COLUMN ONE : Taking an Eager Step Back : In Central Asia, young women are embracing arranged marriages, other traditions and rejecting Soviet-style equality. Resurgent Islam feeds backlash that some say poses serious risks.

As far as Makhbube Ashurova is concerned, it was emancipation that sent her mother to an early grave.

The 20-year-old teaching student recalls a woman who rose before the sun to prepare the day’s bread for her husband and seven children, then tended a courtyard garden before setting off for the factory to do her part in the Soviet drive for industrial prowess.

At night, Ashurova recalls, her mother cooked, fed the children, then served her husband, his parents and his friends. While the household slept, she did the cleaning and the laundry.

“I don’t remember my mother well. She died more than 10 years ago. But I remember she was always tired and had too much to do,” says Ashurova, who expects to be married next year if her father can arrange a suitable union.

“I don’t think women should have to go to work. I want to live a more traditional life and just take care of my husband and family,” she says, concluding that “the Soviet style of living was never really appropriate here.”

Indeed, the rousing messages of fulfillment from labor and a new feminist ideal--promoted by Communist revolutionaries who stalked the backwaters of the Soviet empire in the 1920s--did little for the poor and isolated women of Central Asia.

Seven decades of socialist brainwashing on the benefits of liberation never broke the grip of tradition in the rural areas, and poverty and resurgent Islam are now whittling away at the few advances made by urban women before the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

In this ancient oasis along the fabled Silk Road, which has always had a window on the outside world, women are retreating to the veiled and isolated existence of their forebears and writing off the Soviet notion of emancipation as just another assault on a culture that has endured centuries of invasion.

But human rights champions warn that those disillusioned by the dual burdens of work and family may be condemning themselves to a new and insurmountable form of enslavement if they abandon the few inroads women made into the power structure under Soviet rule.

They fear the strange hybrid of woman prepared for a contemporary life but lured back to the clannish ways of another century may, if the traditional path leads to an unpleasant end, remember with regret that she once had other options.

Roza Mergenbayeva, a 40-year-old Muslim who made a shocking 1989 documentary on women driven to self-immolation, says she watches with trepidation as increasing numbers of young Central Asian women are drawn to the novelty of fundamentalist Islam.

“Those of us who believe know that the Islamic faith has never been practiced here in a pure form. It has always been our own version,” says Mergenbayeva, who is also a wife and mother. “Not one of us believes that women are second-class citizens. Yet if fundamentalist influences from abroad succeed here, this will irreparably damage the rights of women.”

In the fertile ground of widespread poverty and post-Soviet confusion, Uzbeks and other peoples of predominantly Muslim Central Asia have welcomed the aid flooding in from supportive Islamic countries.

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In the three years since Uzbekistan proclaimed independence from the shattered Soviet Union, 15,000 mosques and madrassahs --segregated schools for religious education--have been built in Uzbekistan by foreign Islamic benefactors.

The spiritual aid comes at a time when many Uzbeks, especially women, have been thrown into poverty by the closure of bankrupt textile mills and the shrinking of a vital cotton crop as the sources of water diverted to the desert plantations dry up.

Uzbekistan, where nearly half of Central Asia’s 50 million people live, is among the world’s most richly endowed countries in gold, copper, minerals and natural gas.

But investments to tap those resources have been slow in coming to this country that was tethered to Russia for 75 years and cut off from its historic trading partners. What income has been generated since independence has largely been spent to strengthen the omnipresent police and security forces supporting ex-Communist President Islam Karimov.

“The country is faced with a huge unemployment problem, especially in the agrarian sector, and women as a rule are the first to lose their jobs,” says Vitaly A. Ponomarev, a Central Asian specialist with the Panorama social analysis agency in Moscow. “Coupled with the strong pull of Islam, we are seeing some broad societal changes.”

In the Namangan region, he notes, public buses now have separate entrances and seating areas for women and men. Yet out of a habit developed in the socialist age, couples chat casually together in public--an activity Islam would prohibit--while they wait for the bus.

Young women such as Ashurova and her friend, Firuza Kudratova, exhibit the seemingly contradictory values that give rise to unease in defenders of a woman’s right to live and work outside the rigid confines of the traditional family.

Kudratova will marry an agricultural student from the Silk Road city of Samarkand this month--a prospect she looks to with innocent delight. She has seen her fiance once, when presented to his family for inspection before the final bidding for her dowry.

