NewsGram: Religion Identity Governance TJ hijab beards miniskirts

NewsGram (India), authored by Dhruv Sharma and updated 25 November 2025 (dated 22 November 2025), is a human-rights feature examining Tajikistan’s restrictions on hijabs, beards and “non-traditional clothing” in regional context. The article reports that over 95% of Tajikistan’s population is Muslim and that President Emomali Rahmon, in power since the mid-1990s after the civil war, has framed bans as defence of Tajik identity against “alien clothing” associated with foreign religious influence. The report states that a ban on “foreign clothing” in public institutions was first introduced in 2007 and expanded via the 2018 “Guidebook of Recommended Outfits in Tajikistan”; the latest law, passed in June 2024, formally bans religious markers in public spaces — clothes, public displays and proclamations. The document reports enforcement practices: police shaving men’s beards at checkpoints, questioning women in headscarves, demolishing mosques, monitoring marketplaces for “foreign dress”, and imposing fines on parents for dressing daughters in headscarves. A 2015 quote from Rahmon calling foreign clothes “a sign of poor education” is cited. The article finds comparable but less severe controls elsewhere in Central Asia — Kazakhstan (niqab discouraged), Uzbekistan (hijab in education, partly loosened post-2017), Kyrgyzstan (no formal ban, anti-”Arabisation” campaigns), Turkmenistan (tight informal pressure on hijabs) — and draws parallels with France, Iran and India. No internal human-rights-body citations; the piece is analytical and relies on government statements and regional context.