Turan Research Center

As the summer burns hot and the tourism season in Kazakhstan nears its apogee, visitors are flocking to high-altitude areas near Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty. At the top of 3,200 meter-high Shymbulak Mountain Resort, just 25 kilometers from Almaty, the sight of fully-covered women strolling through nature with their families is a normal sight. A boom in tourism from the Gulf states may be partly driving that trend.

But such scenes may change now after President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a decree in June making Kazakhstan the last country in Muslim-majority Central Asia to ban women from wearing the niqab in public.

The full-face veil worn by some Muslim women, which leaves only the eyes visible, was formally banned from public places in Uzbekistan in 2023, Tajikistan in 2024, and most recently, in Kyrgyzstan in February 2025.

No such law is needed in authoritarian Turkmenistan, where tightly-proscribed ethnic national attire is widely imposed on female government employees from teachers to news anchors.

But for many analysts, it is the hijab, not the niqab, that is more likely to determine future relations between secular governments and their fast-changing populations.

Governments Tout ‘Safe Cities’

In Kazakhstan, as in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, lawmakers justified these bans as a crime prevention measure, targeting clothing that restricts the identification of persons in public places. Kazakhstan allows exceptions for medical reasons, official duties, weather protection and during sports or cultural activities, but there are no exceptions based on religion. Unlike the other three Central Asian nations, where fines of hundreds of dollars are in place for violators, the Kazakh law is prophylactic, making no provisions for punishing violators, instead just issuing warnings.

Moreover, Central Asian nations have embraced Chinese-style facial recognition systems with enthusiasm in recent years. Tokayev, for instance, has not hidden his desire to see the technology more widely applied.  “We need to head in this direction,” he said after a 2019 trip to China.

Kazakhstan Ban: Long Time Coming

Calls for a ban on the niqab were common even before hundreds of Kazakh men, women and children fought in Iraq and Syria with such extremist groups as Islamic State and al Qaeda. Those groups imposed strict Islamic dress controls on women.

The appearance of Kazakh children assembling assault rifles and undergoing military training in a 2014 Islamic State propaganda video panicked the government, which blocked foreign news websites that covered the video.

Two years later, Kazakhstan suffered a rare  terror attack, after religious extremists went on a rampage in the western region of Aktobe, killing eight people and launching attacks on military targets.

Also in 2016, a lone gunman killed two civilians and eight police officers in Almaty, later citing what he called authorities’ mistreatment of religious believers as a motivation for his actions in his statement to the court. The shooter, Ruslan Kulekbayev, is now serving a life sentence as Kazakhstan banned the death penalty in 2021.

It was after those events that the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Civil Society was formed, which championed bans on face-covering veils. Then-president Nursultan Nazarbayev sought to prohibit “dark clothing”, long beards, and Arabic-style three-quarter length shorts in 2017. But by the time the ministry was disbanded in 2018, none of these restrictions had become law.

From thereon, official references to the dangers of “Salafism” – the fundamentalist revival movement within Sunni Islam – tapered off. Kazakhstan later won international plaudits after launching in 2019 “Operation Zhusan,” which allowed the return and reintegration of hundreds of Kazakh families formerly embedded with the Islamic State in Syria.

In the 2020 documentary on the operation by Kazakh filmmaker Kanat Beisekeyev ‘The Long Road Home,’ some of the returned women still covered their faces while giving interviews, describing children that they had lost as “martyrs.”

 “Many of [the women] have the same radical beliefs” as their husbands, who either died or were immediately jailed on their return to Kazakhstan, said Erlan Qarin, who helped oversee the effort and is now an influential official in Tokayev’s administration.

“Yes they betrayed their country and their people,” he added. But we need to give them a second chance. We’ll see how it goes.”

Kazakh authorities said that most returnees were not under criminal investigation. Only around a dozen women were convicted on terrorism charges over what authorities viewed as more active roles in the group’s operations, others completed rehabilitation and begun full reintegration into society by 2020. Media and international organizations have reported on individual cases and Tokayev has declared the process successful, however the government has not published a full report on the reintegration period.

The Hijab and Access to Public Education

The niqab was not commonly worn by Kazakh women even before its ban, with western regions like Aktobe among those where women sometimes donned the veil in public.

Hijabs – covering the neck and hair while leaving the face visible –– are a common sight across Kazakhstan. In contrast, the headscarf has long been at the heart of ongoing disputes, particularly regarding its role in educational settings.

