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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

This chapter addresses how citizens in Uzbekistan are able to express

themselves as Muslim while being subject to an authoritarian regime that

narrowly defines what is acceptable Islamic practice and is prepared to

punish ruthlessly anything it sees as deviating from it. Previous chapters

have argued that hegemony should not be understood as the capacity of

a dominant discursive regime simply to determine subjectivities. Rather,

the discourses of the postindependence government in Uzbekistan are

hegemonic in the sense that, to a significant degree, they fix the terms

in which citizens are able to present themselves and others as Muslim

and develop their own understandings of Muslim selfhood. The govern-

ment’s construction of good and bad Islam, of cultural authenticity, and

of a national spiritual heritage at the heart of its state-building ideologies

has made the notion of tradition intensely political. Practices that can

be placed within its narrative of a historically developed national tradi-

tion are permitted and celebrated by the government, whereas anything

that falls outside this narrative or is simply unfamiliar is open to being

perceived as alien and potentially dangerous.

The government is prepared to employ the coercive capacities of the

state, the organs of law enforcement, and the judiciary to ensure that cit-

izens adopt appropriate attitudes and practices. It encourages an atmo-

sphere of mutual surveillance and fear. Through frequent exhortations in

the president’s speeches, in the media, and from the pulpits of mosques it

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calls on the public to be constantly on the alert for deviant activities and

attitudes. Compounded by the often arbitrary exercise of state coercion

by local functionaries, this has engendered an atmosphere of existen-

tial vulnerability associated with religious practice. In situations where

state power can be invoked, citizens in Uzbekistan must present them-

selves as Muslim in terms of the government’s constructions of good and

bad Islam; of tolerant, local tradition and alien, extremist Wahhabism.

The actual nature of an individual’s belief or practice is less important

than whether it might be perceived, or be made to seem, contrary to

state-approved forms.

The chapter begins with a broad outline of government policy towards

Islam since independence. It goes on to outline the structure of directly

regulated Islam, the registered mosques incorporated within the over-

sight of the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, and the efforts of the govern-

ment to extend its control to unregulated religious practice through the

establishment ulama. The practice of Islam, which is unregulated but nev-

ertheless institutionalised within the framework of the mahalla, is also

described. The dilemma of establishment ulama is discussed. Official

imams are expected to promote and enforce the government’s construc-

tion of a culturally authentic Central Asian Islam, but this conflicts in

fundamental ways with their own understandings. In the final section,

I describe how the practical efforts of the government to control and

regulate religious expression and its instrumentalisation of the concept

of tradition influence the way individuals are able to present themselves

and others as Muslim.

Throughout this book, I use the term ‘imam’ to refer to the offi-

cially appointed head of a registered mosque, formally known as imom

khatib. The title reflects the duties of this individual both to lead the

prayers (imom) and to deliver the sermon (khatib). The sermon can

only be delivered by the imom khatib appointed by the Muslim Board

at a registered Friday mosque. Following local usage, I use the term

‘mullah’ to refer to men recognised locally for their knowledge of Islam

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

who are invited by individuals and households to recite the Qur’an and

deliver prayers on ritual occasions. These individuals may have extensive

religious education, or their knowledge may be limited to appropriate

prayers and Qur’anic verses. Female religious practitioners who perform

this function for women are known as otincha in the Fergana Valley and

bibikhalfa in Samarkand. Again, their levels of religious knowledge and

education vary greatly, as does the extent to which they combine recita-

tion of the Qur’an at ritual occasions with healing practices, often with

the aid of spirit agents.1

Divergent Discourses

The government’s construction of good and bad Islam is not the only

discourse that has been available to Muslims in Uzbekistan. Ideas of

Islamic reformism were present in Central Asia in the Jadid movement

at the beginning of the twentieth century. Like reformist trends in other

Muslim societies during this period, the Jadids arose largely in response to

European colonial domination. The best account of Jadidism in Central

Asia is provided by Adeeb Khalid (1998).2 The Jadids identified the root

cause of Muslim weakness in the face of Tsarist Russian domination as

a moral decay caused by the outmoded pedagogy, the approach to the

sacred texts, and the corrupt personal conduct of the established ulama.

They sought to move away from the rote learning of sacred texts through

the mediation of a master to the cultivation of a critical, reflective stance.

They advocated the spread of functional literacy, with an emphasis on the

meaning of the text rather than solely on its accurate reproduction. The

Jadids criticised much of local customary practice as not truly Islamic

and condemned the wealthy for waste and immorality. The solution was

not the Russification of Central Asian society but an Islamically informed

modernisation.

After the Jadid movement was suppressed in the early years of Soviet

rule, reformist ideas once more began to enter Central Asia beginning in

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

the 1960s. As part of the Soviet Union’s attempt to improve its relations

with the broader Muslim world, a limited number of students were

permitted to study in Arab and other Muslim countries, and Muslims

from those countries entered the Soviet Union as students. Many foreign

and returning students adopted alternative interpretations to the practice

of Islam that was promoted by the establishment ulama of the Soviet

Spiritual Directorates. The Uzbek social scientist Bakhtiyar Babadjanov

has described what he terms a theological ‘schism’ in the late 1960s and

early 1970s between a new generation of religiously educated Central

Asian Muslims and the establishment ulama (Babadjanov 2004). Their

dispute about what constitutes true or correct Islam reflected similar

debates that have taken place all over the Muslim world in the modern era

(Bowen 1997; Horvatich 1994). Typically, they revolved around the efforts

to reform and rejuvenate the practice of Muslims and to bring it into line

with what are regarded as the prescriptions of the Qur’an and Sunna.

Detailed accounts of the different ideas and trends within Islam in

Soviet Central Asia and during the early years of independence are avail-

able elsewhere (Khalid 2007; Naumkin 2005); here, I provide only a brief

outline. The Muslim philosopher and theologian Tariq Ramadan has cat-

egorised the diverse approaches to the sacred texts within Islam into five

broad trends, separate from the rich and diverse Sufi traditions of mysti-

cal, experiential modes of knowledge, which he subsumes under a sixth

trend (Ramadan 2004, 24–8). I include his typology here not because it is

necessarily comprehensive or an accurate reflection of interpretive trends

in Uzbekistan. Debates about interpretation as well as the lived practice of

Islam are shaped everywhere within locally specific dynamics of power,

social processes, and models for practice, interaction, and experience.

Rather, my intention is to provide for the reader who is unfamiliar with

studies of Islam or Muslim societies a broad context in which to locate

discussion of Islam in Uzbekistan.

The first trend Ramadan identifies is what he terms ‘scholastic tradi-

tionalism’, which holds that the scope for individual interpretation of the

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

Qur’an and Sunna (Ar. ijtihād) was effectively closed by the tenth century

and that Muslims need to follow the collective wisdom of medieval schol-

ars laid out in one of the established Sunni legal schools (Ar. madhhab).

