In Their Own Words: Are People Becoming More Religious?

Everyone is worried about increased religiosity, maybe because they associate it with extremism. Let’s point out the obvious fact that if a person becomes more religious that does not mean he becomes a fanatic. There are plenty of very devout people in the world, in all different religions, who don’t do anything weird or violent. They just live good lives and are generally very pleasant to talk to. Pretty much everyone—outside scholars as well as locals—agree that people in Central Asia in general, and Kyrgyzstan in particular, are becoming more religious. The man in this post, who is also the man from the last post, disagrees.

We should get one thing straight. People are not becoming more religious right now. They’re just devoting themselves more to religious rituals. I’m talking about saying the prayers and things like that. But becoming more religious—no. Here’s a simple example from real life. We talked about why people get married. That question can only be answered by religion and no one else, because people don’t know, really, why they need to get married. There are a lot of divorces. We went to the universities and asked students the question of why they are supposed to get married. Some said that you get to an age where you get married. Others said they get married so their wife will do the washing and cooking. Others said it was to have children. Others just said that you just needed to get married. There’s no education given—people get married for those reasons and bring children into the world for the same reasons. People aren’t becoming more religious, because they still don’t know the purpose of getting married or having children and things like that.

So why are people devoting themselves more to religious rituals?

People always have needs. If you don’t eat for a day, then the next day you want to eat. Even if you go half a day, around lunchtime we start to search for the food. A person is made up of two parts—a physical and a spiritual. During Soviet times we didn’t feed the spiritual portion. We had the ideology of the government, the communist party. We filled our spirit with that ideology. When the Union fell apart, we were deprived of that spiritual food. So our spirit started to search for something that would satisfy its needs. So there are a lot of cases where people join sects and other things, because the spirit has to be fed.

If people aren’t really becoming more religious, why are we seeing more extremist groups?

Who joins [extremist groups]? As a rule, it’s ignorant people. They join this religion [Islam] because of their spiritual needs, but they fall prey to those groups’ agitations because of their ignorance. If we would have lessons about religion in the schools and universities—not lessons about Islam, but just lessons about what religion is, what different religions say about themselves, is religion right or wrong, what extremism is, then they wouldn’t join. It’s all because of religious ignorance.

In Their Own Words: Misunderstandings about Islam

This is a selection of an interview I took in Osh. This man runs a religious school for women. He and the other founders of the school spent a lot of time searching through different religions after the fall of the Soviet Union. They finally decided that Islam was correct, but they felt that very few people knew anything about Islam, so the opened the school. Here, he explains why people in and out of Islam misunderstand the religion.

The thing is that people in the world today don’t understand Islam correctly. There area a lot of bad representatives of what Islam is and what it is like. Islam isn’t there to do bad things to people. Besides that, the majority of people, when they hear the word Islam, only understand a few limited things, like saying prayers, giving charity, going on the hajj. We tell people that that is not Islam, that those are just duties given to man.

So what are some examples of misunderstandings about Islam?

Terrorists, for example. People connect that with Islam. Or places where there are attacks, people connect that with Islam. Or take our society. We don’t know how to build family relationships. The exploitation of women, for example, forcing her to just do housework. People assign that sort of thing to religion, say it’s part of Islam. That’s not the way it is in Islam. We want to explain that. Also, when it comes to the question of who is supposed to run the family, a lot of people say, of course, it’s the man. That’s not what is says in our religion. It says that Shari’a is the head of the family: that husbands have their own duties and so do wives. We take a look at what Shari’a says about who ought to go grocery shopping, who out to do the washing, make the food. Everyone says that that’s for women to do. That is absolutely not what it says in Islam. Just the opposite: it says that a man is supposed to go buy groceries, that he ought to carry the heavy things, that he ought to help with the washing, with the cooking.

Why do those misunderstandings exist?

