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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person and the Colonisation of Consciousness
Olimjon, whom I met in 2004, is a lecturer in philosophy at a higher
educational institute in Samarkand. He described himself as having been
a committed communist in the Soviet period, but since independence, he
has become an actively engaged Muslim who regularly attends the Friday
prayers at a registered mosque near his university. The mosque was built
in the years after independence by staff at his institute, and he was one of
the original hundred signatories needed for its registration in 1996. He
was born in 1942 and graduated from the history faculty at Samarkand
State University. For his military service, he was posted to a district
near Moscow, where he rose to a leading position within the branch of
Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Communist Party) in his unit.
He was proud that he had held this leadership position in a Union-wide
context, despite the fact that he was from Central Asia. Olimjon described
how, as a youth, he had internalised a communist consciousness during
his school and university education. At the same time, from his present
perspective as a practicing Muslim after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
he maintains his former self at arm’s length, explaining his previous
consciousness as something he automatically, unreflexively developed in
response to the pervasive propaganda to which he had been exposed
at school and university, a ‘child’s consciousness’, as he described it.
Being a communist was part of being a ‘correct person’ (Rus. pravil’nyi
chelovek), a necessary part of his career path as a university lecturer at
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
a time when things were clear and straightforward, unlike the present.
After returning from military service, he reenrolled in the history faculty
at Samarkand as a postgraduate student and was eventually awarded a
kandidat degree (the equivalent of a Ph.D.) with a dissertation on the
religiosity of believers in southern Uzbekistan. He went on to teach the
subjects of atheism and philosophy.
Reflecting on how he had arrived at his present active engagement with
Islam, Olimjon described this as an almost unconscious process during
which he was influenced, even during the Soviet period, by his family and
social environment as well as his professional research and teaching. His
father had been killed in Germany during the Second World War, and his
mother had remarried a religiously observant man who performed the
five daily prayers regularly. To show respect for them, he had arranged
for his sons to be circumcised, but because of his position as a university
lecturer – in particular, one whose specialty was atheism – he had to do
so discreetly. He organised the operation in a clinic far from his home so
that state officials would not notice, holding only a small celebration feast
(to’y) for a few close relatives and friends. ‘On the one hand there was the
idea of communism, and on the other our parents’, he explained. ‘We had
to listen to communist ideology and do the rituals according to Islam’. In
that period, the spiritual or theological significance of such rituals had
not been important to Olimjon. This did not mean that his participation
in them was empty formality. By including the Muslim nikoh within
wedding ceremonies; holding the janoza, the funeral prayers for deceased
relatives; or circumcising sons, a person was doing good (Rus. dobro), he
stated. These were enactments of a shared sociality and full participation
within a community, as discussed in Chapter 1. Had he not arranged for
the circumcisions, it is likely that his sons would have been rejected as
suitable marriage partners by other Uzbek or Tajik families.
From his present location as an actively practicing Muslim, Olimjon
interprets his immersion within this sociality as having influenced him
without his being aware of it, preparing him for a swift transition
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
(Rus. perekhod) from being a communist to a Muslim after the strict
insistence upon the formal adherence to communist ideological norms
began to slacken during Gorbachev’s perestroika period and after inde-
pendence when communism was abandoned altogether as state ideology.
Interestingly, in retrospect, Olimjon sees his study of scientific atheism
in the Soviet period as having had a similar influence:
In the course of researching Islam I came across religious literature. As a future specialist I had to know about communist ideology and Islam, and as a young man I was interested in both. I criticised Islam but subconsciously knowledge of Islam entered my soul. To criticise Islam you had to know the sources. My family circumstances also influenced me, my relatives and others close to me. That’s why I quickly went over (to becoming a believing Muslim).
Olimjon describes himself as a modern or contemporary believer (Rus.
sovremennyi veruyushchii) with a multifaceted (Rus. raznostoronnii) rela-
tion to Islam, and he has not completely abandoned his previous outlook.
He does not perform all of the prescribed five daily prayers, only the early
morning prayers (bomdod) daily and the Friday noon prayer at the con-
gregational mosque. This is not because he does not have the time, but
because it is the habit of the ‘contemporary intelligentsia’. He reasons
that it is possible to find a number of references in the Qur’an and hadith
stating that God has promised to be with a person who performs the
bomdod and that the Prophet has said that a Muslim can make up for the
prayers he has omitted to perform – that God would forgive the omission.
He also admits to drinking alcohol occasionally in company. He looks to
Islam for inspiration in answering his questions about virtuous conduct
in society and to address the existential questions for which science has
no answer. He puts Islam in a comparative context, pointing out that
core values of humanism and tolerance are central to all religions, and
he regards the Baha’i faith as a particular instance of this. This is no
doubt influenced by his professional study and teaching of religion. He
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
has not simply rejected communism but feels that communist ideology
also promoted these core values – ideals of equality and social justice.
Where communism went wrong was in its class analysis and denial of
God, but its moral message had much in common with religions such as
Islam and Christianity.
Olimjon’s account is similar to the narratives of others I encoun-
tered during field research, particularly university lecturers and other
members of the former Soviet intelligentsia, who described themselves
as committed communists in their youth but have become active Mus-
lims since independence. An alternative, commonly repeated account by
observant Muslims was that they had always performed the Islamic ritual
prescriptions, such as prayer and fasting, even during the Soviet period,
but they had done so discreetly, at home rather than in public space such
as a mosque, and that they had learnt about Islam informally, usually
from relatives. Most of the people who gave this sort of account had close
relatives who had been imams or mullahs, people known for their knowl-
edge of Islam who had been called upon by their local communities to
perform ritual services such as Qur’an recitations or to lead the congre-
gational prayer, during the Soviet period and before. Most commonly,
men who at the time of my research described themselves as active Mus-
lims, who at least regularly performed the congregational Friday prayers,
and who had reached adulthood during the Soviet period recounted how
they had not observed Islamic ritual prescriptions in the past, although
they did not characterise themselves as committed communists either,
as Olimjon had done. They considered themselves to have been Muslim
but had not prayed except perhaps at major Islamic festivals, had drunk
alcohol, and had eaten pork. Typically, they blamed their former laxity
on the antireligious atmosphere of the period, which made it difficult to
hold a formal salaried job in the social sector and at the same time to
be seen as an observant Muslim. It must be noted that a large number
people in Uzbekistan continue to ascribe to being Muslim in these terms.
Although they participate in a sociality that includes Muslim ritual, they
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
do not pray regularly or observe Islamic prescriptions, and being a Mus-
lim is not necessarily a central reference for their own understandings of
moral selfhood. I will return to a discussion of what some have called a
‘cultural’ or ‘secular’ Muslim identity at the end of this chapter.
