108 ESTADO DE LA NACION EQUIDAD E INTEGRACIÓN SOCIAL CAPÍTULO

Layla’s statements indicate that government efforts to stop people leaving for Syria have trickled down to popular discourse, fueling phobia toward hijab even as state rhetoric itself changes. Yet my interviewees’ attitudes toward hijab shifted when it came to Almaty’s cosmopolitan environment. In their musings, interviewees drew a discursive line between hijab’s acceptability in Almaty and the provinces, where the majority of incidents related to extremism in 2011-2012 took place.

“There aren’t that many women here in Almaty [that wear hijab]. We have a lot in Atyrau,” said Layla. “And they cover their kids, too, up to their eyes… We had explosions [in Atyrau] one or two times. But people treat them [hijabi women] fine here, there are fewer.”

Janna expressed the same distinction between hijabis in Almaty and her home city, Shymkent.

“Our parents always told us to keep our distance from covered women in Shymkent… but here it’s fine,” she said, her friend Marina nodding in agreement. The women’s more positive outlooks on hijabis in Kazakhstan’s cultural capital may have been spurred partly by the fact they were being interviewed by one in Almaty, yet they drew other distinctions between their hometowns and current city. Janna goes to mosque with her father in Shymkent, yet has not been in Almaty. Melike is in the same situation, having visited mosques in Almaty once and not enjoyed it, but attends mosque with her parents in Astana.

Along with preferring to visit places of worship in their hometowns, my interviewees set Almaty’s social atmosphere apart from the provinces.

“I like society, people, places here more than in my hometown. Here, you feel freer. There are a lot of people… but not pandemonium… probably because there are so many trees, flowers, I don’t know. The city looks different than mine, we don’t have that,” Layla remarked. During the Soviet Union, Almaty was known for its abundance of fruit trees, especially for the apple orchards to the city’s north. While many have been cut down for post-Soviet elites’ villas, Almaty has retained the reputation for having a large amount of green space, along with its role as the cultural capital.

“I’ve been here two years, and I really like it here,” said Janna.

“There’s not much of a difference between here and Tashkent,” Marina added, referring to the capital of Uzbekistan, her hometown. “It’s a city for young people.”

“Yes, it’s a young people’s city,” agreed Janna.

Since Soviet times, Almaty has been famous across Central Asia for its opportunities for young entrepreneurs and artists, and continues to attract youth from Kazakhstan’s provincial cities as well as villages. In recent years, it has struggled to accommodate an influx of migrant laborers from villages, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The city now has a center-periphery divide, with housing prices high and continuing to rise in the core among restaurants, shopping centers and concert halls; and suburbs that sprawl past the huge bazaars on the outskirts of town (Rigi 2003). Aynara’s family lives near one of these bazaars, and it is the only place she mentions specifically when I ask whether she receives any ill treatment from passersby in Almaty.

“I live near Barakholka [bazaar], and there are lots of people from villages there, they sometimes look at me a bit strangely,” she said, “Their understandings [of the world] are a little different, but other than that I see it [negative treatment] very rarely.”

My interviewees’ discursive distinctions between hijab’s acceptability in Almaty and the provinces reflect wider geopolitical debates around tradition and borders. While the provinces are physically closer to Uzbekistan and the Middle East, villages represent reserves of Kazakh culture and tradition apart from the modern, busy life of cities. While I did not have the chance to interview women in provincial cities or villages, or observe state regulation of religious practice in these areas, my interviewees’ comments imply that there is a greater trend toward securitization of non-traditional religious practices in Kazakhstan’s peripheral spaces. The women’s rhetorical emphasis on Almaty’s cosmopolitanism indicates that the borders of Kazakhness are more fluid within its relatively wealthy public spaces.

Yet Aynara also said that she can expect to encounter negative treatment anywhere in Almaty, not only on its periphery, and described her treatment at the hands of classmates and their parents when she started wearing a headscarf.

“Some of my classmates understood and some looked at me differently. Parents can say anything, you know, and some people became afraid.”

Aynara’s experience shows that hijab still does not always fit in to Kazakhstanis’ ideas about what is acceptable dress for modern Kazakhs; that some citizens still believe it does not quite belong in public space. While hijab is not banned or outright excluded, it is still a non-normative clothing and lifestyle choice for Kazakhstani women, reflected in

the constant debate over its place in schools, universities and streetscapes (Myong and Chun 2015).

Hijab’s multiple, shifting meanings thus translate to various redefinitions of Kazakh national identity within the bounds of Kazakhstan’s fragmented urban and rural geographies. Its meanings are dictated by various connotations of modernity, power and tradition evoked by politicians, the media, and women themselves, specific to Kazakhstan and the spaces within it.

Conclusion

Kazakhstani women’s practices and attitudes toward veiling contribute to the redefinition of the Kazakh nation and what is acceptable within its borders, as well as how it relates to its neighbors and the Middle East. In summer 2013, I met a young woman at an iftar dinner who told me she had won a scholarship to study at Al-Alzhar, but was having trouble getting a visa because “they don’t want us to go.” Her situation is a powerful reminder of the need to consider the individuals who compose a state in order to understand the complicated, shifting criteria for membership within the state.

