DUSHANBE, Tajikistan, January 25, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – The secular government in Tajikistan has revealed plans to teach Islam’s past history in its secondary schools.

“The ministry has been studying a draft law that will see the history of Islam be included in the country’s textbooks,” Minister of Education Abdjabbour Rahmonov told reporters on Tuesday, January 25.

He said the move will help students to know more about Islam throughout the centuries.

“Many parents have appealed to the ministry to teach the Islamic history in schools,” the minister added. “We want to raise the religious awareness of the students and stand up to extremist ideologies.”

Muslims are making up the majority of Tajikistan’s six million population. Sunni Muslims represent 85 percent, according to the CIA’s World Fact Book.

The government initiative was welcomed by leading Islamic powers in the Central Asian former Soviet republic.

“It is a positive and necessary step,” said Mohidin Kabiri, the deputy head of the Islamic Renaissance party.

“But the move is overdue in Muslim Tajikistan given that many European countries make religion an obligatory subject in schools,” he fumed.

Critics, however, said the move will do injustice to the country’s minorities.

“This initiative contradicts the secular nature of the government, which banned hijab in school and universities,” opined Lidia Asamova, an active member of the War and Peace Center for Strategic Studies.

Experts see the move as a bid by the secular government to calm down a growing sense of anger among lay people over the hijab ban.

“The regime further wants to closely knit Islam and the Tajik identity to counter Turkish and Russian influences,” Motiallah Tayeb, an expert in Central Asian affairs, told IslamOnline.net over the phone.

Rahmanov said in October that hijab represented a religious ideology and was in “contravention of education law.”