Pursuing 'Muslimness'Shrines as Sites for Moralities in the Making in Bukhara

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Pursuing 'Muslimness': shrines as sites for moralities in the making in post-Soviet BukharaMaria Louwaa Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, Aarhus University, Denmark

To cite this Article Louw, Maria(2006) 'Pursuing 'Muslimness': shrines as sites for moralities in the making in post-SovietBukhara', Central Asian Survey, 25: 3, 319 339

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/02634930601022583URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02634930601022583

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Pursuing Muslimness: shrines assites for moralities in the making inpost-Soviet BukharaMARIA LOUW

Bahodir was a man in his late thirties who served as domlo, shrine guardian, at the

shrine of Imom Xoja Baror in Bukhara and had done so for about a year whenI met him in 1998. The time immediately after Uzbekistans independence hadbeen hard for Bahodir. He was a bricklayer, but after a period of illness he hadnot been able to find any work and instead sat at home, as the situation ofbeing unemployed is commonly termed. He turned to drinking and became noto-rious in his neighbourhood for being able to drink one-and-a-half bottles of vodkaa day. Then, one day in 1997, something happened that was to change his life com-pletely. Burdened with illness and debt and shunned by his neighbours, he hadstarted paying frequent visits to several of Bukharas shrines. One night hedecided to sleep at the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror, a place where his father

used to take him at night when he was a child. He hoped that the saint wouldshow up in his dreams and give him counsel and strength that could help himout of his troubles. I fell asleep, Bahodir told me:

. . . and suddenly I saw a figure in a ray of light. That was Imom Xoja Baror. Imom Xoja Baror

said that just as he himself had been one of those men . . . one of those links who for the first time

connected Bukhara with the Islamic world, I should take part in bringing Islam back to Bukhara

again. Listen to Bahouddin Naqshbands motto, Bahodir, he said, the heart with God, the hand

at work! Tomorrow you must start rebuilding this place in order that it may again be visible to all

the world . . . and you must serve the people who come here! Then he disappeared.

In an imitation of acts of a distant past in which the sacred had regularly eruptedinto history, Bahodir then broke down the wall that had blocked access to the mau-soleum for a long time, put in the door from his own house and started restoring thedecayed place. After that, he told me, he recovered his health, stopped drinking,paid off his debt, and had since been able to maintain his family, a wife andfour children, by building tombs at the burial place which surrounds the shrineand by praying for the visitors to the shrine.

Central Asian Survey (September 2006) 25(3), 319 339

Correspondance should be addressed to Maria Elisabeth Louw, Department of Anthropology and Ethnography,Aarhus University, Moesgaard8270 Hoejbjerg, Denmark. (Tel: 45 89 42 46 76; Email: [email protected])

0263-4937 print=1465-3354 online=06=03=0319-21# 2006 Central Asian SurveyDOI: 10.1080=02634930601022583


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Pursuing Muslimness

Much of what has been said and written about life in post-Soviet Uzbekistan in

Western media and scholarly discourse has focused on radical Islamist movementssuch as Ozbekiston Islom Harakati and Hizb ut-Tahrir and their utopian visionsabout the reestablishment of the Caliphate. They have been occupied with the ques-tion of whether there is a risk that militant or radical Islam may gain a footholdamong a population haunted by economic despair and suffering from its govern-ments repression of the freedom of faith in the name of the war against terror.

This is of course an important discussion. But it is equally important to pointout, a fact perhaps lost in the discussions of radical Islam in the region, thateven though they perceive post-independence society as a mixed blessing, themajority of Muslims in the country do not see the diverse Islamist movements

as a serious alternative. In any case, that was the general impression I gainedfrom my fieldwork in Bukhara.1 The people I worked among tried to accom-modate to the changing realities and were suspicious of the utopias preached bythe radical Islamists. What they articulated in their search for the Divine wasnot an interest in an abstract orthodox worldview or a utopian world order.Rather, they adopted down-to-earth strategies for regaining agency and a senseof social belonging and attempted to rebuild the shattered moral foundations oftheir lives. As they put it, they attempted to restore the proper Muslimness ofsociety as well as of their own lives.

The term musulmonchilik, Muslimness, is widely used both in the official dis-courses of the post-Soviet Uzbek government and in the everyday discourses of

ordinary Muslim believers to denote a local way of being Muslim. It refers toan inner essence, which was repressed during the 70 years of Soviet rule and istherefore partly forgotten, but which is just waiting to be revived in order torestore an imagined normality in society.

A desire for normality may seem a humble aspiration, but this is not so in asituation characterised by existential insecurity. I conducted fieldwork at a timewhen rapid social change had made the ground shake beneath the feet of manypeople, challenging their accustomed ways of acting in their lifeworlds. Manyfelt alienated from the social communities and moral orders they used to identifywith. Talking about their lives, they disclosed a profound social malaise, charac-

terised not so much by material poverty as by the fact that they felt bereft of anymeans of adapting to the changing conditions of their lives and thereby achieving asatisfying social existence. Trying to create a normal existence on this shakyground, pursuing their partly forgotten Muslimness, people were strugglingalong.2 They were tentatively establishing relations with various parts ofreality which they hoped would provide them with a foothold, however limitedand temporary, in a rapidly changing social world.

Experiencing their lifeworlds as fragmented and insecure, Bukhara Muslimsoften pursued what they were missing at sacred places, which they saw as mani-festations of the Divine in the world which had somehow escaped the corrosion of

time. In their efforts to rescue local Muslimness from oblivion, and seeking it at

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sacred places, people created new understandings of Islam and of what it means tobe Muslim. These new understandings highlight the inadequacies of the somewhatreified concept of Islam that constructs a dichotomy between essentialised con-ceptions of tradition and religion on the one hand, and modernity on theother, which have informed many studies of Central Asias Muslims. I do notfind it illuminating to view Central Asian Islam as a remnant of earlier formsof social consciousness, as Soviet studies usually did.2 Nor do I agree with theanalysis of many Western scholars who viewed Islam in the Soviet Union as aquasi-primordial defence against modernisation.4 Similarly, I do not subscribeto the argument commonly found in post-Soviet studies which compares howIslam is understood and practised in the region to some kind of orthodox, pureIslam, concluding that an eradication of knowledge about Islam took placeduring the Soviet years.5 While a Muslim believer or Islamic theologian might

argue in these terms, I find it much more interesting to bracket questions concern-ing the status of peoples ideas and beliefs relative to some idealised Islamiccanon, and instead focus on the ways in which Islam is lived and experiencedin practice.

I proceed from a view of Islam as a morality in the making, the contours ofwhich are continually negotiated at various levels of society. I shall argue thatalthough the post-Soviet Uzbek government has sought to co-opt the countrysmany shrines within a nationalist narrative, their meanings are in no way fixed.Rather, they should be considered as focal points for such moralities in themaking, for peoples efforts at recreating agency and its moral grounding in the

economically harsh, socially insecure and politically tense atmosphere ofpost-Soviet Uzbekistan.

