This website classifies, organizes, and links to legal documents pertaining to religious regulation in three countries: Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.
Map image source: https://www.britannica.com/place/Central-Asia
The state’s efforts to control religious regulation in Central Asia has been a topic of increasing interest and concern among academics and policymakers alike. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many have claimed that Central Asia experienced an Islamic revival and that governments across the region have actively attempted to both repress and co-opt this revival. However, these claims are primarily based on a small set of major legal documents or high-profile events that have received the attention of media outlets and NGOs and often rely on secondary sources. We have created this database for public use in order to address these limitations, which are mostly due to the lack of systematic data collection.
This website contains an original database that includes information on and classifies/sorts links to legal documents pertaining to religious regulation in three countries: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It provides a resource for more comprehensive and rigorous study of religious regulation in Central Asia for two reasons: first, it links to the full body of legal documents in each country (located on official government websites for the years 1991-2018); and second, it is based on a systematic classification of legal documents as pertaining to “religion” or being “religious” beyond the title of these documents.
Focusing on legal documents will enable researchers not only to identify past trends but also to anticipate emerging ones and to do so with a greater level of detail. While changes in the legal framework do not correlate perfectly with the degree of religious freedom that people experience in their daily lives, tracking these changes is still critical for understanding the signals states wish to send about their treatment of religious regulation moving forward. Alongside analyzing changes in state rhetoric and tracking enforcement of existing regulations, these signals can serve as a valuable tool for anticipating future trends in religious regulation.
More than 18,000 legal documents analyzed.
More than 30,000 legal documents analyzed.
More than 20,000 legal documents analyzed.
To analyze and sort the legal documents referenced and linked to here, we scraped document text from a number of official government websites using parsers developed by the research team (see below). These sites differ for each country. For the Kyrgyz Republic, we used Kyrgyzstan's Ministry of Justice website. For Tajikistan, we used Tajikistan's Ministry of Justice website. For Uzbekistan, we used The National Database of the Legislation of the Republic of Uzbekistan website. The scraper (see below) developed a technique to obtain individual legal documents as well as any amendments and modifications that were made to these documents.
Predictive models were then used to classify and cluster the documents according to the extent to which each pertained to religious regulation. This was done by scanning through individual documents and finding string(s) or substring(s) of relevant religious terms that the research team predefined (e.g., religious regulation, Islam, Muslim, mosque) in the appropriate language. The documents were then organized into nine distinct categories that the research team deemed salient: 1) religious institutions, 2) religious leaders and clergy, 3) non-state/independent religious organizations, 4) religious education, 5) religious publications and media, 6) religious clothing, holidays, and rituals, 7) religious practices and worship, 8) extremism and terrorism, and 9) penalties and punishments.
Legal documents were sorted into these categories by using search terms to indicate that they belonged to the category. For example, to determine whether a legal document belonged in the “religious leaders and clergy” category, terms such as “mufti” and “imam” were used in the appropriate language.
Once you click get the GET STARTED button at the bottom of this page, you will be redirected to the search page where you can select appropriate parameters to refine your seach and limit your results.
You can type in the names of documents or the relevant religious terms you would like to search for in the database using the simple search function. Alternatively, you can use the prefiltered options below the search: country; date of adoption; document number; religious category; and religious term. These options will help you to narrow your search. When you finish making your selections, press enter to see the table with your results. The results you receive will be sorted by the number of references that the document has to some aspect of religious regulation (based on our initial search terms). Please note that if you do not choose a country option, then the results will include all three countries.
Research Team:
Pauline Jones is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. She has published articles in several leading academic and policy journals, including the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Foreign Affairs, Politics and Society, Europe-Asia Studies, and Resources Policy. She is author of five books: Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Power, Perceptions, and Pacts (Cambridge 2002); The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence (Cornell 2003); Oil is not a Curse: Ownership Structure and Institutions in the Soviet Successor States (Cambridge 2010); Islam, Society, and Politics in Central Asia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016) and the Oxford Handbook on Politics in Muslim States and Societies (forthcoming 2020). Her research has received generous support from several sources, including the McArthur Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Mellon Foundation, Smith Richardson, and the National Science Foundation. She is also the founder and director of the Digital Islamic Studies Curriculum (DISC), a collaborative program of instruction in Global Islamic Studies across the institutions of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) that aims to provide students with a truly global perspective on Islam and the Muslim world.
Scraper & Website developer:
Pavlo Lisovyi is a graduated from the University of Michigan with the Computer Engineering bachelor's degree. Currently he works at the semiconductor industry.
This database is part of a larger research project on Religious Regulation and Political Mobilization in Central Asia. It was made possible due to the National Science Foundation (grant no. SES-1658336).