Tajikistan

Religious History

Religion has been an important aspect of the social and political life of Tajikistan, a Central Asian nation north of Afghanistan, long before the creation of the modern nation-state. In the fourth century BCE, the armies of Alexander the Great helped establish the Greek kingdom of Bactria in Central Asia, bringing together Eastern and Western cultural influences. The Silk Road flowed through the area, carrying eastward Greek thought, Persian Zoroastrian and Manichean ideas, and later the teachings of Nestorian Christians. At the same time, Buddhist culture was travelling from India northward to Asia, and Chinese concepts were flowing west. Tajikistan and other parts of Central Asia were in the midst of this cultural ferment.

Islam came to the region in the seventh century CE from Persia in the southwest, bringing with it the ethnic people, language, and culture that became the Tajik tradition. Nearby Uzbekistan became the center of Central Asian Muslim culture, especially the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. The Mongol Empire in the 13th century seized political control of the region, though Islam survived, and in the 14th century the Mongol leaders became themselves Muslim, and Islam again thrived in Central Asia.

Most areas of Central Asia fell to Russian control in the latter half of the 19th century. At that time, most of Central Asia was administered together under the name of Russian Turkestan. The 1917 Russian Revolution emboldened the indigenous political leaders in the region to proclaim their freedom from Russian control, and in 1918 they proclaimed the Turkestan Independent Islamic Republic. Lenin and the new Communist government did not look kindly on the emergence of an independent state in what he regarded as part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and by 1925 the independence movement had been crushed. The nascent Turkestan was separated into different ethnic countries, which became the five republics of Soviet Central Asia.

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