Sacred places

Belief in, and veneration of, Gods avliyo (saints) as the Prophet Muhammadsspiritual successors, persons who, by the grace of God and because of their exemp-lary lives, hold a special relationship with God and possess baraka, blessingpower, has often been identified as the most important aspect of popular Islamin Central Asia.6 As the historian Robert McChesney has noted,7 other religioussites, mosques for example, do not seem to have the same hold on the imaginationas have the shrines ofavliyo, the importance of which lies in their being thresholdsor doorways to the spiritual world and what lies beyond human experience.

Places gather, as the philosopher Edward S. Casey has observed in a pheno-menological account of place.8 Places gather not only things, understood asvarious animate and inanimate entities, but also experiences and histories,language, thoughts and memories. When visiting particular places, people experi-ence these places as holding memories for them, releasing or evoking these memo-ries in their presence.9 Thus, people often experience places as inherentlymeaningful. Places, however, only express what their animators enable them tosay. As anthropologist Keith Basso has noted, places are natural reflectors that

return awareness to the source from which it springs.10 Space acquires meaning

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through the multiple lived relationships that people maintain with places, throughtheir dwelling. 11 Relationships with places are lived whenever a place becomesthe object of awareness, and notably when individuals step back from the flowof everyday experience and attend self-consciously to places. Doing so, theymay also dwell on aspects of themselveswho they presently are, who theyused to be, and who they might become. The physical landscape becomes activelywedded to the landscape of the mind.

Relationships to places, however, are not solely lived in contemplativemoments of social isolation. A relatively fixed, though never completely stable,array of collective representations develops around some places which becomethe loci of social memory. This is the case, for example, for many shrines inBukhara, whose very placeness is indicated, and partially constituted, by thehagiographic complexes, nationalist discourses and miracle narratives connected

with them, the ritual practices carried out there, and the subtle changes in the com-portment of people who visit them. These hagiographic complexes, nationalist dis-courses, miracle narratives, ritual practices and special ways of comportmentdirect peoples awareness toward these places. They encourage people to dwellthere, to reflect on themselves by way of the things, histories and memoriesgathered there.

In Bukhara shrines are everywhere, if sometimes hidden behind the signs of anemergent global capitalism or obscured by reminders of Soviet modernism; thebrand new bank buildings and the flashy advertising billboards, or the endlessrows of grey and decaying apartment blocks decorated with faded wall paintings

commemorating events such as the 1980 Moscow Olympics. These shrines aretraces of a golden past that made Bukhara known as Bukhoroi Sharif, NobleBukhara, and gave it a reputation as one of the most important or holy places inthe Muslim world, apart from Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. A reputation thatwould make people say that it is not heavens light that lights up Bukhara, it isthe light from Bukhara that lights up heaven. A domlo, shrine guardian, at theBahouddin Naqshband shrine told me that when the prophet Muhammadreached the sky on his Mirajascension to heaven12he saw the light fallingfrom heaven and down unto the earth. Only at one place did he see a lightwhich emanated from the earth, and that place turned out to be Bukhara. Seeingthat, the prophet said that many saints would be born in Bukhara. I heard versionsof this story which had a modernist twist. Here it was not the prophet, but rathersome cosmonauts flying around in outer space whose privileged viewpoint made itpossible for them to perceive the light emanating from Bukhara.

Numerous saints are associated with the city and its surroundings.13 Mostshrines in Bukhara are gravesites, the burial places of saints. Others are placeswith another connection with a saint, such as a place with which he or she hasbeen in contact, has rested or performed a miracle. Terms such as mazar, grave-yard, or ziyoratgoh, place of visit are used about them, but they are most fre-quently referred to as avliyo 14 or pir. No verbal distinction is made between theavliyo or pir as a living or dead person or as a sacred place, which points to the

fact that their tombs, and more generally the physical materials associated with

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them, are commonly regarded as extensions of them, as somehow embodying theirpowers. Some of Bukharas avliyo are associated with the Sufi orders, notably the

yetti pir, seven pirs, all of whom are important links in the Naqshbandiyyasilsila, spiritual chain.15 One of these links, Bahouddin Naqshband (d. 1389),lent his name to the Naqshbandiyya Sufi tariqat (order). Today he is by farBukharas most popular saint and an unofficial patron saint of the city. A verypopular shrine also exists for Abdulqodir Giloni (10881166), founder of theQadiriyya Sufi tariqat.

Some avliyo are associated with the conversion of the people in the region toIslam, such as Imom Xoja Baror, the saint who appeared in Bahodirs dream.Imom Xoja Baror is said to have played an important role in making Bukharasinhabitants convert to Islam. He accomplished this by curing the citys disabled,the blind, the deaf, and the mentally ill in the name of Allah right after the

region was conquered by the Arab Umayyad dynasty in the beginning of theeighth century. Around his tomb grew what is now Bukharas central cemetery.

Another popular shrine is Chashma Ayub, spring of Ayub, associated withAyub (Job) the biblical prophet, who is mentioned in the Quran as one of the pro-phets to whom God gave special guidance and inspiration, and who is a model ofpatience in Islam as in both Judaism and Christianity. The story goes that Ayubwas an exceptionally pious, God-fearing man whom God had blessed with allkinds of wealth, a large family and good health. One day, Satan expresseddoubt about the sincerity of Ayubs faith, claiming that if God withdrew his bles-sing, Ayub would no longer worship God. To prove Ayubs sincerity, God allowed

Satan to put him to the test. Satan then destroyed Ayubs possessions, killed hischildren and filled his body with diseases and pain. Through all his suffering,which lasted for 40 years, Ayubs faith remained intact. When he asked God formercy God told him that he should strike the ground. When Ayub did so, a foun-tain appeared, and when Ayub washed himself in the water and drank it, his goodhealth was immediately restored and everything became as it had been 40 yearsbefore. According to the legend, Chashma Ayub is this spring.

Often hagiographic narratives deal with oppositions between secular and divinepower. Some secular rulers, however, are also conceived of as avliyo. In Bukharathe most notable example is Ismail Samani, whose conquests of Khorasan andlater the whole of Persia laid the foundations of the Persian Samanid dynastythat ruled from 874 to 999 from their capital in Bukhara. Today the Samanidmausoleum, situated in the Samani Park in the centre of the city, is a verypopular place of ziyorat.

Some avliyo are regarded as the patron saints of various occupations, notablyhandicrafts.16 And then there are all the more anonymous avliyo, less visible tothe untrained eye and typically known only to a few people in the immediate vicin-ity of their shrines or to family members. For example, I only learned about theshrine of Chuja Chofiz Buxoriy, which is situated in the basement of a privatehome in Bukharas old town, because I accidentally fell into conversation withsome people from that area. Whereas a relatively formalised hagiographic

complex is typically related to larger and better-known avliyo, no hagiographic


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reasons are usually given for why the less well-known avliyo should be veneratedas such. Their reputation, the placeness, which encourages people to dwell there,is rather constituted by the special practices taking place around them as well as bywhat is typically an array of local miracle stories that demonstrate their powers.Salima, the guardian of the shrine of Chuja Chofiz Buxoriy, did not know muchabout him. She had married into the family that lived there and one night thesaint had revealed himself to her in a dream and said that she had to work thereas a tabib, a traditional healer. If she did that, she would be cured (she was anepileptic), but if not, she would become seriously disabled. She did what thesaint asked and the shrine gained a reputation in the neighbourhood as a placewhere various headaches in particular could be cured. But who Chuja ChofizBuxoriy had been, apart from being an avliyo that had called on Salima to workas a healer, and whose force helped her healing, was apparently unknown.

