Please describe in 175-200 words, each chapter assigned for this w.docx

Please describe in 175-200 words, each chapter assigned for this
week’s class. Then, in 175-200 words, discuss why you think I
titled this week's theme "practicing Islam." What do you think it
means to "practice" Islam in this context -- in other words, what
seems to be the common thread that runs through each of these
chapters? How does "lived" Islam as it emerges in these
readings, differ from our expectations of what "religion" is
supposed to be?
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Central Asian Survey
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
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Pursuing ‘Muslimness’: shrines as sites
for moralities in the making in post-
Soviet Bukhara
Maria Louw a
a Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, Aarhus
University,
Denmark
Available online: 13 Dec 2006

To cite this article: Maria Louw (2006): Pursuing ‘Muslimness’:
shrines as sites for moralities in the
making in post-Soviet Bukhara, Central Asian Survey, 25:3,
319-339
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Pursuing ‘Muslimness’: shrines as
sites for moralities in the making in
post-Soviet Bukhara
MARIA LOUW
Bahodir was a man in his late thirties who served as domlo,
shrine guardian, at the
shrine of Imom Xoja Baror in Bukhara and had done so for
about a year when
I met him in 1998. The time immediately after Uzbekistan’s
independence had
been hard for Bahodir. He was a bricklayer, but after a period of
illness he had
not been able to find any work and instead ‘sat at home’, as the
situation of
being unemployed is commonly termed. He turned to drinking
and became noto-
rious in his neighbourhood for being able to drink one-and-a-
half bottles of vodka
a day. Then, one day in 1997, something happened that was to
change his life com-
pletely. Burdened with illness and debt and shunned by his
neighbours, he had
started paying frequent visits to several of Bukhara’s shrines.
One night he
decided to sleep at the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror, a place
where his father
used to take him at night when he was a child. He hoped that the
saint would
show up in his dreams and give him counsel and strength that
could help him

out of his troubles. ‘I fell asleep’, Bahodir told me:
. . . and suddenly I saw a figure in a ray of light. That was
Imom Xoja Baror. Imom Xoja Baror
said that just as he himself had been one of those men . . . one
of those links who for the first time
connected Bukhara with the Islamic world, I should take part in
bringing Islam back to Bukhara
again. ‘Listen to Bahouddin Naqshband’s motto, Bahodir’, he
said, ‘the heart with God, the hand
at work! Tomorrow you must start rebuilding this place in order
that it may again be visible to all
the world . . . and you must serve the people who come here!’
Then he disappeared.
In an imitation of acts of a distant past in which the sacred had
regularly erupted
into history, Bahodir then broke down the wall that had blocked
access to the mau-
soleum for a long time, put in the door from his own house and
started restoring the
decayed place. After that, he told me, he recovered his health,
stopped drinking,
paid off his debt, and had since been able to maintain his
family, a wife and
four children, by building tombs at the burial place which
surrounds the shrine
and by praying for the visitors to the shrine.
Central Asian Survey (September 2006) 25(3), 319 – 339

Correspondance should be addressed to Maria Elisabeth Louw,
Department of Anthropology and Ethnography,
Aarhus University, Moesgaard—8270 Hoejbjerg, Denmark.
(Tel:þ 45 89 42 46 76; Email: [email protected])
0263-4937 print=1465-3354 online=06=03=0319-21 # 2006
Central Asian Survey
DOI: 10.1080=02634930601022583
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Pursuing ‘Muslimness’
Much of what has been said and written about life in post-
Soviet Uzbekistan in
Western media and scholarly discourse has focused on radical

Islamist movements
such as O’zbekiston Islom Harakati and Hizb ut-Tahrir and their
utopian visions
about the reestablishment of the Caliphate. They have been
occupied with the ques-
tion of whether there is a risk that militant or radical Islam may
gain a foothold
among a population haunted by economic despair and suffering
from its govern-
ment’s repression of the freedom of faith in the name of the war
against terror.
This is of course an important discussion. But it is equally
important to point
out, a fact perhaps lost in the discussions of radical Islam in the
region, that
even though they perceive post-independence society as a mixed
blessing, the
majority of Muslims in the country do not see the diverse
Islamist movements
as a serious alternative. In any case, that was the general
impression I gained
from my fieldwork in Bukhara.
1
The people I worked among tried to accom-
modate to the changing realities and were suspicious of the
utopias preached by
the radical Islamists. What they articulated in their search for
the Divine was
not an interest in an abstract orthodox worldview or a utopian
world order.
Rather, they adopted down-to-earth strategies for regaining
agency and a sense
of social belonging and attempted to rebuild the shattered moral

foundations of
their lives. As they put it, they attempted to restore the proper
‘Muslimness’ of
society as well as of their own lives.
The term musulmonchilik, ‘Muslimness’, is widely used both in
the official dis-
courses of the post-Soviet Uzbek government and in the
everyday discourses of
ordinary Muslim believers to denote a local way of being
Muslim. It refers to
an inner essence, which was repressed during the 70 years of
Soviet rule and is
therefore partly forgotten, but which is just waiting to be
revived in order to
restore an imagined ‘normality’ in society.
A desire for ‘normality’ may seem a humble aspiration, but this
is not so in a
situation characterised by existential insecurity. I conducted
fieldwork at a time
when rapid social change had made the ground shake beneath
the feet of many
people, challenging their accustomed ways of acting in their
lifeworlds. Many
felt alienated from the social communities and moral orders
they used to identify
with. Talking about their lives, they disclosed a profound social
malaise, charac-
terised not so much by material poverty as by the fact that they
felt bereft of any
means of adapting to the changing conditions of their lives and
thereby achieving a
satisfying social existence. Trying to create a ‘normal’
existence on this shaky
ground, pursuing their partly forgotten ‘Muslimness’, people

