As Islam Replaces Communism in Uzbekistan, Economy Stagnates, Men Remain “More Equal” Than Women

By Lucy Jones

Narsha Myohamasteva guzzles vodka as she swats the 50 or so flies swarming above the dinner table in the richly carpeted front room of her mother’s home in the Ferghana Valley in eastern Uzbekistan.

“I like to enjoy myself and go to parties,” says Narsha, a Russian-language teacher, competing with a video about the Princess of Wales dubbed in Uzbek playing in the background. “I’d be bored if I didn’t,” she adds, her mouthful of gold teeth glinting in the dim light.

Narsha’s sister, Nadira, however, by contrast sits silently at the corner of the low-lying table, which is covered with colorful plates of carefully arranged sausage, cheese, salads and the rice dish plov.

She doesn’t participate in the toasting and covers her head and neck with a scarf when her brother-in-law enters the room. She leaves early because her in-laws ask her not to stay out late.

Nadira married into a Namangan family which, since the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan gained independence in August 1991, has reverted to Muslim traditions banned under communism. She rises at dawn to read the Qur’an and divides her day between looking after children and her in-laws. Her husband forbids her to work.

“This is my life,” she says, adding that relations with her in-laws are difficult. “But I can’t do anything to change it.”

An Islamic revival in Central Asia is fundamentally changing the position of women in the region. And in the Ferghana Valley, encompassing parts of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a conservative, rural area that has experienced a particularly vibrant resurgence of Islam, women are seeing their rights eroded more than those of their counterparts elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

They are working less and earning less (although in part this also reflects the region’s economic difficulties). They are becoming less likely to enter higher education or hold a position in parliament. They are also increasingly under pressure to fully cover themselves in public. Arranged and plural marriages are becoming more widespread.

“Women are losing everything they gained in the Soviet period. In some regions they are practically being sold. Men are increasingly regarding women as objects,” said Svetlana Garfareva, head of the Kyrgyz women’s organization “Vimka”—the Center of Mass Information on Women in Central Asia, based in the city of Osh in the Ferghana Valley.

In the Ferghana Valley, more than 40 percent of marriages in 1998 are thought to have been arranged—a significant increase since Soviet times when the illegality of arranged marriage, although it did not prevent the practice, certainly made it a dangerous business. (The handing over of a dowry was considered particularly risky because it could be used as evidence of an agreement.) During the Soviet period, people usually met their future spouses at the weddings of friends or relatives.

An increase in arranged marriage is thought to have led to a wave of “bride suicides” since independence. Last year, women’s organizations in Uzbekistan estimated that more than 800 women committed suicide because of desperately unhappy arranged marriages, involving tyrannical mothers-in-laws, drunken and violent husbands, and financial pressures.

There are non-governmental organizations (NGOs) helping women in such situations, including a recently opened hostel for battered wives. But in general, women tend not to trust such quasi-official groups—a legacy from Soviet times, when people had little respect for public bodies.

Marital problems are also not a top priority for these NGOs. These groups devote most of their energies to tackling the most basic of women’s issues—such as the right to decide how many children to have and when, decisions normally taken by Uzbek husbands. (Families are large in Uzbekistan. According to the 1989 census, 55 percent of families had 5 or more children.)

There is also very little political weight behind women’s issues. The percentage of women in the Uzbek parliament has dropped from 32 percent to 5 percent since 1991. The only woman in the cabinet heads the Office of Women’s Affairs.

And the situation is unlikely to change. Despite his concern at the rise of conservative Islam, President Islam Karimov has done little to improve the status of women in Uzbekistan. Indeed, the University of World Economy set up by his office excludes women from the International Relations and International Law department on the grounds they will marry and have children. More than 80 percent of students at the establishment are male.

But perhaps the most visible indicator of how the lives of women in Islamic Central Asia are changing is their dress. In 1927 the Bolsheviks forced women to publicly burn their veils. From that date until independence, women (especially in rural areas) dressed modestly in brightly colored pantaloons and dresses, sometimes covering their heads with scarves in the manner of a Russian babushka.