Certain shrines are considered to have specialties in miraculous action. Suchspecialities typically relate to the particular life stories of the saints. Becausethe saints have experienced difficulties similar to those that lead pilgrims totheir shrines, they are considered particularly sympathetic and helpful towardsthese pilgrims. Hagiographies of saints, in other words, inspire biographies ofordinary people, and often people have relations with specific avliyo whom theyconsider to be particularly influential in their lives. Craftsmen, for example,visit the patron saints of their respective handicrafts. People typically visit theshrine of Ayub to ask for patience if they are undergoing great difficulties thatthey find hard to endure, with the hope that their problems might be solved as

miraculously as Ayubs troubles were. They visit the shrine of Said AhmadPobandi Kushod in the old city who, according to legend, was thrown in jailand put in chains but broke the chains each time it was time for performing thenamoz, the Muslim daily prayer. They visit this saint when they experiencetheir hearts being in chains, that is, when they experience being inhibited intheir agency in whatever they are concerned with. Also the shrine of BahouddinNaqshband, though usually considered an all-round shrine, is considered bysome to be particularly suitable for those who seek help in business matters, asBahouddin is known to have worked himself and been successful at combiningdevotion to God with worldly engagement.17

The politics of sacred space

Every landscape tells, or rather is, a story, as Tim Ingold has noted. It enfolds thelives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in itand played their part in its formation.18 People, as Ingold points out, learn to readthe story of the landscape through an education of attention as they travel throughit with their mentors, who point specific features out to them. Other things theydiscover for themselves, by watching, listening and feeling.19

The ways people have been instructed in reading the story of the sacredlandscape of Bukhoroi Sharif have, among other things, been influenced by the

shifting significance successive rulers and governments have accorded the

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shrines. After the Bolshevik revolution, and particularly since the late 1950s, shrinesand shrine pilgrimage became major targets for Soviet anti-Islamic measures andpropaganda.20 The official Soviet Muslim Board of Central Asia and Kazakhstansharply dissociated itself from saint worship and shrine pilgrimage. Beginning inthe 1950s and continuing into the 1980s, the board issued several fatwas againstsuch practices, condemning them as bidat, heretical innovations in belief and prac-tice.21 Most shrines were destroyed or left to decay, like other buildings with reli-gious associations. In the case of others, notably the main shrine centres, a muchsubtler strategy was adopted. Some of these were actually preserved as monuments,museums or tourist attractions. Shrines in Soviet Central Asia which were classifiedas representing significant medieval architectural structures were redefined asmonuments of Central Asian architecture expressing an earlier stage in the develop-ment of the culture of the proletariat.22 They were subjected to what Benedict

Anderson in a discussion of nineteenth-century colonial South Asia has aptlytermed a museumising imagination, an imagination which turns ancient shrinesinto important institutions of modern state power.23 The museumising imaginationin Soviet Central Asia desacralised the sacred sites. They were as far as possibleemptied of pilgrims and filled with tourists instead. The social dramas that usedto unfold at these places, where human suffering and hope met the power of theDivine to change the course of lives, were bracketed and relegated to a place farback in history before Soviet modernising forces had eliminated religion as aform of social consciousness and made way for a rationalist, secular outlook.This place far back in history was made a foreign country,24 the relics of which

were irrelevant to modern concerns.

Ziyorat in secular space

In spite of the fact that shrines and shrine pilgrimage were for a long periodprimary targets for Soviet anti-Islamic measures and propaganda, they remainedfocal points for popular Islam in Central Asia during the whole Soviet era.Although a foreign country in official ideology, many people apparently foundthe past embodied in the shrines very relevant to modern concerns. Almost allpractitioners of ziyorat that I talked with during my fieldwork had paid ziyoratin Soviet times too, usually having been brought to the shrines by parents, grand-parents or other relatives in the first place, and then later imitating their practice:Qosh uyasida korganini qiladi (The bird does what it has seen in the nest), as oneof them said. They performed ziyorat despite the stories about relatives, neigh-bours, colleagues, friends and other people who had been kicked out of theparty, who had been fired from their jobs or expelled from school or university,or who had been forced to renounce their religious beliefs at local Party meetings.However, they explained their courage by asserting that when people had faith,faith and the benefits of visitation would overshadow any fear of potential sanc-tions. If they wanted to do ziyorat they would find a way. They would go to theshrines and couch their activities in such accepted secular terms as tourism or

studies in ancient architecture, contesting the authorities monopoly of truth


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by investing conventional categories with alternative meanings. They would go indisguise, or they would go at night, under the cover of darkness, hidden from theeyes and ears of people they feared and people they did not know. They would goin their dreams, and they would go to places that experience had taught them wererelatively safe, where they knew that local officials turned a blind eye to suchpractices, or where local officials themselves secretly engaged in them.

The enforcement of anti-religious policy was not uniform because it hinged on anumber of local factors, including the officials on the ground responsible of imple-menting policies. Such low-level officials were not just mouthpieces of the regime.They had usually been born and raised in the community which they served, andmany sought to make compromises between Soviet policy, their own responsibil-ity for implementing it, and local sensibilities.25 With their silent collusion, thepractice ofziyorat became a public secret in Michael Taussigs sense; something

which is generally known, but cannot be articulated.26

That is, it was predicatedon a kind of mutual deception or dissimulation which was intended to keep thepeace and maintain a sense of community. People would also pay ziyorat toshrines that were officially zakret, closed,27or converted to secular use. In short,if one is to believe these accounts of the past, things were difficult, but peoplehad a sense of the game; where and with whom it was safe to play it, andwhich codes to use when doing so.

Monuments that obtained their originality

The late Gorbachev years and the years after independence gave new significanceto Bukharas shrines, which became primary sites for a state-sponsored effort torecast earlier representations of collective experience in order to support and vali-date present patterns of authority. Numerous central Muslim avliyo connectedwith the area that is now Uzbekistan have been rehabilitated and celebratedafter independence, their shrines restored and inaugurated anew with statefunding. On the homepage of the information agency Jahon under the Uzbek Min-istry of Foreign Affairs28 a list can be found of shrines, mosques and madrasaswhich were restored during the period from 1991 to 2001. Monuments thatobtained their originality, is how they are presented here.

These immediately visible material improvements to some of the larger andbetter-known shrines in the country, and the nation-wide celebrations of theMuslim saints and scholars connected with them, have constituted one of themost common reference points through which President Islam Karimov arguesthat his government has worked for the rehabilitation of the nations Islamictradition. However, these efforts are not fundamentally different from the effortsof the Soviet era to museumise Islam. The shrines are still called obidalar,monuments. Rather than being icons of the sacred in its universal, transcendentalsense, they are now chronotropes, that is, tropes which fuse space and time.29

More specifically, they are chronotropes of national monumental time.30 Thereis no official canonisation process in Islam, but one could argue that what has

been going on in Uzbekistan since independence is a kind of canonisation of

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the saints of the nation. There has been an attempt to appropriate the avliyo,embodiments of ideal Muslimness, and make them national heroes, connectingthem with the governments ideology of national independence.

