In Uzbekistan, the discourse of extremism functions as a self-deflecting mechanism: by locating moral failure in the believer, the state absolves itself of responsibility for the conditions that produced dissent. This chapter examines adashganlar—“those who have gone astray”—as a central technology through which the Uzbek state governs Islam, produces fear, and secures its own moral authority. Moving from the stories of Sardor and Muslima to the workings of courts, prisons, textbooks, and sermons, it shows how ordinary Muslims become legible as deviants through expansive surveillance, arbitrary policing, and legal ambiguity. Adashganlar is revealed not as a theological category but as a bureaucratically manufactured identity that fuses security, morality, and legality: visibility, association, or minor acts of piety can be recoded as “extremism.” The chapter traces how this category is institutionalized through restrictive religion laws, undefined notions of radicalism, prison-based “repentance,” and the “Enlightenment Against Ignorance” campaign, which mobilizes state ulama and curricula to equate official Islam with enlightenment and unsanctioned belief with ignorance and danger. It analyzes the purge of independent Islamic authorities, the framing of Hizb ut-Tahrir as an existential ideological enemy, and the political economy of repression in which accusations become sources of profit and loyalty. Ethnographic testimonies and rights reports illuminate carceral brutality and everyday humiliations that turn legality into a pedagogy of fear. Together, these practices create a moral economy in which obedience is learned as virtue and dissent appears as sin, advancing the book’s core argument about paradoxical governance: a secular state that sacralizes Islam as heritage while criminalizing autonomous religiosity. In doing so, this chapter illuminates dialectical radicalization—how repression and resistance co-produce one another.