This chapter provides an account of Soviet policy on religion as it was
practiced in Central Asia. It describes the Soviet discursive regime; the
attempt, particularly in the early years of Soviet rule, to fashion the New
Soviet Person in Central Asia; its efforts to classify social space and the
category of religion within it; and the state regulatory infrastructure. The
state-building project and tactics of governance of the postindependence
government owe much to the Soviet legacy, and this chapter provides an
historical context for later discussions.
The chapter also discusses how best to understand Olimjon’s swift
‘conversion’ from communist to Muslim. Analysis in terms of the success
of a discursive regime in fashioning individual subjectivities and how
domination is negotiated or resisted does not capture the ways Soviet
citizens in Uzbekistan developed moral selves that were Muslim, com-
munist, or neither, or how we might understand their engagement with
Islam since independence. We are directed to interpret Olimjon’s self-
representations and actions in the Soviet period in terms of sincerity and
dissimulation. He was either acting out a performance as a communist
while really being a believing Muslim, or his participation in Muslim rit-
ual was the performance behind which he concealed his true communist
and atheist beliefs. This dichotomy is implicit in those accounts of Islam
in Soviet Central Asia that oppose an officially state-sanctioned Islam,
promoted by the Spiritual Directorates that regulated and monitored the
practice of Islam, to a ‘parallel’ or ‘underground’ Islam that existed out-
side state regulation. Islam and religion in general, in this view, are treated
as ideologies, beliefs, or worldviews that exist in competition with other
ideologies or beliefs, such as communism or alternative interpretations
of Islam. However, Olimjon’s account complicates any straightforward
dichotomy. He recognises the tensions between the expectations of the
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Party and his state employers, on the one hand, and his family, on the
other. However, both his self-representation as a communist and his par-
ticipation within the sociality of his family and community were sincere.
He sees his participation within this sociality during the Soviet period
and even his professional work as a lecturer on atheism as significant in
the development of his present Muslim self.
The Hegemony of State Discourse
John and Jean Comaroff have written about the ‘colonisation of con-
sciousness’ in nineteenth-century colonial southern Africa (Comaroff &
Comaroff 1992). Colonial domination was not only a matter of estab-
lishing political and economic supremacy. They argue that an essential
part of this process was an attempt by the European colonisers to shape
the subjectivities of colonised peoples, to gain control over the symbolic
categories through which the colonised interpreted and acted within
their lifeworlds, and to refashion them as individualised subjects in the
colonisers’ own idealised image of European capitalism. The Protestant
evangelical missionaries who were the vanguard of the ideological coloni-
sation in Africa described by the Comaroffs saw themselves as engaged in
a civilising mission to liberate the native from traditional modes of think-
ing and superstition that mystified the objectively true relation between
human effort and production. In their place, they sought to instil a con-
sciousness founded on empirical reason and individual responsibility
where an individual’s labour was recognised as the source of creativity
and value and the means by which nature was dominated and made
productive. The Comaroffs describe how these European norms could
be recast in local terms, but they nevertheless played an important part
in the eventual subordination of the black population within a capitalist
economy as dependent wage labourers and domestic servants.
The Bolshevik reformers in Central Asia in the early years of the Soviet
Union shared with these Protestant evangelical missionaries a vision of
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
a civilising mission in which they set out to remake the Central Asian
person. Both saw themselves as liberating the savage from the bonds of
superstition and tradition, replacing these with rational argument and
empirical reason. In achieving their goals, Christian missionaries and
Bolshevik reformers alike focused their efforts on transforming the prac-
tices of day-to-day living in what the Comaroffs have called a ‘mastery
of the mundane’. In the early years of Soviet rule, the Bolshevik authori-
ties turned their attention to reforming the family, particularly targeting
women, in an attempt to transform everyday lifeworlds. However, the
New Soviet Man or Woman was not to be the individualist subject of
modern European capitalism. Rather, he or she was to be a loyal citizen
working for collective rather than individual goals, embodying commu-
nist ideals and committed to building socialism.
Following the 1917 October revolution, one of the most urgent tasks
facing the Bolshevik authorities was the ‘re-classing’ of society, not only in
Turkestan but also throughout the territory of the former Tsarist empire.1
They needed to reshape Soviet society in line with Marxist class analysis,
a process that culminated in Stalin’s tripartite categorisation of workers,
collectivised peasants, and intelligentsia as the only legitimate groups
in the Soviet Union. In the immediate aftermath of the revolution the
occupational structure of the population was far from this ideal. Groups
that could most readily be classified as proletariat, namely wage workers
in industry and landless peasants, made up only a small proportion of the
population. The Bolshevik revolutionary leadership needed to identify
‘class enemies’ as well as those whose interests were perceived to coincide
with their revolutionary aims and who might more easily be moulded
into a proletariat class (Fitzpatrick 2000).2
Gender relations were identified early on as an important site for
an attack upon the prerevolutionary foundations of society in order to
replace them with a socialist consciousness (Ashwin 2000; Lapidus 1979).
This was nowhere more the case than in Central Asia, where Gregory
Massell (1974) has argued that women were regarded as a ‘surrogate
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
proletariat’.3 Because of low levels of industrial development, the prob-
lem of identifying and allying with a marginalised and alienated class was
particularly acute. Those sections of the population who were underpriv-
ileged had not developed a class consciousness, in Marxist terms, which
made them aware of their condition of oppression. The targeting of
women served a dual role. Because they were perceived by the Soviet
leadership as the victims of a patriarchal society, the lowest of the low,
segregated, exploited, and degraded, it was assumed that they would
readily ally themselves with the Communist Party, which offered them
greater freedoms, dignity, and independence. Moreover, Party activists
believed that the position of women within the family and in broader
society expressed and sustained the prerevolutionary social and religious
order. The liberation of women was viewed by the Bolsheviks as one
of the key strategies for replacing this order with a new revolutionary
consciousness.
Massell identifies three elements in the Bolshevik effort to reshape
Central Asian society in the early years of Soviet rule: revolutionary law,
administrative assault, and systemic work. Judicial reform included the
gradual replacement of religious courts, presided over by a qozi (Muslim
judge) who administered shar̄ı!a law, with civil judges and courts. The family was targeted for reform by laws granting equal rights to women
within marriage in matters of inheritance and divorce. The payment
of bride-price (qalin), polygamy, and forced marriage were outlawed,
and the minimum legal age of marriage for girls was set at sixteen.
