Tajiks
Tajiks, also spelled Tadzhiks or Tadjiks, are a group of various Persian-speaking Eastern Iranian groups of people native to Central Asia, living mainly in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Even though the term Tajik does not refer to a cohesive cross-national ethnic group, Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan, and the second-largest in both Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak variations of Persian, a west Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, its small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups are included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to its Pamiri ethnic groups, the Tajiks of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are considered a separate ethnic group.
As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which originally had some previous pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians, has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Fārsīwān, and Dīhgān which translates to "farmer or settled villager", in a wider sense "settled" in contrast to "nomadic" and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as "Persian of noble blood" in contrast to Arabs, Turks and Romans during the Sasanian and early Islamic period.
The Tajiks are of mixed origin, and are primarily descendants of Bactrians, Sogdians, Scythians, but also Persians, Greeks, and various Turkic peoples of Central Asia, all of whom are known to have inhabited the region at various times. Tajiks are therefore mainly Eastern Iranian in their ethnic makeup but speak a Persian dialect, which is a Western Iranian language, likely adopting the language in the 7th century AD following the Islamic conquest of Persia. This was when the Persian language consequently spread further east leading to the gradual extinction of the Bactrian and Sogdian languages. The Tajiks and their ancestors have inhabited Northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and other parts of Central Asia continuously for many millennia. The culture of the Tajiks is predominantly Persianate but with strong elements from other cultures of Central Asia, such as Turkic and heavily infused with Islamic traditions.
History
The Tajiks are an Iranian people, speaking a variety of Persian, concentrated in the Oxus basin, the Fergana valley and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i.e., the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan, and northeastern Afghanistan. Historically, the ancient Tajiks were chiefly agriculturalists before the Arab Conquest of Iran. 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. 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 Sogdians and the Bactrians. They are also possible descendants of other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples. The latter group includes Greeks who are known to have settled in the Tajikistan and Uzbekistan region before and after the conquests of Alexander the Great, and some of them were referred to as Dayuan by ancient Chinese chronicles. According to 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. 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."
Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:
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.
Modern history
During the Soviet–Afghan War, the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e Islami founded by Burhanuddin Rabbani resisted the Soviet Army and the communist Afghan government. Tajik commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, successfully repelled nine Soviet campaigns from taking Panjshir Valley and earned the nickname "Lion of Panjshir".Etymology
According to John Perry :The most plausible and generally accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk 'Arab', or an Iranian cognate word. The Muslim armies that invaded Transoxiana early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with the Qarluq Turks consisted not only of Arabs, but also of Persian converts from Fārs and the central Zagros region. Hence the Turks of Central Asia adopted a variant of the Iranian word, täžik, to designate their Muslim adversaries in general. For example, the rulers of the south Indian Chalukya dynasty and Rashtrakuta dynasty also referred to the Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century. By the eleventh century, the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more specifically to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models, overlords, and subjects. Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq and Atābak periods 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. Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks". The distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy.The word also occurs in the 8th-century Tonyukuk inscriptions as tözik, used for a local Arab tribe in the Tashkent area. 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 the region of Transoxiana in Central Asia.
According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, however, the oldest known usage of the word Tajik as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the famous Persian poet and Islamic scholar Jalal ad-Din Rumi. The 15th-century Turkic-speaking poet Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī who lived in the Timurid empire also used Tajik as a reference to Persians.
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.Tajikistan
Tajiks make up around 84.3% of the population of Tajikistan. This number includes speakers of the Pamiri languages, including Wakhi and Shughni, and the 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.Afghanistan
Despite sharing the same name, Tajiks do not refer to the same group of people in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. In Afghanistan, a "Tajik" is typically defined as any primarily Dari-speaking Sunni Muslim who refer to themselves by the region, province, city, town, or village that they are from, such as Badakhshi, Baghlani, Mazari, Panjsheri, Kabuli, Herati, Kohistani, etc. Although in the past, some non-Pashto speaking tribes were identified as Tajik, for example, the Furmuli. By this definition, according to the World Factbook, Tajiks make up about 25–27% of Afghanistan's population, but according to other sources, they form 37–46% of the population. Other sources however, for example the Encyclopædia Britannica, previously stated that they constituted about 12–20% of the population before the War in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, which is mostly excluding Persianized ethnic groups like some Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Qizilbash, Aimaqs etc. who, especially in large urban areas like Kabul or Herat, assimilated into the respective local culture. Tajiks are predominant in four of the largest cities in Afghanistan and make up the qualified majority in the northern and western provinces of Badakhshan, Panjshir and Balkh, while making up significant portions of the population in Takhar, Kabul, Parwan, Kapisa, Baghlan, Badghis and Herat. Despite not being Tajik, the westernmost Indo-Aryan Pashayi people of northeastern Afghanistan have deliberately been listed as Tajik by census takers and government agents. However, this is probably because Pashayi-speaking Nizari Isma’ilis refer to themselves as Tajik.Uzbekistan
In Uzbekistan, the Tajiks are the minority 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, Surxondaryo Region accounts for 20.4% of all Tajiks in Uzbekistan, with another 34.3% in Samarqand and Bukhara regions.Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community accounts for 5% of the nation's population. During the Soviet "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. It is only in the last population census that the nationality could be reported not according to the passport, but freely declared based on the respondent's ethnic self-identification. This had the effect of increasing the Tajik population in Uzbekistan from 3.9% in 1979 to 4.7% in 1989.
According to other sources, Tajiks live exclusively in the centers of cities such as Samarkand, Bukhara, and Termez. There are practically no Tajiks in the countryside outside of the City. If you count the population figures for these cities, it barely reaches one million. It is therefore unreasonable to claim that over six million Tajiks live in Uzbekistan, as Richard Foltz has claimed.
Even Arne Haugen, a Central Asia expert, criticized and noted in 2018: While Richard Foltz estimates over 6 million Tajiks in Uzbekistan, official census data reports only ~1.5 million. This discrepancy likely stems from counting Tajik-speaking Uzbeks as ethnic Tajiks. Geographically, Tajiks are concentrated in urban Samarkand/Bukhara, with negligible rural presence
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According to the U.S. State Department Report, it is estimated that there are between 1.2 and 1.8 million Tajiks in Uzbekistan.
Official statistics in Uzbekistan state that the Tajik community accounts for 4.5% of the nation's population. Approximately 1.7 million Tajiks live in Uzbekistan. It is difficult to accurately count the number of Tajiks in Uzbekistan, as many Uzbeks, Turkmens, Azerbaijanis, and Jews also speak Persian.File:Registan square 2014.JPG|thumb|View of the Registan in Samarkand – although the second largest city of Uzbekistan, it is predominantly a Tajik populated city, along with Bukhara.|250x250px