Paper abstract:

This paper focuses on Islamic shrine pilgrimage in contemporary Kazakhstan and why shrine pilgrims tend to be predominantly women. In Kazakhstan, shrines are an esteemed legacy of Sufism and, after targeted repression and institutionalization during the Soviet era, are emerging as an important site of nation building. However, despite its historical and contemporary importance, most studies on Islamic shrine pilgrimage have overlooked a crucial aspect: the predominance of women as shrine pilgrims. In Kazakhstan, women are often the majority of shrine pilgrims, and yet few studies focus on why Islamic shrine pilgrimage is particularly popular among women, and none specifically examine gendered shrine pilgrimage in the modern Kazakhstani context. In this paper, I look into two dynamics prevalent in modern Kazakhstani shrine pilgrimage which, I argue, can explain why the practice is consistently female predominant. The first dynamic is how pilgrims come in two analytical categories: pilgrims with urgent motivations, such as those who make pilgrimage specifically to ask for a child, and pilgrims with general motivations, such as those who enjoy history or ask for general wellbeing. The second dynamic is how Kazakhstani shrine pilgrimage is dominated by two major groups of pilgrims: specialized tour groups called ‘caravans’ that only pilgrimize shrines, and which overwhelmingly consist of female pilgrims, and family pilgrims, which also tend to consist of more women than men. I ask how these dynamics originate from within Kazakhstani history and society and how they precipitate in female dominated shrine pilgrimage in Kazakhstan. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Aisha Bibi shrine in Taraz, south Kazakhstan in the summer of 2021.