These offences were included in the newly created category of ‘crimes
of daily life’ (Rus. bytovoye prestuplenie). They were characterised as
dangerous survivals of religion and tradition that were antithetical to the
new revolutionary order.
In parallel with legislative reform, the Soviet authorities engaged in
direct action, or administrative assault. In an attempt to challenge directly
and sweep away the preexisting social system, thousands of mosques and
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
religious schools were closed and religious endowments were nation-
alised. Muslim religious practitioners, such as mullahs or eshon,4 were
condemned as the agents of oppressive classes and were subject to arrest
and exile (Keller 2001). These direct measures culminated in the hujum,
the campaign for the mass desegregation and unveiling of women that
was launched in 1927, during which women publicly burned their veils in
mass rallies. Communist Party activists sent to Central Asia to support
this policy saw themselves as engaged in a modernising project, intro-
ducing enlightened social relations to a Muslim population mired in
oppressive tradition. The ‘missionary imagination’ (Massell 1974, 69) of
these activists resonates strongly with the Comaroffs’ account of Protes-
tant missionaries in southern Africa, and they similarly targeted every-
day lifeworlds, the intimate sphere of relations within the family, in an
attempt to instil a socialist consciousness.
However, the historian Douglas Northrop has observed that Commu-
nist Party rule in Central Asia was relatively weak in the early years of the
Soviet Union, and the Party leadership could not rely on its local repre-
sentatives to implement central policies. Although a number of Central
Asians became committed communists (Kamp 2002), the antireligion
campaigns seem to have had the effect of strengthening a local Muslim
identity. During the hujum, thousands of women activists and those who
removed their veils in public were attacked or murdered. In fact, the
practice of veiling became more widespread in response to the hujum
and was adopted even by the wives and daughters of Communist Party
members (Northrop 2004). Laws banning the payment of bride-price,
polygamy, and early marriage were commonly ignored or circumvented.
Fathers colluded with doctors and local officials to obtain certificates
falsely attesting to their daughters’ age, or an older woman would be sent
to the state registry office in place of the real underaged bride (Massell
1974; Northrop 2004, 264–74). The measures taken against Islam were
perceived by the local population as an attack on their moral ideals and
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
way of life and Soviet rule was interpreted by many as God’s punishment
on Muslims for straying from the path of Islam in the same way that
many understood natural disasters such as earthquakes (Massell 1974,
275; Northrop 2004, 165). Veiling, bride-price payments, and polygamy,
which were characterised within Soviet discourse as means of oppression
and a block to enlightened progress, were instead adopted as markers of
piety and community belonging.
By 1929, the Soviet authorities came to the conclusion that a direct
assault on religious and cultural practices was not having the desired
effect. Instead, they refocused their attention to ‘systemic work’, a long-
term strategy of gradual social reconstruction through education, indus-
trialisation, and socialist modernisation (Massell 1974). It was assumed
that religion, as well as ‘feudal’ family relations and other elements
of the prerevolutionary social order, would naturally wither away as they
became irrelevant within a changed social and economic environment.
Indeed, the use of the veil quickly disappeared after the Second World
War, and in the postwar years, women gradually began to participate
in all sectors of employment and public life (Lubin 1981). By the 1960s,
many Islamic norms were no longer regularly adhered to by the major-
ity of the population in Central Asia. Only a tiny percentage regularly
attended prayers at the very few mosques permitted to function legally,
and Islamic prohibitions against the consumption of pork and alcohol
were commonly ignored.
Much of the historical and anthropological analyses of this early period
of Soviet history have been framed in terms of power. They have addressed
the efforts of the Party and state organs to fashion a socialist society and
consciousness and how individuals negotiated or resisted these efforts.
The works of Massell and Northrop referred to in this chapter are exam-
ples. Writing about other parts of the Soviet Union, Stephen Kotkin
(1995) and Oleg Kharkhordin (1999) have similarly examined efforts to
shape the consciousness of citizens. Both have taken inspiration from
Foucault’s work on subjectification – the processes by which individuals
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
are fashioned, and also fashion themselves, into subjects with particu-
lar habits, orientations, and interpretive frames within technologies and
disciplines of power. Kotkin describes how workers in an industrial new
town in the Stalinist period were individuated within the regime of the
factory through the public honouring of model workers and shaming
of slackers. Material incentives such as access to better food, clothing,
housing, medical care, and holidays were tied in the Soviet Union to
work performance. This was a powerful tool in an economy of shortage
that fixed a worker’s material well-being to centrally defined performance
standards and ideological orientations.
Kharkhordin, for his part, analyses the nature of the Soviet collective
as an institution designed to produce a communist consciousness. The
Soviet collective would tie the everyday activities of the individual to
the collective goal of building socialism within the Soviet Union and
beyond. This consciousness was to be instilled through techniques of
mutual surveillance and admonishment and also through the practice
of oblichenie – self-examination and self-fashioning. The latter prac-
tice became routinised in institutional settings such as the school class-
room, where classmates would discuss each other’s positive and nega-
tive features, offering up the character traits of the individual to group
judgement.
Central to the analyses of these authors is the manner in which indi-
viduating practices were resisted, partly through the manipulation of
partial and hidden transcripts (Scott 1985). Kotkin develops Foucault’s
notion of capillary power, which sees power as a relation, dispersed
throughout society rather than located in particular institutions such as
the state (Foucault 1990, 1994). He locates both resistance and the for-
mation of subjectivities in the ‘politics of everyday life’, the ‘little tactics
of the habitat’. People did not openly reject the individuating pressure
from above, but alternately submitted to, circumvented, or resisted state
efforts, ‘working the system’ to their own ends. In public, they ‘spoke
Bolshevik’, mastering a language of ideological compliance, taking part in
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
official demonstrations and ‘voluntary’ activities outside working hours,
whereas in private, they violated the rules and engaged in the black
economy of goods and services. Kharkhordin similarly describes the dis-
simulation that became commonplace as workers and officials simply
stopped practicing suspect behaviour in pubic and maintained a private
self hidden from public gaze.
