o - Aceh Books website

UZBEK 835
a modernization program was pursued, consisting of secularization, collectivization,
industrialization and education.
Contemporary Uzbekistan contains 16.5 million people. The 11.4 million
Uzbek constitute 69 percent of the population. Russians number 1.8 million and
are 10.8 percent of the population. Other peoples of Muslim heritage number
15.7 percent, and various other nationalities make up 4.8 percent. Uzbek occupy
most of the prominent public administrative positions.
The Uzbek are Hanafi Sunni Muslims, with some pre-Islamic shamanist and
Zoroastrian influences remaining in folkways. Islam was brought forcibly to
Transoxiana by the Arab conquerors during the eighth century. Conversion to
Islam did not become extensive in the steppes until the fourteenth century. At
the end of the fifteenth century, when the early Uzbek began their move into
Transoxiana, they were already Muslim. The Uzbek khanates supported Islamic
cultural institutions. With the establishment of Soviet power the religious life
of the Uzbek changed; they became subject to officially sponsored secularization,
which included invalidating Muslim law, abolishing adat and Shariah courts,
confiscating waqfs and closing maktab and madrasa schools. Many mosques
were closed, and the Islamic clergy persecuted. The overt practice of Islam was
discouraged.
In recent decades there has been an official relaxation of limitations on the
practice of Islam for several reasons. A reliable secularized Soviet Uzbek leadership
has emerged; the supremacy of the state over religion has been established,
and Uzbekistan has become a Soviet developmental "showcase" for visitors
and students from Muslim states. Since 1956 schools for training a small number
of Islamic clergy have operated in Bukhara (the Barak Khan madrasa, for one)
and in Tashkent (the Mir-i Arab madrasa). The clergy graduated are too few to
meet the needs of the functioning congregations. A limited amount of religious
publication is allowed, mainly calendars and prayer books in the Arabic script.
Recently in Uzbekistan a few old mosques have been restored and reopened,
and a few new mosques have been built (for example, the new cathedral mosque
in Jizzak built in 1981).
Islam has its strongest overt manifestation in rural areas, mainly in the persistence
of social customs long associated with religion. Almost all Uzbek male
infants are circumcised, and the event is usually an occasion for family ritual
and feasting. Traditional Islamic feast days are observed in gatherings of family
and friends, although the religious significance is often minimized or ignored.
It is common for Uzbek to observe the Ramadan feast. Most Uzbek do not eat
pork, but drinking alcohol is widespread. Children are given names from the
Turkic or Islamic tradition; an Uzbek with a Russian name is rare.
Among adults, especially among the laboring classes, informal occupational
fraternities with a religious-type ritual and patron Islamic saint persist from the
pre-Soviet period. Many Uzbek still venerate Islamic shrines, and among some,
belief in supernatural beings continues. In some rural areas there are pilgrimages
to nominally Islamic holy sites which have been venerated since before Islam.