Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Central Asian republics, public Islamic religiosity has proliferated; new mosques have been constructed, forms of Islamic dress newly adopted, and previously proscribed Islamic literature published. Sufi circles of adepts (halqa) are key producers of nascent religious discourse within this so-called Islamic revival. Sufis in Tajikistan have revived their performance of public ritual and adopted new texts for ritual use. These texts, many of them manuscripts long hidden from Soviet authorities, have newly entered the religious imaginations of Tajik Muslims. The focus of this study is on the specific power of these nascent textualities, the processes of their replication and dissemination, and the discursive support for entextualizing processes that historical narrative and ritual performance provide within Sufi groups in post-Soviet Tajikistan.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan during 2010 and 2011, this study considers how nascent religious discourse becomes authoritative and how the new hagiographic and canonization process in Central Asia operates. I argue that in Tajik Sufism there exist ongoing projects of textual canonization, historical valorization, and general hagiographic construction for the express purpose of legitimating the life and practices of post-Soviet Sufism after the enormity of Soviet disjuncture.
At the center of this story of texts are their sites of their enactment, the interrelated contexts of their reading and performance within the intricate bounds of Sufi ritual. As such, this study analyzes specific speech events, such as halqai zikr, the ritualized, collective out-loud remembrance of the names of God, and darsi tariqat, formalized group teaching events, which model and shape conceptions of the grand Tajik Islamic past and draw contemporary practitioners into a discursive relationship with past Sufi masters. I demonstrate how in the tabula rasa post-Soviet religious environment historical narrative and ritual performance work to provide discursive legitimation to relatively new projects of Islamic piety. I further suggest that Sufi practitioners’ creative engagement with the Persian sacred past mitigates discourses of Islamic revivalism and that localized religious, poetical tradition works to open up emic heuristic space for critiquing dominant state strategies aimed at combating terrorism and extremism.