The Uzbekistan government has been criticized for its brutal suppression of its Muslim population. This 2011 book, which is based on the author's intimate acquaintance with the region and several years of ethnographic research, is about how Muslims in this part of the world negotiate their religious practices despite the restraints of a stifling authoritarian regime. Fascinatingly, the book also shows how the restrictive atmosphere has actually helped shape the moral context of people's lives, and how understandings of what it means to be a Muslim emerge creatively out of lived experience.
• An ethnographically rich account of Muslim lives in post-Soviet Uzbekistan • Distinctive in its analysis of the effects of a repressive political system on religious practice and expression • Important contribution into a growing discussion within anthropology about the nature of the moral
Contents
Introduction: towards an anthropology of moral reasoning; 1. Islam and sociality in Pakhtabad and Samarkand; 2. The new Soviet (Central Asian) person and the colonization of consciousness; 3. Good and bad Islam after the Soviet Union: the instrumentalization of tradition; 4. The practical hegemony of state discourse; 5. The moral sources of experience: social, supernatural and material worlds; 6. Moral reasoning through the experience of illness; 7. Debating Islam through the spirits; 8. Experience, intelligibility and tradition.
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