an offshoot of a Soviet Union-wide organization. The Tajik Communist Party tried to outlaw and suppress the movement:

Even before this series of events, a media campaign was launched to portray Tajik Islamists as terrorists trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or, alternatively, in Saudi Arabia and Iran with CIA money, who desired to ‘found an exclusively Islamic society through physical elimination of ideological opponents and non-believers, and general genocide’. The IRP was even accused of organizing the riots in Dushanbe in February 1990 on behalf of ‘the Wahhabis and other fundamentalist Islamic forces from abroad’.


The Iranian embassy in Dushanbe predictably pushed back against the new documentary, saying in a statement that “The airing of such biased films… shows that certain circles do not want to see… stronger friendship betweenjournalist, author, and speaker whose opinion columns appear regularly in the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News and the Middle East’s Al-Monitor.com. He has been a regular contributing writer for the International New York Times since 2013. Akyol has published six books in Turkish; his last book, Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, was published in four languages, long-listed for the Lionel Gelber Prize, and praised by the Financial Times as “a forthright and elegant Muslim defense of freedom.”