Under Solomon's Throne: Uzbek Visions of Renewal in Osh

6. Republic and Virtuous Leadership

148 Republic and Virtuous Leadership 6 At a Russian restaurant in Osh one summer day in 1999, a young Uzbek man eloquently summarized for me why the republic of Uzbekistan was so much on the minds of Uzbeks in Osh at the time. Nurolim stood out as the most cosmopolitan individual of all my friends in the city. He spoke fluent, idiomatic American English, in addition to his Russian, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Turkish, and he was one of the few from Osh who had studied in the United States. Nurolim expressed a sense of alienation from “traditional Uzbek culture” and described mahalla life as oppressive, filled as it was with what he called “Islamic ways of thinking,” and leading many younger residents to resentment and evasion of strict norms. Elders in the mahalla where he used to live, for example, insisted that weddings be done musulmancha: without loud music, dancing, mixing of the sexes, or alcohol. Nurolim distastefully recounted a time when an unmarried woman moved into his mahalla. When she had occasional male visitors to her house, the elders assembled one evening and delivered an ultimatum: she was to stop receiving men, get married, or move out. Nurolim himself moved out of his mahalla as soon as he was financially able and was working at the time for a nongovernmental organization promoting Republic and Virtuous Leadership 149 independent media. Nurolim was, simply put, the most Western-minded Uzbek person whom I knew in Osh. Over pel’meni dumplings and borshch soup, our lunch conversation turned to politics in the neighboring republic of Uzbekistan. Nurolim commented that although President Karimov ruled Uzbekistan with a Soviet-style iron fist, he astutely created a self-image of being the benefactor of the Uzbekistani people. But Nurolim took me by total surprise with the following comments: I’ve spent years criticizing Karimov’s authoritarianism. But I now recognize that Karimov’s ways are not all bad. Things like a quasi-command economy, state-run media, relentless crackdowns on political dissidents and Islamic militants are perhaps necessary for the time being in Uzbekistan, because the alternative would be chaos. There is an Uzbek proverb that captures this. Do you know it? Shoh ko’rgan, khon ko’rgan halqmiz. “We are a people who have seen the shahs, seen the khans.” This means, Uzbeks have witnessed only dictatorial rule in all of their history. Why should we expect them to understand democracy in the short years after independence?1 Enter the Khan This comment shocked me because it came from an active democracy and civil society promoter in Central Asia, one who had just finished telling me how much he resented the paternalism of social life in the mahallas. Nurolim was offering his advocacy, provisional as it was, of President Karimov as a kind of modern khan figure—an enlightened despot whose harsh ways worked for what was presumed to be long-term good. Despite his personal distaste for “traditional Uzbek authority” and his promotion of Western societal models, Nurolim grudgingly assented to the need for this kind of political leader in Central Asia at this time. In his view, only through the political and economic stability that a dictatorial state provides can a people who are used to such rule be educated in the ways of liberal states. Authoritarianism was the path to liberalism. Although Nurolim was an exceptional Osh Uzbek, his advocacy of President Karimov’s approach to post-Soviet rule was widespread and fervent in the late 1990s among Uzbek men and women in Osh of various education levels, professions, and ages. During my fieldwork in that period, I found that Osh Uzbek men in particular harbored a collective obsession about the Uzbekistani president and state. When talking about all sorts of topics, in casual conversation and formal interview alike, these men revealed a fixation on the idea of President Karimov’s effective leadership. I initially found this talk a distraction from my prepared research questions on historical change in the 150 Republic and Virtuous Leadership mahalla, but my interlocutors kept changing the subject on me. An account of wartime hardships in Osh of the 1940s would wander into comparisons with post-Soviet hardships, and then into anti-Akaev, pro-Karimov tirades. Talk about pre-Soviet mahallas would digress to whether traditional sensibilities are returning in the post-Soviet moment. Taxi drivers would offer unsolicited commentaries on comparative developments in...