The subject of this reading response concerns the relationship bet.docx

The subject of this reading response concerns the relationship
between Islam and national identity. The readings for next
week, one by David Radford, and two by myself (I was not able
to scan the Borbieva chapter, unfortunately) give us very
different perspectives on what this relationship looks like.
Please write 200-250 words comparing Radford and Artman’s
perspectives on the relationship between Islam and national
identity. What were their main arguments? Where do they
agree? Where do they disagree? Please also discuss how some
of the readings from week 11 (Peshkova, Rasanayagam,
Privratsky) might inform our understanding of the debate about
national identity and religion. Which perspective did you find
most persuasive? (and you don’t have to agree with me just
because I wrote some of the readings – remember what we’ve
learned in class: it’s ok to disagree!). What did you find most
interesting about the readings for these two weeks?
1
CONTEMPORARY MODES OF ISLAMIC DISCOURSE IN
KYRGYZSTAN: RETHINKING THE MODERATE -
EXTREMIST
DUALITY
CAP PAPERS 170
(CERIA SERIES)

Vincent M. Artman1
Islam’s growing political, cultural, and social influence in
Central Asia has become a major
preoccupation of analysts and policymakers since 1991. Much
of this discussion, however, has
focused on questions related to security, extremism, and
terrorism.2 A characteristic motif in
this literature is the juxtaposition of “moderate Islam” with
“Islamic extremism.” The struggle
between moderates and extremists, in turn, works to shape a
broader geopolitical metanarrative
in which Central Asia is constructed as a place of instability,
violence, and political repression.3
Some have even depicted the region as being faced with the
possibility of a Eurasian “Arab
Spring” scenario.4
Not surprisingly, the actual religious landscape in Central Asia
is substantially more complex
than this binary admits: rather than a stark division between
local moderates and foreign
extremists, closer inspection reveals a myriad of different
theologies, religious groups and
1 Vincent M. Artman is is an instructor in the Center for Peace
& Conflict Studies at Wayne State
University. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University
of Kansas. His publications include
“Documenting Territory: Passportisation, Territory, and
Exception in Abkhazia and South Ossetia” in the
journal Geopolitics and a co-authored piece entitled “Territorial
Cleansing: A Geopolitical Approach to
Understanding Mass Violence” in Territory, Politics,
Governance.

2 An example of this genre is R. Sagdeev, Islam and Central
Asia: An Enduring Legacy or an Evolving
Threat? Washington, DC: Center for Political and Strategic
Studies, 2000. See also S.F. Starr, “Moderate
Islam? Look to Central Asia,” New York Times, February 26,
2014.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/opinion/moderate-islam-
look-to-central-asia.html; A.
Masylkanova, “Radicalization in Kyrgyzstan is No Myth,” The
Diplomat, June 22, 2016.
http://thediplomat.com/2016/06/radicalization-in-kyrgyzstan-is-
no-myth/
3 For more on this “discourse of danger,” see: J. Heathershaw,
N. Megoran, “Contesting Danger: A New
Agenda for Policy and Scholarship on Central Asia,”
International Affairs 87:3 (2011), pp. 589-612.
4 R. Kaplan, L. Goodrich, “Central Asian Tensions,” Stratfor,
January 30, 2013.
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/central-asian-tensions
2
movements, and discourses about the proper role of religion in
society. In the end, attempts to
conceptualize Islam in terms of generalized moderate and
extremist variants obscures the very
real diversity that exists within such categories. The end result
is an inaccurate and unhelpful
depiction of the role of religion in Central Asia today.
The focus of this brief will be Kyrgyzstan, where government
regulation of religion has typically
been less severe than in neighboring states, affording greater
freedom for debates within the

religious sphere to occur openly. Indeed, one of the most
striking developments in Kyrgyzstan
since the 1990s has been the growth of popular interest in Islam
and the increasingly visible
participation of Muslims in the public sphere. At the time of the
Soviet collapse, however,
Kyrgyzstan was widely considered by Western observers to be
one of the most secularized
republics in the Soviet Union.5 Even as late as 1999, one
scholar wrote, “At first glance, there is
no obvious sign that Islam is the official religion of the Kyrgyz.
When you walk in the street of
the capital, you feel only the cold breeze of ‘Scientific Atheism’
blowing in your face.”6
Such an assessment would make little sense today: even in the
country’s cosmopolitan capital,
Bishkek, it is common to see people in modern professional
attire walking side by side with
friends wearing fashionable, brightly-colored hijabs. 7 Vendors
sell Islamic literature on the
streets and in public markets, and stores advertise their stocks
of halal products.8 Theologians
hold popular seminars in conference centers in the city center,
which are attended by hundreds
of young men and women, and parents can send their children to
any number of Islamic
schools.9 Consumers can now do business with any of several
Islamic banks, and universities,
government offices, and even bazaars often set aside space for a
namazkhana, or prayer room.
On Fridays, the streets around Bishkek’s Central Mosque are
even more choked with traffic than
usual, while the mosque itself is usually filled beyond capacity.
During warmer seasons
hundreds of men lay their prayer rugs on the ground in the

courtyard and perform prayers
(namaz) under the open sky.
The growing conspicuousness of such conventional markers of
religiosity, however, only tells
part of the story, and it would be a mistake to interpret these
developments as evidence of a
general consensus about the role of Islam in Kyrgyzstan today.
After all, the so-called “Islamic
revival”10 in Central Asia has never been a uniform
phenomenon. Historically, there have always
been many competing streams of Islamic discourse and practice
in the region. A full accounting
of this diversity is well beyond the scope of this paper. 11
Instead, what follows is a brief
5 A typical assessment notes: “The Kyrgyz received Islam late,
and lightly, and Soviet rule left them with a
vague conception of being ‘Muslim,’ as much in a cultural as a
religious sense.” R. Lowe, “Nation Building
in the Kyrgyz Republic,” in T. Everett-Heath (ed.), Central
Asia: Aspects of Transition, New York:
RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, p. 122.
6 M. Gardaz, “In Search of Islam in Kyrgyzstan,” Religion 29:3
(1999), p. 276.
7 As in many other countries, the practice of veiling has taken
on a political dimension in Kyrgyzstan. See
N. Schenkkan, Kyrgyzstan: Hijab Controversy Charges Debate
over Islam’s Role in Society,” Eurasianet,
October 12, 2011. http://www.eurasianet.org/node/64306
8 There are several competing standards for halal certification
in Kyrgyzstan, a fact which has caused
some confusion for consumers. See “Kyrgyzstan: Rival Halal
Standards Means ‘Trust with Your Eyes
Closed,’” Eurasianet, January 15, 2014.

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/67943
9 B. De Cordier, “Kyrgyzstan: Fledgling Islamic Charity
Reflects Growing Role for Religion,” Eurasianet,
December 8, 2010. http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62529
10 M. Haghayeghi, “Islamic Revival in the Central Asian
Republics,” Central Asian Survey 13:2 (1994), pp.
249-266.
11 To get a sense of this diversity during the post-Soviet era
see: A. Khalid, Islam after Communism:
Religion and Politics in Central Asia, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007; M. Louw, Everyday
Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia, London: Routledge, 2007; B.
Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak
3
examination of some of the many cleavages and perspectives
that make up the contemporary
religious scene in Kyrgyzstan, where the meaning of terms like
extremist and moderate is
everything but self-evident.
Textualists
Much of the literature on Islam in Central Asia devotes a
disproportionate amount of attention
to a motley assortment of what are called “Islamic extremist”
organizations. At different times
this list has included groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, Tablighi
Jama’at, the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, the Islamic Jihadist Union, al-Qaeda, and, most
recently, the Islamic State. It is
worth noting several key points about these organizations,
which are in many respects quite

different from one another. First, not all of them embrace
violence, and those that are violent
have had a negligible impact in Central Asia. For example,
according to one account, “From
2001-2013, there were three attacks that have apparently been
claimed by such groups, with a
total of 11 deaths.” 12 Despite their apparent impotence, the
fear of violent extremism has
nevertheless been seized upon by governments in the region as a
convenient justification both
for domestic political repression and as a means of “ensuring
the cooperation and support of the
West but also of Russia and China.”13
A second crucial point is that the very designation of extremist
likely obscures more than it
explains. Indeed, one of the few characteristics held in common
among the various extremist
groups in Central Asia is a perspective on Islam that might be
referred to as “textualist” or
“originalist.” This perspective tends to understand the Qur’an
and Hadith (accounts of the words
and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) as the only authoritative
source of religious norms and
rejects much of the broader Islamic scholarly tradition that
developed over the centuries. From
the textualist point of view, moreover, local customs and
traditions that came to characterize the
practice of Islam in various geographical and social contexts are
condemned as bid’a, or
“unwelcome innovations.” Textualists of all stripes, meanwhile,
typically claim to represent a
more pure and authentic form of Islam; however it is not a
given that this purist perspective
necessarily constitutes extremism.

A third, related, point is that the term “extremist” is misleading
because it usually serves as an
umbrella label that conflates truly violent radical organizations
like the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan, non-violent, albeit revolutionary, movements like
Hizb ut-Tahrir, and wholly
apolitical groups like the Tablighi Jama’at. While this kind of
terminological fuzziness often
works to the advantage of state regimes interested in controlling
the religious sphere, it tells us
little about the nature of the organizations in question.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, for example, is banned throughout Central Asia
because the group’s propaganda
advocates the establishment of an Islamic caliphate. Moreover,
the group is often viewed as an
“Uzbek phenomenon” 14 in Central Asia. In Kyrgyzstan, this
perception plays into prevalent
Religion and Collective Memory, London: Routledge, 2001; J.
Rasanayagam, Islam in Post-Soviet
Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011.
12 J. Heathershaw, D. Montgomery, “The Myth of Post-Soviet
Muslim Radicalization in the Central Asian
Republics,” London: Chatham House, 2014, p. 14.
13 B. Balci, D. Chaudet, “Jihadism in Central Asia: A Credible
Threat after the Western Withdrawal from
Afghanistan?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
2014.
http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/08/13/jihadism-in-central-
asia-credible-threat-after-western-
withdrawal-from-afghanistan
14 E. Karagiannis, Political Islam in Central Asia: the
Challenge of Hizb ut-Tahrir, London: Routledge,

