Everyday Islam

Most of the statistics concerning Kyrgyzstan estimate that about 75% of the population is Muslim.

That doesn’t mean a whole lot.

It’s not that I think the figures are wrong. I’m sure if you asked everyone in Kyrgyzstan what religion he or she was, about 3 out of 4 people would say they are Muslims. It’s just that the term itself can me so many different things. Saying that a person is a Muslim (or a Christian, or a Buddhist, or any other ideology) is like saying he likes to read books. Technically, that tells you something about the person that you didn’t know before. But what kind of books does he like to read? How often does he read them? Does he really pay attention when he reads them? You don’t know. Same with religion. The fact that someone claims a specific religious affiliation doesn’t mean much at all.

Take the family in Chong Jer, for example. The father in the family is probably in his sixties. Why whole time there, he tried to convince me of a few things. One of the things he tried to convince me of was that I ought to become a Muslim so I could have seven wives. (I told him Islam only allows four wives, but he said I could have seven because the Prophet has seven). Another thing he tried to convince me of was that I should learn to drink alcohol, especially vodka. Now, many Muslims, including the devout householder and the mosque student in Talas, would say that that was a rather un-Muslim thing to do. The stricter versions of Islam forbid alcohol. Nevertheless, many Muslims in Kyrgyzstan (and throughout the world) drink alcohol. They don’t see that as an important part of their religion. Other Muslims see it as very much a part of their religion.

The thing about Islam is that it has no centralization or standardization. The center of authority is the local mosque. Each mosque, is run by a mullah (in Kyrgyz, the title is “moldo”) who teaches his congregation what it is to be a Muslim. He doesn’t answer to anyone for his teachings, and there is generally no oversight from any kind of organization. In fact, many of the people I have talked to so far did not even learn how to be Muslims from a moldo. They bought a few books (there are tons and tons of books on Islam here) and learned from them. Islam, organizationally, is a lot like American congregationalism. The local congregations makes the decisions. There is no pope or archbishop of anyone else who has the authority to standardize teachings.

I can see that lack of centralizations all around here. While people talk about their religion in global terms (“it’s the one true religion,” “all Muslims are brothers and sisters, no matter what their nationality”), they live it locally. Being a Muslim means doing the things that Muslims do on an everyday basis: reading the Q’uran, praying five times a day (preferably in the mosque if you are male), abstaining from certain foods. If they ever act based on an ideology, it is on an ideology that they assume other Muslims share, not an ideology that is actually uniformly taught.