In Uzbekistan, this is predominantly the Hanafi madhhab. By contrast,

‘salafi literalists’ reject the mediation of interpretative schools and instead

advocate that Muslims approach the sacred texts directly. The texts must

be understood literally, and any interpretation is by definition innovation

and therefore inadmissible (Ar. bid‘a). The term ‘salafi’ is a reference to

the title given to the first generations of Muslims, aslāf (Ar. sing. salaf ).

In the context of Uzbekistan, however, this distinction has not always

been so clear. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Babadjanov has shown how

the ostensibly Hanafi ulama of the Soviet era Spiritual Directorate some-

times adopted a ‘salafi’ line in condemning Sufism and the visitation of

shrines in response to Soviet state policy, despite the fact that both have

been legitimated within certain limits by centuries of Hanafi theological

reasoning (Babadjanov 2001).

A third trend Ramadan identifies is ‘salafi reformism’. This devel-

oped from the ideas of nineteenth-century reformist thinkers such as

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839–97) and the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh

(1845–1905), partly in response to the challenges posed by the military

and scientific domination of the European imperial powers. While also

referring back to the first generations of Muslims and avoiding medieval

interpretation, this trend seeks to reconcile Islam with scientific progress

and rationality. It therefore maintains that the texts remain open to

contemporary interpretation in response to the challenges of prevailing

social conditions. The Central Asian Jadid movement would fall within

this trend.

A fourth trend is ‘political literalist salafism’. This is similar to salafi

literalism but advocates direct political activism to create a truly Islamic

society. This trend is inspired by thinkers such as the Egyptian Sayyid

Qutb, who was imprisoned for many years and finally executed in 1966

under the government of Nasser. Qutb characterised all contemporary

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

societies, both non-Muslim and Muslim, as being in a state of unenlight-

ened ignorance or jāhil̄ıya (Ar.). Significantly, he declared that to be a

Muslim, one had to live in complete accordance with the shar̄ı!a, in effect declaring the majority of Muslims and all Muslim governments to be

un-Islamic. He called on Muslims to remove themselves from the jāhil̄ı

environment and to work to overthrow jāhil̄ı governments, replacing

them with a truly Islamic society (Qutb 1990). The final trend identi-

fied by Ramadan is ‘liberal reformism’, which follows a Western-style

secularism in which religion becomes a private affair of the individual.

In Uzbekistan, disputes about the nature of Islam in the late Soviet

period and the early years of independence involved a number of these

trends. The establishment ulama of the Muslim Spiritual Directorates

generally advocated a Hanafi interpretation of Islam and were critical

of many of the practices of local Muslims they considered heterodox.

However, the restrictions placed on religious practice in the Soviet Union

limited their influence among the mass of the population. A limited

number of nonestablishment, independent scholars provided Islamic

education to small circles of students discreetly in their own homes. These

individuals were distinct from the mullahs and otincha who provided

informal training in most village contexts because they had obtained

an advanced Islamic education either in the pre-Soviet period or outside

the Soviet Union. Many, such as Muhammadjan Hindustani (1892–1989),

who has received a fair amount of recent scholarly attention (Babadjanov

& Kamilov 2001; Naumkin 2005, 43–51; Whitlock 2002), could also be

described as Hanafi traditionalist scholars.

In the 1970s, however, a younger group of scholars, some of them

former students of Hindustani and other independent scholars like him,

began to adopt interpretations of Islam divergent from the Hanafi tradi-

tion. Some of these referred to themselves as Mujaddidiya, or movement

of renewal (Babadjanov 2004, 49). They could be categorized as salafi

to the extent that they criticized a blind adherence to the local Hanafi

interpretation of Islam and advocated a direct reading of the Qur’an and

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

Sunna. On a practical level, they performed the daily prayers (namoz)

in a manner that was not the established practice in Central Asia, and

they focused their attacks upon the incorporation within the practice of

local Muslims of what they considered non-Islamic customs and tradi-

tions (urf-odat). The Hanafi traditionalists also acknowledged that such

practices had no basis in the Qur’an or Sunna, but, according to Babad-

janov, they were more open to incorporating and regulating them within

an officially sanctioned Islam (Babadjanov 2004; Khalid 2007, 144–7).

However, those who follow salafi-inspired ideas cannot be distinguished

from traditionalists on the basis of their opposition to local customary

practice alone. Most of the officially appointed imams I came to know

during my own research do not adopt the salafi literalist position that

all interpretation is illegitimate, but they acknowledge that there is both

good and bad bid’at. However, they also criticise what they consider to be

heterodox practice in equally strong terms, including the extended series

of commemoration feasts associated with a death or physically touching

the structure of the tombs of avliyo, placing the ‘saint’ as an intermediary

or companion alongside God rather than praying directly to God at the

site.

More significant is the opposition of followers of salafi trends to the

local Hanafi tradition of Islam and their willingness to engage in polit-

ical activism. During the perestroika years in the late 1980s, there was a

resurgence in popular interest in Islam and a great diversity of interpre-

tation. After a brief period of intensified repression of Islam that lasted

until 1988 (Hanks 2001), obstacles to the building of mosques were eased,

and their number increased rapidly.3 By the end of the decade, Qur’anic

clubs and study groups were being organised outside the parameters of

the official religious administration (Malashenko 1994a). A number of

organised Islamic groups with an explicitly political agenda sought to cre-

ate an Islamic society (Babadjanov & Kamilov 2001, 205). Two significant

groups that emerged in the Fergana Valley at the beginning of the 1990s

were Islam Lashkarlari (Warriors of Islam) and Adolat (Justice). The

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

latter initially addressed deteriorating standards of living, declaring its

aims to be maintaining public order, combating corruption, and pro-

moting social justice. It organised patrols of young men to police bazaar

traders to prevent them from increasing their prices and to maintain order

in residential areas. The movement quickly took on an Islamic charac-

ter and worked with local imams, holding meetings in mosques. In the

city of Namangan, they demanded that the president establish a public

centre for studying the Qur’an in the former Communist Party building

(Malashenko 1994b, 133–4; Naumkin 2005, 58–60). These groups began

to be referred to collectively by their Hanafi traditionalist opponents and

by state authorities as ‘Wahhabi’ after the politically engaged and puritan

movement in Saudi Arabia, although they did not necessarily have any

concrete connection with that movement. As I discuss in the final sec-

tion of this chapter, the term ‘Wahhabi’ has come to denote any form of

religious (and sometimes clearly nonreligious) practice that falls outside

what the government considers part of its definition of national-heritage

Islam (Khalid 2007, 172–3).

