Tajiks

Page semi-protected
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
(Redirected from
Tajik people
)

Tajiks
Тоҷикон
تاجيکان
Tajiks
Total population
c.19–26 million
Regions with significant populations
Afghanistan8-15 million (2024)[1] [2]
Tajikistan~8,700,000 (2024)[3] [4]
Uzbekistan
    
~1,700,000 (2021)[5]
other, non-official, scholarly estimates are 8-12 million[6][7][8]
Russia~400,000[9]
Kyrgyzstan58,913[10]
United States52,000[a]
Kazakhstan50,121[12]
China39,642[13]
Ukraine4,255[14]
Languages
Persian (Dari and Tajik)
Secondary: Pashto, Russian, Uzbek
Religion
Vast majority Sunni Islam[15]
minority Shia Islam, Sufism, and others[16]
Related ethnic groups
Other Iranian peoples

Tajiks (

Pamiri languages.[19][20] In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are counted as a separate ethnic group.[21]

As a self-designation, the literary

Sassanid and early Islamic period.[24][22]

History

Bamiyan
, Afghanistan
Tajik man and woman in 19th century photos

The Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the

Farḡāna valley (Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan) and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i.e., the Pamir Mountains (Mountain Badaḵšān, in Tajikistan) and northeastern Afghanistan (Badaḵšān).[22] Historically, the ancient Tajiks were chiefly agriculturalists before the Arab Conquest of Iran.[25] While agriculture remained a stronghold, the Islamization of Iran also resulted in the rapid urbanization of historical Khorasan and Transoxiana that lasted until the devastating Mongolian invasion.[26] Several surviving ancient urban centers of the Tajik people include Samarkand, Bukhara, Khujand, and Termez
.

Contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular, the

Richard Nelson Frye, a leading historian of Iranian and Central Asian history, the Persian migration to Central Asia may be considered the beginning of the modern Tajik nation, and ethnic Persians, along with some elements of East-Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, as the main ancestors of modern Tajiks.[30] In later works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that many "factors must be taken into account in explaining the evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia" and that "the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them."[31]

Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:

The Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranian peoples whose continuous presence in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan is attested from the middle of the 1st millennium BC. The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwārezm (Khorezm) and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania (Sogdiana). Over the course of time, the eastern Iranian dialect that was used by the ancient Tajiks eventually gave way to Farsi, a western dialect spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.[32]

The geographical division between the eastern and western Iranians is often considered historically and currently to be the desert Dasht-e Kavir, situated in the center of the Iranian plateau.[33]

Modern history

During the Soviet–Afghan War, the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e Islami founded by Burhanuddin Rabbani resisted the Soviet Army and the communist Afghan government. Tajik commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, successfully repelled nine Soviet campaigns from taking Panjshir Valley and earned the nickname "Lion of Panjshir" (شیر پنجشیر).

Name

According to John Perry (

Encyclopaedia Iranica):[22]

The most plausible and generally accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk 'Arab' (cf. New Persian tāzi), or an Iranian (Sogdian or Parthian) cognate word. The Muslim armies that

Seljuq and Atābak periods (ca. 1000–1260) adopted the term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of Greater Iran
, now under Turkish rule, as early as the poet ʿOnṣori, ca. 1025 (Dabirsiāqi, pp. 3377, 3408). Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks" (Bayhaqi, ed. Fayyāz, p. 594). The distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the (ideally) nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy (Niẓām al-Molk: tāzik, pp. 146, 178–79; Fragner, "Tādjīk. 2" in EI2 10, p. 63).

The word also occurs in the Tonyukuk inscriptions as tözik, used for a local Arab tribe in the Tashkent area.[36] These Arabs were said to be from the Taz tribe, which is still found in Yemen. In the 7th-century, the Taz began to Islamize Transoxiana.[37]

According to the

Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī also used Tajik as a reference to Persians.[39]

Location

Haft-Seen, White House ceremony for new Persian Year, prepared by Laura Bush
.

The Tajiks are the principal ethnic group in most of Tajikistan, as well as in northern and western Afghanistan, though there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. Tajiks are a substantial minority in Uzbekistan, as well as in overseas communities. Historically, the ancestors of the Tajiks lived in a larger territory in Central Asia than now.

Tajikistan

Tajiks make up around 84.3% of the population of Tajikistan.

Yaghnobi people who in the past were considered by the government of the Soviet Union nationalities separate from the Tajiks. In the 1926 and 1937 Soviet censuses, the Yaghnobis and Pamiri language speakers were counted as separate nationalities. After 1937, these groups were required to register as Tajiks.[18]

Afghanistan

President of Afghanistan
.

In Afghanistan, a "Tajik", is typically defined as any primarily

Herat
.

Uzbekistan

View of the Registan in Samarkand – although the second largest city of Uzbekistan, it is predominantly a Tajik populated city, along with Bukhara.

In Uzbekistan, the Tajiks are the largest part of the population of the ancient cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, and are found in large numbers in the Surxondaryo Region in the south and along Uzbekistan's eastern border with Tajikistan. According to official statistics (2000), Surxondaryo Region accounts for 24.4% of all Tajiks in Uzbekistan, with another 34.3% in Samarqand and Bukhara regions.[54]

Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community accounts for 5% of the nation's population.

