Ar. jurisprudence) did not

separate private virtue from correct public conduct as defined within

the shar̄ı!a. An individual’s ability to judge what is right or good did not depend on an inner conscience, or even on formal learning alone.

Correct discernment depended upon the acquisition of desired habits

of thought and behaviour through disciplined practice. This was not

acquired autonomously by individual effort but was a social process

in which the actions of the individual were subject to comment and

intervention by relatives, friends, and authoritative figures within the

community. Thus, in many precolonial or premodern Muslim societies

(including Central Asia before the Russian conquest), training at religious

schools and madrasas aimed as much at inculcating appropriate habits

of comportment, behaviour, and practical judgement as in transmitting

scriptural knowledge (Eickelman 1978; Khalid 1998, 19–44). The author-

ity of judges who arbitrated disputes on the basis of the shar̄ı!a depended more upon their personal reputations for piety and integrity than upon

any official position they may have occupied within the state bureaucracy

(Khalid 1998, 38; Lindholm 1996, 159–60). When, in the course of legal

reform in colonial Egypt, the shar̄ı!a was transformed from a socially embedded guide for conduct into a disembodied and formalised legal

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

code authorised and regulated by the state, a separation was established

between personal morality and public law. The shar̄ı!a was confined to the sphere of personal status and a newly defined category of the family,

governing issues of marriage, inheritance, and divorce. This, Asad argues,

created the conditions whereby it became possible to conceive of a dis-

tinct religious sphere, confined to the private space of personal morality

and separate from a public ethic codified in law and regulated by the

state.

The key feature of secularism, therefore, is not simply a separation

of the religious and the political. This is only one form that secularism

might take. Rather, secularism refers to the claim of the modern state

to classify and regulate the entirety of social space, part of which entails

defining what constitutes the religious. As such, the efforts of many

European states to establish a clear boundary between religious and

political spheres, the Soviet project of social reconstruction in Central

Asia, as well as the efforts of some states in the Muslim world to regulate

Islam directly and incorporate religion within the state bureaucracy are

equally secular endeavours. Secularism as a state project of classification

need not be modelled upon a Western European separation of a public

sphere from an internal space of private morality. This is not the type

of society and person that either the Soviet state or the post-Soviet

government in Uzbekistan has sought to produce.

A comparison of Ataturk’s secularist reforms in Turkey with the

early Soviet reconstruction of Central Asia, which was largely contem-

poraneous, is illustrative. Kemalist secularism in Turkey both parallels

and diverges in important ways from the Soviet project. The Kemalist

project was one of modernist development modelled on a conception of

Western European ‘civilisation’. It attempted to fashion a new Turk-

ish subject whose consciousness was rooted in rational reasoning and

empirical science. In a manner that recalls the Soviet policies in Central

Asia in the 1920s and 1930s discussed in Chapter 2, Ataturk’s reforms were

directed at liberating the individual from the regressive, communitarian

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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

constraints of religion and tradition, embodied in Islamic institutions

such as the Caliphate, Sufi brotherhoods, the Arabic language and script,

and social institutions such as the mahalle (Mardin 2004; Shankland

1999).2 Religion ideally was to be a matter of private conscience, excluded

from the public conduct of political life. However, the type of subjects

envisioned by the Kemalist and Soviet states were radically different.

The Turkish subject whom Ataturk attempted to fashion was modelled

on the European concept of the autonomous, morally responsible indi-

vidual, free from the collective constraints of ‘traditional’ community-

oriented life. By contrast, the new Soviet citizen was conceived not as an

autonomous individual but as part of a larger collective that ultimately

extended to encompass the entire socialist state. The individual was not

so much subordinated to the collective, as collective values and goals were

intended to be embodied within and constitutive of individual subjectiv-

ities. Within official ideology, there was no distinction between private

and public, an important point to which I will return later in this chapter.

Despite these radically different conceptions of the citizen, both the

Soviet and Kemalist states conceived of their projects as modernist and

progressive. Islam and tradition, insofar as they posed a threat to this

project, had to be circumscribed, and both states dealt with this in a

similar manner by subordinating religion within a state or quasi-state

administrative structure. In Turkey, Islam was institutionally incorpo-

rated through the Directorate of Religious Affairs, which reports to the

Prime Ministry, and through other relevant ministries. The state controls

the education and the assignment of religious professionals, approves the

content of Friday sermons, controls education at religious schools, and

enforces laws regulating religious attire in certain public spaces (Shank-

land 1999; White 2002). This is a tactic of governance that has been

adopted by a number of governments of Muslim majority states in their

attempts to shape religious subjectivities,3 and Chapter 4 discusses the

present Karimov government’s attempt to control Islamic expression

through the quasi-state Muslim Board of Uzbekistan.

