Tag Archives: religion

Uzbek mosques warn faithful against complaining

APRIL 13 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Controlled by the state and with Ukraine’s revolution still fresh in the mind, media reported that mosques in Uzbekistan have been preaching about the joys of refraining from discontent and remaining humble.

Information leaking out of Uzbekistan points to a fairly crude attempt to control the masses through the mosques.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, funded by the US government, quoted one resident of the town of Andijan in the east of Uzbekistan who had listened to the Friday sermon at his local mosque.

“Complaining and criticising is testamount to betrayal,” the unnamed man quoted the imam as saying.

Unsurprisingly, Uzbekistan was opposed to the revolution in Ukraine, mainly because it didn’t want it to set a precedent.

Uzbekistan is also wary of religion. It blames radical Islamists for a series of attacks against government targets in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

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(News report from Issue No. 180, published on April 16 2014)

Tajik archaeologists find Zoroastrian artefacts

APRIL 6 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Archaeologists in Tajikistan have found several water jugs which they estimate are 2,000 years old and of Zoroastrian heritage, media reported. Tajikistan was one of the homes of Zoroastrianism, a draw for tourists.

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(News report from Issue No. 179, published on April 9 2014)

Row over Islam in Kyrgyzstan heats up

MARCH 21 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — Disagreements over the pagan Nowruz celebration, marking the beginning of spring have highlighted fault lines in Kyrgyz society.

While the state-affiliated Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kyrgyzstan (SAMK) views celebrating Nowruz as an acceptable part of pre-Islamic Kyrgyz tradition, more hard-line clerics, perhaps with a more Arab influence, called on believers to ignore the holiday completely in the run up to March 21.

The debate brings into focus the sharp rise of nontraditional Islam, imported from the Arab world, in Central Asia.

Nowruz — a key event in the calendar of all five Central Asian states and also Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey — is not celebrated in other parts of the Muslim world.

In February, Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev expressed alarm at signs of “Arab culture, including the appearance of women wearing hijab, something alien to the gentler Kyrgyz traditional Islam.

As well as a gulf between the views of secularists like Mr Atambayev and practicing Muslims, Kyrgyzstan is also witnessing what a local religion expert called a “battle for control of mosques between different Jamaats.

As if to illustrate the point, last month the deputy Imam of a mosque in Kara-Suu, a southern city, was arrested for organising radical activity.

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(News report from Issue No. 177, published on March 26 2014)

Turkmenistan forces military conscription

MARCH 21 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — The authorities in Turkmenistan have imprisoned a seventh man for refusing to sign up for conscription, the Forum 18 website reported.

Forum 18 reported that Pavel Paymov, a 23-year-old Jehovah’s Witness member, was sent to one year in prison in January for dodging conscription.

According to the article, Turkmenistan does not offer an alternative to military service. This, apparently, breaks international human rights laws.

Turkmenistan’s constitution calls on men to serve for two years in the military between the ages of 18 and 27.

Earlier this month, Turkmenistan mobilised its reserve forces after an attack on its border with Afghanistan.

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(News report from Issue No. 177, published on March 26 2014)

Kyrgyzstan elects new mufti

MARCH 4 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — A religious council in Kyrgyzstan appointed Maksat Hajji Toktomushev as its seventh grand mufti in four years. Toktomushev is best known for issuing a fatwa against same-sex relations in January. His election highlights the issue of human rights in Kyrgyzstan.

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(News report from Issue No. 174, published on March 5 2014)

Uzbekistan restricts religious freedom

FEB. 12 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — A law specifically banning books and pamphlets that encourage people to switch religion came into force in Uzbekistan last month, the Forum 18 news service reported. The law, which was formalised on Jan. 27, also allows the authorities to confiscate Muslims’ literature when they return from a Hajj to Mecca.

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(News report from Issue No. 172, published on Feb. 19 2014)

Kazakhstan controls religious content

FEB. 4 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — If you think it sounds Orwellian, you wouldn’t be alone.

Kazakh officials announced that the Agency for Religion will now vet all religious content before it is run on state-owned media.

The plain speaking chief of the agency, Marat Azilkhanov, explained the move: “It’s a matter of the government’s ideology.”

Or this is just plain censorship, depending on how you look at it.

If truth be known this is the way it’s been going in Kazakhstan for some time.

In 2011, Kazakhstan introduced a law restricting religious activities and gatherings. This was generally regarded as an attempted crackdown on Islamic extremists.

New figures released by Mr Azilkhanov showed that over 500 different religious groups have failed to meet these new requirements and have been banned.

Human rights groups have complained that Kazakhstan uses the new religion laws to get rid of groups it finds troublesome.

(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)

Madrasah collapses in Kyrgyzstan

FEB. 3 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — The second floor of a madrasah in southern Kyrgyzstan collapsed during a memorial service for a local imam injuring 49 people, local media reported. The accident highlights some of the poor building construction in rural Kyrgyzstan.

(News report from Issue No. 170, published on Feb. 5 2014)

Kyrgyz mufti resigns after scandal

JAN. 7 2014 (The Conway Bulletin) — A secretly filmed sex video involving Kyrgyz Grand Mufti Rakhmatulla-Hajji Egemberdiev has rocked Kyrgyzstan’s establishment.

The video of Mr Egemberdiev having sex with a younger woman appeared on the internet on New Year’s Eve. His opponents accused him of adultery and organised street demonstrations, common in Kyrgyzstan, to force him to resign.

After a week of resistance, Mr Egemberdiev handed in his resignation. He blamed his opponents for setting up a trap and called on the government to intervene.

The whole tawdry episode means that Kyrgyzstan now has to look for its seventh religious leader in four years — a destabilising effect that even a more secure country would have problems dealing with. Mr Egemberdiev’s predecessor was sacked a year ago because of tax evasion issues.

It also throws up the issue of polygamy in Kyrgyzstan. This is technically banned but is still relatively commonplace in Kyrgyzstan and is accepted in the Sufi form of Islam.

Mr Egemberdiev’s defence was that the woman in the video was one of his additional wives.

The destabilising effect of losing another religious leader, the political in-fighting and open debate about polygamy means it’s been a messy start to the year for Kyrgyzstan.

(News report from Issue No. 166, published on Jan. 8 2014)

Tajikistan persecutes religious literature

NOV. 18 2013 (The Conway Bulletin) — Police in Tajikistan have confiscated religious literature from Muslims, Protestants and Jehovah Witnesses this year, the Forum 18 news agency reported. It said that many of the people who carried the literature were fined for carrying banned religious texts.

(News report from Issue No. 161, published on Nov. 20 2013)