Murat Abdumomynov

Murat Abdumomynov grew up in a world he describes simply as “ordinary.” He was a healthy twenty-year-old student, on track for a technical degree, more interested in motion than in reflection. He loved the speed of change in the early 1990s: flights to Almaty or Sochi felt glamorous, China was opening, and the streets were a marketplace where energy turned into cash. Then a single rupture reordered everything. “I was a completely healthy guy,” he says. “At the age of twenty I was attacked and injured.” The injury cost him his sight over time. The institute expelled him, “physically unable” to continue in that program, and the identity he had expected to inhabit closed like a door behind him. Losing vision also stripped away the background noise that had once filled his days. He talks about this with startling clarity and without self-pity:

Focus did not erase grief, but it gave him a tool. He began again, not at a desk but in the hustle of the bazaar, the first wave of “buy-and-sell” that people then called business. He opened what was possible: a sauna, a gym, two kebab shops, ice-cream outlets, whatever would move. A Tatar5 friend taught him the basics, how to start, where to rent, who to pay, and Murat passed that knowledge on to others. “The first law,” he would tell young people, “is not to work for anyone. The second is to start where you get pleasure and profit.” He registered his company when needed, bought patents when it was simple to do so, and built a life in motion. A different turn came in 1995 in Taraz, when he and a small group of friends met leaders of public organizations, old men, some war veterans, who told the young to look after the elderly and to build something for people like themselves. The meeting redirected Murat’s ambition from individual survival to collective purpose. They founded the Youth Society of Disabled People in Taraz to defend the interests of 16–35-year-olds who did not fit neatly into categories designed for children or pensioners. And then in 2005 they opened the same organization in Astana. Education, culture, leisure, sport, he repeats these four words as a refrain because they make a life. The organization would be the place where a newly injured 19-year-old could walk in and be told, like in a good supermarket, “Here are the services; choose what you need.”

The path was not linear. In the 2000s, after entrepreneurship programs shifted and opportunists multiplied, Murat was scammed. “It’s life experience,” he shrugs. “Good that I lost only money. Others lost shops, houses, cars.” Before that, he had already tasted the dizzying heights of quick wealth: in 1992 he and a friend made a million and then, as he says with disarming honesty, “drank for six months.” The emptiness that followed became an education of a different kind. He met an old man in his kebab shop who had no money for food and said he was preparing for Hajj6 . Murat assumed it was a con, this was the 90s, but he listened, gave him the meal, even added $500 for the journey, and asked that the man bring back zamzam7 water and a tasbih (prayer beads). The man returned the next day with a story of having once been one of the richest in Dushanbe and losing his soul to money. The encounter unsettled Murat. “We had everything,” he recalls of himself and his friends, “but inside there was emptiness.” Soon after, an imam told him plainly: “What you’re doing is temporary. You were made for charity.” Something shifted. Not a conversion moment with trumpets, more like a slow light dawning. He began to rebuild his days around discipline and faith.

Now his mornings start at four or five. Exercises. Qigong. Athletics. He studies Arabic in Braille —“a week ago I started reading” — because he wants to read the Qur’an in the original and because, as he puts it, so much of philosophy and medicine crossed into Arabic and radiated outward. By nine he is at work. At noon, if possible, he trains again. In the evenings he walks two hours, breathes, and clears the mind. He talks about burnout with a smile:

He meditates, recites zikr (a form of devotional remembrance), and resets priorities. Calmness is his strategy: “Only calmness in harmony. When you are calm, you achieve something.” The conditions around him are far from calm. He lists barriers with clinical precision. Meetings where all materials are on paper or slides but gadgets are banned, “like taking the wheelchair from a wheelchair user,” so he must wait for someone to whisper a summary in his ear. Grant programs that look open until you get to the collateral clause. Training schemes designed by “armchair experts” who have never sold a thing, consultants who lecture without taking questions, and an ecosystem that often funnels people into narrow roles, “plasterer, painter, shoemaker,” as if that were the full range of human capability. At official events, he notes the scheduled agenda for speeches for 15 minutes and in reality, minister 30 minutes, vice-minister 30, MP 30, department head 30 and when it comes to people with disabilities, they rush them and say that meeting time is over. “What is this if not discrimination? There is no quality dialog or debates to solve problems because we can’t always write our thoughts on paper.” The problem behind the problem, he says, is fragmentation: organizations divided by category — deaf, blind, general disability — each strong inside its fence, weak together. Unity would alter the terms of the conversation.

