Fined for a Child's Religious Lessons: Articles 47 and 229-2

On 20 February 2025, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signed a law that moved the legal risk of informal religious teaching in Uzbekistan from the teacher to the family. Since then, a mother who sends her ten-year-old to a neighbour for Quran lessons can be fined 5 to 10 base calculation values, even if the neighbour charges nothing and teaches nothing but the Arabic alphabet.

The teacher was already exposed. What changed in 2025 is that parents are now on the hook too.

Two laws, two targets

Uzbekistan now handles unlicensed religious teaching with two separate provisions, and they're easy to mix up.

Criminal Code Article 229-2 is aimed at the teacher. Forum 18's translation of it punishes "teaching religious beliefs without specialised religious education and without permission from the central organ of a [registered] religious organisation, as well as teaching religious beliefs privately." The penalties run from a fine of 50 to 100 base calculation values (BCV) through community service, corrective labour and restricted freedom, up to three years in prison. Forum 18 also notes that officials usually reach for Administrative Code Article 241, which covers the same conduct with a fine of 5 to 10 BCV or up to 15 days' detention, rather than the criminal article.

Administrative Liability Code Article 47 is aimed at the parent. It's the article on failing to meet obligations for bringing up and educating children, and the 2025 law added a new offence to it: unlawfully involving a child in religious education. According to Gazeta.uz and Kun.uz, "unlawful" means sending a child to an unregistered or unlicensed religious institution, or handing their religious education to someone without formal religious training and without authorisation from the central body of a registered religious organisation. For Muslims, that central body is the Muslim Board of Uzbekistan.

The same law amended the Law on Guarantees of the Rights of the Child, which, as Forum 18 quotes it, now bars "illegal involvement of a child in the process of religious education by parents or their guardians".

What the fines are worth today

Fines are set in BCV, so their value in som rises whenever the government raises the base value. The figures below use 440,000 som, the BCV in force from 1 September 2026 under presidential decree PF-115. When the law was signed in February 2025 the BCV was 375,000 som, which is why Gazeta.uz reported the first-offence fine as 1.875 to 3.75 million som.

Provision	Who it targets	Penalty (BCV)	At 440,000 som
Admin. Code Art. 47, first offence	Parent or guardian	5–10 BCV	2.2–4.4 million som
Art. 47, repeat within a year	Parent or guardian	10–15 BCV or up to 15 days' arrest	4.4–6.6 million som
Admin. Code Art. 241	Teacher	5–10 BCV or up to 15 days' detention	2.2–4.4 million som
Criminal Code Art. 229-2	Teacher	50–100 BCV, or other sanctions up to 3 years' prison	22–44 million som

For scale, Forum 18 pointed out that 10 BCV was already more than a month's average wage when the law was drafted.

It was softer than the first draft

The bill passed its first reading on 25 June 2024. The Legislative Chamber put the text online the next day and allowed one week of public comment. By 2 July, Forum 18 counted 6,490 comments, which it described as almost universally hostile. One commenter asked what kind of parents wouldn't give their children a religious education.

That draft, as Forum 18 reported it in July 2024, proposed 10 to 15 BCV for a first offence and 15 to 25 BCV for a repeat. The version the Senate approved on 16 August 2024, and the president signed six months later, came down to 5 to 10 and 10 to 15. So the public pushback didn't stop the law, but the final fines were smaller than the ones first proposed.

The government's case

Officials made three arguments, and they're worth setting out in their own terms.

The first is scale. Gazeta.uz reported that 2,457 administrative violations linked to unlawful religious education were recorded in 2021–2023, 1,479 of them involving study in a hujra, an informal home classroom, and that about 60% of the students involved were minors. Deputy Speaker Odiljon Tojiyev told Kun.uz that authorities had found 9,705 children in unauthorised religious settings over five years, some left with teachers for months and cut off from ordinary schooling.

The second is safety. Senator Farakhat Sadullayeva argued that children in illegal religious schools risk radicalisation and also physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Deputy Interior Minister Ramazon Ashrapov, quoted by Forum 18, said the law would stop children falling under the influence of terrorist groups.

The third is framing. The law's stated aim is to protect the child's right to education and "harmonious personal development." And officials insist that parents teaching their own children at home remains, in Kun.uz's report, "an inviolable right."

Where a child can legally study, then

Not many places. The 2021 Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organisations, in force since 6 July 2021, defines religious education carried out privately outside licensed religious schools as illegal religious activity. Public schools don't teach religion beyond general classes on world religions and national culture.

The State Department's 2023 religious freedom report counts 15 religious educational organisations, including ten madrasas that provide secondary education. Fee-based Arabic and Quran courses exist, but they've been limited to adults since June 2018. The report also records that some official imams said they couldn't teach Islam to children because the law forbids it. Forum 18 goes further and says there's no legal religious education for children except for a few selected by the authorities.

Is that a gap the state intends to fill? The State Department says the government describes its own religious education as an antidote to what it calls less "enlightened" Islam, and it ran 28 Quran teaching centres with 4,440 students in 2023. For a Muslim-majority country of around 39 million, that's a narrow channel, and it's the main reason hujras exist at all.

This isn't the first ban

The hujra is older than the Uzbek republic. In 1927, according to historian Eren Tasar's study of Soviet-era madrasas, the Uzbek statistics office counted 21,183 pupils in 1,362 "old method" religious schools. A 1928 decree ordered those schools and the madrasas liquidated, which pushed Islamic teaching into homes and back rooms.

It never fully disappeared. After the Second World War, Moscow let the Central Asian muftiate run a tiny official system: the Mir-i Arab madrasa in Bukhara reopened in 1945 as the only legal madrasa in the USSR, an elementary madrasa operated at Barak Khan in Tashkent from 1949 to 1964, and an Islamic institute opened in Tashkent in 1971. Alongside them, Tasar found plenty of archival and oral evidence of unofficial hujras teaching Quran recitation and Arabic grammar.

So the 2025 law is a new tool against a very old workaround. Our view: the officials' concern about unsupervised teachers is real, but fining parents without widening legal options for children is likely to push hujras further out of sight rather than end them. Tasar's history suggests the same thing happened last time.

How critics see it

Forum 18 describes the law as part of a wider crackdown on informal religious teaching since 2021, citing, among other cases, a 2021 raid on a mosque in which a man teaching five boys aged 8 to 15 to read the Quran was jailed for 15 days under Article 241. The State Department's 2023 report says US embassy officials repeatedly raised "the continuing inability" of parents to educate their children in their faith. In March 2025, when Forum 18 reported on the law taking effect, it hadn't yet found any case of a parent fined under it.

If you're visiting, none of this touches you directly. You'll see children at mosques with their families (the law restricts classes, not worship), and our guide to working mosques covers how to visit respectfully. Bringing religious books into the country is governed by a different set of rules, covered in our piece on religious literature.

Sources

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.