2010, p. 58.
4
narratives regarding the potential for a repeat of the traumatic
inter-ethnic violence akin to that
which ravaged the country in 2010.15 At the same time, Hizb
ut-Tahrir has won many adherents
by providing social goods that the Kyrgyz state has been unable
to supply.16 Thus, while Hizb ut-
Tahrir’s goal of establishing a caliphate is shared with violent
organizations like the Islamic
State, its non-violent, gradualist methods are not; simply
grouping both together as “extremist”
obscures the very real differences between them.
In a similar fashion, the case of the Tablighi Jama’at clearly
illustrates the difficulties in using
the broad, overarching terminology of “extremism” to refer to
textualist Islamic movements. The
group, whose name loosely translates as “the society of
spreading the message,” was founded in
the 1920s in India, and its primary mission is “faith renewal…to
make nominal Muslims good
practicing Muslims by helping them to get rid of un-Islamic
accretions and observe Islamic
rituals faithfully.” 17 However, like Hizb ut-Tahrir, the
Tablighi Jama’at is banned as an
“extremist” organization throughout most of Central Asia,
despite the fact that it is non-violent
and expressly apolitical. In most cases, the unstated motivation
behind such restrictions is a
desire on the part of governments to maintain a monopoly over
the religious sphere.18

In Kyrgyzstan, however, the Tablighi Jama’at operates openly,
and in fact appears to be widely
influential. In some respects, the group’s appeal is not difficult
to understand: its message of
helping Muslims to practice a more “pure” Islam based solely in
the Qur’an and Hadith, attracts
many who are in search of what they feel to be a more authentic
religious experience. Moreover,
the fact that the Tablighi Jama’at is an apolitical movement
means that participation in its
activities, especially daavat,19 the act of inviting fellow
Muslims to pray at the mosque, provides
a risk-free avenue for exploring and expressing a self-
consciously Islamic identity rooted in the
foundational texts of the religion.20
Yet, even in Kyrgyzstan the Tablighi Jama’at is not entirely
without detractors. Adherents have
sometimes provoked controversy for wearing what are
sometimes derided as “Pakistani” styles
of dress – “long tunics, baggy pants and turbans in emulation of
the Prophet Mohammed.”21
Many Kyrgyz consider such clothes to be culturally
inappropriate, or even a potential sign of
extremist beliefs. In response to the controversy, members of
Tablighi Jama’at have been
encouraged to adopt more familiar “national” styles, including
the traditional Kyrgyz kalpak hat.
15 I. Rotar, “Situation in Southern Kyrgyzstan Continues to
Smolder Two Years Since Ethnic Riots,”
Eurasia Daily Monitor 9:115 (2012).
http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_ne

ws]=39507
16 E. McGlinchey, “Islamic Revivalism and State Failure in
Kyrgyzstan,” Problems of Post-Communism
56:3 (2009), pp. 16-28.
17 M. Ayoob, The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and
Politics in the Muslim World, Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2008, p. 135.
18 G. Saidazimova, “Uzbekistan: Tabligh Jamaat Group Added
to Uzbek Government's Blacklist,” Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 20, 2004.
http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1056505.html
19 Davaat is the local pronunciation of the Arabic word dawa.
So prevalent is this activity in Kyrgyzstan
that members of Tablighi Jama’at are colloquially referred to as
daavatchilar.
20 Numerous other Islamic funds and organizations also operate
in Kyrgyzstan, including the Turkey-
based Nurçular (also known as the Gülen movement),
Mutakallim, an Islamic women’s organization, and
Adep Bashati, a Kyrgyz group whose leadership received
training at the renowned Al Azhar University in
Egypt. Like the Tablighi Jama’at, these organizations often
operate schools and medresehs, run charities,
and provide other kinds of social services. The Kyrgyz
government maintains a list of officially registered
organizations, which can be found here:
http://www.religion.gov.kg/ru/muslim.html
21 N. Schenkkan, “Kyrgyzstan: Islamic Revivalist Movement
Quietly Flourishing,” Eurasianet, 2011.
5
While such compromises appeased some critics, officials in the

State Commission for Religious
Affairs continue to express skepticism about the group’s
ultimate goals. Some suggest that the
Tablighi Jama’at could be “laying the groundwork” for radical
extremist movements.22 Other
observers, such as the popular Kyrgyz theologian Kadyr
Malikov and Emil Nasritdinov, a
professor of anthropology who has himself participated in
daavat, 23 argue that the group
actually siphons potential recruits away from more violent
groups by providing Kyrgyz Muslims
with an apolitical avenue for exploring the possibilities of faith
renewal.24 Nevertheless, the
Kyrgyz government is still considering the possibility of
following the example of its Central
Asian neighbors and banning the Tablighi Jama’at as an
extremist organization alongside the
Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
In the end, such overly broad and politically arbitrary
definitions of what constitutes extremism
ultimately reinforce the notion that the term itself is usually of
limited analytical value.
Normative Hanafism
If the word “extremist” lacks definitional clarity, then the term
“moderate” is similarly imprecise.
For example, in Kyrgyzstan the definition of “moderate Islam”
is in many respects a product of
the mobilization of theology in the service of state policy.
According to an official report entitled
the “Conception of State Policy of the Kyrgyz Republic in the
Religious Sphere 2014-2020”: “[I]n
order to ensure national security and cultural identity, the state
is creating conditions for the

strengthening and development of traditional forms of moderate
Sunni Islam, based on the
religious-legal school of Hanafism and the Maturidi creed.”25
To this end, the government has
begun to promote what it calls “traditional Kyrgyz Islam,”
which “does not place in opposition
Islamic beliefs and national traditions and customs, and has an
ideological basis for the
development of partnership with the state.”26
As a secular entity the government is constrained in the degree
to which it directly intervenes in
theological issues. Nevertheless, the State Commission for
Religious Affairs, a secular body
under the jurisdiction of the President of Kyrgyzstan, has broad
authority to “regulate the
religious sphere or other activities of religious organizations
through laws and other normative
legal acts.”27 At the same time, Kyrgyzstan also has an
“official” Islamic governing body, which is
called the Muslim Spiritual Authority of Kyrgyzstan. Although
this institution, which is also
known as the Muftiate, is legally separate from the Kyrgyz
government, in practice it cooperates
closely with the state. Moreover, unlike the State Commission
for Religious Affairs, the Muftiate
is an explicitly religious body, and it is composed of ulema, or
Islamic scholars.
22 Personal communication.
23 E. Nasritdinov, “Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian
Tablighi Travelers,” Ab Imperio 2 (2012), pp.
145-167.
24 Personal communications.
25 Kontseptsiia gosudarstvennoi politiki Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki

v religioznoi sfere na 2014-2020 gody
(2014), p. 17.
http://www.president.kg/files/docs/kontseptsiya_na_rus._priloje
nie_k_ukazu_pkr-1.pdf.
The Hanafi madhhab is one of the four major schools of Islamic
jurisprudence, and the one that is most
widespread in Central Asia. Typically, Hanafism allows for
more consideration of local customs and
practices than other madhhabs, and is sometimes interpreted as
advocating political quietism.
Maturidism is a philosophical doctrine that grew out of the
teachings of Abu Mansur Muhammad al-
Maturidi, a tenth century philosopher from Samarkand.
Maturidism affords a greater role to human
reason and free will than some other schools of thought.
26 Ibid,. p. 10.
27 Chotaev, Z., Isaeva, G., Tursubekov, Z. “Metodicheskie
materialy: gosudarstvennaya politika v
religioznoi sfere: zakonodatel'nye osnovy kontseptiya i
"traditsionnyi islam" v Kyrgyzstane,” Bishkek:
Gosudarstvennaya komissiya po delam religii Kyrgyzskoi
Respubliki, 2015, p. 12.
6
A significant proportion of the Muftiate’s activities is aimed at
spreading “correct” knowledge of
Islam among Kyrgyz Muslims.28 In addition to holding classes
on the basics of the Qur’an and
Hadith, the Muftiate also publishes religious literature, much of
which is devoted to outlining
the basics of Islamic belief and ritual, providing answers to
common questions about religion,

giving religiously-grounded advice on topics like marriage,
child-rearing, and so forth. But the
Muftiate’s efforts to promote knowledge of Islam are not
limited to remedial religious
instruction; they are also intended to foster the development of
patriotic, nationalist, political
quietist, and moderate Kyrgyz Muslims.
The Muftiate thus provides important theological underpinning
to the state’s broader efforts to
combat extremism. For example, along with representatives
from the president’s Security
Council and the State Committee for Religious Affairs, the
Muftiate now evaluates imams on
their “knowledge of Islam.”29 The tacit goal of this process is
to ensure that imams are not
spreading religious extremism, which is defined as “adherence
to violence and radical acts
directed towards the unconstitutional change of the existing
order, and threatening the integrity
and security of the state, society, or individuals using religious
rhetoric.” 30 Similarly, the
Muftiate argued that “real sacred ‘jihad’ is…a struggle against
‘terrorism,’ which is accursed by
God and the angels.”31 In 2015 the Muftiate hosted an
international symposium on “Extremism
and Takfirism32 as a Threat to Modern Society.” This
symposium brought together religious
officials from across the Central Asian region, as well as from
countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, India, and Pakistan, to discuss the problem of
extremism and terrorism. Among the
resolutions adopted by the delegates were a declaration that
terrorism and violence are contrary
to the teachings of Islam and calls to put an end to communal,
tribal, and sectarian divisions

among Muslims.33
Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev himself used the
symposium as an occasion to remind
people of the nature of traditional Kyrgyz Islam. In remarks
from a local newspaper, which were
reproduced in the preface to the symposium proceedings,
Atambayev noted, “The Kyrgyz people
were never religious fanatics. That our forefathers belonged to
the Hanafi madhab was not a
coincidence. I would like to stress one feature of the Hanafi
madhab. In modern parlance: it was
tolerant.”34 Similarly, an analyst in the Kyrgyz Commission for
Religious Affairs, commented:
“Maturidism is [our] traditional Islam. It says that Islam and the
state should live in harmony
and that there is no necessity to build a caliphate.”35 The
“Conception of State Policy” also
highlights the patriotic and quietist character of Maturidism,
noting that “[t]his school, which is
28 N. Kurbanova, “Islamic Education in Kyrgyzstan,” Central
Asia and the Caucasus: Journal of Social
and Political Studies 15:1 (2014), pp. 90-103.
29 “Kyrgyzstan Testing Clerics’ Knowledge of Islam,”
Eurasianet, May 28, 2015.
30 “Kontseptsiia gosudarstvennoi politiki Kyrgyzskoi
Respubliki v religioznoi sfere na 2014-2020 gody,”
op. cit., p. 34.
31 F. Yusupov, “Musul’manin ne terrorist – terrorist ne
musul’manin, paralelli mezhdu dzhikhadom i
terrorismom,” March 17, 2016.
http://muftiyat.kg/ru/article/musulmanin-ne-terrorist-terrorist-
ne-

