Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Abstract

This volume is a good contribution to the growing body of ethnographic literatureon religious life in Central Asia; it adds substantively to the diverseperspectives on the practice of Islam in Uzbekistan that have begun to emergeas, in effect, pieces of a puzzle that no single study has yet attempted to integrateinto a fuller picture, yet it suffers from some of the problems thatplague nearly all recent ethnographic works on Central Asia, including anover-reliance on terminological discussion at the expense of the “voices” ofthe author’s informants, and a palpable reluctance to engage with any kindof historical perspective (beyond the Soviet era) that might illuminate religiouslife today. The book is at once a fine example of the recent advancesbeyond 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 thatmuch more must be done, practically and conceptually, for this region toreach qualitative parity with other parts of the Muslim world in terms of thestudy of religion.The book is based on the author’s research stays from 1998-2000, andagain in 2003-2004, centered in the Farghana valley (in Andijan and in a villagefor which the author uses a pseudonym) and in Samarqand. The task hesets for himself is to assess the impact of strict, and in practice mostly arbitrary,limitations on acceptable religious activity imposed by the government ofUzbekistan upon citizens seeking to cultivate their religious, or “moral,” selvesin the aftermath of the Soviet state’s official hostility toward religion ...