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Even though the Kemalist insistence of a strict exclusion of religion

from public life has been eroded since the 1950s, its modernist project

has continued to shape Islam in Turkey in distinctive ways. Over the

years, a number of political parties have adopted attitudes and policies

favouring a more public presence for Islam. In the mid-1990s the Wel-

fare Party, an explicitly Islamic political party, won the largest number

of seats in local and national elections. Despite this apparent rever-

sal of the Kemalist ideal, Yael Navaro-Yashin has argued that Islamism

in Turkey is shaped ‘within the conditions of possibility of a public

life dominated by secularist discourses’ (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 7). The

Kemalist project, which promoted civilised modernity in opposition to

regressive, tradition-bound communitarian culture yet at the same time

was intensely nationalistic, continues to provide the dominant themes

though which both Islamists and Kemalist secularists construct them-

selves and each other. Kemalists imagine themselves as modern, liberal,

secular, and individualistic and characterise Islamists as authoritarian,

patriarchal, religiously fanatic, and collectivist (White 2002, 29). Navaro-

Yashin has suggested that Islamists have come to understand themselves

in terms of this secularist discourse, internalising, inverting, and reeval-

uating the negative attributes ascribed to them. They present themselves

as modern and at home in the contemporary capitalist economy but

also lay claims to a local cultural authenticity, criticising secularists for

merely simulating Western values. A distinct Turkish Islam has emerged,

most clearly exemplified by the Gülen movement. This international

network of schools, universities, commercial enterprises, and media out-

lets promotes a distinctly Turkish version of Islam that it differentiates

from Arab Islam, presenting it as tolerant, modern, and compatible with

the secular, democratic state (Turam 2004; White 2002, 111–13; White

2005).

Chapter 2 examines the question of whether individual subjectivities

in the Soviet Union were determined within state authoritative discourses

and suggests that approaching the problem in terms of domination and

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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

resistance is not always productive. But such discursive regimes do have

effects. The Turkish case illustrates that, although hegemonic discourse

does not determine subjectivities in a direct and simple way, hegemony

can operate by shaping the conditions of possibility within which indi-

viduals are able to engage with Islam and fashion Muslim selves. The

Karimov government’s discursive construction of cultural authenticity

and tradition can be understood in a similar way. Cultural authenticity

provides a means for state officials to monitor and control citizens and

to make practical interventions. It is the criterion by which the actions

of citizens can be judged and in terms of which individuals must present

themselves in situations where the coercive apparatuses of the state can

be invoked.

Good and Bad Islam: Authoritative State Discourse

In recent years, characterisations of good and bad Islam have become

increasingly common in the discourses of Western European and Amer-

ican governments. Good Islam is characterised as moderate, reasonable,

and prepared to coeexist with other faiths. Above all, it is ‘secular’, mean-

ing that it is content to remain a matter of private belief and morality

and recognises the authority of the state to regulate public life. Bad Islam

is extremist, violent, irrational, and does not recognise a separation of

religion from governance. It seeks to impose its narrow worldview and

morality over the whole of social space, usurping the position of the sec-

ular state. Because this is a construction of Islam by non-Muslims, it can

be interpreted as a form of Orientalism, as Edward Said has defined it –

an instance of how the West has created an essentialised ‘Other’ in terms

of its own interests and cultural categories. The immensely varied locally

grounded perspectives of Muslims – the diverse political and theological

positions they adopt in situated social and political contexts – are reduced

to the labels ‘moderate’ or ‘terrorist’. Lila Abu-Lughod, describing dis-

courses on Islam and tradition in Egypt, has observed that Muslim states

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

also adopt the dichotomy between good and bad Islam (Abu-Lughod

2005, 163–91). Cultural authenticity is an important reference for this

indigenous construction, and in the case of Muslim states, the ‘Other’

is not so much an external, alien force as it is constructed in Western

discourses, but an inauthentic or misguided version of the self.4

The distinction between good and bad Islam made by the postinde-

pendence government in Uzbekistan largely takes this form. Tradition

and cultural authenticity are important references in its discourse. How-

ever, bad Islam is not portrayed as an inauthentic self, but as a completely

alien ‘Other’, opposed to Uzbek national character and tradition. At the

same time, although good Islam is constructed as tolerant and moder-

ate, it is not located in a private morality, outside the sphere of public

governance as the dominant Western model of secularity would have it.

