Renegotiating Identities and Cultural Legacies Chapter Twelve Be(com)ing Uzbek

Implicit, Ambivalent, and Forthcoming Challenges
As with every origin story, Uzbekistan’s elites have obscured some inconvenient elements in order to create the impression of linear development and avoid too visible paradoxes. Many implicit and ambivalent moments and aspects have been discreetly put to the side. The relationship to the Soviet past—officially denounced as colonial, although many citizens display strong Soviet nostalgia⁶³—is one of these unpleasant contradictions. The place of Tajiks in Uzbek society, the intimate relationship between the two nations more broadly, and the existence of a shared identity, is another aspect that remains undiscussed, because it does not correspond to the strict national “boundary project” required by the nation-state.
In the national historiography, the arrival of Islam is one of these silenced moments, because a national religion cannot arrive through foreign influence and Arab conquest, especially in a regime keen to denounce any foreign interference. Claiming the Aryan past of the Scythian empires seems problematic, too, as it reproduces a colonial frame coming from nineteenth-century Europe about Asia as a cradle of Aryaness. The role of other Central Asian nations in building a Transoxiani and Turkestani culture also belongs to these ambivalences: Uzbek nationhood does not seem ready to share a common pantheon of cultural heroes, and therefore continues to inspire resentment in its neighbors, who feel deprived of part of their history.
Like any other country in the world, Uzbekistan can live with a nationhood narrative full of ambivalences and unspoken elements. However, two challenges will need to be addressed in the future, and these challenges have the potential to dramatically reshape the nation’s metanarrative.
The first is the articulation of Islam with national identity. The current narrative is, in a sense, schizophrenic: Islam has been glorified as a national religion in all official speeches, local pilgrimage sites have been valorized, and the great national figures linked to Sufism have been celebrated, but at the same time religious practices have been strictly monitored, sermons in the mosques are controlled, religious education is highly restricted, and interactions with the rest of the Ummah are looked upon with suspicion.⁶⁴ “Uzbekness” is intimately articulated with “Muslimness” (Musulmonchilik), but the latter is acceptable only when “Uzbekified”—that is, when seen as national tradition, a cultural and folkloric heritage, and an architectural legacy. The space left for Islam in terms of practices and norms for behaviors and attitudes, much less invoking Islam to legitimize political claims, is heavily restricted.⁶⁵ As nicely phrased by Charles Kurzman, Islam has been “politically neutered”⁶⁶ by the Karimov regime. This contradictory policy will likely become increasingly challenging to maintain, as Islamic practices are rising among the younger generations, which see it as part of their individual and collective identity. The state secularism inherited from the Soviet regime is progressively eroding in the face of multiple ways to display “Muslimness,” and the Uzbek official narrative will have to take these deep societal evolutions into account.
The second critical element is the role of labor migration, the existence of which has been virulently denied by Uzbek authorities so far. Karimov’s declaration that migrants are “lazy” and that only the most disgraced go to Russia to work⁶⁷ exemplified this negative connotation and denial of the socioeconomic reality that pushes several million citizens to look for work abroad. Migration has become a rite of passage for many young men and their family in all rural regions of Uzbekistan, structuring individual identities as well as collective mechanisms of solidarity and economic strategies.⁶⁸ Migration seems also to change the relationship to Islam, as many young migrants are introduced to Islamic practices during their time abroad, and once back home they feel even more constricted by the repressive atmosphere surrounding Islam. Such an identity-shaper will have to be, in one way or another, integrated into the nation’s narrative. It will mean, however, recognizing how difficult it is to find work in a demographically vibrant society with a glut of young people arriving on the job market every year (more than 50 percent of the population is less than twenty-five years old). It will also push for a narrative that would be less isolationist and more able to celebrate Uzbek citizens as living in close interaction with some other regions of the world and Uzbekistan as connected to its diaspora’s abroad.