Beyond Islam: Tradition and the intelligibility of experience

Abstract

Rasanayagam focuses on the varying ways in which Islam is invoked as important to people in Uzbekistan and argues that to explore Islam either as a bounded discursive tradition or an objectified form can be misleading. The study opens the category ‘Muslim’ to ethnographic exploration in terms of people’s everyday life-worlds and pays attention to the ways that Uzbeks bring together a remarkably diverse range of ways of understanding morality, religion and the self. These are recognisable to many as distinctively ‘Islamic’ yet they are also mutually intelligible to varying others – Christians, atheists, the followers of new religions –who recognise shared forms of experience in them.