“This is as it should be,” Kudratova says of the decision her parents made about whom she should marry.

Yet she expresses interest in completing her teaching degree and working after graduation--decisions that will be in the hands of her husband’s family.

By Uzbek tradition, brides move in with the groom’s parents and serve as handmaidens to their mothers-in-law as well as to their husbands. Whether the new family is satisfied with her reflects on the family of the bride.

“Many mothers-in-law are deliberately cruel to the young wives because they remember how they were treated when they arrived in the home,” says Mergenbayeva, adding that most of the 300 self-immolation deaths recorded in 1990, the last year she was able to research the cases, were new brides driven to despair.

In preparing her film, which was supported by Uzbek Communist Party officials in the heyday of glasnost , Mergenbayeva interviewed more than 250 family members of female suicide victims and survivors of botched immolations.

“I found women desperate to talk about these torments they had been forced all their lives to keep inside,” the filmmaker says.

“For too many women, suicide ends up being their only means of protest,” she continues, adding that the country’s poverty and drift toward fundamentalism can only increase the pressures on women.

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While the filmmaker was able to research the suicides of five years ago when her work was considered politically correct, she says that under the current government the subject is taboo.

“Nothing has changed for the better, so we can only assume the situation has become more critical,” Mergenbayeva says. “But you cannot even inquire about self-immolation nowadays. No one wants to discuss or even acknowledge any social problems or deficiencies--anything that would reflect badly on the leadership.”

Other critics of the Karimov regime who spoke on condition they not be identified blamed his policies for the deteriorating economic conditions feeding the dependence on foreign strains of Islam.

In the poorest and most rural areas, such as the Fergana Valley and the Namangan district, parents have been eagerly sending their children to study the Koran and partake of the meals and supplies that accompany the free Islamic education.

Throughout the country, the old practices of arranged marriages and staggering dowries have resumed, and village women tend to cover their hair and faces with gauzy white veils whenever they leave their walled and windowless dwellings.

This backlash has met with little opposition in the hinterlands, but it has alarmed the 2 million ethnic Russians and hundreds of thousands of other Uzbek citizens who do not share the Muslim faith or the Turkish-based Uzbek language.

“The situation for all citizens of Uzbekistan has deteriorated sharply since the collapse of the Soviet Union, without exception, but the strengthening of Islam and the rise of Uzbek nationalism have made it particularly difficult for the large number of Russian speakers, especially non-Uzbek women who have a more European orientation in their lifestyles,” says a Russian diplomat based in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital.

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“Russian-speaking women have been migrating in alarming numbers,” he says, noting that most of the 500,000 emigres from Uzbekistan to Russia since independence have been educated, urban women.

Although less than two-thirds of Uzbekistan’s population of 22 million are ethnic Uzbeks, the Uzbek language will become the sole tongue permitted in public or official discussions and documents in 1997.

This is forcing ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, Caucasus nationalities and others accustomed to communicating in Russian to learn what during the Soviet era was a language limited to backward regions.

Mindful of the strong security forces and Karimov’s harsh treatment of dissenters, few Uzbek citizens will openly criticize the official policies infringing on their rights.

Six political dissidents were sentenced to prison in April after show trials condemned by the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki organization as reminiscent of Soviet-style repressions. State-run television reported five men were executed in early May for organized crime activities, and secret police shadow suspected opponents of the Karimov regime.

But women accustomed to the limited freedoms they won during the Communist era intimate fear of the years ahead.

“There are still opportunities for women in the cities, but only for those who know the state language,” says Zhana Grigoryan, an Uzbek citizen of Russian-Armenian descent who works as a flight attendant for the state airline, Uzbekistan Airways. “My command of Uzbek is only 50-50, so I must learn it to keep my job.”

Fatima Sharipova, a stylishly dressed travel agent with the state tourism agency in Bukhara, likewise says she prefers to maintain European manners despite her country’s collective step back to pre-Soviet customs.

But she acknowledges that the strengthening influence of Uzbekistan’s fundamentalist neighbors could one day bring an Islamic regime to power in this country, closing out all choice.

“I don’t feel pressure to live a traditional lifestyle. Right now it is more of a freedom than a pressure. Those who want to wear veils can and do,” she says.

Her hopeful smile fades, though, when asked what happens to women like herself if the freedom one day becomes the law:

“All we can do is hope that doesn’t happen.”