On 13 May 2005, government security forces massacred hundreds of protesters in the city of Andijan, in Uzbekistan's portion of the Fergana Valley. Accounts are contested, and reliable facts are hard to come by, given the Uzbekistan government's efforts to restrict the flow of information. International human rights and crisis monitoring groups claimed that as many as 750 people were killed, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians protesting the economic hardship caused by corruption, government repression, restrictive government regulations on trade, and the arbitrary arrest of individuals on charges of religious extremism. The government, for its part, claims that the demonstrators were armed Islamist extremists and terrorists who had forced civilians into the square as human shields, and that fewer than 200 were killed, most of whom were the gunmen themselves or security service personnel (Human Rights Watch 2005; Kendzior 2007; Khalid 2007, 192; Megoran 2008). The protests were sparked by the trial of a group of local businessmen on charges of religious extremism and involvement in a banned Islamic group named as ‘Akromiya’ by the state prosecutors. The trial itself attracted large demonstrations by the relatives and supporters of the accused, who protested their innocence and criticised the unfairness of the criminal justice process. At the conclusion of the trial, a group of armed men stormed the prison in Andijan in which the businessmen were being held and freed them, along with hundreds of other prisoners, many of whom were also convicted on charges of religious extremism.

Chapter 5 discussed the moral quality of experience, and in this chapter I explore its creativity. Experiential reasoning is not only a self-conscious, cognitive activity of the mind but is inherent in life as it is lived. It takes place within embodied, intersubjective engagement in a social and material world. At the same time, experience is not ‘neutral’ or unmediated but is refracted through models for action, cosmologies, and local histories that make possible particular qualities of experience. It is creatively configured and made meaningful within a developing narrative frame.

I have chosen illness as a context for examining moral reasoning because it introduces an obvious break into the flow of experience. It presents a point of discontinuity, an interruption and challenge that demands attention (Good 1994; Mattingly 1998). Perhaps because of this, a significant body of literature has developed that seeks to explore personal illness as an experience through which sufferers and those around them construct meaning. Arthur Kleinman has distinguished between illness, disease, and sickness. The former is the subjective experience of suffering – how sufferers themselves perceive affliction and how this is shaped through cultural orientations and within social networks. Disease is the objectification of the sufferer's complaint by expert practitioners through the lens of their particular form of practice, whether they are doctors trained within a Western biomedical tradition or the healers described in Chapter 7 who work with the aid of spirits.

Previous chapters have focused on power and hegemony. They have described the discursive regimes of the Soviet and postindependence states: their efforts to classify social space and the category of religion, and to fashion citizen-subjects. In the remainder of the book, I turn to experience as a site for moral reasoning, and this chapter develops the theme of moral sources, the transcendent locations that give experience its moral quality.

An Aqiqa to'y

In the spring of 2004, I accompanied Tohirjon, my host in Pakhtabad, to an aqiqa to'y in a neighbouring mahalla. An aqiqa to'y is an event common to many Muslim societies held in connection with the birth of a child. The head of the household was a butcher whose son and kelin (daughter-in-law) had been having difficulty conceiving a child. Finally, the older sister of the kelin agreed to give the couple a baby girl. The aqiqa to'y followed the template of other celebratory feasting occasions, such as a circumcision or wedding feast. On this occasion, however, the hosts chose to give the event a particularly distinct Islamic character, a practice that has been on the increase since independence. The head of the household, the butcher, who was known by the honorific title of Hoji-bobo, had made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, which may have influenced his choice.

In this chapter, 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 objective form. The government's efforts to monitor and control religious expression have stifled public debate and the free circulation of interpretations 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 Central 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.

Islam hardly featured in my first research project in Uzbekistan between 1998 and 2000 in the city of Andijan in the Fergana Valley and the nearby village of Pakhtabad. At that time, I was not looking specifically at Islam but was interested in the state as it is experienced on a daily basis. I focused my attention on the activities of small-scale entrepreneurs, practices of corruption, household income–generating strategies, and networks of exchange as sites in which the state becomes locally manifested. Even so, looking back on that research, I am surprised by how little attention I devoted to Islam in developing my understanding of the individual, the household, the community, and the state in Uzbekistan.

I was aware while conducting that research that almost all of the people I was working with considered themselves Muslim except, of course, the Russian, Korean, or other non–Central Asian minority populations who mainly resided in the city of Andijan. Life-cycle events for the Central Asian population, such as marriages and funerals, invariably incorporated Islamic rituals, and particularly in the village of Pakhtabad, many of the other occasions of feasting that link households within wider kinship and neighbourhood relations take place within an Islamic frame, such as iftor meals to break the fast during the month of Ramadan. In addition, Islamic references are present in much of day-to-day interactions.

