A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Summary and conclusion 307
center/east (Garm), aside from the ethnically centrifugal Badakhshan
(the entire east of Tajikistan) and the large Uzbek minority along the
border with Uzbekistan around the regional center of Tursunzod
(besides an assertive pocket near Khujand).The fact remains that in the
welter of contending currents, the Communists on the government side
and Muslim clerics on that of the opposition have given the contest a
distinctive tinge absent from the other Central Asian republics.The
present government is headed by President Imamali Rakhmanov (b.
1952), 1 who rose as a Party apparatchik during the pre-glasnost years.In
December 1992 (thus at the dawn of the post-glasnost period), as chairman
of the Supreme Soviet, Rakhmanov virulently denounced the
opposition highlighted by such leaders as Ali Akbar Turaevich
Kahhorov, better known as Akbar Turajonzoda (or Turadzhonzoda, if
we transliterate the name from Russian Cyrillic; b.1954).Turajonzoda
was in 1988 elected to head the Qoziyot, Muslim Spiritual Board of
Tajikistan, hence his title qozi (more exactly qozi kalon, “The principal [lit.
‘great’] judge”) also prefixed – often with the capital Q – to his name.
From the Islamic angle, Turajonzoda had impeccable credentials.His
father, Ishoni Turajon, was a murid (disciple) of Said Qalandarshoh, a
Naqshbandi murshid (Sufi master) who at the beginning of the twentieth
century had come to Tajikistan from Afghanistan.Turajon eventually
succeeded his master as leader of the local Naqshbandi dervishes, hence
also the honorific title ishon ([his] eminence, lit.“they”).Turajonzoda (lit.
“the offspring of Turajon”) himself received excellent education in
Islamic theology and jurisprudence: first at the Mir Arab madrasa in
Bukhara, then at the Barak Khan madrasa in Tashkent, and finally at
the University of Jordan in Amman, where he graduated with a degree
in Islamic law.After his return he worked one year in the department of
international relations of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Central Asia
and Kazakhstan in Tashkent.His election to the Tajik qoziyot occurred
in 1988, a year that happened to coincide with the fresh currents
brought by glasnost and perestroika.Instead of remaining yet another
(seemingly) docile Muslim cleric mindful of the strictures imposed by the
system, Turajonzoda emerged as a vigorous leader of the Islamic community
claiming its share of the public debate.Perhaps nobody could
have then predicted the magnitude of the problems bound with his role
1 Imamali Rakhmanov is the form of the name as it appears in Russian language media and as a
result in most Western media.The Tajik form, Imomali Rahmonov (if we use E.Allworth’s transliteration
system), has also begun to appear in the media.The dilemma which form to use in a
book like ours is obvious, and it affects most Central Asian names.