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1 This article was downloaded by: [University of Kent] On: 23 January 2014, At: 01:47 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: Registered office: Mortimer House, Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK History and Anthropology Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: Experience, Moral Creativity and Reasoning: The Journey to Muslim Selfhood in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan David Henig a a University of Kent Published online: 14 Nov To cite this article: David Henig (2011) Experience, Moral Creativity and Reasoning: The Journey to Muslim Selfhood in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan, History and Anthropology, 22:4, , DOI: / To link to this article: PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content ) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

2 History and Anthropology, Vol. 22, No. 4, December 2011, pp Review Article Experience, Moral Creativity and Reasoning: The Journey to Muslim Selfhood in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan Downloaded by [University of Kent] at 01:47 23 January 2014 Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience Johan Rasanayagam Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 281 pp., ISBN (Hardback), 55 At the outset of his distinguished Muslim Society, Ernest Gellner (1981) sets out Islam as the blueprint for social order. Despite later criticism and discontent with his arguments on Muslim societies, Gellner s proposition succinctly foregrounded the shift in the study of Islam, from theological and primarily textual scholarship to comparative sociological, historical and anthropological enquiry. Since then, the anthropology of Islam has expanded considerably. After the Rushdie affair, 9/11, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, increasing Islamophobia around the world, social science scholarship on Islam and Muslim societies has arguably gained substantially more significance and breadth (Marranci 2008). This list of key events amply illustrates that the very subject matter is inevitably and thoroughly embedded in historical and political contingencies, as well as power relations (Abu-Lughod 1989; Asad 1986). This is no less true for another politically and historically critical event in the twentieth century, that of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the development of Islam after decades of Communist atheist ideology in Muslim dominated post-soviet societies of Central Asia. Although the trajectories of social, economic and political transformations have been multiple in the successor states, an increased observance of and interest in Islam throughout Central Asia by and large has been reported and reflected in the growing scholarship on the region (Hann 2006; Hann & Pelkmans 2009). Johan Rasanayagam s book, Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience, is a welcome and timely contribution to this endeavour. It is a splendid and illuminating analysis of the ways Muslims in Uzbekistan come to an understanding of what it means to be a Muslim and live a Muslim life in post-soviet times. Apart from a compelling anthropological analysis the book offers a succinct historical account of the institutionalization of Islam in the state hierarchies of power and the ways the Soviet state colonized the consciousness of its citizens. In addition, something that will be of considerable satisfaction to anthropologists, the book is rich in ethnographic details and individual lifeworlds. ISSN print/ online/11/

3 514 Essay Review In Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan, Rasanayagam recounts (Chapter 2) how the Soviet policy on religion was repressive for several decades, and during Stalinism in particular. In the case of Central Asia, the main attempt was to evaporate superstitious belief and traditional parochial values. The primary focus of the state ideology was to create and cultivate a new Soviet Person (for example Humphrey 2005; Kotkin 1997). As Rasanayagam argues, the Sovietization of Central Asia was a civilizing mission to modernize the region, as the social fabric of local societies resembled all but class struggle, and hence it hardly fit into the framework of Communist ideology. As a result, the Party activists like missionaries of the Communist gospel turned their focus towards the transformation of the very social fabric. In particular, activities were targeted at the local judicial system that was embedded in Islamic legal traditions; the institution of family and gender equality; and thousands of mosques and centres of religious training were closed, with many practitioners and clergy being either arrested or expelled. The main concerns of the Soviet mission in Central Asia, however, were Muslim lifeworlds and the spheres of everyday intimacy and sociality. Nonetheless, this view on the Soviet religious policy as a relationship of domination and resistance, as Rasanayagam and other authors have pointed out, is too simplistic and not helpful for analysing the years of late socialism after the 1970s and during the years of Perestroika in particular, during which individuals often reinterpreted communism in their own terms and routinely transgressed officially proclaimed norms (pp ). This is poignantly illustrated in the book, for example by the