were ‘struggling
along’.
2
They were tentatively establishing relations with various parts
of
reality which they hoped would provide them with a foothold,
however limited
and temporary, in a rapidly changing social world.
Experiencing their lifeworlds as fragmented and insecure,
Bukhara Muslims
often pursued what they were missing at sacred places, which
they saw as mani-
festations of the Divine in the world which had somehow
escaped the corrosion of
time. In their efforts to rescue local ‘Muslimness’ from
oblivion, and seeking it at
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sacred places, people created new understandings of Islam and
of what it means to
be Muslim. These new understandings highlight the
inadequacies of the somewhat
reified concept of Islam that constructs a dichotomy between
essentialised con-
ceptions of ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’ on the one hand, and
‘modernity’ on the
other, which have informed many studies of Central Asia’s
Muslims. I do not
find it illuminating to view Central Asian Islam as a ‘remnant’
of earlier forms
of social consciousness, as Soviet studies usually did.
2
Nor do I agree with the
analysis of many Western scholars who viewed Islam in the
Soviet Union as a
quasi-primordial defence against modernisation.
4
Similarly, I do not subscribe
to the argument commonly found in post-Soviet studies which
compares how

Islam is understood and practised in the region to some kind of
orthodox, ‘pure’
Islam, concluding that an eradication of knowledge about Islam
took place
during the Soviet years.
5
While a Muslim believer or Islamic theologian might
argue in these terms, I find it much more interesting to bracket
questions concern-
ing the status of people’s ideas and beliefs relative to some
idealised Islamic
canon, and instead focus on the ways in which Islam is lived
and experienced
in practice.
I proceed from a view of Islam as a morality in the making, the
contours of
which are continually negotiated at various levels of society. I
shall argue that
although the post-Soviet Uzbek government has sought to co-
opt the country’s
many shrines within a nationalist narrative, their meanings are
in no way fixed.
Rather, they should be considered as focal points for such
moralities in the
making, for people’s efforts at recreating agency and its moral
grounding in the
economically harsh, socially insecure and politically tense
atmosphere of
post-Soviet Uzbekistan.
Sacred places
Belief in, and veneration of, God’s avliyo (saints) as the

Prophet Muhammad’s
spiritual successors, persons who, by the grace of God and
because of their exemp-
lary lives, hold a special relationship with God and possess
baraka, blessing
power, has often been identified as the most important aspect of
popular Islam
in Central Asia.
6
As the historian Robert McChesney has noted,
7
other religious
sites, mosques for example, do not seem to have the same hold
on the imagination
as have the shrines of avliyo, the importance of which lies in
their being thresholds
or doorways to the spiritual world and what lies beyond human
experience.
Places gather, as the philosopher Edward S. Casey has observed
in a pheno-
menological account of place.
8
Places gather not only ‘things’, understood as
various animate and inanimate entities, but also experiences and
histories,
language, thoughts and memories. When visiting particular
places, people experi-
ence these places as holding memories for them, releasing or
evoking these memo-
ries in their presence.

9
Thus, people often experience places as inherently
meaningful. Places, however, only express what their animators
enable them to
say. As anthropologist Keith Basso has noted, places are natural
‘reflectors’ that
return awareness to the source from which it springs.
10
Space acquires meaning
PURSUING ‘MUSLIMNESS’ IN POST-SOVIET BUKHARA
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through the multiple lived relationships that people maintain
with places, through
their dwelling.
11
Relationships with places are lived whenever a place becomes
the object of awareness, and notably when individuals step back
from the flow
of everyday experience and attend self-consciously to places.
Doing so, they
may also dwell on aspects of themselves—who they presently
are, who they
used to be, and who they might become. The physical landscape
becomes actively
wedded to the landscape of the mind.
Relationships to places, however, are not solely lived in
contemplative
moments of social isolation. A relatively fixed, though never
completely stable,
array of collective representations develops around some places
which become
the loci of social memory. This is the case, for example, for
many shrines in
Bukhara, whose very ‘placeness’ is indicated, and partially
constituted, by the
hagiographic complexes, nationalist discourses and miracle
narratives connected
with them, the ritual practices carried out there, and the subtle
changes in the com-
portment of people who visit them. These hagiographic
complexes, nationalist dis-

courses, miracle narratives, ritual practices and special ways of
comportment
direct people’s awareness toward these places. They encourage
people to dwell
there, to reflect on themselves by way of the ‘things’, histories
and memories
gathered there.
In Bukhara shrines are everywhere, if sometimes hidden behind
the signs of an
emergent global capitalism or obscured by reminders of Soviet
modernism; the
brand new bank buildings and the flashy advertising billboards,
or the endless
rows of grey and decaying apartment blocks decorated with
faded wall paintings
commemorating events such as the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
These shrines are
traces of a golden past that made Bukhara known as ‘Bukhoroi
Sharif’, Noble
Bukhara, and gave it a reputation as one of the most important
or holy places in
the Muslim world, apart from Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. A
reputation that
would make people say that it is not heaven’s light that lights
up Bukhara, it is
the light from Bukhara that lights up heaven. A domlo, shrine
guardian, at the
Bahouddin Naqshband shrine told me that when the prophet
Muhammad
reached the sky on his Mi’raj—ascension to heaven
12
—he saw the light falling
from heaven and down unto the earth. Only at one place did he