The response of the government of Islam Karimov has been to ban

these groups and to arrest anyone suspected of involvement in any inde-

pendent Islamic organisation. In 1992, the government clamped down

on Adolat and ordered the arrest of its leaders. Foreign Muslims sus-

pected of missionary activity were expelled, and members of opposition

groups, whether Islamic or otherwise, were arrested or fled the country

(Naumkin 2005, 70). Muslim religious groups independent of state con-

trol are not tolerated, and those who are suspected of overstepping these

limits are defined by state authorities as ‘extremist’ regardless of their

actual ideological or spiritual orientations (Khalid 2007, 168–91). People

who have been labelled in this way range from Muslims who merely pray

regularly and strictly observe the tenets of Islam to those who actually

advocate the establishment of an Islamic state and shar̄ı!a law.4 People who openly proselytise, encouraging others to observe the Islamic duties

of prayer, abstinence from alcohol, and other prescriptions have also

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

been labelled ‘Wahhabis’ by law enforcement agencies, whether or not

they have any links to political or militant Islamic movements (Human

Rights Watch 2004, 20–4). After police officers were murdered and a local

government official was beheaded in the city of Namangan in 1997, arrests

of suspected Islamists increased. Measures against independent Islamic

activity reached a peak in the aftermath of the bombings in Tashkent

in 1999 that were attributed to Islamic groups, after which thousands of

suspected ‘extremists’ were arrested.

By the late 1990s, organised independent groups had only a limited

presence in the country, although an Islamic political opposition contin-

ued in the form of the Afghanistan-based Islamic Movement of Uzbek-

istan. This group was critically damaged in the U.S.-led invasion of that

country following the attacks on New York City in 2001.5 Within the coun-

try, the most prominent organised group is Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami, a

transnational organisation that seeks to transform Muslim societies in

line with the shar̄ı!a. It professes to achieve this through nonviolent, bottom-up change, transforming the consciousness of individual Mus-

lims through education. It seems to have become active in Uzbekistan

from the mid-1990s onward, but little can be said with certainty about its

activities or the extent of its following because of the clandestine manner

in which any independent group is forced to operate in Uzbekistan. It is

viewed by the government as extremist and politically motivated. Com-

mentators on Islam in Central Asia have claimed that Hizb ut-Tahrir is

organised in small cells or circles (Khalid 2007, 163; Naumkin 2005, 143),

and it is estimated to have approximately 10,000 followers in Uzbekistan

(Naumkin 2005, 158). However, this figure remains largely guesswork,

and it is unclear how one could precisely identify who is a member or

follower of the organisation.

In her research on otincha (female religious practitioners) in the

Fergana Valley in 2001–02, Svetlana Peshkova recounts how some of the

women she interviewed described a theological divide among the teach-

ing of otincha between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘Hizb’ approaches (Peshkova

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

2006, 227–8). The latter were critical of non-Islamic customary practice

in the manner of the salafi reformists mentioned earlier in this chapter,

whereas other otincha supported these practices as part of a local tra-

dition. She also records encounters with study groups of women who

acknowledged that they followed Hizb ut-Tahrir teachings (Peshkova

2006, 311). However, most otincha distanced themselves from Hizb ut-

Tahrir, even those who followed a scripturalist interpretation of Islam

and criticised much of local practice as un-Islamic. Peshkova describes

how some otincha used the accusation of belonging to Hizb ut-Tahrir as a

tactic to discredit the teachings of rivals. Thus, whatever the actual extent

of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s activity in Uzbekistan, its presence in the conscious-

ness of local Muslims is shaped by the government’s opposition between

good and bad Islam. Those who promote a version of Islam that may

be viewed as attacking local tradition are open to being characterised as

extremist and Wahhabi, regardless of their actual orientation.

State Regulation and the Category of Religion

The Karimov government has sought to maintain tight control of reli-

gious expression. The Soviet-era Spiritual Directorate for the Muslims

of Central Asia and Kazakhstan has been transformed into a nomi-

nally nongovernment, national body and renamed the Muslim Board of

Uzbekistan,6 and religious affairs within the republic more generally are

overseen by the Committee for Religious Affairs of the Cabinet of Min-

isters. In May 1998, the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious

Organizations, which codifies the government’s position on religious

expression, was passed. This law reiterates the secular character of the

state; however, as discussed in Chapter 3, secularism here is not conceived

as the separation of religion from a public political sphere, whereby reli-

gion is the private affair of the individual. The law explicitly places the

state in the position of arbiter, deciding what religious expression is per-

missible; guaranteeing the observance of what it considers good, tolerant

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

practice; and excluding ‘fanaticism’ and ‘extremism’ (article 5). The inter-

ests of stability and interconfessional harmony, as these are interpreted

by central government, are placed firmly ahead of individual freedom of

religious expression. The wearing of religious clothing in public, except

by officially recognised functionaries, is banned, as is the private teach-

ing of religion outside officially registered institutions, proselytism, and

any kind of missionary activity. Anything interpreted by the government

as antistate propaganda or destabilising ideas, as well as the storage or

distribution of what it considers extremist literature and other material,

is also banned.

Through the process of registration, the government retains the right

to define what counts as genuine religion, politically motivated extrem-

ism, or merely foreign ideas with no place in Uzbekistan. The Soviet

model, which treated religious expression as contained within discrete

organisations, has been retained, most likely because of the control this

gives to state bodies through the process of registration. Every mosque

or church is legally an independent religious organisation that must

apply for registration to the Ministry of Justice, and applications must

also be approved by the Committee for Religious Affairs. The applica-

tion must be signed by 100 citizens older than eighteen years who are

permanent residents in the country and must include a list of the manage-

rial committee, information about its sources of funding, and a charter

detailing, among other information, its goals, activities, and management

structure.7 Central religious administrations, such as the Muslim Board

of Uzbekistan, may be established by the representatives of religious

organisations from at least eight provincial regions (viloyat) of the coun-

try. Registration of these administrations is similar to that for individual

religious organisations, and like the latter, they have the status of a legal

entity. Central administrations are able to set up religious educational

institutions to train clergy (open to those leaving state secondary school);

these also have to pass through the registration process of the Ministry of

Justice.

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

figure 8. A registered mosque in the old section of Samarkand

Nonregistered religious organisations are banned, but unlike the

Soviet authorities, the postindependence government recognises that

religious activity takes place outside the physical premises of the formal

religious organisations. The 1998 law allows for worship and religious

rites at the premises of religious organisations (mosques and churches),

but also at pilgrimage sites and cemeteries; within prisons, hospitals,

and other residential institutions; and within the home. However, in

light of the government’s aggressive pursuit of cultural authenticity,

the overall effect is not an increase in freedom but an ambiguity that

further heightens the atmosphere of existential vulnerability associated

with religious expression and practice. On the one hand, gatherings in a

domestic context – for example, a Muslim or Christian prayer group –

could be considered an illegal gathering of an unregistered organisa-

tion, and participants would be prosecuted accordingly. On the other

hand, a wide range of ritual gatherings are regularly held in households,

such as mavlud ceremonies, which celebrate the birth of the Prophet, or

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

khatmi qur’on, at which the Qur’an is recited for a deceased individ-

ual. Visiting the shrines of avliyo is widespread. Whether or not these

gatherings are permissible depends upon how the local law enforcement

functionaries choose to view them. In making such interventions, the

frame of cultural authenticity is critical, leaving individuals in a con-

dition of uncertainty when their practice does not fall unambiguously

within the category of ‘national tradition’.

