Iranian Vice President's Statement that Iran and Tajikistan are ‘Second Homes for Each Other’ Limited in Meaning

Paul Goble

    Staunton, May 11 -- Mohammad Reza Aref, Iran’s first vice president, says that Iran and Tajikistan are “second homes for each other” because of their “broadening of economic and energy cooperation.”  However, there is a danger that his words will re-enforce or even spread a major misconception about the two countries.

    Aref made this comment in the course of a meeting with Daler Juma, Tajikistan’s minister for energy and water resources, and focused on the results of the latest meeting of a joint commission on economic ties rather than on something broader (parstoday.ir/ru/news/iran-i210978).

    But the Iranian official’s words are at risk of being misunderstood because Iranians and Tajiks speak mutually intelligible languages and thus are frequently assumed to share a common culture. However, that is a mistake: the Iranians are Shiite Muslims while the Tajiks are Sunnis, a divide which limits the appropriateness of speaking of them as closer than they are.

    Moreover, while their languages are similar, they use different scripts – Iran uses a Persido-Arabic one while Tajikistan uses a Cyrillic-based one – and their different religious traditions reflect even broader cultural divisions, facts of life that must not be forgotten in any analysis of Iran’s role in Tajikistan in particular and Central Asia more generally.

    Unfortunately, that does not always happen given that the four other Central Asian countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan – are all Turkic linguistically and share a common Sunni Islamic faith and so many are inclined to counterpose Tajikistan with its Persian-linked language as necessarily opposed to them.