Postcard from Bishkek

The Kashful Mahjub or Unveiling the Veiled –  an early treatise on Sufism - by Ali bin Uthman al-Hujwiri. Tomorrow evening marks the start of Ramadan – probably, it all depends on the sighting of the new moon and whereas some Muslims are happy to calculate the date on the basis of astronomical data, in Muslim circles this is […]

Yesterday, when I left the office to go down to the hotel, my accountant still hadn’t arrived.  That’s not unusual because on Mondays she has to visit the banks to collect some paperwork and I assumed that she had gone there on her way to work. When I got back to the office in the […]

Last year we saw calls from leaders of the Muslim community for the faithful to refrain from participating in the celebrations as they bear no relation to Islam … nor to traditional Kyrgyz culture.  As it happens, the call was more or less ignored and the festivities progressed as usual. As the New Year Celebrations […]

Today is the second of the St, George’s Day of 2013.  It’s actually St. Yuri’s Day, but Yuri is one of the Russian equivalents of George. In the Orthodox calendar, Russians commemorate two St. George’s Day: the first in the Spring falls on April 23rd – as in the West – but there is a […]

Sometimes you see references to Kyrgyzstan as a Muslim country but, technically, according to the constitution, it is a secular state and it is probably better to describe the country as “predominantly Muslim”. The majority of the population – possibly as much as 80% – probably consider themselves as Muslim but for many people it […]

One of the oldest forms of tourism is the Pilgrimage: a journey or search of moral or spiritual significance, typically a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to one’s beliefs and faith. Its a growing aspect of tourism with the numbers of people involved continuing to rise.  For example, just 39 of the most […]

We all like the sunshine, which cheers us up and makes the world seem a better place. When I first came to Kyrgyzstan, I was promised something like three hundred days of sunshine a year.  We never seem, however, to make it and that was probably an exaggeration.  Indeed, I once read that there are […]

In Russia, today is Andrei Rublev Day … dedicated to the memory of the famous fifteenth century icon painter. We don’t know much about his life.  We don’t know, for example, where or when he was born, (it is assumed that it was in the 1940s),  we do know that he died in Moscow on […]

In the Orthodox Church, every day of the week is dedicated to the memory of certain events, holidays, and dedicated to one or more of the saints.   According to Orthodox Tradition, this is St. Thomas’ Week. The name refers to the incident in the John’s Gospel when, following his crucifixion and Resurrection, Jesus appears to […]

Language is not static but changes with usage over the period of time with new words being coined, whilst other are “borrowed” from foreign languages.  Some words are replaced or simply dropped from common usage and others are transformed and given new meanings.  Thanks particularly to the internet, we are going through a period of […]