Table of Contents I. Introduction
A. “Is Hijab for Kazakh Girls?” B. Methods
C. Background on Kazakhstan
II. Chapter 1: “You Don’t Dress According to Kazakh Tradition” A. Traditional Clothing and Gender, Soviet Style
B. Religious Media and Literacy
C. Shifting Access to Public Spaces for the Hijab III. Chapter 2: Changing Regulation of Religion
A. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan: A Long, Gendered Rivalry
B. Regulating Religion Post-Independence: Securitization of the Foreign C. A Shift to Textual Interpretation and International Appeals
IV. Chapter 3: Veiling and the Production of the Nation and its Borders A. The Spectrum of Hijab: Niqab, the Headscarf, and the Oramal B. Gendered Bodily Practices and the Production of Nationhood C. The Periphery, Almaty and Borders of the State
V. Conclusion VI. Works Cited
Introduction
A. “Is Hijab Something Kazakh?”
“In Islam, it is forbidden for a woman to walk around with her hair showing, just however she wants… She is supposed to keep her beauty for her husband. We [in Kazakhstan] have the opposite. At home, women just throw on some kind of bathrobe, their hair going off in some random direction, and walk around. But when they go out, it’s the other way around. Women get all made up, and you think, wow. All her ‘beauty’ at home is for me, but for whom is this makeup when she goes outside?”
These are the words of Arman Kuanishbayev, a preacher popular throughout Kazakhstan for his lectures relevant to contemporary Kazakh life. The quote is from a question-and-answer session in April 2014 at Kazakh National University (KazNU) in Almaty1. Kuanishbayev was speaking to a lecture hall filled with 70-80 women, the majority of whom were non-veiled and seem to have been in their early twenties. The quote is part of his response to a question asked by a young, non-veiled women in a bright red shirt, who took up the microphone smiling, to inquire, “Is hijab something inherent (тән) for Kazakh girls?”2 She used a word in Kazakh that implies something deeply belongs to a culture’s origin and core values. It is used in public discourse to speak about Kazakhs’ natural inclination toward things such as living on the steppe and eating copious amounts of meat in their daily lives. Therefore, the way the young woman 1 A recording of this particular question and answer is available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUGvAV8f0LA
phrased her question has political implications for whether veiling is a practice that is acceptable for public membership in Kazakhstan’s core ethnic community.
Instead of explaining the technicalities of Islamic textual interpretations used to religiously mandate Muslim women’s veiling, Kuanishbayev used daily life and spatial practices in Kazakhstan to argue that hijab is more in sync with traditional Kazakh values than the way contemporary Kazakhs dress and live. He went on to make a religious distinction between men and women, before using a Kazakh proverb to explain that hijab is not meant to make a woman disappear but to protect her from unrelated men’s gazes. As Kuanishbayev spoke, women in the audience ranged from smiling at his words to staring at him with blank or pensive expressions. Yet audience reactions to his use of the proverb and examples from everyday life indicate that his talk carried significant relevance for a spectrum of Kazakh women in Almaty.
This Q&A is an example of the debate over the headscarf still taking place in Kazakhstani society five years after President Nursultan Nazarbayev personally requested that women not wear it in 2011. Like many of the conversations occurring in the media, politics and between citizens, the debate is not encased primarily in religious terms. Instead, discourse on the headscarf frequently includes a national identity component: Does it have a place in Kazakh society?
hand, and keep ethnic harmony on the other. Yet the identity of Kazakhs themselves has been subjected to an even more complex debate: 25 years after independence, the government, its citizens and religious institutions all still hold differing opinions of who Kazakhs were, are, and should be. On Kuanishbayev’s part, casting the headscarf as part of Kazakhstani society signals an attempt to redefine Kazakh identity as compatible with a certain type of religious Muslim identity. Both the issues of national identity and public religious visibility in Kazakhstan contain deep geopolitical connotations and implications for the country’s place in the regional and global communities.
competing visions and formations of Kazakh identity and how Kazakhstan situates itself in relation to its past, its neighbors, and the world.
B. Methods
Similarly, hijabi interviewees’ emphasis on the religious over the political reflected the views of hijabi women I had met outside of KIMEP.
All of my interviewees knew I wear a headscarf, and I was wearing a headscarf during all interviews except my one Skype session, when I was located in a women-only space. While most of the non-veiled interviewees were fairly candid about their opinions, my own visible headscarf may have caused some to hold back. To balance potential self-censorship on the part of non-veiled women who knew I wore hijab, I have included quotes from women who did not know that I wore a headscarf.
During my time studying at KIMEP in Almaty, I observed how individuals from varying backgrounds reacted to hijabed women (including myself) in different spaces around the city. I also attended Friday prayers at four of Almaty’s mosques, situated in different neighborhoods. In this thesis, I draw on some of the rhetoric that I heard from Kazakh imams in their Friday sermons, as well as what I heard KIMEP students say about Kazakhstan and what they considered modern.
I followed the Kazakhstani media sources that previous scholarly studies used to choose articles on President Nazarbayev and the Supreme Muftis’3 rhetoric on hijab, Islam and Islamist groups in the five-year period from 2011-2015. All of my quotes are from news sources that I have verified against other media and/or the original videos of speeches posted to YouTube.
C. Background on Kazakhstan
3 The Supreme Mufti is the title of the official, elected by Kazakhstan’s Muslim religious leaders, who heads the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Kazakhstan, an
After independence in 1991, to avoid the same type of ethnic discord that arose in neighboring countries, the government of Kazakhstan adopted a two-pronged policy toward nationality (Brubaker 2011). It upheld an ethnic orientation that proclaimed Kazakh tradition and history as the basis for the nation, giving Kazakhs special status in their titular state. At the same time, the Kazakhstani government promoted a civic identity for its citizens, proclaiming the equality of all Kazakhstanis, regardless of nationality4. Kazakhs were the only titular nationality in Soviet Central Asia who held a minority in their own republic, and many Kazakhs grew up under policies that repressed Kazakh culture and language and privileged Russian (Melich and Adibayeva 2013).
While President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s government worked to promote Kazakh culture as the foundation for national heritage, Kazakhstan’s historic and geographic fragmentation complicated this venture. Kazakhs are descended from Turkic Kipchaks, nomadic tribes who migrated into the steppe from the Altay region, in what is now southeastern Russia. Tribes that identified as Kazakh organized politically under the Kazakh Khanate from 1465 until the mid-1800s (Esenova 2002). The tribes coalesced into three larger clans, or juz - the great, middle and small juz. Ethnic Kazakhs still identify themselves by juz. Each is known for certain behavioral and cultural characteristics, and each corresponds to a different region of Kazakhstan – the great in the south, middle in north and east, and small in the west (Rivers 2002). Despite intermixing and fluid borders between ethnicities in Central Asia, Soviet nationality policy created fixed nationalities and characteristics (leaving out the category of “Kipchak” entirely in favor of “Kazakh,” “Kyrgyz,” etc.), and dictated that every citizen
have only one nationality written on his or her passport (Brubaker 1994). The USSR thus solidified social divides between nationalities as well as nationalities themselves, and provided the foundation for Kazakhstan’s current conundrum: piecing together what Kazakhness is, for a population and global community that give great significance to the nation as the basis for the state.
