Almaty, Kazakhstan

Ascension Cathedral

Although 80% of the population in Kazakhstan is Muslim and although it’s Ramadan, there’s little evidence of the Muslim faith in the architecture or customs of the people. As we toured the sights, Cholpon mused. “We think of ourselves as ‘Momun’ Muslims, You might think of it as Muslim ‘light.’ We believe in Allah and practice a form of Sunni Islam, but we also believe in a form of Shamanism, that the sky, mountains, and those who have passed away inhabit the spirit world. People pray to the sky spirit in much the same way they pray to Allah, with their hands open and ending their prayer by pressing them to their faces. When someone dies, we prepare special bread called ‘borsok.’ When the dead smell the bread they know that we are remembering them. If I have a dream about my grandmother, who died, and make ‘borsok’ the next morning and read the Koran, her spirit will be thankful and grant my prayer. We have evil spirits too. When I come home, my mother doesn’t greet me with a hug or kiss. Instead, she hands me a cup of water into which I spit three times. She then throws the water on the side of our house to get rid of the evil spirits that I may have picked up in my travels. Not many women wear the headscarf here. Some women wear the headscarf out of respect for their spouse's parents, but as soon as they leave their home they take it off. Most people lost their religion during the Soviet period. The beautiful Ascension Cathedral, the second tallest wood structure in the world, was used for storage and then later as a museum. Now it’s been restored back to a Russian Orthodox Church. The government has made it clear that Church and State should be separate. Muslims wanted to use a public square for prayer, but the government wouldn’t allow it. They also wanted to set up a prayer room for Muslims in the parliament, but the president, who’s a Muslim, said, ‘no,’ because then they would have to do the same for all religions. There was a parliamentarian who had a very conservative Muslim agenda, but he was resoundingly defeated.