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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
The Sunni branch of Islam has a 1,200-year-old tradition among the
sedentary population of Central Asia, including the Tajiks. A small
minority group, the Pamiris, are members of a much smaller denomination of
Shia Islam, Ismailism, which first won adherents in Central Asia in the
early tenth century. Despite persecution, Ismailism has survived in the
remote Pamir Mountains.
During the course of seven decades of political control, Soviet policy
makers were unable to eradicate the Islamic tradition, despite repeated
attempts to do so. The harshest of the Soviet anti-Islamic campaigns
occurred from the late 1920s to the late 1930s as part of a unionwide
drive against religion in general. In this period, many Muslim
functionaries were killed, and religious instruction and observance were
curtailed sharply. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941,
official policy toward Islam moderated. One of the changes that ensued was
the establishment in 1943 of an officially sanctioned Islamic hierarchy
for Central Asia, the Muslim Board of Central Asia. Together with three
similar organizations for other regions of the Soviet Union having large
Muslim populations, this administration was controlled by the Kremlin,
which required loyalty from religious officials. Although its
administrative personnel and structure were inadequate to serve the needs
of the Muslim inhabitants of the region, the administration made possible
the legal existence of some Islamic institutions, as well as the
activities of religious functionaries, a small number of mosques, and
religious instruction at two seminaries in Uzbekistan.
In the early 1960s, the Khrushchev regime escalated anti-Islamic
propaganda. Then, on several occasions in the 1970s and 1980s, the Kremlin
leadership called for renewed efforts to combat religion, including Islam.
Typically, such campaigns included conversion of mosques to secular use;
attempts to reidentify traditional Islamic-linked customs with nationalism
rather than religion; and propaganda linking Islam to backwardness,
superstition, and bigotry. Official hostility toward Islam grew in 1979
with Soviet military involvement in nearby Afghanistan and the increasing
assertiveness of Islamic revivalists in several countries. From that time
through the early post-Soviet era, some officials in Moscow and in
Tajikistan warned of an extremist Islamic menace, often on the basis of
limited or distorted evidence. Despite all these efforts, Islam remained
an important part of the identity of the Tajiks and other Muslim peoples
of Tajikistan through the end of the Soviet era and the first years of
independence.
Identification with Islam as an integral part of life is shared by
urban and rural, old and young, and educated and uneducated Tajiks. The
role that the faith plays in the lives of individuals varies considerably,
however. For some Tajiks, Islam is more important as an intrinsic part of
their cultural heritage than as a religion in the usual sense, and some
Tajiks are not religious at all.
In any case, Tajiks have disproved the standard Soviet assertion that
the urbanized industrial labor force and the educated population had
little to do with a "remnant of a bygone era" such as Islam. A
noteworthy development in the late Soviet and early independence eras was
increased interest, especially among young people, in the substance of
Islamic doctrine. In the post-Soviet era, Islam became an important
element in the nationalist arguments of certain Tajik intellectuals.
Islam survived in Tajikistan in widely varied forms because of the
strength of an indigenous folk Islam quite apart from the
Soviet-sanctioned Islamic administration. Long before the Soviet era,
rural Central Asians, including inhabitants of what became Tajikistan, had
access to their own holy places. There were also small, local religious
schools and individuals within their communities who were venerated for
religious knowledge and piety. These elements sustained religion in the
countryside, independent of outside events. Under Soviet regimes, Tajiks
used the substantial remainder of this rural, popular Islam to continue at
least some aspects of the teaching and practice of their faith after the
activities of urban-based Islamic institutions were curtailed. Folk Islam
also played an important role in the survival of Islam among the urban
population. One form of this popular Islam is Sufism--often described as
Islamic mysticism and practiced by individuals in a variety of ways. The
most important form of Sufism in Tajikistan is the Naqshbandiyya, a Sufi
order with followers as far away as India and Malaysia. Besides Sufism,
other forms of popular Islam are associated with local cults and holy
places or with individuals whose knowledge or personal qualities have made
them influential.
By late 1989, the Gorbachev regime's increased tolerance of religion
began to affect the practices of Islam and Russian Orthodoxy. Religious
instruction increased. New mosques opened. Religious observance became
more open, and participation increased. New Islamic spokesmen emerged in
Tajikistan and elsewhere in Central Asia. The authority of the official,
Tashkent-based Muslim Board of Central Asia crumbled in Tajikistan.
Tajikistan acquired its own seminary in Dushanbe, ending its reliance on
the administration's two seminaries in Uzbekistan.
By 1990 the Muslim Board's chief official in Dushanbe, the senior qadi
, Hajji Akbar Turajonzoda (in office 1988-92), had become an independent
public figure with a broad following. In the factional political battle
that followed independence, Turajonzoda criticized the communist
hard-liners and supported political reform and official recognition of the
importance of Islam in Tajikistani society. At the same time, he
repeatedly denied hard-liners' accusations that he sought the
establishment of an Islamic government in Tajikistan. After the
hard-liners' victory in the civil war at the end of 1992, Turajonzoda fled
Dushanbe and was charged with treason.
Muslims in Tajikistan also organized politically in the early 1990s. In
1990, as citizens in many parts of the Soviet Union were forming their own
civic organizations, Muslims from various parts of the union organized the
Islamic Rebirth Party (IRP; see Political Parties, this ch.). By the early
1990s, the growth of mass political involvement among Central Asian
Muslims led all political parties--including the Communist Party of
Tajikistan--to take into account the Muslim heritage of the vast majority
of Tajikistan's inhabitants.
Islam also played a key political role for the regime in power in the
early 1990s. The communist old guard evoked domestic and international
fears that fundamentalist Muslims would destabilize the Tajikistani
government when that message was expedient in fortifying the hard-liners'
position against opposition forces in the civil war. However, the Nabiyev
regime also was willing to represent itself as an ally of Iran's Islamic
republic while depicting the Tajik opposition as unfaithful Muslims.
Data as of March 1996
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