In addition to a murky historical origin, Kazakhstan’s government has contended with geographic fragmentation in its nation-building enterprises. Kazakhstan has fourteen provinces that vary by ethnic makeup and language and dialect spoken. Adjacent to Russia, the northern, eastern and central provinces are home to more Russians and Russian-speaking Kazakhs. Kazakh speakers from the North and East generally prefer a dialect closer to Kazakh literary language. The west and south are home to more ethnic Kazakhs, a larger percentage of whom are estimated to speak Kazakh as a first language. Yet the dialect of Kazakh spoken varies from the literary language, and in the south includes Uzbek words. Northern Kazakhs sometimes refer to their southern counterparts as Uzbek, and southern Kazakhs to their northern compatriots as Russians due to historical cultural influences in their respective regions. Kazakh culture varies accordingly throughout Kazakhstan’s regions, with distinctions in food, dress, marital customs and other aspects.
degree of geographic fragmentation, russification, and the income gap between villages and cities that makes Kazakh less desirable to learn for Russian speakers, the government’s efforts have not brought the same level of national cohesion among Kazakhs as in neighboring Uzbekistan or Tajikistan (Dadabayeva and Adibayeva 2010).
Kazakh youth in Almaty, especially those at elite KIMEP University, subscribe to another definition of Kazakhness (Holloway, O’Hara and Pimlott-Wilson 2012). They cast Kazakhs as a modern nation, and say their ancestors were non-religious people who drank alcohol and women did not veil. This popular urban definition is likely influenced by government ideology that promotes religion only within the frame of tradition, but youth add emphasis on Kazakhs being modern. The popularity of Western-style music, film and other media among urban Kazakh youth signals that the Kazakh lifestyle is completely compatible with Western lifestyles considered modern, and therefore Kazakhstan’s successful development along a Western trajectory is guaranteed.
female and male students recognized that Kazakh men are expected to earn more than their spouses and be the main breadwinners, while wives raise children and take care of housework; and that if a woman were to earn more than her husband, his masculinity may be questioned by himself and others in their family and social circle, causing relationship difficulties (Holloway et. al. 2012). Some students – both male and female – said directly that women are the weaker sex, and men as the stronger sex must provide for them.
Yet some individuals such as Kuanishbayev and his colleagues appear to assert that religious practice is an inherent part of everyday Kazakh life. Kazakhstan saw a popular religious revival after the fall of the USSR, and then-residents of Almaty say the amount of women wearing headscarves on the city streets increased. The government welcomed ties with Turkey and other Muslim majority countries, and organizations and schools with Turkish, Saudi and UAE backing opened in Kazakhstan (Abramson 2010). New mosques opened and attendance rose as Kazakhs and other Central Asian nationalities tried to take advantage of the new freedom to explore their heritage and history. There has been a rise in religious media in the last few years in Kazakhstan as well, as the government sponsored several websites and Islamic TV channel Asyl Arna (opened in 2007) gained in popularity (Abazov and Alexandrova 2014, Schwab 2015).
were not outright banned from public institutions, but access was limited, and many students and professors reported pressure to take off the headscarf during interviews in a 2014 study (Myong and Chun 2015).
Permission to wear the headscarf was given in some schools in Almaty in 2014, and there are many headscarved women now studying in Almaty’s national university. Kuanishbayev’s lecture at the national university may itself be a sign that public institutions are now more open to discussing public religious practice. Government rhetoric continues to mention to fighting extremism, but in recent years, President Nazarbayev has not explicitly mentioned the headscarf in well-publicized speeches as in 2011-2012. Kazakhstani media reported that while the government has passed several laws since 2011 banning hijab in school on the grounds of secularism, women and girls have circumvented these laws, and continue to study while wearing hijab (Guzeeva 2014, islam.kz 2015, Nur.kz 2013).
moving across different normative regimes governed by different sets of formal or informal rules, norms, and expectations” (Gökarıksel 2009 p. 658). Scholarship has shown how individuals contribute to the reality of the state and its policies through their daily actions (Dowle and Sharp 2001, Fluri 2006, Gökarıksel 2009, Holloway 2006, Smith 2009). Feminist geopolitics has taken the analysis of the local in relation to the global further, destabilizing the traditional geopolitical perspective from “nowhere and everywhere” “[t]hrough… increasingly ethnographic accounts of geopolitical practices, through examining the assumptions made in war calculations, and through bringing a feminist attention to intersectionality into geopolitical analysis” (Smith 2009 p. 200). Smith and others’ work has shown how an analysis of women as agents who embody and destabilize the borders of the state can be a useful framework for understanding how geopolitical trends play out on a local scale (Smith 2009, Fluri 2011). This thesis will attempt to contribute to this body of literature by analyzing interviews with women in Almaty and shifts in political rhetoric and religious media. The main question I will address is: How do women’s choices to veil and not veil in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s geopolitical and historical context, affect the borders of Kazakh nationhood and the Kazakhstani state, and how Kazakhstan situates itself in relation to its past, its neighbors, and the world?
Chapter 1: “You Don’t Dress According to Kazakh Tradition” A. Traditional Clothing and Gender, Soviet Style
her face. I met her two days before in a prayer space at her university, after praying alongside her. Aynara is a first-year student at university who moved to Almaty from the surrounding province with her family when she was 10. She patiently answers my questions, a smile playing over her face as she considers my query “Some people say the hijab is something that’s foreign, imported – what do you think of this?”
“Yes, some people say that hijab isn’t part of Kazakh tradition. But if you ask me, Kazakhs are mostly wearing now what they didn’t in the past anyways. We only had the kimeshek, which is mostly what older women and women who were married wore. We didn’t cover our faces, not really a hijab, it looks like a headscarf. And after women got married, they immediately started wearing the headscarf. They wore long skirts, not short like we have today.” Aynara referred to common Kazakh dress from pre-Islamic times up to the 1920s, when the Soviet Union brought more Western uniforms to workplaces and schools. Today, the national costume she described is more commonly seen on performers and at special occasions than on an average day on the streets of Almaty.
Many of my interviewees mentioned the head coverings that are part of Kazakh national costume, promoted in state-sponsored imagery covering media from billboards to a new television channel that exclusively broadcasts music produced in Kazakhstan5. One of these coverings, saukele, is a long, pointed hat that is part of traditional wedding costume and still used in nuptial ceremonies today. Saukele are typically decorated with a range of materials including pearls, metals and feathers, and symbolize protection as well as the transfer of a precious subject from girls’ parents to their new husbands. The other
head covering is the kimeshek, a garment made from wrapping white fabric around the head, and is still worn by some older women today.