Within state discourse, no claim is made to Islam as a divine revelation

applicable to all of humanity. Instead, a distinctly Central Asian form

of Islam is constructed as an element within a uniquely Uzbek cultural

and historical heritage. This heritage is portrayed as providing norms

and values, which all Uzbeks are expected to share. Non-Central Asian

nationalities, such as Russians, Koreans, and others who make up approx-

imately 10 percent of the population, are incorporated in terms of the

tolerance and secularism inherent to the spiritual heritage. Central Asia

is presented as a region in which historically different religious and eth-

nic groups coexisted peacefully,5 and values of tolerance and hospitali-

ty are portrayed as inherent to the Uzbek character. Thus, morality and

religion are not matters for the private belief of autonomous, morally

responsible individuals. Instead, like the Soviet concept of citizen-subject

discussed in Chapter 2, citizens are expected to share collective values

and orientations that now are defined in terms of an authentic national

tradition.

The postindependence government’s concept of culture and histor-

ical heritage, its ideas about the nature of the citizenship and society,

and the practical strategies it pursues owe much to Soviet ideological

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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

constructions and tactics of governance (Adams 1999). The independent

state that emerged in 1991 was itself a Soviet creation. In the 1920s and

1930s, the Soviet authorities categorised the local populations of Central

Asia into distinct ethnonational entities and drew up the borders of the

five Central Asian republics largely as they exist today. There is now an

established body of good historical analysis of this process, examining the

extent to which the national delineations were the product of a divide-

and-rule policy on the part of central authorities in Moscow or a result

of the efforts of local Central Asian elites who were following their own

varied interests (Haugen 2004; Hirsch 2005; Roy 2000). What is relevant

here is the ideological conception of ethnicity and nation within Soviet

nationalities policy and its enactment in practice.

As finalised by Stalin, this policy was based on a primordialist con-

ception of ethnonational development, within which each ‘people’ (Rus.

narod) constituted a stable community characterised by shared language,

culture, and territory. Each was thought to follow an evolutionary path

of development from kin-based or clan groups, through tribes and tribal

federations, and finally reaching the stage of the nation-state. Soviet

ethnographers were employed to categorise in these terms the vast diver-

sity of peoples within the Soviet Union, which then were ascribed a

nationality and granted an administrative status commensurate with

their assessed stage of development.6 Uzbeks, Georgians, Armenians,

and Ukrainians, for example, were considered to merit an ‘independent’

republic. Peoples at a lower stage of national development were given

the administrative status of an autonomous region or national territory

within one or another of the republics. The paraphernalia of statehood

were set up in every republic, including a national flag and anthem, a

head of state, and ministries. Moreover, each nationality was supposed

to have its own ‘Great Tradition’, and by the end of the 1930s, all of

the Union Republics had their writers’ unions, theatres, opera compa-

nies, and academies that specialised in national history, literature, and

language (Abashin 1999; Slezkine 2000; Smith 1996).

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

The Karimov government has inherited the Soviet concept of the eth-

nonational state, whereby the existence of the state as a political and

territorial entity depends upon, and is legitimated by, association with

a culturally and linguistically defined group. Within Soviet nationali-

ties policy, the separate national republics were to be a temporary stage

on the road to eventual merger into a supranational socialist collec-

tivity. In the famous formula worked out by Lenin and Stalin, they

were to be national in form and socialist in content. Since indepen-

dence, the Uzbekistan government has discarded the Marxist-Leninist

ideology and filled the Soviet-created form of the nation with a new

Uzbek nationalist content. Soviet historiography has been retained, but

the previous negative valuation of historical figures and events has been

reversed (Roy 2000, 161). Amir Timur (Tamerlane), for example, has been

adopted as the founding father of the Uzbek state, and his statues have

replaced monuments to Lenin in prominent locations throughout the

country.

Central to the government’s nationalist project is its construction

of ‘Uzbekness’ (O’zbekchilik) as an historically developed complex of

distinctly Uzbek spiritual values and national personality traits, which

are promoted as the basis for economic, political, and social life in the

country. Islam forms an important element within the new ideology

the Karimov government is promoting. However, Islam in Uzbekistan is

not treated as a transcendent or codified system of belief and practice

that exists independent of Uzbek culture. Rather, the Islam constructed

within state discourses is subordinated to the national spiritual her-

itage. The territory of Uzbekistan is portrayed as having played host to a

number of religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Chris-

tianity, and Zoroastrianism, and Central Asian society is characterised

as one in which historically multiple faiths and places of worship peace-

fully coexisted (Milliy istiqlol g’oyasi, 60–1). Emphasis is placed upon the

‘spiritual originality’ of Central Asian Islam, which incorporates many

elements of pre-Islamic culture and religion (Karimov 1997, 124). It is just

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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

figure 7. The Imom al-Bukhoriy mosque and mausoleum complex near Samarkand

such nonscripturally founded practices that are criticised by ‘reformist’

Muslims in diverse Muslim societies as illegitimate, un-Islamic innova-

tion, and particularly in Chapters 4 and 7 I will discuss how such debates

are played out in contemporary Uzbekistan.