It just so happens that the majority of mullahs and imams up to our current day are uneducated. When you say they’re uneducated, it really hurts them. They know how to read the Qur’an, they can open the book and read it, but they don’t understand the meaning of what they are reading, they don’t grasp it. They didn’t learn how to do that—they weren’t taught religion on that level. During the Soviet Union, the only religious school was in Bukhara (Uzbekistan), and there they taught people how to read the Qur’an and recite prayers. They’re wrote the Qur’an into people’s brains like with a parrot or a tape recorder. If you tell them to read they open the book and read, but they didn’t teach them to understand the meaning, the point of what they read. They’re still ignorant in that sense. If you take doctors for example, you can divide them up according to specialty: surgeons, eye doctors, therapists. The same thing happens in Islam. When they teach them to become imams, they teach them how to read the Qur’an correctly, how to recite a prayer, how to answer simple questions that people often have. It’s like preparing teachers for elementary school. Besides that there aren’t any specialists equivalent to middle school, high school, or higher education.

In Their Own Words: Not-So-New Converts

People who have been in their religion longer and have had to spend more time explaining why they believe what they do tend to explain their belief differently than the people in the last post. Take, for example, this Russian woman who converted to Islam with her husband. She is explaining why she believed in life after death, even before she converted.

I had doubts [about the permanence of death], even though with my mind I understood that we are all mortal and that we will die. In my heart I still felt that the soul doesn’t die, even though the body dies, you bury it, and it turns to dust. I always wondered where the spirit went. The body dies, but what about the spirit? I always looked for answers to the question. I’m a doctor, and I read in a journal that some American researchers did an experiment. When they weigh a body after it’s death, it suddenly looses about 30 grams, and they took pictures of the body with infrared and they saw these beams over the body and they thought that might be the spirit. And plus when people are clinically dead and then they come back, they all tell the same thing, that they saw a path, a tunnel, and that there was a light at the end of it. And the closer they got to the light the more they felt that they were loved, and they felt such happiness at the moment. Those people lived in all different countries, didn’t know each other, but they all tell the same thing. At that time, it helped me to understand what happened to the spirit, but where does it go after that? What happens to it? We found our answers in the Qur’an.

Not-So-New Converts use these kinds of stories a lot. Why is alcohol forbidden in your religion? Well, look at all of the evidence about what alcohol does to people, to their health. Why don’t you eat certain foods? Look at the health consequences of those foods. Why do you believe in your scriptures? Look at this archaeological or scientific evidence that fits what the scriptures say. And the scriptures were written hundreds or even thousands or years before anyone knew about the scientific evidence.

In Their Own Words: Proof of Faith (New Converts)

People who believe in something—it could be a religion, a political ideal, a desired social condition—will give reasons why they believe if you ask for them. I’ve noticed that people who have more recently dived into their new belief system tend to give similar kinds of answers. Here is a person who recently (a few years ago) became active in the Russian Orthodox religion. When I asked him how he knew that God existed, that his religion was correct, he told this story:

In 1991 my parents lost their jobs, and then we moved to Russia because conditions here were very hard and we didn’t have anything to eat. There was no work, and my parents with their higher educations were very hard workers. It was the first time in my life that I remember my mother crying at night because we didn’t have anything to eat. There was absolutely nothing to eat. All of a sudden they got their hands on some money and we moved to Russia. Life was hard there as well. We lived in a really rural area. After some time we moved back here, but there were still moments…for example, my father was a businessman, he transported gasoline to different places, and his partners set him up and he ended up being brought to trial. I was starting to realize more at that age and I realized there was nothing we could do. People in high-up places in the government were trying to send us to jail. My mother and I went out onto the street and prayed really loudly so everyone could hear. We prayed all night, and at about 4 o’clock in the morning they let my father out of jail. My soul started to take a turn for the better right then.

I saw something similar from my participation in an Evangelical Christian meeting here in Bishkek. The meeting was mostly singing with a few time-outs for prayer and testimonies (short talks on religious topics). One man got up and told a story about how prayer had helped him. He drives a large truck for a living, carrying different loads to different places, depending on who hires him. He was pulling out into the street one morning when a car appears on the cross street, coming right at him. Because of his heavy load, he know he would not be able to stop his truck in time. The words “Oh Lord” came out of his mouth, which he says was a kind of a prayer—he didn’t have time to pray for anything specific, so he just called to God. At that moment, a pigeon flew down from a tree and hit the oncoming car’s windshield, causing the car to swerve and miss him. Therefore, he said, he has proof that prayer works.

