The Muslim Terror Within: Tajikistan’s Islamophobic Legislation

Michael Dhanoya

PhD Candidate in Criminology

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Tajikistan has become the latest country to place prohibitions on Muslims.

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Previously, various nations around the globe have made headlines for curtailing the right to freedom of religious expression for their minority Muslim populations. What makes the edicts passed in Tajikistan on the 19^th of June, 2024 all the more newsworthy is that 99% of the nation’s population are Muslim. This article discusses the recent laws passed in Tajikistan and how such decrees form part of a wider discussion on how Islamophobia is a manifestation of cultural racism.

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The Law

The legislation passed in Tajikistan prohibits the wearing of the hijab. Those found in contravention are subject to a fine ranging from 7,920 Tajikistani Somoni (approximately £590) for ordinary members of the public, to 54,000 Tajikistani Somoni (approximately £4,000) for government officials and 57,600 Tajikistani Somoni (approximately £4,200) for those who are deemed to have religious authority. Moreover, participation in certain Islamic celebrations has also been prohibited, including Muslim children being prevented from collecting money gifted to them during the Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr festivals. Predictably, these legal edicts have been poorly received. Indeed, the Council on American-Islamic Relations declared the laws a violation of religious freedom that has no place in a nation that respects the rights of its people.

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Sadly, the prohibitions are merely the latest in a long series of laws that have targeted the country’s Muslims during the thirty-year presidential reign of Emomali Rahmon. Indeed, the past decades have been marked by the nation’s government imposing an unofficial ban on the wearing of the hijab, evident through the police raiding marketplaces to prevent the selling and purchasing of the religious garb. Seeking to transform the unsanctioned prohibition into a legislative decree, the government officially banned the wearing of the hijab in educational and public institutions in 2007 and 2009, respectively. Continuing to highlight his disdain for the hijab, Rahmon took to referring to the traditional Islamic garment as a ‘sign of poor education’ in 2015.

Yet, this is merely the tip of the iceberg.

Numerous visible symbols of Islam have historically been subject to government sanctions. It has been illegal for children to attend mosques since 2011. Furthermore, approximately 2,000 mosques were closed in 2017 alone. Moreover, the performance of Islamic ritual prayers is officially restricted to specific locations throughout the country. Such sanctions followed a purge on 160 businesses that sold hijabs in 2016, a year that also saw police forcibly shaving off the beards of 13,000 Muslim men. Other blatant expressions of anti-Islamic fascism have been chronicled. Muslims often name their children after revered figures from Islamic history. Yet, parents have been encouraged to abandon giving their children Arab names, in favour of Tajik names. Aside from the hijab, Tajikistan’s government has also discouraged its populace from wearing other Islamic garments. This is no better illustrated than by various government-endorsed promotional activities encouraging the wearing of traditional Tajik attire (including the publishing of a 376-page manual entitled ‘The Guidebook of Recommended Outfits in Tajikistan’ in 2018).

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The rationale behind outlawing various expressions of Muslim identity is two-fold. Firstly, Tajikistan’s government has declared itself engaged in a project to safeguard the nation’s pre-Islamic culture and values. Accordingly, the wearing of the hijab has been prohibited on the grounds of the Islamic garb being declared an ‘alien garment’. Secondly, Rahmon deems such measures a necessary element of protecting the state from the threat of militant Islamist extremism. Regarding the latter point, it has been reported that Sunni Muslim Jihadist groups, such as Islamic State-Khorasan Province, recruit from within Tajikistan. Indeed, the group took responsibility for the attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on the 22^nd of March, 2024. This act of terrorism was perpetrated by four men, three of whom were either Tajik in origin or nationals of the Central Asian nation.

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Islamophobia as Cultural Racism

The explicit targeting of Muslims entails that the laws are a clear act of Islamophobia. However, whilst Muslims are accustomed to experiencing this phenomenon at the hands of those believed to be non-Muslims, what makes the events discussed in this article all the more startling is that the perpetrators and victims belong to the same faith. Rahmon openly identifies as Muslim. Thus, Tajikistan’s latest legal edicts enrich notions of offender identity regarding the perpetration of Islamophobic hate. In short, Muslims can also perpetrate Islamophobia.

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One may question how this can be so.

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In response, it is important to acknowledge that racism is a multifaceted entity that can be applied to a variety of contexts. Thus, the concept ought not to be linked unwaveringly to notions of biological determinism alone, as it can also be associated with concepts of cultural or religious superiority. Indeed, cultural racism is a phenomenon that draws upon visible identifiers of cultural difference to justify manifestations of hostility and vilification circulated about and directed towards those considered as ‘other’. This implies that cultural racism can be perpetrated by one group of people against another if they hold different cultural values, irrespective of sharing a religious identity. Thus, Tajikistan’s latest decrees are a prime example of Islamophobia being a form of cultural racism.

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Rahmon’s desire to preserve Tajikistan’s historic cultural values and reference to the hijab as an ‘alien garment’ evidences that he deems the pre-Islamic social norms of the nation at risk of displacement due to the supposed ‘Islamisation’ of the country. Consequently, the visible symbols of Islam cause the President of Tajikistan to indirectly label the state’s Muslim-majority population as exhibitors of non-native and antagonistic cultural values. Moreover, by arguing the need to expunge visible markers of Muslim identity to safeguard national security against acts of terrorism, Rahmon is in danger of constructing a ‘normative truth’ at least at the governmental level (given that Muslims constitute a demographic majority in Tajikistan) that Muslims inherently endorse and engage in acts of violent extremism. Consequently, the Islamophobia inherent in Tajikistan’s latest crackdown on its Muslim community is a form of cultural racism perpetrated against visible signifiers of Muslim identity that seeks to frame members of said community not only as the ‘other’, but also, as the ‘terror within’.

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The Uncomfortable Truth

The argument of Islam being an alien presence that replaces the homogenous non-Muslim culture of a given state is nothing new. Indeed, various nations around the world are participating in a global drive to curb expressions of Islam, under the pretence of wishing to preserve their native (explicitly non-Muslim) worldviews. Such measures frame Islamophobia as a phenomenon that sees Muslims undergo the process of racialisation, albeit with notions of biological superiority being supplanted by notions of cultural superiority. Unsurprisingly, reports of Muslim communities undergoing this racialisation process typically emerge from those states where Muslims constitute a demographic minority, thereby contributing to the notion that followers of the Islamic faith are unwelcome in said nations. However, far from having to ‘go back to their own country’, Tajikistan is a predominantly Muslim state. They are in their own country. Thus, the fact that its citizenry undergoes the same process of racialisation reveals the uncomfortable truth…Muslims are not even welcome there.

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