In state discourse, Central Asian Islam is evidence of the uniqueness

of Uzbek culture and of its tolerance and openness. The word ‘secular’

(dunyoviy) is interpreted within the context of this tolerance. It is used to

reference political pluralism, the coexistence and recognition of multiple

religious viewpoints, and interethnic harmony. Central Asian Islam is

associated with this idea of tolerant secularism through the assertion

that it was the combination of secular science and religious ideas in the

region that produced great medieval Islamic philosophers, theologians,

and scientists such as Ibn Sino (Avisenna), Imom al-Bukhoriy, and al-

Beruniy (Milliy istiqlol g’oyasi, 17–18). All of these ‘great ancestors’ have

contributed to the unique national heritage.

Key themes within the Karimov government’s construction of Uzbek-

ness are thus uniqueness and tolerance, and much is made of the ‘Uzbek

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

model’ – the distinctly Uzbek path of development (o’zimizga khos va

o’zimizga mos taraqqiyot yo’li). The rationale of the Uzbek model is used

to justify the government’s continued direct control over many sectors

of the economy, as well as the limited extent of democratic reforms. The

experiences of other parts of the world are declared irrelevant and unsuit-

able for Uzbekistan. It is in these terms that alternative interpretations of

Islam are condemned. They are characterised as alien, intolerant because

they espouse a narrow version of Islam that excludes many Central Asian

practices, dangerous to interethnic harmony, politically motivated, and

opposed to ‘true’ religion. Interpretations of Islam not endorsed by the

Karimov government are labelled as extremist and ‘Wahhabi’, with links

to international networks of terror. Echoing the Soviet construction of

religion as socially regressive, foreign forms of Islam are characterised

within state discourse as preserving backwardness and inhibiting the

civilised development of society. Neighbouring Afghanistan is held up

as an example of the civil conflict and social and economic devastation

wrought by alien forms of Islam (Karimov 1997, 39–40).7

By contrast, the Karimov government celebrates Uzbekistan’s own

national Islam, exemplified by the region’s Sufi tradition (Kehl-Bodrogi

2006; Louw 2007; Schubel 1999). The government has renovated and

monumentalised the mausoleums of past Sufi masters such as Baha’

al-Din Naqshband (d. 1389), founder of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, as

well as those of other prominent figures. It has supported the publica-

tion of numerous books and newspaper articles and the broadcast of

programmes in the media about the lives of prominent figures in the his-

tory of Central Asian Sufism. The official endorsement of these avliyo,8

and the public state recognition awarded to their shrines, has granted

implicit endorsement to the practice of shrine visitation whereby Mus-

lims seek the intercession of avliyo in overcoming illness or worldly

difficulties (Schubel 1999). During the Soviet period, shrine visitation

was criticised by state authorities as a practice that preserved prerevolu-

tionary attitudes and inhibited the development of a progressive, socialist

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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

consciousness. It is also condemned by some Muslims who subscribe to

a strictly scripturalist interpretation of Islam. As such, the practice of

visiting shrines has become an important focus for debates about what

constitutes ‘authentic’ Islam.

The postindependence government has inherited not only the pri-

mordial concept of ethnicity and the form of the ethnonational state

from the Soviet Union, but also the Soviet concept of citizenship. As

noted earlier in this chapter, this was not founded upon the rights of

the sovereign individual and the concomitant existence of an inviolable

space of private morality. No private space was recognised, because indi-

viduals were expected to internalise collective goals and values. Whereas

in the Soviet period, these were defined in terms of building a socialist

society, in state discourses in independent Uzbekistan, they are phrased

in terms of the unique cultural and spiritual heritage, the oltin meros

(Golden Heritage), of the Uzbek people. To formalise and disseminate

the official construction of this heritage, the Karimov government has

developed what it calls the ‘Idea of National Independence’ (Milliy istiqlol

g’oyasi).9 The main ideas of this ideology are published in a booklet of

this title (henceforth referred to as MIG), and the themes it contains are

developed in numerous other publications, many penned in the name of

Karimov himself. Thus, tradition and cultural authenticity are intensely

political fields in Uzbekistan.