musulmanin-paralleli-mezhdu-dzhihadom-i-terrorizmom
32 To accuse someone of takfir is to accuse them of being an
unbeliever, even of they call themself a
Muslim. “Takfirism” is thus not a coherent ideology, as the
name might suggest, but rather a label that
refers to a broad spectrum of purist or extremist viewpoints that
categorize many, if not most, other
Muslims as having been corrupted by un-Islamic ideas and
practices.
33 “‘Ekstremizm zhana takfirizm koomgo keltirgen
korkunuchu’: I el aralyk simpoziumu,” Bishkek, April
16, 2015.
http://muftiyat.kg/sites/default/files/books/simozium_2015_fina
l_akyrky.pdf
34 Ibid., p. 3.
7
shared by the majority of the citizens of the Kyrgyz Republic,
has a historically proven capacity
for tolerance, good-neighborliness, and respect in conditions of
ethnic and religious diversity.”36
The defection of what constitutes moderate Islam in Kyrgyzstan
today therefore effectively
conforms to the government’s preferred qualities: politically
inert, loyal to the state and the
existing order, and unreceptive to extremist ideologies like
“takfirism” or calls to establish a
caliphate in Central Asia. It is important to recognize, however,
that the fact that traditional
Kyrgyz Islam is rooted in the venerable Hanafi tradition imbues
it with a theological legitimacy

that is independent of its political utility. However, the
traditional Kyrgyz Islam promoted by the
state and the Muftiate is not the only form of moderate,
culturally authoritative Islam in
Kyrgyzstan.
Traditionalists
According to a report published by the State Commission for
Religious Affairs, Islam, “[h]aving
become an integral part of our culture and history…exists in
harmony with the customs and
traditions that spread in Kyrgyzstan over the course of
centuries.”37 From the perspective of the
state and the Muftiate, “tradition” refers to moderate, tolerant
Hanafism. But for many Kyrgyz,
the concept of tradition also refers to a broad constellation of
beliefs and practices that are
linked to the concept of kyrgyzchylyk, which translates roughly
as “the essence of Kyrgyzness.”
Although it is a somewhat vague concept, kyrgyzchylyk
typically includes practices like
divination, performing ziyarat to mazars,38 attending to the
spirits of the ancestors, and various
other practices, many of which are linked with the Kyrgyz
people’s nomadic past. Importantly,
for many Kyrgyz such traditional practices are also closely
intertwined with Islam. Although the
two are not necessarily conceived of as being identical, the
boundaries that separate one from
the other are often indistinct. It is important to note, however,
that this “traditionalist Islam”
does not constitute an organized movement or group; rather it
should be understood as a
perspective on the faith that is less concerned with bid’a than it
is with honoring Kyrgyz customs

and traditions.
Not surprisingly, many practices associated with kyrgyzchylyk,
and thus with traditionalist
Islam, are frequently excoriated as “un-Islamic” or as
“shamanism” by textualists and others.
For example, members of the Tablighi Jama’at sometimes argue
that people who engage in
fortune telling derive their powers from djinni, or evil spirits.39
The supernatural powers of
healing and fortune telling manifested by clairvoyants, from this
perspective, are simply
intended to mislead people and tempt them into shirk (idolatry
or polytheism). Similarly, the
Muftiate itself has argued, “There are still many superstitions in
Kyrgyzchilik [sic] that go
against Islam and are sinful…The one who commits shirk
certainly can expect to be thrown into
the fires of hell.”40
36 “Kontseptsiia gosudarstvennoi politiki Kyrgyzskoi
Respubliki v religioznoi sfere na 2014-2020 gody,” op.
cit., p. 17.
37 Chotaev et al., op cit. p. 19.
38 Ziyarat is the practice of performing a pilgrimage to a mazar,
or a sacred place. Mazars can include the
graves of ancestors or saints, as well as natural sacred sites like
springs, trees, or stones, which are said to
have a special holy quality. Visiting mazars is an important
aspect of religious practice throughout Central
Asia.
40 Quoted in N. Borbieva, “Parallel Worlds: Male and Female
Islam in the Central Asian Republics,”

presented at “The Turks and Islam: An International
Conference,” Bloomington, Indiana, 2010, p. 7.
8
Traditionalism’s historical connection with Kyrgyz culture and
identity, however, also imbues it
with prestige and authority. Many traditionalists view both
textualist interpretations of Islam
and the normative Hanafism promoted by the Muftiate as posing
a threat to authentic Kyrgyz
Islamic customs. As one traditionalist argues, “Pure Qur’an is
good. But today’s Islam is a
negative influence. It is destroying all our traditions. Women
have started wearing the hijab.
People are wearing Pakistani clothes. The number of mosques
has grown in villages. Mullahs are
prohibiting crying and saying koshok [mourning of the dead] at
funerals. Our ancestors
accepted pure Islam. It didn’t contradict our culture.”41
Suggestions that traditional practices are somehow not
consistent with Islam are often met with
confusion and scorn. As one practitioner argues, “[W]e perform
namaz, read and recite the
Qur’an, we often do feasts of sacrifice, and perform alms.
[Islam] is in our blood, and it is passed
to us from our ancestors from seven generations ago.”42 Indeed,
despite pressures from the
Muftiate to conform to normative Hanafism, one observer notes
that people with “pieces of
crucial local knowledge – knowledge of texts in Farsi and
Chagatay Turkic, knowledge of rituals
at mazars, local vernacular poetry, and songs and epics – have

asserted their voices as
purveyors of real and legitimate Central Asian Islamic
traditions.”43
Traditionalism thus represents another authoritative modality of
Islamic belief and practice in
contemporary Kyrgyzstan, one that has strong roots in culture,
history, and tradition. At the
same time, however, traditionalism occupies a peculiar position
outside the boundaries both of
extremism and normative moderate Hanafism. But, since
traditionalists do not constitute an
organized group or movement, they have not attracted the
attention of the state. Consequently,
disputes over belief and practice between traditionalists and the
Muftiate tend to play out on the
theological and rhetorical planes, rather than in the realms of
politics and national security.
Conclusion
The meta-discourse about the nature and threat of Islamic
extremism, both in Central Asia and
elsewhere, is likely to continue unabated. However, as the furor
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‘My Poor People, Where Are We Going?’: Grounded
Theologies and National Identity in Kyrgyzstan
Vincent M. Artman
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Grounded Theologies and National Identity in Kyrgyzstan,
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‘My Poor People, Where Are We Going?’:
Grounded Theologies and National Identity
in Kyrgyzstan
VINCENT M. ARTMAN
Abstract
Although Islam is described as a fundamental aspect of Kyrgyz
national identity, its theological aspects are
generally elided in nationalist discourse. However, as Islam
becomes more prominent in Kyrgyz society,
anxieties about ‘Arabisation’ and the weakening of national
traditions permeate popular and political
discourse. These anxieties operate simultaneously in the
national and religious registers, suggesting the
extent to which theological beliefs inform national identity,
even in secular states. Examining a recent
controversy over veiling in Kyrgyzstan, this article argues that
theology is both linked to nationality and
also a site of contestation over the terms of nationalism itself.
IN THE DECADES SINCE THE SOVIET COLLAPSE,
SOCIAL, CULTURAL, economic and
political landscapes across Eurasia have been dramatically
refashioned. However, along
with sometimes halting and geographically uneven integration
into the global economy

(Laruelle & Peyrouse 2013), the most transformative processes
affecting this region have
arguably been nation-building and the revival of religion in the
public sphere. These
developments, importantly, have not occurred in isolation from
one another, and the
numerous zones of interpenetration between religion,
secularism, and ethnic and national
identities have attracted substantial interest from scholars
working on Central Asia
(Laruelle 2007; Louw 2012; Thibault 2013; Montgomery 2016;
McBrien 2017).
A recurrent theme in this literature has been a critique of the
framing of nationalism and
the nation-state as ‘the bearers of modernity par excellence’
(van Biljert 1999, p. 317) and the
habit of dismissing religion as ‘traditional’ and ‘backwards’
(van der Veer & Lehmann 1999,
p. 3). Such narratives feed into stereotypical depictions of Islam
as antipathetic to the modern
© 2019 University of Glasgow
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1656167
I would like to acknowledge Dr Alisa Moldavanova, for her
support and her invaluable feedback and
suggestions; the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped
to improve the article from its original
version; Dr Alexander Diener; the University of Kansas
Department of Geography and Atmospheric
Science and the Wayne State Centre for Peace & Conflict
Studies, where substantial portions of the research
included in this article were conducted; IREX; and all of the
people who participated in this research

project. This work was supported by International Research and
Exchanges Board: Grant Number
Individual Advanced Research Opportunity.
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, 2019
https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2019.1656167
http://www.tandfonline.com
sovereign-territorial regime (Huntington 1997, p. 175); as
Bassam Tibi has pointed out,
‘Western scholars argue that the idea of the nation-state was
exported from Europe to the
“abode of Islam”. Those who have adopted it are viewed as
modernisers, whereas those
who reject it are considered to be traditionalists’ (Tibi 1997, p.
10). By contrast, other
scholars have sought to highlight the dynamic and often
contradictory roles that Islam
plays in the modern nation-state, as well as in the articulation
and performance of national
identity itself (Piscatori 1986; Hashmi 2002; Rasanayagam
2011). Indeed, there is growing
recognition that the spheres of ‘the political’ and ‘the religious’
are not as alienated from
one another as classical theories that link nationalism with
secularisation would hold
(Hobsbawm 1990; Gellner 2006).1 This is to say, putatively
secular ideologies like
nationalism are often bound up with notions of religious
solidarity (van der Veer 1994),
and collective memories of national origins are frequently
rooted in religious stories,
myths and symbols (DeWeese 1994; Smith 2003). Rather than
an antagonism between

religion and nationalism, we instead find that religion, national
identity and the nation-
state overlap in sometimes unexpected ways.
In Central Asia, for example, Islam has often been described as
an inalienable part of the
cultural patrimony of the titular nationalities (Haghayeghi 1994;
Tazmini 2001; Hann &
Pelkmans 2009; Rasanayagam 2011; Olcott 2014). At the same
time, Islam has
occasionally been characterised as playing an ‘instrumental’
role for Central Asian
governments (Peyrouse 2007; Omelicheva 2016), insofar as they
are seen as trying to
invoke religious heritage to bolster their own legitimacy.
However, while nationalist
ideology has undeniably made use of religious symbols and
rhetoric for political purposes
(recall the late Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, taking his oath
of office on the Qur’ān),
the intensity and frequency of such mobilisations has been
geographically uneven and has
varied substantially over time. The Karimov government, for
example, went from
emphasising Islam to imposing harsh controls over the religious
sphere in reaction to the
perceived threat posed by radical groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir
and the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan (Rasanayagam 2006). Similarly, the
Islamic Renaissance Party
of Tajikistan (Hizbi Nakhzati Islomii Tojikiston), long the only
legal Islamic political party
in Central Asia, was outlawed in 2016 and many of its members
imprisoned.2 In
Kyrgyzstan, meanwhile, Islam has never figured prominently in
the state’s official ideology.

