Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 101Directorate for the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan (SADUM), estab-
lished in 1943, an institution sometimes used as a bridgehead of Soviet diplo-
macy towards the Muslim world during the cold-war period (Malashenko 1993).
This contributed to the increased ‘privatisation’ of religious practice and its
relegation to the domestic domain. Khalid (2007: 114) observes that, paradoxi-
cally, the anti-religious campaign in Central Asia served to preserve aspects of
customary Islam that came under sustained attack in other parts of the Muslim
world during the twentieth century.
Women’s close association with the domestic domain and the fact that their
activities more readily escaped the scrutiny reserved to men’s more public
pursuits positioned them as privileged custodians of local custom and ethnic/
national identity (Tett 1994; Tohidi 1998). In Uzbekistan, women ritual special-
ists, the otin , kept the transmission of Islamic knowledge alive by providing infor-
mal religious instruction to girls and offi ciating at women’s gatherings marking
important life events (births, marriages and funerals) and religious feasts (Fathi
1997). Ritual life, communal participation, sociality and mutual help combined
seamlessly in the everyday lives of Central Asian women and continue to do so
(Kandiyoti and Azimova 2004).
Against this background, the message of women’s emancipation was most
readily assimilated into and equated with expectations of entitlements and
benefi ts from the state to assist women in the performance of their maternal
and communal duties. These expectations resonate with both the more general
observations of Verdery (1996) on the gender regime of socialism – a regime
that substitutes social protection and state paternalism for civic rights – and the
characteristics of Central Asian societies discussed above. The ease with which
discourses about women’s ‘natural destiny’ and invitations to return to ‘tradi-
tional’ roles fell into place in the post-Soviet period is less surprising when we
consider the specifi c trajectory of Soviet ‘modernisation’.
After the break-up of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Central Asian
states embarked upon ‘nationalising’ policies ranging from language policies
and revised national histories, geared to consolidating the hegemony of their
respective titular nations, to new iconographies for successor regimes (Smith et
al. 1998). The promotion of national values explicitly targeted the family and
gender relations. This was not a uniquely Central Asian phenomenon, for it
also refl ected broader currents across the post-communist world, where neo-
familial ideologies, critical of Soviet-style emancipation and advocating a return
to ‘traditional families’, were plainly in evidence (e.g. Kuenhast and Nechemias
2004).
In Central Asia this reassessment of the Soviet legacy was preceded by a
period of Islamic revival that started in the late Soviet period in Uzbekistan
and achieved full-blown expression during perestroika at a point when the ideo-
logical monopoly of the Soviet state was on the wane. New openings to religion