Women, the State and the Semi-Private Sphere in Post-Independence Uzbekistan

The Uzbekistan state, caught between the need to be a secular nation and the need to ground its governing mandate in a depiction of a unified nation based on Turkic and Muslim values and tradition, is forced to take a contradictory stance vis-à-vis women.  To legitimize its own rigid hierarchy and create a homogenous nationalism, the state employs body politics, identity politics, Islamic norms (that have not necessarily any basis in Islamic jurisprudence), patriarchy, tokenism, and above all it uses women as a symbol of Uzbek values, tradition, history, and the future of the country as a modern nation-state.  The primary mode through which the state pursues these objectives is the cooptation of neighborhood comities.  By infiltrating the semi-private sphere, and through it restricting women’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, problematizing Islam, and lessening the population’s opportunities for resistance, the Uzbekistan state consolidates and legitimizes its rule.

The autonomous republic of Uzbekistan proclaimed its independence from the Soviet Union on September 1st, 1991.  The Communist Party Committee that had been administering the territory proclaimed itself the new government of the secular Uzbekistan nation, and up until the present time it has continued its rule uninterrupted.   However, the area that is now Uzbekistan lacks any real historical or cultural basis for unity.  As a result, in the early years popular instability and the threat of separatism challenged the state’s hegemony.  The state, faced with the urgent need to control its populace and legitimize its rule, seems to have followed a three-prong approach, all of which involve infiltrating and regulating the public and private spheres through the use of community bodies called mahalla.

First, the state has propagated, with a heavy hand, a homogenizing nationalism.  This nationalism uses revisionist history and re-traditionalization to create a generic Uzbek citizen whose loyalty is to the state and whose identity is in the nation.  Second, the state has reinforced the idea of traditional, communal society, and has placed itself within that sphere.  Third, it has established hierarchy as the source and means of organization in society, and placed itself at the highest point.  All three prongs of this policy have had detrimental effects on the everyday lives of Uzbekistan women.  

The use of revisionist history and tradition to create a monoculture

Re-traditionalization, the practice of distorting the true cultural histories of a people and blending their disparate traditions into one seamless whole, is a common tactic of nationalizing forces.  The portrayal of women as the keepers of tradition is integral to this process.  For example, as Partha Chatterjee and Deniz Kandiyoti have shown in India and Turkey (Chatterjee , 1993), when nationalists forge a national consciousness by creating a monoculture, they use women as symbols of the nation’s customs, spirituality and highest values.  “For a colonized people,” Chatterjee writes, “the world…was a place of oppression and daily humiliation, a place where the norms of the colonizer had perforce to be accepted…But in the entire phase of the national struggle, the crucial need was to protect, preserve, and strengthen the inner core of the national culture, its spiritual essence”(Chatterjee , 1993).  This inner core is located in the private sphere, the inner sanctum that is removed from the control of the colonizer; it is located within the domain of women.  In Uzbekistan during the USSR era, men were involved in politics while women were involved in maintaining good Muslim homes and the spiritual and communal life of the family (Kandiyoti,  2004).  As symbols of the pure Uzbekness that was criminalized under the Soviet Union, women logically became the key in the creation of a new homogenous identity for the nation.  Chatterjee writes that in post-colonial societies, the home is “the original site on which the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched”(Chatterjee, 1993).  Deniz Kandiyoti also writes that in Turkey there was “an early link between nationalist discourse and concerns over the condition of Turkish womanhood” (Kandiyoti, 2004).

However, by using women as symbols instead of allowing them agency as active individuals, and by strengthening the core and essence of a patriarchal society, nationalists imprison women within ideals and obligations that curtail their ability to define their own roles and place in society.  Chatterjee has said about India that “the new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate, subordination”(Chatterjee, 1993).  “Subordination and absorption of the ‘woman question’ into the cause of state-building” also took place in Iran under Reza Shah (Najmabadi, 1991).