His answer is pragmatic and, in its way, radical. Make access to experiment easy again. Let people buy a simple sixmonth patent for 30,000 tenge and try a seasonal kiosk, a small rental, or a home service. If it works, extend it; if it fails, close and try again. “The state is still in profit,” he argues; the citizen learns without being crushed by compliance. He wants social entrepreneurship to move from token projects to production that matters: canned meat during winter culls, saline and disposables for neighboring health systems under strain, fast food that is actually fast nutrition. He believes the future belongs to mini-factories and robots, “They work at night; 1/100 error,” and to joint programs that put Qazaqstan on markets where there is real demand. This is how he thinks: from a blind man’s attention to detail to a strategist’s scale of imagination.

Yet the heart of his work sits closer to home. Murat organizes life-giving leisure for his members: cinema days, theater visits, pools, equestrian sessions. He insists this can be arranged for free through partnership if you approach businesses “through the prism of nobility.” He refuses to beg. Instead, he translates the language of profit into the language of meaning. “Your business brings joy, success, happiness, love to people,” he tells owners; “that is the best feeling.” When it works, and it often does, he watches people laugh, dance, sing; he sees energy return to bodies dulled by isolation. He calls this a business project too, an investment in people. And he is careful to model a discipline of giving without spectacle. “It’s not customary for us to advertise charity,” he says. “The poor know who helps.

There is, in his way of speaking, a constant negotiation between aqyl (mind), zhurek (heart), and qairat (will). He thinks hard about systems and incentives; he protects his spirit from bitterness with humor and faith; and he moves, even when the path is clogged, step by step. When he talks about money now, it is with a mature respect: “Successful people love money. They count it, talk to it, ask it to bring more.” But money has to be attached to a transcendental goal, or else it curdles into the emptiness he remembers too well. His advice to a young entrepreneur with a disability is crisp:

Murat’s identity has been rebuilt, not erased and redrawn but layered. He remains an entrepreneur, searching and testing, alert to demand. He is also a founder who has stepped above the swirl, a mediator who brings cinemas and circuses and swimming pools into view for people accustomed to being told “no.” He is a student starting fresh with dots under his fingers, learning letters his eyes cannot see. He is a believer who learned that generosity fills the jug with fresh water as you pour. He is a critic of bad design who still sits at the table and answers questions, even an hour late, because he had to wait for someone to read the slide aloud. He is a man who once partied away a million and now walks two hours each evening to quiet the mind.

The broader impact of this life is both measurable and intangible. Measurable in the 45–50 members served on a servicemodel basis, in the partnerships that open doors to public institutions free of charge, in the policy arguments sharpened around patents and accessible devices, in the scientific program he is assembling to study how physical activity changes health outcomes. Intangible in the way his calm resolves panic in a room; in the way he names his blindness with dignity, “the light is off,” and refuses the language of pity; in the way his insistence on joy reframes what inclusion can look like in Qazaqstan. To sit with Murat is to feel a quiet recalibration. He does not dramatize his losses or polish his victories. He speaks with the steadiness of someone who has learned to align mind, heart, and will, so that work is not merely survival but a form of moral coherence.

“Business is simply a person being businesslike in everything,” he says. In his narrative, that means counting receipts, yes, but also counting smiles at the end of a cinema night; arguing about cash registers and also about dignity; learning Arabic dots and also teaching a city to open its doors. The light that went out in his eyes turned on, elsewhere, in his purpose. And the city is brighter for it.