Uzbekistan: Shia Muslims face legal troubles in Bukhara

As per the coming news, Shia Muslims are facing legal troubles in Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan, which with the migration of Turkic tribes to Central Asia, gradually took shape in the 16^th century in parts of the ancient Iranian land of Khwarezm in Transoxiana, around the once flourishing centres of Islamic civilization, the Persian-speaking cities of Samarqand and Buhkara, is today home to a deliberately dwindling population of a few thousand persecuted Shi’a Muslims that over twenty-five years earlier numbered over two million. Many have concealed their beliefs to which they openly held during seventy years of Soviet communist rule, and many have been forcibly classified as Uzbek, although the vast majority of them are ethnic Persian-speaking Iranian Muslims. Here's an interesting news report, recently published by Euasianet.org on the ongoing repression of Shi’a Muslims in the Central Asian country.

Back in early February this year, police in Bukhara, the ancient Iranian city which is now in the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, detained 20 men in their early thirties on charges of disorderly conduct. Fifteen were released immediately, but the remaining five were slapped with 15-day jail terms for allegedly harassing a woman and refusing to obey police orders.

Although the episode did not seem especially noteworthy on the surface, the National Security Service – or SNB in its Russian initials – quickly got involved. What drew the interest of security agents was that all the detainees were members of Uzbekistan’s tiny community of ethnic Iranian Shi’a Muslims. The homes of the men were searched, seemingly in a hunt for religious literature. Attention focused on two of the five detainees – Jahangir Qoli-Khanov and Shaukat Azimov.

When the pair served out the petty hooliganism rap that had been unjustly imposed upon them, they were charged with another, more serious, crime – establishing a public association, or religious organization, which the authorities said was illegal, without giving any reasonable justification. The suggestion was that they were secretly propagating what the Uzbek authorities vaguely said: radical Shi’a views among members of their community.

They were both released from detention pending trial, but on May 30, Qoli-Khanov was again summoned to the local office of the SNB and charged with yet another offense – production and dissemination of materials alleged to be a threat to public order. Qoli-Khanov was again taken into custody and remains in detention to this day.

On August 22, a Bukhara District Court judge ordered Azimov and Qoli-Khanov to pay a $1,000 fine on what he alleged was setting up an illegal religious association. The trial for Qoli-Khanov’s other charge, which is punishable by up to eight years in prison, is still to come.

Prosecutions against Muslims are nothing unusual for Uzbekistan. But Azimov’s lawyer, Munajaat Parpiyeva, told EurasiaNet.org that she believes these are the first criminal trials in Uzbekistan’s history that are specifically singling out Shi’a Muslims on religious grounds.

The accused and their family members believe their minority status leaves them vulnerable to abuse. When the group of 20 – all of them ethnic Iranians and Shi’a Muslims – was detained, police searched their homes without a warrant. They had their phones confiscated and were unable to contact a lawyer of their choice.

Officials have issued no public comments on the reports and statements of Nadira Samadova and rights activists working on behalf of the accused.

Among those held for 15 days was Alibeg Hussainov. His mother, Nadira Samadova, described the two-week stay in jail as a cavalcade of abuse.  Samadova said: “For the entire time, all five were kept in solitary confinement. They were roughly treated and subjected to mental and physical mistreatment. Their right to make a phone call, and have access to a defense [lawyer] were crudely violated.”

Bukhara-based rights activist Shohrat Ghaniyev, who has been trying to draw attention to the case, said the detainees came under pressure to confess that they had been in contact with an Iraqi businessman living in Bukhara who investigators claim was trying to recruit local Shi’a Muslims to fight Daesh militants in West Asia.

The men at the heart of this case believe they are being discriminated against on two fronts – for being ethnic Persians and the other Shi’a Muslims.

If official figures are to be believed, around 98 percent of Uzbekistan’s Muslims are Sunni. There are by some estimates several thousand Shi’a Muslims, who besides some Azeris from the Caucasus, are predominantly ethnic Iranians the offspring of ancient families who have continued to remain in Samarqand and Bukhara since medieval times when the region was still Persian-speaking and part of the Iranian world, while the Uzbeks had not yet entered the region.  

But nobody knows quite how many ethnic Iranians live in Uzbekistan. In the 1989 census, some 25,000 people were listed as Iranian. But the community is not named at all in the censuses of 2000 and 2013.

Samadova explained that ethnic Iranians have in more recent surveys simply been designated as Uzbeks, and many conceal their beliefs and roots because of state suppression.

She said: “When I received my biometric passport, in the field reserved for ethnicity, it just said Uzbek. But in my old passport I was described as Persian. In the passport office they alleged that my parent’s ethnicity was Uzbek and so, accordingly, I could no longer be Persian.”

The religious issue is even more tangled.

Bakhtiyar Babajanov, an expert on Islamic culture and history, said that Shi’a Muslims operate legally and are represented in the state-approved Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of Uzbekistan.

Yet Ghaniyev, the rights activist, said the investigations and trial showed how poorly the authorities understand the specifics of Shi’a Muslims, who are followers of the School of the Ahl al-Bayt or Blessed Household of Prophet Mohammad (blessings of God upon him and his progeny).  

Ghaniyev told EurasiaNet.org: “The prosecution provided what they said was evidence of alleged appeals to religious discord, but similar passages are contained in officially authorized literature used in mosques. The lack of a competent expert on Shi’a Muslims in Uzbekistan has led to a ridiculous interpretation,”

Indeed, among the suspect materials found in Qoli-Khanov’s possession were recordings made by a Russian Shi’a Muslim preacher going under the name of Amin Ramin. The preacher in question, who was originally called Dmitry and converted to Shi’a Islam in the late 2000s, created a lecture-cum-sermon series in Russian, covering the history of Shi’a Muslims and the faith’s basic tenets.

If Shi’a Muslims in Uzbekistan turn to Amin Ramin, it is not for any especially sensational message, but because he is easy to understand.

The Imam at Bukhara’s only Shi’a Muslim mosque, I. Habibov, said in a letter that their collection holds only 114 authorized religious works, and all of them are in either Arabic or Persian.

So Hussaonov, one of the five detainees, told EurasiaNet.org that he and his friends listen to Amin Ramin’s sermons in Russian on the internet instead. “Shi’a Muslims religious literature hasn’t been translated into Uzbek. It is written either in Arabic or Persian. But I don’t speak Arabic, and I don’t understand the religious texts in Persian that well. So I read and listen to sermons by the preacher Amin Ramin on various themes of the School of the Prophet’s Ahl al-Bayt,” he said.

The specific recording that landed Qoli-Khanov in trouble was titled “The Movement of Imam Husain (AS)” – an account of the life and teachings of the Prophet’s younger grandson and his Third Infallible Heir.

There is no specific official document designating Amin Ramin’s works as forbidden religious material. And yet the very fact of it propagating Shi’a beliefs appears to have been enough to earn the attention of the authorities.

Robert Almeyev, a historian of Bukhara, said Shi’a Muslims in the city, particularly the ethnic Iranians, often disguise their religious affiliation for fear of repression. “Bukhara’s Iranian community is assimilating. Among them you find Shi’as and Sunnis. We have no official figures about Iranians. All the Iranians live in one densely populated neighborhood called Zhuibar,” Almeyev told EurasiaNet.org.

Qoli-Khanov, who is still in jail, is the only one left with a serious legal battle to fight. But others worry that their legal troubles may not be over.

Azimov said: “There is a fear that they could eventually charge me too [for the production and dissemination of materials containing a threat to public order].”

SS/EA