Paper long abstract:

Recent ethnographic scholarship on politics in Central Asia has emphasized the performative dimensions of state governance and the ways that ordinary people constitute the political in repeated actions and negotiations (e.g. Reeves, Rasanayagam, and Beyer 2014). In this frame the state is performed into being through acts of signification to the extent that state control holds the capacity to shape the terms of being Muslim (e.g. Rasanayagam 2011). This paper considers two large shrine complexes—Hazrati Amirjon in Kulob and Hazrati Mavlono outside Dushanbe—in order to explore contrasting approaches to the state administration over sacred space in Tajikistan. Though both sites accommodate pilgrims, Hazrati Amirjon primarily exists under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture as a museum and heritage site, while Hazrati Mavolono operates as an active congregational mosque, with its leadership appointed by the State Committee for Religious Affairs.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tajikistan between 2010 and 2014, this paper takes Hazrati Amirjon and Hazrati Mavlono as test cases for how authoritarian approaches to governing Islam affect Central Asian believers on the ground. Hazrati Amirjon and Hazrati Mavlono are particularly compelling in that we can use them to chart the efficacy of state projects to connect sacred geography to state-endorsed forms of national belonging. This paper discusses convergences between sacred spaces, devotional practices, state heritage projects, museumification, official religious discourse, and ever-present performative politics at Hazrati Amirjon and Hazrati Mavlono. I argue that shrine practices in Tajikistan suggest an important lacuna in ethnographic studies of the state and religious life in Muslim Eurasia; greater attention needs to be paid to less agonistic sites and responses to Central Asia's authoritarian regimes' securitization of Islam.

Paper long abstract:

The resources of the Orthodox Church were spread thin among the Russian settlers, who migrated to the Kazakhstan by the hundreds of thousands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A frequent complain among the Orthodox population was that children were dying without being baptized due to that lack of ordained clergy near their settlements. Folk religion, thus, played an important role in guiding religious practice and establishing sacred space. The official Church put forth considerable effort to regulate folk religion, often by prohibiting its various manifestations. For example, in 1910, the Metropolitan of Turkestan and Tashkent rejected a profession of loyalty to the Church from followers of John of Kronstadt. Local Church authorities sealed up sacred springs that were revered by peasants.

This paper examines the intersection between Church authority and folk Orthodoxy, focusing a sacred spring near the current village of Kosmos in Almaty Oblast. A Church was founded on the spring in 1909, and was destroyed soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Locals threw coins in the spring as early as the 1880s, and throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet period, until a new church was built over the spring in 2007. This paper examines the history of this spring as a sacred space for both folk Orthodoxy and the official Church. It examines the various religious needs that this sacred space served in prerevolutionary Kazakhstan, and compares it with the Soviet period and present day.

Paper long abstract:

I argue that in contemporary Kazakhstan we witness the rise of private hagiographies about local so called "tribal" saints such as Beket-Ata of Mangistau peninsula. Beket -Ata is associated as the aulia (saint) and patron of Kazakh Adai tribe whose miraculous deeds are highly praised in this part of Kazakhstan. Today it is quite easy to see in local markets and books shops, books or modern hagiographies (which often published by small private publishing houses) devoted to the memory of saintly figures as Beket-Ata. In this research I would focus on this type of Muslim sacred genre on the rise or ( or reemergence??) of this tradition of saintly sacred hagiographies.