Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Islam in Contemporary Central Asia 1 4 7illustrated and come with attractive covers (Gonzalez-Quijano 1998). Publishingpractices have not changed very much since the Soviet era, and the actualproduction is still done by a few mammoth concerns that own most printingpresses. Large numbers of small-scale publishers, like those that dominate themarket for popular literature in Pakistan (Hanaway and Nasir 1996), are notto be found in Uzbekistan. Moreover, much of the impact of the easing of ideologicalconstraints has been mitigated by a severe economic crisis that hitpublishing especially hard.The one sphere of life where the Islamic revival has had some effect is thatof gender roles, where the rhetoric of cultural authenticity seeks a rehabilitationof traditional, “properly Islamic” norms for women’s lives. There is a newemphasis on traditional roles for women, accompanied by a debate onwhether the h u j u m (and, by implication, all it represented) was “necessary. ”But even here, the emphasis on reclaiming national traditions far outweighsconcern with the Islamization of everyday life that accompanies political Islamelsewhere. Of the small number of manuals on proper behavior for womenthat have appeared in print, most are translations of turn-of-the-century reformisttracts from Central Asia (and in at least one case, from the OttomanEmpire [see Nazimo 1994]). Finally, the disappearance of large numbers ofjobs resulting from the economic dislocation of the Soviet collapse feeds therhetoric of redefining women’s place in society (Tokhtakhodjaeva 1995).The Post-Soviet Political FieldThe Islamic revival is thus a grassroots movement, an example of nonstategroups asserting their presence in the public realm. How have relations betweenreligion and the state, on the one hand, and between religion and thediscourses of national identity, on the other, been changed since the collapseof the Soviet Union?In all five countries of Central Asia, the states remain the dominant playersin politics and society. The Brezhnev-era patterns of politics survived the transitionto independence. The transition was not entirely smooth. Brezhnev’ssuccessor Yuri Andropov (in office 1982–1984) and Gorbachev himself tried toshake up the entrenched networks in the name of combating corruption. Althoughthe anticorruption campaign dislodged many incumbents from theiroffices, it did little to alter the nature of the politics, and indeed, it served toarouse nationalist sentiment in the republics, especially in Uzbekistan, whichwas hit hardest by the anticorruption campaign (Critchlow 1991, 39–54). Nevertheless,independence came as a surprise to Central Asia—support for thedissolution of the Soviet Union was lower in Central Asia than anywhere else inthe union—and the Party elites managed to stay in power as Soviet republics