ABSTRACT
Tajikistan is a small country with some six million inhabitants, located with the Ferghana Valley in the north and bordering on Uzbekistan, Kyrgyztan China and Afghanistan in the south. The Tajiks are of Persian origin since the millennia before Christ and the language is Persian. Arabs invaded in the eighth century and stayed for a couple of centuries before the Mongols invaded and ruled for several more centuries. Islam came early, with the Persians, and was the upperclass religion in cities like Samarkand and Bukhara (in today’s Uzbekistan). Before the Russians arrived and made the Bukhara khanate a vassal state in the nineteenth century, Uzbeks exercised strong influence on Tajiks. The many Tajik insurrections that followed were severely crushed by the Russians. The Tajiks became part of Turkestan in 1924 and became a Soviet Republic in 1929.