Ziyorat in national space

No wonder, then, that the practice of ziyorat remains very popular in post-SovietUzbekistan, or rather has become popular in a different way. If ziyorat was apublic secret in Soviet days, it has now become conspicuously public. Frombeing associated with the most backward aspects of local culture and a cause ofembarrassment, ziyorat has become something that leading government officialswillingly engage in, in particular on the occasion of national celebrations ofsaints and scholars, and preferably in front of running cameras. The political

elite has turned ziyorat into a national commemorative ceremony, a ritual whichnot only implies continuity with the past by virtue of a high degree of formalityand fixity (a characteristic of ritual in general) but which also explicitly claimsto commemorate such continuity.31 The veneration of saints, in other words,has also become a sign of loyalty to the regime and commitment to its versionof national tradition. Even declared atheists may engage in the practice of

ziyorat on these terms.Many shrines are accessible at any time. People embark on ziyoratin groups

of families, friends, colleagues, neighbours, or alone. If there is a domlo present,visitors will usually have him or her read the Fatiha, the first sura of the Quran,

followed by a dua, a free prayer in plain words in the local language. The saint isasked to intercede with God on behalf of visitors. In return, visitors will usuallygive the domlo some money or some sweets, cakes, or bread. Sometimes theywill circle the tomb, touching it with their hands or other parts of their bodiesand placing small votive offerings such as grain or coins on it. At larger shrinesthere might be a place with facilities for slaughtering and preparing animals for

xudoiy, sacrifice. A xudoiy is sometimes made after the favourable outcome ofan event (for example, recovery from illness, graduation, or release fromprison) especially if one has requested this successful outcome from the saint.The slaughtered and prepared animal should then be offered to other visitorstoo. There might also be a spring or a well, the water of which is considered tohave healing qualities. Pilgrims might drink from it, clean themselves, or fill upbottles of its water to take home with them. At some shrines it is relativelycommon for people, in particular those with serious problems, to sleep overnightin order to subject themselves to the force of the place more intensely and in orderto dream. Dreaming is considered to be a state in which the ruh, spirit, is able toleave the body and move freely, meeting and communicating with other spirits,and where a human being with a clean heart may receive messages from Godand his avliyo. People who come to sleep at shrines hope that the saints associatedwith the places will appear in their dreams and give them a sign or advice.

In fact, people can also pay ziyorat in their dreams, or experience avliyo

appearing in their dreams, sometimes giving them more or less clear directions


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and advice about how to lead their lives. Such dream-encounters with saintsbecome particularly important in situations where ones physical movement isinhibited. In Soviet times this was important for those who were afraid toperform a physical ziyorat, and in post-Soviet society for people who are impairedin some way, because of illness for example. Dreams about avliyo also frequentlylead to more or less dramatic changes is peoples lives. In these dreams, the saintusually warns the dreamer that harm may befall him or her if proper action is nottaken, but also promises that if such action is taken, the dreamer will be freed frompain or illness, granted a child or a job, or whatever haunts his or her heart andmind. Such proper action may consist in starting to perform the namoz, visitingthe saints tomb regularly, stopping drinking alcohol, or more radically, devotingones life to religious healing or service at a shrine.

Living saints are not common in present-day Uzbekistan, in contrast to other

places such as South Asia where saints have continued to emerge.32

A shrine guar-dian told me that a couple of years ago there was a man in Bukhara who claimed tobe avliyo, and who roamed about the streets telling people that they should not eatpork or margarine. He was arrested, and nobody had heard from him since.Whether this story is true or not, a person claiming to be avliyo and operatingoutside the official Islamic establishment would probably have serious troublewith the authorities in present-day Uzbekistan. Living saints, as embodiments ofthe sacred, can be threatening Others in relation to centralised, bureaucratic reli-gious institutions. Being outside the control of these institutions they mayprovide the sacred with faces other than those they promote. Living saints

might challenge the nationalist plot into which avliyo have been woven in post-Soviet Uzbekistan.

Although ideological colonisation seems like an easier project when the saint istransformed into a shrine, the meaning of the shrines is still not so easy to control.If official nationalist ideology has colonised sacred space, it has hardly colonisedthe lifeworlds of the visitors to it, changing the associations triggered by theshrines. As a commemorative ceremony celebrating the Muslimness of thenation the practice of ziyorat may play a significant role in the shaping ofcommunal memory, but the precise content of that commemoration is subject tocontinuous redefinition in the practice of everyday life. People are able tocreatively relate the shrines to their own experiences, projects, and hopes, thusinvesting them with new meaning and redefining what it means to be a goodMuslim in present-day society.

Recreating illusio

Sacred places are focal points for reflection on and practical experiments withdifferent ways of remaking lifeworlds. More specifically, I suggest that sacredplaces are focal points for recreating what Pierre Bourdieu in his late writingstermed illusio: that is, what gives meaning and direction to existence and whatmakes certain parts of reality worth engaging in.33 To care about a reality,

writes Ghassan Hage in a reading of Bourdieu which relates the concept of

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illusio to his own concept of intensity, is to share in the illusio that it is worthbeing part of it or being implicated in it, and the more one becomes implicated in areality the more one feels it intensely.34

Taking my point of departure too in Michael Jacksons suggestion that being athome in the world is a matter of working out some kind of balance between activeand passive modes of being,35 I argue that in order to commit themselves to acertain part of reality, to share its illusio, individuals need to experience a senseof agency in relation to this part of reality as well as a sense of belonging to it,a sense that it has been active in shaping what they are. The concern to create abalance between a sense of agency and a sense of belonging to a larger moralorder is a fundamental dynamic force in human practice and one which informsBukhara Muslims engagement with sacred places. People most often seek outthese places when this balance is disturbed.

In order to make this argument clearer, let me return to Bahodir and hisdream-encounter with the spirit of Imom Xoja Baror.

Dreaming a charismatic self

For a long time Bahodir had experienced marginality in relation to the social worldthat surrounded him, and he was now in search of a way out of this marginality. Hewas striving to disengage from the social games in which he had no success in anycase, in order to be subjected only to God and to saints of past times, manifestingpast powers and past morality in the present. He seemed to be striving to become

recognised as charismatic, as a person standing beyond the social context in whichhe lived, having knowledge of the social games that people around him wereimmersed in but being emotionally detached from them, not sharing theirillusio. The dream he had at the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror established the con-tours of such a new charismatic self, providing him with a way to turn his positionas an outcast into an advantage.

