Nozim Kalandrov, Reuters

On September 9, Tajikistan celebrated 24 years as an independent state. The celebrations, however, were overshadowed by a pair of gun-battles on September 4, the short-lived mutiny of Deputy Defense Minister Abduhalim Nazarzoda, and a manhunt ending with Nazarzoda’s death in the remote Romit Gorge. The final scenes of the Tajik government’s sustained crackdown on the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT), the country’s most prominent opposition party, bracketed this flare of violence in Dushanbe.

Viewed together these events form just another chapter in Tajikistan’s uneasy history navigating the post-Soviet space – especially with regard to the role of religion in society.

Islam and Communism in Central Asia

Islam began migrating into Central Asia as early as the the late 7th century. In 751, the Abbasid Caliphate won a hard-fought battle against China’s Tang Dynasty in the Talas river valley, in modern Kyrgyzstan, for influence in the region. The battle marked the end of China’s westward expansion and although the Abbasid Caliphate’s empire eventually eroded away, Islam remained and grew to become the region’s dominant religion.

Central Asia was incorporated into Imperial Russia throughout the 19th century, and while there was some debate about how to manage newly acquired, Muslim-majority territories, Imperial Russia settled on general tolerance. This began to change in 1918 with the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism. One of the defining facets of Marxist-Leninist communist ideology, which guided the Soviet Union, was atheism. In the early years, pragmatism dominated and Islam was tolerated, but after Lenin’s death Stalin guided Soviet policy toward condemnation. Mosques were closed and the practice of Islam, which the Soviets could not entirely eradicate, was brought under state regulation. Informal religious circles remained, in some cases tolerated and enabled by local authorities, but Islam receded from public life.

The Soviet Union ruled Central Asia via proxies – local elites who bought into, and were enriched by, the Soviet system. They were largely interested in perpetuating that system, even as the dusk of the Soviet Union approached. In the case of Tajikistan, the local communist elite had been recruited from the northern region called Leninobod during the Soviet period and now called Sughd, as well as from the southern region of Khatlon, particularly the city of Kulob. Not incidentally, President Emomali Rahmon hails from Khatlon.

Glasnost and Civil War

Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost opened the door for political pluralism in Tajikistan. By 1990, there were four non-Marxist parties in the country, including the Democratic Party and the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT). Adeeb Khalid, in his 2007 book Islam After Communism, writes that at “after seven decades of Soviet rule, the main goal [of the IRPT] was to restore the basics of Islam to society and to begin the process of bringing Islamic knowledge and Islamic values back to public life.”

John Heathershaw and David Montgomery note in their recent Chatham House report The Myth of Post-Soviet Muslim Radicalization in the Central Asian Republics that the IRPT has roots as far back as 1973. The party, “rather than forming a parallel and clandestine movement” was characterized by members and leaders who “often also took roles in new mosques and state religious authorities.”

The resurgence of religion in public sparked by glasnost, however, was a direct threat to the communists in power. In November 1991, Tajikistan held a presidential election. While the four non-Marxist parties initially offered separate candidates, in the end they all endorsed Davlat Khudonazarov, the Democratic Party’s candidate. Still, the opposition lost the election and the communist party’s candidate, Rahmon Nabiyev, took power. Protests grew in intensity until the Tajik Civil War broke out in early 1992.

Khalid notes that the two sides of the war were framed by many as “fundamentalists” against “communists,” but the war is better understood as “neo-Soviets” against “the opposition.”

The struggle was over control of resources and of the mechanisms of power; the conflict was based on the regional networks of power that had emerged in the Soviet era. The alliances between the networks were profoundly pragmatic, and the parameters of the conflict were rooted squarely in the crisis of the end of the Soviet Union. The ulama [Islamic scholars] emerged as major players in the war, but neither in their ideology nor in their conduct did they have much in common with Islamists in the rest of the Muslim world.

