Tajikistan's Giant Mosque Project Inches Forward
Tajikistan's Giant Mosque Project Inches Forward
With a capacity of 115,000 and an estimated bill of 100 million US dollars, a new mosque planned for the Tajik capital Dushanbe will break all sorts of records.
When it is built, it will be Central Asia’s largest mosque, able to accommodate a sixth of the city’s population at any one time. As President Imomali Rahmon laid a foundation stone two years ago, but attended a ground-breaking ceremony for the project earlier this month, that suggests work has not really got under way.
Seventy per cent of the estimated costs are to be covered by Qatar, and the rest by Tajikistan itself.
Analysts see the mosque project as the latest in a series of attempts by the Tajik government to control Muslim religious practice, in this case by concentrating it in one physical location. The authorities are fearful of imported fundamentalist versions of the Sunni Islam practiced by most Tajiks.
The audio programme, in Russian and Tajik, went out on national radio stations in Tajikistan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
