Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan by Benjamin Gatling (review)

Commenting on a 2013 article and radio segment on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Tajik service, a user uploaded a low-quality clip of capture footage of men writhing on the ground, while another "growled like a wounded animal." Others were seen in the background, dancing erratically. The footage was a response to a radio segment, "Does Tajikistan Have Any Sufi Pirs" (Tojikiston piri tariqat dorad?) (P. 1). The initial article and the video-upload response serve as the opening vignette for Benjamin Gatling's Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan. As responses to the video revealed, Sufis in contemporary Tajikistan are approached with skepticism and confusion. They are seen as potentially heretical by Muslim reformists, uncivil by secular Tajiks, and dangerous by the Tajik state. More sympathetic to Sufis in Tajikistan, Gatling's work seeks to understand how they use various forms of expressive culture to navigate the complexities of a politically and economically fraught environment. Eschewing an approach that looks at Sufi culture through the lens of "resistance," Gatling demonstrates how Sufis in Tajikistan employ "alternative temporalities" to draw connections to the Sufis of the past, allowing them to transcend the present and develop their own agency, even in the midst of an increasingly lurking and hostile state and security apparatus.

Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan speaks to two main audiences: scholars of post-Soviet Central Asia and those engaged in folklore studies/ethnography. Gatling first addresses the former. In this regard, the book as a whole, speaks to the potential limitations of "post-Soviet" as an analytical framework, precisely because it restricts the type of questions one can explore. Somewhat related, Gatling also posits the book as a critique of conducting ethnography of Central Asian Muslims with an emphasis on historical continuities and discontinuities. To both expose the limits of the "post-Soviet" lens and move beyond the focus on continuities and discontinuities, Gatling explores how Sufis employ tradition (the "persistence of the Sufi past in the present") by inscribing both the sacred Persian past and the more recent Soviet past into the present, intentionally occupying an asynchronous present.

The organization of the book is well-suited to this end, as each chapter looks at one of the various expressive forms (memories, stories, artifacts, rituals, and embodied behaviors) employed by the Sufis featured in Gatling's ethnographic work. Chapter 1 ("Sufis in Tajikistan") introduces Tajikistani Sufis' engagement with the past in order to demonstrate how they evaluate and place value on religious authenticity. Chapter 2 ("Nostalgia and Muslimness"), as the title suggests, looks at nostalgic memories of Sufis in order to show how men like Firuz and Khurshed, two of the author's interlocutors, use nostalgia to craft a sense of Muslim identity and bridge the paradoxes in their lives. In a similar vein, chapter 3 ("Narrating the Past") explores how Tajikistani Sufis use historical narratives (stories) to connect with the sacred past and transform their understanding of the Sufi present. Chapters 4 ("Material Sainthood"), 5 ("Remembering God"), and 6 ("Learning to Be Sufi") look at the material and performative modes of expression employed by Sufis in Tajikistan. Chapter 4 explores how the books of Sufis bridged asynchronous time and, for some Sufis, even served as a materialized form of sainthood. Chapter 5 looks at ritual performances like zikr (a ritual that includes poetry, singing, and dancing meant to invoke "remembrance of the divine") provided a way for Sufis to connect with the sacred past. Finally, chapter 6 brings the earlier chapters together to demonstrate how the Tajikistani Sufis embodied the sacred past (through labor, anachronistic dress and manner, and self-devotion) as they learned how to be Sufi.

Central Asian scholars will benefit from Gatling's creative use of these expressive forms to demonstrate how the centrality of alternative temporalities and asynchronies exposes the limits of "post-Sovietness" as a potential framework. In chapter 2, for example, Gatling focuses on the active use...