Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Bukhara

“You’re really not going to eat or drink water today?” I asked my guide, Rustam, as I finished off my third bottle of water after walking three hours in the sweltering 102-degree heat. “Not until sunset. Our thirst should remind us of the poor who go hungry and thirsty all the time. At 8:20 tonight I will break the fast and drink juices, but I won’t eat much. As a practicing Shia Muslim I follow the five pillars of Islam: I believe in Allah and his Prophet Mohamed, observe Ramadan, pray five times a day, give to the poor, and someday hope to do the hajj [pilgrimage to Mecca]. In Uzbekistan, it’s not a crime for Muslims to convert to another religion. Our attitudes toward religion have been influenced by our Soviet experience. The soviets tried to eradicate our religious and ethnic identities. If we don’t know who we are, we lose our willingness to rebel. Ironically, the Soviet era left us with a more tolerant attitude toward other religions and ethnicities, because we had all suffered the same during that time. Yet there are some who would like to return to Soviet times, but there’s no returning now. We are independent— a democracy — all of the statues of Lenin have come down. We don’t want to go back to picking cotton under the Soviet occupation.”