Event

Amid the Soviet assault on Islamic practices and institutions, the Islamic funeral prayer (janaza) was one of the few religious rites that Muslims in Central Asia continued to perform routinely, viewing it as a red line the state could not cross. Today, janaza remains indispensable for most local Muslims; even those opposed to normative forms of Islamic piety aspire to be buried Islamically. Examining this persistence, this talk fleshes out what I call an “ethics of completion”: a striving to complete one’s life in accordance with a moral tradition. Contextualizing this ethics within the broader history of Russian hegemony in Central Asia, I show how it has served as a focal point for colonial anxieties among local Muslims since the late nineteenth century.

Usmon Boron is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. His research examines the entanglements between Islam and secular modernity through a focus on post-Soviet Eurasia. His current book project, In the Shadow of Tradition: Soviet Secularism and Islamic Revival in Kyrgyzstan, explores the conceptual afterlives of Soviet secularization in contemporary Central Asia.