The perspective of power, domination, and resistance is a useful one
for understanding the early period of Soviet rule in Central Asia, when
the state and Party engaged in a concerted effort to reshape society
and fashion socialist subjects. However, it is less helpful when we turn
to late socialism, particularly after the 1970s and the Brezhnev era, the
period during which Olimjon and many others I encountered during
field research reached adulthood. Alexei Yurchak (2006) has identified a
critical shift during the late socialist period in the quality of state ideo-
logical representations, reproduced in daily life in documents, speeches,
slogans, posters, architecture, and monuments. With the death of Stalin,
he argues, the editorial voice external to the discursive regime of the
state disappeared. Stalin had been a charismatic personality, capable of
occupying a position outside state discourse from which he evaluated
the soundness of cultural, political, and scientific expression against the
standard of Marxist ideology. When this voice disappeared after Stalin’s
death, Yurchak identified what he calls a ‘performative shift’. Ideological
representations increasingly became a matter of reproducing a standard-
ised structural form from one context to another, with little attention to
literal, referential meaning, as this was seen as fixed. When delivering or
listening to an address, voting in an election, or participating in a parade,
the literal meaning of the act, the stating of an opinion or belief, became
less important than the performance of reproducing oneself as a ‘normal’
Soviet person.
Yurchak’s perspective moves away from seeing these performances
as being either true representations of an individual’s interior beliefs
or dissimulation. The fact that Soviet citizens routinely transgressed
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
officially proclaimed norms did not necessarily mean that they were not
committed to the fundamental values of socialism as they understood
them. Some individuals in effect reinterpreted communism in their own
terms, making a distinction between ‘mere formality’ and meaningful
discourse and action. They were able to perceive themselves as commit-
ted communists, genuinely engaging in efforts to build a socialist society,
while rejecting what they saw as unimportant (Yurchak 2003). Others
occupied what Yurchak calls ‘deterritorialised’ milieus, which simulta-
neously were inside and outside the system. These were circles of friends,
networks of scientists, literary clubs, and other circles whose members
did not see themselves as either in opposition to or in support of the
state’s authoritative discourse, but simply separate from it or deterritori-
alised in relation to it (Yurchak 2006, 126–57). The state’s discursive and
regulatory structures themselves made these milieus possible, providing
the employment opportunities and institutional settings in which clubs
and associations were able to exist. Members could maintain a position
within the system by performatively reproducing themselves as Soviet
persons while ascribing to alternative meanings and forms of sociality.
Echoes of this relation to authoritative discourse, which developed
in the late Soviet context, were evident during my field research. While
working as a lecturer in the Foreign Languages Institute in Andijan, I sat
through a number of general meetings that the entire faculty was obliged
to attend. The rector or vice rector addressed the audience, but no one
paid any attention as they chatted with their neighbours and moved
about the room, so that sometimes the person making the address could
not even be heard. People seemed to be attending merely for form’s
sake, and what was said at these meetings was irrelevant. During the
period of the cotton harvest in autumn, the production achievements of
the different provinces in the country were regularly aired on national
television, showing how plans were being met or exceeded. These broad-
casts were sometimes playing on televisions in the background in living
rooms, with no one paying much attention. Everyone knew that the
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
official figures bore little relation to real production. Particularly pro-
ductive workers were interviewed for the cameras and given prizes of
carpets. On one such occasion, a woman interviewed for the television
talked about how well and regularly she was paid – a patent falsehood
obvious to everyone, because collective farm workers are rarely paid for
their efforts (Rasanayagam 2003). I was forced to adopt this stance myself
on occasion. As a foreigner in Pakhtabad, peripherally involved in teach-
ing at one of the village schools through Tohirjon, my host in the village,
I was asked to address the pupils at the national Independence Day cel-
ebrations. I was given a ‘script’ by Tohirjon, who told me to talk about
how well the country was developing and how bright the students’ futures
were. Whether my audience or I (which included an inspector from the
district police), believed what the other speakers or I actually said was not
the point. Everyone knew that there was only one script available and that
what mattered was reproducing it. In my case, in doing so I was ensuring
that I represented Tohirjon, my host in the village and at the school, in
the way he wished. In part, I was also reassuring the teachers, pupils,
and their parents, whose support was a necessary condition for my
research, that I could play the game and that my project was not ‘politi-
cal’, that I would not bring them to the attention of the security services.
To the police representative, I was reproducing myself as a harmless
researcher interested only in Uzbek ‘culture’ and not in any political or
sensitive issues.
Yurchak’s analysis provides a useful perspective for interpreting
Olimjon’s self-representation as a committed communist and his par-
ticipation in the everyday sociality of his family and neighbours. The
performance of Muslim ritual outside state regulation need not be seen,
as it has so often been presented, as ‘underground Islam’, oppositional
in some way to the official Islam of the Spiritual Directorate or to state
socialist ideology. The everyday sociality, of which Muslim ritual was a
part, was simply separate from these state discourses, deterritorialised in
relation to them, to use Yurchak’s term. Tamara Dragadze has described
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
what she calls the ‘domestication’ of religion in Soviet Georgia. As a result
of the state suppression of public, institutionalised forms of religious
practice, religious expression migrated to the private space of the house-
hold and came more under the control of ordinary people, particularly
women, rather than dominated and regulated by expert practitioners
(Dragadze 1993). Gillian Tett has described a similar dynamic in her
account of Islam in rural Tajikistan during the period of perestroika in
the late 1980s. Whereas men were constrained by their greater public visi-
bility through their employment in state and social institutions, women’s
location in domestic space made them less visible. Their performance
of religious duties, albeit less prestigious activities of shrine visitation
and domestic propitiatory rituals and adherence to local ideals of proper
female behaviour, helped to maintain the community’s sense of Tajik and
Muslim identity, not only for themselves but for men as well (Tett 1995).5
The enactment of Muslim ritual in ‘private’ or domestic space need
not be opposed to ‘public’ performance in terms of dissimulation or
resistance to state discursive regimes. It is best understood as standing
outside it, so that for Olimjon, participation in this sociality did not
contradict his conception of himself as a communist. He just had to be
careful that his participation in Muslim ritual did not interfere with his
performance of authoritative discourse that reproduced him as a ‘correct
person’.
The Soviet State Regulation of Islam
Following the active repression of Islam before the Second World War,
state policy became more accommodating when popular support was
needed for the war effort. The Muslim Spiritual Directorate for Central
Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM) was established in 1943, with two more
regional Muslim directorates for Transcaucasia and the North Cauca-
sus set up the following year. A further Muslim regulatory body in Ufa
founded by Catherine the Great in 1788 was already in existence. This now
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
became responsible for Muslims in Inner Russia and Siberia (Ro’i 2000,
100f.; Saroyan 1997b). These directorates administered the registration of
mosques and the training and registration of imams and decided on mat-
ters of religious dogma within their jurisdictions. SADUM also adminis-
tered the only two officially recognised institutions for Islamic education
within the Soviet Union: the Mir-i Arab Madrasa in Bukhara, which was
opened soon after the war, and the Imom al-Bukhoriy Institute, founded
in Tashkent in 1971. Although the Muslim Spiritual Directorates were
formally independent, self-governing organizations, they were, in effect,
subordinate to state policies on religion, although I will discuss later in
this chapter the extent to which religious personnel within these bodies
were able to express independent views.
