What does history represented as museums in Uzbekistan say, and to whom?

Perhaps the boldest example of the cultural policy Uzbekistan has embraced in recent times can be seen not in Samarkand or Bukhara but in Tashkent. The Uzbekistan Islamic Civilization Center, built right next to the Hazrati Imam Complex, opened its doors last March. This vast complex, covering more than ten hectares, is not merely a museum; with its library, manuscript collections, archive, and research and education units, it is a major project that aims to gather the memory of Islamic civilization under a single roof. In the Qur'an Hall, beneath the 65-meter dome at its center, the famous Mushaf of Uthman is displayed. At certain hours, in the section it occupies, which has a magnificent architectural design, a light show is held, and the Arabic letters flowing from the sky onto this Mushaf represent the descent of revelation. This representation in turn builds a comprehensive historical narrative stretching from pre-Islamic Central Asia, through the great scholarly rise of the ninth to thirteenth centuries and the Timurid age, to modern Uzbekistan.

In fact, this place is a kind of condensed summary of the relationship Uzbekistan wants to establish between its past and its present. The scholarly legacy of Biruni, Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina, Ulugh Beg and many other scholars, along with manuscripts and historical artifacts, is presented to the visitor in an extremely modern museum idiom, accompanied by digital screens, interactive applications, virtual exhibitions and audiovisual technologies. That it was certified in April by Guinness as "the world's largest museum of Islamic civilization" also shows the scale of the project. But precisely here the basic question of this piece confronts us with its full weight: Is making the immense scholarly and intellectual accumulation of Islamic civilization visible with the most advanced spectacle technologies really bringing it back to life, or is it making a civilization viewable inside an immense museum?

In my view the answer need not choose between the two. A civilization certainly cannot be rebuilt in a museum; you cannot reproduce Biruni's mind in a showcase, Maturidi's thought on a digital screen, or Bukhari's scholarly rigor in a light show. Indeed, such splendid presentations can sometimes cast thought itself into shadow. A person can leave the museum with the feeling "What a magnificent civilization it was!" and go on his way without ever wondering what that civilization thought. This is in fact the greatest semantic danger of musealization: making the mind that produced a civilization invisible while making its works visible.

But credit must be given where it is due: this is largely the language of our age. In a world that speaks through image, digital technology, museums, architecture, light and experience, the re-emergence into visibility of a civilization that has been pushed into the darkness of memory for centuries is nothing to be belittled. A young person who enters this immense center in Tashkent may first be impressed by the technology and architecture; but if he can leave it with the questions "Who was Biruni?", "What did Khwarizmi do?" and "What kind of scientific milieu was there in Ulugh Beg's Samarkand?", then the museum has fulfilled its task. For the duty of a museum is not to be the civilization itself, but to be a door that opens onto the civilization.

In fact, we saw a similar impression in a more intense form in Samarkand, in the music-and-light show at Registan Square.

When evening comes, the square facing the three immense madrasas fills with people. People sit on the steps and on the square; phones are readied, cameras are turned on. After a while the madrasa facades that have stood there for centuries turn into a gigantic show screen. Colors change, domes take on other colors, minarets are redrawn with light. History, architecture and modern spectacle technology blend into one another.

This light show says a great deal about the sociological meaning of a musealized history. First of all, modern tourism does not merely visit the past; it reshapes it. A madrasa is no longer only a historic building in which lessons were once taught. It is also a backdrop for taking photographs, an image put into circulation on Instagram, an experience turned into a video of a few minutes, and a spectacle consumed by thousands of people at once.

The issue Walter Benjamin pointed to when he spoke of the transformation of the "aura" of the work of art in the modern age confronts us here in a new form. The historical monument goes on standing in its own place, but the relationship we establish with it changes. Registan thus ceases to be a history that one goes and sees, and becomes an event that begins at a certain hour, that crowds wait for, in which phones are raised into the air at the same moment.

Moreover, the show does not end in the square; the real show begins after that. Registan, having entered the memory of thousands of phones, scatters a few minutes later across the four corners of the world on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and WhatsApp groups. Thus the spectator in the square becomes at the same time a volunteer broadcaster of Uzbek tourism. A person does not merely consume the image; he reproduces and distributes it.

Is this not one of the most interesting mechanisms of globalization? For the local to go global, one no longer necessarily needs big television channels or expensive promotional campaigns. A phone raised by a tourist can sometimes become a country's most effective promotional tool.

Indeed, the tourism boom Uzbekistan has experienced in recent years forms the wider context of this. According to data from the Uzbekistan Statistics Committee, the number of foreign visitors who came to the country for tourism in 2025 reached 11.7 million. In this way Uzbekistan is gradually becoming a more visible and more visited country.

Undoubtedly the matter is not only economic. Tourism is also an economy of memory. Which figures a society selects from its past, which buildings it restores, which squares it illuminates, which stories it tells tourists and which it does not... These are the typical choices of identity politics.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, which past was the independent state going to present itself as the continuation of? In the Islam Karimov period, Emir Timur was turned into one of the principal symbols of the idea of a strong state and independence. How the Timurid legacy was represented for this purpose is also shown in research on the museums and public monuments of the period. In the Shavkat Mirziyoyev period, the same historical narrative combined with a more outward-looking cultural and tourism policy. Figures such as Bukhari, Maturidi and Baha al-Din Naqshband are not merely remembered as great men of the past; through research centers, visiting routes and international promotion, they are turned into figures that tell the story of today's Uzbekistan. The statement the state issued for the Islamic Civilization Center clearly sets out the aim of passing this legacy on to younger generations and introducing it to the world.

However, a very interesting reversal takes place here.

Soviet modernization had put distance between itself and the past, especially the religious past, in order to build the new man. Today's Uzbekistan, by contrast, is summoning its past again in order to build its future. But the past that is summoned no longer returns in its old form. The lights at Registan are perhaps the most beautiful metaphor for this.

Centuries ago, what made the madrasa visible was the knowledge taught there. Today, one of the things that make it visible is projectors. I do not say this sentence as a critique of modern tourism. On the contrary, one must admit that the light show is extremely impressive. To gather thousands of people before a historical building and turn their attention to centuries-old architecture is in itself an achievement not to be belittled. Perhaps one of the children present there that evening will wonder the next day who Ulugh Beg was. Perhaps someone who sees the video in another part of the world will decide to come to Samarkand.

Of course the problem is not the light itself; it is what the light illuminates.

Here a historical correction in particular must be made. The square as a whole is not the work of a single ruler or a single period. While the Ulugh Beg Madrasa was built in the early fifteenth century in the Timurid period, the Sher-Dor and Tilya-Kori madrasas were added to the square in the seventeenth century. Even Registan's present appearance tells us that history is not a single line. In the same square, different centuries stand side by side.

These cities do not belong only to Uzbekistan; nor only to the Timurids. They are a great crossroads of civilization where Turks, Persians, Arabs, Muslims and the different communities that have passed through here throughout history have touched one another. That is why confining Bukhari, Maturidi, Naqshband or Ulugh Beg within modern national borders diminishes their historical greatness.