A mosque under construction in southern Tajikistan. CC BY-NC 2.0: Rohan Shenhav / Flickr. Some rights reserved.
A review of Transforming Tajikistan: State-building and Islam in Post-Soviet Central Asia by Helene Thibault.
Back in 2011, I met Mahmadali, a 38-year-old truck driver, on the outskirts of Dushanbe. He sported a clean-shaven face. Shortly after returning from Russia to his dingy Soviet-era apartment in Tajikistan’s capital city a few days earlier, Mahmadali had been stopped by police, taken to the local station, accused of being a “Wahhabi” (read: extremist) and threatened with repercussions if he did not shave off his beard. He duly went to the barber the next day. At that time, these were some of the first reports of such behaviour by Tajik police in the name of countering extremism. But in the years since, the practice has become more widespread. In 2016, for example, the chief of police in Khatlon region claimed to have “encouraged” 13,000 men to shave. Religion, for the government, is an essential part of national identity.