These scenarios are analogous to that of Uzbekistan in 1991.  After the prohibition of religion, repression of culture and language, and reconfiguration of gender roles that had occurred under the Soviets, the newly independent republic was quick to embrace the idea of a great “Uzbekness” that celebrated regional traditions, histories, and cultures.   They looked to women as the symbol for the inner core that would tell them who they were, and how they belonged together.  Through the medium of TV, radio, billboards, public announcements, books, newspapers, campaigns, schoolbooks and curriculum, and musical and dance performances, the state propounded its vision of the Uzbek woman, and through her, the Uzbek nation.  This New-Traditional Uzbek woman was modest, obedient, hardworking and educated.  She was a loyal daughter and daughter-in-law, an obedient wife, and a loving mother.  She was demure, polite, well-behaved, and embodied all the values and morals of the Uzbek people.  Above all, she was Muslim without being Islamic, and she put family unity as her highest priority.

This new construction of identity has been largely detrimental to women.  The state’s ideology, although framed as respect for tradition, has the effect of removing women from direct involvement in the public sphere, which they had enjoyed under Soviet rule.  This curtails their mobility, and makes it more difficult for them to know and advocate their rights under the secular laws.  Also, women’s troubles are marginalized when they become contradictory to the homogenizing message of the state.  Women who seek divorce, complain about domestic abuse, wish to advance their careers, choose not to have families, and/or who want to become more pious Muslims are not merely stigmatized in the community; because they are compromising the pillars of culture and tradition that are propping up the nation-state’s legitimacy, the state may even view them as threatening.  

Uzbek women also find themselves facing the extremely complicated and contradictory construction of the ideal Uzbek woman as traditional, secular, and Muslim-but-not-Islamic.  From being the “surrogate proletariat” under the USSR and finding encouragement to enter the workforce and the universities, they then returned to their “traditional” roles as mothers and caretakers of the family after independence.  Furthermore, the requirement of the state to validate itself by advocating a return to “tradition” means that women live in increasingly patriarchal familial and social spheres.  Yet at the same time, economic necessity and the desire of the state to be modern and secular demand that women continue to participate in the public sphere.  Moreover, women’s role as the keepers of tradition is problematic.  Uzbek women should organize celebrations of the Muslim holidays for their families and community.  They should ensure that their children are learning Uzbek (this is often indistinguishable from Muslim) values.  They should be caretakers of their family’s spiritual life.  However, their activities must never cross the extremely hazy line between Muslim and Islamic.

State cooptation of the neighborhood mahalla

The cooptation of the neighborhood groups called mahalla has been a crucial avenue for the creation of the ideal Uzbek woman, the merging of the private and public spheres into a communal sphere where private actions can be publicly controlled, and the establishment of state hegemony.  A mahalla is a neighborhood or local community, usually comprised of several hundred people.  Before mahallas were repressed by the Soviet Union many, but not all, areas in Uzbekistan were organized into these cooperatives.  They functioned as mutual support mechanisms.  Members of the same mahalla organized Islamic and cultural rituals and celebrations, supported widows and orphans, and built mosques, teahouses, and other facilities for community use.  Each mahalla had a handful of elders who advised and directed it (Human Rights Watch, Sep 2003).

Since 1991, the Uzbekistan state has promoted the mahalla as an essential and defining component of Uzbek tradition.  According to Julie Peteet, “…an authenticity based on tradition is not necessarily a passive, mutely adopted reversion to tradition.  The use of tradition can be both calculated and creative” (Peteet, 1993). Thus, by ingratiating itself into a respected local body, the state attempts to give itself a legitimacy based on tradition.  This illustrates the potency of redefining the “cultural traditions” of a disparate polity in order to bind them together within a legitimate nation-state.

Not only has the state officially sponsored the mahallas’ activities, it has positioned itself as a member and natural outgrowth of a traditional governing system.  Through this endorsement it has turned the mahalla into a socio-political object through which to legitimize the state’s authority and locate its arms and ears in every community in Uzbekistan (Massicard, 2003).  Every neighborhood in the country, regardless of its earlier traditions, has been divided into registered mahallas.  Each mahalla, instead of listening to the advice of elders, is now under the jurisdiction of state-appointed mahalla committees.  The state empowers these committees to disburse government benefits (like pensions and social assistance), to provide documentation and letters of reference (required when going before officials), to mediate in cases of domestic violence, and to act as gatekeepers to those seeking divorce (Human Rights Watch, 2003).  

