Uzbek Schools Renew Campaign Against Hejab

The authorities in Uzbekistan are mounting a new drive to prevent women wearing Islamic dress in educational institutions is likely to discourage many from attending.

As the academic year got under way in September, reports started coming in of an unwritten ban on women wearing hejab in schools and universities. In a new development, local government officials are visiting the homes of women who wear hejab to discourage them from sending their daughters to school or college dressed the same way, to avoid them being expelled.

Uzbekistan’s education ministry has not commented on the reports, although one official said anonymously that it was “simply a question of normal rules”, which students were breaking if they wore hejab.

The official Muslim clerical body said it was unaware of the issue as no one had complained to it.

Most of Uzbekistan’s population is Muslim, and the constitution guarantees freedom of confession. However, a 1998 law explicitly bans “religious costume” except for clerics. It is unclear how such clothing is defined, so to the ban is subject to arbitrary interpretation, especially in the context of the government’s longstanding hostility to anything that looks like Islamic extremism.

In its global human rights report for 2009, the US State Department says some women in Uzbek educational institutions were ridiculed for wearing hejab and forced to remove it.

This year, the campaign appears to be more widespread.

A teacher at a school in the capital Tashkent said security staff were coming into classrooms and ejecting girls wearing hejab.

"We were told that girls should remove hejab 20 metres from the school building," the teacher said.

A mother whose daughter goes to another Tashkent school said senior staff their had posted a police officer at the entrance to turn away girls wearing Islamic forms of dress.

"My daughter came home in tears every day," she said.

The same rules are being applied in higher education as well.

Aziza, a second-year student of the Uzbek National University said that she and other women were allowed to attend classes if they put on smaller headscarves.

"We remove the hejab," Aziza said. "We can understand our teachers banning us from wearing it; they are just carrying out orders."

Gulbahor, a lecturer at the State University of World Languages, said she understood people’s religious sensitivities but was forced to enforce the ban.

Local observers say the unwritten rules may deter female students from going to school or university.

"I have many talented girls in my class, but many of them have now stopped coming to lessons and stay at home," a secondary school teacher said.

The campaign could have an adverse effect on school attendance rates, experts warn.

"The attendance rate is as low as things stand," a commentator in the Navoi region said. "Only six out of 35 school-age children are going to our village school."

Tashpulat Yoldashev, an Uzbek political analyst based in the United States, says, "No more than 20 per cent of children and young people are attending educational institutions in Uzbekistan. A prohibition on hejab in schools will have a further deleterious effect – girls will drop out of school and devote themselves to religion."

A human rights activist in Fergana, a town in eastern Uzbekistan, said that since the government supported some aspects of Muslim life like the main religious festivals, it could be more flexible on the question of how people chose to dress.

This article was produced as part of IWPR’s News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.