Now, the question of whether or not God actually got the first man’s father out of jail or whether or not God actually had that bird fly into that windshield is not a questions for science to try to answer. They aren’t empirical questions—I can’t test to see if the answers are right or wrong. Science is just the wrong tool for that sort of thing. The fact is, there are a whole lot of things that can happen in your life that you can attribute to the power of your beliefs if you want to. People who write horoscopes and fortune cookie messages stay in business because of this. People who are newer converts tend to explain why they believe in terms of those kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies. By newer convert, I don’t just mean someone who hasn’t been a member of the religion or political party or social network for very long. You can be a member your whole life but just not devote a whole lot of time and effort to explaining why you believe what you do. Those people would also qualify as new members. Maybe I could call them shallow members, but that seems a bit judgmental. Whatever the term, this pattern seems to hold true for all of the people of this type that I have interviewed.

In Their Own Words: What Makes a Person an Activist

This is from an interview from a former member of KelKel, a youth movement that was one of the players in the 2005 demonstrations that resulted in the ouster of Kyrgyzstan’s president, Askar Akayev. This woman is no longer a member of the movement, and has been off the social radar for about a year now. She’s now preparing to return to activism by starting her own NGO. I wanted to post the following portions of the interview because they prove a point that ought to be obvious but usually isn’t: we tend to look at people who demonstrate in protests, try to change their governments, or are just generally socially active and ask, “What makes them do that?” And then we want a single answer. There is no single answer, not even for a single person. A lot of things combine to make a person take action in their society. I think this interview shows that.

Before...I didn't really participate, but I always cared. Earlier, when I worked here in the university, I had academic responsibilities--just taught and taught. I learned a lot of theory, I went to summer school, that was all great. Then I started to rethink life. It became boring to me. I decided to...I worked on a lot of different projects in administrative positions. I would coordinate things, stuff like that. Then I understood the whole picture. The NGO sector, the international people doing things, the government doing something else, and then there are other people--unemployed people, the market. Later, I went back to teaching in 2005, and then I made friends with one NGO. They work with self-help groups. They help people in very real ways. They give them money, they teach them how to clean things up, save money, get out of poverty. I saw that and it seemed very applied to me. I liked it, because it connected me with regular Kyrgyz people, with rural people. I saw what kind of natural homes they live in. They live a very natural life, and they have a different understanding. I come here, and there's a totally different understanding. People here live like in America, and there it's a different world.

I paid attention to that, and then in 2005 there were the parliamentary elections, and that exacerbated the conflict. There were all kinds of injustices, they were repressing certain people--maybe you heard of Rosa Otumbaeva. We supported her. They refused to register her, but they let the president's daughter register. It was a reason to get involved. It pushed what was already ready. I met other people who were already involved--the NGO sector, businessmen, mostly young people who opened their own NGOs. It was interesting to me. It made me feel young again. Not like a professor, but like a young girl. It liked it. I was an actor. And I really liked that role.

Then as the first protests started, I saw how the political science I was teaching, how it all really happens. How we could be actors, feel what it was like to be persecuted, and things like that. It was interesting to me to see both theory and practice, and just be a participant. I came and taught students in the morning, and in the lecture I was talking about the political system of Kyrgyzstan, the constitution and all the branches of government, and I was always giving examples from Kyrgyzstani life: there are so many NGO's in Kyrgyzstan, some of them work, some of them don't, to what extent it is all artificial, to what extent it isn't and so on. It was really interesting to the students, and I invited them to the protests as well. A few of them, 2 or 3 of them, actually came to the protests.

Later, I gave my first speech. There was a really large meeting on February 5th 2005. Elections were in March, so it was one month before. Before that, there had been a lot of pressure from the government. They physically pushed us around. We were so angry that we gave some speeches. I was giving a speech, and I used this quote from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world." We said that, and then I started to feel some responsibility. I said that. People saw me. And one day they would say, "You just talk and talk and talk and you don't do anything." We decided, "Ok, we'll go all the way." There were about 15 people in KelKel, all of them very active. I saw that there were a lot of very different kinds of people. Not just academic smart, there was one person who joined because his father suffered because of the regime. Some people came because they were really authentically patriotic. Another person just wanted to get experience.

