The Central Asian nation of Tajikistan is majority Muslim, but its government recently launched a crackdown against Islamic headscarves and long beards for men, on the grounds that such attire is “alien to Tajik culture.”
New interviews with Tajik Muslims show the government is pursuing this policy with gusto, causing headaches for American officials who want to build a closer relationship with Tajikistan.
Radio Free Europe (RFE) reported on Sunday that the crackdown on Muslim attire has been effective. One Tajik Muslim interviewed by the outlet explained that he was arrested, fined about $18, and held for three days because he had a long beard – and he is now required to send weekly selfies to the police, to prove that he remains clean-shaven.
RFE noted that the Law on Traditions and Ceremonies does not explicitly outlaw beards, but the authorities have still found reasons to detain men and force them to shave. A passport official bluntly admitted that male applicants are told to shave their beards and “reported to higher authorities,” whether or not they comply.
“When I visited a doctor last month, I was stopped at the door by a staff member and told to adjust my head scarf so that my jaw and neck were visible,” a Muslim woman explained, making the ironic point that Tajikistan is almost as forceful as Iran in enforcing headscarf laws, just in the opposite direction.
“I still wear my head scarf, but I choose bright colors, floral patterns, or scarves with sequins,” she added, noting that plain white and black headscarves are frowned upon by the authorities.
Tajikistan started out by banning the hijab, the mandatory Islamic head covering for women, at government facilities and universities. In 2024, it officially amended its Law on Traditions and Ceremonies to ban clothing deemed incompatible with national culture – a restriction widely understood to focus on Islamic attire.
The law also explicitly prohibited children from celebrating the Muslim holidays of Ramadan and Eid al-Adha, banned festive celebrations and public decorations by Muslims returning from the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and limited the size of wedding ceremonies, which tend to be large affairs for Muslims.
Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rahmon, who has been in power since 1992, said the law was necessary to “protect the original values of national culture, prevent superstition and fanaticism, curb extravagance in celebrations and ceremonies, elevate the spirituality of the Tajik people, and protect the rights and freedoms of children, fostering their education in the spirit of humanism and patriotism.”
Before passing the law, Rahmon denounced “foreign dress” as a form of political and religious extremism, intended to show that the wearer is “superior to others.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) denounced the law soon after it was passed in 2024. The U.S. State Department has classified Tajikistan as a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) for religious freedom since 2016.
“The Tajik government, undeterred by the repeated CPC designations, continues to find new ways to further restrict religious freedom, as evident by its tightening of the already repressive 2007 traditions law,” said USCIRF Vice Chair Eric Ueland.
“While the State Department importantly designates Tajikistan as a CPC, naming and shaming is evidently not enough. The designation will only be effective if accompanied by actions, such as targeted sanctions or other consequences,” Ueland added.
Even before the 2024 law took effect, Tajik authorities were arresting women with headscarves and men with Muslim-style beards. USCIRF published an updated report on religious freedom in Tajikistan in May 2026 that found the situation has gotten much worse, with aggressive enforcement of the Law on Traditions and Ceremonies that seemed primarily intended to reinforce Rahmon’s authoritarian rule, rather than to protect Tajik culture.
USCIRF noted that Rahmon essentially has his own state religion, a “particular interpretation of Hanafi Sunni Islam,” and his government is hostile to all others.
Hanafism is among the largest schools of Sunni Muslim religious law. Rahmon’s defenders argue that his embrace of a tailored version of Hanafism is a necessary defense against the incursion of extremist brands of Islam, particularly Salafism, the strict ideology embraced by Sunni Muslim terrorists.
Rahmon essentially believes that his more “tolerant” and secular brand of Islam is part of Tajikistan’s culture and he is militantly intolerant of other religious ideologies. While critics of the approach describe it as incompatible with Western notions of religious freedom, Tajikistan faces heightened threats from ideologies such as Salafism, sharing a border with the Taliban’s Afghanistan.
The Biden administration did not follow USCIRF’s advice to impose sanctions on Tajikistan, and the Trump administration has not done so either, in part because the U.S. has strengthened ties with Tajikistan to pull it away from Russia’s orbit and secure valuable cooperation on counter-terrorism.
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