story of Olimjon, who was a committed Communist and yet participated without any considerable contradiction in the everyday sociality of his family and neighbours that involved Islamic lifecycle rituals such as circumcision or weddings. Following independence he became an actively engaged Muslim. Indeed, this argument reveals another important contribution of Islam in Post- Soviet Uzbekistan to our understanding of the region at the grassroots level. The book outlines remarkable social dynamics of the interactions between Islam and the Uzbek body politic from liberation in the late 1980s to religious freedom in the early 1990s, towards religious repressions in the late 1990s onwards. Rasanayagam documents striking continuity in how the newly independent post-soviet Uzbek state continues to shape Muslim personhood in ways very similar to the Soviet state in the previous decades (pp ). Put in this way, the Marxist Leninist ideology was replaced by the post-soviet authoritarian regime of the Uzbek President Islam Karimov. The government of President Karimov embedded Islam as part of a unique Central Asian cultural and spiritual heritage in the national grand narrative. In doing so, the state discourse utilizes the concepts of tradition and cultural authenticity as tools for governance (Chapter 3). As a matter of fact, the same discourse also draws the boundaries between us and them, and between correct interpretations of what is national Islam and what is not. And yet the discourse is skilfully deployed against any political opposition in the country as anything that would deviate from state norms could be immediately sanctioned. In particular the catch-all category of Wahabi is often used as a label to classify any enemy of the state. At the very outset of the book Rasanayagam portrays this atmosphere of uncertainty and

4 Essay Review 515 ambiguity when he reminds the reader of the massacre of hundreds of protesters in the Ferghana valley in 2005 during which the vast majority of victims were unarmed civilians protesting against the economic hardship caused by a corrupt government. However, the Uzbek government condemned the allegations and claimed that the demonstrators were armed Islamist extremists and terrorists. This historical development forges the ground for Rasanayagam s tour de force analysis of how Muslims in post-soviet Uzbekistan, under such circumstances, when the conduct of individual piety can be easily and unprecedentedly classified as threatening the state, develop their self-understanding about what it means to be a Muslim and live a virtuous life. This is explored in the context of various layouts of everyday life and involvement in the world in which individual Muslim selfhood is cultivated, such as wedding celebrations, religious feasts, living in a neighbourhood, or coping with illness and misfortune, and how these intertwine with divine experiences and Muslim cosmologies (Chapters 1, 5, 6, and 7). Rasanayagam outlines an analytically robust theoretical framework in which the key categories of analysis are morality and/of experience, Muslim selfhood and intelligibility. The usefulness of a moral perspective has been increasingly recognized by many anthropologists in recent years (Carrithers 2005; Heintz 2009), and in the study of Muslim societies as well (for example Lambek 2000; Marsden 2005). The moral perspective is concerned with the dynamics between transcending values and lived practice, when the locus is morality as a state of the person and exercised in the flow of life rather than a set of timeless rules (pp. 8 9). Islam in post-soviet Uzbekistan develops these debates further. Here, Rasanayagam explores the moral nature of experience itself, and argues that it is the transcendent quality of experience that enables moral reasoning (p. 11). In arguing so, Rasanayagam draws mainly upon Charles Taylor s work on morality and selfhood. Moral selfhood develops in relation to values or commitments through a continuous process of evaluation, that creates moments of transcendence. Put in this way, the process of evaluation is oriented towards broader evaluative frameworks in relation to which individuals navigate their moral reasoning. However, such a broad framework of moral reasoning is all but a fixed set of values upon which individuals could draw. Contrarily, it is a shifting horizon as it is experienced, embodied, lived, and embedded in relations of economics, power and politics. Moral reasoning, Rasanaygam argues, is an ongoing creative, reflexive and therapeutic process located in experience with the divine, material and social world and generated through a continual process of involvement with social others (pp ). Moral creativity as well as such evaluative frames arise from intersubjective experience in which the self engages and responds to others in the flow of life. As a reviewer, I am very sympathetic to such an approach that seems to be a vital contribution to the study of Muslim lifeworlds and Islamic knowledge that is not focused solely on the issues of orthodoxy, ideology or piety that have been dominating the debates recently. On the contrary, it intertwines them with other forms of sociality and knowledge transactions between persons in order to explore the divinity of the everyday as intersubjectively cultivated, and where morality and Muslim selfhood are constantly in the making.