We must also be wary of too readily accepting the oft-repeated
dictum that being Kyrgyz/
Uzbek/Kazakh/etc., means being a Muslim (Khalid 2007, p.
107; Omelicheva 2011, p. 246;
Radford 2015, p. 55). This dictum explains neither how that
relationship has been constructed
and articulated, nor the emotional and spiritual resonance with
which it has become imbued.
Instead, it is necessary to examine how discourses surrounding
national identity shape the
ways in which people think about religion, and vice versa. How
are these discourses
embodied and performed? How do the connections between
religion and national identity
implicate the secular nation-state? This article seeks to address
these questions by using
controversies over the hijāb as a lens through which to examine
how theological ideas and
1See Zubrzycki (2010) and Tse (2014) for a critique of this
paradigm.
2‘Shuttered Tajik Islamic Party Branded As Terrorist Group’,
29 September 2015, Radio Free Europe/
Radio Liberty, available at:
http://www.rferl.org/content/tajikistan-islamic-party-terrorist-
organization/
27277385.html, accessed 15 July 2016.
2 VINCENT M. ARTMAN
organization/27277385.html
organization/27277385.html

arguments can become interwoven with discourses surrounding
national identity. What we
find is that nationalist narratives, even in secular states like
Kyrgyzstan, often contain
religious arguments and are in fact grounded in particular
theological formations.
Furthermore, the debate over veiling practices suggests that the
theology/nationality nexus
is also a site for renegotiating the meaning of national tradition
and its relationship with
religion.
The majority of the data analysed in this article was collected
over a five-month period,
August–December 2014. Fieldwork consisted of participant
observation as well as semi-
structured interviews with government officials, representatives
of the muftiyat,3
theologians, local scholars and ordinary Muslims. Subsequent
data were obtained from
publicly available primary documents, including religious
literature, government
documents and published interviews.
The article begins by looking at how the objectification of
Muslim consciousness has
transformed the nation-state into an arena for contestation
between putatively ‘national’
and ‘foreign’ Islamic practices. It takes as an example an
ongoing debate in Kyrgyz
society over the propriety of veiling, a debate that came to a
head with the appearance of
a series of controversial billboards in Bishkek in the summer of

2016. As we will see, the
billboards’ critique of veiling was couched in nationalist
paranoia about cultural
‘Arabisation’, which is in turn connected with fears that
conservative forms of Islam are
poised to overwhelm the moderate and tolerant forms of Islam
that are depicted as being
traditional among Kyrgyz. The article then turns to an
examination of this ‘traditional
Kyrgyz Islam’, arguing that it effectively constitutes a semi-
official ‘national theology’
that is supported by the state and promulgated by Kyrgyzstan’s
religious authorities.
Traditional Kyrgyz Islam, which is rooted in the Hanafi school
of Islamic jurisprudence, is
tied to discourses surrounding Kyrgyz national identity through
appeals to genealogy, as
well as the fact that it incorporates various customs and rituals
associated with Kyrgyz
ethnic traditions. As an objectified theology, it is contrasted
with other forms of Islam,
which are often depicted as being foreign or hostile to Kyrgyz
culture. The final section of
the article returns to the question of veiling, and examines how
the hijāb has become a
focal point in the renegotiation of Kyrgyz national identity
itself, in some ways
challenging, or at least revising, the ways in which the
relationship between Islam and
national identity has traditionally been conceived in
Kyrgyzstan.
Religion, the nation-state and the objectification of Muslim
consciousness
Despite the profound influence that the ‘secularisation

paradigm’ has exerted on the social
sciences (Tschannen 1991), it has become apparent that the
‘death of religion’, long
regarded as ‘conventional wisdom in the social sciences during
most of the twentieth
3The word muftiyat is derived from the term mufti, an Islamic
legal expert. The Kyrgyz Muftiyat is currently
headed by Mufti Maksat azhi Tokotmushev, who is assisted by a
board of deputy muftis. Organisationally, the
Kyrgyz Muftiyat is the descendant of a Soviet-era institution,
the Dukhovnoe upravlenie Musul’man Srednei
Azii i Kazakhstana, or the Spiritual Administration of the
Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan
(SADUM), which administered Islamic religious affairs from its
inception in 1943 until the dissolution of
the Soviet Union in 1991. See Saroyan (1997a, 1997b) and Ro’i
(2000).
‘MY POOR PEOPLE, WHERE ARE WE GOING?’ 3
century’ (Norris & Inglehart 2004, p. 3), has not come to pass.
Across a literature that ranges
from critical reassessments of the idea of secularisation
(Hadden 1987; Swatos & Christiano
1999; Berger 2012), attempts to theorise a ‘post-secular’ order
(Habermas 2008; Gorski et al.
2012) and explorations of religion vis-à-vis modernity
(Casanova 1994; Asad 1999; Lambert
1999), scholars have taken note of the seemingly anomalous
persistence of religious belief in
a modern, industrialised and disenchanted world. Increasingly,
the very notion of a ‘great
divide’ (van der Veer 1994) between ‘traditional religion’ and

‘rational modernity’ appears
antiquated: the faithful today are visible and assertive
participants in social and
(geo)political discourses throughout the world (Westerlund
1996; Eisenstadt 2000; Petito
& Hatzopoulos 2003; Thomas 2005). Thus, as Cavanaugh and
Scott remind us,
‘theological discourse has refused to stay where liberalism
would prefer to put it.
Theology is politically important, and those who engage in
either theology or politics
ignore this fact at their peril’ (Cavanaugh & Scott 2004, p. 1). It
should be noted from the
outset that the term ‘theology’, as employed in this article, does
not (necessarily) refer to
the systematic study of the nature of the Divine. Rather, the
article draws upon Tse’s
(2014, p. 202) conceptualisation of ‘grounded theologies’,
which are defined as
‘performative practices of place-making informed by
understandings of the transcendent’.
According to Tse, grounded theologies:
remain theologies because they involve some view of the
transcendent, including some that take a
negative view toward its very existence or relevance to spatial
practices; they are grounded
insofar as they inform immanent processes of cultural place-
making, the negotiation of social
identities, and the formations of political boundaries, including
in geographies where theological
analyses do not seem relevant. (Tse 2014, p. 202)
Importantly for the present discussion, Tse makes clear that
grounded theologies ‘are not
abstract speculations, for they have concrete implications for

how practitioners understand
their own existence in ways that inform their place-making
practices’ (Tse 2014, p. 208).
The notion of ‘grounded theologies’, then, is a useful lens
through which to make sense of
the ways in which ‘the religious’ intersects with secular forces
such as nationalism while
freeing us from the epistemological baggage carried by the term
‘religion’ (Asad 1993).
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Islam has become an
increasingly prominent factor in
Kyrgyzstan’s social, cultural and political discourse. However,
if Islam has assumed a role that
was impossible under communism, then, as Hann and Pelkmans
note, ‘the new religious
marketplaces’ that emerged in the 1990s have nevertheless been
shaped by the political
imperatives of the governments in the region (Hann & Pelkmans
2009, p. 1518). Although
this ‘framing’ has sometimes been described as the
‘instrumentalisation’ (Peyrouse 2007) or
even ‘étatisation’ (Hann & Pelkmans 2009, p. 1519) of religion,
it may be more helpful to
understand it through the lens of what Eickelman and Piscatori
refer to as the ‘objectification
of Muslim consciousness’. This term refers to ‘the process by
which basic questions come to
the fore in the consciousness of large numbers of believers:
“What is my religion?” “Why is it
important to my life?” and “How do my beliefs guide my
conduct?”’ (Eickelman & Piscatori
1996, p. 38). Objectification is an outcome of widespread
literacy, mass education and the
growing availability of multiple forms of mass media
(increasingly including social media),

which have changed the ways in which Muslims think about and
discuss their own beliefs:
4 VINCENT M. ARTMAN
‘Like mass communications, mass education and publishing
contribute to objectification by
inculcating pervasive “habits of thought.” They do so by
transforming religious beliefs into a
conscious system, broadening the scope of religious authority,
and redrawing the boundaries
of the political community’ (Eickelman & Piscatori 1996, pp.
41–2).
What has emerged out of this process is a way of thinking about
Islam as a self-contained
system of beliefs and practices, one that can be readily
described and compared against other
belief systems—or, indeed, against other forms of Islam
(Eickelman 1992). As we will see in
this article, both the Kyrgyz state and the religious authorities
have contributed to and
leveraged the objectification of Muslim consciousness by
defining what has often been
referred to as ‘traditional Kyrgyz Islam’, arguably a sort of
‘national theology’ that is
counterpoised with other forms of Islam. As the name suggests,
traditional Kyrgyz Islam
is explicitly connected with notions of Kyrgyz ethnic and
national identity and is
portrayed as being bound up with Kyrgyz history, genealogy
and traditions. Meanwhile,
other forms of Islam, particularly those espousing more
conservative or rigidly textualist

theologies, are depicted as at best culturally incongruous, and at
worst as extremist and a
threat to social cohesion and state survival.
An interesting example of this dynamic can be found in a
controversy that erupted over a
series of billboards that suddenly appeared around Bishkek in
the summer of 2016. The
billboards provoked heated debate because they openly
criticised the more conservative
veiling practices that have become increasingly conspicuous
among many Muslim women
in Kyrgyzstan. This critique, importantly, was framed in
explicitly national terms: the
implication was that such forms of veiling were associated with
Arabs, Bengalis or
Pakistanis—outsiders, in short—and were thus inappropriate for
Kyrgyz women. While
the ‘billboard controversy’ was ultimately short-lived, it
nevertheless suggests the degree
to which objectified theological assumptions, grounded at a
variety of scales, from the
individual body to the national community, have become
embedded in normative
conceptions of Kyrgyz national identity.
The hijāb and Kyrgyz national identity
In August 2016, the then president of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek
Atambaev, held a long press
conference during which he addressed a variety of important
topics, ranging from
proposed constitutional reforms, the closure of the US military
base at Manas Airport and
the political pressure emanating from Turkey to close schools
operated by the Gülen

