A Different Kind of “Scripture”: Women’s Access to Religious Knowledge Without the Written Word

It was on the second day of my fieldwork stay in a remote mountain village in Kyrgyzstan in 2004. My hostmother Nurgul and her best friend Ainura decided to show me an important site just outside the village. Together with my two hostsisters, nine and fourteen years old, we set off and twenty minutes later we arrived at an overgrown site: a field, the size of a football pitch, surrounded by what could have been the overgrown remainder of ruined walls. It was an awe-inspiring sight – the snowcapped Altai-mountains in the background, lush vegetation around us, an azure sky above, and not a sound to be heard. This was, my hostmother explained, the place where Manas, the Kyrgyz national hero, had built a fortress, and it was a sacred site. We circumambulated the site while listening to more stories about Kyrgyzstan’s hero of a thousand years ago. Then, just before we turned to walk home, my hostmother suggested to her friend to “read the Qur’an”. We squatted down in that typically Central Asian way and fell silent. Then Ainura cupped her hands in her lap and began to “read the Qur’an”. Only there was no Qur’an. And her recitation was in an Arabic I could not even remotely recognise. We finished our prayer with the “omeen” gesture and made our way home