The World of Islam Comes to Tajikistan
ONCE AGAIN TAJIKISTAN was in my news feed. They had a problem with their COVID reporting. It turns out they actually have it all over the place and they just don’t know how bad it is. Health reporting infrastructure has problems. There was also a news bit about their president, and how he is trying to maneuver his son into the succession. That ancient dynastic impulse is alive and well in Central Asia.
Continuing our story, the arrival of the Arabs and Islam essentially started the modern era in that region. We can call it the “Era of conquering religions” if we wish. Before that there was this general understanding of different gods. The new approach was basically “Our god is the only god, do it our way or else.”
Somehow, small in number but filled with zeal, the Muslim Arabs in their push east, conquered and held Asian territories about three times the size of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great. At the same time, they went all the way across Africa to the Atlantic Ocean and into Spain. Alexander hadn’t even done anything serious in Greece. It was the largest empire the world had yet seen.
They then proceeded to misgovern and decline by every social metric and people started doing what