movement. The event’s most notable moments, however,
transpired when the president
began discussing the topic of veiling. Invoking the spectre of
terrorism, Atambaev
lamented the growing popularity of the hijāb among Kyrgyz
women, linking it with
religious extremism and even terrorism:
in Kyrgyzstan in the 1950s, women went about in mini-skirts,
but it did not occur to one of them to
put on a ‘martyrdom belt’ and blow someone up. You can go
around if you like with a boot on your
head, but do not blow anyone up. Because this is not religion.4
President Atambaev’s remarks added fuel to a controversy that
had been smouldering in
Kyrgyzstan since the appearance of several billboards along
Bishkek’s major thoroughfares
earlier that summer (see Figure 1). The billboards depicted
three contrasting images: the
leftmost panel showed a group of smiling Kyrgyz women
wearing traditional national
costumes; the middle picture portrayed women wearing white
hijābs; and the final panel
depicted a group of women fully covered by black chadors, with
only their eyes visible.
Beneath the pictures were the portentous words ‘My poor
people, where are we going?’
(‘Kairan elim, kaida baratabyz?’) superimposed upon a red
arrow that pointed ominously
towards the black-clad women on the right (Nasritdinov &
Esenamanova 2017). In the

end, the billboards, though they only lasted a few weeks, laid
bare the thorny issues
surrounding secularism, Islam and national identity in Kyrgyz
society.
Not surprisingly, Kyrgyzstan’s official Islamic authority, the
Muftiyat, denounced the
banners, calling them ‘divisive’ and ‘provocative’ for offending
the sensibilities of pious
Muslims (Shuvalov 2016).5 At the same time, however, many
politicians and other public
figures expressed their support for the anti-hijāb message;
President Atambaev even
endorsed the notion of placing similar billboards throughout the
entire country.6 The
popular television host Meerim Shatemirova argued that the
billboards struck a blow for
the principles of secularism and women’s rights: ‘If I’m being
honest, I would have hung
up the banners myself … . I want to live in a society that is
based on the law of the
Constitution, not upon religion!’.7 Curiously, a few days later,
several new billboards
appeared, emblazoned with the same slogan, but this time
juxtaposing women in
traditional Kyrgyz clothing with those in more revealing
‘Western’-style mini-skirts. They
were quickly removed, and the whole affair came to an
ignominious close (Nasritdinov &
Esenamanova 2017).
Although a local controversy over a short-lived series of
billboards defending Kyrgyz
national costume against the Islamic headscarf may seem like a
somewhat idiosyncratic
affair, it is emblematic of the complex and ambiguous role that

religion often plays in
Kyrgyzstan’s putatively secular political sphere. Wearing the
hijāb—or choosing not to—
is ‘an embodied spatial practice through which women are
inserted into relations of power
in society’ (Secor 2005, p. 204), and as such is a political act
irrespective of intent.
Veiling, as both a symbol and as a grounded theological
practice that engages practitioners
4‘Atambaev: Pust’ luchshe khodyat v mini-yubkakh, no nikogo
ne vzryvayut’, ASIA-Plus, 2 August 2016,
available at: https://news.tj/ru/node/228994, accessed 29 July
2019.
5‘DUMK: banner “Kayran elim, kayda baratabiz?” mozhet
naverit’ edinstvu’, Sputnik, 13 July 2016,
available at:
http://ru.sputnik.kg/society/20160713/1027634490.html,
accessed 28 November 2016.
6‘Kyrgyzstan: President Throws Weight Behind Anti-Veil
Posters’, Eurasianet, 14 July 2016, available at:
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/79661, accessed 16 September
2016; ‘Atambaev poruchil povesit’ bannery
“pro parandzhu” po vsei strane’, Sputnik, 14 July 2016,
available at: http://ru.sputnik.kg/society/20160714/
1027672085.html, accessed 28 November, 2016.
7‘Snyat’ nel’zya ostavit’! 7 avtoritetnykh mnenii o
skandal’nykh bannerakh’, Sputnik, 13 July 2016,
available at:
http://ru.sputnik.kg/opinion/20160713/1027636498.html,
accessed 28 November 2016.
6 VINCENT M. ARTMAN

https://news.tj/ru/node/228994
http://ru.sputnik.kg/society/20160713/1027634490.html
http://ru.sputnik.kg/opinion/20160713/1027636498.html
in the ‘contestations that continually shape everyday human
geographies’ (Tse 2014, p. 205),
therefore exists in dialogue with other social and ideological
currents, including nationalism,
secularism and prevailing religious norms. Thus, even though
96% of Kyrgyz report that they
were ‘raised Muslim’ (Bell 2012), and while many Muslim
women in Kyrgyzstan cover
themselves in some fashion, wearing the hijāb remains a
contested practice owing to its
ambivalent status vis-à-vis Kyrgyz national tradition.
During the Soviet period, veiling was virtually non-existent, an
outcome of the prevailing
anti-religious atmosphere of the times, as well as of Soviet
campaigns to ‘liberate’ women
from what were portrayed as harmful and backwards customs
(Northrop 2004). Indeed,
ending the practice of veiling was linked with what was viewed
as ‘one of the biggest
triumphs of Soviet modernizing campaigns—women’s
emancipation’ (McBrien 2017,
p. 117). However, the disappearance of the atheist regime in
1991 resulted in a
‘deprivatisation’ of religion (Casanova 1994) in a place where
many religious people
simply practised their faith in private to avoid mistreatment by

the state. Since
independence, Islam has re-entered the public sphere as both a
source of moral and
spiritual authority and as a publicly embodied set of practices,
even if many people lack a
precise understanding of what constitutes Islam.
For many, an interest in rediscovering ‘authentic Islam’, which
was felt to have been lost
during the Soviet period (Simpson 2009; McBrien 2017), has
encouraged, among other
things, the adoption of self-consciously ‘Islamic’ styles of
dress. Wearing the hijāb has thus
become increasingly commonplace in Kyrgyzstan, even though
activists are still fighting the
stigma surrounding veiling, which has manifested in restrictions
on wearing the hijāb in
schools and in the workplace and other forms of discrimination
(Shenkkan 2011; Nasritdinov
FIGURE 1. ANTI-VEILING BILLBOARD IN BISHKEK
Source: ‘DUMK: Banner “Kairan elim, kaida baratabyz?”
mozhem navredit’ edinstvu’, Sputnik, 13 July 2016,
available at:
https://ru.sputnik.kg/society/20160713/1027634490.html,
accessed 29 July 2019.
https://ru.sputnik.kg/society/20160713/1027634490.html
& Esenamanova 2017). Nevertheless, by the end of the 2000s,
the sight of women wearing the
hijāb, even in cosmopolitan Bishkek, no longer seemed as

remarkable as it had in 1992.
But if the hijāb is no longer an uncommon sight, then it is not a
practice that all Kyrgyz
people are comfortable with. As Mohira Suyarkulova explains:
‘as women wearing various
styles of hijāb and veils became more numerous and visible on
the streets of Bishkek after
independence, many citizens and authorities reacted with
irritation, and often the
discomfort with this new practice was expressed in ethnic
terms’ (Suyarkulova 2016,
p. 258). Particularly among older generations raised during the
Soviet period (McBrien
2017; Nasritdinov & Esenamanova 2017), as well as among
nationalists concerned with
defending ‘authentic’ national traditions, the veil is interpreted
as ‘fundamentally at odds
with the Kyrgyz character’ (Murzakulova & Schoeberlein 2009,
p. 1240).
Ethno-nationalist anxieties related to the hijāb can partly be
seen as by-products of the
Kyrgyz state’s efforts to articulate a coherent ‘national idea’.
Such efforts have welded
Kyrgyz cultural memory and its attendant myth-symbol complex
(notably the Manas epic)
with a teleological narrative of the modern Kyrgyz nation-state
as the political-territorial
culmination of the Kyrgyz nation’s historical destiny (Akaev
2003; Gullette 2008). This
process has been accompanied by deliberate efforts to revive
Kyrgyz epic poetry, nomadic
customs,8 indigenous sports and musical styles, and distinctive
national costumes. In an
ideological environment like this, the politics and symbolism

invested in national costume
can become particularly intense (Suyarkulova 2016, p. 247);
choosing to wear the hijāb
may be interpreted as an affront to national identity.
Consequently, the juxtaposition on
the billboards of traditional Kyrgyz clothing with hijābs and
chadors served as a potent
reminder of the apparent erosion of Kyrgyz national culture.
With this in mind, the response of Tynchtykbek Chorotegin, the
director of the Muras
Foundation, which is dedicated to the study and preservation of
Kyrgyz historical and
cultural heritage, to the hijāb controversy and, more broadly,
Islam’s role in Kyrgyz
society, is particularly revealing:
We are not against Islam, and we respect the historical choices
of our ancestors. But we are against
mankurtism and the imposition on us of alien clothing, since
[clothing is] an important part of the
culture of every nation. … [People have] only just begun to
openly support and develop their
culture and wear clothes with Kyrgyz ornaments. So, at this
moment there is a real threat of what
is known as ‘Arabisation’. … But we are Kyrgyz Hanafis, who
managed to preserve all our
Muslim and non-Muslim traditions through hundreds of
centuries. … We hope that our citizens,
regardless of the depths of their religious beliefs, will
understand correctly the meaning of the
billboards [that read] ‘My poor people, where are we going?’
We have always had our own
Kyrgyz headscarves, elecheks, embroidered kalpaks, and
skullcaps. … Our grandmothers and
great-grandmothers never wore black …

SEVEN
!
Debating Islam through the Spirits
In this chapter,1 the theme of illness is continued, but the
perspective
shifts from sufferers to the practice of healers who work with
spirits.
Within the cosmologies of healers, experiential reasoning is
given objec-
tive form. The government’s efforts to monitor and control
religious
expression have stifled public debate and the free circulation of
interpre-
tations independent of its own discourses, but Muslims in
Uzbekistan
are still able to develop their own understandings of Islam and
contest
the practice of others. We have seen that imams criticise much
of the
practice of Central Asian Muslims as un-Islamic innovation, but
their

criticism is muted by the government’s celebration of an
authentic Cen-
tral Asian cultural and spiritual heritage. Those who do not
speak from
the security of the quasi-state regulatory structure that imom
khatib enjoy
are even more vulnerable to charges of extremism if they
proselytise too
vociferously.
In this environment, criticism of the practice of healing and
prophesy
with the help of spirits is ‘safe’. The postindependence
government has
not incorporated these practices within its idea of cultural
authenticity.
Healing with spirits falls outside the categories of Islam,
religion, culture,
and politics produced in state discourse and therefore is less
likely to
attract the attention of state officials and organs. It has become
a site
where debates about what it means to be a Muslim can take
place in
relative freedom.

