An Olympic champion, a popular singer, and a Western tourist in Tashkent claim they were recently targeted in Uzbekistan's ongoing campaign against long beards.
The sportsman -- who won a gold medal at the Paris Olympic Games this summer -- told RFE/RL that he and several other athletes who wore full beards were ordered to trim their facial hair ahead of a video call with their country's president, Shavkat Mirziyoev.
The Olympian, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the call took place when the athletes were still in France.
Uzbek media reported that amid the authorities' persistent clampdown on beards, several young men were recently tried in administrative courts for "the concealment of one's face in public that prevents identification."
Many others have had their beards forcibly shaven at police stations at the instruction of police.
Records of those cases obtained by RFE/RL show that most of the men affected were ordinary Muslims, social activists, and artists.
According to a social media post by a German tourist, foreigners can also fall victim to the Uzbek police's hunt for bearded men.
The tourist said police officers stopped him on the streets during a recent visit to the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, and ordered him to shave his long beard, which the man said had taken him three years to grow.
"They took me to the police station without giving any explanation," the man said. "They told me that either I have to shave my beard there myself, or that they would shave it."
RFE/RL cannot verify the tourist's claim. But similar accounts by dozens of local men have been widely reported in Uzbekistan in recent years, as human rights groups accuse the predominantly Muslim Central Asian country of backsliding on the modest reforms in religious freedom that it had made when Mirziyoev took office in 2016.
Police were accused of rounding up bearded young men in Tashkent and the eastern city of Namangan and forcibly shaving off their beards. Authorities have denied the claims.
Authorities in Central Asian countries often interpret a beard as a display of Islamic piety.
An official at the National Television and Radio Company told RFE/RL on condition of anonymity that there is an unofficial ban on performers appearing on TV with a beard. The ban applies both to state and private channels, he said.
In a recent case, pop singer Shohjahon Juraev was barred from taking part in a song contest on the Zor TV channel in July because of his beard, the official said.
"Juraev then cleanly shaved off his beard and got a place in the show as a panel member," the official added.
During a concert, Juraev told his fans that he had to shave off his facial hair because artists who grow their beards aren't allowed to appear on television.
The singer's images on social media show that in the past he sported a short beard and a mustache from time to time before shaving it off.
What The Law Says
Uzbekistan does not have a law that explicitly bans beards.
Police justify the beard crackdown with a new law that prohibits any facial covering that prevents a person from being identified. The law came into force in October 2023 as part of a package of amendments to the Administrative Responsibility Code.
Breaching the law is considered a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to 5.1 million soms (about $400). The average monthly salary in Uzbekistan is just about 4.9 million soms ($390), according to official figures.
Those who refuse to follow police officers' instructions to shave off their beards often face additional charges of hooliganism and resisting police.
Mirziyoev was initially credited with moving away from his predecessor Islam Karimov's notorious clampdown on religious freedoms.
Mirziyoev released hundreds of people imprisoned for their peaceful religious beliefs during the Karimov era and removed thousands of others from a so-called security-service blacklist of potential religious extremists.
In recent years, however, the Uzbek government has been criticized for failing to deliver on its promises of granting more religious freedom to its citizens.
In a report last year, Human Rights Watch stated that the Uzbek government continued to restrict religious freedom with authorities still considering the legitimate expression of religious sentiment to be "extremism."
