The Karakum and Kyzyl Kum deserts are increasing at a rate surpassed on a planetary scale solely by the desertification course of within the Sahara and Sahel areas of Africa. Between eight,000 and 10,000 km² of new desert now seems every year in Central Asia. Its longest border is with the Caspian Sea (1,786 km (1,one hundred ten mi)).

Today, nevertheless, the nice majority of Tajiks follow Sunni Islam, though small Twelver and Ismaili Shia minorities additionally exist in scattered pockets. Areas with large numbers of Shias embody Herat, Bamyan, Badakhshan provinces in Afghanistan, the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province in Tajikistan, and Tashkurgan Tajik Autonomous County in China. Some of the well-known Islamic students were from both modern or historical East-Iranian areas mendacity in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and subsequently can arguably be considered as Tajiks. They embrace Abu Hanifa,[62] Imam Bukhari, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawood, Nasir Khusraw and lots of others.

Article History

Approximately a hundred million citizens think about themselves Russian Orthodox Christians, though the overwhelming majority usually are not regular churchgoers. The largest spiritual minority is shaped by 14 to 23 million Muslims, most of whom reside within the Volga-Urals region and the North Caucasus, though Moscow, St. Petersburg, and parts of Siberia and Yakutia have sizable Muslim populations. The Buddhist Association of Russia estimated that there were between 1.5 and a couple of million Buddhists, who reside within the traditionally Buddhist regions of Buryatiya, Tuva, and Kalmykiya. According to the Slavic Center for Law and Justice, Protestants make up the second-largest group of Christian believers, with 3,500 registered organizations and greater than 2 million followers.

History

According to a 2009 Pew Research Center report, 93.1% of Turkmenistan’s inhabitants is Muslim.[1] Traditionally, the Turkmen of Turkmenistan, like their kin in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, are Sunni Muslims. Shia Muslims, the other major branch of Islam, aren’t numerous in Turkmenistan, and the Shia non secular practices of the Azerbaijani and Kurdish minorities aren’t politicized.

During the reporting period there were no indications the Turkmenistan government planned to rescind or modify previous policies concerning non secular freedom. The Turkmenistan authorities threatened members of minority religious groups with fines, lack of employment and housing, and imprisonment because of their beliefs.

Remarks at the International Conference on 40 Years of Afghan Refugees in Pakistan

Church officers maintained that these charges had been fabricated and that she was really eliminated because of her non secular beliefs. Muslims in Beslan appealed to the Presidential Council for Cooperation with Religious Associations for the return of its Cathedral Mosque. During the reporting interval, the number of overseas non secular personnel experiencing visa and customs difficulties while coming into or leaving the country decreased, although some issues continued. Authorities have deported or denied entry to religious staff with valid visas prior to now.

Despite its embrace of certain features of Islamic culture, the Government is anxious about overseas Islamic affect and the interpretation of Islam by native believers. The Government promotes a average understanding of Islam primarily based on Turkmen religious and national traditions. In April 2007, President Berdimuhammedov visited Saudi Arabia and performed umrah (minor pilgrimage) rituals in Mecca, recalling former President Niyazov’s 1992 umrah.

According to many observers, native governments are more prone to strain from the native spiritual majority and due to this fact are more likely to discriminate in opposition to local minority religious communities. Many localities appeared to implement their own insurance policies with very little federal interference. When the federal Government intervenes in local cases, it works turkmenistan singles via the Procuracy, Ministry of Justice, Presidential Administration, and the courts. The federal Government solely sometimes intervened to forestall or reverse discrimination at the native level. The regions of Kabardino-Balkariya and Dagestan have laws banning extremist Islamic «Wahhabism», however there were no reviews that authorities invoked these legal guidelines to disclaim registration to Muslim groups.

Turkmenistan is currently one of the secretive nations on the planet. The restricted internet entry is extraordinarily unreliable, and it is only available to a small proportion of the inhabitants.

Indian, Iranian and Far Eastern religions

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Atheism and agnosticism are not usually considered religions, however knowledge concerning the prevalence of irreligion is beneficial to scholars of non secular demography. Although the religion started in Arabia, its three largest communities are found in Indonesia, Pakistan and India. These instances don’t contribute to a development of Christianity total, however somewhat to a substitution of a brand of Christianity with one other one.

Religions

Islam is the religion most common within the Central Asian Republics, Afghanistan, Xinjiang and the peripheral western areas, corresponding to Bashkortostan. Most Central Asian Muslims are Sunni, though there are sizable Shia minorities in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.