Word: tadzhikistan
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This fall, Professor of Anthropology C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky and Ahmed Ali Askarov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, plan to excavate a site in the Ferghana Valley in the Republic of Tadzhikistan...
...startling display of religious assertiveness took place at the height of the revolt against Moscow's rule that broke out three weeks ago in Tadzhikistan, perhaps the most ardently Islamic of the 15 Soviet republics. For the Tadzhiks who forced the soldiers to observe their demonstration of piety, the moment represented a vindication of their faith, long suppressed under the official Soviet policy of atheism. But for Soviet journalists who took in the scene, the moment may have confirmed a nightmare...
...Dushanbe protesters last month demanded that Islam be declared the official religion of Tadzhikistan...
...religious functions were often viewed with suspicion by the Muslim laity. As a result, a network of "parallel" mosques sprang up across the Asian republics, where Muslim believers practiced their religion without official imprimatur. In Uzbekistan an undetermined number of Muslims have joined mystical Sufi sects. In Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan authorities have recently become concerned about the spread of groups espousing Wahhabism, the puritanical sect of the Sunni branch of Islam that first emerged in Saudi Arabia in the 18th century...
...more sinister view of the riots was provided by a Russian intellectual resident in Tadzhikistan. He told TIME last week that the violence was deliberately fomented by a group of young radicals within the republic's government who want to give the area an Islamic character. Some extreme elements, he says, have been calling bluntly for the establishment of an Islamic republic. The intellectual reported that all non-Tadzhiks in the republic are anxious to leave and, as he put it, "everyone is terrified" of what will happen with the departure of some 7,000 Soviet soldiers who arrived...