Later, I started to see...even after all of this, after the revolution, I started to see where we were. I started to get interested in agriculture, and I went as a researcher to all of the southern provinces--Batken, Osh, Jalalabad. Then to Chui province. It was for the Asian Development Project. I saw how people live in the rural areas. Five som [about 12.5 cents] are really important to them. They talk about how kerosene has become expensive—really vital kinds of needs. It was essential. Information itself—a computer was important for them. It brought me into real life. After that, I wrote all kinds of reports, that was all fine, but I received a lot for myself. I learned how the Kyrgyzstani people actually live. Not just in Bishkek--everything here is warm, hot water, that's wonderful, the Internet, the whole world, we have money here. Then I worked as a researcher on the issue of education. It was the Save the Children Project. I traveled around to learn how it worked in both the North and South.

After that...I have a lot of friends who are academics--they're westerners. Talking with them, it started to become really interesting to me. They study real life, living in Batken and things like that. I understood that they were raising serious questions about identity, some kinds of paradoxical questions in our society. And all of those issues are mixed up in one another. They changed my identity. I was taught in all the theories, so I asked myself: why not use that? I can't just be somehow...in some narrow area. I need to use it. So now I'm in the process of doing that.

I also noticed poverty, migration, a lot of people—even my own sister works in Alamaty [Kazakhstan]. She was a teacher but made a very poor living. 300 som a month [less than a dollar]. They had children. She and her husband moved to Almaty. And now when I go to visit them and then return to Kyrgyzstan, I go through the border and I'm so happy that I've come to Kyrgyzstan. It's not blind patriotism. It's because I see how [Kyrgyz] people are tormented in Almaty--they don't have rights. They have to speak Kazakh in order to sell something. Some people demand a lot but don't do a lot themselves. I see that a lot and when I come back here I feel that our people are somehow simpler—I start to love my country. I pay attention to a lot of things just generally. We had a big surge in this country after the Soviet Union--it happened in all of the republics--where it was popular to get married to a American or some other Western person. It was a way of saving yourself. it was popular for some people. When I came back here, everyone said, "Oh, you're so smart. You only have one thing left to do--get married to a foreigner!" I said, "Well the most important thing is that he's a good person, no matter where he's from." I not married, but I went through those feelings in our society. But now I've decided that it really is just important what kind of person he is. It's not important where he's from. I don't think that our people are bad, we're poor, I'm tired of them, that I need to look for a good life somewhere else. Sometimes you can make a good life here, if you believe. I believe.

There are people who want to change. But I also understood that there is corruption in the NGO sector as well. It's in the government too. I saw all of that, but I didn't know where to search for change. Even change in myself. I was an un-mobilized person. Now I've gone through some course on mobilization of personality, positive thinking, and things like that. It's really helped me. And I've found like-minded people among the human right activists. They are my close friends. There is a women's center...it doesn't matter who they are, but their personalities have changed me. Now we want to make a living and do some social projects at the same time. Everyone should do what he or she is capable of doing, what their soul asks for. I am a social person. I can't just sit at home without any kind of interaction. I had a crisis moment--I stayed at home for a long time. I worked as an interpreter, and I'm still doing that. But I've felt that without participation I don't feel actualized.

Translations--the Bane of My Existence

I’ve taken 66 interviews total. There might be a 67^th this next week, but I’m pretty much done with the interview phase of my work. Now I have to translate everything. The translation is really rough going. Every once in a while I run across one of my interviews that only ran about 20 or 30 minutes. Those are heaven. I usually translate all of my questions first (I don’t have to be very accurate—just convey the basic meaning so I can understand the context of the answer), and then I can usually quickly translate the answers. Then I hit one of my hour-and-a-half interviews. Those go forever. The real kicker is that the long interviews are almost always more useful. The short ones just kind of confirm what the longer ones say, so I can have an idea of how widely shared certain ideas are. Most of what ends up on the blog comes from the large interviews, and most of those quotes will end up in my dissertation.

The interviews also get harder to translate depending on who transcribes them. If Tynara transcribes, she’s careful to double check everything she writes to make sure she got it right, and she knows grammar and punctuation rules better, so the transcriptions are really easy to read. It gets tough when one of my research assistants does the transcription. They often are actually better at writing in English than in Russian (thank you, internet), and I often have to read their transcriptions twice before I know what to write in English, just because each paragraph is in fact one long sentence. It’s not entirely their fault—people usually don’t speak in complete, grammatically correct sentences—but the purpose of punctuation is to approximate the effect of pauses and intonations and the students just don’t know how to do that.