203
Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan
Healing with Spirits in Uzbekistan
The healers I encountered in Uzbekistan evoke spirits to
diagnose and
treat illness in others and for purposes of prophesy. Spirits do
not take
physical possession of the bodies of the healers, but healers
remain
autonomous and fully conscious. They might be described as
inhab-
iting an expanded or altered consciousness that enables them to
see and
converse with spirits while displaying no change in outward
demeanour
(Stephen & Suryani 2000). At the same time, interaction with
spirit
beings is not confined to discrete occasions of healing or
prophecy but is
continuous within the lives of healers. Some claim that when
they were

children they were able to see strange beings invisible to others.
They
encounter and converse with spirits in dreams and waking
visions, and
many discovered the existence of their spirits through an illness
expe-
rience. This illness was caused by the spirits and recurs if the
person
does not practice healing. In some cases, the spirits are
fulfilling a greater
mission through the healer, calling the people of Uzbekistan
back to
Islam after decades of Soviet-imposed atheism. Healers might
be said
to embody the spirits in the sense that through their relation
with the
spirits they establish and maintain an ongoing moral state
(Lambek 1993,
316–20).
A brief account of healing with spirits during the Soviet period
pro-
vides a historical context for current practice. Gleb Snezarev
provides one
of the most detailed descriptions. Basing his account on

fieldwork he con-
ducted in the 1950s, he describes what he calls remnants of
shamanism
and its demonology in Khorezm province in northeastern
Uzbekistan
(Snezarev 2003). He describes varieties of supernatural beings,
including
jin and pari, among others. Jin, in his account, are malevolent
beings
that cause harm to people who encounter them. They are found
in such
places as abandoned villages, houses, and mosques; in
cemeteries; in
the manure of horses and donkeys; and in ash. Pari both harm
peo-
ple and have a benevolent attitude; they are classified as
Muslims and
204
unbelievers. Men and women who were called by pari to serve
as shamans
were referred to as parikhon or folbin in Khorezm and as

bakhshi among
Kyrgyz and Kazaks. This call sometimes came in the form of a
dream in
which the chosen person was offered one of the objects used by
shamans
such as a tambourine or whip, and those who were called risked
illness or
madness if they refused. In addition, upon accepting the call,
the shaman
had to visit a saint’s tomb to receive the saint’s blessing –
again, often
through a dream. Snezarev provides a detailed account of the
various
healing rituals shamans used to expel the problem-causing jin
with the
aid of the pari spirit helpers, including the placing of chicken
blood on
various parts of the patient’s body as food for the pari.
Like Snezarev, Vladimir Basilov draws a distinction between
what
he describes as shamanic practices and Islam in pre-Soviet and
Soviet
Central Asia. Shamans were healers who expelled illness-
causing jin and

divined the future with the aid of spirit helpers. He
characterises the
history of shamanism in Central Asia from the late nineteenth
cen-
tury onward as one in which it became Islamised. Shamanic
cosmology
was enriched by Islamic imagery, and shamans repositioned
themselves
within an Islamic frame. For example, they demanded that their
clients
carry out the same ritual ablutions before their healing
ceremonies that
they would before performing Muslim prayers; they used the
Qur’an
and Muslim prayer rugs in their divination and healing rituals;
and they
claimed that their healing spirits were prominent figures from
Islamic
history or cosmology, such as the angel Gabriel. Basilov also
describes
the hostile attitude of many Muslims towards shamans for
contravening
the doctrines of Islam and the opposition of some shamans to
Islam.

These shamans criticised the wearing of protective amulets that
con-
tained verses of the Qur’an written on pieces of paper, claimed
that their
spirits forbade them from becoming a mullah, or stated that they
could
not say the name of God when making offerings to the spirits.
For the
most part, however, Basilov describes a situation of peaceful
coexistence
and assimilation. Muslim figures such as mullahs adopted
elements of
205
the shamanic tradition and used spirit helpers. He describes
Sufism,
with its traditions of ecstatic trance states and its scorn for the
normative
strictures of ordinary Islamic practice, as particularly open to
incorpo-
rating elements of shamanic practice. Sufi spiritual leaders,
Basilov states,

accepted shamans among their followers and allowed them to
combine
shamanic divination with Sufi practices such as the zikr (the
chanted
repetition of the name of God). Shamans, for their part,
presented them-
selves as exemplary Muslims, and some considered it essential
to obtain
initiation from such Sufi masters (Basilov 1992).
Snezarev and Basilov attempt to differentiate between what they
implicitly assume to be Islam proper and pre-Islamic shamanic
prac-
tices that have been assimilated within it. There are two reasons
why I do
not agree with this approach. Firstly, this implies the objective
existence
of a ‘pure’ Islam, of which these practices do not form a part.
This dis-
misses the subjective experience of the healers who construct
themselves
as Muslims precisely through their interaction with spirits.
Moreover, to
assert that certain practices are pre-Islamic survivals is to make

a theo-
logical claim (Launay 1992, 5). Rather than focusing attention
upon the
process through which Muslims themselves construct moral
selves and
debate and negotiate the nature of Islam, the analyst implicitly
prejudges
local debates with his or her own notions about how the
boundaries
of Islam should be drawn. A more productive approach is to
look at
how individuals come to their own understandings. This means
taking
seriously the diverse perspectives of Muslims in their own
terms.
Secondly, classifying the practice of healing as shamanism sets
it apart
as a field of knowledge and practice with its own specialist
practition-
ers, separate from ‘lay’ experiences of spirit beings. However,
everyday
encounters with spirits in dreams or during visits to the tombs
of saints
draw on the same cosmologies and histories as those of

specialist healers,
and both are enactments of moral reasoning through which
individuals
develop an understanding of what it means to be a Muslim.
What distin-
guishes specialist healers is their more explicit reflection on
encounters
206
with spirits. The cosmologies healers develop present in
objective form
and thus make more readily accessible to conscious reflection
and manip-
ulation, the processes of moral reasoning that are largely
implicit within
experience. Like practices anthropologists have described using
the labels
of witchcraft, sorcery, or spirit possession, healing practices are
creative
interventions within ongoing, immediate concerns through an
appeal to
power that transcends the present. An important characteristic

of this
‘magical’ practice is its ambiguity. Healing with spirits,
witchcraft, and
sorcery can be morally evaluated in both negative and positive
terms,
often both at the same time. This renders them creative media
for debat-
ing and contesting what is true Islam and who is a good Muslim.
If we want to explore the creative dynamic of healing practices,
we
need to take the subjective experience of these practices
seriously in
their own terms. As the healers locate themselves firmly within
Islam,
we need to be open to exploring how debates about what it
means
to be a good Muslim are carried on through interaction with
spirits.
Even from Basilov’s own account, it is clear that identifying
different
types of shamanic or Muslim healing practices as distinct
categories
is problematic. In the present-day context, the labels used to
describe

healers and their spirits are not objective descriptors. They are
morally
loaded labels through which the practice of healing with spirits
and the
healers themselves are characterised as truly Muslim or
excluded from
genuine Islam. It is common for healers to be referred to by
others using
a term they personally disavow.
Taking Spirits Seriously
Much of the anthropological literature on spirit possession and
sorcery
has aimed to reveal the rational motivations underlying the
seemingly
exotic. There is a sometimes implicit, sometimes openly stated
assump-
tion that spirits and magic do not exist as empirical realities, so
that
the task of the social scientist is to uncover what is indeed real,
namely,
207

their observable social effects. Emphasis is placed upon the
motivations
and strategies of actors involved and the structural position of
spir-
its and magic within a social system. This was most clearly
evident in
the British structural functionalist tradition of anthropology, in
which
witchcraft accusations were commonly interpreted as expressing
the ten-
sions generated by a society’s social structure (Middleton 1963;
Nadel
1952). Similarly instrumentalist assumptions underlie more
recent anal-
yses in which spirit possession is understood as a means for
socially
marginalised groups within society – often women – to exercise
a degree
of agency or to establish a social network that offers them the
support,
autonomy, and authority they lack in wider society (Doumato
2000;
Lewis 1998). Alternatively, the practice of healers who work

with spirits
or magic has been analysed in terms of personal charisma and
the strate-
gies healers employ to convince clients of the efficacy of their
treatments
and in terms of their competition with other healers (Bellér-
Hann 2001;
Lindquist 2001a).
These analyses have provided important insights into the
dynamics
of healing and into the societies within which they are located.
Healers
as well as those who employ sorcery, or accuse others of doing
so, are
often motivated by such strategic and instrumental concerns.
Moreover,
in societies where women have limited autonomy outside the
enclosed
space of the home, networks formed through possession cults,
groups
formed for visiting shrines, or regular ritual gatherings women
hold to
invoke divine or spirit intercession can give those involved a
means of

expression they otherwise would not enjoy. However, by
excluding the
subjective reality of spirits and magic, creativity of moral
reasoning is also
excluded. It is true that a moral dimension is often part of
instrumentalist
or functionalist analyses. Lewis has made a distinction between
central
and peripheral possession cults, where the former represent and
enforce
the dominant morality and are the province of more powerful
sections
of society, whereas peripheral cults are amoral. Structural
functionalist
analysis typically makes a similar claim that witchcraft
allegations act to
208
enforce social norms. But morality here is seen as static rules
and norms
that leave little space for creativity and diversity.

The issue of morality takes centre stage in the more recent
litera-
ture, which studies witchcraft and sorcery in relation to
conditions of
modernity. This literature suggests that far from being forms of
primi-
tive, premodern thinking that should be displaced by the
advancement
of scientific knowledge, sorcery and occult practices are in fact
pro-
duced within the local experiences of global capitalism and the
politics
of the modern nation-state. In these terms, occult practices and
spirit
possession are understood as moral commentaries of the
dispossessed
within colonial and postcolonial societies, as resistance to their
situation
of inequality and exploitation (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999;
Moore &
Sanders 2001; Ong 1988; Taussig 1977), as well as a critique of
the politi-
cal power and corruption of politicians (Meyer 1998). Insightful
though

these analyses are, they, too, gloss over the possibility of the
reality of
magic. Occult practices and spirit possession are not studied on
their
own terms but are regarded as really being about something
else. They
are taken to be meta-narratives arising out of a more tangible
(and more
apparently rational) economic or political reality. Dynamism is
located
in changing political economies that are objectified and
reflected upon
within sorcery discourses.
In order to fully appreciate the creativity of magic and how this
creativ-
ity enables processes of moral reasoning, we need to open
ourselves to its
reality for those involved (Boddy 1988; Kapferer 2003; Lambek
1988). This
is the approach adopted by a number of recent studies of spirit
possession
and sorcery in Muslim societies. By taking spirit agents
seriously, rather
than attempting to ‘decode’ spirit possession as an allegory or

