ABSTRACT
Two Tajik Ph.D. students at Moscow’s Institute of Asian Peoples asked a fellow Central Asian in a Moscow restaurant in the latter half of the 1960s why he was eating pork: “After all, you are a Muslim”. Most Muslims were thought to see in this a cultural and social, rather than a religious, issue, and there is evidence of Uzbeks and Tajiks living in mixed areas of Central Asian cities expressing resentment at having to inhale pork fumes from their neighbours’ kitchens.
