Dinora Tukhtamurodova
When Kyrgyzstan became independent in 1991, it inherited almost nothing in the way of Islamic infrastructure. Seven decades of Soviet policy had reduced the country’s mosques from several hundred before the revolution to a small handful by the eve of the Second World War, and madrasas and Islamic courts had been dismantled even earlier. What followed after 1991 was one of the fastest religious building booms anywhere in the post-Soviet world, and it was financed overwhelmingly from abroad.
Within five years of independence, mosques in Kyrgyzstan already numbered more than 1,000. By 2016, the official count stood at 2,669, and the country had accumulated more Islamic educational institutions than Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan combined. The money behind this expansion came disproportionately from the Gulf. The Saudi-linked World Assembly of Muslim Youth alone is credited with financing roughly 200 mosques in Kyrgyzstan by 2017, and researchers surveying individual regions have found that close to two-thirds of local mosques trace their construction funds to Saudi Arabia, with most of the remainder from other Gulf states.
This amounts to a kind of outsourced religious education system: rather than the Kyrgyz state building its own capacity to train clergy, accredit madrasas, and set curricula after independence, that role was filled by foreign foundations, largely unaccountable to Bishkek, working through local intermediaries who arranged the transfers.
The consequences went beyond bricks and mortar. Kyrgyzstan’s Islamic tradition before the 1990s was predominantly Hanafi and shaped by local Sufi practice. Researchers studying the post-independence period have documented a marked shift toward stricter Salafi and Wahhabi teachings in many newly built mosques and madrasas, introduced through foreign-trained imams and foreign-funded curricula rather than any domestic religious debate. A generation of Kyrgyz Muslims was, in effect, educated into a version of Islam substantially different from their grandparents’, without the state ever deciding this should happen.
The government has spent the past three years trying, belatedly, to reassert control. A new Religion Law took effect in February 2025, replacing 2008 legislation. It requires madrasas to obtain operating permits from the State Commission on Religious Affairs, raises qualification requirements for religious teachers, and requires state permission for anyone seeking religious training abroad.
A parallel 2024 law on non-commercial organisations, modelled openly on Russia’s foreign-agents legislation, requires any group receiving foreign funding to register with the state. In April 2025, the State Commission was upgraded into a National Agency for Religious Affairs and Interethnic Relations with an expanded mandate.
Most recently, a draft law developed through mid-2026 specifically targets minors sent abroad to unaccredited foreign madrasas, citing documented cases of Kyrgyz children studying in religious schools with no oversight.
Officials frame this as a straightforward counter-extremism measure, and the security rationale is not invented. Unregistered religious schooling abroad, with no curriculum oversight and no accountability to any Kyrgyz institution, is a legitimate governance gap. But the response has been almost entirely regulatory and coercive: permits, registration, travel authorisation, and, according to monitors including Forum 18 and the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion, provisions broad enough to sweep in ordinary religious practice alongside genuine security threats.
Largely absent is any comparable investment in a credible domestic alternative: state-supported madrasas with transparent funding, a pipeline for training Kyrgyz religious teachers at home rather than abroad, and a public curriculum that could compete with, rather than simply restrict, what foreign-funded institutions have offered for three decades.
That is the deeper problem with treating this purely as a control question. Kyrgyzstan did not end up dependent on Gulf religious funding because Bishkek chose to outsource Islamic education. It ended up there because the state built nothing of its own when the vacuum was largest, and foreign money moved in to fill it.
Tightening permits can reduce the visibility of that dependency and give the state more leverage over who operates where. It does not, on its own, reduce the underlying reliance on outside actors to train clergy and fund religious infrastructure, since no comparable domestic system yet exists to replace what is being restricted.
Kyrgyzstan’s experience is a useful cautionary case for the wider region precisely because it shows both halves of the story: what happens when a government leaves religious education entirely to outside funders during a period of state weakness, and how difficult it is, three decades later, to claw back control through regulation alone.
A more durable answer would treat domestic capacity-building, not just foreign-funding oversight, as the actual objective. Absent that, Kyrgyzstan risks trading one dependency for another: less exposure to unaccountable foreign financing, but no closer to an Islamic education system genuinely its own.
Dinora Tukhtamurodova is a graduate in English Philology from Uzbekistan State World Languages University, researching education policy and religious and cultural governance in Central Asia.
