Two Days in Bukhara (Islam in Uzbekistan)

Bukhara looks like what you probably imagine Uzbekistan looks like. The sun beats down on turquoise domes and tan buildings with pointed archways. Overripe mulberries are ground into the pavement. Public squares are lined with white-shirted men and hijabi women trying to sell you miniature paintings, embroidered scarves, Russian fur caps, and knives so sharp that they can split paper. Dusty white Chevys park along the streets at odd angles.

It’s also a good place to start explaining Uzbek history to you. Bukhara, perched on the edge of the Kyzylkum Desert, sits in the middle of the Silk Road, and for that reason it has been touched by every major Eastern civilization under the sun—the Russians, the Turks, the Persians, the Arabs. Buddhism and Zoroastrianism were dominant religions in the region before the arrival of Islam, and many of the oldest buildings, including a thousand-year-old minaret, still have a bit of a Zoroastrian flavor. Zoroastrianism is considered to be the first monotheistic religion, but it’s a little more complicated than that, because what we consider to be monotheism now is certainly not what they considered to be monotheism then. The Zoroastrian god was associated with the sun.

the aforementioned super old minaret, the Kalyan Minaret

But Islam arrived with the Abbasid caliphate not too long after the angel Gabriel appeared to the Prophet. And when the Persianate Samanid empire took Bukhara and its surroundings in the ninth and tenth centuries, Uzbekistan stayed Muslim and remains so to this day. Over ninety-five percent of the population is Muslim, and despite all the Persian influence, the vast majority are Sunni, not Shia (Iran didn’t become Shia until several hundred years after the Samanids).

Bukhara has a holy tinge, not only to Uzbeks but to many Muslims, because it was a major center of learning. Beautiful stone madrasas with blue tiling crowd the center of the city, and they all start to blend together. Bukhara was the birthplace of Imam Bukhari, a highly revered ninth century scholar who spent his whole life compiling and teaching hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. The Naqshbandi Sufi order also began in Bukhara.

monument to Imam Al-Bukhari

I’m not an expert on Sufism by any means, so I’ll just say that Sufism is essentially Islamic mysticism. The name “Sufi” comes from the Arabic suf meaning wool, because Sufi followers were ascetics who wore wool clothes, rejected material wealth, and used everything from coffee to spinning around to meditation to attain higher states of consciousness, where they’d personally be closer to God Himself. There are lots of Sufi orders, I don’t know most of them, but I had heard of the Naqshbandi in college. Their claim to fame, so to speak, is that they practiced a trade to pay for food instead of begging on the street.

Today, on the outskirts of Bukhara, you wouldn’t know any of this. Bukhara is home to just over 200,000 people who speak Uzbek, Tajik, and Russian, but salaam alaikum is a greeting that works for everyone (or, more simply, salaam). The landscape is like New Mexico, with dust, desert shrubs, and buildings that look like they’d be good sets for dystopian films. There are strip malls with slightly gaudy storefronts sporting knockoff Disney characters and curlicue fonts. Then you pass a few refurbished buildings with a little Soviet flavor before finally reaching the city center, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Put on sunscreen and pants (or shorts that at least go past the knees) and grab a stack of som and a scarf and you’re ready to go out and explore.

It will be hot, hence the sunscreen, so I’d try to do most of your sightseeing in the morning. And if you want to go into the Kalyan Mosque, the Iranian-style Friday mosque that holds twelve thousand people, you’ll need to be appropriately dressed. Stewart, a good-natured English fellow in our group, had to wrap a scarf around his legs like a skirt because his shorts didn’t quite cover his kneecaps. Don’t be like Stewart! Unless you don’t mind wearing a scarf that a bunch of other tourists probably also wore and sweated on.

A single mulberry tree grows in the courtyard. The tilework and the domes are all shades of blue, from bright turquoise to deep royal. I had to adjust the saturation on all my pictures so you can understand just how vibrant the blues are in real life.

courtyard of the Kalyan Mosque

In Turkey, you hear the call to prayer five times a day. A fellow group member who flew through Dubai on her way here said that there they broadcast the call over the loudspeaker in the airport. But here in Uzbekistan, even in Bukhara, the call to prayer only sounds once or so on Fridays, and maybe not even then. Officially, Uzbekistan is a secular country. “Religious groups don’t interfere with the government,” our guide told us. “The government interferes with religious groups.”

Women are in hijab, but many aren’t. Most of the women we saw outside the cities wore kerchiefs. I didn’t see many shorts on men or women, but plenty of t-shirts. There’s hardly any pork, but there is alcohol: wine, beer, and vodka, all made in Uzbekistan.  Our bus driver has a little book ornament with Arabic script hanging from his rearview mirror. Schools are coed.

the crumbling madrasa

Islam in Uzbekistan also has its quirks, additions that Saudi clerics would certainly not be fans of. If you make three separate pilgrimages to Shah-i-Zinda necropolis in Samarkand and climb the steps to the top, many Uzbek Muslims think it's as good as making hajj to Mecca and Medina. But more conveient, obviously. The pre-Islamic Persian holiday nowruz, the celebration of the new year in spring, is also a big holiday in Uzbekistan. Nowruz has nothing to do with Islam.

I read a book before coming here about the five Central Asian republics. The book was written right after the fall of the USSR and the republics’ declaring independence, and the author, Ahmed Rashid, tries to predict how things will go for each state. The way he sees it, the states have two choices, outlined in the book’s title: Nationalism or Islamic Fundamentalism? Uzbekistan certainly hasn’t gone the way of Islamic fundamentalism, not even a little bit.

And while Uzbekistan certainly isn’t the freest society out there, it’s no nationalist authoritarian hellscape like Turkmenistan. Uzbek news channels are all censored sunshine and rainbows, so most Uzbeks get international news from Russian programs. The museums are propaganda light, talking about the Proud History of the Uzbek People.  Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan’s first president who died in office in 2016, is the Beloved Leader who suppressed both opposition and religion during his time in office. The airport in Tashkent, a main boulevard in Tashkent, etc. are named after him. The pale blue and green Uzbek flag is everywhere.

But even Uncle Karimov couldn’t go too crazy, because Uzbekistan needs to be friends with all of its neighbors. If you haven’t noticed, Uzbekistan lives in a little bit of an unfriendly neighborhood, with Afghanistan and Tajikistan as roommates and China, Russia, and Iran right down the hall. Uzbekistan relies on these countries for trade and access to resources. Not to mention, if Uzbekistan wants to reach the ocean, it needs to cross at least two other states to do so. So, the Uzbek government keeps calm. Chill. Cool. Because it has to.

Ahmed Rashid wasn’t quite right about Uzbekistan. Things have gone okay for this thirty-five-million-person republic, at least so far. But Islam is most definitely here; it was in the past and it’s here in the present and I think it will only become a bigger presence in the future now that the atheist agendas of the Soviets and Uncle Karimov are gone.