As already mentioned, Bahodir restored the shrine of Imom Xoja Baror. He alsostarted praying for people who visited the shrine. Receiving visitors he wouldoften moralise, talking about good and evil, complaining that people nowadayshad forgotten their Muslimness and were too concerned with this-worldly pur-suits of money, power, and material things. People, he pointed out, were increas-ingly seeking Imom Xoja Barors help in financial matters, forgetting thatfinancial matters are meaningless in the light of the eternal, and forgetting thatImom Xoja Baror himself had never been concerned about them. Complainingabout peoples misguided priorities, he often pointed at the tug, the pole whichusually marks the tombs of saints. Placed on the top of the pole is an image ofa hand. In the opinion of many, the hand symbolises the denunciation of materi-alism.36 This symbolism is linked to Alexander the Great, who is a great legendaryfigure in Central Asia,37 as in other parts of the world. The story goes that Alex-ander, when he sensed that his death was near, told people around him to bury himwith an empty hand on his grave as a symbol that although he had conquered the

world, he left it empty-handed, carrying nothing with him to the next life. Bahodir


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also complained that when people touched the shrine in the hope of a miracle theywere forgetting that shrines do not have any magical powers. He pointed out thatshrines are only special places in the sense of being triggers for reflection, remind-ing people to view their lives in the light of death and the afterlife and inspiringthem to imitate the ideal Muslimness of the saints.

In spite of all his efforts Bahodir was not particularly convincing in his claim tocharisma. In other words, his charisma rested on a very fragile foundation. Therewere a few people who seemed to recognise his diagnosis of social reality in theirown lifeworlds, regularly visiting Imom Xoja Barors shrine when they knewBahodir was there, letting him pray for them and listening to his advice. Otherscontinued treating him as an outcast. Some believed that he was deranged andsuffered from the delusion that he was a saint (which, they pointed out, heobviously was notwho had ever heard about a saint who had spent several

years of his life as an alcoholic?). Furthermore, Bahodir was perhaps also cautiousnot to draw too much attention to himself as a charismatic religious authorityoutside the religious establishment. In the field of religion in post-SovietUzbekistan too much success can amount to failure. Setting oneself too muchabove the surrounding society can be interpreted as a sign of anti-state extremistor Wahhabi sentiments.

Time is money

Perhaps because he was only partially successful, the claim to charisma was not

the only strategy Bahodir pursued in order to create a satisfying social existence.There were times when he showed a more accommodating attitude. At these timeshe seemed to approach the social games of the world on their own terms and didhis best to help the visitors to the shrine to do so as well, thus confirming that thesegames were worth engaging in. Sometimes when he received visitors at the shrinehe would start telling stories about people who had miraculously had their wishesfulfilled and their hopes realised after visiting the shrine, who had achievedsuccess in their business transactions or who had won the lottery. These werestories that reflected priorities which he had previously denounced, and ideasabout the magical power of sacred places which he had earlier dismissed asirrational.

Another favourite saint of Bahodirs was Bahouddin Naqshband, Bukharasunofficial patron saint who is known for his appreciation of honest work, for thefact that he did not turn his back on the world, but worked in order to supporthimself and his family. Bahodir had not unambiguously turned his back on theworld either. Since Imom Xoja Baror visited him in his dream, he said, he hadmiraculously, in a way he could not explain, been able to maintain his familyby building tombs at the burial place which surrounded the shrine and bypraying for the visitors to the shrine.

However, this periodic engagement with the surrounding society on its ownterms also raised suspicion at times. It made some people doubt the sincerity of

his motives for serving as a shrine-guardian. Maybe he just did it for the sake

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of the money he received from the visitors for whom he prayed? In reply Bahodirwould insist that all his worldly pursuits were connected with God. He had got intothe habit of performing some sort of improvised inner zikr, recollection of God,when he built tombs. His heart would praise God, Allah, Allah, in time withhis bricklaying, assimilating the eternal moral order of the universe to thetempo of social life. And if what he did was wrong, why would God help him?

Bahodir struggled along, hedging his bets, accentuating different aspects of thephenomenon of saints and of sacred space as he tentatively participated in differentgames, having little success in any of them. He wavered between standing abovethe worldly pursuits of society and actively engaging in them, using his mysticknowledge of the past to both condemn these pursuits and succeed in them. Heconsidered all his small victories to be signs of Gods blessing.

Imaginative potentials of sacred places

For Bukharas Muslims sacred places are focal points for creative experimentationwith different ways of remaking lifeworlds at a time when rapid social change hasdisrupted the habitual, hampering previous ways of acting and bringing forth anew repertoire of possibilities.

In his book Post-Soviet Chaos: Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan,38

which is based on a fieldwork in Almaty, Joma Nazpary argues that post-Sovietreforms have dispossessed the majority of the population in Kazakhstan, madethem lose economical, social and existential security. For the dispossessed in

Kazakhstan, life is characterised by bardak; a Russian word literally meaningbrothel, but used as a metaphor for complete chaos.

Experiences of loss and feelings of navigating in chaos were not unknown to thepeople I worked among in Bukhara. The society that has emerged in the wake ofthe dissolution of the Soviet Union is one that many people experience as a mixedblessing, being increasingly disillusioned with the unfulfilled promises of the post-Soviet Uzbek government, which has left them struggling in their daily lives witheconomic despair. After independence, most Uzbeks have experienced a steadyfall in the level of real wages due to high rates of inflation, the liberalisation ofprices and the reduction of subsidies. Unemployment is high and seems to beincreasing, and average salaries are hardly sufficient to meet bare subsistence.Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, many people experiencesociety as amoral and corrupt, characterised by gross social injustice. They findthemselves having to pay considerable amounts of money under the table ifthey want to get a job, pass an exam, or achieve proper medical treatment, andthey see money open every door for those people who possess it. On the otherhand, many people are also fascinated by the seemingly unlimited array of oppor-tunities to improve life which have been introduced after independence. One oftenhears the view expressed that the virtues of entrepreneurship and industriousness,which are necessary if one wants to make a good living in post-Soviet society, areindeed virtues which are fundamental to local Muslimness, and that post-Soviet

society is therefore conducive to proper Muslimness (in contrast, it is sometimes


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added, to Soviet society where people were able to succeed in society withoutmaking an effort). Frequently, during my fieldwork I witnessed people makingreferences to Bahouddin Naqshbands saying The heart with God, the hand atwork, to make an argument that engaging in worldly matters is not contradictoryto the message of Islam, and that honest work may in fact be the best way ofserving God.

Moral and existential dilemmas

Life in Uzbekistan is thus characterised by chaos and existential insecurity, butalso by hope and fascination with the new opportunities independence hasbrought about for those who understand how to navigate in the post-Sovietchaos. It has confronted people with a range of new existential and moral dilem-

mas. Sacred places are focal points for their efforts to tackle these new existentialand moral dilemmas. They are focal points for reflection on, negotiation of andpractical experimentation with the question of which parts of reality are worthengaging in, which illusios are worth sharing, and what it takes to be a goodMuslim in this changing society. Should one turn ones back on society, rejectingits amoral nature, or should one do ones best to play the games of this society,focusing instead on the virtues of entrepreneurship and industriousness? Mostpeople are ambiguous about how they tackle such moral and existential dilemmas.Like Bahodir they struggle along, constantly on the lookout for new opportunities,however small, for creating a more satisfying existence, and continually revising

their ideas about the constitution of proper Uzbek Muslimness. They hope forfuture divine interventions, but also frequently justify morally ambiguousactions, decisions and achievements in retrospect by reference to divine interven-tions. When a person, say, passes an exam, gets a job or performs a successfulbusiness transaction, social recognition is not unambiguous as, in the opinion ofmany, such achievements are hardly possible without paying bribes or havingconnections. Just as the post-Soviet regime has made use of avliyo and theirshrines as part of its self-legitimating agenda, people often, in their everydaylives, seek to lend legitimacy to morally ambiguous actions, decisions andachievements by connecting them with divine agency. This is perhaps mostnotable in the sphere of business, or biznes as it is termed in the local language.