State discourses stress the need to avoid an ideological and spiritual

vacuum that would allow space for the influx of alien and dangerous

ideas and to provide an ‘ideological immunisation’ (mafkuraviy immu-

nitet) in the form of an indigenous national idea, particularly for the

younger generation (MIG, 41–2).10 The Idea of National Independence

contains a passage titled ‘The Perfect Person’ (komil inson – MIG, 56–

7), an ideal described as an organic element of Uzbekistan’s spiritual

heritage, fed by Islamic philosophy and developed by great thinkers in

Uzbek history. The ‘perfect person’ is a morally complete, harmoniously

developed individual who is master of an independent worldview. This

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

clearly echoes language used in Soviet discourses on the need to cul-

tivate harmonious and complete persons who embodied a modernist,

socialist ethic (Hoffmann 2003, 35–6), and perhaps also Sufi ideas of

individual self-perfection. Of course, ‘independent’ in this context refers

to the uniqueness of the Uzbek model rather than to an individual moral

autonomy.

The postindependence Karimov government does not have at its dis-

posal many of the tools that were available to the Soviet state. The Com-

munist Party attempted to develop a collectivist, socialist subjectivity

through direct control over all aspects of a person’s life. Work, housing,

leisure, and the provision of the necessities of daily life, as well as the

media and the system of education, were all intended to be encompassed

within the social sphere controlled by the state. Since independence, the

state in Uzbekistan no longer directly provides employment and housing

to all and has left individuals and households to obtain the necessities

of daily life for themselves. The government therefore can no longer use

social and material provision as a tool for shaping subjectivities. Instead,

it utilises its control over the security apparatus, the media, and edu-

cation and has made the concept of cultural authenticity into a tool of

social control.

The Mahalla: Tradition as a Tool of Governance

In Chapter 1, I describe the institution of the mahalla, a residential

neighbourhood in both urban and rural settlements. Despite the fact

that the present form of the mahalla is relatively recent, it is presented in

government discourse as a repository of centuries-old traditions and as

embodying authentic ‘Uzbekness’. In its construction of the mahalla, the

Karimov government is attempting to use tradition as an instrument for

social control, and even refers to the mahalla as a ‘lever’ it can manipulate

to achieve desired ends.11 It attempts to use the mahalla as a medium for

extending the presence of central government into the intimate spaces of

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Good and Bad Islam after the Soviet Union

the family. Relations within the mahalla are presented as founded upon

an ethos of mutual respect, support, and cooperation, guided by elders

known as oqsoqol (literally translated as ‘white beard’). The mahalla,

along with an idealised image of the Uzbek family, is put forth as a model

for national rule, in which citizens are expected to perform their duties

to the nation, mutually supporting each other and the state leadership,

with the president, as the head of the national family, making decisions

for the common good. Under the slogan ‘from a strong state to a strong

society’ (kuchli davlatdan, kuchli jamiyat sari), an all-powerful executive

presidency is legitimated with reference to the timeless traditional values

of the Uzbek people.

The mahalla plays a dual role for the Karimov government. It uses

the ideal of the mahalla to naturalise the authoritarian rule of President

Karimov. The state is presented as the family or community writ large,

where all members perform their allotted duties and look out for each

other’s well-being. The following extract from one of the many publi-

cations produced by the government is typical of the way in which the

mahalla is functionalised.

Our choice of the road of transition to a market economy to a decisive extent stems from a comprehensive consideration of national and historical factors, i.e. traditional way of life of the people, their outlook, thinking, customs and rituals. The people of Uzbekistan are historically characterised by their communal form of social self-organisation, which is rooted in the traditional lifestyle of the people. This is displayed in the priority given to the interests of a family, the commitment to the community in daily activities, careful preservation and consolidation of the institution of the mahalla, but has had a deep impact on the entire social structure of the society. . . . The republic itself may be considered as a kind of community, as a big family where no one can live a prosperous and decent life without mutual respect and lasting order, without strict commitment to their obligations and mutual concern, i.e. as a system of informal social relations imbued with the spirit of ethnic group solidarity. (Karimov 1993, 27–8)

