98 Islam and Modernity
the prism of anti-colonial resistance against the Russians, Kamp interprets the
widespread murders, assaults and rapes perpetrated by Uzbeks against other
Uzbeks as a predominantly internal struggle fuelled by a violent reassertion of
patriarchal power (see also Massell 1974: 275–6; Keller 1998).
In a comparative evaluation of colonial policies, Edgar (2006) highlights the
fact that, unlike the Soviet regime, Western colonial powers in Muslim lands
refrained from interfering with the religious control of personal-status law
and, more generally, from mobilising subject populations.^ Thus, interpreting
Soviet modernisation solely through the prism of a colonial encounter between
the Bolsheviks and the Muslims of Central Asia misses out on the revolution-
ary drive that was also calling local hierarchies into question. Edgar detects,
instead, both similarities with state feminisms in the Muslim world and forms of
anti-colonial resistance in responses to Soviet modernisation.
What is striking about these debates is that, although the question of whether
Soviet modernisation could be equated with other forms of imperial domina-
tion became the subject of a heated controversy, the category of ‘modernisation’
itself was not suffi ciently problematised. Martin (2001), who used Soviet nation-
ality policies as a test case for an evaluation of the claims of the modernisation
paradigm in relation to the Soviet Union, is an exception in this respect. The
manner in which the Soviet state dealt with the national question was, in his
view, what set it apart from other colonial encounters. The policy of affi rmative
action vis-à-vis titular nationalities in the Union republics was intrinsic to the
Bolshevik decolonisation project, since Tsarist colonial oppression (and Great
Russian chauvinism) was assumed to be responsible for the ‘cultural backward-
ness’ of the imperial borderlands. However, from the second half of the 1930s
onwards the Soviet state began to propagate a crude form of primordialism that
locked populations into ethnic (and class) designations, thus transforming the
modern categories of class and nationality into ascribed social-status categories
(Martin 2000).^ These policies had the overall effect of making ethnic belonging
the single most important determinant of life options and the principal focus
of social mobilisation and confl ict. This, Martin argued, was not the result
of the persistence of traditional values into the Soviet era but the unintended
consequence of extreme Soviet statism.
The coexistence of two seemingly contradictory discourses in the literature
on Central Asia betrays a subterranean unease on the question of modernisa-
tion. On the one hand, ideologically inspired celebrations of the achievements of
Soviet policies spoke of dramatic progress and rapid social change. On the other
hand, Soviet ethnographers lamented the immutability of local cultures, the
relative lack of penetrative capacity of the Soviet state and the resilience of local
social patterns. The hurdles on the way to full modernisation were described
with reference to the concept of ‘traditionalism’ or ‘survivals’ of tradition. The
domestic domain, and particularly the role of women within it, were singled out