The directorates were not the only organs responsible for the admin-
istration of Muslim religious affairs in the Soviet Union. The Council
for the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC) was formed in 1944 as a link
between central government and religious communities in the Soviet
Union, with the exception of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was
assigned its own council. Both councils were amalgamated in 1965 into
a single Council for Religious Affairs. The CARC and its successor were
responsible for drafting laws relating to religious communities for consid-
eration by government, supervising their implementation, and compiling
statistics on religious practice (Ro’i 2000, 12). The actual implementation
of laws and the direct supervision of religious activities, however, were
the responsibility of organs of local government, and a large measure of
effective control was exercised by these officials. Thus, there were multi-
ple organs and officials with overlapping responsibilities involved in the
administration of Muslim religious affairs in Central Asia.
Yaacov Ro’i has shown in his detailed study of Islam in the decades
following the Second World War that the different regulatory bodies
frequently diverged in their approaches. The CARC generally favoured
the registration of sufficient religious associations and their mosques to
address the needs of the bulk of the Muslim population. In line with
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Communist Party policy, the leadership of the CARC aimed at the erad-
ication of religious belief in the long term, but felt that this could best be
achieved by incorporating all Islamic practice under state registration,
where it could be more easily monitored and regulated. This policy reg-
ularly put them in conflict with the organs of local government, who
shared the responsibility for registering religious associations. On the
one hand, CARC reports accused local officials of turning a blind eye
to unregistered religious activity and accused the imams appointed to
registered mosques of cooperating with the unregistered mullahs. On the
other hand, at times they argued in favour of the oversight by officially
appointed imams of unregistered mullahs as a means of bringing this
activity under official scrutiny, and SADUM itself issued instructions to
this effect. CARC was also critical of local government officials for not
registering religious associations, even where there was a clear lack of
registered places of worship in the area, forcing local Muslims to resort
to unregistered mosques and prayer houses (Ro’i 2000, 550–606).
Additionally, the local officials who actually implemented policy on
the ground interpreted it in the light of their own shifting priorities. On
the one hand, their actions, along with those of others in positions of pub-
lic authority such as teachers or the managers of state enterprises, were
evaluated in accordance with conformity to state policies and discourses.
On the other hand, like Olimjon, they were immersed within an alter-
native sociality of families, kinship, and neighbourhood networks. As a
result, their implementation of state policies and laws was inconsistent.
At times, local government officials ignored unregistered religious prac-
tice and even participated in Muslim rituals themselves (Rorlich 1991). In
fulfilling their own obligations to their superiors and ensuring that state
production targets were met, they sometimes worked with unregistered
mullahs and other community leaders to mobilise workers (Rasanayagam
2002a, 91–92; Ro’i 2000, 434). At other times, they closed unregistered
mosques, withdrew registration from existing associations, and refused
approval for the formation of new ones, sometimes opposing the CARC
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
representatives in doing so (Ro’i 2000, 607f.). Their attitude tended to
mirror the campaigns of repression and periods of relative tolerance
towards religion expressed in the pronouncements of the Communist
Party’s central leadership. During periods when the central leadership
was particularly critical of religion, such as during Khrushchev’s anti-
religious campaign in the late 1950s and early 1960s, local officials needed
to demonstrate their loyalty to the government by taking a harder line.
Attendance at registered mosques likewise mirrored the fluctuations in
central policy, falling off during periods of repression (Ro’i 2000, 218).
The religious personnel of the Muslim Spiritual Directorates were gen-
erally loyal to the Soviet state in that they did not challenge communism
within the Soviet Union and were willing to cooperate in its foreign
policy in relation to Muslim states. Through their instructions and guid-
ance to the imams appointed to administer the few officially registered
mosques allowed to operate, and through their administration of the
two institutions of Islamic learning, they promoted their own vision of
theologically correct Islam. In general, this followed the interpretation
of the Hanafi legal school, dominant among Sunni Muslims in Central
Asia. However, in his analysis of fatwas issued by the board, their letters
to the republican structures of the CARC, and their guidance to imams,
Bakhtiyar Babadjanov has shown how the official clerical establishment
could be flexible in their theological interpretation to make it fit in with
Party and state priorities (Babadjanov 2001).
Babadjanov focuses particularly on pronouncements regarding what
was considered to be ‘superstition’ and ‘pre-Islamic survivals’ within the
practice of local Muslims. These included pilgrimage to holy shrines,
what the Directorate termed ‘ishanism’ (the ability to channel bless-
ing and healing attributed to members of certain lineages, such as the
descendents of prominent Sufi scholars), the extended series of feasts
held to commemorate the deceased, and Qur’an readings to make up
for people’s sins and omissions. This is an area where the interests of
the Party and the ulama of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate coincided
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to some extent. As noted above, such practices were considered by Party
ideologues as reactionary and harmful practices that inhibited the social-
ist enlightenment of the population. Many of these practices were also
considered innovation (bid’at) by the scripturally trained scholars of
the Muslim Spiritual Directorate, practices not derived from a correct
reading of the Qur’an and hadith, which they criticised as un-Islamic
(Saroyan 1997b, 50). Babadjanov has shown that in criticising these prac-
tices, the theological interpretations of establishment ulama went well
beyond Hanafi orthodoxy. Some of their fatwas criticised as innovation
anything not present within the practice of the Prophet himself and
the first four Caliphs. This excludes many practices that have for cen-
turies been regarded as legitimate by scholars within the Hanafi school,
such as the Sufi pursuit of mystical, experiential knowledge. Moreover,
although scholars working within the Hanafi tradition have condemned
the visiting of the tombs of individuals regarded as being particularly
close to God (ziyorat) when this crossed the border into idolatry or poly-
theism, they have recognised the legitimacy of praying to God at such
tombs (Babadjanov 2001). Babadjanov has shown how the hard line has
softened since independence, when fatwas were issued that condemned
practices of ‘ishanism’ but recognised the legitimacy of Sufi practice. The
change follows the new Idea of National Independence set out by the
postindependence government, which presents the great Sufi scholars of
the past who lived in the region as bearers of the ‘Golden Heritage’ to
which the nation is returning. This will be discussed further in Chapter 3,
and the different interpretations of officially appointed imams will be
discussed in Chapter 4.