Oh well. The fact that I don’t have to do the transcriptions myself makes my research infinitely easier than it would have been otherwise, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. I expect to have everything translated by the end of the month.

Happy New Year!

Ok, so I know I’m not posting this on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. I haven’t had the chance to write anything since I got home.

New Year’s here is basically equivalent to American Christmas. People put of trees, give presents, have a Santa Claus-like figure :Grandfather Frost, accompanied by Snegurochka (that’s basically a play on the word ‘sneg’, meaning snow. It usually translates as Snow Maiden.) Actually, the Kyrgyztani government has gone a little Santa Clause-crazy this year, ever since some Scandinavian scientists used data on population distribution, air currents, and time zone differences to determine that if Kyrgyzstan would be the most efficient starting point for Santa’s Christmas-eve flight around the world. There were all kinds of people dressed up as Santa and they government even named a mountain after him.

I spent a fairly quiet Christmas Eve. Tynara’s sister, Chynara, is an administrator at AUCA, and they invited me over to her house. We at a whole lot (Olivie salad—kind of like American potato salad but with carrots and peas and no bacon—and manti—meat dumplings that are featured at almost any Kyrgyz meal) and watched a whole lot of New Year’s specials, most of them transmitted from Moscow.

The only not quiet part was the fireworks. Kyrgyzstan is on the border with China, and fireworks are pretty cheap here. The whole city lit up at 12:00, and the fireworks didn’t start to die down until about two hours after that.

We actually watched those Russian specials until almost 4:00 in the morning. They were still going when I went to sleep (at Chynara’s house—it was too late and too cold to try to find a taxi).

It’s very cold right now. Historically, from about the 26^th of December to about the 5^th of February everything is brutally cold. Besides one exceptionally warm day a couple days ago (I could just barely see my breath), the weather has been following the pattern. Most roads don’t get plowed and the sidewalks are never shoveled, so walking around the city is always an adventure. Most of the shoes men wear are similar in style to American dress shoes—they don’t have much traction on the bottom. In the winter, people skate around as much as they walk.

Back from the South

I flew from Bishkek (in the North—look at the map on this site) to Osh (in the South) on December 24^th. I went down there with Tynara, my colleague from AUCA, and Mirlan, one of my research assistants. The plan was to stay in Osh for three or four days to collect about 6 interviews, then down to Isfana, if the very southernmost corner of Batken province in between Uzbekistan and Tajikstan for another 7-8 interviews, and then north to Jalalabad, the third southern province, for another 7-8 interviews.

It didn’t really work out that way. Osh was great. I had a wonderful contact down there who helped me find people to interview. I took about 9 interviews. I interviewed more people than I originally planned because we got a huge snowstorm the day after Christmas (western Christmas, that is, the Russian Orthodox church celebrates Christmas on January 7^th). There are two roads into Batken province. The better of the two roads goes through Uzbekistan, and I don’t have an Uzbek visa, so that wasn’t an option. The other road is basically a dirt road, and the prospect of driving that in the snow was unappealing. Not to mention dangerous. It’s not that it would be incredibly slippery—that’s the road through Uzbekistan. It would just be very likely that we would get bogged down in rocks and mud.

I decided it wasn’t worth the risk. My contact in Osh was kind enough to inform me about a couple people from Batken province who had come up for a meeting, and I was able to interview two of them. That means I only have three interviews from Batken. That’s unfortunate. But not the end of the world. In the end, it’s my surveys that really absolutely need to be distributed in certain geographic areas, although I really would have like to have seen Batken province. Maybe I’ll go down again once the weather clears, just to see it. It would be too late in my research schedule to do more interviews.

So we stayed to extra days in osh to allow the roads to clear up and to regroup. I actually go a few really good interviews during that time, so I’m glad I stayed. We then went up to Jalalabad and got another 9 interviews. That was to make up for the lost interviews in Batken—I’m already going to have more interviews from the north than from the south, and I didn’t want the difference to be too drastic.

We flew home on New Year’s eve. It’s very cold.

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.