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]
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]
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
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.
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]
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]
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.
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.
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]
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]
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]
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
Main articles:
Buddhist pre-Islamic heritage of the Tajik people. Early temples for fire worship have been found in Balkh and Bactria and excavations in present-day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan show remnants of Zoroastrian fire temples.[86]
Today, however, the great majority of Tajiks follow
Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province in Tajikistan, and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Some of the famous Islamic scholars were from either modern or historical East-Iranian regions lying in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and therefore can arguably be viewed as Tajiks. They include Abu Hanifa,[22]Imam Bukhari, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawood, Nasir Khusraw
and many others.
According to a 2009
Bukharian Jewish community in Uzbekistan is the largest remaining community of Central Asian Jews and resides primarily in Bukhara and Samarkand, while the Bukharaian Jews of Tajikistan live in Dushanbe and number only a few hundred.[89] From the 1970s to the 1990s the majority of these Tajik-speaking Jews emigrated to the United States and to Israel in accordance with Aliyah. Recently, the Protestant community of Tajiks descent has experienced significant growth, a 2015 study estimates some 2,600 Muslim Tajik converted to Christianity.[90]
Tajikistan marked 2009 as the year to commemorate the Tajik Sunni Muslim jurist Abu Hanifa, whose ancestry hailed from Parwan Province of Afghanistan, as the nation hosted an international symposium that drew scientific and religious leaders.[91] The construction of one of the largest mosques in the world, funded by Qatar, was announced in October 2009. The mosque is planned to be built in Dushanbe and construction is said to be completed by 2014.[92]
Recent developments
Cultural revival
The collapse of the
Emomalii Rahmon, dropped the Russian suffix "-ov" from his surname and directed others to adopt Tajik names when registering births.[95] According to a government announcement in October 2009, approximately 4,000 Tajik nationals have dropped "ov" and "ev" from their surnames since the start of the year.[96]
In September 2009, the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan proposed a draft law to have the nation's language referred to as "Tajiki-Farsi" rather than "Tajik." The proposal drew criticism from Russian media since the bill sought to remove the Russian language as Tajikistan's inter-ethnic lingua franca.[97] In 1989, the original name of the language (Farsi) had been added to its official name in brackets, though Rahmon's government renamed the language to simply "Tajiki" in 1994.[97] On 6 October 2009, Tajikistan adopted the law that removes Russian as the lingua franca and mandated Tajik as the language to be used in official documents and education, with an exception for members Tajikistan's ethnic minority groups, who would be permitted to receive an education in the language of their choosing.[98]
, constituting 30% of the republic's 22 million population, rather than the official figure of 4.7%(Foltz 1996;213; Carlisle 1995:88).
^Lena Jonson (1976) "Tajikistan in the New Central Asia", I.B.Tauris, p. 108: "According to official Uzbek statistics there are slightly over 1 million Tajiks in Uzbekistan or about 3% of the population. The unofficial figure is over 6 million Tajiks. They are concentrated in the Sukhandarya, Samarqand and Bukhara regions."
^M. Longworth Dames; G. Morgenstierne & R. Ghirshman (1999). "AFGHĀNISTĀN". Encyclopaedia of Islam (CD-ROM Edition v. 1.0 ed.). Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV.
Richard Nelson Frye, "Persien: bis zum Einbruch des Islam" (original English title: "The Heritage of Persia"), German version, tr. by Paul Baudisch, Kindler Verlag AG, Zürich
. Retrieved 1 November 2023. "Western languages were located in the western portion of the Iranian plateau, separated by the Dasht - e Kavir and Dasht - e Lūt deserts from the Eastern Iranian dialects."
^Political History of the Chālukyas of Badami by Durga Prasad Dikshit p.192
^The First Spring: The Golden Age of India by Abraham Eraly p.91
^Lawrence Krader (1971). Peoples of Central Asia. Indiana University. p. 54.
^Jean-Charles Blanc (1976). L'Afghanistan et ses populations (in French). Éditions Complexe. p. 80.
^C.E. Bosworth/B.G. Fragner, "Tādjīk", in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Online Edition: "... In Islamic usage, [Tādjīk] eventually came to designate the Persians, as opposed to Turks [...] the oldest citation for it which Schraeder could find was in verses of Djalāl al-Dīn Rūmī ..."
^Ali Shir Nava'i Muhakamat al-lughatain tr. & ed. Robert Devereaux (Leiden: Brill) 1966 p6
^Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress (1997). "Afghanistan: Tajik". Country Studies Series. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007. Retrieved 19 December 2007.
^Markham, C. R. (January 1879) "The Mountain Passes on the Afghan Frontier of British India" Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography (New Monthly Series) 1(1): pp. 38–62, p.48
"Population: 28.1 million Religions: Sunni Muslim 84%, Shi'a Muslim 15%, other 1% Ethnic Mix: Pashtun 38%, Tajik 25%, Hazara 19%, Uzbek, Turkmen, other 18%"
^Maley, William, ed. Fundamentalism reborn?: Afghanistan and the Taliban, p. 170. NYU Press, 1998.