Sara, another young Kazakh woman who wears hijab, mentioned the saukele specifically when asked about the hijab’s Kazakhness.
“I mean, the way we wear hijab now is just a convenient way to veil that works with our lifestyle. We can’t really wear saukele everywhere – how would that look? Getting onto buses would be difficult,” she mused, referring to the task of jumping onto low-ceilinged buses before Almaty drivers veer away from bus stops. At 19 years of age, Sara works in a bazaar selling hijabs and accessories, and spends her days in motion fulfilling her store and customers’ needs. Wearing a pointed cap would be as impractical as it was in the 1800s, when women wore it for ceremonial occasions but did their daily work using simple white fabric to cover part or all of their hair. Many married women in southern and western Kazakhstan still tie scarves around their heads, leaving their necks and collars exposed, yet Sara and her 18-year-old friend Dina make a distinction between what they say are separate cultural and religious practices.
“First of all, it is fulfilling a command from Allah. What’s in the Quran, religion, women have to cover themselves to avoid the evil eye.”
When asked the same question as Aynara, a non-veiled woman named Kuralay took the discussion over national clothing further.
“People don’t understand – they think that when you veil, it’s part of nationality. The Kazakh national costume never had much veiling in the first place. Kazakhs were really not Muslims in the first place, they were more pagans. For example, you know Nauryz [Nowruz]? It’s a pagan holiday… people only think it’s Muslim because parents tell their kids, and then their kids tell their kids…” Kuralay, a non-veiled, half-Kazakh, half-Uyghur native of Almaty in her late teens, continued to make her point that Kazakh tradition did not have much to do with Islam in the first place.
While historians agree that Kazakhs did not fully become Muslim until the mid-1700s, Islamic teachings and customs were first brought to Kazakh-occupied lands by Arabs in the 700s. There is still a group of Kazakhs that does not identify with any juz, yet claims ancestry from these Arabs (Privratsky 2001). Like language, clan and culture, religious practice within Kazakhstan’s current territory varied by region. Islamic practice is recorded as being widespread among the inhabitants of Taraz and other parts of the more agricultural south, which were more closely connected to centers of Islamic learning including Bukhara and Samarkand through trade routes.
north still associate Islam with Russian imperialism, citing mosques and schools that taught Kazakh children in other Turkic languages instead of their native Kazakh, and were connected to the spread of Russian settlements and administrative structures across the northern steppe (Fisher 1968). The Nauryz (Nowruz) that Kuralay mentions was originally a Zoroastrian celebration of the coming of spring, and is now an official holiday in March across Central Asia. It is among the main holidays promoted by the Kazakh government, with sponsored celebrations in main squares throughout Kazakhstan’s cities and several days of vacation.
Kuralay’s comment highlights a result of the Soviet nationality policy – the equivocation of religion with nationality, at least for Central Asians (Khalid 2008, Islam After Communism). When in the 1920s the Bolsheviks first entered locally administered territories of the collapsed Russian Empire, they found religious practice more strongly ingrained in everyday life compared to Russia. Instead of promoting the state policy of atheism, to gain Central Asians’ trust the Soviet Union played up its anti-colonial ideology. This struck a chord with reformist intellectuals of the time who were looking to avoid the colonial situation of Muslims in India and across the Middle East. Mosques and longstanding religious education institutions stayed open, and the Soviets put local Muslim reformist intellectuals, the Jadids, in office. Through korenizatsiya6 policies, Central Asians were actively educated and promoted to local positions within the Soviet system. Yet in the purges of the 1930s under Stalin, most of the Jadids were executed,
6 Korenizatsiya (Rus: “Indigenization”) policies were designed to actively promote the culture and traditions of indigenous peoples in non-Russian Soviet republics (especially Central Asia and the Caucasus). As part of the policies, new Latin alphabets for
mosques were destroyed or repurposed, and the Soviet Union began active repression of anything deemed religious practice. Citizens could only perform their daily prayers and fast during Ramadan in secret, and those caught risked demotion or imprisonment (Khalid 2008).
Soviet policy on atheism stayed the same in Central Asia until the USSR collapsed, yet citizens found creative ways around the policies. Especially in Central Asia, the Soviet Union aimed to promote communist, egalitarian friendship between peoples and cultures – so what were once religious practices were now termed cultural in order to preserve them. Central Asians circumcised their sons and prepared special meals on Eids (the two Islamic holidays), all under the banner of national practice (Khalid 2008). So it comes as no surprise that their descendants would lean toward equating other practices like veiling with nationality – and basing veiling’s place in Kazakh society on history.
Melike, a third-year non-veiled Kazakh student from the current capital Astana, made a statement similar to Kuralay’s distinction between traditional pagan and Islamic practices.
“Saying veiling isn’t a Kazakh thing is strange, because religion and culture are two different things. You can’t really argue, but people argue yes and no, it’s a controversial thing here. Tradition is culture, religion is a big thing not really connected to tradition I think.”
equivocation between Kazakh women’s perceived freedom in the past relative to their southern, more religious counterparts in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan; and women’s status as part of Kazakhstan’s current trajectory toward becoming a modern, developed country. When I asked her about some Kazakhs’ characterization of hijab as foreign, Aynara replied by situating hijab in terms of history and gender.
“People are saying we’re dressing like Arabs with hijab, but I think people in Kazakhstan are dressing more like western people than Kazakhs… Kazakh women never wore pants, never wore jeans, never walked around uncovered like they do now,” Aynara continued, referring again to the period before Russian cultural influence bloomed under the Soviet Union. Russian colonial settlements existed in Kazakhstan and multiplied over the nineteenth century (Almaty itself was once a Russian outpost), yet Kazakhs continued their mostly nomadic way of life under the loose administration of the Russian Empire. It was only in the 1930s under Stalin’s forced collectivization movement that a famine hit and a third of the Kazakh population, unable to survive without grazing lands for livestock, perished (Pianciola 2001).
As Kandiyoti argues, instead of subverting local structures of patriarchal authority, Soviet policy focused on women’s empowerment simply brought women out from private, male-dominated domestic spaces into fields where they worked under the watchful eyes of unrelated male foremen (2007).