The mahalla system has been called a “sub-national form of identity construction” (Massicard, 2003).  In order to realize its goal of national unity within the homogenous configuration of an “Uzbek identity” based on re-traditionalization and revisionist history, the state pressures the mahallas to enforce controversial policies that uphold the new standards of “Uzbekness” while contradicting actual state laws.  Mahalla committees are under heavy pressure to keep the divorce rate in their communities down, to make sure that their members are behaving properly, to maintain the image of strong families, strong communities, and strong nationalist feelings, and to see that religious sentiment is sufficiently Muslim to be Uzbek, but not Muslim enough that community members could turn to political Islam.  This is very much like the sectarian nature of Lebanon, in which Suad Joseph writes that, “The institutionalization of nation defined as a collection of religious communities…reinforced already existing and contributed to the growth of new patriarchal and parochial institutions and structures that further subordinated women” (Joseph, 1999).  The variety of mahallas, and their relative freedom to monitor, report, and enforce at will, creates an unequal legal code.  State laws are modified and reinterpreted at the local level; different communities enforce different norms.

These policies include prohibiting hijab for women and beards for men, public displays of Islamic faith (i.e. attending mosque), and women’s unrestricted movements, occupations, and social relations.  The mahallas prepare detailed reports on all their members, even recording forms of behavior, dress, speech and attitude that go against the ideal.  Through this system, the mahallas, as an intermediary between the nation and the state, become a new field of state control and intervention (Massicard, 2003).

The mahallas are a useful forum for understanding the tension between the state, Islam, and women.  We have seen that the state only reluctantly supports Islam.  The strong Muslim identity of the nation, and the backlash to the suppression of religion under the USSR, made the inclusion of Islam into the national identity inevitable.  However, the state accuses Islamist groups of trying to fracture the country and take over the government.  Therefore, state tolerance of Islam is conditional.  

Uzbekistan is officially secular, and its laws and policies reflect that.  However, some of the traditions enforced through the mahalla committees are more in line with cultural-religious norms than with secular (i.e. the pressure on men to maintain their families, the acceptance of polygyny and domestic violence, the relegation of women to the domestic sphere, and the behavioral expectations of women).  Saba Mahmood has written that, “Islamic sociability” is in “a secular-liberal society difficult if not impossible” (Mahmood, 2001).  The issue that arises in Uzbekistan is: how can the state enforce Islamic customs  for the sake of nationalism, but reject Islamism for the sake of secularism?¹ The mahalla system is a crucial tool in negotiating the plane of this contradiction.  In the mahalla system, women are not individuals; they are members of a family unit and the mahalla committee treats them as such.  The committees punish women who have criminal or Islamic connections (Human Rights Watch, Sep 2003).  Also, the mahalla committee takes on a parental and disciplinary role over women who live alone outside of their home communities.²

Body politics, social imaginaries, and Islam

It is through women’s bodies that the dramatic opposition between the state and Islam is played out.  According to national law, all citizens have the freedom to dress as they choose outside of public facilities.  However, on the mahalla level the state has made religious dress illegal everywhere.  Thus, contradictorily, a woman must act like a good Muslim but she must not dress like one.  In theory, a woman punished by the mahalla committee for wearing hijab could petition the state and complain that her constitutional rights have been violated – but she is not allowed to make a petition without first obtaining the permission of her mahalla committee.  In reality, state authorities have a sordid record of using reports from mahalla committees and other surveillance bodies to arbitrarily detain and torture Muslim women who wear hijab (Human Rights Watch, April 13, 2004).