see a light
which emanated from the earth, and that place turned out to be
Bukhara. Seeing
that, the prophet said that many saints would be born in
Bukhara. I heard versions
of this story which had a modernist twist. Here it was not the
prophet, but rather
some cosmonauts flying around in outer space whose privileged
viewpoint made it
possible for them to perceive the light emanating from Bukhara.
Numerous saints are associated with the city and its
surroundings.
13
Most
shrines in Bukhara are gravesites, the burial places of saints.
Others are places
with another connection with a saint, such as a place with which
he or she has
been in contact, has rested or performed a miracle. Terms such
as mazar, ‘grave-
yard’, or ziyoratgoh, ‘place of visit’ are used about them, but
they are most fre-
quently referred to as avliyo
14
or pir. No verbal distinction is made between the
avliyo or pir as a living or dead person or as a sacred place,
which points to the
fact that their tombs, and more generally the physical materials
associated with
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them, are commonly regarded as extensions of them, as
somehow embodying their
powers. Some of Bukhara’s avliyo are associated with the Sufi
orders, notably the
yetti pir, ‘seven pirs’, all of whom are important links in the
Naqshbandiyya
silsila, spiritual chain.
15
One of these links, Bahouddin Naqshband (d. 1389),
lent his name to the Naqshbandiyya Sufi tariqat (order). Today

he is by far
Bukhara’s most popular saint and an unofficial patron saint of
the city. A very
popular shrine also exists for Abdulqodir Giloni (1088 – 1166),
founder of the
Qadiriyya Sufi tariqat.
Some avliyo are associated with the conversion of the people in
the region to
Islam, such as Imom Xoja Baror, the saint who appeared in
Bahodir’s dream.
Imom Xoja Baror is said to have played an important role in
making Bukhara’s
inhabitants convert to Islam. He accomplished this by curing the
city’s disabled,
the blind, the deaf, and the mentally ill in the name of Allah
right after the
region was conquered by the Arab Umayyad dynasty in the
beginning of the
eighth century. Around his tomb grew what is now Bukhara’s
central cemetery.
Another popular shrine is Chashma Ayub, ‘spring of Ayub’,
associated with
Ayub (Job) the biblical prophet, who is mentioned in the Qur’an
as one of the pro-
phets to whom God gave special guidance and inspiration, and
who is a model of
patience in Islam as in both Judaism and Christianity. The story
goes that Ayub
was an exceptionally pious, God-fearing man whom God had
blessed with all
kinds of wealth, a large family and good health. One day, Satan
expressed
doubt about the sincerity of Ayub’s faith, claiming that if God
withdrew his bles-

sing, Ayub would no longer worship God. To prove Ayub’s
sincerity, God allowed
Satan to put him to the test. Satan then destroyed Ayub’s
possessions, killed his
children and filled his body with diseases and pain. Through all
his suffering,
which lasted for 40 years, Ayub’s faith remained intact. When
he asked God for
mercy God told him that he should strike the ground. When
Ayub did so, a foun-
tain appeared, and when Ayub washed himself in the water and
drank it, his good
health was immediately restored and everything became as it
had been 40 years
before. According to the legend, Chashma Ayub is this spring.
Often hagiographic narratives deal with oppositions between
secular and divine
power. Some secular rulers, however, are also conceived of as
avliyo. In Bukhara
the most notable example is Ismail Samani, whose conquests of
Khorasan and
later the whole of Persia laid the foundations of the Persian
Samanid dynasty
that ruled from 874 to 999 from their capital in Bukhara. Today
the Samanid
mausoleum, situated in the Samani Park in the centre of the
city, is a very
popular place of ziyorat.
Some avliyo are regarded as the patron saints of various
occupations, notably
handicrafts.
16
And then there are all the more anonymous avliyo, less visible

to
the untrained eye and typically known only to a few people in
the immediate vicin-
ity of their shrines or to family members. For example, I only
learned about the
shrine of Chuja Chofiz Buxoriy, which is situated in the
basement of a private
home in Bukhara’s old town, because I accidentally fell into
conversation with
some people from that area. Whereas a relatively formalised
hagiographic
complex is typically related to larger and better-known avliyo,
no hagiographic
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2
reasons are usually given for why the less well-known avliyo
should be venerated
as such. Their reputation, the ‘placeness’, which encourages
people to dwell there,
is rather constituted by the special practices taking place around
them as well as by
what is typically an array of local miracle stories that
demonstrate their powers.
Salima, the guardian of the shrine of Chuja Chofiz Buxoriy, did
not know much
about him. She had married into the family that lived there and
one night the
saint had revealed himself to her in a dream and said that she
had to work there
as a tabib, a traditional healer. If she did that, she would be
cured (she was an
epileptic), but if not, she would become seriously disabled. She
did what the
saint asked and the shrine gained a reputation in the
neighbourhood as a place
where various headaches in particular could be cured. But who
Chuja Chofiz
Buxoriy had been, apart from being an avliyo that had called on
Salima to work
as a healer, and whose force helped her healing, was apparently
unknown.
Certain shrines are considered to have specialties in miraculous
action. Such
specialities typically relate to the particular life stories of the
saints. Because

