Word: tashkenters
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...outburst of violence in Uzbekistan, the fourth largest republic, located in the southern part of the U.S.S.R. The worst outbreak of ethnic mayhem in the modern Soviet era began on the night of June 3, in the city of Fergana (pop. 190,000), 150 miles southeast of Tashkent, as bands of native Uzbeks staged a series of brutal attacks on minority Meskhetian Turks, who were deported from Georgia in 1944 by Joseph Stalin. Most of the 190,000 displaced Meskhetians settled in Uzbekistan, a region that did not always welcome their presence...
Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" The call to prayer echoes forth from a minaret in Tashkent, as it has from mosques throughout the 13 centuries of Islam. "Was it loud enough?" asks the mullah who will lead the prayers. That is an eminently reasonable question, since in the Soviet Union no muezzin is allowed to use a loudspeaker. The inquiry is also metaphorical. In the U.S.S.R.'s fourth largest city and leading Islamic center, as elsewhere across the nation, believers are cautiously regaining their public voice after an oppressively enforced silence...
...Tashkent-based Muslim board for Central Asia, the most important of the four government-imposed bureaucracies for Soviet Islam, Deputy Chairman Abdulgani Abdulla recalls that "almost nobody was interested in religion" in the 1960s. Now, he reports, large numbers are becoming active believers, many of them young people. "None of the philosophies except the religious ones are able to satisfy men's needs," he maintains. The leader of the Muslim board for Transcaucasia, Allahshukur Pasha-zada, declares that until recently "freedom of conscience was on paper only." The pre-Gorbachev regimes, he says, "destroyed all the values of the people...
...affairs. Popular pressures led to last month's installation, with great fanfare, of a new leader for the Central Asia board. The previous head, reputed to be more adept at drinking (forbidden by Islam) and politics than study of the Koran, was ousted after an unprecedented protest march in Tashkent. His successor is Mukhammadsadyk Mamayusupov, 36, a modest and dignified scholar. At the same time as Mamayusupov's elevation, the Uzbek Republic gave his board a precious Koran dictated by Caliph Osman, one of Muhammad's earliest followers. Thousands cheered and wept as the invaluable holy book was moved from...
...Private Mohammad Beg, a Soviet soldier stationed in an isolated outpost north of Kabul, the odyssey to confinement and conversion began with a dispute with one of his superiors in 1987. After beating the officer unconscious, the 21-year-old Uzbek from Tashkent deserted, and before long, Afghan villagers handed him over to the mujahedin...