Establishment Islam: Control by Proxy

Within Sunni Islam, there is no ‘clergy’ in the sense of an institutionalised

hierarchy of religious specialists located within a centralised administra-

tive structure. There is no recognition of an intermediary between an

individual Muslim and God. In Muslim communities, anyone who is

acknowledged to possess adequate religious learning and an appropri-

ate character can lead communal prayers or fulfil other ritual func-

tions. However, in Uzbekistan, the state system of regulation has cre-

ated what might be described as an official or quasi-state hierarchy of

religious personnel. Registered organisations and the central religious

administrations, such as the Muslim Board, are formally independent,

self-financing entities, but in effect they are subordinated to the state and

expected to promote the government’s policies on religion. The territorial

administrative structure of the Muslim Board mirrors that of executive

government. The board is headed by the Mufti based in Tashkent, and

there are offices at the provincial (viloyat), district (tuman), and city

levels. Although the management committees of individual mosques

are chosen by the founders of the religious organisation, the Muslim

Board appoints the imom khatib. The 1998 law stipulates that the leaders

of religious organisations must have an appropriate religious educa-

tion, and imom khatib without official qualifications are steadily being

replaced by those who have graduated from one of the ten madrasas or

the Imom al-Bukhoriy Islamic Institute in Tashkent, which are run by the

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Muslim Board, or from the Tashkent Islamic University, which is under

the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education.

A registered mosque is a legally discrete entity, an organisation headed

by the imom khatib with a management committee and a number of

salaried personnel who usually include an accountant, a muazzin (a per-

son who performs the call to pray), and perhaps a night guard. Although

the Muslim Board pays salaries to its representatives at the provincial

level, it gives no financial assistance to individual mosques, which are

expected to be self-financing from the donations of their congregations.

Indeed, they are expected to send a proportion of these donations to the

Board, and according to interviews with a number of imom khatib, this

amount seems to be anything between 15 and 50 percent of the regular

monthly income and 80 and 90 percent of donations given at festivals

such as qurbon hayit (the festival of sacrifice) and the festival to mark

the end of the fast of Ramadan. A mosque’s income may come from

donations given directly to the mosque, donations in connection with

cemeteries they control, or the payments to mullahs who carry out rituals

on behalf of the mosque. It is used to pay for utilities bills, such as gas

and electricity, as well as salaries, the level of which is decided by the

management committee.

The incomes of mosques, and thus the salaries of the imom khatib, can

vary enormously. Large mosques associated with the tombs of particu-

larly prominent historical figures and with extensive attached cemeteries

attract large congregations and a steady flow of pilgrims and therefore

can raise significant levels of income. By contrast, newer mosques with

smaller congregations raise barely enough to cover running costs. The

imom khatib of the mosque located in the mahalla where I lived in the old

city of Samarkand received the insignificant monthly salary of 5,000 sum

(about U.S.$5), and claimed to live off the voluntary donations of the

congregation. The imom khatib of a village neighbouring my research site

of Pakhtabad in the Fergana Valley received no salary at all. He made his

living by working in a textile factory in a nearby town and only attended

134

The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

the mosque on Fridays to lead the prayers and deliver the sermon. In

fact, he had not applied for the post but had been asked to fill it by the

Muslim Board, as no one else with a madrasa education was available. He

was scornful of those who made a living from religion. Being an imam,

he said, should not be seen as a profession:

People don’t go to mosques to earn money, but to pray. The old imams from before independence used to live from ehson (charitable giving), 1000 sum today, 2000 sum the next. This idea has sunk in, but it really shouldn’t be like this. People should earn money from their own work. . . . I could do the same, sit in the mosque and wait for people to come for [weddings, funerals and other ceremonies], but I don’t want to do this. Why should they give me money for doing nothing? . . . Ordinary people do their own work and then pray. I’ll also have another job. Imomlik (being an imam) is not a profession for a person. This is something which should only be done for God, as a service to the people.

During my field research in 2004, the Muslim Board was introducing a

hierarchy of grades or ranks of imom khatib depending on knowledge and

experience, which was to be reflected in salary levels. However, because

the incomes of mosques are so varied, it is hard to see how this can have

any meaningful impact.

Through the sermons and teaching that take place in the mosque, the

government seeks to shape the religious subjectivities of citizens in line

with its own version of good Islam. The Department for Fatwas at the

Muslim Board issues an outline for the sermon that all imom khatib must

deliver at the Friday congregational prayers. This contains the themes

to be covered and suggests references to Qur’anic passages or hadith,

but imams are expected to flesh this out on their own initiative so that

an identical sermon will not be delivered from every mosque in the

country.8

Just as significant as fatwas and sermons is the indirect control

the government exercises through the quasi-state religious structures

over religious expression that takes place outside the sphere of official

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

figure 9. The chief imam of Samarkand province delivering a sermon

regulation. This constitutes the bulk of Muslim practice and occurs at

the tombs of Muslim saints and in life-cycle celebrations and other ritual

occasions that are conducted within households and local communities.

In a manner that recalls the strategy of the Soviet-era Council for the

Affairs of Religious Cults (see Chapter 1), imom khatib appointed by

the Muslim Board see it as part of their duty to monitor and super-

vise the activities of the unofficial mullahs. In the village of Pakhtabad,

there is only one officially registered mosque, but there are a number

of unregistered mosques that cater to particular mahalla. Villagers who

pray regularly typically will attend their local mahalla mosque on a daily

basis and go to the main mosque for the Friday noontime prayers that

can be held only at a registered mosque. These mahalla mosques and

their mullahs, though unregistered, are under the effective supervision

of the officially appointed imom khatib, although there is no legal or

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

formal relation between them. Certain religious rituals, such as the nikoh

(marriage) or the janoza (funeral prayers), by law can be performed

only by those with appropriate religious education, usually the imom

khatib of an official mosque or his assistant (although imams might give

official authorisation to mullahs). For most other ritual occasions, house-

holds in principle invite anyone they think appropriate. In the village of

Pakhtabad, this is usually the mullah who is chosen by the inhabitants of

a mahalla to look after its mosque and lead the prayers there.