The sphere of biznes is the object of great fascination, as it offers a seeminglyunlimited array of opportunities to improve life, a means for the acquisition ofgoods one could not even begin to imagine during Soviet times, and an arenafor the display of the highly valued virtues of industriousness and entrepreneur-ship. At the same time, the emerging and rather disparate sphere of biznes isalso looked upon with considerable suspicion, being considered potentially sub-versive and threatening in relation to the social and moral order. This suspiciondoes not only stem from the fact that private trading activities were branded asamoral during Soviet times. It also stems from the experiential realities of post-Soviet life. Biznes is associated with somewhat shady dealings and most people

have felt morally offended by encounters with fellow citizens who have made a

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biznes of charging for services that ought to be provided for free. Among people Iknew in Uzbekistan there was intense discussion and speculation about whethersuccess in business, with its ambiguous connotations, should be regarded as aresult of divine blessing, or on the contrary, as a result of immoral acts thatwould have repercussions in the afterlife.

I met several businessmen and women who connected their business enterpriseswith esoteric experiences: dreams about saints, miracles, or divine inspiration. Takefor example Gulnora, a middle-aged woman who was educated as a teacher, but whohad been unable to live on her teachers salary and therefore had changed track tothe potentially much more profitable path of doing biznes in the new jungle of thepost-Soviet market, buying furs and selling them in Russia. Here she had to struggle,not only with the tough competition and the opaqueness of economic structures, butalso with harassment from customs officers and other officials trying to supplement

their own meagre incomes with bribes (also a kind ofbiznes), with dealers whom shewas never sure that she could trust but had to engage with, and with mafia-likegroups trying to control the trade. They are like mad dogs, Gulnora once saidabout the businessmen she worked among. She, however, did pretty well amongthese mad dogs. This fact she largely attributed to the help of God who, she said,provided her with a sense of which people were trustworthy and who were to beavoided, and whose avliyo had several times appeared in her dreams, giving herwarnings and advice.

I first met Gulnora in 1998, on the occasion of an Osh Bibiyo, a womens ritualheld in honour of the female avliyo Bibi-Seshanba, who is considered the protector

of home and family life, and of women in particular.39

Gulnora had arranged theceremony. She told me that many years ago when she had had problems gettingpregnant, she had promised that if she had a child, she would arrange an Osh

Bibiyo. She actually did become pregnant and later gave birth to a girl who wasnow 15 years old. She had been too busy to arrange an Osh Bibiyo, but now shewanted to do it; better late than never. And besides, she had recently experienceda karama, a miracle worked by a saint. Last time she was in Russia, in August1998, she had a strange dream. A figure came to her and said the seventeenth.When she woke up, she wondered what that meant, and decided to buy a tickethome to Bukhara for 17 August. And indeed, on 17 August, 1998, Russia experi-enced a major economic collapse, and the rouble was devalued dramatically. If shehad stayed, or rather, if she had not changed her roubles in time, she would havebeen ruined. She was not sure about who the figure in the dream was, but shethought that it was some avliyo, and possibly Bibi-Seshanba, and she wanted toexpress her gratitude at the Osh Bibiyo.

Considering that Bibi-Seshanba is primarily seen as the protector of home andfamily life, I found it interesting that Gulnora connected her with the relativesuccess of her business. When I confronted her with my doubts, Gulnora toldme that formerly it might have been the case that women only worked at home,taking care of the children and of the house, but nowadays things were different.Now people needed more money, and many women had to work in order for their

families to live a decent life. Fortunately, Bibi-Seshanba also helped her with that.


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Like many Uzbek women, Gulnora was trying to attain some balance between aperceived traditional gender ideology defining the ideal role of a woman as wifeand mother occupied with domestic obligations, and a perceived modern (or inthe critics words Soviet, Western or just foreign) gender ideology that allowswomen greater personal independence and freedom of choice outside the home.40

Added to this, they must deal with an economic situation that makes it necessaryfor many women to work outside the home in order for a family to maintain whatis considered a decent living standard. Gulnoras way of relating her business toBibi-Seshanba may be seen as a way of countering the risk of losing her valuedstatus and identity as centre of the family and keeper of good morality while enga-ging in an activity, biznes, that is generally considered morally suspect, and evenmore suspect for a woman to engage in.

This is not to say that Gulnoras and other peoples ways of connecting their

lives with the secret purposes of the Divine amount to some kind of bad faithintended to convince others to approve of their actions, decisions and achieve-ments. I see no reason to doubt that people really experience divine agency asplaying an important role in their lives. However, it seems plausible to suggestthat the reason people accentuate these experiences so much has to do withtheir potentially positive social effects. That is, people who had recourse to thenotion of divine interventions were employing a strategy aimed at redefiningmorally ambiguous situations to their advantage.41 People, in other words, notonly invest institutionalised shrines with new meaning as they relate them totheir own concerns, they also make their own maps of sacred landscapes, plugging

in their own landmarks. These might be a dream-encounter with a saint, amiracle happening upon a visit to a shrine, or merely a sudden brainwave orimpulse perceived to be divinely inspired. However, just as the state has notsucceeded in colonising sacred space, people can never be sure that otherpeople will acknowledge the validity of these landmarks. These are oftencontested and dismissed by others as merely reflecting the personal, self-servingconcerns of the experiencing subject, as being merely subjective utopias, non-places, not worth dwelling on. Not everyone acknowledged that the Divine hadintervened in Bahodirs and Gulnoras lifeworlds.

A phenomenology ofavliyo in post-Soviet Bukhara

It might be the relative indeterminacy in the conception of avliyo that give themtheir strong imaginative potential and such a strong hold on peoples imagination.Far from being the captives by nationalist discourse, far from being frozen assymbols of the nations great past, in semiological terms they could rather becharacterised as signs with a surplus of the signifier. Neither embodied in living(all too human) human beings, nor defined unambiguously in (all too human)human language, they are capable of playing virtually unlimited roles in themost diverse stories characterised by the most diverse concerns, while at the

same time representing an essential, unchanging moral order.

