Poetry and Intrigue in Uzbekistan: On Hamid Ismailov’s ‘The Devil’s Dance’

In ’s book , one Uzbek prisoner says to another, “It’s time for afternoon prayers, I think. Are you a believer, or one of the moderns?”—a familiar and false dichotomy that intellectuals in Muslim countries have had to contend with for a very long time. From the very start of the , Ismailov’s fictionalized version of the late Abdulla Qodiriy, a celebrated Uzbek writer, lives in defiance of this dichotomy, shown to be doing his daily prayers in the cell where time seems punctuated only by prayers. There is, however, one concession given to the conventional wisdom that secular people guard culture against the believing masses: Qodiriy remembers how an Uzbek janitor beat him when he attempted to join in the Christmas celebrations in his Russian school and how his Russian literature teacher saved him. Still, Qodiriy remains a believer one of the modern ones. His and Ismailov’s modernism, above all else, is in the way they engage with history, by bringing different