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At the same time, on a more immediately practical level, the institution of

the mahalla is used as an instrument of surveillance and control over the

population (Massicard & Trevisani 2003). Although the mahalla commit-

tee is by law a self-governing institution with a locally elected leadership

and is outside the government administrative hierarchy, in practice it is

treated by centrally appointed local governors (hokim) as an extension of

their own personal authority.12 Indeed, the local governor must approve

the list of candidates for election as mahalla committee chairman. A num-

ber of benefits and services that previously had been provided by state

organs have been devolved to mahalla committees. These include the

identification of which households qualify for state welfare payments,

the distribution of child support, and the maintenance of registers of

those eligible for military conscription. This structure exists partly to

relieve the state from the responsibility for directly providing these ser-

vices, but the Karimov government also intends to use local networks of

social interaction and sociality to extend the reach of central government

(Noori 2006). For example, local government uses the mahalla to collect

payments for utilities such as gas and electricity, to collect taxes, and

even to aid in the fulfilment of production targets for industries. Mahalla

committees are expected to promote government propaganda through

the work of their various subcommittees. They are expected to organise

state-sponsored festivals, such as Independence Day and navro’z (a festi-

val in early spring celebrating the New Year). In addition, the educational

programmes undertaken by the mahalla committees mirror government

priorities, and each year the committee is obliged to present its pro-

gramme of activities to the office of the district or city governor for

approval.

Mahalla committee leaderships are expected to act as the eyes and ears

of the government and to be on the lookout for antigovernment senti-

ments among their residents. They keep a record of all residents who are

working abroad and report this information to the district government.

Residents and local organisations must approach the mahalla committee

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for proof of residence or references to obtain a number of official docu-

ments, such as passports or exit visas for foreign travel. After a series of

bomb attacks in the capital in 1999, the president called on mahalla lead-

erships to monitor the populations and mosques in their territories for

indications of what the government considers ‘extremist’ tendencies.13

During the period of my field research in the spring of 2004, there was

a further spate of bombings and shootings directed against the police,

after which mahalla chairmen were asked by the state security forces

to inform them of any residents who expressed dissatisfaction with the

government.14

Central government has functionalised the mahalla as an element

within its legitimating ideology and as a practical extension of its author-

ity and control. This is possible because the concept of the mahalla as a

model for virtuous living resonates powerfully with much of the popu-

lation. In Chapter 1, I argue that immersion within a shared sociality can

contribute to an individual’s understanding of moral selfhood and dis-

cuss how the institution and ideal of the mahalla is a part of this sociality.

The mahalla, like Islam, has resonance outside its construction within

state discourse. Individuals come to their own understanding of the

mahalla that emerges from their ongoing experience, but this is shaped

in important ways by government discourses and practice. I explore this

dynamic through an account of Abdumajid-aka, whom I met on my first

day in Samarkand in 2003 and who cooperated with me in much of my

fieldwork in that city.

Abdumajid-aka was in his late fifties when I met him. He is a lecturer in

mathematics at the University of Samarkand and director of a secondary

school. In 2003, he was elected chairman of his mahalla committee.

Abdumajid-aka is someone who could be called a social activist: He

takes seriously the official legal status of the mahalla as a self-governing

institution and believes that the mahalla can form the basis for a genuine

democratic society in Uzbekistan. He is active in promoting the interests

of mahalla residents. He does not see himself or his residents as opposed

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to the state. On the contrary, he believes in cooperative relations with

residents, the mahalla leadership, and city officials working towards a

common goal. Of course, many local government officials do not share

this idealistic view.

Much of his work as mahalla chairman involves cooperation with

the city government officials or supporting central government policies.

For example, he has taken the initiative in working with the public utility

providers and local government to find a means to ensure that the gas and

electricity bills are paid on time. Abdumajid-aka is not simply concerned

that his residents are guaranteed supply. In fact, the gas supply to an

individual household is rarely cut off because of nonpayment. Instead,

shortages of gas result in an overall reduction in provision. In the case

of electricity, it is common for people to connect their houses directly to

overhead power lines, avoiding payment altogether. Abdumajid-aka has

a larger vision of the equitable distribution of resources in the nation as

a whole and in the contribution of individuals to the collective good. In

the case of natural gas, he expressed the view that it is the property of

the people (Rus. narodnie dostoyanie), as it is extracted from the ground.

He does not accept the view that the gas-supplying organisation is in

financial crisis, arguing that the cost for gas has increased much faster

than salaries and that those who pay are in fact making up for those

who do not. As evidence, he points to the relatively high salaries of its

employees, with their leather coats and mobile phones. The solution he

has suggested is to cancel past debts and for the mahalla leadership to

work in cooperation with local government in collecting payments. In

return, the mahalla would be allowed to keep a percentage of the revenue

to aid poorer families.15

Abdumajid-aka is widely travelled, having visited Iceland and Israel for

academic conferences and courses, and he has visited the United States to

participate in a project promoting the creation of civil society sponsored

by the U.S. government. On his return, he founded an association of

heads of mahalla committees with the aim of supporting their members

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and increasing awareness of their legal rights and status. To this end, his

association runs seminars to educate mahalla chairmen of their rights

vis-à-vis the local state representatives. This is something unprecedented

in Uzbekistan and, in the political context in which any hint of activism

independent of central government control is regarded as suspect, it is

not a little dangerous. What protects Abdumajid-aka and his association

is the state discourse itself. It provides space for such initiatives, as long

as they can be presented as fitting within official discourses about the

mahalla and as being supportive of the Karimov government, or at least

not in conflict with it.

