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

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have demonstrated how despite—and because of—the Uzbekistani government’s social control, women religious teachers and leaders, otinlar, continue effecting change in themselves and others by leading public life in private spaces. As private individuals, they are social actors actively engaged in shaping their communities. To prove this point, I have used my ethnographic research and Susan Gal’s theory of fractal and indexical dichotomies. Theorizing the public/private distinction as a nested communicative phenomenon demonstrates that social change is not limited to a particular space or a particular gender and can happen anywhere and happens everywhere. One’s personal opinions about daily life (hayot) and religion (din) (can) include political (siyosat) commentaries or can be interpreted as such by others, and one’s political views are often deeply personal.⁶¹ Historically, in autocracies such as Uzbekistan, sociopolitical changes are thought of, articulated, planned, and enacted during social gatherings in private arenas, such as domestic space. For instance, in the Soviet Union these changes were conceived of and materialized in private spaces, such as an apartment, more precisely, in its kitchen, which was a public part of the private space provided often by the Soviet government itself! Since many social activities taking place at homes are out of the immediate reach of government agents, and as long as representatives of the existing autocratic government and its large judiciary system leave no other space for a political dissent in the country, this sovereign’s fear of public life in private spaces will continue to be a self-fulfilling prophecy just like in the Soviet Union.
Notes
1. Susan Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2002): 77–95.
2. Mahabat Sadyrbek, “‘There Is No State in This Country!’ Legal and Social Treatment of Marital Rape in Kyrgyzstan,” in Gender in Modern Central Asia, ed. Thomas Kruessmann (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2015), 105–24.
3. Peshkova, Women, Islam, and Identity.
4. Deniz Kandiyoti and Nadira Azimova, “The Communal and the Sacred: Women’s Worlds of Ritual in Uzbekistan,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10, no. 2 (2004): 327–49; Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 118, quoted in Madeleine Reeves, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 55.
5. Bruce Grant, “Shrines and Sovereigns: Life, Death, and Religion in Rural Azerbaijan,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 3 (2011): 670.
6. Sergey Abashin, “The Logic of Islamic Practice: A Religious Conflict in Central Asia,” Central Asian Survey 25, no. 3 (2006): 267–86; Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne.
7. For an example of a recent use of this distinction, see Sergei Poliakov, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992); Alma Sultangaliyeva, “Women and Religion in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: A View from Within,” in Gender in Modern Central Asia, ed. Thomas Kruessmann (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2015), 139–61.
8. Khalid, Islam after Communism; Reeves, Border Work. For more on the concept of “publically private” in online communication, see Patricia G. Lange, “Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007): 361–80.
9. For more on how private family life was managed by the Soviet state, see Marianne R. Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006); Douglas Taylor Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). On “semi-public,” see Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne, 232, n10.
10. Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 78.
11. Ibid., 81.
12. Grant, “Shrines and Sovereigns,” 670, n19.
13. See, for example, Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Louw, Everyday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia.
14. “US: Press Uzbekistan on Political Prisoners, Prison Death,” Human Rights Watch, accessed May 10, 2016, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/01/15/us-press-uzbekistan-political-prisoners-prison-death.
15. There are diverse ways of how people feel to be Muslim, and how they articulate and embody this feeling.
16. For a critique of konflictologia see Reeves, Border Work; John Heathershaw and Nick Megoran, “Contesting Danger: A New Agenda for Policy and Scholarship on Central Asia,” International Affairs 87, no. 3 (2011): 589–612; Adeeb Khalid, “The Age of Karomov in Context,” in Central Asian Survey: Uzbekistan Forum, special online issue, ed. by Madeleine Reeves (2016), accessed September 28, 2016, http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/pgas/cas-uzbekistan-forum.
17. David Abramson, “Foreign Religious Education and the Central Asian Islamic Revivial: Impact and Prospects for Stability,” Silk Road Papers, Washington, DC: Central Asia–Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, March 2010; Adams, The Spectacular State; Louw, Everyday Islam; Julie McBrien and Mathijs Pelkmans, “Turning Marx on His Head: Missionaries, ‘Extremists,’ and Archaic Secularists in Post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan,” Critique of Anthropology 28, no. 1 (2008): 87–103. On historical debates, see Adeeb Khalid, “What Jadidism Was, and What It Wasn’t: The Historiographical Adventures of a Term,” Central Asian Studies Review 5, no. 2 (2007): 3–7; Rasanayagam, Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan.
18. See Maria E. Louw this volume. On “correct” Sufism and its proponents see Alexander Papas, “The Sufi and the President in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan,” International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) Review 16 (2005): 38–39; Sergey Abashin, “Islam i kul’t svyatykh v Sredney Azii,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie 3 (2001): 128–31.
19. Eric McGlinchey, “Divided Faith: Trapped between State and Islam in Uzbekistan,” in Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present, eds. Russell Zanca and Jeff Sahadeo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 310.
20. For examples of the government’s intolerance of religious proselytism by protestant missionaries, see Rasanayagam, Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan; Sebastien Peyrouse, “Christians as the Main Religious Minority in Central Asia,” in Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present, eds. Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 371–83.
21. On the Uzbek state’s control of foreign religious education, see Abramson, Foreign Religious Education.
22. See McGlinchey, “Divided Faith”; Svetlana Peshkova, “Bringing the Mosque Home and Talking Politics: Women, Space, and Islam in the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan),” Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life 3, no. 3 (2009): 251–73; Kendzior, “A Reporter without Borders,” 40–50.
