QURGHON TEPPA, July 2, 2011, Asia-Plus — The Coordination Council of the Khatlon Law Enforcement Authorities met in Qurghon Teppa, the capital of Khatlon province on June 30 to discuss implementation of the Law on Freedom on Conscience and Religious Associations (Law on Religion) in the area.
Speaking at the meeting, the deputy head of the State Committee for National Security (SCNS)’s office in Khatlon, Nusratullo Mirzoyev, noted that 47 illegal religious schools with a total of 400 students have been discovered and shut down in the province over the past year.
According to him, one of the main reasons for appearance of followers of the banned religious groups such as Salafiya and Jamaati Tabligh in the country is poor knowledge of local imam-khatibs.
“Their poor knowledge of Islam and inactivity have allowed these organizations activating in our country,” said Mirzoyev, “There have been revealed cases, when these imam-khatibs were involved in sending young people to foreign religious schools.”
He, in particular, noted that imam-kahtib of mosque in the village of Hosilot in Vakhsh district, Ilhom Norqulov, had illegally taught Islamic studies to 50 young men in his house. He then selected the most active and sent them to his acquaintance in Roudaki district. “Those young men were taking training course in Roudaki district and after that they were sending them to religious school abroad,” noted the Khatlon senior security officer. “We have revealed illegal religious school in the village of Korvon in Roudaki district. More than 80 teenagers have been studying in that school, 66 of them are young men from Khatlon province.”
According to official data, 922 students from Khatlon province have been sent to study religious in foreign countries and 817 of them have returned home to date. Mirzoyev said 250 of the former students who returned home have already left the country again. He said officially they went to Russia and other CIS nations as labor migrants but nobody knows their real aims and destinations. “Who may guarantee that they will not return to the foreign religious schools? Unfortunately, local authorities have failed to provide them with jobs here, while to detain these young men is not the way out of the situation. It is necessary to provide them with jobs, we must help them.”
“If the Supreme Court had not banned the Salafi group Jamaati Tabligh we would had become witnesses of religious clashes in the country,” Mirzoyev stressed. According to him, all such groups are controlled from abroad and can be used for destabilization the situation in the country at any point.
Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service reports the Khatlon prosecutor Yusufjon Yusufzoda blamed the returnees” plight on the Khatlon Department of Social Affairs and the Department of Religious Affairs. He said the departments had not done enough to create jobs or education opportunities for the former students and that most of those who came back to Khatlon have nothing to do.
The meeting concluded that the creation of employment and education opportunities for returned students is the only way to keep them in the province and avoid their returning to Islamic countries or joining extremist religious movements.
According to RFE/RL’s Tajik Service, more than 1,000 young Tajiks studying at foreign madrasahs and Islamic universities returned home in recent months after President Emomali Rahmon warned that foreign religious schools are indoctrinating Tajik students with radical Islamic ideology.