reflec-
tion of processes external to it, Jennifer Nourse has been able to
explore
possession as an arena in which the Lauje in Indonesia come to
differ-
ing understandings of what it means to be Muslim. Whereas
reformist
Muslims, mainly immigrants to the area but also some local
Lauje, criti-
cise belief in spirits as a pagan practice that denies the
fundamental unity
209
of God, Lauje who take part in possession rituals emphasise the
collective
nature of spirits as refractions of a single essence created by
God, and
therefore consistent with monotheistic Islam. An additional
voice is that
of elite Lauje followers of a Sufi tradition who establish their
authority
and identity as true Muslims through their mastery of

knowledge of the
spirits as separate, individual entities with their own natures
and powers
(Nourse 1996). It is only by accepting the subjective experience
of all
parties in their own terms, Nourse argues, that we can free
analysis from
the limiting perspective of individual strategies and competition
over
authority and power.
Nourse’s ethnography touches on an important aspect of magic
that
creates particular space for creativity, namely its ambiguity.
The spirits
are located within the experience of the Lauje Sufi elite in a
fundamen-
tally different manner than the way in which they inhabit the
mediums
themselves. Although their utterances during possession rituals
through
the bodies of the mediums emphasise their collective nature, the
Sufi
elite take these occasions as opportunities for displaying and
expanding

their own esoteric knowledge by discerning genuine from fake
spirits,
reinterpreting their utterances for the audience, and attempting
to dis-
cern and individuate the spirits’ origins and identities. All
participants
are involved within the same possession episode, but experience
is not
uniform and they develop contrasting Muslim identities through
their
interaction with spirits.
This quality of ambiguity has been pointed out in accounts of
sor-
cery and spirit possession in a wide range of ethnographic
contexts. The
power of sorcery is often viewed as amoral, so that it can be
used both
to inflict harm and protect. Healers and those who provide
protection
against sorcery attacks are frequently held in suspicion as being
poten-
tial sorcerers themselves. This is true even when the power
involved is

attributed ultimately to God or is located within the text of the
Qur’an
(Barth 1993, 257–60; Bowen 1993b; Lambek 1993, 121–33).
Similarly, pos-
session complexes among previously non-Muslim groups
incorporated
210
within a Muslim dominated polity have been shown both to
negotiate
an accommodation with Islam and even reflect the hegemony of
Islamic
ideals, while at the same time being a forum for expressing
resistance to
Islam and to validate alternative non-Muslim identities and
moralities
(Masquelier 2001; McIntosh 2004).
The ambiguity of magic is the ambiguity inherent in the
indetermi-
nate nature of experience itself. Magic brings this into sharp
relief. Bruce
Kapferer makes the point that sorcery is located in the lived-in

world. It
does not present an abstract model through which contingent
events can
be understood, merely offering explanations for misfortune or
express-
ing interpersonal conflict. Rather, sorcery brings to bear on
crises and
suffering in the lived-in world cosmologies that articulate the
ontolog-
ical state of humans in the world and the forces motivating
individual
action. It aims to effect material interventions in ongoing life-
concerns
(Kapferer 1997). Healing cosmologies and histories manifest the
reason-
ing inherent in experience. Moreover, Kapferer argues that a
person’s
subjective experience of sorcery arises from a consciousness
grounded
both in the body and the world. Consciousness is not only
reflective
thought, but arises from an embodied existence in a lifeworld as
well
as a person’s relations and interaction with others, much of

which is
not explicitly reflected upon (Kapferer 1997, 222). For
Kapferer, sorcery
is a manifestation of consciousness. In Chapter 6 I argue that
moral
reasoning is innate to experience, whereby indeterminate,
contingent
experience is apprehended within an unfolding moral narrative.
This
takes on objective form in the cosmologies healers invoke. The
dynamic
process of moral reasoning is laid bare in the creative work of
healers as
they develop Muslim selves through their interaction with
spirits.
Healing Cosmologies
As I show in Chapter 6, individuals draw on a variety of
domains of
knowledge in apprehending their experience of illness and
encounters
211

with spirits. Healers in Uzbekistan similarly invoke within their
healing
practice an eclectic mixture of Islamic cosmology and practice,
Sufi
ideas about chains of the transmission of knowledge, ideas from
what
might be termed ‘New Age’ healing such as bioenergy, as well
as imagery
from the biomedical tradition. This mixture of imagery and
practice
is not unique to healing in Uzbekistan but has been observed
among
healers in a variety of settings from Kazakhstan and Russia to
Bali (Barth
1993; Bellér-Hann 2001; Lindquist 2001b). Kapferer has
described sorcery
practices as ‘metacosmologies’ in the sense that they break
apart elements
of different cosmological frames and recombine them in novel
ways, so
that they are major sites for invention (Kapferer 2003). The
creative
dynamic of healing with spirits offers a means for healers to
construct

themselves as Muslims in the face of critics who claim that they
stand
outside true Islam.
The ethnography on healing with spirits I present here was
recorded
in and around the village of Pakhtabad. Gulnorahon is a fifty-
year-
old woman who lives and works in a town in Andijan province
located
approximately ten miles from Pakhtabad. I have chosen to relate
her story
because it is particularly rich in creative imagery and includes
features
common to most of the healers I encountered, although imagery
and
practice vary from healer to healer. Gulnorahon described her
ancestors
on both her mother’s and father’s side as ‘white bones’,
descendents of the
Prophet or of Muslim saints, and recalled performing the
morning namoz
(Muslim prayers) with her grandmother in her childhood. She
graduated

from a higher educational institute and works as a
schoolteacher. At the
age of twenty-five, she became ill and had a series of heart
attacks, which
persisted for ten years and resulted in the partial paralysis of
her face
(a condition people often associate with the influence of jin). In
1989,
when she was thirty-five, after recovering from a heart attack in
a clinic
in the city of Andijan, the doctor who treated her suggested that
she turn
to a ‘spiritually pure person’ who could cure her by reading the
Qur’an
over her and that she turn to ‘our own musulmonchilik’
(Muslimness).
212
figure 17. One of Gulnorahon’s apprentices treating a fallen
heart in Pakhtabad
Gulnorahon recovered after a healer in Kyrgyzstan cleansed her
of the

hostile spirits possessing her.
During the healing process, Gulnorahon had a dream in which a
woman gave her seven objects connected with healing,
including prayer
beads (tasbeh) and a knife. When she subsequently related the
dream, the
healer summoned the spirit, asked her name, and identified her
as Lojim
Poshsha Hojaona, one of Gulnorahon’s ancestors who had
performed
the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca seven times and become a healer
(tabib)
herself. The healer identified Gulnorahon as a healer and
became her
master (ustoz). Gulnorahon learnt healing practice with her and
was also
shown how to heal by an oqsoqol (old man) who appeared to her
in
dreams. In fact, Gulnorahon said that in her childhood, she had
dreams
where she saw spirit beings but she did not know what they
were at the
time. In 1990, her master gave her the duo (blessing and
permission) to

213
‘work in Islam, purity (poklik), to perform the prayers five
times a day,
to work in a halol (ritually pure) manner, not for monetary gain
in this
world but for God’. She gave her the prayer beads, knife, and
other tools
of healing, and also the spirit of her ancestor Lojim Poshsha
Hojaona as
a spirit helper.
In 1991, after working as a healer for a short period,
Gulnorahon
completed a three-month course at an ‘extrasense’ centre in
Tashkent that
her master from Kyrgyzstan had also attended. At the centre,
she studied,
as she put it, how to perform the Muslim prayers, religious
knowledge
(ilm) from a domla (person learned in Islam), anatomy and
physiology

from a doctor, and how to heal spiritually. She received a
diploma. The
centre was founded by a retired university professor who had
been on the
hajj and who had herself graduated from the parent centre in
Moscow
with which the Tashkent centre had been affiliated during the
Soviet
period. After independence, it was registered with the state
authorities
and in fact became a private firm belonging to the founder.2
When I
asked Gulnorahon why she felt the need to attend the course,
she replied
that she needed to obtain official documentation (hujjat): ‘If
you gather
people they will ask you if you have any documents. I am a
teacher as
well, and because there are all sorts of worldviews, this diploma
gives me
lots of strength’. She added that her documents gave her the
right to check
up on people who practice her form of healing in Andijan. She
claimed

that there were a lot of charlatans pretending to heal people for
money,
whereas she had read the Qur’an and had a duo (blessing) from
a master.
In fact, Gulnorahon was the only healer I encountered who had
attended
any sort of institutionalised training or had paper qualifications.
Most
had obtained a duo from another healer or through a dream
encounter
with an ancestor, Muslim saint, or some other spirit being.
In the course of her healing, Gulnorahon relies on her spirit
helpers,
which she refers to as azizlar (saints) or otakhonlar (sing.
otakhon: ances-
tor). The fact that she and other healers refer to their helping
spirits
in this way rather than as pari is significant, and I will return to
this
214
issue in the next section. She has a principal otakhon named

Hurshid
Mahsum who was also given to her (qo’y bergan) by her master
in Kyr-
gyzstan. This otakhon has a ‘deputy’ named Karim Polonoglu
Nusrotilloh
Qori, and they call on other azizlar as necessary. Gulnorahon
uses her
azizlar to diagnose patients’ illnesses and to inform her as to
what heal-
ing actions she needs to perform, such as reading a specific
passage from
the Qur’an. ‘I will read and they will stand behind me. Together
we
will heal, and . . . they will tell me how to massage, to give
heat, to pass
biopower.’ With a Russian patient, Gulnorahon recounted how
her prin-
ciple otakhon called ‘the head of the popes’ from her (the
Russian’s) own
nationality (millat). Her head spirit has told her that he has
spirits from
every national group.
Gulnorahon’s healing contains a mixture of elements pertaining
to

