LAUSR

refusing to accept its authority, and of how SADUM’s centralized authority was sharply dented by Khrushchev’s antireligious campaign. Yet, he persists with his maximalist argument about the centrality of SADUM to Central Asian life. I also have to profess deep skepticism of Tasar’s claim that CARC bureaucrats of the late Stalinist period were motivated by a desire “to consolidate a rule-of-law society” (95) and a “sense of responsibility for the communities they served” (100). Tasar paints a picture of an unbroken continuity in the place of Islam in modern Central Asia. In this, he is part of a cohort of scholars today who insist on the essential Islamicness of Central Asia. The region, they assert, is innately Islamic and can only be understood through Islam, defined as a reified tradition of authority embodied in the ulama. The upheavals of the Soviet period did nothing to dent the authority of Islam and Islamic elites in the region, while other groups that emerged in the modern period, whether Muslim modernists, nationalists, or communists, remained uninfluential and insignificant. This view is not new, but if its previous iterations had seen the reified Islam in a heroic mode, battling adversity. Tasar effaces all adversity from his account, leaving us with a view of Islam never having been trammeled at all. This is a serious mischaracterization of the cultural and religious dynamics in Central Asian society. It is achieved by ignoring everyone except the officials of SADUM and CARC. The only Muslims worthy of Tasar’s attention are those connected to mosques and shrines. Non-observant Muslims, Muslims in the Communist Party or in local government, or the urban intelligentsia, many of whom were deeply hostile to SADUM, are completely banished from the narrative, leaving the ulama of SADUM as all-important. Tasar also willfully ignores all expressions of national discourse in his sources, for Central Asians for him can only be Muslim, and pious and observant ones at that. There is no place in his account for challenges to Islamic authority, its displacement under political assault, or its fraught relationship to discourses of ethnic nationhood. To his credit, Tasar describes (but does not explain) SADUM’s shift from a Sufi-centered traditionalism to rigorist scripturalism, but beyond that, “Islam” remains unproblematized in the book. Tasar’s argument is profoundly essentialist and, as such, fundamentally flawed. It does little to advance our understanding of the complexities of Central Asia’s modern history or of the place of Islam in it.