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

Otinlar and Social Control
Several scholars have written about otinlar (or otins or otinchalar).³⁰ The women I have met during the ethnographic research by and large have no institutionalized religious education and do not hold an official administrative position such as the office of the imam. These women are often taught by other otinlar and/or other local religious practitioners in domestic spaces and supplement this education with self-education. By routinely facilitating daily life in their communities in the privacy of individual homes, otinlar continue effecting change in themselves and others, despite the Uzbek government’s attempts to control individual religiosities. These women lead public life in private spaces by either providing (often unsanctioned) religious instruction (as a teacher, ustoz) or by officiating at various ceremonial occasions (as otinlar or otinchalar). In addition, some of them can perform healing rituals or provide advice on mundane matters to individual community members.
The word otin is often translated as a “teacher.” This translation, however, does not capture the kind of knowledge these women possess and share with others and, as a result, obscures otinlar’s role vis-à-vis their local communities. These women’s communal significance exceeds social roles ascribed to and/or assumed by them. Many otinlar are local leaders committed to changing themselves, their families, and local residents into better human beings; they do so intentionally and purposefully. As leaders, these women may not organize or head street protests or run for government office (although since my last visit this might have changed). Rather, by effecting incremental changes in themselves and others while engaging in the mundane and ceremonial affairs in their communities, these women help maintain the existing social order and/or challenge it.
For instance, in 2003, accompanied by a local otin, Jahon, I witnessed a street protest in a city in the Valley; protestors were demanding gas and electricity and amnesty for political prisoners.³¹ When I asked whether a bad government should be changed or tolerated, Jahon replied,
If you are good, your rulers will be good. If you are bad, your rulers will be bad. Our rulers have houses and cars, and our people do not. I’m not going to advise that the rulers be punished. I would advise that we’d be punished. We deserve what we get. If we [emphasis added] were good, our rulers would be good. Everything starts with a person, with a family. If I am good and my husband is good, then my children and family are good. . . . But you need to work on becoming good.
To Jahon, then, the state was like a family. In order to have a good leader and order in the family, each member had to be good, and behave morally, with correct intentions toward others. In her view, a societal transformation started with an individual one. This statement was Jahon’s personal opinion—she did not see it as referencing a political project. Yet, geared toward societal change and pertaining to “the realm of human affairs, stressing the action, praxis, needed to establish and sustain it,” this statement had a political nature.³² While Jahon affirmed a primacy of “the who” (or in her words “you”)—“the who” that a self can become—a change in “the who” was directed toward achieving a plurality as “we.” This “we” started with her learning how to be a “good” Muslim and attending to the needs of her family and community. It is this involvement with and within the “we” that generates a strong interest in otinlar’s activities on behalf of local law enforcement agencies.
The Uzbek government uses several techniques to control religious leaders like otinlar. One of them is, what I call, “an ideological character assassination,” by branding events these women preside over as sites of conspicuous consumption and dissemination of “non-traditional,” “alien,” or “foreign” forms of Islam.³³ Another technique is mahalla (neighborhood) committees’ efforts to monitor such activities and report to the National Security Service (SNB).³⁴ Representatives of local police departments also require religious leaders, registered or unregistered with the state, to sign written commitments to not teach minors. In 2003, two otinlar suspected that police informants were attending public gatherings in individual homes.³⁵ Since 2008, the government has deployed three more techniques: (1) a required certification of otinlar by traveling ulama (male religious leaders who have received an institutionalized religious instruction and certification) through “exams,” which some otinlar locally called “competitions”; (2) the creation of administrative positions for women religious leaders both at the city and regional level, as a hokymyat (city) and viloyat (region) otin; and (3) an introduction of courses about Islam at local city halls (hokymyats). The efficacy of these techniques is yet to be assessed by researchers; I come back to some of these techniques later in the chapter.
In 2011, not only government representatives but also three local otinlar saw these techniques of social control as positive developments. According to these women, these techniques were used to ensure the practice of “correct” Islam, guaranteed security, and helped to maintain an ordered and predictable state. The same year, twelve Uzbekistani citizens used Tajikistan’s civil war (in the 1990s) and Kyrgyzstan’s putsches and violence (in 2010) as examples of the states that did not work; they were neither ordered nor predictable and did not ensure individual security. A predictable daily life came at a cost, including sometimes providing information to the SNB agents about the contents of teaching and exchanges of information taking place in individual homes during life-cycle ceremonies and other social events that (could have) instigated discussions of global and local politics. By promising a safe state and engaging in the politics of fear—which Zizek argues, is the most effective form of current biopolitics³⁶—the Uzbek government representatives justified the need to know about public life taking place in domestic spaces.³⁷ Yet, these techniques of social control continue to be, by and large, unsuccessful, since the unsanctioned religious instruction and discussions of politics at home have not ceased.