Mukadas’s struggle: veils and modernity in Kyrgyzstan

When Mukadas Kadirova changed her mode of dress as an act of religious devotion, she and her family - the self-proclaimed (former) epitome of modern, Soviet citizenry - were confronted with conflicting normative systems. Was Mukadas still a modern woman? Was the family? And what was modernity anyway, they asked: socialist ideals, capitalist consumption, or pious women fashionably tying their headscarves? This paper, based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan, examines Mukadas's religious transformation; her attempts to map this alteration onto the shifting discursive and material realities of the post-Soviet period; and her play with variant notions of modernity. Mukadas's struggle ultimately shows that while modernity is often characterized by a linear, forward-looking gaze, experiences of modernity are not always marked by this progressive 'onward' sense. Modernity can be simultaneously past, present, and future.