the saints have experienced difficulties similar to those that
lead pilgrims to
their shrines, they are considered particularly sympathetic and
helpful towards
these pilgrims. Hagiographies of saints, in other words, inspire
biographies of
ordinary people, and often people have relations with specific
avliyo whom they
consider to be particularly influential in their lives. Craftsmen,
for example,
visit the patron saints of their respective handicrafts. People
typically visit the
shrine of Ayub to ask for patience if they are undergoing great
difficulties that
they find hard to endure, with the hope that their problems
might be solved as
miraculously as Ayub’s troubles were. They visit the shrine of
Said Ahmad
Pobandi Kushod in the old city who, according to legend, was
thrown in jail
and put in chains but broke the chains each time it was time for
performing the
namoz, the Muslim daily prayer. They visit this saint when they
experience
their ‘hearts being in chains’, that is, when they experience
being inhibited in
their agency in whatever they are concerned with. Also the
shrine of Bahouddin
Naqshband, though usually considered an ‘all-round’ shrine, is
considered by
some to be particularly suitable for those who seek help in
business matters, as
Bahouddin is known to have worked himself and been
successful at combining
devotion to God with worldly engagement.

17
The politics of sacred space
Every landscape tells, or rather is, a story, as Tim Ingold has
noted. ‘It enfolds the
lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have
moved around in it
and played their part in its formation’.
18
People, as Ingold points out, learn to read
the story of the landscape through an education of attention as
they travel through
it with their mentors, who point specific features out to them.
Other things they
discover for themselves, by watching, listening and feeling.
19
The ways people have been instructed in reading the story of the
sacred
landscape of Bukhoroi Sharif have, among other things, been
influenced by the
shifting significance successive rulers and governments have
accorded the
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shrines. After the Bolshevik revolution, and particularly since
the late 1950s, shrines
and shrine pilgrimage became major targets for Soviet anti-
Islamic measures and
propaganda.
20
The official Soviet Muslim Board of Central Asia and
Kazakhstan
sharply dissociated itself from saint worship and shrine
pilgrimage. Beginning in
the 1950s and continuing into the 1980s, the board issued
several fatwas against
such practices, condemning them as bid’at, heretical
innovations in belief and prac-
tice.

21
Most shrines were destroyed or left to decay, like other
buildings with reli-
gious associations. In the case of others, notably the main
shrine centres, a much
subtler strategy was adopted. Some of these were actually
preserved as monuments,
museums or tourist attractions. Shrines in Soviet Central Asia
which were classified
as representing significant medieval architectural structures
were redefined as
monuments of Central Asian architecture expressing an earlier
stage in the develop-
ment of the culture of the proletariat.
22
They were subjected to what Benedict
Anderson in a discussion of nineteenth-century colonial South
Asia has aptly
termed a ‘museumising imagination’, an imagination which
turns ancient shrines
into important institutions of modern state power.
23
The museumising imagination
in Soviet Central Asia desacralised the sacred sites. They were
as far as possible
emptied of pilgrims and filled with tourists instead. The social
dramas that used
to unfold at these places, where human suffering and hope met
the power of the
Divine to change the course of lives, were bracketed and
relegated to a place far

back in history before Soviet modernising forces had eliminated
religion as a
form of social consciousness and made way for a rationalist,
secular outlook.
This place far back in history was made a ‘foreign country’,
24
the relics of which
were irrelevant to modern concerns.
Ziyorat in secular space
In spite of the fact that shrines and shrine pilgrimage were for a
long period
primary targets for Soviet anti-Islamic measures and
propaganda, they remained
focal points for popular Islam in Central Asia during the whole
Soviet era.
Although a ‘foreign country’ in official ideology, many people
apparently found
the past embodied in the shrines very relevant to modern
concerns. Almost all
practitioners of ziyorat that I talked with during my fieldwork
had paid ziyorat
in Soviet times too, usually having been brought to the shrines
by parents, grand-
parents or other relatives in the first place, and then later
imitating their practice:
Qo’sh uyasida ko’rganini qiladi (The bird does what it has seen
in the nest), as one
of them said. They performed ziyorat despite the stories about
relatives, neigh-
bours, colleagues, friends and other people who had been kicked
out of the
party, who had been fired from their jobs or expelled from

school or university,
or who had been forced to renounce their religious beliefs at
local Party meetings.
However, they explained their courage by asserting that when
people had faith,
faith and the benefits of visitation would overshadow any fear
of potential sanc-
tions. If they wanted to do ziyorat they would find a way. They
would go to the
shrines and couch their activities in such accepted secular terms
as ‘tourism’ or
‘studies in ancient architecture’, contesting the authorities’
monopoly of truth
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by investing conventional categories with alternative meanings.
They would go in
disguise, or they would go at night, under the cover of darkness,
hidden from the
eyes and ears of people they feared and people they did not
know. They would go
in their dreams, and they would go to places that experience had
taught them were
relatively safe, where they knew that local officials turned a
blind eye to such
practices, or where local officials themselves secretly engaged
in them.
The enforcement of anti-religious policy was not uniform
because it hinged on a
number of local factors, including the officials on the ground
responsible of imple-
menting policies. Such low-level officials were not just
mouthpieces of the regime.
They had usually been born and raised in the community which
they served, and
many sought to make compromises between Soviet policy, their
own responsibil-
ity for implementing it, and local sensibilities.
25
With their silent collusion, the
practice of ziyorat became a public secret in Michael Taussig’s
sense; something
‘which is generally known, but cannot be articulated’.