Islam, knowledge of biomedicine and anatomy, and what might
be called
‘New Age’ philosophy.
People get lots of illnesses from getting frights, stress. Blood
doesn’t circulate
properly and a person can go mad, blood doesn’t go to the
brain. Hardened
blood goes to the organs. Medicine can’t detect this. We raise
the heart with
water and with hands (passing heat and bioenergy through the
hands). Then
we use lead (she drops a small amount of molten lead into a
bowl of cold
water and makes a diagnosis of the state of the patient’s inner
organs from
the shape the lead takes), and after we’ve raised the heart two or
three times
the blood vessels will loosen, the circulation will improve.
In fact, Gulnorahon and the healers she trained were the only
healers
working with spirits I encountered who referred explicitly to
‘bioenergy’.
I surmise that this is because she and her master had attended
the training
institute in Tashkent, and Gulnorahon had incorporated this
knowledge
within her healing practice. In describing how she worked with
her spirit

helpers, she explained:
I’ll do two rakaat of the namoz (cycles of prayer) to give them
strength to do
the job. For example, I’ll place three oqsoqol, otakhonlar on the
first person
215
to come. If there’s a problem with the internal organs, a doctor
otakhon will
come, give injections and heal. I’ll ask them to give light from
the third planet
to the place which is cold. They will clean the client. This is not
seen, you
have to believe. I will cut the jin out with my knife and the
black things will
fall off the person. The otakhonlar will sweep them up, and a
person from
the second planet will come and take them away.
In addition to healing with spirit helpers, Gulnorahon prepares
herbal
medicines and also dips paper on which verses of the Qur’an are
written
in tea, which the patient drinks.
The cosmology and practice of most healers I observed share a
set of

central features, many of which are also described in the
ethnographic
accounts of healing in Uzbekistan during the Soviet period that
I referred
to earlier in this chapter. These include the initiatory illnesses
by which
the sufferer is identified as a healer, self-identification as
coming from a
line of healers so that healing is seen as a natural quality of the
person
transmitted by blood, obtaining the blessing and sometimes
training
from established healers, and often being visited in dreams by
ancestors
or Muslim saints who might also pass on certain objects used in
healing,
such as a Qur’an or prayer beads. Despite the wide variation in
indi-
vidual practice and cosmology, these shared features unite the
diversity
of individual practice into a tradition of healing shared by
practitioners
and clients. Tradition in this sense is not a bounded and fixed
body of

knowledge and practice, mechanically reproduced from
generation to
generation, perhaps incorporating elements from other such
traditions
and shedding some of its own with the passage of time. This
sort of con-
ception would encourage an ‘archaeology’ of healing, which
attempts to
identify a pure essence continuing through time …
Bringing the mosque home and talking politics: women,
domestic space, and the state in the Ferghana Valley
(Uzbekistan)
Svetlana Peshkova
Published online: 12 August 2009
# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract In this article I argue that domestic space has to be
theorized as an
important center of religious practice and socio-political
activism. Born-again and
devout Muslim women in the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan) use
domestic space as
an important sacred place for religious observance and
socialization equal to the
mosques. This sacred place has a special meaning for born-
again and devout

Muslims as it carries a promise of personal and social change.
In the context of
religious and political persecution by the Uzbek state, domestic
space is experienced
as a politically safe place and as a critically important site of
socio-political criticism
and activism, as some intimate in-house discussions about
religious, political, and
social oppression take a form of public protest on the streets.
Keywords Islam . House . Socio-political activism . Muslim .
Uzbekistan . The state
...we have a desire to go to the mosques, but in Uzbekistan only
men go there.
We [women] are not very upset because the Qur’an says that
one needs to read
within a group and we do just that at our meetings (interview,
2002).
Ugar used to be a street boy, you know, he was drinking,
fighting, and
smoking. In 1994 something happened, I do not know what, and
he began to
read namoz [ritual prayer],1 study Arabic, and his life has
changed, one
hundred per cent. But he suffered because of his faith. He was
set up by the
Cont Islam (2009) 3:251–273
DOI 10.1007/s11562-009-0093-z
S. Peshkova (*)
Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire,
Huddleston Hall, # 310, 73 Main Street,
Durham, NH 03824-3532, USA

e-mail: [email protected]
1 Ritual prayer(s) performed five times a day (Uz. Namoz and
Ar. salat) is one of “the five pillars” of
Islam.
police when the government was fighting against Wahhabists2
here. They
[police] planted drugs in his suitcase. He ended up in prison.
Now he is out but
still is a deep believer. You know, he was innocent. He was
guilty of one thing:
trying to change his life and live like true Muslim. Our system
[government]
does not want us to lead Muslim lives. If we do, they will stop
making
money.... We are all set up in this country. We have to steal and
live criminal
lives. Many people suffer innocently if they try to break away
from this life.
Our police officers do not know our rights. It [police] does not
want us to know
and does not respect these rights anyway. All it [police] needs
is money. I used to
be a driver. I know plenty. There were five young men in
Margilon that were
arrested as Wahhabists. There were no evidences against them.
One of them was
killed, beaten to death. They [police] threw his body in the
canal and some people
later fished his body out. Another one was raped.... When some
people in Tashkent
[capital of Uzbekistan] found out about it, they punished those
officers who did it.
But nothing has changed. Some Muslims in one zona

[correctional facility] in
Karakalpakistan, I know it for a fact, are political and religious
prisoners who are
tortured and live in inhuman conditions (personal
communication, 2002).
In October 2002, a young man from the Ferghana Valley
(Uzbekistan), 3 Ulugbek,
told me this story. Like many other stories it demonstrates that
consistent religious
observance by some Muslims in Uzbekistan was suspect, read as
a sign of political
affiliation by the Uzbek government whose abuses of power and
persecutions of
devout Muslims are well documented4 (International Crisis
2007; McGlinchey 2007;
Kandiyoti and Azimova 2004; Human Rights Watch 2005). This
increased religious
observance by some Muslims is a part of a religious renewal in
post-Soviet Central
Asia in which some locals transform from being culturally or
secularly Muslim
(celebrating some religious holidays or occasionally
participating in religious rituals)
to being devout. This transformation is expressed through
consistent performance of
ritual prayers, participation in communal religious rituals,
observance of dietary
restrictions, adoption of particular forms of covered dress,5
cultivation of piety
through spiritual exercises (e.g. zikr)6 and religious education
(cf. Mahmood 2005).
2 In my experience the term was used in the Valley in reference
to those who (1) wanted to purify, to different
degrees, existing religious practices from innovations; (2) were

reported by the mass media (reflecting such
government sources as the national security service [former
KGB]) to desire an Islamic state by overthrowing
existing government; and (3) to those in agreement with certain
principles outlined in the Kitab at-Tawhid by Abd
al-Wahhab (reported by one interlocutor to be available in the
Valley since late 1970s). The term was also used
to slander one’s opponents and to justify the state’s
authoritarianism by politicians and political commentators.
Louw (2007:30–33) has a useful discussion about the state’s use
of the term. Those referred to as “Wahhabists”
were not, to my knowledge, the supporters or representatives of
the Hanbali school (of jurisprudence) of Sunni
Islam widespread in Saudi Arabia. For a detailed discussion of
Wahhabism see Algar (2002).
3 My research was conducted in the part of the Ferghana Valley
that belongs to Uzbekistan. The Valley is
shared among Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In light of
the on-going persecution of devout and
born-again Muslims in Uzbekistan, the names of the
interlocutors have been changed. When quoting
individuals I omit references to a particular city or village.
4 On the theory of oppression and violence perpetuated by
states, see Rashid Omar’s dissertation
“Religion, Violence & the State: A Dialogical Encounter
between Activists and Scholars.” Doctoral
Dissertation in Religious Studies, University of Cape Town,
South Africa (December 2005).
5 For women it is usually a scarf that covers one’s hair and neck
(two scarves for some) and a long, loose dress.
6 In this case a devotional practice that consists of repeating
such phrases as la illaha illa’llah [Ar. there is
no other God but Allah].
252 Cont Islam (2009) 3:251–273

These transformed Muslims I refer to as “born-again.” Not
every inhabitant of the
Valley is Uzbek, not every Uzbek is a born-again, and not every
born-again is
Uzbek. Local communities include several ethnic groups such as
Tajiks, Kyrgyz,
Koreans, Russians, Roma and Jews; among these are Christians,
Jews, Buddhists,
Hare Krishna, and agnostics. There are also Muslims who
continued to be devout
before, during, and after the Soviet rule. There are atheist (born
into Muslim families
but lacking belief in God) Muslims as well.7 In this article I
focus on the devout and
born-again Muslims’ socially “active religiosity” that I,
following Bayat (2005), take
to include not only increased religious observance but also
socio-political activism.
I have heard stories similar to Ulugbek’s recollection of
persecution and abuse in
private conversations with local people and at several social
gatherings taking place in
domestic spaces. These included ihsons (ceremonial gatherings
and feasts to express
one’s gratitude to God, to make special requests and to gain
religious merit and
blessing),8 life-cycle ceremonies, gap (gathering of one’s social
network), mavlud
(celebration of the Prophet’s birth) and dars (religious lesson)
at local home-schools
(cf. Kandiyoti and Azimova 2004). In some cases verbal
criticism of contemporary
life in the Ferghana Valley was preceded or followed by public

protests outside
domestic space. At least three public protests took place during
the second part of my
ethnographic fieldwork in 2002–2003. The participants in these
protests suffered or
feared various degrees of the Uzbek state’s disciplinary action
against them.
Following Foucault (1978), I take the state to mean an
aggregation of various
administrative and law enforcement institutions, constituted by
individuals behaving
in patterned ways. This aggregation has an authority to make
rules that govern people
living within a particular territory (and beyond) and to enforce
these rules through
techniques of power at every level of social organization, such
as the police, the
mahalla (neighborhood) committee and the family. Despite on-
going persecution by
the state socio-political activism beyond domestic space
continued to be vibrant in the
Valley. In 2005, one of these protests culminated in the
massacre of civilians by
government forces in the Valley’s city of Andijan (Andijon)
(Khalid 2007:192–198;
Human Rights Watch 2005). In this context individual homes
were safer environments
than other public spaces, such as the streets or the mosques, for
expressing one’s
socially active religiosity through verbal criticism of the
existing regime.9
7 These descriptive adjectives refer to various feelings about
and ways of expressing in words and acting
out one’s religiosity.

8 The definition I use is a direct translation of the local
women’s definition of these occasions. By hosting such
ceremony a household (not just its individual members) gains
religious merit and blessing. Similar ceremonial
occasions based on individuals sponsoring feasts in their homes
or at the sacred sites take place in other Muslim
communities. For instance, in Malaysia, Bosnia, and Ajaria
these occasions have been analyzed as a way of
establishing and solidifying interpersonal connections and
networks (see Bringa 1995, Being Muslim the
Bosnian way: identity and community in a central Bosnian
village. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, and Neuburger 2004, The Orient within: Muslim
minorities and the negotiation of nationhood in
modern Bulgaria, Cornell University Press). In Turkish villages
Mevlud celebrations have similar elements
(see Tapper and Tapper 1987, The Birth of the Prophet: ritual
and gender in Turkish Islam. Man 22(1):69–
92). Abramson and Karimov (2007) translate ihson as
“pilgrimage” (p. 320).
9 Although McGlinchey (2007) suggests that there are limits to
the Uzbek state’s control of local mosques,
during my research Ferghana and Margilan cities’ mosques were
not only patrolled by the local militsia
(police) but also were talked about as “unsafe” spaces where the
government’s informants abound.
Cont Islam (2009) 3:251–273 253253
Gradually, after Uzbekistan’s independence from the Soviet
Union in 1991, the
state’s inability to effectively control domestic space resulted in
both secular and
religious authorities’ criticism of social and religious gatherings

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