Politicking of Islam and LGBTQ+ discourse in Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT

While the rights of LGBTQ+ people are improving in many regions of the world, the protections and freedoms of the queer community in Uzbekistan are stagnating. In this research note, I share some of my preliminary observations from interviews I conducted myself with political elites and from my content analysis of social media posts from religious figures and bloggers in Uzbekistan between 2019 and 2022. I find that it is not Islamic texts such as the Qur’an or hadith that necessarily condemn the queer community, it is in fact Uzbekistan’s political and religious elites’ cultural interpretation of Islamic aspects that does so. As such, homophobia and transphobia are not a Muslim problem per se in Uzbekistan. It is Uzbekistan’s political and religious elite who define it as such. The anti-queer arguments themselves are intimately connected to communal identity and mentality rather than simply Islam.

KEYWORDS:

• LGBTQ+ rights
• Islam
• elites
• Central Asia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For security purposes, I will not directly name any of the individuals I talked to. All the names used in this account are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity and safety of my interlocutors.

2 Bakhtir’s own vexed relationship with Islam supports previous scholarships’ observations (Ro’I and Wainer 2009; Sharipova 2019) that even though some Central Asians may describe themselves as Muslim, some of them do not necessarily follow Islamic rituals (in Bakhtir’s case, abstinence of alcohol) in their everyday lives.