Religion and History in Tajikistan

Tajikistan's religious identity is rooted in a Persian-speaking Islamic culture that once looked to Bukhara and Samarkand, the great centers of Central Asian Islamic learning, before Soviet-era borders separated Tajiks from those cities and folded them into a new republic. The great majority of Tajiks are Sunni Muslim of the Hanafi school, while a distinct Ismaili Shia minority, followers of the Aga Khan rather than of mainstream Sunni or Twelver authority, is concentrated among the Pamiri peoples of the mountainous Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region in the east.

Seventy years of Soviet suppression of religious practice were followed, after independence in 1991, by a brutal civil war from 1992 to 1997 in which an Islamist-led opposition coalition fought the secular post-Soviet government for control of the new state. The war ended in a negotiated power-sharing peace accord rather than outright victory for either side, but it left the government of Tajikistan acutely wary of organized Islam operating outside state channels, a wariness that has shaped religious policy in the decades since.