On July 29, Tajikistan’s Committee on Faith, Regulation of Traditions, Celebrations, and Ceremonies advised Asia-Plus, the nation’s solely remaining main impartial media outlet, that the nation has adopted no legislation banning beards or the hijab, and that international assessments of Tajik spiritual freedom relaxation on unreliable sources. The denial adopted per week of Russian-language studies asserting that Dushanbe had outlawed hijabs, beards, and Arab-style costume.
The studies appear to run again to a single submit. On July 27, the Uzbek website Nuz.uz reported that Tajik authorities have been tightening restrictions on clothes handled as alien to Tajik tradition, singling out black hijabs. The report cited unnamed native sources. Lenta.ru, Trud, RBC, Fontanka, and retailers in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan republished the report inside a day, selling what seems to be an enforcement marketing campaign into a brand new legislation.Â
Nezavisimaya Gazeta traced the wording again additional, to an identical posts from Instagram accounts presenting themselves as authorized advisers that appeared a day earlier than Nuz.uz, and located no Tajik-language protection of the topic dated from 2026. Asia-Plus added that a number of retailers had credited the declare to Asia-Plus, which had printed nothing of the sort.
The committee’s denial is narrowly correct and largely inappropriate.Â
The legislation it declines to say handed two years in the past. Article 18 of the Regulation on the Ordering of Traditions, Celebrations, and Ceremonies, in drive since June 2024, bars importing, promoting, selling, and sporting in public any clothes that doesn’t correspond to nationwide tradition. It doesn’t outline what which means. As Asia-Plus famous when the legislation was first printed, it attaches no penalty to that clause both; the fines of as much as 100,000 somoni ($10,800) within the accompanying administrative code amendments cowl weddings, funerals, and pilgrimage rituals as an alternative.
That is the place police discretion is available in. RFE/RL reported on July 26 {that a} dealer in Bokhtar, held for 3 days over his beard and fined 180 somoni ($18), now sends officers a weekly {photograph} of his shaved face. Two different males stated police shaved them by drive and launched them with out cost. An official at a passport workplace in Khatlon stated candidates with beards are advised to shave, that every case is logged, and that the names go into month-to-month studies monitoring males’s facial hair and girls’s spiritual costume. In Could, the ladies’s affairs committee in Rudaki district posted images from a village-by-village marketing campaign steering ladies away from international clothes, then deleted them.
None of that required new laws. Tajikistan has been a U.S. Nation of Explicit Concern on spiritual freedom since 2016, and USCIRF’s Could nation replace discovered the 2024 legislation being enforced by means of campaigns towards costume deemed international to nationwide tradition, together with faculty visits in February. Police forcibly shaved some 13,000 males way back to 2015, when no clothes legislation existed in any respect. A prohibition that names neither the particular offense nor the punishment may be utilized by any officer and denied by any ministry.
The clothes guidelines are one piece of a a lot bigger combat. Dushanbe banned the Islamic Revival Social gathering of Tajikistan (IRPT) as an extremist group in 2015, handed life sentences to its leaders or pushed them into exile, and has since jailed journalists, attorneys, and bloggers on the identical expenses. The framing has paid off. Sharing the area’s longest border with Afghanistan has made Tajikistan a sturdy recipient of Western counterterrorism and border-security cash. As Edward Lemon of the Oxus Society argued, U.S. coaching helped construct a coercive equipment that Dushanbe then turned by itself residents, most visibly through the 2022 crackdown in Gorno-Badakhshan. Overstating the risk buys each funding and the latitude to make use of it at house.
Uzbekistan banned face coverings in 2023, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan adopted in 2025. Russian media retailers have amplified every of those measures since Moscow’s post-Crocus Corridor migration crackdown started, as a result of the story is helpful at house: proof for Russian audiences that the states supplying their labor migrants are policing their very own Muslims – and so ought to Moscow.
