women. In the most conservative areas, such
as Khatlon province in Tajikistan, rural Gharmi
women continued to be secluded and cover their
faces with a white headscarf in the presence of
strangers, right up to the outbreak of the civil war.
Today the economic situation has forced them to
abandon this. Many now shop in the market and
some have even become the family breadwinners.
The struggle by Muslim peoples to retain their
cultural identities within the Soviet Union was
closely bound up with the construction of differ-
ence through gender identities, where female mod-
esty played a major role. Today’s endeavors by the
newly independent states to devise legitimate
national identities are similarly bound up in con-
structing ideals of national womanhood. Islamic
modesty discourses play a significant role here,
although the extent to which attempts are made to
enforce them varies significantly, depending on
social status, class, educational and income levels,
and urban or rural residence. For instance, in Kyr-
gyzstan some young women have adapted their
behavior as a response to such influences as soap
operas, like Santa Barbarafrom the United States,
and make great efforts to procure stylish Western
garments. Although many young urban women in
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have begun doing the
same, one can also see women there wearing ™ijàb.
In fact, Islam enjoins both men and women to
observe modesty practices, by keeping their bodies
discreetly covered and especially by behaving in
such a way as to limit attraction between the sexes.
Tajik males, however, rarely regulate their behavior
according to such rules. On the contrary, in both
urban and rural areas they frequently harass
women in the street, often making it difficult for
them to face leaving their homes without a male
escort. They make particularly free with those
wearing modern dress, thus pressuring women into
assuming traditional garb. Both during the riots of
1990 and during the power struggles of 1992,
young women wearing modern dress were as-
saulted and raped, supposedly as a way of enforc-
ing Islamic practices. In Kyrgyzstan in the late
1990s, women whose behavior was judged incom-
patible with such practices were beaten (Handra-
han 2001, 477). Since the end of the Soviet Union,
similar incidents have occurred in other parts of
this region.
Thus, contemporary Islamic discourses, in Cen-
tral Asia and the Caucasus alike, support the female
adoption of explicit practices of modesty expressed
both in dress and demeanor. In the most conserva-
tive circles, the latter goes beyond promoting the
roles of wife and mother to include encouraging
iran and afghanistan 499women to retire from wage labor, thus allowing
men greater access to economic resources in this
difficult period. In general, modesty discourses
contradict the legal equality expressed in national
constitutions, appearing to aim at restoring tradi-
tional pre-revolutionary gender identities privileg-
ing male domination.Bibliography
F. Acar and A. Ayata (eds.), Gender and identity con-
struction. Women of Central Asia, the Caucasus and
Turkey, Leiden 2000.
L. Handrahan, Gender and ethnicity in the transitional
democracy of Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asian Survey20:4
(2001), 467–96.
C. Harris, Women of the sedentary population of Russian
Turkestan through the eyes of Western travellers, in
Central Asian Survey15:1 (1996), 75–95.
——, Coping with daily life in post-Soviet Tajikistan.
The Gharmi villages of Khatlon Province, in Central
Asian Survey 17:4 (1998), 655–71.
——,Control and subversion. Gender relations in Taji-
kistan, London 2004.
M. Kamp, Unveiling Uzbek women. Liberation, represen-
tation, and discourse, 1906–1929, Ph.D. diss., Univer-
sity of Chicago 1998.
G. Massell, The surrogate proletariat. Muslim women
and revolutionary strategies in Soviet Central Asia
1919–1929, Princeton, N.J. 1974.
N. Tohidi, The intersection of gender, ethnicity and Islam
in Soviet and Post-Soviet Azerbaijan, in Nationalities
Papers25:1 (1997), 147–67.
M. Tokhtakhodjaeva and E. Turgumbekova, The daugh-
ters of Amazons. Voices from Central Asia, Lahore
1996.Colette HarrisIran and AfghanistanIn Afghanistan and Iran contemporary Muslim
women live under restrictive civil/secular and
Islamic Sharì≠a law that regulates their appearance.
They struggle to define themselves, their social
hierarchy, status, and modesty in economic, politi-
cal, and religious spheres of influence when and
where their appearance is regulated. The two coun-
tries share a geographic border and links to a
Persian historical and linguistic past. There are
seemingly many shared similarities as well as dif-
ferences that circumscribe Muslim women’s daily
lives. Consequently, to be female, Muslim, and
either Afghan or Iranian is an identity frequently
visually essentialized by wearing head coverings
(™ijàb) and observing modesty (™ayà±).
According to Muslim and non-Muslim scholars,
the concept of ™ijàbgenerally in popular Islamic
culture is understood in two specific forms. Often,
™ijàbis considered as an item of clothing worn as
concealment by women as a religious obligation