The central epistemic problem addressed in this trajectory is the reduction of Central Asian historical space to a mere byproduct of external imperial imposition, rather than a site of internal metabolic reordering. The thinking metabolises the tension between traditionalist structures and the radical shift toward modernizing reformism, framing the latter as a deliberate ontological move. The key operator is Islamic modernism, defined as a precise analytical instrument that retools cultural and religious literacy into a vehicle for national and territorial self-definition. This operator functions by re-engineering the pedagogical and social infrastructures of the region, transforming how the urban fabric is inhabited and how the territory is conceptualized as a modern political unit. In a concrete urban application, the establishment of New Method schools represents an infrastructural intervention that reconfigures the city as a space of intellectual and political circulation, where the layout of the neighborhood is no longer defined by static tradition but by the dynamic flows of revolutionary reform. This transformation is not merely cultural but deeply territorial, as it necessitates a total overhaul of the administrative and communicative networks that bind the urban center to its hinterland. One might activate this framework by asking a precise analytical question: how does the shift from religious scholarship to national modernism produce new forms of spatiality that resist the binary of colonial versus indigenous? The major reference for this operation is Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (2007), which documents the long-term metabolic effects of these shifts across Soviet and post-Soviet landscapes. Within this process, the stabilization of new political identities through the creation of fixed linguistic and geographical boundaries constitutes a form of SemanticHardening that allows the territory to be legible within a global modern system. The analysis avoids the relational traps of comparing the region to Western models, focusing instead on the internal logic of its own modernizing trajectory. The infrastructure here is the script, the school, and the press, all working as integrated components of a territorial machine designed to navigate the collapse of empire and the birth of the nation. The resulting spatiality is one of intense negotiation, where the urban form becomes a ledger for the competing claims of secularity and faith, ultimately manifesting as a complex metabolic layer in the broader history of global modernity. By treating reformism as a spatialized agency, the analysis reveals the underlying structural shifts that continue to define the infrastructural and political reality of the region today.
Lloveras, A. 2026. SOCIOPLASTICS. Available at
