KYRGYZSTAN TODAY Policy briefs on - Department of Geography

women). About 50 percent of students who participated in the survey received their
initial religious knowledge from parents, grandparents and among the male students
interviewed, this proportion was 38 percent. Taking into account that parents of the
younger generation were brought up under the Soviet system of education, with its
ruling atheistic ideology, one can conclude that young women’s faith is not based on
fundamental religious knowledge.
The religiosity of modern women cannot be explained only by referring to traditions
and history. Marianna Kamp in her book “The New Woman in Uzbekistan” fairly noted
that the new religious clothes khydjab, popular since 1991 among young Uzbek girls and
women, is not an element of national culture. Modern khydjabs do not have any relation
to the traditional veil, which women wore until 1930. [11, с. 233–237]
Rejection of an atheistic ideology, and a loyal attitude to proclamations in the
Republic’s freedom of conscience, promoted a certain type of “religious renaissance”
expressed in the accelerated development of religion and religious organizations.
Openness to the external world, intensive communication between the Central Asian
region and important Islamic centers of the Arab world, Southern Asia, Turkey and Iran
was one consequence of the post-Soviet transitional period. To a certain extent, it was
also promoted by an ideological and spiritual vacuum that emerged after the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Official bodies’ attempts to create some new national ideology have
not been successful so far, due to emerging sharp discord between declared goals and
the conditions of an uneasy transitional period.
Intensive construction of faith-based institutions was one of the most recent
splashes of Moslem revival in the Republic. During the first three years of independence
in Uzbekistan alone, 5,000 mosques were erected. The local population stick strictly to
the old rule: each makhalla shall have its own mosque.
My field studies, conversations with chairmen of makhalla committees in the
Fergana valley and Tashkent oblast conducted from 1999 to 2008, demonstrate that the
national revival is most often perceived by the population as a religious revival, and
construction or re-construction of mosques was mainly financed by makhalla residents.
For the majority of the population of Uzbekistan, Islam was and still is to a considerable
extent an element of national and cultural identity, which is expressed in lifecycle rituals,
visits to sacred places, and various forms of religious healing.
As mentioned above, wearing a khydjab first meant strengthening women’s
religiosity and a “return” to traditions; however, this phenomenon itself started
influencing a transformation of the structure and nature of religion itself. At some
point, Islam started dictating the spiritual, everyday and ritual behaviors and way of
life of women. Respectful makhalla women, who are called otyn, play a special role in
propagating religious rules. They know the religious literature, can read the Koran, and
interpret khadisy and religious stories [1, с. 77–79; 10, с. 27–43].
Many modern or “new” otyn received a good religious education. Ritual practices in
makhallas started to change considerably under their influence. Nowadays, many women
consider the religious ceremonies Bibimushkul-kushod and Bibiseshanbba, (intensively
described by ethnographers and historians 2 and which represent a traditional form of
women’s communities) as outdated forms of religious ceremonies or rituals that were
not part of Islam. Currently, women’s communities constantly practice devotions, now
2
During those very popular rituals women pray about addressing some of routine life problems
[2, с. 17; 3, с. 56].
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