106 ESTADO DE LA NACION EQUIDAD E INTEGRACIÓN SOCIAL CAPÍTULO

The varied discourse that Kazakhstanis use to connect history and tradition to hijab’s place (or lack thereof) in Kazakh society is in part so infused with political meaning because it is intimately tied with the definition of the Kazakh nation, and with nationalism. Throughout the twentieth century, women were cast as the bearers of culture

and tradition, and their roles given significance for the formation of nation-states in majority Muslim societies. In Kazakhstan’s case, women’s visibility in public space becomes important and politically recognized because it bears significance for the construction of the Kazakh nation as simultaneously modern and forward-looking, yet also culturally distinct from Europeans. Myong and Chun assert that there has been such a widespread backlash to hijab in Kazakhstan’s post-independence period because it is an article of clothing that carries connotations of the other, the Middle East, the Oriental, that do not fit in with either the Kazakhstani government or the popular urban definition of Kazakhs’ trajectory from a free nomadic life to free, Western-style, modern life (2015). As shown in government rhetoric from 2011-2012, the concern over the veiling of women exceeds Kazakhstan’s borders to extend to shifting geopolitical relationships with Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Islamic State in Syria, and imbues hijab with a representative geopolitical significance.

The state and popular debate over hijab’s Kazakhness has drawn the borders of Kazakh nationhood on the bodies of women, as women’s choice of dress comes to embody the limits of acceptable religious ideology, as feminist geopolitics and geography scholarship has shown (Fluri 2006, Gökarıksel and Secor 2013). By wearing hijab and running counter to popular belief of what is acceptable, women have complicated the definition of Kazakhness and Kazakhs’ religiosity. Kazakhstani politicians’, media, and my interviewees’ comments on the hijab’s presence in public space show how women contribute to the creation of overlapping geopolitical and discursive borders with their everyday movement through space. Women’s dress attracts so much significance because

it forms a challenge to the status quo, and also a challenge to what the Kazakh state should be.

Public spaces and visibility have long been associated with power and masculinity in the Western context. Kazakhstanis’ subscription to a discursive connection between what is modern and wealthy, and what is Western or European, gives significance to the practices of women who appear in public space (Okin 1998). By being publicly visible but not wearing Western dress, women who practice veiling complicate the dichotomy between Western and Oriental, civilization and backwardness. Hijabed women are able to do so in Almaty’s context because their presence in public space associates hijab with wealth, power and modernity, coded “good” in the public imaginary; not out of public respect for the religious ideals that these women profess to hold over political aims.

Yet my interviewees referred to a discursive connection between hijab and extremism, citing ideas about Arab Islam that they or others held incompatible with contemporary Kazakhstani life.

“A lot of women from the [United] Arab Emirates and other Muslim countries, there women have to be covered, and here you see people – it’s connected recently with the Islamic State,” Layla said, when I asked her about hijab. She noted that in her hometown of Atyrau, there were a lot of women and young girls who covered their faces as well. “When people cover a woman completely, well here, I don’t know… I don’t get scared, but… It’s just you see, some people use hijab for completely different purposes.”

Sara’s mother had the same reservations about her wearing hijab, Sara told me. “It has certain connotations here,” she said, referring to her mother and relatives’ fear of

extremism. Aynara echoed her testimony, citing the experience of a friend who wanted to begin wearing hijab.

“Some parents are against [hijab], they’re afraid of terrorism… Some [veiled women] participated in terrorism, this is the reason people have this association. People think women who wear hijab are like them.”

Still some Kazakhstanis take phobia of hijab to another level. One of the comments about religiosity heard frequently implies that extremists are somehow hypnotizing innocent people.

“People get zombified,” a classmate at KIMEP told me. “I knew this girl, she was completely normal and then she started wearing hijab and praying, and she walked around with a blank expression on her face, and stopped talking to her mom and sister,” the classmate said with wide eyes while her friends shook their heads. More recently, the word appeared from a Kazakh user on social media to describe three men convicted of extremist propaganda in March 2016 (VKontakte 2016).

“I know a lot of people who all their lives recite Qur’an, for themselves, proper Muslims… and now some people have gone down a crooked path, and a lot are leaving for Syria,” Layla said, distinguishing between proper Muslims who dedicate themselves to personal religious practice and extremist political action. Syria has become a much- discussed topic among Kazakhstanis, even more so after video emerged in October 2014 purporting to show ethnic Kazakhs fighting for Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Supreme Mufti Mayamerov issued a statement shortly after the video made headlines condemning the “Kazakh jihadis” as “acting against Islam” and perverting the minds of the children they brought with them (RFE/RL 4 December 2014). Kazakhstani security services

estimated that Kazakhs with IS in Syria numbered around 300, with women half of the group (RFE/RL 18 November 2014).