From Hujum to Hijab: A Century of Dress Law in Uzbekistan

In 1927, Communist Party activists in Uzbekistan staged public meetings where women took off their veils and threw them on bonfires. In 2015, police in Tashkent were detaining women at a bazaar for wearing a headscarf. In 2021, parliament finally dropped the clause that had made that possible.

Across roughly a century, the state has legislated what Uzbek women wear in public in both directions, and each time it's said the same thing: this is for progress, or for security, or for the secular state. The clothes changed. The assumption that the government gets a say didn't.

8 March 1927: the "attack"

Hujum means "attack" or "assault" in Uzbek, and the Party chose the word on purpose. The campaign opened on International Women's Day, 8 March 1927, organised largely through the Communist Party's women's department, the Zhenotdel. Its target was the paranji, the long robe worn over the head, together with the chachvon, a stiff face veil woven from horsehair.

For the Party, the veil stood for everything it wanted gone from Central Asia: seclusion, arranged marriages, women kept out of schools and wage work. Some women unveiled by choice; historians have also documented pressure, and cases where it was far worse than pressure.

It's worth being precise about what kind of instrument this was. The hujum was a political campaign driven by the Party, not a single statute banning the veil. The law came in around it.

The legal scaffolding: "crimes of custom"

By the late 1920s, Soviet law in Uzbekistan had a category for offences it saw as rooted in the traditional way of life. A 1930 article by the Soviet jurist S. Iakopov, reprinted in the Seventeen Moments in Soviet History archive, lays out the Uzbek penal code's provisions:

up to five years in prison for forcing a woman into marriage, "especially by way of kalym" (bride price);
up to five years for abducting a woman to marry her against her will;
up to five years for anyone who married "without having first dissolved his former marriage", which is to say polygamy;
criminal liability for marrying off girls who hadn't reached marriageable age.

These weren't dead letters. Iakopov reports 248 kalym charges in Uzbek courts in 1928 alone.

Polygamy has stayed illegal ever since. Notice, though, what this code did and didn't do. It punished the men and families who arranged marriages. It didn't make wearing the paranji an offence.

The counter-campaign, and a number to handle carefully

Unveiling provoked a violent backlash. Women who removed the paranji were attacked, and many were killed. Historians' research points mostly to husbands, relatives and men from the women's own communities, not strangers.

How many? The figure that recurs in the academic literature is around 2,500 women killed in connection with unveiling between 1927 and 1930. Treat it as what it is: a scholarly estimate reconstructed from incomplete records, not a count. The contemporary Soviet numbers were lower and partial. Iakopov's article, for instance, records 203 cases of "anti-feminist murder" in Uzbekistan in 1928 and 165 in the first half of 1929. Official statistics from that period rarely captured everything, which is one reason historians' figures run higher.

The state's legal response is the telling part. Historian Marianne Kamp, in her study "Femicide as Terrorism", shows how the authorities moved these killings out of the category of everyday crime and into "terrorism" and "counter-revolution", treating them as attacks on Soviet power itself. Iakopov dates a decision of 16 February 1930 that made murders committed in opposition to women's emancipation classifiable as counter-revolutionary crimes, with the harshest penalties that implied. Kamp's argument is that the killings were often deliberate, meant to show that the community, not the state, decided what women did.

Douglas Northrop's Veiled Empire takes a longer view: by forcing the question, the Party turned the paranji into a symbol of Uzbek identity it hadn't quite been before.

1998: the pendulum swings the other way

Seventy years later, the same country was worried about the opposite. Independent Uzbekistan's Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organisations of 1 May 1998 contained, in Article 14, a line that would shape the next two decades: citizens, other than clergy of religious organisations, could not appear in public places in "cult" or ritual attire.

The law didn't define ritual attire. Human Rights Watch, reporting in 1999, noted the vagueness and quoted testimony that officials treated dress as ritual only when the dress and scarf were solid black, a rule that appears nowhere in the text. The Code of Administrative Responsibility was amended the same month to back it up, with fines of five to ten times the minimum monthly wage or up to fifteen days' administrative arrest.

HRW also documented students expelled in 1998 from Tashkent institutes, including the Institute of Oriental Studies and the Pediatric Medical Institute, after their institutions adopted dress rules aimed at headscarves. The government's stated rationale throughout was secularism and the fight against religious extremism.

Enforcement came in waves. In June 2015, RFE/RL reported that a "deveiling" drive that had started in the Ferghana Valley had reached Tashkent: police detained women in hijab at the Quyluk bazaar, released those who agreed to uncover "after a conversation", and passed those who refused to the counter-terrorism department, which called in husbands or fathers. Even after the reforms began, Forum 18 reported a Tashkent schoolgirl summoned by police in 2020 over wearing a hijab to school and, according to her family, added to a police "preventive register" in December 2021.

The face-covering fine

On 31 October 2023 Uzbekistan added Article 184-4 to its Administrative Code, which fines appearing in public places in a way that prevents identification. The text never mentions religious dress, but in practice it targets face veils such as the niqab. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2025 issue update reports that it has also been applied to men with beards.

And beards?

There's no law against beards in Uzbekistan, although USCIRF reports enforcement pressure on bearded men, including under Article 184-4. Human Rights Watch made that point directly in 2023. Yet the US State Department's 2021 religious freedom report cites RFE/RL on police in Angren summoning dozens of practising Muslim men that June and shaving their beards, and HRW recorded men in Tashkent in May 2022 saying police threatened them with fifteen days' arrest unless they shaved. The authorities denied a campaign; according to human rights defenders cited by the State Department, some officials said men had been asked to shave so they'd match their ID photos.

2021: the clause comes out

A new version of the religion law, ZRU-699, passed the Legislative Chamber on 4 May 2021, was approved by the Senate on 26 June and was signed by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev on 5 July 2021. The ban on appearing in public in religious clothing was gone.

Wearing a headscarf on a Tashkent street is now plainly legal. Full face covering is a different matter, and it is fined under Article 184-4 (see above). But the new law also left it to public institutions to set clothing rules for their own employees and students, and that's where the argument moved.

Schools are the sharpest case. On 3 September 2021, education authorities issued a decision that the State Department described as allowing schoolgirls to wear skullcaps and Islamic headdress. What it meant in practice was narrower. CABAR.asia reported in November 2022 that the education ministry still described hijabs as prohibited in schools under its internal regulations, while allowing skullcaps and light-coloured headscarves tied at the back of the neck, in line with what the education minister of the time had announced. Officials justified the line by pointing out that Uzbekistan is a secular state in which religion is separate from the state.

It hasn't settled. A July 2024 opinion column in The Diplomat reported complaints from teachers in the Jizzakh and Syrdarya regions who said district education officials had pressed them to remove their hijabs or face dismissal, and argued that some officials were still relying on the repealed Article 14. It's a complaint, not a court finding, but it shows how an old rule can outlive its repeal inside an institution.

What a visitor needs from this

Very little, legally. There's no dress law for tourists, and no rule about covering your hair on the street. The headscarf you're asked to wear at a working mosque is a custom of that place, not a state requirement; the practical side is covered under what to wear in Uzbekistan, and this list of working mosques tells you where the stricter expectations apply.

What the history does explain is the variety you'll see in a single Tashkent metro carriage: hijabs, loose scarves, bare heads, older women in the headscarf knotted at the back. Each of those styles has, at some point in the last hundred years, been the one the state preferred.

Sources

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