The authorities of Uzbekistan are intensifying the campaign to combat excessively explicit manifestations of the Muslim religion in public places and in social life. As Radio Ozodlik illustrates, those who profess Islam are forced to cut their beards, and women are prevented from wearing the khidžab, the local version of the Islamic veil.
There is a video circulating online in which some students from the Bankovskij college in the city of Andižan are forced in rather violent ways to weave their veils behind their heads, and those who refuse to do so are not admitted to the lessons.
Such cases are frequent in Uzbekistan, such as that of the third-year student of the Bukhara Technological Engineering Institute, Fatima Abdullokh, who appealed to the daughter of President Šavkat Mirziyoyev, Saida, with a request to defend the students forced to take off their khidžab.
Similar measures were also taken at the ir ik pedagogical institute, in the Tashkent region, where the management demanded that the Uzbek language and literature student Karomat Mukimova take off her khidžab if she wanted to keep her place in the student hostel.
There were also raids organized on the homes of inhabitants of the provinces of Zangiata and Yangiyol, where men in black masks carried out searches to take all the clothing deemed inappropriate, because it was considered a sign of Islamic radicalism.