Pursuing ‘Muslimness’: shrines as sites for moralities in the making in post-Soviet Bukhara

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements For very constructive and encouraging comments to this article I owe my thanks to Lotte Isager and Johan Rasanayagam. I am also grateful to the participants in the ‘Post-Soviet Islam: An Anthropological Perspective’ workshop at the Max Planck Institute in Halle, 29 June to 1 July 2005, who contributed with their comments to the paper on which this article is based. Notes 1. My fieldwork was conducted from June 1998 through February 1999, and from June through September 2000. Cf also M. Louw, ‘The Heart with God. The Hand at Work.’ Being Muslim in post-Soviet Bukhara (PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, Aarhus University, 2004 and M. Louw, Everday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Routledge 2007)). 2. Robert Desjarlais uses the phrase ‘struggling along’ to denote a distinct way of being in the world in which future, present, and past have little to do with one another, and in which recollections depend on momentary preoccupations more than any deftly woven remembrances of time past. R. Desjarlais, ‘Struggling Along’, Things as They Are. New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology, M. Jackson (eds.), (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). 3. Most Soviet scholars tried to explain the perseverance of Islam in the Soviet Union by reference to the thesis that social consciousness is more conservative than social being. Although the evolution of consciousness, according to Marxist historical materialism, is determined by changes in social life, there is not necessarily complete harmony between different stages of the development of society and consciousness, and remnants or survivals of earlier forms of consciousness can be found in more developed societies, including the Soviet Union. 4. Western scholars of Islam in the Soviet Union, with Alexandre Bennigsen as the leading figure, often assumed that the Muslim societies in the Soviet Union had not been modernised in a cultural or psychological sense, as they were protecting themselves and their tradition against Soviet attempts at modernisation. Retrospectively, these studies appear to have been informed by some rather stereotypical categories which were substitutes for the ethnographic richness that was lacking due to the impossibility of doing first-hand research in the Soviet Union. These categories were rooted in a modernist theoretical framework similar to the one informing Soviet analyses, a framework which maintained a dichotomy between essentialised conceptions of ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’ on the one hand, and ‘modernity’ on the other, and which treated these concepts as mutually exclusive. 5. See for example Shirin Akiner, ‘Social and political reorganisation in Central Asia: transition from pre-colonial to post-colonial society’, Post-Soviet Central Asia, T. Atabaki and J. O'Kane (eds.), (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998); Y. Ro'i, ‘The secularisation of Islam and the USSR's muslim areas’, Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies, Y. Ro'i (eds.), (London: Frank Cass, 1995); M. Atkin, ‘Islam as faith, politics and bogeyman in Tajikistan’, The Politics of Religion in Russia and the new States of Eurasia, M. Bordeaux (eds.), (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe 1995); D. Ibrahim, The Islamisation of Central Asia. A Case Study of Uzbekistan (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation 1992) and N. Shahrani, ‘Islam and the Political Culture of ‘Scientific Atheism’ in Post-Soviet Central Asia’, The Politics of Religion in Russia and the new States of Eurasia, M. Bordeaux (eds.), (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe 1995). 6. See for example A. Bennigsen and S. E. Wimbush, Mystics and commissars. Sufism in the Soviet Union (London: Hurst, 1985); H. Fathi, ‘Otines: the unknown women clerics of Central Asian Islam’, Central Asian Survey, Vol 16, No 1, 1997; I. Lipovsky, ‘The awakening of Central Asian Islam’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 32, No 3, 1996; S. Poliakov, Everyday Islam. Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1992); B. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001) and V. Schubel, ‘Post-Soviet Hagiography and the Reconstruction of the Naqshbandi Tradition in Contemporary Uzbekistan’, Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia. Change and Continuity, E. Özdalga (eds.), (Swedish Research Centre in Istanbul, 1999). 7. R. D. McChesney, Central Asia: Foundations of Change (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1996), p 19. 8. E. S. Casey, ‘How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological prolegomena’, Senses of Place, S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds.), (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996). 9. Ibid, pp 24–25. 10. K. H. Basso, ‘Wisdom sits in places. Notes on a western apache landscape’, Senses of Place, S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds.), (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), p 56. 11. Basso adopts Martin Heidegger's concept of ‘dwelling’ to denote the multiple ‘lived relationships’ that people maintain with places. 12. According to Islamic tradition, the prophet Muhammad, in 622, ascended to heaven, where he met with the prophets of the past, was given visions of heaven and hell, gazed upon God and was given the command of five prayers a day for all Muslims. 13. The local historian Narzulla Yo'ldoshev has written about the most well-known of them in his book Buxoro avliyolarining tarixi, ‘The history of Bukhara's avliya’. N. Yo'ldoshev, Buxoro avliyolarning tarixi (Bukhara: Buxoro, 1997). 