The scholars of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate were not mere
mouthpieces for the central Party leadership, however. In promoting
their own vision of theologically correct Islam, they were also offering
an alternative to the socialist secularism of the Communist Party. Mark
Saroyan has argued that the Muslim leadership in these directorates
attempted to demonstrate that the values of Islam were compatible with
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
communist ideology, but he interprets this not as accommodationism
but as a counter discourse. By reworking state discourses of the ‘New
Soviet Man’ into the ‘new Soviet Muslim citizen’, they attempted to sub-
vert the state’s argument that religion served only to hamper human
progress (Saroyan 1997b).
In the decades after the Second World War, there were multiple, some-
times conflicting discourses and approaches to Islamic practice within
the Soviet establishment. Even those at the centre of policy making
who shared a belief in the eventual elimination of religion, such as the
Central Committee of the Communist Party and the CARC leadership,
sometimes differed in their strategies to achieve these goals, and the
implementation of their policies was then filtered through the local gov-
ernment and Party officials. A further discourse was put forward by the
religious leadership of SADUM, who expounded a scripturalist version
of Islam as an alternative to both secular socialism and many aspects of
local Muslim practice.
Memories of Being Muslim
The Muslim Spiritual Directorate’s control over the registration of
mosques and the appointment of imams, combined with state-enforced
restrictions on independently organized religious activities, guaranteed
a monopoly for their version of Islamic orthodoxy at officially sanc-
tioned places of worship. However, this orthodoxy could not extend very
far beyond the official ulama themselves. During the Soviet period, the
population of Central Asia was cut off from many dimensions of Islamic
practice. Formal, theological education at the official Islamic educational
institutions was limited to a tiny handful of students,6 and Muslims in
the Soviet Union were isolated from contact with the rest of the Islamic
world. The mass of Muslims were in effect excluded from communal
prayers at mosques. People in positions of authority, such as government
officials and teachers, as well as the young, would have risked their jobs
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if they had attended. People I spoke with during my field research about
the practice of Islam in the Soviet period recalled that those who did pray
at a mosque, whether registered or unregistered, were almost exclusively
older people. The men I encountered who had prayed while still young
tended to be the sons of mullahs or imams, and even they prayed mostly
at home rather than in the mosque.
This is not to say that those who did not attend mosques did not
express themselves as Muslims in other ways. The circumcision of boys
(sunnat) was more or less universally practiced; the janoza (prayers said at
funerals) was performed; and marriage ceremonies commonly included
the nikoh (Muslim marriage ritual). For many in Uzbekistan, Muslim
practice was central to sociality and their idea of a moral community. This
was true particularly in rural areas, where 60 percent of the population
lived. In the administrative district (Rus. raion)7 in which Pakhtabad is
located, there was only one registered mosque for most of the Soviet
period. However, each mahalla (residential neighbourhood) within the
village was defined as a discrete social entity with regard to a mosque.
The building that formerly had functioned as a mosque often continued
to be referred to as such, even if it had been closed or was being used for
some other purpose, and usually one of the neighbourhood’s residents
acted as mullah. Since independence, these mosques have been reopened
or new ones have been constructed.
During the Soviet period, many older villagers in Pakhtabad prayed at
unregistered mosques or prayer houses in their mahalla. The collective
farm chairman had converted the largest mosque in the village, which
had functioned as the congregational Friday mosque before Soviet rule,
into a warehouse to save it from destruction, according to the current
imam. Until 1988, when it was reopened, some who lived in its vicinity
prayed in a room next to the house of the unofficial mullah of that
mahalla. In another mahalla where the mosque had been destroyed, a
family had given a section of land at the end of their household plot so
that an unregistered prayer house could be built, disguised as a shed.
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Older men prayed discreetly at these unofficial mosques, coming for the
early morning and evening prayers (see also Poliakov 1992).
Although people were unable to pray openly, the mahalla mullahs can-
not be described as having operated completely clandestinely or ‘under-
ground’, nor was this resistance to Soviet rule. The present imam for
the main village mosque, who had been an unofficial mullah during the
Soviet period, said the Soviet authorities had not troubled him during
his long years as a mullah because he had been a worker in the collec-
tive farm. This position within the social sector allowed him to fulfil his
obligations within the state system so that he could occupy an alternative
sociality outside it. Moreover, he stated that as long as a mullah had
official authorisation (hujjat), he was able to officiate at rituals without
interference, and some mullahs described themselves as having been sub-
ordinate to the official imam. Others recounted that during the Soviet
period, the Village Soviet (Rus. selsovet)8 used to work through leading
members of the mahalla, including the mullahs, in mobilising villagers
for state-directed projects or in dealing with social problems such as
crime or domestic disputes.
In addition to formal prayer and life-cycle celebrations, other reli-
gious gatherings were commonly organized. Older men would attend
the khatmi qur’on, a ceremony where the Qur’an was recited in order to
transfer merit to the deceased. In Samarkand, people recalled that in the
late Soviet period, these ceremonies were held openly, with many guests
in attendance, even if the fiction that it was a birthday party or some
other nonreligious gathering had to be maintained to any officials who
inquired. People recalled the authorities seriously clamping down on reli-
gious activity only during a brief period from 1983 to 1985. Women held
their own gatherings. These included the bibiseshanba, held to invoke
divine aid in overcoming a problem or to give thanks for some success,
and the mavlud ceremonies in honour of the Prophet Muhammad. What
distinguished the conduct of these rituals in the Soviet period was that
they were organized discreetly and on a small scale, in comparison with
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
figure 6. A khatmi qur’on in Pakhtabad
the open way in which they have been held since. In Pakhtabad, there are
now mavlud circles in which the women of a mahalla take turns hosting
gatherings, whereas previously these were held irregularly, and only a
small number of women were invited.
Engagement in more formal ritual obligations such as praying and
fasting was often correlated with age. Many men in Pakhtabad began
fulfilling these religious obligations at about the age of forty, some starting
to perform the namoz (Muslim prayer) when their father died and they
became the oldest male member of their household.9 In Samarkand, the
head of a mahalla committee recounted his uncle’s experience:
My uncle was the head of a big department in the Party ObKom (provincial branch of the Communist Party). He was the head of the oblast department of transport, construction, and a few other departments. He was a Party member, a fervent communist, an atheist. But despite this, a year or two
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
after he became a pensioner he first of all started to visit the choykhona (tea- house), then started going to khatmi qur’on with the old people. Gradually he started going to the mosque on occasion. He didn’t pray, but went and talked to people there. If he had lived a little longer he would probably have started praying as well. People who weren’t fervent communists, who were just workers like [my wife’s] father – he was a driver – when they become pensioners, some of them start praying. That’s natural.
