On July 29, Tajikistan’s Committee on Religion, Regulation of Traditions, Celebrations, and Ceremonies told Asia-Plus, the country’s only remaining major independent media outlet, that the country has adopted no law banning beards or the hijab, and that foreign assessments of Tajik religious freedom rest on unreliable sources. The denial followed a week of Russian-language reports announcing that Dushanbe had outlawed hijabs, beards, and Arab-style dress.
The reports seem to run back to a single post. On July 27, the Uzbek site Nuz.uz reported that Tajik authorities were tightening restrictions on clothing treated as alien to Tajik culture, singling out black hijabs. The report cited unnamed local sources. Lenta.ru, Trud, RBC, Fontanka, and outlets in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan republished the report within a day, promoting what appears to be an enforcement campaign into a new law.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta traced the wording back further, to identical posts from Instagram accounts presenting themselves as legal advisers that appeared a day before Nuz.uz, and found no Tajik-language coverage of the subject dated from 2026. Asia-Plus added that several outlets had credited the claim to Asia-Plus, which had published nothing of the kind.
The committee’s denial is narrowly accurate and largely beside the point.
The law it declines to mention passed two years ago. Article 18 of the Law on the Ordering of Traditions, Celebrations, and Ceremonies, in force since June 2024, bars importing, selling, promoting, and wearing in public any clothing that does not correspond to national culture. It does not define what that means. As Asia-Plus noted when the law was first published, it attaches no penalty to that clause either; the fines of up to 100,000 somoni ($10,800) in the accompanying administrative code amendments cover weddings, funerals, and pilgrimage rituals instead.
This is where police discretion comes in. RFE/RL reported on July 26 that a trader in Bokhtar, held for three days over his beard and fined 180 somoni ($18), now sends officers a weekly photograph of his shaved face. Two other men said police shaved them by force and released them without charge. An official at a passport office in Khatlon said applicants with beards are told to shave, that each case is logged, and that the names go into monthly reports tracking men’s facial hair and women’s religious dress. In May, the women’s affairs committee in Rudaki district posted photographs from a village-by-village campaign steering women away from foreign clothing, then deleted them.
None of that required new legislation. Tajikistan has been a U.S. Country of Particular Concern on religious freedom since 2016, and USCIRF’s May country update found the 2024 law being enforced through campaigns against dress deemed foreign to national culture, including school visits in February. Police forcibly shaved some 13,000 men as far back as 2015, when no clothing law existed at all. A prohibition that names neither the specific offense nor the punishment can be applied by any officer and denied by any ministry.
The clothing rules are one piece of a much larger fight. Dushanbe banned the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) as an extremist organization in 2015, handed life sentences to its leaders or pushed them into exile, and has since jailed journalists, lawyers, and bloggers on the same charges. The framing has paid off. Sharing the region’s longest border with Afghanistan has made Tajikistan a durable recipient of Western counterterrorism and border-security money. As Edward Lemon of the Oxus Society argued, U.S. training helped build a coercive apparatus that Dushanbe then turned on its own citizens, most visibly during the 2022 crackdown in Gorno-Badakhshan. Overstating the threat buys both funding and the latitude to use it at home.
Uzbekistan banned face coverings in 2023, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan followed in 2025. Russian media outlets have amplified each of these measures since Moscow’s post-Crocus Hall migration crackdown began, because the story is useful at home: proof for Russian audiences that the states supplying their labor migrants are policing their own Muslims – and so should Moscow.