Despite her radical views, Manji refuses to give
up her Muslim identity, and instead levels her cri-
tique of dominant Islam from the vantage point of
an insider. As a lesbian and a feminist, she diverges
a long way from the usual standards of those who
speak for Islam.
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Position%20Papers/Position_Sharia_Law.htm.
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Alisa PerkinsCentral Asia“We Central Asians are Muslims, so we must
all marry and have children. Our parents are sup-
posed to choose our husbands, unlike Russian girls.
They have to manage by themselves and they can-
not always find one,” explained a Tajik girl from
Dushanbe.
The family is at the center of Muslim society,
and the relationship between spouses is prescribed
in the Islamic family code, which is generally sup-
posed to give men domination over their wives. In
pre-revolutionary sedentary Central Asian fami-
lies, each sex had distinct duties, women’s centering
round childbearing and housework, while men’s
were to protect and regulate the family, and provide
material resources. The Sharì≠a allowed girls to be
married as young as 9 and boys from 15 years of
age, but parents might betroth their children at
birth. Women were generally secluded. In theory,
men might have up to four wives, whom they could
easily divorce, but in practice most had difficulty in
saving bride price and wedding costs for even one,
and could ill afford to divorce her. On sufficient
grounds women could petition the qà∂ìcourts for
divorce, but this was rare, especially as it could be
hard to support themselves afterwards. Even
secluded women could earn money, which they
were not obliged to contribute toward family
finances, except in the poorest households.
In the nomadic societies, women were not se-
cluded and could mix with men. Their responsibil-
central asia 163ities included putting up the yurtthat was their
portable dwelling place, and taking charge of the
household for long periods, while the men took
their livestock to pasture. Nevertheless, in these
families men also dominated and women were little
freer than their secluded sisters.
After the revolution, the Soviet government tried
to transform the Central Asian family. Attention
was particularly focused on a small set of traditional
practices considered to result from the pernicious
effects of religion. Starting in the 1920s polygyny,
child marriage, forced marriage, and bride price
(kalym) were all banned. The state tried to substi-
tute civil marriage and divorce ceremonies for reli-
gious ones, and discouraged religious funerals and
circumcision. Women were encouraged to abandon
seclusion, educated, and taken into the workforce,
thus upsetting the customary division of labor
within the family, although men rarely took on
domestic tasks in compensation.
Central Asians resisted these strategies by at-
tempting to preserve traditional family values,
legitimizing this by appeals more to religious norms
than to the defense of their cultural heritage. Even
those Central Asians who modernized their atti-
tudes toward education and the workforce tended
to retain traditional attitudes toward family rela-
tionships. Weddings of underage girls and polygy-
nous unions were celebrated by nikà™without civil
registration. Most marriages were still arranged,
especially in rural Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Brides had to submit to their husbands and obey
their mothers-in-law, who often treated them as
servants. Even women with high public status were
expected to subordinate themselves at home. Fre-
quently, all monies were placed in a common pot,
so that women’s earnings did not serve to gain them
increased decision-making powers. Such changes
as did occur were more often due to official pres-
sures rather than individual commitment to moder-
nity. For instance, parents who married underage
daughters were liable to imprisonment, as were
mullahs who officiated at marriage ceremonies.
Since independence, the governments of Central
Asia have derived the construction of new national
identities from religiously based traditional values
that identify women with domesticity. This has
been accompanied by Islamist discourses that
strongly suggest that women’s roles should be lim-
ited to those of housewife and mother, and also by
a popular resurgence in customs formerly pro-
scribed by the Soviet government but never com-
pletely abandoned, including polygyny. Proposals
to legalize this last were unsuccessfully debated
in the parliaments of several countries, including