For many, seeking divine intercession in overcoming illness or other life
crises through the medium of saints or spirits was a significant element
of Muslim practice. Healers who worked with spirits or by using the
power of the Qur’an were active in the Soviet period, and some people
visited the tombs of Muslim ‘saints’ (Basilov 1992; Snezarev 2003). A
Russian language teacher in one of the schools in Pakhtabad described
how his mother and grandmother had served as representatives of a
female descendant of the Prophet.10 This particular woman was con-
sidered a pir, a blessed and honoured person (tabarruk). The man’s
grandmother had been ‘given the hand’ (qo’l bergan) by the pir, which
meant that she acted as an intermediary between the pir and those seeking
her blessings.11 People would bring offerings of food and money to the
teacher’s grandmother, who would then pass them on to the pir. This is
the sort of practice the official ulama of the Muslim Spiritual Directorate
criticised as ‘ishanism’. When his grandmother died, this duty passed to
his mother. However, she soon asked the pir for permission to give it
up because it was making her ill, and afterwards she quickly recovered.
The teacher interpreted his mother’s illness as evidence of the power
of the pir, and it contributed to the development of his understanding
of Islam.
Throughout the Soviet period, practice understood as Muslim never
ceased to be an important dimension of the flow of sociality, but Soviet
policy and regulatory practice significantly influenced the way Muslims in
Uzbekistan were able to express themselves as Muslim. In most Muslim
societies, there are active debates and sometimes conflicts about what
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constitutes ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ Islam. In the Soviet Union, such debates
were stifled. The official ulama within SADUM attempted to establish
their own orthodoxy, criticizing much of local Muslim practice from the
pulpits of the registered mosques. However, because most Muslims were
effectively barred from attending mosques, they were deprived of their
audience. Until the perestroika reforms, education in the core Islamic
texts was largely confined to the few who studied in the two official
Islamic educational institutions in Uzbekistan or who were sent abroad.
For the majority of the population, those who received knowledge of
Islam did so through the informal teaching of mahalla mullahs or female
religious specialists, known as otincha in Pakhtabad or bibikhalfa in
Samarkand.12 As a result, during the Soviet period, Muslim practice was
diverse and decentred. Most people developed their sense of themselves
as Muslim through engagement in life-cycle rituals that created and
confirmed them as members of their community. They did this through
fulfilling their obligation to perform the prayers, fast during Ramadan,
and participate in communal gatherings and rituals when they reached
a certain age or position within the life cycle of their household. Some
also expressed themselves as Muslim through engagement in what John
Bowen has described as transactional relationships with spirits, where the
intercession of spirits is invoked to address material concerns in exchange
for sacrifice or prayer (Bowen 1993a, 229–50). Some experienced direct
encounters with divine power in the course of illness and healing or
in dreams and visions. However, there was no open and active debate
about the nature of Islam and no coherent, scripturally based theological
positions that reached the mass of the Soviet Union’s Muslim citizens.
Cultural Muslims
How should we understand what Olimjon described as his swift ‘crossing
over’ (Rus. perekhod) to Islam? Should this be seen as a radical conver-
sion or transformation of belief and worldview, a return to a cultural and
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
spiritual heritage suppressed during the Soviet period, or a transforma-
tion of Islam from a cultural identity to a spiritual commitment? All of
these characterisations convey an aspect of what is taking place, but none
is fully adequate. They imply that ‘culture’ and ‘religion’ are discrete cat-
egories, the former being an unreflexive immersion in tradition, whereas
the latter is a matter of self-conscious, considered belief. The relation of
Muslims in the Soviet Union towards Islam should not be seen as a belief
in opposition to the ideology of Marxism, or as culture in opposition to
true religion.
The concept of religion as belief or worldview is implied in the
dichotomy that has often been proposed between official and ‘under-
ground’ or ‘parallel’ Islam. Some analysts have interpreted the continued
practice of Muslim life-cycle rites, such as circumcision and Islamic mar-
riage ceremonies, as evidence that Central Asian society remained firmly
‘traditional’ despite Soviet efforts to produce a secular, socialist world-
view (Poliakov 1992; Vaisman 1995; Vishnevskii 1996). They have empha-
sised the ubiquitous, ‘clandestine’ practice of Islam at ‘underground’
mosques and the activities of unregistered mullahs who presided at
household rituals. Alternatively, a contrast has often been drawn between
official and ‘parallel’ Islam (Bennigsen & Wimbush 1985; Ro’i 2000;
Rorlich 1991). The former refers to the imams and mosques operating
under the auspices of one of the four Muslim Spiritual Directorates. The
latter is characterised as an underground movement operating outside
state control and even in opposition to it.
Such analyses have already been thoroughly critiqued (DeWeese 2002;
Rasanayagam 2006b; Saroyan 1997a, 1997c). As the recollections of vil-
lagers in Pakhtabad show, there was no simple dichotomy in the prac-
tice of Islam in Soviet Central Asia between a public, official domain
and clandestine or underground practice. Villagers did not make a dis-
tinction between worship at officially registered mosques, unregistered
mosques, or ritual outside mosque space, all of which constituted Muslim
practice. Even in terms of administrative classification, it is impossible to
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make a clear distinction between registered and unregistered activities, as
registered mosques were often the site of officially condemned practices
such as shrine visitation (Saroyan 1997a). Moreover, the imams appointed
to the registered mosques frequently worked closely with unregistered
mullahs who officiated at household and community ritual occasions.
The latter were routinely given authorisation to conduct ritual in private
households and returned to the mosque a proportion of the payments
they received (Ro’i 2000, 135–6, 267; Roy 2000, 151).
The dichotomy between official and underground Islam is produced
within the Soviet regulatory framework itself rather than being an
expression of differing theological interpretations or beliefs. This sys-
tem assumed religion to be a matter of individual belief and ignored the
intersubjective and performative nature of Muslim practice. Within the
state regulatory framework, a religious association consisted of a defined
membership with a prayer house, a group of twenty original signato-
ries to the application for registration, an executive organ, an auditing
committee, and a religious functionary appointed, in the case of Islam
in Central Asia, by The Muslim Spiritual Directorate for Central Asia
and Kazakhstan (Ro’i 2000, 20–1). No religious activity was permitted to
take place outside these associations and their prayer houses. However,
for much of the Muslim population of Central Asia, as elsewhere, Mus-
lim practice is not solely a matter of interior belief, but is carried out
within and is constitutive of sociality. Most of this takes place in house-
hold spaces or sacred sites rather than in mosques or other premises
recognised by the Soviet regulatory structures as specifically devoted to
religious worship. This clearly does not conform to the Soviet model
of discrete religious associations and individual belief, abstracted from
the social context within which individuals develop a sense of Muslim
selfhood. As a result, a large proportion of Muslim practice in the Soviet
Union was placed outside the state regulatory framework in that it took
place outside formally registered places of religious worship and was
therefore criminalised.
