An ethnographic study set in Uzbekistan which shows how Muslims practise and celebrate their religion despite a repressive government.

Introduction: towards an anthropology of moral reasoning; 1. Islam and sociality in Pakhtabad and Samarkand; 2. The new Soviet (Central Asian) person and the colonization of consciousness; 3. Good and bad Islam after the Soviet Union: the instrumentalization of tradition; 4. The practical hegemony of state discourse; 5. The moral sources of experience: social, supernatural and material worlds; 6. Moral reasoning through the experience of illness; 7. Debating Islam through the spirits; 8. Experience, intelligibility and tradition.