Busy--Going to Be Out of Town

Hey. I'm in the middle of the last part of interviewing, which means I'm crazy busy. I'm trying to get transcriptions of the interviews I've already recorded, translate the transcriptions, and talk to the last few people I need to in order to get the fullest pictuer possible of what is happening here.

I'll be in Yssyk Kol this weekend for a few more interviews. I go down to the southern provinces on the 24th of December. I plan to get about 20 interviews in Osh, Jalalabad and Isfana over a 10-day period or so. I'm not sure how long I'll be down there. It all depends on how quicky I can get the interviews. I have to take into account that I will be there over New Years, which means the majority of people will be drunk (and therefore un-interviewable) for a 5-6 day window.

I'll try to post something next week, but I cant' make any promises. Then I'll be off the map for two weeks or so. I'll start posting regularly again in January.

Happy Holidays!

Election Time

Kyrgyzstan had a popular referendum about a month ago to revise its constitution. I talked to several independent observers who said there were a lot of irregularities and that the voter turnout was pretty low. In fact, I heard the following joke the day after the referendum:

An electoral official goes to his boss and says, “The results of the referendum are in. Eighty-one percent of the population voted.” His boss gets really angry and says, “What are you talking about? We agreed that the number would be 80 percent! Why did you change it?” The official apologized, “It’s just that one percent of the population actually came. We thought we ought to count them.”

Parliamentary elections are coming up December 16^th. Maybe I’m an eternal optimist, but I have greater hopes for these elections than for the referendum. During the Akayev administration (President Askar Akayev was ousted in March 2005), there was really widespread corruption in the legislature. People were basically installed in those positions instead of being elected to them. Most of those people are still in those positions. I think (I hope) that will change in a couple weeks. There are now over 100 political parties in Kyrgyzstan, and that’s growing every day. That much competition means there is a much better chance that people are going to have to form coalitions after they get elected, which means it will be harder to push through bad legislation or to just not do anything.

That is, assuming, that the larger parties just don’t buy up people’s votes this time around. They’ve done that in the past.

Close to Finishing the Interviews

I have to apologize for just putting up other peoples words on the blog lately. I know that is interesting—probably much more interesting that what I have to say—I did promise that I would try to talk about all of the aspects of my fieldwork.

The interview phase of my fieldwork is coming to a close. Right now, I’m in the middle of translating the interviews I have already taken. I’ve recorded 39 interviews so far, and I have at least three more scheduled for this week so far. Interviewing is an interesting thing. You never know how many interviews you’re going to need. I started out estimating that I would need about 100. That moved down to 70 shortly after I got here. Now, I’m thinking between 50 and 60. What you do with interviews is make a list of different topics that you want to understand. When you start interviewing a person, you start with the first topic and ask him or her everything you can about that. When that person has said everything he or she can about that topic, you move onto the next topic that that particular person will be likely to know something about. In an average interview (about 1 to 1 ½ hours long), you cover three or four topics.

After a number of interviews—you can never be sure how many—the first topics on your list get full. New people stop giving you any new information. That’s when you know you’ve probably filled in your understanding of that topic enough to stop asking about it. Then you move onto the topics that people are still saying interesting things about, or to topics you haven’t covered yet. In fact, as you interview people, they will mention a lot of things you never thought of. Those will become new topics to ask about. You just stick them at the end of your list.

My list is now about gone. I stopped getting new information about people’s everyday lives over a month ago. I stopped getting new information about groups like religion, ethnicity, and country about a week or so ago. I’m now just trying to understand social participation: no matter what religion you belong to, why do you decide to give your time, effort, and/or money to it? Why do people decide to sacrifice for their country? Engage in a protest? Become independent observers for an election? The new material for those questions is starting to get slim. Comparatively speaking. I’m still getting a lot of new information, but not as much as I got in the beginning.

I’m going down to the southern provinces of the country (Osh, Jalalabad, and Batken) at the end of this month. I plan on getting about 20 more interviews while I am there, and most of those are going to be with people who are socially active. I think that will finish my interviewing needs.

My next phase is to create a survey based on the information from the interviews. I don’t even want to think about that until I at least have all of my interviews translated.