The imom khatib of the official Friday mosque in Pakhtabad described

these mullahs as his apprentices (shogird), whom he appoints on the

recommendation of the mahalla residents. The mullahs themselves see

things differently. Although they acknowledge that they are subordinate

in terms of religious knowledge to the imom khatib, they see themselves

as appointed by the leaders of their own mahalla. Similarly, in the city

of Samarkand, most imom khatib told me that mahalla mullahs were

under their direct authority and that they could dismiss them if they

did not have adequate religious knowledge. The imam of a registered

mosque in an Iranian district of the city was planning to conduct a

systematic examination of all the mullahs and bibikhalfa (female religious

practitioners) in the mahalla in the vicinity of his mosque and was seeking

an order from the provincial office of the Muslim Board to carry this out.

Again, mullahs and the chairmen of mahalla committees did not share

this view of their relationship. They considered themselves independent

of the Muslim Board and the registered mosques and did not recognise

the authority of the imams to appoint or dismiss them. At the same time,

they generally obeyed directives from the imom khatib and the Muslim

Board.

This ambiguity results from the tension between the formalised hier-

archical structure of the Muslim Board and the accepted practice among

local Muslims that any individual with adequate knowledge and appro-

priate personal character is qualified to cater to their ritual needs. Mullahs

in the village of Pakhtabad defer to the imom khatib on religious matters,

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and he is respected by villagers for his religious learning. However, he

has no exclusive claim to Islamic authority simply by virtue of his office.

In addition to the mahalla mullahs, there are a number of other individ-

uals in the village known for their Islamic learning. These include men

known as qori, who have acquired the skill of chanting the Qur’an and

are invited to perform on ritual occasions such as the mavlud (commem-

oration of the birth of the Prophet). If a household wishes to hold such

an occasion on a grander-than-usual scale, they might invite well-known

qori or renowned scholars from outside the village as well. The imom

khatib is afforded respect and deference because of his character and

religious learning on the same terms as these other individuals. However,

official imams within the structure of the Muslim Board have the power

of the state behind them. When they advise unofficial mullahs, they are

also implicitly giving guidance on the government’s own definition of

acceptable Islamic practice.

An Imam’s Dilemma

Central government seeks to use the establishment ulama of the Muslim

Board as it uses the institution of the mahalla – as an extension of its

executive rule. Official imams are expected to promote what the gov-

ernment considers legitimate expressions of Islam and to monitor the

population for signs of ‘extremism’. Yet the construction of Islam within

state discourse, as subordinated within a locally authentic cultural and

spiritual heritage, contradicts in fundamental ways the official imams’

own conceptions of Islam. Through a study of the sacred texts, albeit

within madrasas controlled by the quasi-state Muslim Board, they view

Islam as a universal Truth that transcends geographical and cultural bor-

ders, even if allowances are made for local traditions. Much of what state

discourse extols as an authentic Central Asian spiritual heritage is consid-

ered by madrasa-trained imams as the product of fallible human tradition

(urf-odat) – survivals of pre-Islamic ritual. However, in an environment

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where the government does not tolerate anything it considers contrary

to its version of acceptable Islamic practice and expects the official func-

tionaries of the Muslim Board actively to support and enforce this view,

imams and others who share their scripturally based understanding of

Islam are forced to walk a fine line. Their freedom to condemn what they

consider to be un-Islamic innovation is constrained.

This conflict is nowhere more apparent than in the practice of ziyorat,

the visiting of the tombs of Muslim saints (avliyo) to seek their interces-

sion in worldly affairs. Chapter 3 describes how the government celebrates

the practice of ziyorat as an expression of a culturally authentic Islam that

privileges its unique, Central Asian character. It has elevated historical

figures in Central Asian Sufism as contributing to Uzbekistan’s distinct

national heritage. The government has monumentalised the tombs of

these figures, and state officials have publicly engaged in ziyorat, turning

the practice into a symbol of Uzbek nationhood (Louw 2007). It has

sanctioned the publication of hagiographies of the lives of avliyo and the

miraculous events and deeds associated with them (Schubel 1999). For

imom khatib, however, the local practice of ziyorat comes dangerously

close to polytheism. There are a large number of saintly shrines in and

around Samarkand, and the head imom khatib for the city complained

that visitors were praying directly to the avliyo, not to God. He did not

consider visiting the tombs as in itself contrary to the shar̄ı!a. It is, he said, perfectly acceptable for Muslims to visit cemeteries to remind them-

selves of their final end, to address prayers to God and recite the Qur’an

at the graves of avliyo, and even to dedicate these prayers in the name of

the avliyo as a person who had been particularly close to God. He drew

the line at the common practice of touching the physical structure of the

tombs or taking water from the springs that are frequently in the vicinity

of the tombs (this water is believed to have healing properties), as this

smacks of idolatry.

Another imam in Samarkand held a similar view. He is a fairly young

man and a native of Samarkand who graduated from the madrasa in

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Andijan in the mid-1990s. He claimed to be a sayid (descendent of the

Prophet) and also a descendent of the prominent Naqshbandi shaykh

Makhdum-i Azam (d. 1542), whose tomb and mosque complex is located

in the town of Dahbed near Samarkand. After graduating from the

madrasa, he taught Arabic from 1997 to 2000 in a secondary school. When

Arabic was banned as a school subject after the bombings in Tashkent in

1999, he became an imom khatib and was posted to his present mosque

in 2001, initially as an assistant. Like all imom khatib, he is critical of

practices he considers contrary to the shar̄ı!a, including the veneration of shrines and women’s propitiatory rituals, such the bibiseshanba, which

he attributes to ignorance of the true essence of Islam. At the same time,

he expressed the view that seeking the intercession of avliyo could be

effective, as these individuals are particularly close to God. They possess

karomat (spiritual power), and requests from them were more likely to be

granted. God would forgive the sins of others because of respect for such

avliyo. He expressed the Sufi idea that certain individuals, by virtue of

their perfection of character, are able to receive knowledge directly from

God, knowledge that is distinct from that acquired through a formal

study.