14. Derived from the Arabic awliyā', plural of wali. The term wali is seldom used. The plural form avliyo is commonly used as a singular. The Uzbek plural form, then, is avliyolar. Avliyo, however, is also commonly used as a plural form. 15. Abdulkholiq G'ijduvoniy (d. 1220), Xoja Orif ar-Revgariy (d. 1259), Xoja Mahmud Anjir Faghnaviy (d. 1245 or 1272), Xoja ali Rometaniy (d. 1306 or 1321), Muhammad Boboiy Samosiy (d. 1340 or 1354), and Sayyid Mir Kulol (d. 1371) and Bahouddin Naqshband (d. 1389) (names according to contemporary Uzbek spelling). According to Jürgen Paul the concept of the ‘seven pirs’ is a modern invention. They are nowhere grouped together in this fashion in medieval sources. J. Paul, ‘Contemporary Uzbek Hagiography and its Sources’, Sprachen, Mythen, Mythizismen: Festschrift Walter Beltz zum 65. Geburtstag, Hallsche Beiträge zur Orientwissenschaft, Vol 32, No 1, 2002, p 631. 16. For example Boboyi Porado'z, who is patron saint of shoemakers, Usta Ruhiy, patron saint of metalworkers, Jonmardi Qassob, patron saint of butchers, Imom Muhammad G'azzoliy, patron saint of tailors—and numerous others: See Yo'ldoshev, op cit, Ref xiii, p 123. 17. According to Jürgen Paul this interpretation of the figure of Bahouddin Naqshband constitutes an anachronistic projection of a Soviet/post-Soviet ethics into the past and should be regarded as an instance of how classical texts are adapted, and past principles and figures reinterpreted, to suit present concerns and accommodate present-day political circumstances. See Paul, op cit, Ref xv, pp 629–38. 18. T. Ingold, ‘The temporality of the landscape’, World Archaeology. Vol 25, No 2, 1993, p 152. 19. Ibid, p 153. 20. Cf A. Bennigsen and S. E Wimbush, op cit, Ref vi, p 42. 21. Cf A. Bennigsen and S. E. Wimbush, op cit, Ref vi, p 42 and M. Saroyan, Minorities, Mullahs and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (IAS: Berkeley, 1997), pp 48–50, 66–68. 22. For a sketch of Soviet interpretation and preservation of Bukhara's ancient heritage, see M. Azzout, ‘The Soviet interpretation and preservation of the ancient heritage of Uzbekistan: the example of Bukhara’, Bukhara. The Myth and the Architecture, A. Petruccioli (eds.), (Cambridge MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999). 23. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), p 183. 24. Cf David Lowenthal who has demonstrated how in the twentieth century the past has been treated as a ‘foreign country’ radically different from modern time, its relics being largely irrelevant to modern concerns. D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 25. Cf also O. Roy, The New Central Asia. The Creation of Nations (London and New York: I. P. Tauris), p 152. 26. M. Taussig, Defacement. Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p 5. 27. People often used the Russian term zakret when talking about the fact that ziyorat was forbidden during Soviet times. Using the Russian term in discourses otherwise held in Uzbek or Tajik, it seems, they dissociate themselves from the practice of closing off and indicate that it is to be conceived as a foreign imposition. 28. http://jahon.mfa.uz/english.htm 29. Mikhail Bakhtin used the concept of chronotrope (literally ‘time space’) to denote the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships; the inseparability of space and time. He, more specifically, discusses literary chronotopes, which fuse spatial and temporal indicators into wholes, but the concept, I believe, is also revealing outside the literary realm. M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time and chronotypes in the novel’, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, M. Holquist (eds.), (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991). 30. Cf M. Herzfeld, A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 31. Cf P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p 48. 32. Cf P. Werbner and H. Basu, ‘The embodiment of charisma’, Embodying Charisma. Modernity, Locality and the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p 3. 33. P. Bourdieu, ‘The Economy of Symbolic Goods’, Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp 76–77 and P. Bourdieu, ‘Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence’, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 34. G. Hage, ‘The differential intensities of social reality: migration, participation and guilt’, Arab Australians Today (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), p 201. 35. M. Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p 123 and M. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press), p 13. 36. The hand is also interpreted as a symbol of the ‘five pillars’ of Islam. I did not encounter the common interpretation in the Arab world which identifies the hand as ‘Fatima's hand’, a widely used protection against the evil eye and djinns, demons. 37. Alexander the Great invaded Central Asia in 329 BC, defeating the Persians, the Scythians who lived north of the Syrdaryo River and finally the Sogdians (the Persians had created the province of Sogdiana and Bactria covering much of present-day Uzbekistan). In Samarkand, Alexander killed his best friend Clitus and later married Roxana, daughter of the Sogdian chief Oxyartes. Alexander died in 323 BC. A. Rashid, The Resurgence of Central Asia. Islam or Nationalism? (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1994), pp 84, 165. 38. J. Nazpary, Post-Soviet Chaos. Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (London and Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press 2002). 39. Cf also A. Krämer, Geistliche Autorität und islamische Gesellschaft in Wandel. Studien über Frauenälteste (otin und xalfa) im unabhängigen Usbekistan (Berlin: Klaus Schwartz Verlag 2002). 40. Cf S. Akiner, ‘Between tradition and modernity: the dilemma facing contemporary Central Asian women’, Post-Soviet Women: from the Baltic to Central Asia, M. Buckley (eds.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 41. Cf V. Argyrou, ‘Under a spell: the strategic use of magic in Greek Cypriot Society’, American Ethnologist, Vol 20, No 2, pp 256–271. 42. M. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press), pp 16–18.