In Their Own Words: Islam in Kyrgyzstan

This is the Uzbek student again. He takes his religious very seriously. He actually gave better explanations of Islamic doctrines than anyone else I have talked to so far. He feels that there is a big problem with Islam in Kyrgyzstan.

What’s the problem? Islam here in Kyrgyzstan…we [the younger generation] didn’t grow up in the Soviet times. Our parents lived in it for 70 years. The regime was atheistic. They were categorically opposed to any religion. It was all communism. When they achieved independence—the USSR fell apart, so they got independence whether they wanted it or not—Turkey set up an embassy here and other countries too. That’s when Islam started to grow in Kyrgyzstan. But the problem is we have a lot of stereotypes—misinformation about Islam. People aren’t ready…that’s a really big problem right now. Even if you were to go to an imam right now and want to learn about Islam, he’s not going to start with the ABC’s. He start with, “Don’t do this, don’t do that…don’t smoke, don’t drink.” It’s fine to do that, but a person should start with the basics. People here haven’t even held a Bible in their hands, for example. If you ask if they’ve ever even held a Bible, they tell you no. Or the Torah, for example. We just don’t have a dialogue with other religions. Everyone is the same. So I think we need to change that somehow in Kyrgyzstan.

I pointed out that many Muslims had told me that it was a sin to even hold the Bible in their hands.

Do you understand what they think that? It’s because a lot of imams don’t know much themselves…. That’s not what Islam is about. When people in Kyrgyzstan say that it’s sin even to hold the Bible in your hands, that’s not written anywhere. The Bible, the Torah—we’re all children of Abraham. And religion and all of that—we all have one God. It’s just that Christians interpret the Bible one way, Muslims a different way, Jews a different way. What they say here—that’s just hearsay. If you ask them why, they can’t tell you, because there are no facts in support of it. That’s the problem.

We have another problem in that a lot of people aren’t answerable for what they teach. They say that something is not right, for example, that it’s a sin to drink. Yes, everyone knows that, but why? They can’t answer, because they don’t dig deep into the matter, you see? That’s the problem. Because we…the imam says don’t do that, it’s a sin, but we don’t ask why. We don’t ask them to explain in more detail.

The thing that interests me about Islam is why I am a Muslim. It’s not because my parents are Muslims or because someone affected me. It’s because you can find an answer to any question in Islam. What do we do first? If we have a question, we look in the Qur’an. If we can’t find it in the Qur’an, we go to the hadith [the sayings of the prophet]. As long as you take the earlier forms of the hadith. And then after that the 3^rd step is…I forget what it’s called in Arabic…it’s like consensus. Scholars gather and they issue a fatwa. A lot of people don’t know who any of those scholars are. They don’t know why we look at what they said and not at what others have said. Why do we do that? Because some contradict themselves and others have been accepted by the whole world. We have a problem when it comes to sources. A lot of people don’t check their sources. For example, if you go to the mosque here, there’s a lot of book stores. A lot the books have a Tashkent copyright. A lot of people who really understand Islam, they don’t read those books, because Tashkent books are unreliable sources. Karimov’s regime [in Uzbekistan] and a lot of imams in general distort information.

So we have that specific problem right now. Another problem is that we aren’t even on the first step and those people [the reliable sources] are already on the 10^th or 20^th floor, so we can’t understand them. The first step is the creed—the foundational principles. Who is Allah, what are his qualities, why are we Muslims? What is the confession of faith? [“There is no deity except Allah alone, and Muhammad is his messenger.” Saying this is the first, and technically the only, thing that one must do to become a Muslim.] What is that? We don’t understand anything, but we already know what’s forbidden and what’s not. Why is that? Those are very difficult questions with difficult answers. That’s why a lot of people… I talked to a lot of Imams. I asked them if there was any place in Kyrgyzstan where I could find the foundational principles—specifically the foundation stuff. They don’t know, because a lot of Imams can beautifully explain things, but they get mixed up when it comes to basic things. There are a lot of different interpretations of the Qur’an here.

In Their Own Words: Islam and America

This person gave perhaps the best interview I have taken so far. He is an Uzbek from the southern city of Osh. He is now a university student at AUCA. He studied for a year in America. The following is about his experience in California—especially his experience regarding people’s attitudes towards Islam.