This democratic vision of the mahalla is exceptional among the com-

mittee chairmen I encountered. Most described the mahalla as the lowest

layer in the state governing hierarchy, directly under the control of the city

or district governors. Some described themselves as ‘little hokim’, map-

ping the national structure of executive government onto the mahalla. In

this structure, state power is largely concentrated in the hands of the pres-

ident, who appoints the provincial governors (hokim), who have similar

executive authority in their regions. These governors, in turn, appoint

the lower-level district and city hokim. Although the mahalla leadership

is not appointed directly by governors but elected by residents, their

appointment must be approved by the district governor.

Even where mahalla leaders see themselves as primarily acting in the

interests of their residents rather than as mere extensions of the state,

they do not perceive this in terms of representative democracy. They tend

to view themselves in paternalistic terms, as acting in the best interests

of their communities, upholding and enforcing correct conduct, looking

after the economically vulnerable, and protecting residents from the

excesses of state authorities. To support their authority over residents,

they use their control over the resources and functions that have been

devolved to them, such as the issuing of documentation people need

to obtain exit visas for travel or work abroad, the allocation of state-

provided relief for poor families, and the issuing of character references

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for jobs and court cases. The state judicial system often refers back to

the mahalla domestic disputes and other cases that judges consider of

minor importance. Mahalla chairmen might also organise social boycotts

of those they consider are ignoring their authority. Their vision of the

mahalla and the role of the oqsoqol as an authoritarian but benevolent

leader mirrors central government discourses. However, because they

are not outsiders cynically attempting to instrumentalise the mahalla for

their own ends, but are seeking to protect residents from interference

from the outside, their self-representations are perhaps more convincing

to mahalla residents.

Abdumajid-aka’s activities have led him into direct confrontation with

the city government and the leadership of law enforcement agencies on a

number of occasions. One such conflict concerned their efforts to force

the mahalla chairmen to collect fees from prospective army conscripts for

a reduced term of military service. During the time of my field research,

military service was no longer compulsory. However, a requirement for

entry into the police force, the National Security Service (successor of

the Soviet KGB), and the public prosecution service (all highly desirable

careers, not least because of the opportunities for earning money through

bribes), is a certificate of completed military service. People can either

serve for a full year or can pay the equivalent of approximately U.S.$140

to serve for one month. This has led to the unusual situation in which

people actually pay a bribe or use personal connections to enter military

service for the full one-year term, as such positions are now limited. A

large number of people who did not manage to get a place and were

signed up for the one-month service had failed to pay, and the local

government was forcing the mahalla chairmen to collect this money.

At a meeting organised by the city district authorities to which the

mahalla chairmen were summoned, the assistant district public prose-

cutor tried to bully the chairmen into compliance. He referred ominously

to certain chairmen who were refusing to collect this money and thus

opposing the president. When some of the mahalla chairmen objected,

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the prosecutor rudely dismissed them. Abdumajid-aka and the press

secretary of his association decided to publish an article in a national

newspaper dedicated to mahalla matters about how the assistant public

prosecutor was exceeding his authority and failing to treat the mahalla

chairmen with respect. In a meeting with the head of the provincial

branch of the national Mahalla Foundation (a body set up by the gov-

ernment to develop the mahalla as an institution), it was decided that

the assistant public prosecutor would be asked for an apology. How-

ever, the Mahalla Foundation official refused to allow the article to be

published. He did not want to portray Samarkand in a bad light to cen-

tral government authorities and just wanted to smooth over the whole

affair. Determined to publish the article in any case, Abdumajid-aka and

his press secretary did so through the Uzbek language newsletter of The

Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a British nongovernmental organ-

isation (NGO) supporting journalism. As a result of the embarrassment

this article caused to the local government officials, portraying them as

opposing an institution the president was publicly supporting in his offi-

cial pronouncements, the assistant public prosecutor was transferred to

a position in the provincial administration.

This conflict reveals something about the nature of governance in

Uzbekistan, which, to a large extent, is a legacy of the Soviet period.

