“Tengrism (editor: in Kyrgyz tengirchilik) in Kyrgyzstan is a concept which is well known and it is going through a revival process nowadays.”

I think that’s over-idealised. Every now and then there is talk about creating a ‘Tengrist national religion’ or ‘national spirituality’ for KG. But like this whole Manas ideology, it is artificial and based on something dead or reduced to folklore.

The real religious dynamic in KG today is one of a frontline between Protestantism (the ideology promoted by the Dajjal’s neo-colonial oppressors and their local compradores) and Islam (the anti-imperialist resistance and liberation force).

“This is the same with the nomads today. In the nomadic culture, when religion comes, gives money to men to earn money, it destroys the whole thing, the whole relationship between people. (…) I met these people who have this experience, who lost the meaning of the live. There is a character in my film, the man who is paid by a group of religious extremists, who have money. They send him to make war.”

IMO, there is no more real nomadism in KG since the early USSR years. What she and many Western tourists call ‘nomadism’ is in fact seasonal transhumance whereby people live in villages of PGTs during the winter months and go to the mountains in summer. Besides that, I don’t agree that ‘nomadism’ is being threatened by ‘religious extremists’. It is rather swept away by rapacious capitalism.

Reg. “They (religious extremists) send him to make war (for money)“ Does she means the IMU? It’s a popular thought that the IMU guerrillas only fought for the money. Well, it’s wrong. Maybe most local liberal NGOs only exist for the sale of fishing for grants. But most Islamic militants (IMU and others) are sincere about their beliefs and definitely driven by anger about what is happening in the region.

“I am very sensitive to the way the women are treated in the whole world.

So am I and those who think like me but then it depends from what perspective you say that. Because that’s the problem: you have these Western women who are indeed well-meaning in their sensitivity about the way women are treated in the whole world. Some of them end up in KG or AF wanting to do something for the women there. The do-gooders industry is full of them. Often, they create more of a mess than they solve. Mostly they don’t understand that local women have other priorities and other definitions of ‘emancipation’ than to become a copy (or more likley a parody) of an emancipated European woman.