26
That is, it was predicated
on a kind of mutual deception or dissimulation which was
intended to keep the
peace and maintain a sense of community. People would also
pay ziyorat to
shrines that were officially zakret, closed,
27
or converted to secular use. In short,
if one is to believe these accounts of the past, things were
difficult, but people
had a sense of the game; where and with whom it was safe to
play it, and
which codes to use when doing so.
‘Monuments that obtained their originality’
The late Gorbachev years and the years after independence gave
new significance
to Bukhara’s shrines, which became primary sites for a state-
sponsored effort to
recast earlier representations of collective experience in order
to support and vali-
date present patterns of authority. Numerous central Muslim
avliyo connected
with the area that is now Uzbekistan have been rehabilitated and
celebrated
after independence, their shrines restored and inaugurated anew
with state
funding. On the homepage of the information agency Jahon
under the Uzbek Min-
istry of Foreign Affairs

28
a list can be found of shrines, mosques and madrasas
which were restored during the period from 1991 to 2001.
Monuments that
obtained their originality, is how they are presented here.
These immediately visible material improvements to some of
the larger and
better-known shrines in the country, and the nation-wide
celebrations of the
Muslim saints and scholars connected with them, have
constituted one of the
most common reference points through which President Islam
Karimov argues
that his government has worked for the rehabilitation of the
nation’s Islamic
tradition. However, these efforts are not fundamentally different
from the efforts
of the Soviet era to ‘museumise’ Islam. The shrines are still
called obidalar,
‘monuments’. Rather than being icons of the sacred in its
universal, transcendental
sense, they are now chronotropes, that is, tropes which fuse
space and time.
29
More specifically, they are chronotropes of national
monumental time.
30
…

1
The Religious, The Secular and The Esoteric in Bishkek1
Maria Elisabeth Louw, PhD in Anthropology and Ethnography,
Aarhus University, Denmark
Visiting Research Fellow, Social Research Center,
American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
A Disenchanted city?
Doing anthropological research on religion in Bishkek can be a
bit discouraging. During what has,
so far, been around six months of fieldwork there I have often
been met with reactions signalling
surprise, indifference and discomfort and comments hinting that
I was in the wrong place. As one
man said, after lifting his eyebrows in surprise and clearing his
throat, as if wanting to make sure
that I would get his point: “You need to understand that we
have never been religious.”
During my former fieldwork in Bukhara2 I was also regularly

met with remarks, which seemed to
suggest that I was in the wrong place. There, people pointed
out, the seventy Soviet years had made
people forget about their Musulmonchilik, ‘Muslimness’, and as
a researcher interested in Islam I
would be better off doing my fieldwork somewhere else.
However, whereas the religion lost in
Bukhara was surrounded by a profound sense of nostalgia,
which seemed to reflect people’s
feelings of dislocation in post-Soviet space, most people in
Bishkek seem quite content with the
idea that they ‘have never been religious3’. Talking with people
there about their religion, the first
thing they will often tell you is that Islam has never had such a
strong hold on Kyrgyz people, that
they are only superficially Islamized, because Islam came to
them relatively late, and because the
Kyrgyz were traditionally nomads – as if Islam needed a place
to settle in order to take place in
peoples’ hearts and minds.
1 This paper was presented at the panel “Challenging
Interpretations of Islam in Central Asia” at the eighth annual
conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society, Seattle

October 18-21, 2007
2 Louw 2007
3 I use the concept of ‘religion’ as a translation of the Russian
term религия and the Kyrgyz term дин, and the term
‘religious’ as a translation of the Kyrgyz terms динчил and
динге берилген and the Russian term религиозный.
2
Bishkek and its inhabitants have often been described as
thoroughly secularized. “When you walk
in the street of the capital,” writes Michel Gardaz, for example,
in a report named “In Search of
Islam in Kyrgyzstan”4, “you feel only the cold breeze of
‘Scientific Atheism’ blowing in your face.”
People in Bishkek may also refer to the urban landscape to
support their arguments that people there
are not ‘religious’, asking you to look around: Does this look
like a ‘religious’ city? Indeed, at a
first gaze Bishkek hardly seems the kind of city you would
settle in in order to study Islam.
Whereas the numerous ancient mosques, madrasas and shrines
in Bukhara may trigger images of a
time when life was characterised by ‘Muslimness’, stereotypes
of how ‘religion’ looks like are

hardly triggered by Bishkek’s urban landscape: Soviet urban
planning with post-independence
twists in the shape of new business-centres, shopping-malls and
casinos.
People may also draw your attention to the tempo of city-life,
arguing that people there have too
much to do, too much to think of, and too little time to do so.
Modern urban nomads – be it elites
rushing from place to place in search of the next business deal,
cell phone in hand, or the less well-
off struggling along to provide for their families – do not have
much time and space for religion in
their lives.
Others may be attentive to what they perceive as signs that
Bishkek is indeed becoming more
‘religious’ or ‘Islamic’: A politician or prominent state
employee making reference to Islam in
public speeches, the meeting with a davatchi5; the occasional
sight of a veiled woman, people
selling ‘religious’ literature in the street, or perhaps of roads
being blocked by people attending the
Friday prayer. Such signs that ‘religion’ is invading the public
sphere are regarded with ambivalent

