“We Central Asians are Muslims, so we must all marry and have children. Our parents are supposed to choose our husbands, unlike Russian girls. They have to manage by themselves and they cannot always find one,” explained a Tajik girl from Dushanbe.

The family is at the center of Muslim society, and the relationship between spouses is prescribed in the Islamic family code, which is generally supposed to give men domination over their wives. In pre-revolutionary sedentary Central Asian families, each sex had distinct duties, women's cente…