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

Religion, Social Control, and Space
Among regional governments, the Uzbek one is particularly notorious for the way it treats political opposition. Thousands of people have been imprisoned on trumped-up, politically motivated charges; including journalists, human rights activists, and pious Muslims.¹⁴ Since the late 1990s, local Muslims have often been charged with alleged religious extremism and terrorism.¹⁵ This reflects a Soviet legacy of state control over religious sensibilities, as well as increasing regional securitization, whereby the Uzbek National Security Service is envisioned and ensured through a set of punitive and preventive measures, which come with an ideological justification of physical violence and/or military force.¹⁶
While the general public, religious leadership, and local and national elites continue debating what it means to be a good Muslim or Christian or a good person, Uzbek government officials continue both celebrating Islam as a pillar of national identity and deriding it as a source of political opposition and a potential threat to political stability in the country.¹⁷ Similar to the Soviets, for more than two decades, the post-Soviet postsocialist Uzbek government has been struggling to establish and maintain social control of religious discourses and practices by deploying both negative and positive sanctions. Negative sanctions include systematic intimidations by law enforcement agents as well as allegations of religious extremism and terrorism, and the subsequent imprisonment of individuals whose acts of identity, such as participation in a protest and criticism of the existing regime, serve to challenge the government’s legitimacy. Positive sanctions are exemplified by rewarding with administrative positions those who advocate for and perform “safe” religious identities in ways that support the government’s status quo.¹⁸
Religious life in Uzbekistan is also juristically regulated. The 1998 Law of Freedom of Consciousness and Religious Organizations sets, among other things, a religious dress code and establishes registration requirements for religious organizations and certification of religious leaders and teachers. The law also prohibits the “private teaching of religious principles.”¹⁹ As a result, this law becomes an actionable source of strategic social control of individual Muslims and other religious organizations or congregants.²⁰ By creating and funding religious administrative institutions, such as the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan, the government can monitor the substance of religious knowledge produced and shared at educational centers, such as registered madrassas, and disseminated on such occasions as Jumma Namoz (Friday communal prayers).²¹ Yet, the existing research also shows that political activism and unsanctioned religious instruction and practices continue to challenge the government’s claim to legitimacy and its status quo in mosques, private homes, online, and on the streets. Local individuals continue to negotiate—by resisting, co-opting, and/or complying with—the government agents’ techniques of social control.²²
Local spaces such as mosques and public events such as Friday communal prayers are more susceptible to social control by the government’s agents, including police officers, agents of the National Security Service (SNB), or informants working for these law-enforcement agencies. For instance, McGlinchey notes that in Uzbekistan, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, some local imams and congregants, individuals, and families ignored or successfully resisted government intimidation and “false charges of Islamic extremism,” while others had to face long prison terms.²³ Private events behind the closed doors of individual homes posit a challenge to the government’s agents, since, as political actors, those who attend or organize these events are often invisible. Fear that subversive activities take place in domestic spaces bolsters the Uzbek government agents’ attempts to monitor and control such social events.
This fear is not new. The Russian Imperial and the Soviet governments were equally concerned about what happened behind the closed doors of individual homes during social events. For instance, in the early twentieth century, in their field-reports, agents of the Imperial Russian Security Service clearly stated their fear that those who lead public life in private spaces, such as during a gap (club, talk, a social gathering) or prayer meetings, are “plotting a great conspiracy.”²⁴ Later, the Soviet government’s representatives, both its “indigenous” and “European” cadres, likewise experienced and exhibited a great anxiety about public life in private spaces.²⁵ During the 1920s and 1930s, many public spaces previously occupied by religious institutions, including mosques and sacred sites, were destroyed or appropriated for other social and economic needs.²⁶ However, the daily life of local individuals in domestic spaces obscured the substance and degree of social change it generated, thus limiting the government agents’ ability to exercise more effective social control. Khalid’s recent work provides examples of Communist organizers’ fear of local resistance to social change in the early Soviet period (1920–1930s) as a result of different visions of modernity between the Party and society as well as among the Party members themselves.²⁷
In contemporary Uzbekistan, despite draconian measures of social control, the government’s concern over public life in private spaces has not subsided and is not completely unfounded. For example, some clandestine activities of Islamic social movements, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation), an ideological opponent to the Karimov’s (1991–2016) regime, did take place in domestic spaces.²⁸ Frequent searches at and surveillance of religious activists’ homes and local mosques manifested the government’s anxiety over the potential for religious discourse and practice to undermine the regime’s legitimacy. Since many social events held in individual homes continue to be somewhat out of the government agents’ reach, and while representatives of the still autocratic post-Karimov’s Uzbek government and its large judiciary system leave no other space for political dissent in the country, the regime’s fear of public life in private spaces continues to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The government’s sanctions and techniques of social control remain variegated, but not always successful. Their persistence, however, points to the importance of investigating individuals’ public life in such private spaces in a finer detail.
The Uzbek government (or anyone) often interprets domestic space and social events taking place there as subversive political activity, while the actors themselves may perceive these events to be private and apolitical. In order to understand how and why this happens, I deploy Gal’s treatment of public/private distinction as a fractal difference. This way public/private distinction does not describe any one domain corresponding to places and practices, but refers to a repeating communicative pattern displayed at every scale. To borrow Levi-Strauss’s words, such application of a public/private distinction is “good to think” about local religious practice, its social significance, and its relations to and with the sovereign.²⁹ Below, I apply this distinction to social activities organized and attended by women in domestic spaces in Uzbekistan.