In Uzbekistan, an Islamic revival under strict surveillance

It’s still a work in progress, but already the tourist guides are calling it one of the most important sites in the capital. On the vast square opposite the ancient Tillya Sheikh mosque and the peaceful garden inside the Barak Khan Madrasa (seminary), the workers are busy putting the finishing touches to the future Islamic Civilization Centre in the north-west part of Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, a metropolis of more than three million inhabitants.

Long awaited by the people of Tashkent, this huge museum, under construction since 2018, will be open to the public at the beginning of next year. But already in September it received several foreign delegations of religious academics. They all praised this architectural colossus, three storeys high, with a total floor space of 45,000 square metres, crowned by a majestic turquoise dome 65 metres high.

A spectacular tribute to the Timurid architecture¹ of Samarkand, a historic gem of Uzbekistan, and to great Uzbek scholars such as Imam Muhammad al-Boukhari (810-870ad), al-Tirmidhi (824-892), Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna (980-1037) and al-Biruni (973-1058 or 1052). Among other treasures, it will house the Uthmani Qoran, one of the oldest Qorans in existence, written shortly after the Prophet’s death, preserved and protected under the reign of Tamerlane, the 14^th century Turko-Mongol conqueror. As President Shavkat Mirziyoyev stressed at the beginning of the year,

“Islamic civilization and teachings have always been founded on science, culture and education [...]The Centre’s main objective is to gather in a single place the age-old heritage of Islamic culture associated with our nation”.

Stirring both national pride and, in the daily life of the people of Tashkent, relative indifference, the Centre for Islamic Civilization, surrounded by a complex of hotels and souvenir shops, is slated to become one of the country’s most important cultural sites. With avowed diplomatic implications. “We see future diplomatic visits taking place in the Centre,” says Akhror Burkhanov, who is spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry and in charge of following up the Centre’s development.

The religious heritage is also on display in Tamerlane’s ancient capital, Samarkand. It was celebrated on 27 May 2025 as “cultural capital of the Islamic world” by the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ICESCO)², partnered with the Uzbek Ministry of Culture. A few hundred meters away from the Registan Square, the historic centre of the city, the mausoleum of Al-Maturidi, the 10^th-century imam and philosopher, a native of this city, is being expanded as the authorities wish to make it one of Samarkand’s chief holy places.

An averred Islamic identity

At the same time as its Islamic heritage is being highlighted, religious practice is gathering pace in this former Soviet Republic, where 90 percent of the population is Muslim. “Religion is increasingly present, here as in the other post-Soviet countries in the region with a Muslim majority,” says Ilkham Umarakhunov, a specialist in Central Asian Islam, based in Kyrgyzstan and coordinator for programmes aimed at preventing religious extremism. “People are practising more and more, the mosques are increasingly full. After 70 years of forced atheism under the Soviet Union, this is to be expected”, says the expert.

In the capital’s new museum, an exhibit will be devoted to the “New Uzbekistan”, inaugurated by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, in office since 2016. This concept is meant to signify a clean break with the “old Uzbekistan” of his predecessor, Islam Karimov, who ran the country unchallenged for a quarter of a century, from independence in 1991 until his death.

When he became President, Islam Karimov reopened the mosques and passed a “Law on Religion”, restoring Islam to the core of national identity. A major turning-point after the decades of Soviet rule, during which the regime had imposed a strict state atheism, closed all places of worship and banned religious teachings.

However this “religious revival” went hand in hand with a mass repression of Mus-lims, justified by the rise of the Islamic Uzbek Movement (IUM) and the Hizb ut Tahrir (a pan-Islamist party which advocates the establishment of a new Caliphate)³. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new century, these groups perpetrated a series of terrorist attacks in the capital and in the east of the country, aimed at President Karimov, as well as the abduction of soldiers, police officers and tourists. So the au-thorities cracked down indiscriminately on all Muslims. “Youngsters under 16 weren’t allowed into the mosques!”, recalls Behruzbek Yadgorov, a student at the University of Tashkent. In his view the population has greater religious freedom today, compared with the previous decade.

The current President, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, has indeed injected an air of freedom: 16,000 Uzbeks blacklisted on mere suspicion of religious extremism have now been released from prison. The broadcasting of the azan, the call to prayer, and the display of overt religious symbols, such as the hijab for women and the beard for men, are more tolerated than before.

However, although according to the constitution “religion is formally separated from the government”, the state continues strictly to control religious practice through the Muftiate, the Muslim spiritual council headed by a mufti and by a council of ulema (theologians). It presides over the imams, the mosques, the seminaries and the posting of religious messages, while remaining closely connected to the state, via the State Committee for Religious Affairs, a government body which monitors religious practices. We asked for an interview, but the Muftiate did not respond.

Mass surveillance

Thus the religious sphere remains under close surveillance in spite of the liberalisation promoted since Mirziyoyev’s first term of office: “I could go to jail for sharing a hadith with my children. Of course there’s a problem,” a Tashkent businessman testifies anonymously. Fingering his prayer beads, he describes being regularly stopped by the police because of the length of his beard and undergoing long and humiliating ID checks.