In the beginning I was in the southern part of California, because my classes were supposed to start September 27 but we got there on August 14^th. I spent a week in Washington, then we went to southern California. It was really hard for me there—culture shock, first time in America. That’s understandable. Well, I was interested in going to a mosque, but my host wouldn’t let me go. As you know, there’s a problem with transportation in America. Especially in California [you need a car to get anywhere]. I didn’t even know that I could…the town I was in isn’t a big town, but because of the lack of transportation, I had a problem. My host parents refused to take me to a mosque. I asked if I could just go once, just to see the architecture, see American Muslims. They said September 11^th was coming up and they didn’t want there to be any conflicts. They said maybe they’d take me later. I was in shock. I said, “This is America—that land of the free. Why would there be a conflict if you take me there? It seems that’s actually a good thing. You’re showing me how Muslims in America live.” They categorically refused. I said, “Welcome to America.”

I thought I wouldn’t be able to go to a mosque for the whole year. I was really disappointed. But then I went to the North. East Bay is in the bay area. I fell in love with it. That place isn’t similar to any other place in America. I told a lot of Americans about that region and they said I was lucky that I lived there, not because there are a lot of Muslims, but because the people there are different. If you compare north and south California, the north has more Democrats. The south has more Republicans. They think differently about a lot of things. In the north, it was still hard for me for about a month after I arrived. There were classes, a new location, the credit system. Some time in October, during the month of Ramadan, I started to keep the fast. I didn’t know that the university had a Muslim Student Association. It turns out there’s one in every university. I didn’t know, I just fasted. I didn’t know anyone else who was. We have a tradition that when you break your fast, you do that with your friends. They [the other Muslim students] did that on campus in the student union building. There was only about a week of Ramadan left when I happened to meet some guys that were also fasting and one of them was the president of MSA. They told me to come to the union building. I came and there were a lot of Muslims there. I hadn’t known.

After that my life started to get totally better. My life was perfect from October to June. I went to a lot of mosques. When I had been in southern California, I thought that after 9/11 there was now a lot of discrimination against Muslims, like after Pearl Harbor with the Japanese in California. I thought it was the same thing with Muslims, not at the same level, but that there was some indirect discrimination going on. When I came to the north I really saw that any religion is welcomed. You have freedom of choice. Life in America changed me, in that I became more aware, and in relation to my religion…the Islam I found in America was more real than the Islam here in Kyrgyzstan.

In Their Own Words: Why People Engage in Corruption

This is a student in Bishkek. He’s from Batken, the southernmost—as the poorest—of Kyrgyzstan’s seven provinces. We got to talking about corruption. Nearly everyone I have talked to here says that people in general, and especially government leaders, are corrupt. It’s just a widespread assumption that people take bribes, get their relatives and other supporters into powerful positions, and generally act dishonestly. This student was unusually honest about how he, personally, relates to all of that.

I want to be honest, fair, but that’s going to be hard, I think. I could be lying to myself. I’m afraid I’m lying, that I’m saying right now that I’m going to be honest and fair, but then some situation will come up where I’ll have to lie a little or…but I’m going to try not to do that, because…I don’t know. I just that people—and maybe I don’t understand the ins and outs of it—but if I understood, maybe I’d talk different. Maybe I’d say that I could do this little dishonest thing and get a lot of money from it. I just know a lot of people who say if you do certain things you can make a lot of money—through corruption or something else—you can do that. I’m afraid with time I will change. People always change in the face of other people’s influence. First of all they see the opportunity to make some money. It pulls them, attracts them. They make an excuse, “Ok, I’ll do it this time, but not any more.” And then, the gradually come to like it. Then they have some kind of need. They want to fulfill that need, but they can only do it that way [through corruption]. These are obvious things. They’re everywhere. Honestly I’m afraid. You become more aware of things, maybe I’ll have some things I really need. I don’t know, I don’t want it to be that way. I’d like to have enough without that. I’m just afraid that if I don’t have enough of something, I’ll start looking for a way to…I can’t say I won’t look for way, if they offer to…I don’t know. One side says take it. The other side says “No, stop.” I’d make myself feel better by saying, “Oh, but look how many other people do it. I’ll do it too.” That’s how you feel when you go along with the majority—that’s how it is with corruption—a lot of people are doing it. How are they going to find out about me? I’m not alone. There are hundreds of people doing it.