feelings by many. They might find that a certain amount of
‘religion’ is desirable as it counters
tendencies to moral decay and ‘westernization’ or
‘russification’. However, “even honey may
become bitter if there is too much of it,” as a woman expressed
it, and many people in Bishkek
display a profound discomfort with ‘religion’ and with people
who have begun to embrace, and
publicly display, a ‘religious’ identity.
The social life of stereotypes
4 Gardaz 1999: 276
5 I.e. a person who calls other people to Islam
3
Research on Islam in Central Asia has been haunted by
stereotypes and essentialisms. The tendency
was perhaps most notable back in Soviet times6. But also in
contemporary research there is a
stubborn tendency to postulate that Central Asian peoples’
Muslim identity is somewhat superficial;
that knowledge about Islam has been lost during the Soviet

years7, and that it, in the case of the
region’s former nomadic populations, was always shallow
anyway8. Such approaches ex- or
implicitly compare how Islam is understood and practiced in
Central Asia with some kind of
idealtypical ‘real’ or ‘pure’ Islam – as if defining ‘real’ Islam
was unproblematic9.
Deconstructing stereotypes and essentialisms is fundamental to
the anthropological endeavour, and
so is the effort to bring out the complexity of meaning as lived
‘on the ground’; among the people
we are studying. In this case it means bracketing questions
concerning the status of peoples’
practices and beliefs relative to Islamic orthodoxy – the
definition of which is by no means
unproblematic – and instead focus on the ways in which people
actually live and experience them;
why some ideas about, and ways of practicing, Islam are more
compelling, or meaningful, to them
than others.
Going to the field with the aim of deconstructing essentialisms
and looking for the complexity of

meaning as lived ‘on the ground’ it can be a bit disheartening to
meet people who describe
themselves in terms of the stereotypes one has set out to
deconstruct. This is indeed what people in
Central Asia often do when asked by a researcher to describe
their relationship with Islam: “I am
Muslim, but I am not real Muslim,” “The Kyrgyz people were
nomads, and therefore we are not
real Muslims like the Uzbeks” or “We have never been
religious” – Just to give a few examples of
statements I have recently heard in Bishkek. Statements which,
interestingly, coexist with a strong
sense, among many people, that their lives are intimately
connected with God, with Divine,
‘supernatural’ or ‘extrasensory’ interventions.
Stereotypes present meaning as unambiguous and semantically
stable. In this way they disguise
what is in fact their own enormous capacity for multiple
interpretations; their unstable semantics10.
Now starting to analyze the material from my fieldwork in
Bishkek I am trying to probe into the
shifting semantics of what it means to people not to be
‘religious’, not to be ‘real’ Muslims; the

6 Cf. DeWeese 2002; Saroyan 1997
7 See for example Akiner 1997: 274; Gardaz 1999; Atkin 1995;
Shahrani 1995.
8 See for example Kosmarskaya 1996, Akbarzadeh 2001
9 Cf. DeWeese 2002; Khalid 2007
10 Cf. Herzfeld 1992: 73
4
local social life of the enlightenment concepts of the ‘religious’
and the ‘secular’ and related
concepts: How, when, and by whom are the categories of
religion and its others defined? What
assumptions are presupposed in the acts that define them?11
What do statements about being
‘religious’ or not being ‘religious’ imply in the local context?
Which experiential realities are
people referring to when they engage in such concepts? What is,
for example, the experiential
‘other’ which people define themselves in opposition to when
they say that they are not ‘religious’?
What don’t they include in the concept and why? Which
meaning do they ascribe to experiences of
the Divine if such experiences are not meaningful in terms of
‘religion’?

Although it might be flawed from an anthropological viewpoint,
the objectifying and essentialist
gaze that distinguishes between ‘real’ and not so ‘real’ Islam –
deeming the Kyrgyz not so ‘real’ –
makes sense to many people in Bishkek and should therefore be
taken seriously. While some people
there are beginning to embrace a ‘religious’ identity, being
Muslim in a not very ‘religious’ way, or
not being ‘real’ Muslims, to many others, remains part of what
distinguishes them from other
Muslims; be it Arabs, Uzbeks or people from the southern part
of Kyrgyzstan who are generally
perceived as very ‘religious’, as being ‘real’ Muslims. And the
fact that some people in Bishkek are
beginning to embrace a more ‘religious’ identity is seen as a
symptom of the ills of society and
explained in quasi-sociological or –psychological terms.
Being very ‘religious’, to many people in Bishkek, is associated
with excess; it feeds into other
images of excessive aspects of social change. As anthropologist
Jon P. Mitchell has argued, social
and economic change – or more importantly perception of social
and economic change – often

leads to a kind of moralising against excess that establishes a
boundary within which people are
censured to remain, but in turn creates a proliferation of images
of transgression, and of the
consequences of transgression12.
In Bishkek, as in other parts of the post-Soviet world,
perceptions of radical social and economic
change has led to a proliferation of images of, on the one hand,
excessive individualism and, on the
other hand, fanaticism: Excessive strategies for survival and for
regaining a sense of agency and
identity which some people, it is believed, have resorted to as
an answer to the social upheavals that
have characterised the time since independence. Extreme ways
of being-in-the-world which are
surrounded by both fascination and repulsion: Repulsion
because they are indeed excessive, anti-
11 Cf. Asad 2003: 201
12 Mitchell 2001
5
social, and embody peoples’ anxieties about where society is

