ABSTRACT
Studies of Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia had long been predetermined and foreshortened by the influence of Soviet-era scholarly frames and contemporary political and security concerns, which fixated on Islam as a source of violence and instability in the region and were overly reliant on dichotomist frames. Over the last 10–15 years however, a body of scholarship, primarily in anthropology, has emerged that has broken with these concerns and examined, instead, the multiple ways that Muslims in Central Asia understand and live Islam. This work has drawn from rich discussions in the wider anthropology of Islam, within which, Talal Asad’s 1986 essay ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ is a foundational text. Intriguingly, there seems to be a tension between Asad’s articulation of Islam as a discursive tradition and studies of Islam in Central Asia which conceptualize it in terms of belonging or culture. In this chapter, I interrogate this ostensible contradiction, re-evaluating these studies and drawing attention the centrality of practice in Asad’s approach. Resolving the tension, I argue that the study of Islam in Central Asia is a vibrant, maturing field with insights ready to enrich the wider study of Islam.