Since 1991, some women have started covering themselves fully from head to foot—including the throat and face—especially on the Uzbek side of the Ferghana Valley. For some this has been by choice, as a way of expressing their Islamic faith. For others it has been at the behest of their husbands.

The Ferghana Valley acts as a naturally controlled experiment in how governments can affect the manner in which people practice religion. Women in the Kyrgyz region of the valley live under a relatively tolerant political system. Kyrgyzstan is the most liberal and free-market republic in Central Asia. The government has even passed a law permitting women to wear the veil. Interestingly, they are less likely to do so than women living in the Uzbek side of the valley, where it is discouraged or forbidden.

There, Uzbek women live under a regime bent on preventing the rise of an Islamist opposition and which has clamped down on veil wearing. Veils are now prohibited on public transport. Female teachers wearing veils in the classroom have been sent home, and veiled students expelled from university. Such policies, it seems, have resulted in more women choosing to wear the veil.

In relatively relaxed Kyrgyzstan, women also appear to have more equality when they practice Islam. They can enter the mosques, whereas in Uzbekistan women are excluded from attending Friday prayers, and from the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca), and are forbidden to enter most madrassas (Islamic education centers).

Officially, there are only “love” marriages in Kyrgyzstan (an assertion women’s groups deny). Certainly, for better or for worse, there is greater sexual freedom. In contrast to Uzbekistan, which has one of the world’s lowest rates of adolescent pregnancy, an international health organization has felt the need to set up a clinic in the Kyrgyz city of Osh to treat sexually transmitted diseases, which are on the increase there.

But while Kyrgyzstan is still one of the poorest nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States—only faring better than states which have been torn apart by civil wars—women have started to work in traditionally male jobs, in areas such as sheep, cattle and horse breeding. According to 1998 government statistics, 42.6 percent of employees in small businesses in the Kyrgyz Ferghana region were women.

“Women are just as likely to set up a small business as a man. They virtually run the bazaars. But there has been a backlash,” said Toktokan Borombaeva, head of the governmental Commission on Women, Youth and Family in Osh, Kyrgyzstan. “Some men have not liked seeing their wives make more money than their husbands and have turned to drink.”

The economy of the region is likely to be as much of a deciding factor as religion in the future position of women. Recession across Central Asia over the past decade has led to huge job losses, particularly among women (although some women, such as the Kyrgyz, have managed to carve out new existences in commerce).

Under communism, women received considerable benefits—maternity pay until the child’s third birthday, leave when a child was sick and cheap childcare. There was always a “glass ceiling” preventing women from attaining decision-making positions, but they held important jobs in the medical profession, schools and academia. All that is gradually changing, and not for the better. Private companies are unable to provide such generous benefits, and high unemployment rates mean that what few jobs there are go to the men.

But it is also true that, given the choice, many women would rather stay at home, especially as having a job often means working long hours in the cotton fields or at some other strenuous task. It would take an improvement in the economy to change this state of affairs.

There is also a belief among many women that they cannot alter their situations. There is very little discussion of feminism and no feminist movement to speak of. Even those working for women’s NGOs prefer not to class themselves as “feminists” because the term is widely seen as a Western concept, not suitable for the Oriental world.

“People have a very definite idea of what a woman should be like. She must be domestic, attractive, subordinate,” said Marfua Tokhtakhodzhaera, a leading Uzbek feminist author. “Given such prevailing views, feminism cannot be strong for many years.”

The status of women is also low on the agendas of people struggling to make ends meet. For them, discussions about a woman’s social role look like a luxury.

The outlook for Uzbek women, therefore, seems gloomy. Under communism, men still were “more equal” than women. Now in a newly Islamic but politically rigid Uzbekistan, that gulf appears to have widened.

The position of Uzbek women has deteriorated because of political and economic factors as well. Clearly any improvement in the economy would help both women and men.

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in Tashkent.