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The tales of the saints of Bukhara often recount their supreme powers ascompared with the power of secular rulers. Equally often, they tell of their self-sacrifice and devotion to the communities they lived in. In the most generalsense they can be perceived as embodiments, or allegories, of everything per-ceived to be missing in the intersubjective encounters of current society. Avliyo,to those Bukhara Muslims who seek them out, embody the fulfilment of boththe desire for agency and the desire for existence within a larger sphere ofBeing which has been active in shaping them. On the one hand they embody absol-ute power and knowledge, absolute autonomy and agency. They possess the powerto intervene radically in the lives of others, imposing their will on these lives. Onthe other hand, they embody what might be termed an absolute passivity or soci-ality, that is, a sacrificing of the self for the sake of society. To be more precise,when people feel the social to be suffocating, leaving no room for agency, what

they seek in the phenomenon ofavliyo is power to act on the world or knowledgeto imagine the social in a different way. This is a way that symbolically switchesthe locus of action from a context in which it does not seem to make a difference toa context in which it does.42

This was what Bahodir did. On the one hand he sought magical powers toimprove his chances in a worldly game where money, social status and masculineidentity were at stake. At the same time he disengaged from this game by way ofmoral narratives that put them into perspective and helped him imagine an alter-native sphere of Being to which he could belong and within which he could experi-ence agency. This was the ultimate game set up by God, in which the stakes are

ones fate in the afterlife.When people experience agency and autonomy but find themselves on the

margins of their social world, they seek to imagine subjectivity differently. Thephenomenon of avliyo provides a moral foundation for this agency and know-ledge. They seek to symbolically transfer the constitution of their subjectivityfrom a sphere of Being within which they feel alienated to a sphere of Beingwithin which they can be integrated. This is what Bahodir did when he justifiedhis engagement in the social games of the world. If what he did was wrong,why would God, then, help him? Similarly, Gulnora justified the fact that she suc-ceeded among the mad dogs of the market by reference to the help of God andBibi-Seshanba. People often waver between the idea that sacred places embodythe Divine concretely, endowed with a kind of contagious blessedness whichcannot be perceived by ordinary human reason, and the idea that sacred placesare merely symbols or traces of a divine presence in the world and the idealsattained by the saint. This wavering or ambiguity should not be seen as an indi-cator of a lack of knowledge of Islam among Central Asias Muslims, as ithas sometimes been presented, but rather as evidence of the general point thatknowledge is related to doing, to practice. People who, when asked directly,deem the belief in the magical or miraculous power of sacred places irrationalindeed sometimes experience such magical or miraculous powers and drawattention to these experiences, because they lend transcendent authority and

moral righteousness to acts that might otherwise be found morally suspect.


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Moralities in-the-making: negotiating Muslimness

Social change in post-Soviet Central Asia has confronted people with a range of

new existential and moral dilemmas. Sacred places are focal points for theirefforts to tackle these dilemmas; for reflecting on and negotiating what it meansto be a good Muslim in post-Soviet society. Political elites in Uzbekistan haveattempted to co-opt the concept of Muslimness and the sacred places whichembody Muslimness within the ideology of national independence. Itsmeaning, however, is by no means fixed. On the contrary, the meaning ofMuslimness is continually redefined in the course of everyday life, as peoplerelate their own concerns to the concept. They constantly redefine Muslimnessas everything they miss or wish to conjure up in the intersubjective encountersof their lifeworlds, as everything that prevents them from reaching fulfilment in

life. Muslimness sometimes consists in the moral righteousness they findlacking in the actions of people around them. Sometimes it is their grip on theworld they feel they had lost. Sometimes it is the moral foundation they seekfor their struggles to get by in life, while others around them seem not torequire any moral grounding for their actions.

Although they may find themselves in situations characterised by extremeexistential insecurity, they do not resort to extreme ways of being in the world.They do not find the moral utopias of the radical Islamists particularly convincingor attractive. They do not unreflectively embrace post-Soviet nationalist dis-courses or blindly follow the dominant moral orders of their local communities.Neither do they resort to some kind of ultra-liberal morality, cynically engaging

in whatever illusions might serve their personal interests at particular moments.Blind belief and cynical pragmatic faith are rather the rare extremes of their con-stantly shifting, and sometimes ambiguous, engagement with reality in theirefforts to create a balance between a sense of agency and a sense of belongingto a larger moral order. And precisely because Muslimness, rather than a fixedanswer to the predicaments of everyday life, is a morality in the making animatedby the shifting concerns of this everyday life, it is able to give people meaningfulanswers as they struggle along, trying to cope with a changing social world.

Acknowledgements

For very constructive and encouraging comments to this article I owe my thanks toLotte Isager and Johan Rasanayagam. I am also grateful to the participants in thePost-Soviet Islam: An Anthropological Perspective workshop at the Max PlanckInstitute in Halle, 29 June to 1 July 2005, who contributed with their comments tothe paper on which this article is based.

Notes and references

1. My fieldwork was conducted from June 1998 through February 1999, and from June through September2000. Cf also M. Louw, The Heart with God. The Hand at Work. Being Muslim in post-Soviet Bukhara(PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology and Ethnography, Aarhus University, 2004 and M. Louw,Everday Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Routledge 2007)).

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2. Robert Desjarlais uses the phrase struggling along to denote a distinct way of being in the world in whichfuture, present, and past have little to do with one another, and in which recollections depend on momentarypreoccupations more than any deftly woven remembrances of time past. R. Desjarlais, Struggling Along,

Things as They Are. New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology, M. Jackson (ed) (Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996).

3. Most Soviet scholars tried to explain the perseverance of Islam in the Soviet Union by reference to the thesis thatsocial consciousness is more conservative than social being. Although the evolution of consciousness, accordingto Marxist historical materialism, is determined by changes in social life, there is not necessarily completeharmony between different stages of the development of society and consciousness, and remnants or survivalsof earlier forms of consciousness can be found in more developed societies, including the Soviet Union.

4. Western scholars of Islam in the Soviet Union, with Alexandre Bennigsen as the leading figure, oftenassumed that the Muslim societies in the Soviet Union had not been modernised in a cultural or psychologicalsense, as they were protecting themselves and their tradition against Soviet attempts at modernisation. Retro-spectively, these studies appear to have been informed by some rather stereotypical categories which weresubstitutes for the ethnographic richness that was lacking due to the impossibility of doing first-hand researchin the Soviet Union. These categories were rooted in a modernist theoretical framework similar to the oneinforming Soviet analyses, a framework which maintained a dichotomy between essentialised conceptions

of tradition and religion on the one hand, and modernity on the other, and which treated these conceptsas mutually exclusive.5. See for example Shirin Akiner, Social and political reorganisation in Central Asia: transition from pre-

colonial to post-colonial society, Post-Soviet Central Asia, T. Atabaki and J. OKane (eds) (London:I. B. Tauris, 1998); Y. Roi, The secularisation of Islam and the USSRs muslim areas, Muslim Eurasia:Conflicting Legacies, Y. Roi (ed) (London: Frank Cass, 1995); M. Atkin, Islam as faith, politics andbogeyman in Tajikistan, The Politics of Religion in Russia and the new States of Eurasia, M. Bordeaux(ed) (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe 1995); D. Ibrahim, The Islamisation of Central Asia. A CaseStudy of Uzbekistan (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation 1992) and N. Shahrani, Islam and the PoliticalCulture of Scientific Atheism in Post-Soviet Central Asia, The Politics of Religion in Russia and thenew States of Eurasia, M. Bordeaux (ed) (Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe 1995).

6. See for example A. Bennigsen and S. E. Wimbush, Mystics and commissars. Sufism in the Soviet Union(London: Hurst, 1985); H. Fathi, Otines: the unknown women clerics of Central Asian Islam, CentralAsian Survey, Vol 16, No 1, 1997; I. Lipovsky, The awakening of Central Asian Islam, Middle Eastern

Studies, Vol 32, No 3, 1996; S. Poliakov, Everyday Islam. Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia(Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1992); B. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and CollectiveMemory (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001) and V. Schubel, Post-Soviet Hagiography and the Reconstructionof the Naqshbandi Tradition in Contemporary Uzbekistan, Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia.Change and Continuity, E. Ozdalga (ed) (Swedish Research Centre in Istanbul, 1999).