Simultaneously, Soviet propaganda also exoticized Central Asian men and women, showing them as equal but different Eastern nations juxtaposed to Europeans (namely Russians). Part of korenizatsiya policies and the ensuing emphasis on respecting national traditions was allowing the continuation of traditional gender roles and national sayings, music and stories that rhetorically characterized Central Asian women as physically weaker, and males as physically stronger and able to take control of situations.7
By official statistics on pay and employment, women’s position in Kazakhstan has recessed since the fall of the Soviet Union (Nazpary 2002). The power dynamics between Kazakh clans influenced republic and local government in Soviet times, and there is much speculation that clan and tribal politics still heavily affects political maneuvers across the country (Schatz 2004). With clan politics has come the renewed influence of traditional patriarchal structures, and a government media emphasis on women’s place in Kazakh society based on traditional values (Surucu 2002). Women are under pressure from relatives and friends to get married and start a family early, yet also expect a certain degree of differentiated treatment from men. When asked about whether women should have to do anything different in public space to gain men’s respect, Melike replied:
“No, we shouldn’t. I don’t know in which language, but there’s a saying that women gave you birth, and you should respect all women. A woman will give birth to your kids, it’s a big thing, it’s enough for you to show respect for all women.”
Sara, educated at a Turkish-Kazakh lyceum like Melike, cited a slightly different expectation of how women should be treated:
“We don’t mind working by ourselves, we have to because we’re single, but it would be nice to have a guy with you in public space to keep people from staring at you. You always feel that protection, and we think staying in safe spaces in the home is a better path for women.”
Preservation of traditional gender ideals has resulted in a popular distinction between women and men that permits rhetoric like the government’s promotion of traditional family values. At the same time, Soviet policies led to a shift in gendered spatial practices in Central Asia, creating an association between women’s visibility and dress in public space and modernity. Government propaganda on Kazakhstan’s economic development is replete with images of women in the workplace, signifying that women’s participation in the public sphere is crucial for Kazakhstan to join the world’s fifty most developed states, its goal for 20508 (Aitzhanova, Katsu, Linn, and Yezhov 2014).
“I think women can be politicians,” Janna, a non-veiled, second-year Kazakh student from the southern city of Shymkent, said immediately when I asked about women’s role in society.
“Men should also contribute to the family, should also discipline children,” her friend Marina, a non-veiled Russian student from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, stated, indicating
that the Kazakhstani conversation about women’s roles is intertwined with discourse on expectations for men as well.
A non-veiled Kazakh student from the western oil town of Atyrau, Layla echoed Janna’s statement, asserting, “We live in such a time that women need to be independent… In Kazakh families, the man occupies the main role. But now… a lot of women switched roles with men, and women now are more independent, more successful.”
“Women should not sit at home… they should have goals that they want to achieve… If they sit at home, they will not be better, they will stay at the same level. You have to develop yourself,” Melike claimed, reflecting Soviet-inspired ideas about types of development and achievement in the public sphere carrying more sociopolitical weight than anything in the private sphere.
Aynara offered a slightly contrasting opinion on working than Sara (who has more work experience). As with her explanation of hijab, she cached out her future plans in terms of what she could do within Islamic requirements.
“If you’re not married, you can work anywhere, and I’ll have to work as long as I’m not married. But if you’re married, your husband can ask you not to work, especially among men, because there’s a chance you’ll develop relationships with your male colleagues after working with them… and that’s not right, it disrupts the family,” Aynara said. “But I would like to do some kind of useful work… Money that you earn yourself is always more valuable.”
Western, the European, the Russian – with power, and with what is modern, acceptable, and what fits into today’s globalized, supposedly cosmopolitan world. At the same time, the policies created a parallel association between spatial gender division in public and backwardness, barbarity, and an inability to govern oneself. In essence, the Soviet Union reinforced Orientalist ideas about the West and East, but its promotion of indigenous “nations” resulted in the current Central Asian elite’s commitment to Western ideals of progress in the economic and public realm (Khalid 2008 “Russian History”). Women’s bodies and spatial practices are thus intimately tied with larger debates about geopolitics, modernity and power, a topic I will return to in Chapter 3.
B. Religious Media and Literacy
requirements she must fulfill to achieve paradise, based on a hadith. Yet there is no indication of the context the hadith was given in, nor of the hadith’s rating of authenticity, signaling the audience is a popular one with limited requirements for authenticating and consuming information on religious practice9.
In addition to using images that deliver short bursts of simplified information, Asyl Arna publishes most of its material in Kazakh, and employs frequent references to Kazakh historical figures and culture that mirror the speech patterns of preachers like Kuanishbayev. A video10 published on Asyl Arna’s YouTube page uses a combination of Kazakh proverbs, expressions that educated native speakers employ, and a reference to the Kazakh equivalent of Shakespeare to educate viewers about the Islamic upbringing necessary for girls. The speeches of preachers like Kuanishbayev are rich in the same types of expressions and sayings, and the imams in Almaty’s mosques employ intricate Kazakh language during their sermons. Kuanishbayev used a well-known proverb during his answer to the question on hijab:
“A man at fifty can marry someone, but who is going to marry a girl at fifty?” he said, smiling ruefully11. The expression refers to a double standard where men are able to take partners when they will, but women “spoil” fast, and therefore in Kuanishbayev’s opinion women need to protect their beauty with hijab. Kazakh is full of sayings distinguishing men and women’s statuses (i.e. “Kazakh girls are banned from forty homes,” referring to a husband’s traditional ability to prevent his wife from returning to
9 The image can be accessed on the Asyl Arna official website: http://asylarna.kz/images/ suretter/37.jpg
10 The video from October 2014 can be accessed at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kSAPA2sU4k
her relatives’ abodes) as well as those praising women (i.e. “A blossoming flower is the beauty of nature; A blossoming girl is the beauty of a nation12.”). The common denominator is a culturally rooted distinction between men and women, which Kuanishbayev employs to convince his audience that hijab fits well into Kazakh society, and was preserved by the Soviet policies toward gender and nationality. Kuanishbayev gives no indication that he himself is a strict adherent to these ideals – in fact, the university where he is rumored to have studied in Egypt, Al-Azhar, promotes a strict textual interpretation of Islam that casts women as men’s spiritual equals and encourages marriage for both sexes (and does not decry marriage of older women if the circumstances call for it) (Gensink 2014).
Kuanishbayev begins to answer the question on veiling by qualifying hijab as a “term of speech.” Yet he then employs the strategy that Asyl Arna has also taken, banking on Kazakh students and professors’ association between religion and culture to drive home his point. Aynara, the hijabi university student, used exactly the same expression when I asked her whether she thought the hijab is mandatory for Muslim women.
“Hijab is a term of speech,” she mused, asserting “There are two fard (mandatory practices) in Islam: beard for men, and the hijab for women.” Aynara then proceeded to explain the technical requirements of hijab, “Only your face and hands can be uncovered, everything else has to be covered,” reciting the consensus in the Hanafi school of Islamic thought, which predominates in Central Asia13.
12 Kaz: Гүл өссе, жердің көркі. Қыз өссе, елдің көркі. (Gul osse, jerding korki. Kyz osse, elding korki.)
At its roots, Aynara’s conceptualization of gender and hijab was in religious terms – she had a scripturally nuanced understanding of the religious technicalities and reasons behind modest dress and gender separation in Islamic practice. Yet she used examples of what Kazakhs wore in the past to justify her position that hijab fits into Kazakh society better than Western clothing, perhaps because she was responding to a question that in some ways assumes a correlation between religious dress and culture.
