Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Abstract

This volume is a good contribution to the growing body of ethnographic literature on religious life in Central Asia; it adds substantively to the diverse perspectives on the practice of Islam in Uzbekistan that have begun to emerge as, in effect, pieces of a puzzle that no single study has yet attempted to integrate into a fuller picture, yet it suffers from some of the problems that plague nearly all recent ethnographic works on Central Asia, including an over-reliance on terminological discussion at the expense of the “voices” of the author’s informants, and a palpable reluctance to engage with any kind of historical perspective (beyond the Soviet era) that might illuminate religious life today. The book is at once a fine example of the recent advances beyond those facile approaches to religious life, and Islam, in Central Asia, that dominated the field in Soviet and early post-Soviet times, and a sign that much more must be done, practically and conceptually, for this region to reach qualitative parity with other parts of the Muslim world in terms of the study of religion. The book is based on the author’s research stays from 1998-2000, and again in 2003-2004, centered in the Farghana valley (in Andijan and in a village for which the author uses a pseudonym) and in Samarqand. The task he sets for himself is to assess the impact of strict, and in practice mostly arbitrary, limitations on acceptable religious activity imposed by the government of Uzbekistan upon citizens seeking to cultivate their religious, or “moral,” selves in the aftermath of the Soviet state’s official hostility toward religion ...