5 516 Essay Review In Islam in post-soviet Uzbekistan, Rasanaygam determines three sources of Muslims transcendent experiences, these are revealed through the Qur an and Sunna; through direct experience and observation of the world around us as a moral source in relation to which individuals might locate themselves as Muslim; and finally, through sociality (p. 18). So for example, when the well-being of a Muslim in Uzbekistan is harmed, he or she may seek treatment through prayers and the healing power of the Qur an that is in accordance with the shari a. However, individuals may, and often do seek treatment from healers who work with the help of spirits, as well as through the individual s direct encounters with spirits in dreams, likewise through sociality, that is, an individual s everyday involvement in interactions with fellows, in the neighbourhood, village or in the mosque. All of these form an embodied experience that shapes the individual s own understandings of what it means to be a Muslim. The ethnographic locus of the book is much wider, however, and could be summarized along two complementary lines. On the one hand, Islam in post-soviet Uzbekistan explores the ways Muslims in post-soviet Uzbekistan develop their understanding of what it means to be a Muslim and live a Muslim life in relation to and under circumstances determined by the authoritarian Uzbek state. In doing so, the state continues with shaping the subjectivities of its citizens in a similar way to the Soviet state. Through attending ethnographically to this tension Rasanayagam explores the limits of the category of secularism in the context of a Muslim Society. Indeed, as he argues, the category of secularism needs to be understood as a claim of the modern state to classify and regulate the entirety of social space, part of which entails defining what constitutes the religious (p. 100). And we can add that in the case of Islam in post-soviet Uzbekistan this also includes an ethnographic examination of the ways the post-soviet state controls what is authentic, traditional or indigenous. This is well illustrated by discussing the examples of the ways the government regulates the places of public piety such as mosques or pilgrimage sites, as well as licensing imams, or just simply approving any social gatherings in public. Furthermore, the government also tries to instrumentalize the institution of mahalla (residential neighbourhood) by embedding it into the grand national narrative from a strong state to a strong society (p. 111), in which all citizens mutually respect each other and cooperate under the guidance of the president Karimov. By incorporating the mahalla into the new national ideology the post-soviet Uzbek government gained an administrative tool through which the state s governmentality is enacted and power appropriated over Uzbek citizens. Nonetheless, this is only one flip of the coin and as Rasanayagam illustrates, mahalla continues to be the backbone of day-to-day sociality, punctuated by the rhythms of Islam as well as life, involving communal organization and celebration of important life-cycle events, and religious feasts. The second ethnographic line of Islam in post-soviet Uzbekistan deals with the contest and moral creativity of Muslims in Uzbekistan, and the ways individuals explore and experience alternative modalities of Muslimness. This is done by focusing on sociality, experiences of illness and practices of healing. Rasanayagam shows how

6 Essay Review 517 sociality is an important source of moral reasoning and persuasion, models of experience and local cosmologies, through individuals day-to-day involvement in the social and material world (pp. 164). Another example is individual experience with illness, here understood as a culture-bound syndrome. Rasanayagam describes various case studies of Muslims engagement with healers due to sorcery attacks or fallen heart syndromes. However, rather than an individual s solely pragmatic decision to employ a certain knowledge to overcome any affliction and recuperate well-being, Rasanaygam explores the moral dimension of the experience of illness and what kind of moral narrative it entails. The local practices of healing are also the lines of contest between different conceptions of moral agency. Rasanayagam outlines the ambiguity between the officially approved imams who see practices such as shrine visitations or healers working with spirits as un-islamic. On the other hand, these practices have been instrumentalized by the government as part of the national heritage and as a matter of Uzbekness. Furthermore, an increasing number of individuals have turned to another source of divine experience many Uzbeks convert to various branches of Pentecostalism a phenomenon that has been observed throughout post-soviet Central Asia on the whole (Pelkmans 2009). Indeed, after reading such a variety of experiences and examples of the divinity of the everyday, one wonders how it comes about that Muslims with often radically