Despite her opinions on Kazakhs’ pagan roots, Kuralay asserted similarly that women in hijab attract far less attention to themselves than girls in miniskirts in Almaty. Kuralay says she is from a religious family, and many of her female relatives wear hijab.
“Actually, people show more respect to women who wear hijab. I decided to walk home from mosque one day without taking off my hijab, and before I had reached home three, four women had said hello to me… I want to start wearing hijab, but something’s holding me back. Shaytan [Satan], probably14.”
Sara reported having similar experiences once she began wearing hijab in her late teens.
bothering you?” referring to her male colleagues who were following her to photograph her experience. The ensuing conversation found that the man was worried she was being harassed, and had stepped in to make sure all was well with her. The reporter also wrote how hijabi women smiled and looked at her with pleased expressions as she encountered them on the streets of Almaty (Nur.kz 2016). The experiences of veiled women recorded here indicate that veiling affects how women in Almaty are perceived by others, their mobility, and how they navigate public space, outside of government-controlled academic institutions.
Yet other non-veiled interviewees did not mention seeing hijabis receive reactions coded as more respectful from men. Melike from Astana said it was the other way around among her friends from KIMEP.
“Right now, it’s popular for teenagers to be atheist. It depends, for example, when some religious guys see these kind of girls [in hijab] they say it’s really cool. But when my atheist friends see people [in hijab], they start judging, like ‘why, what the heck, what’s wrong with them.’”
asking twice whether her religious friends were more interested in Kazakh culture, Melike responded the second time:
“I actually wrote a research paper on this [in high school]. A lot of people [60%] said they were only Muslims because they were born into Muslim families… but in my opinion, when you’re 16, you learn about things and you make your own choice to choose what religion you are,” she said, again making a distinction between culture and religion. Yet the connection between atheism and interest in different cultures she draws corresponds to a larger association between cosmopolitanism, center-periphery divides and security that I will address in Chapter 2.
C. Shifting Access to Public Spaces for the Hijab
A 2015 paper from two professors at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University reports that hijabis face discrimination in Almaty’s scholarly and professional environments (Myong and Chun). The professors’ interviewees reported being asked to take off their hijabs for school and university, and skepticism from professors and coworkers about their suitability for the professional world. Non-veiled women asserted that hijabi women’s dress permitted them only to sit at home, a sentiment that echoed what a 29-year-old woman whom I met in a women’s only space, and did not know I wore hijab, said to me. Another hijabi friend reported difficulties finding a job in Almaty with a university education and fluent Chinese, saying that most interviewers asked if she would be willing to take off her hijab for work.
Yet Aynara’s testimony signals attitudes may be shifting in Almaty.
when I went to meet her there. A lot of people there are hijabis, so people don’t really stare.”
Kuanishbayev’s April 2014 lecture might be another implication of changing attitudes. Four hijabi women sat in the lecture hall, while students and professors asked questions on hotly disputed issues such as hijab. A male professor asked whether it is religiously permissible to skip prayer times for class, indicating he had enough students missing parts of lessons for prayer to raise the issue15. Hijabi women are visible at public events and outdoor celebrations such as Nauryz as well, indicating their presence is at least tolerated in public space. During a Friday sermon at one of Almaty’s smaller mosques in summer 2015, the imam specifically stated that Kazakh women and girls wore hijab in the past. Yet four years ago, President Nazarbayev asked Kazakhstani women to not wear hijab following an address during which he said hijab is not traditionally Kazakh. So why is public access and opinion towards veiling changing? In the second chapter, I will step away from my interviews to discuss the scope of Kazakhstan’s post-independence experience with religious extremism, securitization and regional politics, before examining into the intersection of gender, the state and religion in Chapter 3.
Chapter 2: Changing Regulation of Religion
A. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan: A Long, Gendered Rivalry
Kazakhstan saw a string of violence in 2011-2012 that was attributed to extremist activities. There were over a dozen incidents that occurred, many of them in provincial cities, that included a few explosions, clashes with police and attacks on civilians by
citizens later found to be Muslims affiliated with Islamist groups16. Most of the attacks were on government targets, including a couple of explosions outside offices of Kazakhstan’s Committee of National Security in Astana and the western city of Aktobe. The Kazakhstani government had never before seen anything like the incidents that were occurring every few months.
It was in this context that on March 11, 2011, President Nazarbayev made a speech in Kazakh during a meeting with local elites in the town of Turkestan, one of Kazakhstan’s more historical southern cities.
“A lot of young people now are going around veiling. We in Kazakhstan respect all different views on life, but I am against paranji, especially against students and schoolchildren wearing hijab,” Nazarbayev said. He incorporated language frequently employed to describe official Kazakhstani policies of democratic treatment for all citizens, before making a statement that politicized hijab. He continued, "This has never happened in our history, our religion never had such a tradition... We need to be able to distinguish between real religion and what has been made up for us" (TengriNews 2011).
In a speech the following year at a youth conference in Astana, Nazarbayev asked young people not to wear hijab or “Arab clothing.” His appeal was mixed in with calls for Kazakhs to speak in Kazakh and take up technical professions.
“Look at me,” he said, “I speak Kazakh well. We’re sitting here – let’s all speak our own language amongst ourselves” (Glushkova 2012). Nazarbayev’s speech was a call to remember Kazakh culture and nomadic origins, in which he included Sunni Islam. Yet his words signaled that only a version of Islam tailored to traditional Kazakh life is
acceptable for modern Kazakhs, and continue to be used by secular Muslims as proof that hijab does not belong in Kazakhstan.
In his 2011 speech, Nazarbayev used a word for face veil – paranji – that specifically refers to an article of clothing worn by Uzbek women before the Soviet unveiling campaign of hujum (literally “attack” in Turkic languages) in the 1920s. His choice of lexicon is significant – in its disavowing of a certain type of covering, it differentiates Kazakhs not from Arabs or other majority Muslim populations, but from their immediate neighbors. Nazarbayev’s reference must be situated in relation to regional geopolitics and history to fully understand its context and implications.
Experts note the “constant rivalry” between the two powers jeopardizes regional security (Mohanty 2014). Upon independence in 1990, SADUM broke up and separate religious boards were formed in the other four Central Asian republics. Kazakhstan was the first to sever ties, with officials citing reluctance to get too close to Uzbekistan’s religious politics. Kazakhstan’s first Supreme Mufti Ratbek hadji Nysanbayev paid attention to the southern influence, inviting unofficial clergy in Jambyl and Shymkent to join the official religious establishment. In a speech at the UN in September 2000, Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov rhetorically linked Uzbekistan and terrorism, mentioning difficulties dealing with guerilla groups from Kazakhstan’s southern borders (Mohanty 2014 p. 161).