If we accept that the Uzbekistan state is using identity creation to control the nation, and that they are enforcing the paradigm of homogenous nationalism through the plane of women’s bodies, it becomes clear that at the heart of identity and body politics is the state’s involvement in the creation of new “social imaginaries,” or communally-created and shared perceptions and interpretations of public acts.  The state is deeply involved in a project to control the common spaces, the public performances that go on there, and the social understanding of those performances’ symbolism.

More than just fields of control, the mahallas are the key to the state’s participation in the construction of social imaginaries.  “The more women have become involved in social life, the more necessary it has become to enforce the moral codes to ensure that such increased contact between men and women does not unwittingly undermine the moral fabric of the Islamic community and open it up to alien penetration” (Najmabadi , 1991).  Culturally, the smallest acts can carry much symbolic weight; the repetition of such acts in the public forum creates, “new ways of imagining a collective self and common space” (Göle , 2002).  Thus, as a result of the pressure of ubiquitous billboard propaganda, TV shows, news programs, popular music, and law enforcement Uzbekistan citizens come to alter their opinions of what makes a good Uzbek, a good citizen, and a good woman.

According to interpretations of public performances at the time of independence, people who did not know Russian were uneducated, women in high positions were modern and impressive, secluded women and women in hijab were pious and worthy of respect, and atheists were progressive.  With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of “Uzbekness,” the, “encounter between two cultural codes [has led] not to a simple logic of emulation or rejection but to improvisations in social practices and cultural meanings” (Göle , 2002). Therefore, one of the first things Islam Karimov did after independence was pay a televised visit to a mosque to pray.  Then he learned Uzbek, erected statues in the capital that celebrated the role of the Uzbek mother, and organized performances of traditional music and dance.  Through surveillance and enforcement at the mahalla level, the state is changing the way people perform in public; through extensive propaganda citizens are learning to re-interpret the symbolism of what they see.  

In contemporary Uzbekistan, the state is propagating the following significations: a person who does not know Uzbek is uneducated, women in high positions are only acceptable if they are simultaneously married and fulfilling their domestic roles, people in Islamic dress are enemies of the state, and atheists are shameful.  On May 5, 1998 the state passed a law forbidding people to wear religious dress inside public buildings.  Ten days later when Damin Asadov, the former rector of the Pediatric Medical Institute in Tashkent, expelled seven female students for refusing to unveil, he justified his actions by saying, “How can I be sure they are not terrorists?” (MacWilliams, 2003).  As Göle has written, “the ocular aspect in the creation of significations and the making of social imaginaries becomes of utmost importance”( Göle , 2002).  By changing the way people see and understand the society around them, the state is able to affect their behavior, their communal ideals, and their ability to imagine themselves as part of the “collective self” (Göle , 2002) of a unified, traditional-yet-secular, and Muslim-but-not-Islamic nation.

The hierarchy-patriarchy relationship

The mahallas are also a field for fortifying the hierarchal-patriarchal structure of the nation-state.  In historical usage, mahallas were participatory structures that operated on consensus and/or majority vote systems.  They varied from community to community, and instead of keeping a governing committee they listened to the advice of elders.  In contrast, the new form of mahalla is hierarchal and non-participatory.  The state, which appoints and directs the mahalla committees, is at the top of the hierarchy.  Thus, in the process of re-traditionalization, the state has re-written communal society and created a normative power structure characterized by authority and dominance at the central, highest level, and capitulation and submission below.  

Because Uzbek society is patriarchal, this emphasis on hierarchy as the culturally normal and ideal order of things reinforces patriarchy at all levels.  Joan Scott has argued that gender can be used as an analytic category for understanding power relations (Scott, 1999). She writes that, “gender has been employed literally or analogically in political theory to justify or criticize the reign of monarchs and to express the relationship between ruler and ruled” (Scott, 1999).  This means that the socio-political attitudes toward women directly reflect the attitude of the ruler to the ruled.  In condoning patriarchal behaviors in which men subjugate women, a nation rationalizes the extension of synonymous unequal power relations to that of the nation-state level.  The nation magnifies and refocuses the normative of powerful and powerless, and of protector and protected, to the governmental level, thus permitting the governing body the right to subjugate its populace.  

