Newsnet News of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies June 2017 V
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NewsNet News of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies June 2017 v. 57, n. 3 Table of Contents Central Asian Islam Outside a Soviet Box 2 Morgan Y. Liu, The Ohio State University Opening the Vaults: Art Folios & Resources of the Hoover Institution Library 6 Michael Herrick, Hoover Institution The Lost Archive of Major Martin Manhoff 10 Douglas Smith The Prague Spring Archive Project 12 Ian P Goodale, University of Texas Personages 14 Cohen–Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship Recipients 18 In Memoriam 19 Publications 20 Institutional Member News 25 Affiliate Group News 28 Member Spotlight 31 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 412-648-9911 | [email protected] | www.aseees.org 203C Bellefield Hall | University of Pittsburgh | Pittsburgh, PA 15260-6424 | USA Central Asian Islam Outside a Soviet Box Morgan Y. Liu, Ohio State University A quarter century after the Soviet collapse, anthropological work on Islam in the Middle East Central Asian studies continues to find more of a home and Muslim-majority societies worldwide, that shifts with institutions in the ASEEES realm than with Middle perspective on Central Asian Islam, opening novel East studies, Asian studies, or comparative Muslim questions for both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. societies.1 For those working on the current period, The key intervention here is the contention that there are valid scholarly reasons still to conceptualize Central Asian Islam has been framed, implicitly or Central Asia with respect to the rest of the former explicitly, as a radical rupture from Islam elsewhere Soviet and European state socialist space. Even as (outside of state socialisms) because of the supposedly post-Soviet Central Asian societies have diverged from extraordinary experience of Soviet or European state each other in politics, economics, and society, they are socialist rule. Instead, I present Islam in Central Asia tethered to the Russian Federation through bilateral (and potentially elsewhere in the former Soviet Union ties, multilateral organizations, military arrangements, and Eastern Europe) as being more continuous with media presence, cultural influence, and personal stakes Islam worldwide, as fully locatable on a global canvas of the many Central Asian labor migrants in Russia. of Islamic variation. More importantly, Central Asian nationalisms, cultural The familiar narrative about Central Asian Islam and religious “revivals”, political imaginaries, and follows the contour of Soviet repression succeeded institutions bear deep marks of Soviet understandings by post-Soviet “revival”. Instances of this narrative and practices, the nativist rhetoric of the independent may err not in the particulars, but in their misleading states notwithstanding. explanatory framework. Let us start with the Soviet But a nagging question remains. What is being experience, which varied by period and place. left out in Central Asian research when its scholars tend Mosques and madrasas (Islamic seminaries) were to be associated most with Slavic, East European, and mostly closed, and the few kept running were highly Eurasian units, conferences, and publication venues? restricted in activity and attendance. Imams (mosque What crucial questions remain unasked for Central leaders) were imprisoned, killed, or driven into exile Asia because of the scholarly epistemologies and or underground. Religious texts were destroyed, with histories of debate within the Soviet studies space? a few squirreled away in homes. Islamic education Such a question may be posed for any geographical outside of state-sanctioned institutions happened area, but Central Asia’s current “decolonizing” moment quietly in neighborhoods, with women playing crucial and new global connections constitute an invitation roles in transmission of religious knowledge. Islamic to explore wider comparative frameworks of inquiry. practice – especially praying, fasting, and pilgrimage This move does not seek to repudiate the connections to Mecca – was discouraged, forbidden, and punished, of Central Asian studies to ASEEES-like institutions. On particularly for men under 40. Overall, state efforts the contrary, it is a call only to open up. The idea is to to root out religious “backwardness” in Central Asia encourage multiple footings in Central Asian research were variously interleaved with broader social goals and nimble ways of bringing them into productive for the “emancipation” of women, restructuring of dialogue. class relations, liquidation of illiteracy, modernizing This think piece outlines the beginnings of one of worldviews, and orientation away from the Muslim such attempt. It runs through