Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan The Morality of Experience By Johan Rasanayagam (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 281 pages.)

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 ...