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Another common interpretation has been that the suppression of
religious expression during the Soviet period transformed Islam from
a genuine spiritual commitment to an element of cultural or ethnic
identity for the majority of the self-ascribed Muslim population. This
understanding stems from a concept of religion as concerned ultimately
with belief and the sacred, distinguished in these terms from culture –
an understanding that is implicit in much social scientific and historical
analysis of the region. Low levels of mosque attendance, greater partici-
pation of women in public employment, and the general decline in ritual
observance is interpreted as evidence that Central Asian society became
‘secularised’ and Sovietised in the decades following the Second World
War. It is sometimes argued that socialisation within Soviet schools, the
experience of military service in the Red Army, and the transformation
of work and production through the collectivisation of agriculture and
employment in state industries succeeded in large measure in achieving
the transformation of consciousness that the Soviet leadership desired
(Medlin & Cave 1964; Medlin et al. 1971; Northrop 2004, 347–57). It
is argued that the isolation of the region from the rest of the Islamic
world and the severe restrictions on the availability of religious educa-
tion diminished not only theological knowledge but also engagement
with Islam as a system of belief, as an intellectual and spiritual rela-
tionship with God. Instead, Islam was reduced to an element of secular
national identity (Khalid 2003, 2007; Ro’i 1995; Shahrani 1995). Some
have suggested that Islam became mere superstition and an expression
of communal belonging enacted in life-cycle celebrations, the wearing of
protective amulets, and the visitation of the shrines of Muslim saints in
search of miraculous cures for illness and misfortune (Akiner 1996).
These are not necessarily inaccurate accounts. The idea of a ‘cultural’
or ‘secular’ Muslim, a person for whom participation in Muslim ritual
and identity as Muslim is part of the sociality of family and community
but who has no engagement with Islam as a theological system, is one that
Olimjon himself would probably understand. This is how he described his
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The New Soviet (Central Asian) Person
orientation during the Soviet period. It could similarly be used to describe
many individuals I encountered during my field research who continue
to have a similar orientation, some of whom would consider themselves
to be atheist. ‘Cultural Muslim’ in this sense was an ascription used
consciously by many I encountered during my time in Uzbekistan. These
were often people from indigenous populations who had joined one
of the evangelical Protestant Christian groups that have appeared since
independence. They used the term to describe their own former selves
and the orientation of the majority of people who call themselves Muslim
in Uzbekistan. They commonly asserted that they had not ‘converted’ as
such, in the sense of switching from one belief to another, because in the
past they had not had any genuine faith at all, but had only occasionally
participated in Muslim ritual as a form of cultural expression.
In the context of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, Mathijs Pelkmans and Julie
McBrien have described how the category of culture is manipulated in
interesting ways. They agree with authors who argue that Soviet national-
ities policies had the effect of making religion a marker of ethnonational
identity, so that Christianity became seen as a ‘Russian’ religion, and the
concept of a secular atheist Muslim became a comprehensible category
for many Kyrgyz. They describe how evangelical Christian missionar-
ies who have entered the country since independence, as well as some
Muslims, have attempted to redefine the concept of culture in different
ways and to break the identity between the categories ‘Islam’ and ‘Kyr-
gyz’. For evangelical Christian missionaries, this is done to show that,
in fact, Christianity is more in tune with Kyrgyz identity than Islam, so
that a Kyrgyz can become a Christian without forgoing his or her iden-
tity as Kyrgyz. The concern of Muslim missionaries, for their part, is to
rid the local practice of Muslims of non-Islamic ‘tradition’. For ‘secular’
Muslims, the emphasis on pure or genuine Islam is seen as extremism
(Pelkmans 2007; Pelkmans & McBrien 2008).
The concepts of tradition and culture employed by Protestant mission-
aries and the new members of Protestant groups are produced within
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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
their own constructions of the proper relation between God and an indi-
vidual human being and what constitutes an authentic Christian person,
which they understand in terms of a stance of interior belief. Their con-
struction is different from the way the concept of tradition, as urf-odat,
is employed by scripturally trained Muslim scholars in their criticism of
un-Islamic innovation in the practice of local Muslims, and it is different
still from the postindependent government’s construction of authentic
tradition and the national ‘Golden Heritage’. These different construc-
tions will be examined in later chapters. Here I want to distinguish the
operation of these located discursive constructions from the use of cul-
ture and religion as universal, analytical categories. Although the idea of
a cultural or a secular Muslim is perfectly intelligible within local under-
standings, I am arguing that for the purpose of understanding Islam as
it is lived in Uzbekistan or elsewhere, we should be wary of adopting
the categories of religion and culture as meta-analytical tools, abstracted
from the local processes that give them specific significance.
In Chapter 1, I argue that much of what many individuals in Uzbek-
istan consider to be Muslim practice would not fit into an idea of Islam
as a discrete, bounded phenomenon, and that participation within an
everyday sociality, which is by no means always explicitly ‘Islamic’, can
nevertheless contribute to the development of Muslim selfhood. This
is not to say that the sociality within which an individual in Uzbek-
istan is immersed is in itself Muslim. It was not so for Olimjon during
the Soviet period, nor is it so for many of those I encountered, par-
ticularly in the city of Samarkand. Many might recognise a ritual or
life-cycle event as Muslim without developing a specifically Muslim self
through participation within it. Rather, they see the event and their own
involvement as an expression of ‘tradition’ and may readily ascribe to
being ‘cultural Muslims’. An argument I am making in this book is that
for the purpose of understanding Islam in Uzbekistan, it is not useful
to take Islam itself, independent of how it is enacted within a Muslim
life, as the object of study. Rather, Islam becomes an object within the
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development of a moral self when this is understood as a Muslim self.
What we have is a multitude of objectifications of Islam within diverse
individual moral narratives of self that develop though ongoing expe-
rience. I am arguing that everyday sociality is a moral source that gives
experience the quality of transcendence and enables moral reasoning.
For Olimjon, participation in everyday sociality of family and neigh-
bourhood during the Soviet period is retrospectively reevaluated from
the standpoint of his current Muslim self. Analytical frames that set up
religion, culture, and the social as discrete categories are not helpful for
understanding how sociality itself can provide the quality of transcen-
dence typically reserved for the ‘religious’.
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