r/Uzbekistan • u/UnrecognizableUzbek • 16h ago
history politics | tarix va siyosat How pedophilia was part of the culture: bacha bazi in pre-revolutionary Central Asia
Bacha bazi was a practice of sexually exploiting young boys, often around 11-12 years old. They were dressed up as girls in wigs, silk and makeup, made to dance for grown men. Then the men who paid for the show took the boy for the night and fucked him. That's it. That's the "art". It's child rape with extra steps.
I picked photos from different cities on purpose, so nobody can say "that was just one city". No, it was everywhere, and unfortunately, it is still there in Afghanistan.
Bacha bazi wasn't just a matter of a few isolated performances. Eugene Schuyler (1876) describes dancing boys as a recognized institution across settled Central Asia. He wrote, that men of rank commonly kept a bacha, while men with fewer resources pooled their money to maintain one. Schuyler, Vereshchagin, Count Pahlen, Mstislavsky, Ostroumov, Lykoshin, all of them wrote about it as a normal, visible part of life in Central Asia.
Mstislavsky (1900) describes a village party where a 16-year-old looked 11-12, was dressed as a woman, and grown men fought over whom he'd bow to. The crowd called him "she" the whole time.
The most disgusting part is how "pious" everyone was. In 1884, Tashkent qazis produced a ruling saying bacha-play was against sharia. But Mstislavsky writes, that some qazis kept a bacha themselves, in secret. He also tells of a Samarkand official who raged about hanging all bachas and bacha-lovers, then ten minutes later happily took a bacha into his household while hearing a complaint.
According to Ostroumov (1896), there was an anecdote popular in Turkestan, set at the court of the Kokand khan. A bacha-lover is sentenced to death. To save himself, he claims he knows a secret of how to grow pure gold from "seeds" (semen). The khan, greedy, postpones the execution. When sowing time comes, the man says: "I'm a filthy sinner (slept with bacha), nothing will grow from my sowing. Let one of your courtiers do it while I supervise". The khan orders his courtiers to do it, one by one. Not a single one is clean of the same sin. So the condemned man says: "Then let the khan sow it himself, for the good of the people". And the khan has to admit he is a sinner too.
Notice who sits next to the boys: the "honored guests". The rich and the respected. It was essentially systematized version of nation-wide Epstein Island.
It's in our own literature too. Take, for example, Abdulla Qodiriy's "Mehrobdan chayon", chapter 19 ("Iflos bir moziy", "A filthy past"). The future imam Abdurahmon is sent to Bukhara to study at his uncle's madrasa. He's a "silliqqina" boy and that's exactly why they lusted after him. The uncle locks the gate every night, but merchants lure him out through the window with a rope. He becomes their "Abdurahmoncha", dressed as a 16-year-old girl, serving wine and dancing. When it's discovered, the madrasa students take their turn. Abdurahmoncha becomes popular and gains a lot of "clients". But when the beard grows, the "market goes bad" and customers disappear, so he turns to a third group of clients in teahouses. Then he repents, comes back to Kokand and becomes imam.
Lykoshin (1916) documented murders over bachas in Tashkent in the 1890s. Rich men took two bachas to a garden outside the city, raped them, and one of the drunk men got killed by his friends in a fight over who would get a boy.
Look at the pattern. The qazis banned it on paper and kept a bacha at home. The official demanded executions and then took a boy into his house. The jokes people told said the khan himself wouldn't pass the test. The future imam was a former bacha and Qodiriy wrote about it over a century ago. Everyone knew. Nobody stopped it, because the people who could stop it were the customers. Doesn't this resemble the case in Khorezm in which pedophile officials who raped orphaned children received sentences of just three years? I don't advocate for execution, no. The law already imposes harsh penalties for child rape and the penalties were tightened even more just several days ago. The problem is that the law is not always enforced in Uzbekistan. That's... that's just sad.