an example showing, world and toward the rest of the Union (though Central I suggest, that Central Asian Islam has tended to be Asia served as a showpiece for outreach to the Middle misunderstood in part because of its framing within East, Africa, and Asia). the concerns of Soviet studies, a misconception that After the Soviet dissolution, thousands of has carried forward into post-Soviet scholarship. I mosques were built or restored. Religious teachers sketch out an alternative framing, borrowed from trained abroad, or in newly opened Central Asian June 2017 • NewsNet 3 madrasas and religious faculties at universities. Men that frames it.2 Rather, it is to outline a different and women of all ages, particularly children and perspective, drawn from a stream of anthropological elderly, are acquiring Islamic knowledge in mosque studies on Islam inspired by Talal Asad’s notion of classes and self-organized neighborhood lesson discursive tradition.3 For Asad, Islam is an ongoing circles. People are noticeably praying, fasting, going dialogue between foundational texts, their authorized to pilgrimage, and avoiding alcohol. They are dressing interpreters, and practitioners. Islamic practice and modestly according to global Islamic rather than pre- belief are oriented in some way to Qu’ran, Hadith, Soviet Central Asian standards. Islamic pamphlets, and other sources, yet interpretations shift across DVDs, television programming, and websites in movements, history, and place. Islam is thus a kind Central Asian languages and Russian proliferate. of continual conversation between Muslims trying to Bazaar stalls and retail stores specialize in Islamic orient themselves according to the texts, understood clothing and merchandise. Weddings are done “in the to be fixed points, but where their orientations can be Muslim way”, with no vodka, no mixing of the sexes, mutually contested and evolve. This entire process and less extravagance. Public space – buildings, Asad calls a discursive tradition. Fixity, on one hand, signage, bodily dress, and loudspeakers – has become variation and dispute, on the other, are built into this increasingly saturated with visual and auditory signs notion of Islam. It simultaneously keeps in view ideals of piety. Central Asians today are, in short, practicing of divine perfection and the vagaries of socio-historical Islam with a certain sense of determination and process. ostentation. How does seeing Islam as discursive tradition The question is how to interpret the above. illuminate Central Asia? First, it would avoid generally The repression-revival narrative is compelling but casting Soviet-era Central Asians as lapsed or deficient problematic. It assumes Soviet and post-Soviet Muslims. When they lacked access to Islamic texts, Central Asia to be highly abnormal with respect to an those who tried to maintain some observance implicit standard of what Muslim-majority societies nonetheless sought to conform their practice are supposed to look like. Soviet Central Asia was according to what they believed the texts proscribed. abnormal, as the thinking goes, because it was almost The fact that Soviet-era Islamic practices attenuated, completely cut off from the wider Muslim world to deviated from texts over time, or incorporated local which it had been historically connected and subject elements not attested in any text recognized by to intense political pressures and social engineering. outside Muslims, does not change the fact that Central Post-Soviet Central Asia is abnormal because the rush Asians, in good faith, understood their actions to be of competing Islamic missionaries and movements conforming to absent texts. They remained a part of operating there has created a highly contentious the discursive tradition, even if Muslims elsewhere religious environment. Central Asians, initially would disapprove of their knowledge and practice. educated poorly in the basics of Islam and left in an Second, Asad opens new ways of posing “ideological vacuum” after the Soviet collapse, are questions for the Soviet period. If his approach is swayed by contrasting foreign traditions of the faith, right, then Islam is not ultimately about material or even as the states, ever vigilant against “extremism”, ideological content, but rather a continuing dialogue attempt to promote a supposedly nativist “Islam of our and striving toward correct belief and practice. The forefathers”. For both periods, Central Asian Islam is focus on inquiry should not only be about the number deemed deviant from implicit norms because of the of mosques closed or proportion of people fasting; we extraordinary consequences of Soviet rule. So the are not measuring “how much Islam survived”. Rather story goes. we should ask: how did the contours of the discursive Another Perspective on Central Asian Islam tradition