Uzbekization" supervised by Sharof Rashidov, the head of the Uzbek Communist Party, Tajiks had to choose either stay in Uzbekistan and get registered as Uzbek in their passports or leave the republic for Tajikistan, which is mountainous and less agricultural.[57] It is only in the last population census (1989) that the nationality could be reported not according to the passport, but freely declared based on the respondent's ethnic self-identification.[58] This had the effect of increasing the Tajik population in Uzbekistan from 3.9% in 1979 to 4.7% in 1989. Some scholars estimate that Tajiks may make up 35% of Uzbekistan's population, and believe that just like Afghanistan, there are more Tajiks in Uzbekistan than in Tajikistan.[59]

China

Chinese Tajiks or Mountain Tajiks in China (

People's Republic of China
.

Kazakhstan

According to the 1999 population census, there were 26,000 Tajiks in Kazakhstan (0.17% of the total population), about the same number as in the 1989 census.

Kyrgyzstan

According to official statistics, there were about 47,500 Tajiks in Kyrgyzstan in 2007 (0.9% of the total population), up from 42,600 in the 1999 census and 33,500 in the 1989 census.

Turkmenistan

According to the last Soviet census in 1989,

Mary adjoining the borders with Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.[61]

Russia

The population of Tajiks in Russia was about 350,236 according to the 2021 census,[62] up from 38,000 in the last Soviet census of 1989.[63] Most Tajiks came to Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, often as guest workers in places like Moscow and Saint Petersburg or federal subjects near the Kazakhstan border.[64] There are currently estimated to be over one million Tajik guest workers living in Russia, with their remittances accounting for as much as half of Tajikistan's economy.[65]

Pakistan

There are an estimated 220,000

UNHCR and the two countries' authorities.[67]

United States

80,414 Tajiks live in the United States.[68]

Genetics

A 2014 study of the

western Eurasian haplotypes."[70]

West Eurasian maternal lineages included haplogroups H, J, K, T, I, W and U.[71] East Eurasian lineages included haplogroups M, C, Z, D, G, A, Y and B.[72] South Asian lineages detected in this study included haplogroups M and R.[73] One lineage in the Tajik sample was assigned to the North African maternal haplogroup X2j.[74]

The dominant

R1a Y-DNA. ~45% of Tajik men share R1a (M17), ~18% J (M172), ~8% R2 (M124), and ~8% C (M130 & M48). Tajiks of Panjikent score 68% R1a, Tajiks of Khojant score 64% R1a.[75] The high frequency of haplogroup R1a in the Tajiks probably reflects a strong founder effect.[76] According to another genetic test, 63% of Tajik male samples from Tajikistan carry R1a.[77]

Schematic map showing the possible admixture model for Tajik populations. The time in parentheses represent a range. Arrows in different colors indicate ancestral sources and directions of the gene flows.

An autosomal DNA study by Guarino-Vignon et al. (2022), suggested that modern Tajiks show genetic continuity with ancient samples from

Great Andamanese (~8%). According to the authors, the South Asian (Great Andamanese) affinity of Tajiks was previously unreported, although evidence for the presence of a deep South Asian ancestry was already found previously in other Central Asian samples (e.g. among modern Turkmens and historical Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex samples). Both historical and more recent geneflow (~1500 years ago) shaped the genetic makeup of Southern Central Asian populations, such as the Tajiks.[78] A follow-up study by Dai et al. (2022) estimated that the Tajiks derive between 11.6 and 18.6% ancestry from admixture with from an East-Eurasian steppe source represented by the Xiongnu, with the remainder of their ancestry being derived from Western Steppe Herders and BMAC components, as well as a small contribution from the early population associated with the Tarim mummies. The authors concluded that Tajiks "present patterns of genetic continuity of Central Asians since the Bronze Age".[79]

Culture

Language

Tajik Republic coat of Arms with Persian language: جمهوری اجتماعی شوروى مختار تاجيكستان

The language of the Tajiks is an eastern dialect of

Perso-Arabic script, as well as in Iran. When the Soviet Union introduced the Latin script in 1928, and later the Cyrillic script, the Persian dialect of Tajikistan came to be disassociated from the Tajik language. Many Tajik authors have lamented this artificial separation of the Tajik language from its Iranian heritage.[80]
One Tajik poem relates:

Once you said 'you are Iranian', then you said, 'you are Tajik' May he die separated from his roots, he who separated us.[81][80]

Since the 19th century, Tajiki has been strongly influenced by the Russian language and has incorporated many Russian language

Arabic
loan words than Iranian Persian while retaining vocabulary that has fallen out of use in the latter language.

Many Tajiks can read, speak or write in Russian, however the prestige and importance of Russian has declined since the fall of the Soviet Union and the exodus of Russians from Central Asia. Nevertheless, Russian fluency is still considered an vital skill for business and education.[83]

The dialects of modern Persian spoken throughout Greater Iran have a common origin. This is due to the fact that one of Greater Iran's historical cultural capitals, called Greater Khorasan, which included parts of modern Central Asia and much of Afghanistan and constitutes as the Tajik's ancestral homeland, played a key role in the development and propagation of Persian language and culture throughout much of Greater Iran after the Muslim conquest. Furthermore, early manuscripts of the historical Persian spoken in Mashhad during the development of Middle to New Persian show that their origins came from Sistan, in present-day Afghanistan.[22]

Religion