The position of these imams is, of course, complicated by the promi-

nence the Karimov government gives to the shrines of certain prominent

avliyo within its discourses. Many of the most prominent shrines in the

city are under the administration not of the Muslim Board but of a

state-founded organisation called Oltin Meros (Golden Heritage). This

organisation asked the chief imom khatib of Samarkand to provide imams

to recite the Qur’an for visitors at its holy sites. The imom khatib was put

in a quandary, because he did not want to encourage practice he sees as

outside the shar̄ı!a. At the same time, he was unhappy that those who recite the Qur’an at these sites were ignorant of true Islam. In sending

the imams, he hoped that they would be able to discourage the bad prac-

tice of pilgrims. Krisztina Kehl-Bodrogi (2006) has provided a revealing

account of the dilemmas faced by the official imams appointed by the

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

figure 10. A bibiseshanba held to give thanks for a husband’s return from successful employment in South Korea

Muslim Board to oversee a tomb and mosque complex in Khorezm,

where the desire of successive imams to stamp out what they see as ille-

gitimate forms of pilgrimage conflicts with implicit government support

for this practice.9

The ambiguity of the language of tradition helps imams to negotiate

this minefield. During Friday sermons, official imams call on Muslims to

be united in following the Hanafi teachings, which they describe as hav-

ing been handed down by the great scholars of the past, many of whom

are celebrated by the government as contributors to the national Golden

Heritage. They support the government line in condemning Wahhabis

and the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, branded by the government as a

terrorist organisation, as contrary to true Islam. In the spring of 2004,

there was a series of shootings and suicide bombings around the country

that targeted state law enforcement personnel. These were blamed on

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extremist Islamic groups by the government, and in the weeks follow-

ing these incidents, sermons predictably focused on condemning these

actions. Suicide bombers, the imams declared, were not martyrs but

would be punished by God for all eternity. The sermons characterised

Islam as a religion of peace and emphasised that true Muslims do not

harm others in word or deed, nor do they involve themselves in politics.

The current material difficulties that many in the country were facing

were a test from God, and Muslims had to be patient and not engage

in violent actions. Just as the government has told citizens to be on the

lookout for deviant behaviour in their neighbours, imams, in their ser-

mons, have exhorted parents to correct the attitudes of their children

and neighbours to monitor each other’s activities. The head imam of the

province of Samarkand declared in a sermon I attended that every family

is a madrasa, echoing the government’s pronouncements that liken the

mahalla to a ‘school for democracy’, instilling traditional Uzbek spiritual

values (MIG, 67).

Imams promote the Hanafi tradition of Islam as locally authentic and

in line with state discourse on cultural authenticity. From a position

within this frame, they also condemn un-Islamic behaviour, as they

understand it. In some of the Friday sermons I attended where the

imams appealed to Muslims to be united and to reject groups such as

Hizb ut-Tahrir or Wahhabis who sowed conflict, they also warned against

the false claims of Christian groups who were attracting converts with

false promises and financial incentives. They warned Muslims against

seeking out healers or soothsayers who dealt with spirits (jin) as contrary

to the shar̄ı!a. These practices are characterised as mistaken tradition and un-Islamic innovation – an understanding of tradition that is very

different from the government’s secular construction. Fundamentally

conflicting visions of truth and authenticity are overlooked behind public

and vociferous support of the government.

The establishment ulama do not uncritically adopt the govern-

ment’s construction of a local Central Asian Islam. However, like their

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counterparts in the Soviet period, they present their interpretation of

Islam as consistent with state ideology. They praise Uzbekistan’s Islamic

heritage, endorse the interpretations of the Qur’an by the great Islamic

thinkers who historically have resided in the region, and condemn the

violent actions of religiously based opposition groups as misguided and

un-Islamic. They characterise many of the practices adopted by local

Muslims as bid’at (illegitimate innovation) – customs they claim have

crept into local practice because of the enforced ignorance of the Soviet

period – yet their freedom to condemn them is limited by the state

discursive construction of cultural authenticity.

I’m Not a Wahhabi!

The late perestroika era and the initial years of independence was the

period of greatest freedom and dynamism in Uzbekistan in relation to

Islam. Mosque attendance increased dramatically, and people openly

organised the ritual gatherings they had held more discreetly in earlier

years. A lecturer at Samarkand State University recalled that students had

asked for and received a prayer room in the university building and even

remembered hearing the call to prayer over the intercom system in some

government departments. In 1996, a group of lecturers at another higher

educational institute in the city, along with their friends and relatives,

financed the building of a mosque and helped with construction work. A

vice-rector who had made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca contributed the

bulk of the money for this project. They registered it as a Friday mosque

with the Muslim Board, and it was attended mainly by staff and students

of that institute.

However, as government policies towards Islam became more repres-

sive, this trend reversed. The prayer room in the university was with-

drawn, and by the time I embarked on my first period of field research in

Uzbekistan in September 1998, broadcasting the call to prayer by loud-

speaker had been banned.10 After the Tashkent bombings in early 1999,

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Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

the vice-rector who had donated money to the building of the mosque

was demoted to ordinary lecturer. The rector told him that the money

should have been spent on improving the facilities at the institute rather

than on a mosque.11 The present imam at that mosque told me that in

1996 it had been full of teachers and students but that this changed after

1999:

Then the state imposed restrictions on religion. The teachers were afraid to come, and they told the students not to come either. They told them that if they went they couldn’t study at the institute. They were afraid that one of them might become a Wahhabi. But we don’t teach anything bad in the mosque. The state monitors us. There’s nothing happening here which shouldn’t happen. After that fewer people came to the mosque. People who had strong faith remained, the rest with weak faith left. Again they started doing the things they did in the age of ignorance (johil davr), drinking vodka, taking bribes. . . . But when you die you will be asked if you prayed, if you knew God, if you fasted. The world of material concerns (mol dunyo) will pass. It is temporary.

On the occasions when I attended prayers at this particular mosque in

2004, there were usually about forty people of varying ages at the Friday

noon prayers and only a handful of older men at noon prayers on other

days.

During the spring of 2004, there were further bombings and attacks,

mainly targeted at the police, which the government attributed to Islamic

extremists. Shortly after the first incident, agents from security services

visited the mosque in the mahalla where I was living in the old city

of Samarkand, at the time of the evening prayers, and noted down the

names and addresses of all those present.12 One of my friends at that

time was a devout Muslim, a young man who prayed at that mosque

daily and was learning Arabic from the imam. He told me that he

was avoiding the mosques and the main streets for a while because

of the heavy police presence. He habitually wore a black felt cap, a style

often favoured by devout Muslims, instead of the Uzbek-style do’ppi

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

(a black cap embroidered with white thread) and felt that he would be

a target for their attention. Indeed, a few days later when I was walking

with him in a neighbouring mahalla, we were stopped by the oqsoqol

(chairman of the mahalla committee), who advised him not to wear his

cap because people would think he was a Wahhabi. He continued to wear

it, however.

An atmosphere of apprehension surrounds everything associated with

Islam. At the same time, a great many people continue to engage actively

in Islam, praying regularly at mosques, holding funeral ceremonies and

mavlud gatherings in honour of the Prophet, and visiting shrines of

Muslim saints. I came across a number of young men like my friend in

the previous paragraph who were studying Islam from mahalla mullahs

or imams or from the numerous freely available government approved

publications and recordings of sermons. Particularly in the village of

Pakhtabad, many young men were becoming qori (reciters of the Qur’an)

and were much in demand at religious gatherings. State measures to con-

trol Muslim expression have not so much reduced religious practice in a

crude way but rather altered the manner in which practice is expressed. In

the current atmosphere of fear and vulnerability, the label ‘Wahhabi’ has

come to represent any religious expression of which people are unsure –

any expression that does not fit into the category of established ‘tradition’,

the clearly acceptable, the harmless – and consequently may make those

associated with it a target for the state security services.

