Encounters in the ‘Shatterbelt’

For a few kopecks she was willing to swing a smoking bowl of herbs before you and drive away the evil
spirits. This encounter, a common enough experience for an Indian, in India, occurred in the central
Amir Timur Square in Tashkent dominated by a towering statue of Timur atop a horse. It has been
chosen not because it is unusual but precisely because this is a normal encounter for any ‘outsider’,
something that adds to the exotic character that is so central to most descriptions of the region.
However, this exotic encounter leaves behind questions about popular traditions in a classic ‘zone of
contact’ as it points to the survival of traditions older than Islam. Shamanistic traditions have always been a
part of Central Asian tradition and ethnographers like V.N. Basilov have remarked that while this may seem
strange at first, the fact that shamanism became a part of Islam in the region actually resulted in its
continued significance.
Such encounters raise questions about the nature of tradition, faith and identity in the post Soviet space.
The construction of an identity is said to assume importance when problems of social dislocation emerge
within social structures. In the Central Asian situation this dislocation was identified primarily in terms of
dislocation of cultural authenticity and tradition. What was seen, as having been dislocated were the
structures of Islamic culture and language. The process of identification then necessarily involved a re-
identification with the lost heritage. The common practice was to identity a generic understanding of Islam
as the ‘lost heritage’ and then attempt to come to an understanding of what re-identification would mean.
However, one soon realized that in the Central Asian situation, one would have to begin with the
recognition of the fact that “an Islam” was never a reality in the region. Islam, in Central Asia does not have
a monolithic structure and various other trends like Sufism or even pre-Islamic faiths like shamanism, and
other religions particularly Buddhism and Zoroastrianism exerted influence and wielded power. In fact the
Uzbek state itself recognizes Navroz, the festival symbolizing the arrival of spring and a remnant of
Zoroastrian tradition, as an ‘Uzbek’ national tradition with a national holiday on the day. There is also the
interplay in the region between dogmatic religion, Sufism and popular piety, ‘official’ Islam and ‘popular’
Islam. All these streams share one faith, but the social structures in which their common Islamic sentiment
developed, differed, as did their political experiences. In fact it was interesting to learn that there are also
regional differences in the practice of Islam even among the so called ‘settled’ peoples with an acquaintance
pointing out that the continuation of Islamic practices were more visible in Bukhara, his city of origin, than
in Tashkent. Of course what he included within the practices of Islam, regular visits to mazars for instance,
imbibed within itself practices with much older traditions. There was also a case of sub-regional identity
coming into play in representations of popular culture creating further complexities.
This leads to the realization that in most scholarship on religion in the Central Asian region, the emphasis on
the crucial role of ‘an Islam’ probably resulted primarily from the supposed Soviet era emphasis on the
identification of a structure that was to become the principle focus of anti-religious propaganda. As a result,
it was pointed out that current structure of Islam in the region is said to owe much of its organizational and
academic existence to Soviet efforts. This, however, ignored the fact that there was recognition of this
diversity in Soviet ethnographic literature, which mapped the contours of these beliefs in detail.
Examinations of Soviet research on the religious and cultural traditions of the region points to the fact that
there was detailed examination of other religious traditions, albeit as perezhitki or survivals of older
traditions that the socialist system would replace. This assumes importance in the light of the fact that

official Soviet Islam was recognized as having remained a link in the chain of the modernist Jadidist version
of Islam.
Among the early forms of religion, totemism had attracted the attention of Soviet scholarship; attention
had also been focussed on magic, mythology and folklore. Soviet ethnography had also focussed attention
on syncretism, for example, on the syncretic character of “everyday Islam” with the survivals of pre-Islamic
‘cults’, which having been absorbed by Islam, created distinctive everyday religious phenomena among
different Muslim peoples. Basilov cites the works of O.A. Sukhareva, G. Snesareav, T Bayalieva and L.Lavrov
to show extensive studies of pre-Islamic relics among the Uzbeks. He also pointed to literature that shows
that besides the mainstream Islamic thoughts and beliefs, Sufism in its popular forms had absorbed certain
pre-Islamic traditions of the region. Current studies on everyday life in the region point to a similar
syncretism with the coexistence of ‘namaz and wishing trees’ signifying the diversity of everyday religious
life.

Anita
27 October 2017