Formal adherence to the law is not as important as displaying loyalty to

the Karimov government. In this situation, state officials themselves can

be just as vulnerable to the application of the coercive capacities of the

state as citizens within their jurisdictions. It is not simply a matter of state

officials having access to state power and directing it at others. Both state

officials and nonstate actors manipulate presidential pronouncements

and publicly stated goals to portray themselves as in accordance with

them and their opponents as violating them.

Abdumajid-aka is aware that he is treading a dangerous line. He is safe

only as long as his actions cannot be portrayed as being in opposition

to the Karimov government, and his only protection against such an

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interpretation is his prominent position within Samarkand society, his

reputation for integrity and disinterested public service, and his close

relationship with local government authorities in forwarding their own

work in a number of areas. He does not openly confront the government

but directs his protests at the actions of individual officials, drawing

attention to how their actions are in contravention of presidential pro-

nouncements and the law. He stresses that he is not opposed to payment

for the shortened period of military service and supports the law, as the

money that previously had gone into someone’s pocket in the form of a

bribe to avoid service now goes to the government. In his view, it is the

implementation of the law that is the problem. He was not even opposed

to being asked to help in the collection of payments and considered it

the duty of the mahalla chairmen to cooperate with state authorities

wherever possible. His objection was to the dictatorial manner of gov-

ernment officials. After the public prosecutor changed his attitude in the

face of open opposition from the mahalla chairmen and asked politely,

Abdumajid-aka decided to cooperate and visit the residents who had not

paid:

I fulfilled his request, but if he hadn’t asked politely, I wouldn’t have gone. But I know that the army needs money, needs to protect the borders, fight terrorism. I understand. An educated person should understand, but you have to understand at the level of the subconscious, and not on the level of insult or pressure.

Abdumajid-aka and the state officials he is criticising are, in fact, all

operating within the same discourse of the mahalla and its presenta-

tion within the official pronouncements of the Karimov government,

but the meanings they attach to it and the ends to which they direct

their actions are very different. State discourse on the mahalla empha-

sises its importance in providing support for residents, socialising and

educating young people, and instilling traditional Uzbek spiritual values.

It is even described as a school for democracy (MIG, 67). The Karimov

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government’s aim is to instrumentalise the mahalla within its construc-

tion of an Uzbek cultural heritage as a tactic of governance. For local

governors, the mahalla is an extension of their own authority, a tool for

monitoring and controlling the population and for fulfilling the directives

handed down to them from the central government. Abdumajid-aka has

a different view: He shares the conception of the mahalla as an embodi-

ment of traditional modes of sociality and morality, but he understands

the ideals and practice of social solidarity and equality within the mahalla

as a genuine basis for democracy in the context of the modern nation-

state. He takes seriously the government’s own discourse, reversing the

president’s slogan ‘from a strong state to a strong society’ to argue instead

that in order to have a strong government, you need a strong society. In

day-to-day interaction, he encounters local government officials who

have very different ideas of this institution, and in struggles, negotia-

tions, and cooperation with these officials, Abdumajid-aka is attempting

to realise his own vision of a moral community.

Abdumajid-aka’s freedom to interpret tradition and the mahalla as

the practical enactment of a moral community is shaped by the way

it has been constructed within state discourse and practice. I describe

in Chapter 1 how the institution of the mahalla has been standardised

as a residential subdistrict with a leadership and a set of personnel with

defined duties. It has been imposed in areas where it had no history before,

and variations in local forms of social organisation have been regularised

through the now-official structures. Moreover, the relationship of the

mahalla leadership both with state authorities and residents is, to a large

extent, a product of the official duties and practical power bestowed by the

government. Were Abdumajid-aka to exceed the bounds of expression

considered politically acceptable by the government, he would be forced

into the position of political opposition activist, with all of the dangers

and restrictions on personal freedoms that would entail. He would no

longer be able to retain a self-representation as someone trying to improve

the lot of his residents through cooperative engagement with the state.

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The post-Soviet government needed to find an alternative to Marxist-

Leninism as an ideological basis for the newly independent state and for

its authoritarian vision of governance. Lacking the resources to ensure

that the state remained the dominant provider of livelihoods and welfare,

it also needed to find alternative means to ensure the hegemony of its

ideological vision. It attempts to answer both problems with the concept

of cultural authenticity and tradition. It has made its own construction

of ‘Uzbekness’ and cultural authenticity the standard to judge what is

acceptable and what is not and has attempted to mould existing patterns

of sociality embedded within local patterns of interaction and social

organisation into a practical tool of governance. Citizens in Uzbekistan

must present themselves in terms of the government’s constructions of

good and bad Islam, tolerant tradition and extremist Wahhabism. The

practical hegemony of this discourse in the practice of individual Muslims

is discussed in Chapter 4.

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