Russia, the EU, OSCE and other Western-based international organizations generally consider Kazakhstan the most progressive and promising economic power in post-Soviet Central Asia (Nichol 2013). The state has attracted revenue from extensive foreign investment in its oil and gas reserves, most along the Caspian Sea. Almaty is considered a commercial capital for the region, with well-known international corporations including British American Tobacco and Deloitte basing their regional operations out of the city.
greater economic opportunity, Kazakhstan also attracts migrants from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, who work and live under unstable conditions and experience discrimination in pay, housing and health care, among other factors (Buldekbayev 2006). Kazakh popular opinion toward Uzbeks varies from indifference to racism, with many Kazakhs under the impression that Uzbek women are oppressed by their husbands.
“They strictly control their wives!” one older Kazakh woman at an Almaty mosque told me, her compatriots nodding in agreement. It is a sentiment echoed frequently in conversations among Kazakh women about Uzbekistan. Many women reference the mahalla, a neighborhood division they say Uzbek women were not allowed to leave during pre-Soviet times. While emphasizing family values and tradition, Kazakhstani media provide a contrasting picture of Kazakh women’s role in the past, casting them as relatively free to roam across the steppe with their male counterparts (Isaacs 2015).
institutions (Akbarzadeh 1996). As discussed in the introduction, Kazakhstan has taken a milder approach to national politics, renaming some places after Kazakh national heroes and emphasizing Kazakh ethnicity as the basis for the state’s spiritual origins. Yet the government has taken few concrete steps to increase Kazakh language use in state spaces, and despite alleged Kazakh clan-based politics maintains active forums for keeping ethnic harmony, such as the multi-national Assembly of People (Kesici 2011).
Kazakhstan’s Supreme Mufti gave another sign that geographical proximity and geopolitics could play a role in Kazakhstani state policy toward hijab. Six months after Nazarbayev’s March 2011 speech, then-Supreme Mufti Absattar Derbissali denounced wearing of hijab for Kazakh women. “Kazakhs have beautiful national clothes, but it is not hijab. We should not wear Afghanistan's national clothes” (Tengrinews 2011). His announcement, he said, came after long consideration and even an Islamic clothing contest held in the republic. Derbissali’s reference to Afghanistan is significant – like Uzbekistan, Afghanistan is popularly perceived as a state with a markedly different level of development and attitude toward women. Moreover, due to the rise of extremist groups in the post-independence period, both of these states are associated with terrorism and religious extremism in popular and political rhetoric.
B. Regulating Religion Post-Independence: Securitization of the Foreign
bombings of government targets in Tashkent. The investigation alleged that Almaty had functioned as a safe haven for the suspects (Mohanty 2014).
Aside from practical cooperation, Kazakhstan also adopted the same rhetoric used by the Uzbek government to distinguish between acceptable, “traditional” Islamic practice, and what is unacceptable, or foreign. By the 2000s, the state began to focus on controlling the movement of information and customs embodied by individuals within and across its borders. The government began by recalling Kazakhstanis studying at foreign Islamic institutions in 2000. The country’s first anti-terrorism center (ATC) was founded in 2003, and had deported 36 Islamic preachers to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, Russia and Uzbekistan by 2006 (Yemelianova 2014).
In 2004, Kazakhstan passed a law similar to Uzbek code introduced the same year. Under the legislation’s ban on international extremist organizations, the government closed religious education institutions that had opened in the early 2000s, and by 2012 the only madrassah17 in Kazakhstan was Egypt-funded NurMubarak University in Almaty. The muftiate, supported by the government, introduced a madhhab test to ensure that religious officials practiced only the Hanafi school of Islamic thought, historically implemented in Central Asia along with Sufi practices. The law also banned prayers in schools, military bases and other state institutions. In 2011, Nazarbayev created the Agency for Religious Affairs, lead and staffed by government bureaucrats to further regulate religious activity in Kazakhstan. Achilov and Shaykhutdinov assert that these more stringent policies lead to the rise in Islamist activity seen in 2011-2012 (2013).
Authorities also created three websites to promote religious literacy in Kazakhstan (Abazov and Alexandrova 2014). Azan.kz is a portal run by officials in Almaty, and hosts a myriad of articles and religious opinions on topics ranging from everyday life to politics and Islamic texts. The Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kazakhstan based in Almaty runs the website Muftiyat.kz directly, and publishes similar content. E-Islam.kz, created in 2013, became arguably the most comprehensive resource of the three, with hundreds of articles published on Islam and how it fits into Kazakh culture and life in contemporary Kazakhstan (e-Islam.kz).
C. A Shift to Textual Interpretation and International Appeals
Despite Kazakhstani authorities’ push for the revival of a “traditional” Islam centered on Kazakh culture, Yemelianova (2014) asserts that officials’ own limited religious literacy has led Kazakhstan down a different path in recent years. In 2012, the government named the Egypt-sponsored NurMubarak (now just “Nur”) institute in Almaty the main hub for Islamic education in Kazakhstan. The university uses a curriculum similar to that of Egyptian institute Al-Azhar, which relies heavily on an orthodox, textually based interpretation of Islam that has parallels in Saudi Arabia’s official strain of Islam, Wahhabism.
citing the Qur’an and other Islamic texts as support for women wearing hijab (Kobulova 2016).
While Yemelianova (2014) warns that having an orthodox-leaning muftiate is incompatible with the secular, modern state that Kazakhstan aspires to be, there is no sign that Nazarbayev has softened on political Islam or extremist groups. Kazakhstani courts continue to prosecute citizens on terrorism-related charges, with media coverage of the cases. Yet what does seem to have shifted is Nazarbayev’s strategy toward curbing extremism. He no longer mentions hijab or other signs of “untraditional” religious practice in public forums. Instead, his rhetoric mirrors that of some Western states, using the idea of a moderate Islam to prevail over extremism, and it does not seem to matter exactly what form this moderate Islam may take (Mamdani 2005).
“Attempts to use Islam to justify extremism are sacreligious,” Nazarbayev proclaimed at a religious forum in Astana in May 2015, noting that the world had strayed into a dangerous epoch with groups like Islamic State. “Under the guise of pseudoreligious views, militants are intentionally destroying cultural artifacts thousands of years old in Iraq and Syria, are creating, replicating shots of monstrous public executions of adherents of other religions, journalists and volunteers... I call on all religious leaders to double their appeals to their congregations for peace, harmony, tolerance and forgiveness” (Sputnik Azerbaijan 2015).
“We need a new worldwide consensus,” Nazarbayev proclaimed, “...We showed our unity after 9/11... We must create an antiterrorism coalition in the UN” (Sputnik Kazakhstan 2015). His presence at the forum fits into Kazakhstan’s multivector foreign policy, as he called for states to work together on shared human ideals. Nazarbayev used similar rhetoric at the regional Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) summit in Astana a month later, as along with Uzbekistan and Russia, his government signed a loose security framework for the CIS’ outer borders (Turbekova 2015).
