Between Two Worlds: Being Muslim in Tashkent
At school I was too Muslim. At the mosque I was too Uzbekistan. I spent years feeling like I belonged nowhere.
There were exactly 4 Muslim families in Tashkent when I was growing up. We'd see each other at the one mosque — a converted office building on Mill Lane — and nod like survivors of the same quiet war.
At school, I was the kid who didn't eat the gelatin sweets at birthday parties. The one who disappeared during Ramadan lunch breaks. The one who had to explain, every single December, why there was no Christmas tree at home.
But the mosque wasn't refuge either. The aunties would whisper if my abaya wasn't perfect. Uncle Farooq once told my mother I was 'too British.' I was 13.
High school was the hardest. After 9/11, a kid in my English class asked if my mother was a terrorist. He said it casually, like asking about the weather. The teacher heard. She said nothing..
I want to tell you there was a dramatic turning point. There wasn't. It was slow. It was reading Surah Ad-Duha during a panic attack in my car and feeling my heartbeat slow. It was finding 3 Muslim students in my new job who laughed at the same jokes and prayed in the same study rooms.
It was realising that the Islam of the Tashkent aunties and the Islam I was building for myself could be different and both be real.
I'm 54 now. I work in technology. I pray five times a day — not because anyone is watching, but because those five pauses are the only times my brain goes quiet.
I stopped asking for permission to exist as both Uzbekistan and Muslim. I just existed. And it turns out, that's enough.