Fear of being labelled as Wahhabi affects the way people choose to

express themselves as Muslim, but it can also be instrumentalised within

personal rivalries. An account of the building of another mosque is

illustrative. This took place in the village of Pakhtabad and was located

next to the existing Friday mosque but was planned on a grander scale.

It remained unfinished and unused, however, and people sometimes

referred to it as the ‘Wahhabi’ mosque. Building work started in 1992

with money that apparently came from Saudi Arabia or Kuwait (although

people I asked were not sure). It was organised by a group of villagers who

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might be described as reformists. Most of this group of seven people were

well educated. The chief organiser of the mosque project was an engineer,

and another prominent member was a Russian language teacher known

for his fluency in a number of languages, including Arabic, as well as for

being very knowledgeable about Islam. They believed that people should

study Islam directly from the Qur’an and hadith and were critical of many

village practices. For example, they argued that the series of ceremonies

that occur on the Thursdays after a person dies, and on the twentieth and

fortieth days, were un-Islamic, and that there should be only one short

funeral ceremony. They argued about this with other villagers, including

the imam of the Friday mosque who was the leader of the ‘traditionalist’

camp. The building of the new mosque seems to have brought these

rivalries to a head.

In 1995, this group was denounced as Wahhabi, and building on the

new mosque came to a halt. The catalyst for this was the government

closure of a mosque in Andijan that members of this group attended. It

had been identified by government authorities as controlled by Islamic

extremists. The traditionalist camp in the village used this as an opportu-

nity to isolate the reformists. The Russian teacher, fearing arrest, fled to

Russia. Although the others remained in the village and were left alone by

the state authorities, the imam and his group organised a social boycott

that lasted until a year or so before my second period of field research

began in 2004. They were not invited to village events such as marriage

and circumcision feasts, and people were encouraged to avoid any events

they held.

A factor that might have contributed to the identification of this group

as Wahhabi is that approximately when building work started on the new

mosque, a meeting was held at the Friday mosque adjacent to it. The aim

of the meeting was to organise the village into a new form of governing

structure they called an amirlik (emirate). Each mahalla in the village was

to have a yassaul (judge), with a yassaul boshi (head judge) for the whole

village. These yassaul were to ensure moral behaviour and maintain order

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

in their areas and were to be integrated in a hierarchical structure to the

ruler. This plan came to nothing, however, as the police arrived the next

day and, in cooperation with the imam of the Friday mosque, prevented

it from going any further.

Unfortunately, I was only able to obtain knowledge of this conflict at

second hand, even though many people involved are still in the village,

including the imam I had met on a number of occasions. This is still

a highly sensitive topic, and I was unwilling to attract the attention of

the security services to myself or to those with whom I was associated

by openly investigating the incident. The circumspection I was forced

to observe no doubt affected my research. On the other hand, it would

have been impossible to conduct research on the sensitive topic of Islam

without it.

Villagers with whom I did manage to talk about the mosque meeting

claimed that it had been organised by people from outside the village. It

occurred near the time of the events associated with the political group

Adolat in the city of Namangan referred to earlier in this chapter, and

the subsequent government clampdown on that group, and it is possible

that it was organised by Adolat or a similar organisation. However, most

of the reformist group within the village are unlikely to have been sus-

pected by the law enforcement agencies of having anything to do with

this movement or with Islamic political movements in general, because

they were never arrested. The imam and the other traditionalists were

able to use the prevailing atmosphere fostered by central government of

vigilance against the threat of Islamic extremism to discredit and isolate

them.

The government’s discourses on good and bad Islam, its appeals made

through the media and the official religious structures to maintain con-

stant vigilance against alien forms of Islam and extremism, and the

repressive use of state coercion have created a sense of existential vul-

nerability surrounding religious practice. This is exacerbated by the

ambiguity in the law about what is permissible and what is not. The

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law permits individual and communal practice of religion in the home,

but any such practice might be interpreted as the gathering of an unreg-

istered religious group. It is up to local authorities to decide what is and

is not permissible, and in so doing, they are guided by the government’s

opposition between culturally authentic practice and dangerous, foreign

extremism.

The label of Wahhabism extends beyond the clearly Islamic. It is some-

times even applied to the activities of Christian groups, especially if they

include members with a Muslim family background. An Uzbek student

in Samarkand who was attending a Protestant Christian group told me

that his father was worried that the Bible he brought home to his village

might be Wahhabi literature. Even though the Bible is not banned or

considered extremist literature by the government, I was aware of a case

in the city of Samarkand in which a member of the Baptist church had

been arrested for possessing the Bible at home. The pastor of his church

announced this during a Sunday service, saying that the arrest was illegal

and that when the case came to trial, the man would be freed. I was

aware of a number of other Christians from Muslim family backgrounds

who had been accused of being Wahhabi by neighbours in their mahalla,

including members of the group the Uzbek student attended. This stu-

dent showed the Bible to an eshon (a person who claims descent from

the Prophet or prominent figures in Islamic history) who recognised it

as a Bible and reassured the student’s father that it was from God and

that there was no harm in reading it. However, after the bombings and

attacks on police in the spring of 2004, his father forbade the student

from visiting the group.

The conflict between different interpretations of Islam in Pakhtabad

illustrates how individuals can use the ambiguity and insecurity created

by the state discursive construction of cultural authenticity to charac-

terise opponents as Wahhabi and thus draw the attention of the law

enforcement bodies upon them. In Samarkand, I came across a group

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The Practical Hegemony of State Discourse

led by a charismatic healer to whom I will refer as ‘the Teacher’. He

called his group a ‘school of life’ and seemed to draw on elements of

Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism in his philosophy for attaining spir-

itual enlightenment (I will return to this group in Chapter 5). A large

part of his practical message involved healing physical and psychological

pain and suffering and opening up the way to success in life. The Teacher

described how, in 2001, he had given courses on his philosophy in the

Centre for Spirituality and Enlightenment (ma’naviyat va ma’rifat), a

nationwide network of centres to promote the government’s ideas about

national spiritual development. Students had paid the equivalent of about

U.S.$20, although the Teacher claimed that the director of the centre had

pocketed all of this and he had received nothing. The head imam for the

province of Samarkand objected to his teaching and informed the author-

ities in Tashkent that he was teaching Wahhabism. This imam must have

known that the courses were not concerned with politicised Islam, much

less Wahhabism, but he used the accusation to launch the investigation.