7. R. D. McChesney, Central Asia: Foundations of Change (Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1996), p 19.8. E. S. Casey, How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological

prolegomena, Senses of Place, S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds) (Santa Fe: School of American ResearchPress, 1996).

9. Ibid, pp 2425.10. K. H. Basso, Wisdom sits in places. Notes on a western apache landscape, Senses of Place, S. Feld and

K. H. Basso (eds) (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), p 56.11. Basso adopts Martin Heideggers concept of dwelling to denote the multiple lived relationships that

people maintain with places.

12. According to Islamic tradition, the prophet Muhammad, in 622, ascended to heaven, where he met with theprophets of the past, was given visions of heaven and hell, gazed upon God and was given the command offive prayers a day for all Muslims.

13. The local historian Narzulla Yoldoshev has written about the most well-known of them in his bookBuxoroavliyolarining tarixi, The history of Bukharas avliya. N. Yoldoshev, Buxoro avliyolarning tarixi(Bukhara: Buxoro, 1997).

14. Derived from the Arabic awliya, plural ofwali. The term wali is seldom used. The plural form avliyo is com-monly used as a singular. The Uzbek plural form, then, is avliyolar. Avliyo, however, is also commonly usedas a plural form.

15. Abdulkholiq Gijduvoniy (d. 1220), Xoja Orif ar-Revgariy (d. 1259), Xoja Mahmud Anjir Faghnaviy(d. 1245 or 1272), Xoja ali Rometaniy (d. 1306 or 1321), Muhammad Boboiy Samosiy (d. 1340 or 1354),and Sayyid Mir Kulol (d. 1371) and Bahouddin Naqshband (d. 1389) (names according to contemporaryUzbek spelling). According to Jurgen Paul the concept of the seven pirs is a modern invention. They arenowhere grouped together in this fashion in medieval sources. J. Paul, Contemporary Uzbek Hagiography


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and its Sources, Sprachen, Mythen, Mythizismen: Festschrift Walter Beltz zum 65. Geburtstag, HallscheBeitrage zur Orientwissenschaft, Vol 32, No 1, 2002, p 631.

16. For example Boboyi Poradoz, who is patron saint of shoemakers, Usta Ruhiy, patron saint of metalworkers,Jonmardi Qassob, patron saint of butchers, Imom Muhammad Gazzoliy, patron saint of tailorsand numer-ous others: See Yoldoshev, op cit, Ref xiii, p 123.

17. According to Jurgen Paul this interpretation of the figure of Bahouddin Naqshband constitutes an anachro-nistic projection of a Soviet/post-Soviet ethics into the past and should be regarded as an instance of howclassical texts are adapted, and past principles and figures reinterpreted, to suit present concerns and accom-modate present-day political circumstances. See Paul, op cit, Ref xv, pp 62938.

18. T. Ingold, The temporality of the landscape, World Archaeology. Vol 25, No 2, 1993, p 152.19. Ibid, p 153.20. Cf A. Bennigsen and S. E Wimbush, op cit, Ref vi, p 42.21. Cf A. Bennigsen and S. E. Wimbush, op cit, Ref vi, p 42 and M. Saroyan, Minorities, Mullahs and Modernity:

Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (IAS: Berkeley, 1997), pp 4850, 6668.22. For a sketch of Soviet interpretation and preservation of Bukharas ancient heritage, see M. Azzout, The

Soviet interpretation and preservation of the ancient heritage of Uzbekistan: the example of Bukhara,

Bukhara. The Myth and the Architecture, A. Petruccioli (ed) (Cambridge MA: Aga Khan Program for

Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999).23. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso,1991), p 183.

24. Cf David Lowenthal who has demonstrated how in the twentieth century the past has been treated as aforeign country radically different from modern time, its relics being largely irrelevant to modern concerns.D. Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

25. Cf also O. Roy, The New Central Asia. The Creation of Nations (London and New York: I. P. Tauris), p 152.26. M. Taussig,Defacement. Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford: Stanford University Press),

p 5.27. People often used the Russian term zakret when talking about the fact that ziyorat was forbidden during

Soviet times. Using the Russian term in discourses otherwise held in Uzbek or Tajik, it seems, they dissociatethemselves from the practice of closing off and indicate that it is to be conceived as a foreign imposition.

28. http://jahon.mfa.uz/english.htm29. Mikhail Bakhtin used the concept of chronotrope (literally time space) to denote the intrinsic connectedness

of temporal and spatial relationships; the inseparability of space and time. He, more specifically, discussesliterary chronotopes, which fuse spatial and temporal indicators into wholes, but the concept, I believe, isalso revealing outside the literary realm. M. M. Bakhtin, Forms of time and chronotypes in the novel,

The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, M. Holquist (ed) (Austin: University of TexasPress, 1991).

30. Cf M. Herzfeld, A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1991).

31. Cf P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p 48.32. Cf P. Werbner and H. Basu, The embodiment of charisma, Embodying Charisma. Modernity, Locality and

the Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cults (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p 3.33. P. Bourdieu, The Economy of Symbolic Goods, Practical Reason. On the Theory of Action (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 1998), pp 7677 and P. Bourdieu, Social Being, Time and the Sense of Existence, PascalianMeditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).

34. G. Hage, The differential intensities of social reality: migration, participation and guilt, Arab Australians

Today (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), p 201.35. M. Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p 123 and

M. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen:Museum Tusculanum Press), p 13.

36. The hand is also interpreted as a symbol of the five pillars of Islam. I did not encounter the commoninterpretation in the Arab world which identifies the hand as Fatimas hand, a widely used protectionagainst the evil eye and djinns, demons.

37. Alexander the Great invaded Central Asia in 329 BC, defeating the Persians, the Scythians who lived north ofthe Syrdaryo River and finally the Sogdians (the Persians had created the province of Sogdiana and Bactria

covering much of present-day Uzbekistan). In Samarkand, Alexander killed his best friend Clitus and latermarried Roxana, daughter of the Sogdian chief Oxyartes. Alexander died in 323 BC. A. Rashid, The Resur-gence of Central Asia. Islam or Nationalism? (London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1994), pp 84, 165.

38. J. Nazpary, Post-Soviet Chaos. Violence and Dispossession in Kazakhstan (London and Sterling, Virginia:Pluto Press 2002).

MARIA LOUW

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39. Cf also A. Kramer, Geistliche Autoritat und islamische Gesellschaft in Wandel. Studien uber Frauenalteste(otin und xalfa) im unabhangigen Usbekistan (Berlin: Klaus Schwartz Verlag 2002).

40. Cf S. Akiner, Between tradition and modernity: the dilemma facing contemporary Central Asian women,

Post-Soviet Women: from the Baltic to Central Asia, M. Buckley (ed) (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997).

41. Cf V. Argyrou, Under a spell: the strategic use of magic in Greek Cypriot Society, American Ethnologist,Vol 20, No 2, pp 256271.

42. M. Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling. Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen:Museum Tusculanum Press), pp 1618.


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