id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ajiss-1159	DeWeese, Devin	Islam in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience By Johan Rasanayagam (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 281 pages.)	2013.0	5	.pdf	application/pdf	1988	37	22	One wonders if he is not providing an updated, but no less misleading, contrast along the lines of the Sovietological constructions of “of- ficial Islam” vs. “unofficial” or “parallel” or “underground” Islam; indeed, the author goes too far, to this reviewer’s mind, in equating government-tol- erated Islam with “national” manifestations of Muslim religious practice, in- sofar as the state also supports, if less directly (and quite ironically), the official religious board that sponsors scripturalist madrasa training and contributes in 106 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 30:1 ajiss301-latest_ajiss 12/10/2012 6:55 PM Page 106 other ways as well to the production of critics of various aspects of the “na- tional” practice of Islam. This volume is a good contribution to the growing body of ethnographic lit- erature on religious life in Central Asia; it adds substantively to the diverse perspectives on the practice of Islam in Uzbekistan that have begun to emerge as, in effect, pieces of a puzzle that no single study has yet attempted to in- tegrate into a fuller picture, yet it suffers from some of the problems that plague nearly all recent ethnographic works on Central Asia, including an over-reliance on terminological discussion at the expense of the “voices” of the author’s informants, and a palpable reluctance to engage with any kind of historical perspective (beyond the Soviet era) that might illuminate reli- gious life today.	cache/ajiss-1159.pdf	txt/ajiss-1159.txt