The teacher told the investigators that he didn’t speak Arabic and didn’t

even perform the namoz (Muslim prayers), and the Wahhabism charge

was dropped. However, he was charged with teaching without a licence

and fined the equivalent of approximately U.S.$300. The courses were

stopped. At the time I met him, he was still not officially registered as a

religious organisation, although he continues to operate from his home.

In another case, a village outreach worker for a local NGO in

Samarkand offering help to the victims of domestic violence described

how she initially encountered hostility from the district government offi-

cials and mahalla leaderships who accused her organisation of creating

Wahhabis. This charge was levelled because they offered seminars to

women informing them of their rights under the law and raising aware-

ness of the issue of domestic violence. She and her organisation were only

accepted after they demonstrated that they were able to offer concrete

benefits to the community and forward the interests of local government

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officials. They offered medical and psychological help to victims, but the

decisive factor was that they were able to mobilise aid from a foreign

organisation to build a school in cooperation with the local mahalla

committees and the district government. This allowed these officials to

claim credit for fulfilling directives from central government to provide

schools in their area.

Jan Gross, writing about the Soviet occupation of Poland during the

Second World War, has described the privatisation of the state and the

public domain under totalitarianism. Through the mechanism of denun-

ciation, individual citizens were able to employ the coercive capacities of

the state to settle personal disputes with neighbours (Gross 1982). The

practical hegemony of state discourse forces, and also enables, citizens to

conduct local disputes in terms of good and bad Islam. These are flexible

frames that are given substance within actual social relations. The labels

‘Wahhabi’ or ‘extremist’ are invoked in local disputes over Muslim prac-

tice to position opponents in relation to the critical notion of cultural

authenticity.

Aside from actually engaging in politically oriented religious activity,

there are no fixed markers that would identify a person as being a Wah-

habi. Human Rights Watch has reported that young men with beards are

treated as suspicious by law enforcement organs (Human Rights Watch

2004), but a number of young men in Pakhtabad had long ‘Islamic-style’

beards and were in fact devout Muslims, something of which everyone

was aware. They were not arrested or harassed by the police. Rather, what

is Wahhabi is contextually determined. Bearded young men in the village

of Pakhtabad who were established qori (reciters of the Qur’an) are safe

from the Wahhabi label because they participate in a conventional and

clearly nonpolitical mode of Muslim expression rooted in village prac-

tice. The same is true of officially appointed imams. When conducting

my research, I found that officially appointed imams were among the

most open and easily approachable.

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An official imam in Samarkand told me that when he graduated from

the madrasa, he had not wanted to work as an imam because he felt he

would be more effective in spreading Islam as a teacher of Arabic:

When I finished, I didn’t want to work in religion at first. This was because I thought that if I was a teacher of Arabic language in a maktab or a litsei (forms of secondary school), then during the classes I could bring the boys to Islam. If you sit in a mosque and do ma’ruza (sermon), few young people come, only two or three. I wanted to teach young people the way, to teach them the difference between halol and harom (Islamically permissible and forbidden) because the youth are our future. So I worked in an academic litsei for three years, from 1997 to 2000. I taught Arabic language and also added the hadith and the odob akhloq (morality) of our religion in the course of the lessons. Then in 1999 there were explosions in Tashkent. After that, the government stopped all Arabic lessons in maktab and litsei. . . . They said it was extremist Islamic groups. Our government didn’t want people going over to extremist groups through the language. Some of the Arabic teachers were from that branch (oqim). Because of them, they closed us all down. But these extremist groups, these attacks are not Islamic. People don’t have the right to do them. There’s a hadith, the prophet was asked who was a Muslim. He replied a Muslim is he who in his speech and actions does not cause harm (ozor). But how many people were killed in the bombings? This is forbidden in Islam. So I was made unemployed. I had two specialisations in my diploma, Arabic teacher and imom khatib. I had to change over to my second profession.

Qori and officially appointed imams are able to express themselves as

Muslim in ways that in other institutional and social contexts would

render them vulnerable to being labelled as Wahhabi. However, because

of the ambiguity about what constitutes extremist Islam and the arbi-

trary manner in which law enforcement agencies target individuals as

extremist, people can never be sure that they might not be rendered

vulnerable to the charge if they step outside the boundaries of what is

clearly traditional religious practice.

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This is not to say that people are merely passive victims. The cases I have

presented show that many young men continue actively to engage with

scripturalist Islam and find relatively safe positions from which to express

their religiosity and promote their own interpretations of Islam. The

‘Teacher’, the founder of the new movement of spiritual enlightenment

I mentioned earlier in this section, continues to operate from his home

and counters potential opposition from neighbours in his mahalla partly

by taking a full part in community life and contributing to mahalla

projects. During the navro’z (New Year) celebrations, he prepared large

quantities of the traditional dish of halisa (a paste made from boiled meat

and wheat) and distributed it to residents. The women’s NGO worker

managed to overcome the initial opposition of local government and

mahalla officials by supporting their agendas.

The government’s discourse on Islam does not simply shape the reli-

gious subjectivities of citizens so that they adopt uncritically its con-

struction of Islam as part of a national spiritual heritage. As subsequent

chapters will make clear, Muslims in Uzbekistan contest interpretations

of correct practice and come to their own understandings of Islam. The

government’s discourse is hegemonic in the sense that it shapes the terms

in which citizens must present themselves as Muslims in relation to the

state. The opposition between good and bad Islam has made tradition

and cultural authenticity key frames within which religious practice must

be located to avoid the attention of the coercive apparatuses of the state.

Anything that does not clearly fit into this category is open to the charge

of religious extremism and Wahhabism. This has been tragically demon-

strated in the arrest and conviction of the group of businessmen in

Andijan city accused of belonging to the ‘extremist’ Islamist group

Akromiya and the subsequent massacre of hundreds of demonstrators

by government forces. The significance of this incident is that the state

authorities used the charge of religious extremism as the pretext for pros-

ecuting them and justified their subsequent actions against the demon-

strators in similar terms.

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In neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, Muslims are openly exploring different

discourses and interpretations of Islam. Julie McBrien has described how

life-cycle celebrations such as weddings have become contexts in which

Kyrgyz Muslims experiment with different ideas about what it means to

be a Muslim. They explore alternative understandings of Islam through

adopting particular forms of dress, and travelling preachers (davatchi)

and study groups have become widespread (McBrien 2006a, 2006b).

Although McBrien notes that debates about the nature of Islam are often

framed in terms of extremism and tradition, as they are in Uzbekistan,

individuals are much freer to explore openly alternative interpretations.

In Uzbekistan, however, just as during the decades of Soviet rule, the

open and free circulation of many of the ideas and theological trends

that are debated wherever there are Muslims continues to be severely

restricted.

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