Uzbekistan issued over 1,250 administrative penalties for religious activities in 2024, according to a report by the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)⁴. The same has been observed by several NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, which wrote in its 2025 report⁵:

“Uzbek authorities prevent religious communities from registering, subjecting former religious prisoners to arbitrary controls and prosecuting Muslims on vague and imprecise charges of extremism.”

In recent months, these controls led to fines and short prison sentences, especially for the on-line posting of messages with religious content. Last year, the Spiritual Administration of Uzbekistan Muslims restricted the presence of imams on social networks, and national media called attention to the Mufti’s prevention of imams from expressing themselves on social media⁶.

Recently there was a sensational trial in which the defendant was the religious blogger Alisher Toursounov, known as "Mubashshir Akhmad”, administrator of the Youtube channel, Azon Global. A wide range of Islam-related discussions took place there, sometimes critical of state-sponsored secularism, and Toursounov’s religious reflections were extended to geopolitics and popular culture, to the McDonald’s boycott motivated by the Israel-Palestine conflict and to emblematic figures of Uzbek identity.

Extradited from Turkey in May 2025 at Tashkent’s request, he is accused of posting on-line religious content “likely to excite confessional discord and threaten public order”. He is also accused of having produced and shared without permission documents of a religious nature in violation of the rules governing Islamic practice in Uzbekistan. This earned him a prison sentence of two and a half years, handed down on 9 October. Contacted by OrientXXI, his attorneys said their client did not intend to appeal. They said they see an increasing number of cases like this before the courts.

Toursounov comes from Namangan, in the Ferghana valley, the most conservative region of Uzbekistan. This flat territory, with a population of sixteen million and wedged between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, was the main centre for clandestine Islam during the Soviet period, with radical groups rejecting the popular local forms of worship to impose a literal interpretation of Islam. Today, there are more veiled women in the streets here than in other parts of the country. “In Tashkent, they push Islamic identity, here we practice it,” jokes Behruzbek Yadgorov. In the village of his birth, Tchoust, 20km from Namangan the regional capital with its 700,000 inhabitants, there are traffic jams around the mosque reserved for men at Friday prayers time, the Jummah.

This religiosity has made the valley of Ferghana and Nanangan the most heavily controlled area. This summer, the local media reported that five “illegal” seminaries were shut down in Nanangan⁷. At the end of August, the wives of Nanangan imams were summoned to a meeting where they were told that they mustn’t tie their head scarves around the neck in the Arab manner but, according to the local custom, knotted behind. The husbands of those who disobeyed were threatened with expulsion from their mosques by the local branch of the Muftiate.

In town, people avoid discussing these matters. Kobiljon Murzabayev, head of the madrasa which, at its creation in 2016, brought together all their city’s religious schools, brushes aside the possible repression threatening practising Muslims: “We simply have our own customs and want to keep them! Today, each district has its own mosque!” Berkhader Mukhodin enthuses. He is the caretaker of the Mulla Kirghiz madrasa, a century-old building next to the city’s central market. And he speaks joyfully of the Yusufkhan oglu Qasimkhan mosque, the last great mosque built in 2022 on the outskirts of Nanangan, in a district where the real-estate market is booming.

The ever-present threat of extremism

In 2022-2023, Ilkham Umarakhunov joined Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur on freedom of religion or conviction, in monitoring compliance with the UN recommendations. He says :

“Groups of religious extremists are still active in Uzbekistan: the ultra-Salafists, the Hizb ut-Tahrir. Considering the country’s past and its very dense population, the government does all it can to avoid giving them the opportunity to exploit the Islam issue. Its approach is pragmatic (...) The persecution of Muslims is not enormous in Uzbekistan, but there is still discrimination and extensive monitoring which will continue in the coming years.”

While the fall of Kabul in 2021 revived fears in this Central Asian country which shares a 130km border with Afghanistan, today it is the Islamic State of Khorasan, a branch of ISIS, created in 2015 and advocating global jihad, that is feared. This fundamentalist Islamist movement, which claimed responsibility for the Moscow ter-rorist attack in the spring of 2024 carried out by Tadjik nationals⁸, embodies today the region’s principal menace, espe-cially by its recruitment of Uzbek citizens and/or others from the region.

But the threat remains quite limited, according to Olivier Ferrando, author of a study published in 2024⁹, because Uzbeks are not radicalized in their own country. In his view,

“It is mainly abroad, in the countries which play host to migrant workers, and where the Uzbek government’s restrictive policies have no direct consequences, that political Islam makes its reappearance.”

Especially in Russia, where 80% of Uzbek migrants are to be found.

But for the Uzbek government, on the contrary, the menace is still real: this summer, an Islamic State cell with sixteen members was broken up in Namangan. Uzbekistan’s delicate balancing act between its religious soft power and domestic control is here to stay.

Translated from French by Noël Burch.