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Tajikistan
Islam
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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