Recent feminist geography literature has criticized traditional approaches to geopolitics, asserting that analysis of states as whole entities and macropolitics is not enough to fully understand how the state works, and the lived experiences of those citizens who comprise states (Dowler and Sharp 2001). Instead, scholarship has emphasized the need to analyze individual practices and encounters with the state to comprehend the whole (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005; Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2001, 2007; Secor 2001; Smith 2012). This scholarship has shown that individuals embody the state in their own daily practices, and therefore have a significant

influence on the state’s macropolitics (Kong 2001, Holloway 2006, Hopkins 2007, Gökarıksel 2009). Moreover, women as the perceived bearers of culture are able to shift the borders of nation-states through their spatial practices and choice of dress (Gökarıksel 2009). My thesis has examined the practices and discourse that Kazakhstani women produce and recycle, and their rhetoric’s intimate connection to geopolitics and state efforts to curb extremism. As Fluri points out, “the ‘rights’ and visibility of women are a unifying theme throughout various phases of modernization” (Fluri 2011 p. 520). I conclude that due to a colonial legacy that associated women’s visibility in public space with the modern, Kazakhstani women have contributed to shifting the borders of what is acceptably Kazakh by wearing hijab in public space. Different environments – periphery, cosmopolitan, wealthy, poor – affect whether and which veiling practices – and styles – are acceptable in Kazakhstan. Moreover, my research has shown that there is a shift in political rhetoric away from a discursive connection between untraditional Islam and extremism. Instead, politicians and media seem to be focusing efforts on differentiating between peaceful religious practice and political organization.

This shift may in part be the result of the political elite’s own religious illiteracy in allowing scholars and entrepreneurs who subscribe to a textual interpretation of Islam, to gain clout in religious agencies and media. Or the trend may have had the political elite’s blessing from the start, as they realized that policies akin to Uzbekistan’s securitization of untraditional religion were aggravating the relationship between citizens and the state. Either way, the current discursive trend in media and politics both reflects and influences citizens’ views on what is acceptable religious practice (Foucault 2012). As my interviews have shown, discourse on religion is intertwined with ideas about

geopolitics, gender and modernity that give political significance to the choices women make about their bodies and dress. My research suggests that by virtue of existing in public spaces coded as masculine in the popular imaginary, women who choose to wear hijab have a certain amount of power to change ideas about the acceptability and even attractiveness of hijab for other women and men. Especially in Almaty, women who choose to veil and at the same time occupy cosmopolitan, privileged spaces send a message that embodying a certain type of religious practice does not necessarily translate to crossing the borders of Kazakh nationality or modernity into extremism and backwardness. In doing so, these women are pushing the limits of what is considered Kazakh and modern with their own bodies, embodying the borders that politicians have sought so deeply to control. With their choice in veiling (or not), whether they do so consciously or not, women disrupt notions of the state as pure and whole, reflecting the complexity and contradictions inherent in nation-building itself (Anderson 1991).

My findings raise questions about the future of religious practice and state regulation in Kazakhstan. While the political establishment and some citizens seem to now distinguish between religion and culture in deciding what is politically and socially acceptable for Kazakhs, other citizens (including those who work in the state apparatus) still rhetorically securitize religion that does not conform to their standards of culture, tradition and modernity. And there are individuals like Kuralay, who are in between the two in their sympathies and practices. Due to shifting ideals and definitions of modernity, gender roles and religion, the power to affect how individuals and their choices are treated lies in the hands of the citizens who compose the state. Through their rhetoric and

daily action, these citizens define what is acceptable, civilized, and modern practice for members of the state.

With the current tensions in geopolitics and variety of hyped-up media rhetoric toward Islam and its visibilities, it is important to consider what citizens will do with this power, and how the outcome will affect attitudes toward hijab. Women themselves have a huge role to play in this story due to the significance given to them by twentieth century nation-building. Studying their discourse and practices may prove a more effective means of understanding the fragmented geographies and colonial legacies that influence what is seen as acceptable and normal, for the type of state that Kazakhstan’s government and citizens promote. Through analysis of women’s daily practices, it is possible to see where the notions of state and nation break down to reveal the complex, fragmented power dynamics that define sociopolitical organization. Geopolitics, history and the state are all reflected in the bodies of women, considered at once bearers of culture, tools for the production of modernity, and individuals who influence and complicate the state and nation with their discursive and socio-spatial practices.

Rather than focusing exclusively on traditionally masculine spaces and ideals of the state, my research confirms past scholarship in that it is worth taking the opportunity to at once examine gendered practices such as hijab close up, and zoom out to consider how the local complicates the state. This thesis has shown that feminist geopolitics perspectives on women enable linking such embodied, gendered practices as veiling to broader political trends. My research contributes to this thinking by showing how women not only embody the boundaries of the nation and state, but remake their borders with everyday practices and personal choices. Conversely, women’s personal choice to veil or

not affects their mobility, and how they experience the state at the hands of its citizens, who hold a myriad of shifting opinions about veiling. As rhetoric on religion and security shifts throughout the global community, feminist geopolitical approaches will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the shifting dynamics that influence the state and popularly defined borders of what is acceptable religious practice in Kazakhstan – and other places – in the future.

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