In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan by Benjamin Gatling
  • Tom Mould
Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan. By Benjamin Gatling. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 233, acknowledgments, note on transliteration and translation, introduction, notes, references, index.)

In Expressions of Sufi Culture in Tajikistan, Benjamin Gatling explores how contemporary Sufis use narrative, poetry, prayers, ritual, material texts, and embodied culture to practice their faith and construct a sense of identity that is simultaneously personal, cultural, political, and religious. Guided by ethnographic field practice and analysis of performance in situ, Gatling teases out the various layers of explicit and implicit meaning, identifying particularly relevant nodes of interpretation around time, memory, history, and nostalgia. The result is a carefully documented description and thoughtful analysis of how Sufis construct, interrogate, and deploy competing stories of Sufism past, present, and future.

Laying bare epistemological processes but avoiding the pitfall of the self-referential co-option of the narrative, Gatling introduces the reader to Sufism in Tajikistan as he comes to understand it through careful ethnography. We walk alongside him to shrines, sit with him in zikrs (ceremonies during which the name of God is recited and repeated) and dars (lessons in Sufi teaching), and travel with him to remote villages to meet with local pirs (Sufi masters). Through the experiences of these men—and they are all men; strict gender divisions within this religious group meant Gatling had no meaningful opportunity to conduct fieldwork with women—we come to understand the political, economic, social, and religious marginalization of these disciples and masters, both in the past and the present. Gatling avoids the all-too-common assumption in folklore scholarship that all marginalized peoples are necessarily engaged in explicit acts of resistance. He does, however, explore those ways in which Sufi practitioners claim agency in a present filled with repression and loss. Nostalgic narratives provide one strategy, allegories another. Both draw explicit comparisons between past and present, one as an expression of discontinuity, the other of continuity. This tension between these two states of linear coherence pervades the competing visions of contemporary Sufi practice.

The most explicit articulation of this tension is between a narrative of massive disjunction during the Soviet era and one of continuity despite Soviet control. Such narratives are complicated in post-Soviet Tajikistan, where Islam can again be publicly practiced but is heavily regulated, and where Sufism is seen as a strange anachronism at best, a direct threat to the government at worse. Gatling parses the various arguments for continuity and discontinuity, noting the range of stakeholders and performance contexts that might encourage a person to downplay the impact of the Soviet era in one instance, and highlight it in another. Gatling also found that these stories were individually situated, with many men looking to the 1970s when they discovered Sufism as a period of authenticity and devotion. For virtually all of [End Page 121] Gatling's interlocutors, however, contemporary Sufism is viewed as a pale reflection of what it once was and should be, where loss and inauthenticity are constant challenges to contemporary devotion.

Enter nostalgia. Gatling argues that "nostalgia is the rhetorical glue holding together memories of past greatness and the promises of future glory and mediating the paradoxes in between" (p. 51). And yet, nostalgia clearly has its limits in its ability to provide hope, as Gatling concedes just a page later: "Nostalgic talk evoked ideas about an entire social order now seen as irrecoverably lost" (p. 52). Although Gatling never explains how this glorious future will materialize, he does provide ample discussion on why so many contemporary Sufi practitioners rely on nostalgic narratives to interpret the past and present. His discussion prompts questions about how people select those symbols, objects, and values of the past to represent lost glory, invoking processes of traditionalization and authentication.

Where narratives of past glory compete directly, issues of traditionalization and authentication prove to be paradoxes that practitioners resolve in practice and performance. For example, while direct attribution is crucial to Sufi discourse and practice, spurious attribution is not uncommon. Further, pirs are expected to trace their lineage to powerful pirs of the past. Such expectations have led...

pdf

Share