A sound family for a healthy nation: motherhood in Tajik national politics and society

Abstract

Since independence in 1991, Central Asian countries have put great effort into creating their respective national narratives, which are often based on an ethnic imagination. In Tajikistan this included the idea of shaping society via the family unit. Increasingly, motherhood became the focus of attention, which was made possible by merging two concepts. On the one hand, women are considered as “cultured” and educated people who the Soviet Union freed from “backward” traditions. On the other hand, traditions were reinvented such that the woman is considered the ultimate mother of the nation and the backbone of tradition. This article examines the changing status of motherhood in society and politics through efforts to create a sound family and a healthy nation.

Keywords:

• Tajikistan
• family
• motherhood
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (2005–2008), Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin funded by the DFG (2010–2013), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris, in 2014, and Cluster of Excellence Asia and Europe in a Global Context in Heidelberg.

Notes

1. A woman who has never married continues to be called dukhtar (miss), referring to her biological condition of virginity and the absence of social rights that are granted to a married woman.

2. The SADUM was the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, under which the Muslim clergy of the Soviet Union was officially organized, operating from 1943 until the end of the Soviet Union. The religious authorities of the SADUM repeatedly issued fatwas (legal documents) against traditional health practices that they considered “un-Islamic” (Babadjanov 2001).

3. Harwin (1996, 19) speaks of 27 million people who perished between 1941 and 1945, and still there was a surplus of 20 million women over men fourteen years after the war, to which one must add the victims of the Stalin purges of the 1930s, most of them men (see also Conquest 2008 [1990] and Winter 1992).

4. I thank Sophie Hohmann for sharing her experiences with me during her work with Médecins du monde in Tajikistan in 2014. During her field trip to the region with this organization, she was struck by a kind of “colonial anti-Communist mentality” that assumed the Soviet Union had never cared for its citizens and only produced inefficient health care.

5. According to Sophie Hohmann's informants, since 1997 only 12 people have received certificates from this institute (2010, 13).

6. Today some Tajik ethnographers situate “free” women between the pre-Islamic period and Soviet time. Djzhurabaev (2009) goes even further, claiming that hygiene, comfort, and esthetics of life come from Zoroastrianism, which is responsible for all the “progressive elements in Tajik culture” (50).

7. A girl whose moral behavior was questioned in her own village would still have found a partner further from home.

8. Pushing a woman to abort her child is a crime that can lead to two years imprisonment “Dastur oid ba ta'limi huquqi zanon” [Guide to instruct on women's rights] edited by Sangin (1998, 39).

9. There are controversial discussions about the authenticity of the hadith, which in its correct version seems to read: “Be at your mother's feet and there is Paradise” (Ibn Majah, Sunan, Hadith no. 2771).