Apart from international appeals, one of Nazarbayev’s most recent appearances on Kazakh television also points to a shift in rhetoric in the domestic arena.
“Islam means “peace,” the president said, referring to one of the word’s multiple meanings in Arabic. “...The Qur’an says that if you kill one person, it’s as if you have killed all of humanity. That’s why we need to consider terrorism as an enemy that has come out against all of humanity... I don’t consider terrorism part of Islam” (Nur.kz 2015).
two-pronged strategy to curb extremism by delineating yet expanding the space for acceptable religious practice. In Chapter 3, I will turn to the role women play in the uneven expansion of religious practice and the borders of its acceptability for Kazakhstani nationhood.
Chapter 3: Veiling and the Production of the Nation and its Borders A. The Spectrum of Hijab: Niqab, the Headscarf, and the Oramal
As referenced in Chapter 1, Soviet policies on gender created a discursive association between modernity and women’s presence in public space, allowing women’s daily practices to signify whether a state is “forward-looking” and developed, or backward and uncivilized. Recent feminist geography literature has emphasized how individuals embody the state, and how gendered socio-spatial practices reflect on the state as a whole (Dowler and Sharpe 2001, Fluri 2011, Gökarıksel 2009, Smith 2009). While considering state and its institutions, scholars have sought to consider daily spatial practices “in order to understand their constitutive power” (Smith 2009 p. 198). In Kazakhstan’s context, by coding public space as masculine and saying that women’s presence in it is a sign of modernity and power, the ideological choices that women’s bodies and dress display in public become significant for the way the state is viewed in its geopolitical context.
“I’ve been wearing a headscarf for one year, and no one has looked at me with a negative gaze, no one’s said anything, or particularly stared at me as I passed,” Aynara said, referencing her visits to KIMEP’s elite environment and the upscale shopping malls that dot the city.
Interviewees’ point out that there is a spectrum of coverings that are acceptable, and it varies from place to place.
“There are women who wear [hijab], they just read Qur’an for themselves, seven times a day, something like that. A lot just wear headscarves; like you do, and that’s it,” Layla asserted, referring to my green headscarf. “I think that’s fine. It’s just you see, a lot of people here completely cover themselves and their children, and only leave their eyes. I don’t understand that.”
Layla’s aversion to the niqab was paralleled in Aynara’s comments on it, although the latter gave a more religious perspective on the topic.
“From what I’ve read, covering the face isn’t mandatory... If your husband’s really jealous, he can ask you to cover your face. If he wants you to wear all black, then you’ll walk around in all black,” she said, grinning slightly. “Some people wear really loose, completely black clothing. I also tried it, but it doesn’t look good on me, I wear light colors, I think it’s appropriate.” Aynara referenced the deference to one’s husband that Asyl Arna also emphasizes in its media on women, yet also defined what she thinks is appropriate for her own choice in the Kazakhstani context.
His sentiment is echoed in the images of women on Asyl Arna and government websites like azan.kz, who wear a headscarf usually accompanied by a long dress or skirt. Abayas and niqabs are rare, signifying that while headscarves may be acceptable now, there is still an extreme of Islamic dress from which women are discouraged.
While Aynara and Kuanishbayev both pointed out that the word hijab is a term with a variety of meanings that vary depending on the context, hijab is generally used to mean a headscarf that covers the hair, ears, neck and collar, as shown in Kuanishbayev’s lecture. The word is used to distinguish the head covering associated with Arab styles from the oramal (Kaz: headscarf), which Kazakh women in villages in the southern and western provinces typically wear to signify marital status. The oramal covers most of the hair but is tied in the back, leaving the neck and collar exposed. Yet Aynara switched back and forth between using oramal and hijab in Kazakh to refer to her head covering, as did Kuanishbayev, signaling a fluid discursive distinction between the two. Layla also used the Russian equivalent of oramal (platok) to refer to the headscarf in the following quote.
“Technically, [Kazakhs] have the [hijab], we’ve always had it. My parents have a lot of acquaintances who wear headscarves, fine, long, I mean skirts and everything, it’s fine,” she mused, touching on the skirts that Aynara referenced.
B. Gendered Bodily Practices and the Production of Nationhood
and tradition, and their roles given significance for the formation of nation-states in majority Muslim societies. In Kazakhstan’s case, women’s visibility in public space becomes important and politically recognized because it bears significance for the construction of the Kazakh nation as simultaneously modern and forward-looking, yet also culturally distinct from Europeans. Myong and Chun assert that there has been such a widespread backlash to hijab in Kazakhstan’s post-independence period because it is an article of clothing that carries connotations of the other, the Middle East, the Oriental, that do not fit in with either the Kazakhstani government or the popular urban definition of Kazakhs’ trajectory from a free nomadic life to free, Western-style, modern life (2015). As shown in government rhetoric from 2011-2012, the concern over the veiling of women exceeds Kazakhstan’s borders to extend to shifting geopolitical relationships with Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Islamic State in Syria, and imbues hijab with a representative geopolitical significance.
it forms a challenge to the status quo, and also a challenge to what the Kazakh state should be.
Public spaces and visibility have long been associated with power and masculinity in the Western context. Kazakhstanis’ subscription to a discursive connection between what is modern and wealthy, and what is Western or European, gives significance to the practices of women who appear in public space (Okin 1998). By being publicly visible but not wearing Western dress, women who practice veiling complicate the dichotomy between Western and Oriental, civilization and backwardness. Hijabed women are able to do so in Almaty’s context because their presence in public space associates hijab with wealth, power and modernity, coded “good” in the public imaginary; not out of public respect for the religious ideals that these women profess to hold over political aims.
Yet my interviewees referred to a discursive connection between hijab and extremism, citing ideas about Arab Islam that they or others held incompatible with contemporary Kazakhstani life.
“A lot of women from the [United] Arab Emirates and other Muslim countries, there women have to be covered, and here you see people – it’s connected recently with the Islamic State,” Layla said, when I asked her about hijab. She noted that in her hometown of Atyrau, there were a lot of women and young girls who covered their faces as well. “When people cover a woman completely, well here, I don’t know… I don’t get scared, but… It’s just you see, some people use hijab for completely different purposes.”
extremism. Aynara echoed her testimony, citing the experience of a friend who wanted to begin wearing hijab.
“Some parents are against [hijab], they’re afraid of terrorism… Some [veiled women] participated in terrorism, this is the reason people have this association. People think women who wear hijab are like them.”
Still some Kazakhstanis take phobia of hijab to another level. One of the comments about religiosity heard frequently implies that extremists are somehow hypnotizing innocent people.
