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Experience, Moral Creativity andReasoning: The Journey to MuslimSelfhood in Post-Soviet UzbekistanDavid Henig aa University of Kent

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To cite this article: David Henig (2011): Experience, Moral Creativity and Reasoning: The Journeyto Muslim Selfhood in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan, History and Anthropology, 22:4, 513-518

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Review Article

Experience, Moral Creativity andReasoning: The Journey to MuslimSelfhood in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience

Johan Rasanayagam

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 281 pp., ISBN 978-1-107-00029-2

(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 argu-

ments 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 con-

tingencies, as well as power relations (Abu-Lughod 1989; Asad 1986).

This is no less true for another politically and historically critical event in the twen-

tieth 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 understand-

ing 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 ethno-

graphic details and individual lifeworlds.

History and Anthropology,Vol. 22, No. 4, December 2011, pp. 513–518

ISSN 0275-7206 print/1477-2612 online/11/040513–6

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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. 76–77). 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 life-

cycle 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. 96–97). 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 authen-

ticity 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

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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 civi-

lians 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 cul-

tivated, 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 intelligibil-

ity. 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 per-

spective is concerned with the dynamics between transcending values and lived prac-

tice, 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 com-

mitments through a continuous process of evaluation, that creates moments of trans-

cendence. 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 experi-

enced, 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. 12–13). 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 inter-

subjectively cultivated, and where morality and Muslim selfhood are constantly “in the

making”.

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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, indi-

viduals 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 summar-

ized along two complementary lines. On the one hand, Islam in post-Soviet Uzbeki-

stan 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”, “tra-

ditional” 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 pilgrim-

age 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 narra-

tive “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

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sociality is an important source of moral reasoning and persuasion, models of experi-

ence 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 vis-

itations or healers working with spirits as un-Islamic. On the other hand, these prac-

tices 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 through-

out 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 irreconcil-

able 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

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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 under-

standing 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 argu-

ments are theoretically well crafted and sophisticated. The book grasps and amplifies

current theories on morality and reasoning, religion and secularism, as well as shed-

ding 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 Uzbe-

kistan is a considerable contribution to our understanding of the thorough transform-

ations of the Central Asian region and Muslim societies on the whole, and anyone

concerned with these issues will definitely benefit immensely from reading it.

DAVID HENIG

University of Kent

# David Henig

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