This chapter addresses how citizens in Uzbekistan are able to express themselves as Muslim while being subject to an authoritarian regime that narrowly defines what is acceptable Islamic practice and is prepared to punish ruthlessly anything it sees as deviating from it. Previous chapters have argued that hegemony should not be understood as the capacity of a dominant discursive regime simply to determine subjectivities. Rather, the discourses of the postindependence government in Uzbekistan are hegemonic in the sense that, to a significant degree, they fix the terms in which citizens are able to present themselves and others as Muslim and develop their own understandings of Muslim selfhood. The government's construction of good and bad Islam, of cultural authenticity, and of a national spiritual heritage at the heart of its state-building ideologies has made the notion of tradition intensely political. Practices that can be placed within its narrative of a historically developed national tradition are permitted and celebrated by the government, whereas anything that falls outside this narrative or is simply unfamiliar is open to being perceived as alien and potentially dangerous.

The government is prepared to employ the coercive capacities of the state, the organs of law enforcement, and the judiciary to ensure that citizens adopt appropriate attitudes and practices. It encourages an atmosphere of mutual surveillance and fear.

In my research on Islam in Uzbekistan, I have been impressed by a striking contrast. A subdued, even fearful atmosphere surrounds religious practice. The postindependence government has sought to closely regulate religious expression. It has attempted to subordinate Islam within its construction of a Central Asian national and spiritual tradition, the Golden Heritage at the heart of its ideology of National Independence. Interpretations of Islam not endorsed by the government are outlawed as extremist. I have described the atmosphere of existential vulnerability this has generated, wherein the label ‘Wahhabi’ has come to represent anything not deemed culturally authentic and which might attract the attention of the state security services.

There is, at the same time, a riot of exploration with regards to Islam and also expressed in the variety of Christian and other groups that emerged after independence and are attracting adherents. Muslims in Uzbekistan are creatively developing understandings of moral selfhood and of moral community resulting in a great diversity in interpretations of Islam and what it means to be a Muslim. In addition, registered and unregistered Protestant Christian groups are active and are attracting members from the indigenous, Muslim population, particularly in urban centres such as Samarkand. Groups like the Krishna or Baha'i have become established, and new spiritual movements outside these more formally institutionalised religions are emerging.

Olimjon, whom I met in 2004, is a lecturer in philosophy at a higher educational institute in Samarkand. He described himself as having been a committed communist in the Soviet period, but since independence, he has become an actively engaged Muslim who regularly attends the Friday prayers at a registered mosque near his university. The mosque was built in the years after independence by staff at his institute, and he was one of the original hundred signatories needed for its registration in 1996. He was born in 1942 and graduated from the history faculty at Samarkand State University. For his military service, he was posted to a district near Moscow, where he rose to a leading position within the branch of Komsomol (the youth organisation of the Communist Party) in his unit. He was proud that he had held this leadership position in a Union-wide context, despite the fact that he was from Central Asia. Olimjon described how, as a youth, he had internalised a communist consciousness during his school and university education. At the same time, from his present perspective as a practicing Muslim after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he maintains his former self at arm's length, explaining his previous consciousness as something he automatically, unreflexively developed in response to the pervasive propaganda to which he had been exposed at school and university, a ‘child's consciousness’, as he described it.

Since independence, the government of President Islam Karimov has instrumentalised Islam as part of its nation-building strategies. Islam has been incorporated within the ideology of National Independence that the government has developed to replace the Marxist Leninism of the Soviet era. Religious expression continues to be closely monitored, and like the governments of many Muslim majority states, the government in Uzbekistan attempts to shape the way Islam is interpreted and expressed by citizens. This chapter extends the previous discussion of the efforts of the Soviet state to shape the consciousness of citizens and explores the nature of the citizen-subject and of Islam that is constructed within post-Soviet state discourse. In this discourse, Islam is not treated as a universal Truth that transcends cultural and national boundaries but is localised within the government's conception of an authentic, indigenous culture. It is constructed as an element of a Central Asian ‘Golden Heritage’ (oltin meros) to which the nation is returning after decades of Soviet rule. ‘Good’ Islam is portrayed as culturally authentic, tolerant of other religious traditions in the region, and nonpolitical. ‘Bad’ Islam is characterised as alien in origin, antithetical to Central Asian spiritual values, intolerant in that it espouses a narrow version of Islam that excludes many Central Asian practices, and politically motivated. Interpretations of Islam not endorsed within state discourse are labelled as extremist and ‘Wahhabi’, with links to international networks of terror.