The IRPT formed a major part of the opposition, but worked alongside what Khalid categorizes as “reformist secular nationalists” as well as the Ismailis, who hailed from the country’s western region. Those in the opposition were defined not by Islamism, but by their exclusion from Soviet era power circles that continued to control Dushanbe even after the death of the Soviet Union.

An IRPT spokesman insisted in the mid-1990s that the party “had no intention of establishing a theocratic fundamentalist state in Tajikistan, and that they would never strive to impose Islamic ideology…” The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) recently wrote that the party “steadfastly pursued a moderate line and never aligned itself with radical groups present in Tajikistan.” Another recent report, from Eurasianet, says the IRPT’s current leader Muhiddin Kabiri “pursued a liberal and accommodating line in relations with the government, drawing the criticism of those who believed he should have taken more hardline positions.” In the 18 years since the peace accord was reached, the IRPT has served peacefully inside a secular government which has been bent, all along, on its destruction.

Nazarzoda and the IRPT

On September 16, the government of Tajikistan announced that the rumors were true: Abduhalim Nazarzoda was dead, his supporters killed or captured. The same day, authorities detained 13 leading members of the IRPT. The prosecutor-general’s office characterized the arrests of deputy IRPT chairman, Mahmadali Hayit, and the first deputy, Saidumar Khusaini, as being to “prevent new terrorist acts and … crimes of an extremist nature.” The authorities explicitly linked the IRPT to Nazarzoda and Nazarzoda to the two gun-battles near Dushanbe in early September, therefore accusing the IRPT of being behind the violence.

Nazarzoda’s relation to the IRPT is tangential – though heavily emphasized by government accounts. Reportedly, he spent most of the war in Kazakhstan, as a businessman. Shortly after the peace accord was signed, Nazarzoda allegedly rode back into Tajikistan at the head of a column of SUVs and donated 10 jeeps to Said Abdulloh Nuri, who led the IRPT. Nuri appointed him the commander of the 25th battalion of former opposition fighters which was to be integrated with government forces as part of the reconciliation process. According to RFE/RL, Nazarzoda’s appointment didn’t make him many friends in the opposition. While they fought a war, he had spent five years making money in Kazakhstan. But “Nazarzoda, who was also made a colonel, never looked back.”

Nazarzoda, RFE/RL wrote after the confirmation of his death, “seemed to have everything going for him.” In January 2014 he was promoted to deputy defense minister after seven years heading the Defense Ministry’s military security services and two years as a deputy commander of the ground forces. According to Tajik law, members of the military cannot be part of political parties, so Nazarzoda renounced his IRPT membership years ago.

Ultimately, it looks like Nazarzoda was used by the government as a prop to accompany the coup de grace against the IRPT. In the 1990s, the Tajik government encouraged the West to view its civil war as a conflict between “communists” and “fundamentalists.” This banked on the West’s fear of Islamic fundamentalism – which incidentally ignored the fact that the West had used Islamic fundamentalists as weapons against communism during the Cold War.

The Tajik government encourages the West to view the current troubles as the “government” against “extremists.” The players have changed names but the theme remains the same, capitalizing on Western fears – now usually embodied by the Islamic State – to protect the establishment in Dushanbe.

Among the “myths” explored by Heathershaw and Montgomery in their Chatham House report is that of the idea that “to Islamicize is to radicalize.” They comment that there is a “lack of evidence for the putative relationship between Islamicization and radicalization,” and that “throughout the region, governments have sought to associate all political opposition with increasing Islamic radicalization, reflected in general signs of Islamicization.” Put another way: All political opposition is viewed as radical, and increasing piety and conservatism in society (also seen, in Western countries), is ipso facto evidence of opposition.

In the end, the government of Tajikistan has waged a slow war against the IRPT, not because it is a radical Islamic movement bent on the description of the secular state, but because it represents a threat to the entrenched neo-Soviet leadership in Dushanbe.