“People get zombified,” a classmate at KIMEP told me. “I knew this girl, she was completely normal and then she started wearing hijab and praying, and she walked around with a blank expression on her face, and stopped talking to her mom and sister,” the classmate said with wide eyes while her friends shook their heads. More recently, the word appeared from a Kazakh user on social media to describe three men convicted of extremist propaganda in March 2016 (VKontakte 2016).
estimated that Kazakhs with IS in Syria numbered around 300, with women half of the group (RFE/RL 18 November 2014).
C. The Periphery, Almaty and Borders of the State
Layla’s statements indicate that government efforts to stop people leaving for Syria have trickled down to popular discourse, fueling phobia toward hijab even as state rhetoric itself changes. Yet my interviewees’ attitudes toward hijab shifted when it came to Almaty’s cosmopolitan environment. In their musings, interviewees drew a discursive line between hijab’s acceptability in Almaty and the provinces, where the majority of incidents related to extremism in 2011-2012 took place.
“There aren’t that many women here in Almaty [that wear hijab]. We have a lot in Atyrau,” said Layla. “And they cover their kids, too, up to their eyes… We had explosions [in Atyrau] one or two times. But people treat them [hijabi women] fine here, there are fewer.”
Janna expressed the same distinction between hijabis in Almaty and her home city, Shymkent.
Along with preferring to visit places of worship in their hometowns, my interviewees set Almaty’s social atmosphere apart from the provinces.
“I like society, people, places here more than in my hometown. Here, you feel freer. There are a lot of people… but not pandemonium… probably because there are so many trees, flowers, I don’t know. The city looks different than mine, we don’t have that,” Layla remarked. During the Soviet Union, Almaty was known for its abundance of fruit trees, especially for the apple orchards to the city’s north. While many have been cut down for post-Soviet elites’ villas, Almaty has retained the reputation for having a large amount of green space, along with its role as the cultural capital.
“I’ve been here two years, and I really like it here,” said Janna.
“There’s not much of a difference between here and Tashkent,” Marina added, referring to the capital of Uzbekistan, her hometown. “It’s a city for young people.”
“Yes, it’s a young people’s city,” agreed Janna.
“I live near Barakholka [bazaar], and there are lots of people from villages there, they sometimes look at me a bit strangely,” she said, “Their understandings [of the world] are a little different, but other than that I see it [negative treatment] very rarely.”
My interviewees’ discursive distinctions between hijab’s acceptability in Almaty and the provinces reflect wider geopolitical debates around tradition and borders. While the provinces are physically closer to Uzbekistan and the Middle East, villages represent reserves of Kazakh culture and tradition apart from the modern, busy life of cities. While I did not have the chance to interview women in provincial cities or villages, or observe state regulation of religious practice in these areas, my interviewees’ comments imply that there is a greater trend toward securitization of non-traditional religious practices in Kazakhstan’s peripheral spaces. The women’s rhetorical emphasis on Almaty’s cosmopolitanism indicates that the borders of Kazakhness are more fluid within its relatively wealthy public spaces.
Yet Aynara also said that she can expect to encounter negative treatment anywhere in Almaty, not only on its periphery, and described her treatment at the hands of classmates and their parents when she started wearing a headscarf.
“Some of my classmates understood and some looked at me differently. Parents can say anything, you know, and some people became afraid.”
the constant debate over its place in schools, universities and streetscapes (Myong and Chun 2015).
Hijab’s multiple, shifting meanings thus translate to various redefinitions of Kazakh national identity within the bounds of Kazakhstan’s fragmented urban and rural geographies. Its meanings are dictated by various connotations of modernity, power and tradition evoked by politicians, the media, and women themselves, specific to Kazakhstan and the spaces within it.
Conclusion
Kazakhstani women’s practices and attitudes toward veiling contribute to the redefinition of the Kazakh nation and what is acceptable within its borders, as well as how it relates to its neighbors and the Middle East. In summer 2013, I met a young woman at an iftar dinner who told me she had won a scholarship to study at Al-Alzhar, but was having trouble getting a visa because “they don’t want us to go.” Her situation is a powerful reminder of the need to consider the individuals who compose a state in order to understand the complicated, shifting criteria for membership within the state.
influence on the state’s macropolitics (Kong 2001, Holloway 2006, Hopkins 2007, Gökarıksel 2009). Moreover, women as the perceived bearers of culture are able to shift the borders of nation-states through their spatial practices and choice of dress (Gökarıksel 2009). My thesis has examined the practices and discourse that Kazakhstani women produce and recycle, and their rhetoric’s intimate connection to geopolitics and state efforts to curb extremism. As Fluri points out, “the ‘rights’ and visibility of women are a unifying theme throughout various phases of modernization” (Fluri 2011 p. 520). I conclude that due to a colonial legacy that associated women’s visibility in public space with the modern, Kazakhstani women have contributed to shifting the borders of what is acceptably Kazakh by wearing hijab in public space. Different environments – periphery, cosmopolitan, wealthy, poor – affect whether and which veiling practices – and styles – are acceptable in Kazakhstan. Moreover, my research has shown that there is a shift in political rhetoric away from a discursive connection between untraditional Islam and extremism. Instead, politicians and media seem to be focusing efforts on differentiating between peaceful religious practice and political organization.
geopolitics, gender and modernity that give political significance to the choices women make about their bodies and dress. My research suggests that by virtue of existing in public spaces coded as masculine in the popular imaginary, women who choose to wear hijab have a certain amount of power to change ideas about the acceptability and even attractiveness of hijab for other women and men. Especially in Almaty, women who choose to veil and at the same time occupy cosmopolitan, privileged spaces send a message that embodying a certain type of religious practice does not necessarily translate to crossing the borders of Kazakh nationality or modernity into extremism and backwardness. In doing so, these women are pushing the limits of what is considered Kazakh and modern with their own bodies, embodying the borders that politicians have sought so deeply to control. With their choice in veiling (or not), whether they do so consciously or not, women disrupt notions of the state as pure and whole, reflecting the complexity and contradictions inherent in nation-building itself (Anderson 1991).
daily action, these citizens define what is acceptable, civilized, and modern practice for members of the state.
With the current tensions in geopolitics and variety of hyped-up media rhetoric toward Islam and its visibilities, it is important to consider what citizens will do with this power, and how the outcome will affect attitudes toward hijab. Women themselves have a huge role to play in this story due to the significance given to them by twentieth century nation-building. Studying their discourse and practices may prove a more effective means of understanding the fragmented geographies and colonial legacies that influence what is seen as acceptable and normal, for the type of state that Kazakhstan’s government and citizens promote. Through analysis of women’s daily practices, it is possible to see where the notions of state and nation break down to reveal the complex, fragmented power dynamics that define sociopolitical organization. Geopolitics, history and the state are all reflected in the bodies of women, considered at once bearers of culture, tools for the production of modernity, and individuals who influence and complicate the state and nation with their discursive and socio-spatial practices.
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