heading. Fascination because people
nonetheless may recognise concerns which are their own in such
excessive answers to the
predicaments of present-day life.
On the one hand there is the common image of the religious
‘fanatic’ – in many ways an imagined
cultural entity, known to most people by representations
alone13. Although being branded as
religious ‘extremist’ is not as fatal as in Uzbekistan, in
Kyrgyzstan the trope of the ‘extremist’
Muslim aiming at a violent overthrow of the secular state is also
prominent in public debates about
which role ‘religion’ should play in society14. And the concern
to distance oneself from ‘extremist’
or ‘fanatical’ ways of being ‘religious’ is a major one for many
people. People commonly speak
about religious ‘fanatics’ as weak-minded persons who – similar
to those who have found a refuge
in the bottle, or in drugs – have found a refuge in religious
submission; in submission to an
authority that frees them from the burden of having to care
about their own lives. People who have
become ‘very religious’ are often described as people who have

withdrawn from the world, from
society, even from their families – in short, from the present –
because of their inability to face and
handle everyday problems and find meaning in the ‘ideological
vacuum’ that the breaking up of the
Soviet Union allegedly caused.
In addition to the image of the religious fanatic there has also
been a proliferation of the image of
the religious hypocrite – an image which feeds into other
images of cynicism and hypocrisy,
excessive individualism and consumerism: phenomena also
perceived to be characteristic of post-
Soviet society, in particular urban society. ‘Being religious’ is
by many described as some kind of
superficial lifestyle that has nothing to do with sincere belief
but merely is chosen because it is
some kind of fashionable, signals the right things, much like the
latest Armani-dress. As such,
religious lifestyle, in the opinion of many people is also often
used as a cover of legally or morally
dubious acts. The tendencies of prominent, morally dubious,
politicians and businessmen to make a
big show out of funding mosques or attending the Friday prayer

has undoubtedly contributed to the
suspicion that people regard religious lifestyle with. It is
striking how people, in interviews, jump
from talking about ‘religiousness’ to talking about what is
perceived as other kinds of modern or
urban pretence and insincerity: Notably politicians whose words
about democracy, social justice
and fight against corruption is perceived as just a cover of their
pursuit of power and profit.
13 Cf. Lindquist 2002 on the New Russians as imagined cultural
entities
14 Cf. McBrien 2006
6
When the Divine takes place in the city
People in Bishkek might often define themselves as not very
‘religious’, but that has not necessarily
anything to do neither with their identity as Muslims, nor with
their relationship with God. To be
religious or not has nothing to do with what God, or the Divine
dimensions of existence, do in
peoples’ lives.

The Divine also finds its place in Bishkek’s urban landscape;
among its casinos, bazaars, shopping
centres, bars and advertising billboards; and also Bishkek’s
self-declared ‘non-religious’ population
find themselves surrounded by signs from God which help them
drawing the contours of
themselves, the trajectories of their lives – especially, perhaps,
in situations where their existence is
shaken.
Let me give an example.
Gulmira15 was a middle-aged woman who lived with her
teenage daughter and her elderly mother in
an apartment in one of Bishkek’s suburbs. Like so many others
of her generation, Gulmira had
experienced life in Bishkek deteriorating since the breaking up
of the Soviet Union. When I met her
and asked her to tell about her city she conveyed a general
impression of physical as well as moral
decay, insecurity and vulnerability: Frunze, the city of her
youth, had been green and clean; it had
been a cultural, industrial and intellectual centre. Now the city
had become dirty; the streets were

unkempt; the factories had been closed; the intellectuals had left
for better jobs in Russia,
Kazakhstan or the West. Instead the city had been filled with
labour migrants from the south and
with unemployed people who drowned their sense of
hopelessness in drugs and alcohol. The rising
gap between the rich and the poor had split up society, and the
concern to make money filled up the
minds of people and made them ruthless and unscrupulous. The
former bastion of modernity16 had
become porous; the former symbol of hope and progress had
become the site of day-to-day survival
strategies.
I asked Gulmira about the changes in the religious sphere.
Having talked very passionately about
the changes Bishkek had undergone since independence she
suddenly seemed demonstratively
uninterested and started giving very short answers. She did not
know anything about religion, she
said. Although she was out of a family of moldos she conceived
of herself as an atheist, and that
15 ‘Gulmira’ is a pseudonym.
16 Cf. Buchli & Alexander 2007

7
was all there was to say about that. However, when I talked
with her again a few days later,
returning to the subject, she said that it would not be correct to
say that she did not believe in God.
Probably there existed some kind of ‘supernatural’ force in the
world. She sometimes experienced
such a force herself; notably through her dreams.
Some years ago, Gulmira told me in order to give me an
example, she worked as a chief accountant
in the military. As a chief accountant she had her own office.
People would always comment on
how cosy it was. One night she had a dream: She came to her
office in the morning and saw that
people were removing all the furniture from the room. The
atmosphere had become different; dusty,
dirty and dark. The wallpaper was falling off the wall.
In her dream, the decay of the outside world had invaded what
had until then been one of her safe
havens in the midst of post-Soviet chaos. And that haven, the

