Schools Ban Both Hijab and Miniskirts

Tajikistan’s education ministry has taken the unusual step of ordering female students not to turn up for classes wearing clothes that are either too revealing or too all-enveloping. The ban extend to miniskirts and “hijab”, the costume favoured by many devout Muslim women. NBCentralAsia observers say the authorities are being a little heavy-handed.



On April 17, the Tajik education ministry issued a directive banning female college and school students from wearing miniskirts, extravagant jewelry, Islamic-type headscarves and the full hijab covering, the ITAR-TASS news agency reported.



Earlier in the month, President Imomali Rahmon said students should not take mobile phones into class or drive to school in their own cars.



Education ministry spokesman Noilsho Nuraliev, told NBCentralAsia the latest ban has been introduced “to prevent students and pupils from wearing sport clothes, skimpy tops, miniskirts and hijabs”.



Although things like sportswear and jewellery are included in the ban, Zuhro Madaminjanova, an expert adviser at the Centre for Strategic Studies, which is affiliated with the president’s office, says it is really aimed at fashion styles that are not traditionally Tajik.



“Some [girls] have taken to following Islamic precepts blindly and rigidly, while others are following the fashion for exposing parts of their body, whether as a protest against [Islamic dress] or not,” she said. “Neither the one nor the other is in keeping with the Tajik way of thinking. We have to preserve our own particular identity.”



Political scientist Khodi Abdujabbor thinks that this attempt to impose uniformity on students stems from a fear of diversity, since the clothes that have been banned are culturally symbolic. People who dress in a particular way are sending a clear message to society about their identity and preferences. Both hijabs and miniskirts, in their different ways, represent a challenge to the ruling elite and its vision of political harmony, said Abdujabbor.



“The fact that you can see both the hijab and miniskirts on campus reflects a clash of civilizations,” he added.



Banning such cultural symbols may alienate young people.



According to political scientist Shokirjon Hakimov, some female students from rural areas would rather drop out of university than remove their hijab.



He said, “The coercive methods the political leadership has chosen are remiscent of the approach of an authoritarian regime.”



Hakimov said that however young people react to the ban, it is merely a distraction from the real issues facing the education sector, at a time when the ministry should be focusing on new teaching methods, improving financial and technical support for educational institutions, and raising teachers’ salaries.



A female student at the Tajik-Russian Slavonic University in Dushanbe said young people as a whole should not have to pay for the vulgar dress sense of a minority – they should be allowed to wear whatever they want.



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)