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

Leading Public Life in Private Spaces
The religious instruction offered by some otinlar mainly takes places in individual homes. For example, “Tursun-oi” has been engaged in learning about Islam and teaching others, including children, since the late 1990s. During our meetings in 2011, she often talked about the abundance of her Islamic knowledge, “What should I do with this knowledge. . . . I have to share it with others. . . . I want to learn more so that they can take it from me. What else could I do with this knowledge? Take it to the grave? No. Come, share my knowledge, take it in bags, full bags!” This sharing of knowledge—the packaging of it in full bags by those seeking religious instruction—took place at Tursun-oi’s home, which was secluded from the street by windowless walls and a large wooden gate with elaborate carvings. Her house’s architectural focus on the family’s internal social life was not unusual in the Fergana Valley and facilitated public life in private spaces.³⁸ In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Tursun-oi taught in a room previously occupied by her mother. During our first meeting in 2011, she was happy to report that a recent renovation had added a new room with a separate entrance to one side of the house. She called this bright room with three large windows opening out to the front inner yard her novaya shkola (new school) and, on occasion, qorexona, the place where individuals learn how to recite the Quran. The room smelled of fresh paint and was at least twenty-five by fifteen feet large. A long low table and colorful cotton floor mats (tushaks) around it marked the center of the room. This is where the lessons (dars) took place.
In Uzbekistan, customary practices, opposition from and reluctance by local religious leaders, and a lack of designated physical space for women, inform an ideological connection between mosques as male and homes as female spaces for religious observance and socialization. Domestic space continues to be the center of local women’s religious and social life and political participation, and it is as significant as its counterpart, the mosque. In these spaces otinlar can provide religious instruction, healing, share advice on matters pertaining to local families daily lives, and officiate at ceremonies gatherings among (mainly) women.³⁹ Such social events (meropriyatiya) are not limited to supplications and blessings, but also include various conversations about personal, familial, communal, and larger sociopolitical problems and issues; some of these discussions lead to political protests.⁴⁰ Individual homes, often defined and understood as private nonpolitical spaces for familial activities and (often) homosocial customary and ceremonial occasions, become safer places for information exchange than the streets and/or mosques, often understood as public and, therefore, political spaces. These safer places are not easily accessible to the secular and religious authorities, such as representatives of a local police department or the imam’s office, although, with the introduction of institutionalized positions for otinlar on city and regional levels, this might be changing.
A cartography of private as personal and public as political “is a result and not an explanation of the ideological processes we observe and use.”⁴¹ Gal argues that a commonsensical association of domestic space with lack of politics is informed by the nineteenth century doctrine of “separate spheres.” This doctrine assumes that “social life is organized around contrasting and incompatible moral principles” associated with either public or private, whereby community and politics would be linked to the public, while individual, family, and personal self-interest—to the private.⁴² According to Gal, this assumption breeds an anxiety of contamination, since familial ties could weaken the fairness of politics, or sentiments could undermine one’s rationality. This Eurocentric doctrine made its way into Central Asians’ daily life through Russia’s peculiar colonial and imperial efforts, whereby Russia’s “external imperial difference” created a need to borrow and replicate ideological developments of European modernity and utilize them vis-à-vis its internal colonies.⁴³ The Soviet efforts to modernize Central Asia also materialized this doctrine through the attempts to bring women into what was considered to be a public sphere of socialist economics and politics.⁴⁴ This ideological trajectory continues to affect daily lives of Uzbekistanis through the government agents’ work on ensuring that private religiosities stay personal and not political and belong only to designated spaces, like mosques or private homes. From the government’s standpoint, these religiosities should not contaminate the post-Socialist public sphere—a sphere of political activity. The country’s judiciary is endowed with responsibility to ensure that such contamination does not take place and/or is swiftly curtailed.
Empirical and feminist research shows that contrary to the doctrine of “separate spheres,” such dichotomies as political/personal, rational/emotional, and public/private, are entangled in complex ways. Our personal experiences, choices, and actions are situated and contextual and, therefore, informed by the political views and actions of others. These experiences, in turn, inform our political views and actions toward ourselves and others. For example, Sadyrbek demonstrates how in Kyrgyzstan matters often considered to be private, such as spousal abuse, become public and political issues; yet, the existing structural, social, and cultural mores preclude a just resolution of such cases.⁴⁵ Murzakulova shows how a personal search for social justice in Kyrgyzstan leads to public political mobilization, while, according to McGlinchey, personal religious beliefs inform “Islamic charity,” social activism, and public work of individual Muslims.⁴⁶ Thus, instead of duplicating a commonsensical association of public with political and private with personal, I follow Gal’s suggestion to treat a public/private distinction as a communicative phenomenon, which has “a complex and systematic logic that explains its usage.”⁴⁷ It is this logic that I turn to now.