^"Tajik". Encyclopædia Britannica. Archived from the original on 25 November 2011. Retrieved 6 November 2011. There were about 5,000,000 in Afghanistan, where they constituted about one-fifth of the population.
^Fazel, S. M. (2017). Ethnohistory of the Qizilbash in Kabul: Migration, State, and a Shi'a Minority (Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University), p. 153.
^Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (23 February 2000). "Uzbekistan". Country Reports on Human Rights Practices – 1999. U.S. Department of State. Archived from the original on 12 February 2021. Retrieved 19 December 2007.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^The ethnic composition of the 1.7 million registered Afghan refugees living in Pakistan are believed to be 85% Pashtun and 15% Tajik, Uzbek and others."2012 UNHCR country operations profile – Pakistan". Archived from the original on 24 July 2020. Retrieved 8 August 2012.
from the original on 17 January 2023. Retrieved 17 January 2023. "The Tajik mtDNA pool was characterized by substantial admixture of western and eastern Eurasian haplogroups, 62.6% and 26.4% sequences, respectively. It also contained 9.9% of South Asian and 1.1% of African haplotypes."
. "The Tajik mtDNA gene pool harbors nearly equal proportions of eastern Eurasian and western Eurasian haplotypes"...."The genetic features of other ethnic populations likely also reflect their documented demographic histories. For instance, the small mtDNA distance between the Tajik and Uzbek populations suggests a recent shared history. Tajiks and Uzbeks were only formally differentiated in 1929 when the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was established, and up to 40% of the current Uzbek population is of Tajik ancestry (Library of Congress Federal Research Division Country Profile: Uzbekistan Feb 2007)."
^Ovchinnikov et al. 2014, p. 392: "The western Eurasian component is represented by haplo- groups HV/, HV0, H, J, K, T, and U of the macrohaplogroup R, and haplogroups I and W of the macrohaplogroup N [22]."
^Ovchinnikov et al. 2014, p. 392: "The eastern Eurasian component is represented by haplogroups M8, M10, C, Z, D, G of the macrohaplogroup M, haplogroups A and Y1 of the macrohaplogroup N, and haplogroup B of the macrohaplogroup R [22]."
^Ovchinnikov et al. 2014, p. 392: "The south Asian component is comprised of nine mtDNA sequences (9.9%) belonging to the macrohaplogroups M and R [22]. Two sequences were assigned to main branches of M including M3a1 (1.1%) and M30 (1.1%). Macrohaplogroup R was represented by six mtDNA sequences (6.6%) belonging to R0a (1 sample), R1 (2 samples), R2 (1 sample), and R5a (2 samples). One Tajik mtDNA sequence (1.1%) belonged to aforementioned U2b2, a south Asian autochthonous subhaplogroup of the macrohaplogroup R [25]."
^Ovchinnikov et al. 2014, p. 392: "One Tajik mtDNA sequence (1.1%) was assigned to subhaplogroup X2j. X2j is considered to be of North African origin [23]."
PMID 36006373. Archived from the original on 17 March 2023. Retrieved 18 March 2023.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link
) "The Historical Era gene flow derived from the Eastern Steppe with the representative of Mongolia_Xiongnu_o1 made a more substantial contribution to Kyrgyz and other Turkic-speaking populations (i.e., Kazakh, Uyghur, Turkmen, and Uzbek; 34.9–55.2%) higher than that to the Tajik populations (11.6–18.6%; fig. 4A), suggesting Tajiks suffer fewer impacts of the recent admixtures (Martínez-Cruz et al. 2011). Consequently, the Tajik populations generally present patterns of genetic continuity of Central Asians since the Bronze Age. Our results are consistent with linguistic and genetic evidence that the spreading of Indo-European speakers into Central Asia was earlier than the expansion of Turkic speakers (Kuz′mina and Mallory 2007; Yunusbayev et al. 2015)."
^Moḥammad Reẓa Shafi‘ī-Kadkanī, ‘Borbad’s Khusravanis – First Iranian Songs’,
in Iraj Bashiri (tr and ed), From the Hymns of Zarathustra to the Songs of Borbad,
Dushanbe, 2003, p. 135.
Swat, and Kunar Valleys, and the Parama-Kambojas in the territories on the north side of the Hindu Kush in modern-day Pamir and Badakhshan
region in Tajikistan. See: Geographical and Economic Studies in the Mahābhārata: Upāyana Parva, 1945, p 11-13, Moti Chandra – India; Geographical Data in the Early Purāṇas: A Critical Study, 1972, p 165/66, M. R. Singh
Muslim
writers (See: Studies in Indian History and Civilization, Agra, p 351; India and the World, 1964, p 71, Dr Buddha Prakash; India and Central Asia, 1955, p 35, P. C. Bagch).
^Perry, John. "TAJIK ii. TAJIK PERSIAN". TAJIK II. TAJIK PERSIAN. Encyclopaedia Iranica. Archived from the original on 1 February 2020. Retrieved 20 July 2009.