Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Based on the author’s fieldwork in Andijan (1998-2000) and Samarkand (2003- 2004), the eight lucid chapters of this book throw light on the conditions under which Muslims in Uzbekistan engage with Islam by elucidating the understanding, reasoning, and other diverse strategies through which the Uzbeks develop their Muslim selves.

Based on his experience, Rasanayagam, a social Anthropologist at Aberdeen University, cautions that analytical frames that set up religion, culture, and the social as discrete categories may not be helpful for understanding how sociality itself can provide the quality of transcendence typically reserved for the ‘religious’ (p. 95) and he opines that religion ‘alone’ is an inadequate framework for understanding Islam as it is lived: ‘By understanding Islam in terms of morality rather than religion, the question is not whether practices or processes of reasoning are objectively Islamic or can be understood as concerned with the sacred, but whether they contribute to the development of a moral self that is understood by the individual as a Muslim self’ (p. 35).

Conducting ethnographic research on Islam in post-Soviet Central Asian context is not a straight forward exercise as interactions with beliefs and practices undergo a number of influences, impediments and impositions. Hence Rasanayam’s approach to fieldwork is from the perspective of cultural practice which allows for individuals in Uzbekistan to discuss and engage with Islam within the context of what is defined as ‘traditional’ Islam.