office, became a different place to
her; an enchanted place – replete with omens that her life would
fall apart in case she did nothing to
get away. In the morning, she said, she knew for sure that she
had to leave the job and handed in her
resignation. The month after, she heard, the authorities
discovered some ‘irregularities’ at her
former place of work. Her former colleagues were still in
trouble, but her dream had made her leave
her job in time. Gulmira concluded that probably there had been
some special forces at work in her
life.
In Bishkek, people frequently experience glimpses of the Divine
or supernatural forces in what
might appear to the spectator as unimportant phenomena and
make these glimpses significant as
basis for decision-making and reflections on their lives. Like
Gulmira they might experience such
glimpses in images, voices and feelings experienced in dreams.
Or they might experience it in
intuitions, sudden brain waves or impulses. In words they
overhear in the street, which seem
somehow meant for them. In difficulties in doing something

they have planned – travelling
somewhere, getting in touch with someone – which is perceived
as a sign from God that they should
indeed not do it. In the feeling of hope against all odds. Or just
in a general sense that God takes
part in their lives.
This brings us into the sphere of what one could call everyday
‘esotericism’ or ‘mysticism’. What
characterizes such ‘mystical’ or ‘esoteric’ experiences is the
idea that they somehow defy
expression; that they need to be experienced to be properly
understood. They are states of insights
8
usually hardly reachable by rational understanding. They are
transient, short. And the person
undergoing such experiences feels him- or herself as passively
being held by a superior power. The
Divine takes place – shortly, but usually making a lasting
impression on the person and sometimes
drawing the contours of a new self for him or her.

If the experiences as such are ineffable, the circumstances
surrounding them are often remembered
in great detail, localizing the Divine, enchanting the most
unlikely places in the city, creating sacred
landscapes which are usually highly personal: Gulmira’s office,
for example, was not an enchanted
place to anyone but her, and perhaps the people whom she told
about the dream, and who
recognised the dream’s authenticity and thus the moral
grounding of an act which might have been
interpreted as the mere attempt to save one’s skin in time.
Hermeneutics of suspicion and hermeneutics of enchantment
The point that I wish to make is not that Bishkek is really
enchanted, that people are really
religious, under a thin veneer of secularism. That would just be
a subversion of the argument that
people are not ‘real’ Muslims and another confirmation that
there are certain phenomena which are
really, essentially, religious, and other phenomena which are
essentially secular.
I suggest that a potentially fruitful way of approaching religious
life among Bishkek’s not so

‘religious’ population might be to focus on how people there
variously enchant and disenchant their
surrounding world. How they sometimes engage with a
‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in order to find
mundane concerns behind expressions of ‘religiousness’, and
how they sometimes engage with
what one might term a ‘hermeneutics of enchantment’ that
perceives signs of Divine forces in
apparently secular phenomena. How they create sacred, as well
as secular, landscapes in the city;
how ideas about the ‘religious’, the ‘secular’ and the Divine
become read and inscribed in the urban
landscape and the way life in the city is imagined, and how
these processes are intimately connected
with city life as such; with peoples’ efforts to navigate it; with
their hopes for, and fears about, the
directions society and their lives may take in the future.
References
Akbarzadeh, Shahram (2001). “Political Islam in Kyrgyzstan
and Turkmenistan”, Central Asian
Survey 20 (4): 451-465

9
Akiner, Shirin (1997). ‘Between tradition and modernity: the
dilemma facing contemporary Central
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the Baltic to Central Asia,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Alexander, Catherine & Victor Buchli (2007). “Introduction,” in
Catherine Alexander, Victor
Buchli and Caroline Humphrey (eds) Urban Life in Post-Soviet
Asia
Asad, Talal (2003). Formations of the Secular. Christianity,
Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford
University Press
Atkin, Muriel (1995). ‘Islam as faith, politics and bogeyman in
Tajikistan’, in M. Bourdeaux (ed.)
The Politics of Religion in Russia and the new States of
Eurasia, Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe.
DeWeese, Devin (2002). “Islam and the legacy of Soviotology:
A Review Essay on Yaacov Ro’I’s
Islam in the Soviet Union’, Journal of Islamic Studies 13:3:
298-330
Gardaz, Michel (1999). ”Field Report: In Search of Islam in
Kyrgyzstan.” Religion 29: 275-86

Herzfeld, Michael: The Social Production of Indifference.
Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western
Bureaucracy. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago
Press
Khalid, Adeeb (2007). Islam after Communism. Religion and
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California Press
Lindquist, Galina (2002). “Spirits and Souls of Business. New
Russians, Magic and the Esthetics of
Kitsch”, Journal of Material Culture vol. 7 (3): 329-343
Louw, Maria Elisabeth (2007). Everyday Islam in post-Soviet
Central Asia. Routledge
McBrien, Julie (2006). Extreme Conversations: Secularism,
Religious Pluralism, and the Rhetoric
of Islamic Extremism in Southern Kyrgyzstan, in Chris Hann
(ed.) The Postsocialist Religious
Question. Berlin: Lit Verlag
Mitchell, Jon P. (2001). ”Introduction”, in Paul Clough and Jon
P. Mitchell (eds): Powers of good
and evil. Social transformation and popular belief
10

Kosmarskaya, Natalya (1996). “Russian Women in Kyrgyzstan.
Coping with New Realities.”
Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 19:1-2: 125-32
Ro’I, Yaacov (2000). Islam in the Soviet Union: From the
Second World War to Gorbachev.
London: C. Hurst
Shahrani, Nazif (1995). ‘Islam and the political culture of
“scientific atheism” in post-Soviet
Central Asia’, in M. Bourdeaux (ed.) The Politics of Religion in
Russia and the New States of
Eurasia, Armonk, N. Y.: M. E. Sharpe

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