As Soraya Altorki has written, “…the workings of patriarchy in society and the regime’s patriarchal conduct toward the people may come to be seen as an almost seamless web of mutually reinforcing mechanisms and processes” (Altorki, 2000).  Examples of this abound in the mahalla system.  Despite having ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women, and despite a constitution that provides equal rights, the state maintains a dual system of norms and expectations for its citizens.  Officially, it promotes women’s agency in education and employment.  Unofficially, through the filter of the mahalla system, it undermines women’s legal rights in other areas.  Specifically, women’s participation in the public sphere is contingent upon their conformance to the re-traditionalized Uzbek standards of modest dress, behavior, and speech.  Through Mahalla surveillance, women who do not obey their husbands and mothers-in-law, who associate with men, who speak and dress too freely, who pray five times a day, and who teach their children about Islam are at risk of being written up and denounced by the mahalla committee to the law enforcement agencies.  They could also lose their rights to social benefits and be refused letters of reference (Human Rights Watch, Sep 2003).  Interestingly, the state is enforcing cultural and religious traditions that are neither necessarily authentic nor the result of a system of established Islamic jurisprudence, and it is voicing them through the mahallas so as to give them national, rather than state, validity.  

This method of enforcement is extremely problematic for women because it puts them in the position of either submitting to unequal norms, or defying them and thus negating their cultural identity and undermining the foundations of their cultural community and the nation-state.  The Muslim Indian woman Shahbano faced a similar dilemma when she won maintenance through the Indian civil courts under the 1973 Code of Criminal Procedure, but had to refuse the money in favor of showing her solidarity with the Muslim community and their religious law (Pathak, 1992)  Julie Peteet has also documented this phenomenon within the Palestinian community, where women did not want to undermine the politically crucial idea of a unified Palestinian culture (Peteet, 1993), “Nor did women wish to extract themselves or their problems from the social fabric and the ongoing process of national resistance” (Petett, 2001).  Finally, Doria Cherifati-Merabtine, writing about women in the national independence struggle in Algeria, asserts that a “…[global] line of conduct…denies the specificities of the women’s issue.  Indeed, this line of conduct has subjected women’s ‘liberation’ to national independence and to the building of a socialist society” (Cherifati-Merabtine , 1994).

Caught in a web of shifting power relations

To understand the workings of patriarchy in Uzbekistan, it is important to know that the Uzbekistan “state” is more accurately the nation’s charismatic president Islam Karimov and his coterie, who have been in power since the 1980s.  Karimov strives to maintain an image of himself as the benevolent caretaker of his people.  In 1999 he said that, “the way society treats women shows the level of the culture and the spirituality of a given society, and the results of society’s movement toward democracy” (Cooper, 2003).  Officially, women have a good position in Uzbekistan and those who protest do so because they are enemies of the nation.  In 2005 the state banned virtually all non-governmental organizations and women’s groups, stating that their purposes were suspect and they were no longer beneficial to society.

Like under Mohammad Reza Shah in 1960s Iran, where, “citizens were no longer expected to contribute to the building of the state, to be at its service, but to be its grateful beneficiaries” (Najmabadi , 1991), Karimov wants the citizens of Uzbekistan to feel united in a national family, with himself as the beneficent father figure. This patriarchal construct positions the head of the nation (and by extension of the family) as morally and intellectually superior, deserving of obedience, and capable of maintaining his family.  In this construct, the public and private spheres mirror one another.  Women find themselves voluble as symbols but silent as individuals because the “patriarchal interiorization of women at the domestic level reinforces it at the state level and vice versa” (Altorki, 2000).  The particular difficulty of this paradigm, however, is that it does not reflect the reality of the majority of women in Uzbekistan, who are increasingly the main providers for their families.³

The space in which women can maneuver for better rights is extremely restricted.  Unable to publicly resist their situation, some women have shown their resistance by rejecting public Islam in favor of private, woman-only Islamic rituals.⁴ However, these latter rituals, although often interpreted as women’s involvement in feminist resistance, are more accurately a continuum of the state’s drive to marginalize Islam and subordinate women and relegate them to the private sphere.  In addition to this, many women are practicing illegal internal and external migration, and engaging in small acts of defiance in private (the home) or in semi-private (the mahalla).  

