Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience (review)

What does it mean to be a "Muslim" in post-Soviet Central Asia? Nearly all scholars of the region are in agreement that Uzbekistan, along with its neighbors in post-Soviet Central Asia, is experiencing a process of "re-Islamization" in the ideological vacuum wrought by Communism's demise. Yet "informal" structures of the faith were not completely eradicated by Soviet policy, and it was frequently these communal organizations and traditions that afforded a parallel moral code to that proffered by Soviet strictures, serving as both "moral mentor and moral sensor."¹ Identity and morality are folded into Musulmonchilik or "Muslimness" in Uzbekistan, but the concept remains fluid within a cultural milieu simultaneously shaped by historical circumstance and political repression.

Although he rarely employs the term "identity" (the word is not even listed in the index), Johan Rasanayagam's recent book is a philosophical venture into the dynamics of Islamic identity formation in Central Asia's most populous, and according to some, most influential post-Soviet state— Uzbekistan. Rasanayagam's conceptual frame of "morality of experience" employs a nomenclature that purports to avoid more established, but problematic, social science terminology. An example is his use of "sociality," a notion offered by some social anthropologists in the 1990s who argued that "the concept of society is theoretically obsolete."² As an innovative concept, "sociality" fails to deliver, for if it represents the idea that "the mutually-shared norms and expectations, the ideals of moral personhood and community, the production and reproduction of person—takes place through the flow of daily interaction" (35), then "sociality" translates to nothing more than "socialization." It is a distinction without a difference. This is not a trifling matter, as it is symptomatic of a broader, disjointed, and at points incoherent approach that plagues the theoretical premise of the book.

The argument attempts to draw clear boundaries between the conceptualization of religion's place in moral reasoning, as defined by Durkheim and his more contemporary acolytes, and the "rather different" analysis engendered by consideration of the (alleged) quality of "sociality":

The above [traditional] analyses take ritual or religious practice to be an enactment of a social system that exists independent of the individual.... Daily life and local forms of social interaction are invested with significance and morality by being placed within an Islamic frame.... I seek to explore the transcendent quality of experience itself, in the immersion of a sociality that exists within and between persons, that is at the same time apprehended as extending beyond the contingency of any individual life ... individuals are immersed in a web of relations and obligations that locate them outside their own lives, a location that enables moral reasoning.

(164)

So, one is left to ponder the gulf that separates a "social system that exists independent of the individual" and a "sociality" that exists "beyond the contingency of any individual life." If one sinks a bit deeper into this social constructionist swamp, a conundrum readily emerges: how precisely does the "web of relations and obligations" an individual encounters work to "locate them outside their own lives," when it is these very relationships that provide a person with his/her social identity, and so do not constitute experience that is external to that identity, but rather provide the substrate for its functionality?

Indeed, "experience" as described in the narrative occurs within the context of an established social order. It is meaningless as a "rite" of "moral reasoning" outside this framework. The toys (Uzbek ceremonies and life rituals) described by the author inform the morality of participants only because they recognize and accept the parameters of this order, which is structured and located through an Islamic identity. What the author is really advocating, although he appears unaware of it, is a slight variation of the moral sense theory of David Hume and, more recently, Michael Slote and Jonathan Haidt. Hume's notion of "sentimentalism" suggested that perceptions of social practice ("experience") by an individual are...