different understandings of Islam can recognize themselves and others as belonging to a common community of Muslims (p. 232). What makes these examples, and the two main themes of the book not only complementary but indeed thoroughly interrelated is the third theoretical device elaborated by Rasanayagam, that of the category of intelligibility. Intelligibility of experience, Rasanayagam argues, enables interactions without insisting on a common interpretation (p. 234). This theoretical position leaves enough room for moral creativity and flexible moral frames of evaluation of moral reasoning. Here, Rasanayagam draws upon the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) who addressed the issue of how seemingly different and irreconcilable individuals moral position in Western society can be reconciled. It is the idea of intelligibility as a matter of a historically and socially shaped setting that provides a coherent narrative. Rasanayagam finds parallels with Michael Carrithers (1992) work on the role of narratives in human life (p. 243). Carrithers outlines the idea of human sociality as an intersubjectively cultivated capacity and propensity to understand other lives through individuals own stories and plots of life. And as these plots are part of human intersubjectivity they are shared and thus become intelligible to others in the flow of life, and as such they become an apprehensive historicity and tradition. In arguing so, Rasanayagam finds a way that goes beyond the discourseology that has been dominant in anthropological studies of Muslim societies for a long time (Asad 1986). These approaches interpret Islam as competing discursive traditions over a definition of what is correct orthodoxy and orthopractice. However, in the case of post-soviet Uzbekistan, in which the state controls any public debates, it is experience itself, as Rasanyagam argues, that becomes a privileged site for moral reasoning, and an analysis of the intelligibility of experience can help to overcome the limitations of the discourse analysis. In other words, intelligibility is a therapeutic

7 518 Essay Review modality of knowledge and moral reasoning as it provides individuals immersed in particular settings with a certain range of possibilities for experience. In my view, this is a powerful analytical tool as it enables us to shed light on the forms of understanding between moral persons who are not necessarily alike, and yet it leaves room for creativity. Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan captures a remarkable dynamics of Islam and the changing religious landscape in Central Asia. Rasanayagam s analysis of Islam and Muslim lifeworlds in post-soviet Uzbekistan is ethnographically rich, and the arguments are theoretically well crafted and sophisticated. The book grasps and amplifies current theories on morality and reasoning, religion and secularism, as well as shedding fresh light on the development of Islam and Muslim selfhood and the body politic in post-soviet Uzbekistan and well beyond. Overall, Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan is a considerable contribution to our understanding of the thorough transformations of the Central Asian region and Muslim societies on the whole, and anyone concerned with these issues will definitely benefit immensely from reading it. References DAVID HENIG University of Kent # David Henig Abu-Lughod, L. (1989), Zones of theory in the anthropology of the Arab world, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 18, pp Asad, T. (1986), The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Carrithers, M. (1992), Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Carrithers, M. (2005), Anthropology as a moral science of possibilities, Current Anthropology, vol. 46, no. 3, pp Gellner, E. (1981), Muslim Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hann, C. (ed.) (2006), The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East- Central Europe, LIT Verlag, Berlin. Hann, C. & Pelkmans, M. (2009), Realigning religion and power in Central Asia: Islam, nation-state and (post)socialism, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 61, no. 9, pp Heintz, M. (ed.) (2009), The Anthropology of Moralities, Berghahn, Oxford. Humphrey, C. (2005), Ideology in infrastructure: Architecture and Soviet imagination, The Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 11, no. 1, pp Kotkin, S. (1997), Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Lambek, M. (2000), The anthropology of religion and the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 3, pp MacIntyre, A. (2007), After Virtue, Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd, London. Marranci, G. (2008), The Anthropology of Islam, Berg, Oxford. Marsden, M. (2005), Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan s North-West Frontier, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pelkmans, M. (ed.) (2009), Conversion after Socialism: Disruptions, Modernisms and Technologies of Faith, Berghahn, Oxford.