Mosques and more

Since Ramadan has begun, and we’re all thinking a bit more about Islam, I thought it would be a good time to give you some pictures of mosques in Dushanbe. This one is the Haji Yakub mosque, near our apartment.

  This photo was taken on a Saturday in April. On a Friday, especially this month, there would be much bigger crowds of men.

Women attending the nearby Islamic school wear the more conservative head scarf, that covers their all their hair and their necks, instead of the usual Tajik back-tied kerchief.

   
There’s a giant new mosque under construction in the northern end of the city.

For those of you who might be curious as to why the president is building (with the help of Qatar) a mosque which will be Central Asia's largest, big enough to seat 115,000, and costing $100 million, see this article. National pride? An attempt to control messages coming from mosques?

Most of the people I spend the most time with here in Dushanbe are not traditional,  conservative, or religious. For example, out of the six teachers I interact most with, only two are fasting this month. So I haven’t had much opportunity to learn at a personal level about the tension Tajikistan faces— a clear movement of people toward more devout Islam (after years of imposed atheism during the Soviet period) on the one hand, and a fear of terrorism and doing whatever it takes (including governmental monitoring of messages appearance, and dress) not to turn into its neighbor Afghanistan on the other hand.

The photo above gives a picture of this tension. The two young moms on the left are wearing their head scarves in the traditional Tajik way, while the one on the right is wearing a scarf in a more conservatively Muslim style. Note that in many contexts (schools, other government jobs) wearing a scarf in this hijab-style is not allowed.

But just to show that a single picture isn't enough to explain a complex situation, when I asked about the growing numbers of hijab wearers I've seen in Dushanbe in spite of regulations, I’ve been told that some women started wearing their scarves like this because they were following a fashion trend sparked by a popular Turkish (?) soap opera--in addition to those who do so because they’re more devout (or their husbands or mother-in-laws are).

The above is a mosque in another area of Dushanbe, a bit of east of where we live. A friend who lives here says that all the women in this neighborhood dress conservatively. 

 

Dushanbe is a city where the call to prayer is not broadcast. But it's also a city where the fast food kiosks and ice cream and drinks vendors are closed during the day for Ramadan:

 

This is a place with an emphasis on what can be seen or heard--whether it's the government trying to regulate religious expression or a religion trying to influence people's behavior. It's much harder to attend to what is inside our hearts (Luke 6:43, Luke 11:39-41, Micah 6:8).