However, any actions that contradict “Uzbek traditional norms,” patriarchy, the hegemony of the state and the jurisdiction of the mahalla directly threaten the bases of state control and are not tolerated.  Thus, women in Uzbekistan are increasingly finding themselves caught in a web of shifting power relations, pressured into negotiating themselves through a “choreography of ambivalence” (Göle , 2002).  Any future movements to improve women’s situation will have to take care not to unbalance the status quo, nor to disrupt the purposeful creation of social imaginaries – both of which, through their support of homogenous nationalism and hierarchy, work to keep the state in power.

Notes:

1.      Here I am referring to customs that are associated with Islam in Uzbekistan, not to stipulations that have arisen from an established school of jurisprudence, nor to universal teachings based on scholarly Qur’anic analysis.

2.      E.g., women who move to the capital in search of employment.

3.      This is the case for a number of reasons.  Women stay to provide for their families while their husbands go abroad to find illegal work, women are more likely than men to take even low-paying jobs when nothing else is available, women are almost the sole participants in the lucrative shuttle trade between Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and China, and women engage in money-saving activities like sewing clothes and canning vegetables.

4.      See: Kandiyoti, Deniz and Nadira Azimova. (June 2004). The communal and the sacred: Women’s worlds of ritual in Uzbekistan. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(2), 327-350. 

References:

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Chatterjee P. (1993). The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cherifati-Merabtine, Doria. (1994). Algeria at a Crossroads: national liberation, Islamization and women. In Valentine M. Moghadam (Ed.), Gender and National Identity: Women and Politics in Muslim Societies (pp. 40-62). London, New Jersey: Zed Books, 59.

Cooper, Belinda and Isabel Traugott. (Spring 2003). Women’s Rights and Security in Central Asia. World Policy Journal Retrieved Nov 29, 2006 from  http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/wpj/wpj_spring03h.html

Göle, N. (2002). Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries. Public Culture 14(1), 174.

Human Rights Watch. (April 13, 2004). Uzbekistan: Crackdown Targets Dissident Muslim Women. Human Rights News. Retrieved Oct 19, 2006 from http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/04/13/uzbeki8425.htm

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Kandiyoti, D. (1991). End of Empire: Islam, Nationalism, and Women in Turkey. Women, Islam, and the State, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 22-47.

Kandiyoti, D. and Nadira Azimova. (June 2004). The communal and the sacred: Women’s worlds of ritual in Uzbekistan. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 10(2), 328-333.

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Massicard, E and T. Trevisani. (2003). The Uzbek Mahalla: between state and society. In Tom Everett-Heath (Ed.), Central Asia: aspects of transition. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 205-206.

Najmabadi, A. (1991). Hazards of Modernity and Morality: Women, State and Ideology in Contemporary Iran. In Deniz Kandiyoti (Ed.), Women, Islam, and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 58.

Pathak, Zakia and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. (1992). Shahbano. In Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (Ed.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, 257-279.

Peteet, J. (1993). Authenticity and Gender: The Presentation of Culture. In Judith E. Tucker (Ed.), Arab Women: new boundaries, old frontiers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 52.

Peteet, Julie. (2001). Women and the Palestinian Movement: No Going Back. In Suad Joseph and Susan Slyomovics (Ed.), Women and Power in the Middle East (pp. 135-149). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 140.

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Brenda Schuster is a MA candidate in International Studies (Russia, East Europe and Central Asia) at the University of Washington in Seattle.  A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan and Uganda, she has spent the last two and a half years living and working in Xinjiang, China.  She received an Andrew Mellon Graduate Fellowship in 2005-6, and is currently studying under a federal Foreign Language and Areas Studies grant.  Her thesis research focuses on traditional medicine and public health in Central Asia.

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