Last year, the Kazakh Service of Radio Free Europe reported numerous cases where hijab-wearing schoolgirls were expelled from state schools, causing parents to sue school management. Local courts upheld the girls’ constitutional rights to education, noting that expulsions based on violations of school uniform policy “are not provided for under current [Kazakh] legislation.”

The schools appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court, still refusing to admit the girls to class. The high court then backed the Education Ministry’s right to determine school uniform guidance.  “Parents are responsible for complying with the School Charter and the requirements for the school uniform,” a Court statement read.

In Uzbekistan, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev offered an olive branch to pious Muslims during the start of his presidency, hinting at a break with the ultra-repressive policies of his predecessor Islam Karimov, who died in 2016.

Uzbek officials lifted the hijab ban  in public places in 2021, allowing a version of headscarves – tied behind the neck, not wrapped in front of it – in educational institutions. This thaw, however, hasn’t stopped periodic reports of police forcing men to shave their beards and raiding higher education institutions to enforce dress code regulations that the hijab apparently violates.

Kyrgyzstan remains the only country in the region where the traditional hijab is allowed in classrooms. At the beginning of the most recent school year, the Kyrgyz Education Ministry released a statement denying claims on social media that hijab-wearing girls had been prevented from attending schools.

That same week, a senior official in the State Commission on Religious Affairs reassured citizens that a ban on wearing the hijab would not be included in upcoming changes to legislation covering religious policy.

National Style vs. Personal Faith

Central Asian officials have often revealed their uneasy position towards the hijab by failing to mention it at all.

Months before signing the face covering ban, Tokayev said during a speech that it was preferable for women to wear “clothes in the national style” rather than “face-concealing black robes.”

In 2016, then-Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambayev a controversial billboard campaign that promoted the traditional Kyrgyz elechek – a hair cap and long white fabric wrapped around the head like a turban — over the niqab. Billboards juxtaposed an image of women wearing all-encompassing veils with one of smiling Kyrgyz elders wearing the elechek — kimeshek in Kazakh. The text on the billboard read: “My poor people, where are we headed?”

Tajikistan’s ban on Islamic clothing last year referred to clothing “alien to the national culture.”

The law merely formalized repression of all “alien” Islamic clothing, including the hijab, that has de facto been systemic for many years.

But while Tajikistan has had success in cracking down on headscarves that the government views as foreign, it has done so without dialogue, arguably increasing the distance between the authoritarian regime of President Emomali Rahmon and an increasingly pious society.

In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have both experienced political and social volatility in recent times, such mandated strict policies would likely cause more pushback.

While the niqab raises questions about compatibility with secular society, the hijab is already very much a part of it.

In Kazakh cities like Astana and Almaty, hijab-wearing girls and young women can regularly be seen walking and taking selfies with uncovered women, or attending football games with their partners.

Indeed, secularists often argue that, despite obvious employment discrimination against devout Muslims – Kazakh women committed to wearing hijabs typically cannot do so while working government jobs, – the hijab’s drift into popularity has been far too seamless.

That feeling was summed up by fallout online in 2023 after several female “influencers” with followings of 500,000 and more on social media platforms simultaneously covered up and began espousing religious lifestyles while retaining their penchant for glamour and luxury.

“The wish of several million-follower bloggers to completely change their lifestyles could of course be coincidental. But from the outside it looks like events are part of a marketing strategy,” said Gulnara Bazhkenova, the editor-in-chief of the news website, Orda.

When asked at a press conference about allegations that the influencers had received payments, a representative of the government-endorsed Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kazakhstan (SAMK) advised journalists against spreading “unsubstantiated claims” since doing so is “contrary to Sharia and Kazakh traditions.” In the past, the SAMK, a government-loyal body, has backed the government’s ban on the niqab, while pushing back against the idea that the hijab is a foreign implant.

The saga with the influencers explains why confrontations over the hijab in Central Asia have sticking power, and why for some of the region’s countries, government messaging about preferences for “national” clothes are unlikely to offer an effective counter.

The hijab is powerful not only as a symbol of devoutness and global Islamic identity.

At the same time, Central Asia’s secular governments, already perturbed about the rise of religious observance and political Islam among their populations, will not want to cede further ground to religiously conservative communities, who may in the future seek to challenge secular agendas.

Given this conflict of interests, standoffs over the hijab will likely continue, and replete with risk if mishandled.

Chris Rickleton is a journalist living in Almaty. Previously, he was a Central Asia correspondent for RFE/RL and the Central Asia bureau chief for Agence France-Presse. He is a graduate of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.