100 Islam and Modernity
high-fertility areas but rather offered incentives for larger families in low-fertility
regions. The issue of population control was, nonetheless, fi nally put on the
political agenda. Indeed, around the time of glasnost in the late 1980s, the ques-
tion of family planning emerged as an emotionally charged and highly politicised
issue. The anti-family planning platform, articulated in the Central Asian press,
expressed nationalist sentiments presenting large families and the maternal roles
of women as items of cultural distinctiveness and integrity (Watters 1990).
In the economic sphere, the collectivisation policies of the 1930s had, accord-
ing to Poliakov (1993), the paradoxical effect of giving a longer lease of life to
traditional forms of social organisation in Central Asia by arresting the begin-
nings of agrarian capitalism stimulated by Russian colonisation. Roy (2000)
invokes a similar paradox when he notes that the Soviet project of destroying
traditional society via social engineering translated, in fact, into a recomposition
of traditional solidarity groups within the framework of new Soviet institutions.
The awlad (extended family), the mahalla (neighbourhood) and (among settled
nomads) lineage segments were, in some cases, reincarnated as subdivisions of
collective farms.
In terms of gender roles, collectivisation heralded a new focus on women
as producers and a strong drive to draw them into the socialist labour force.
Women were being called upon to be ‘shock workers’ as well as ‘heroine
mothers’. Raising women’s labour productivity depended, in principle, on limit-
ing the wasteful pursuit of time-consuming household maintenance activities – a
promise that could hardly be fulfi lled in the absence of labour-saving devices,
with inadequate amenities and a rigid sexual division of labour.
Obligations to perform ‘socially useful’ labour were, therefore, experienced
as an onerous burden by the rural majority in Central Asia engaged in com-
pulsory collective agricultural work. Lubin (1981) estimated that in the 1970s
the majority of those working outside social production in Uzbekistan (around
12–15 per cent of the able-bodied population) were women and that most of the
employed were engaged in low-level jobs, even in the health sector, where they
were well represented. Iconographic depictions of women in non-traditional
occupations, driving tractors and handling heavy machinery, bore little relation
to the highly gender-segmented labour market in Central Asia, where, unlike
the rest of the Soviet Union, major untapped reserves of female labour could be
found (Lapidus 1982; Patnaik 1989).
Finally, the Soviet campaign against Islam produced its own contradictions
(Braker 1995; Roi 1995; Keller 2001; Khalid 2007), with a strongly gendered
subtext.^ One of the aims of successive anti-religious campaigns was to create a
clear line of demarcation between small-scale domestic rituals and folk prac-
tices, on the one hand, and any kind of observance that invoked the authority of
organised religious institutions or public expressions of religiosity, on the other.
Offi cial Islamic learning and observance were tightly regulated by the Spiritual