After planting his crosshairs on Borat, a full five years after the release of the film that brought his country worldwide fame, outspoken Kazakhstani MP Bekbolat Tleukhan now has his sights on Charles Darwin.

As privately owned KTK television news explains, Tleukhan believes it is inconsistent to teach both religion and evolution, and has now called on Education Minister Bakhytzhan Zhumagulov to come off the fence on the entire affair. Tleukhan, a former deputy culture minister, insists the indecision is confusing Kazakhstani schoolchildren:

“Let decide once and for all, are we descended from monkeys or made from clay. We either get rid of religious educations or abandon the teachings of Darwin.”

As KTK points out, Tleukhan’s previous contribution to the education debate has been to militate for excluding the teaching of classical mythology on the grounds that this could “yield a negative influence on children’s perception of the world.” Earlier this year, he also demanded that authorities ban the use of a Russian literature textbook used in Kazakhstan, arguing in fabulously exotic terms that it could be used to justify the practices of Satanists and other reputedly dubious cults, such as the Baptists. Not having read the book, we must rely on Tleukhan’s testimony:

“The text is presented as unmitigated truth … First our children are being terrified by all manner of monsters, hobbits, punishment at the hands of all sort of evil, or not particularly benevolent, godly beings. Here, demons, mermaids and hobgoblins mingle with Cupid, Hymen, Zeus, Hera, vampires, Satan and the devils and so on. This gradually becomes propaganda for Christianity and paganism, all under the veil a biblical mythology."

To think that Kazakhstan’s national anthem could have been set to music composed by this gentleman. Back in 2001, Majlis deputies had called for scrapping the old Soviet-era tune with a jauntier ditty written by Tleukhan and set to a patriotic poem penned by President Nursultan Nazarbayev himself.
The president rejected the proposal, however, as Agence France-Presse reported at the time, saying he had written the poem "not for a hymn but at the command of my spirit, for the next generation with the aim of teaching them patriotism, love for our homeland."
For the sake of exhaustiveness, it is worth adding that the victims of Tleukhan’s ire have in the past also included Eurovision 2008 winner Dima Bilan of Russia. In 2006, he indignantly railed in parliament against the gaudiness of copybooks used by schoolchildren. Showing his colleagues the offending items, he complained:

“Here’s a history notebook … It has pictures of guns on it. And look here, this is a picture of Dima Bilan with the slogan “Your Idol.” What do we mean to teach our children with this stuff?”

A fair point there, perhaps. But this susceptibility to which Kazakh schoolchildren, not to say adults, are supposed to be so immensely prone appears to be a recurring feature of Tleukhan’s public statements. Expressed so quirkily, they reflect the unwittingly amusing paranoia of a single deputy, although at their core lies a commonly held fixation over what role the state should play in forging the consciousness of post-Soviet Central Asian societies.