23. McGlinchey, “Divided Faith,” 306.
24. A. Miklashevsky, “Sotsial’nye dvizheniya 1916 g. v Turkestane,” Byloe, 27–28 (1924): 243.
25. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan.
26. Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign against Islam in Central Asia, 1917–1941 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001).
27. Khalid, Making Uzbekistan.
28. See McGlinchey, “Divided Faith”; Emmanuel Karagiannis, “Political Islam in Uzbekistan: Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami,” Europe-Asia Studies 58, no. 2 (2006): 261–80. For women’s participation in such activities in Kyrgyzstan, see Asel Murzakulova, “Searching for Social Justice: the Problem of Women Joining Hizb ut-Tahrir in Kyrgyzstan,” in Gender in Modern Central Asia, ed. Thomas Kruessmann (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2015).
29. Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 89.
30. For example, Fathi offers a taxonomy of local otinlar as “traditional” (educated at homeschools) and “not traditional” (educated at madrassa) using the source of education as a measuring stick. I found such taxonomy less useful, since there is a range of opinions what exactly constitutes “tradition” in Uzbekistan. See Habiba Fathi, “Otines: The Unknown Women Clerics of Central Asian Islam,” Central Asian Survey 16, no. 1 (1997): 27–43; O. V. Gorshunova, Uzbekskaya zhenshchina: sotsial’nyy status, sem’ya, religiya (po materialam Ferganskoy Doliny) (Moscow: Institut etnologii i antropologii RAN, 2006); Peshkova, “Teaching Islam at a Home School,” 80–94.
31. In this chapter, personal names and names of places are pseudonyms. To protect the confidentiality of the research participants, the dates of the interviews have been omitted.
32. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 13, quoted in Adriana Cavarero, “Politicizing Theory,” Political Theory 30, no. 4 (2002): 506.
33. Deniz Kandiyoti and Nadira Azimova, “The Communal and the Sacred: Women’s Worlds of Ritual in Uzbekistan,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10, no. 2 (2004): 327–49; Rasanayagam, Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan; McGlinchey, Chaos, Violence, Dynasty.
34. Elise Massicard and Tommaso Trevisani, “The Uzbek Mahalla: Between State and Society,” in Central Asia: Aspects of Transition, ed. Tom Everett-Heath (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003), 205–18; Matilda Bogner, “From House to House: Abuses by Mahalla Committees,” (New York: 2003) Human Rights Watch.
35. Peshkova, Women, Islam, and Identity.
36. Slavoj Zizek, Violence (New York: Big Ideas, Small Books, 2008).
37. See, for example, Yael Navaro-Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
38. For a description of the built structures in the region see Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne, chapter 5.
39. An Uzbek private house in a mahalla (neighborhood) often consists of multiple structures positioned around a courtyard (hovli), which has inner and outer parts. See Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne, chapter 5, for a thorough discussion of behavioral expectations in, within, and between domestic spaces and their role in reproducing Uzbek cultural practices in Kyrgyzstan.
40. See Paula Holmes-Eber, Daughters of Tunis: Women, Family, and Networks in a Muslim City (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003); Svetlana Peshkova, “Muslim Women Leaders in the Ferghana Valley: Whose Leadership Is It Anyway?,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 5–24.
41. Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 91.
42. Ibid., 78.
43. Tracing a historical genealogy of this doctrine and its arrival to Central Asia is beyond the scope of this chapter. But see Khalid, Islam after Communism, for a discussion of local reformers (Jadids) and their cultural translations of modern European education. See also articles in a special issue of Central Asian Survey about Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union as colonial empires, including Khalid, “Introduction”; Khalid, “What Jadidism Was, and What It Wasn’t”; Tlostanova, “Book Review”; and Madina Tlostanova, “Between the Russian/Soviet Dependencies, Neoliberal Delusions, Dewesternizing Options, and Decolonial Drives,” Cultural Dynamics 27, no. 2 (2015): 267–83.
44. Here I refer to both the “indigenous” and “Europeanized” cadre. See Khalid, Making Uzbekistan.
45. Sadyrbek, “‘There Is No State in This Country!,’” 105–24.
46. Murzakulova, “Searching for Social Justice”; McGlinchey, Chaos, Violence, Dynasty, chapter 4.
47. Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 78.
48. In mathematics, a fractal difference refers to a repeating pattern displayed at every scale.
49. Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 82.
50. Liu, Under Solomon’s Throne, 135.
51. Ibid., 132.
52. For a sample lesson, see Peshkova, “Teaching Islam at a Home School,” 80–94.
53. Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 85.
54. For historical and geographic examples of Muslim women’s leadership see Peshkova, “Muslim Women Leaders in the Ferghana Valley,” 5–24.
55. For more on fractal and indexical, see Gal, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” 81, 86.
56. This ritual is named after a popular female saint, a mediator between the human and divine worlds who solves problems and bestows blessings on her devotees. In one version of the legend, as an example of her power, Bibi Mushkil Kusho helps an elderly poor man, Chol, to deal with his daily troubles.
57. The legend about this saint, similar to Cinderella’s fairy godmother, features an older woman who helps to ensure a young woman’s happiness.
58. See the quote from Miklashevsky (n24) about the field reports filed by the Imperial Russian Security Service’s agents at the brink of the twentieth century earlier this chapter.
59. By conducting independent research about public life in private spaces—by interviewing individuals in their homes about their religious sensibilities and practices and participating in social events there—the gestures that accompanied my research could be and were read as political actions by the government agents.
60. Papas, “The Sufi and the President in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan,” 39.
61. McGlinchey, “Divided Faith”; Peshkova, Women Islam and Identity, chapter 2.