Tajik authorities demand the return of more than a thousand students attending the prestigious al-Azhar University. Egypt so far has repatriated 134 students because they did not have a residency permit. Tajikistan fears extremist groups might recruit students. For months, the Tajik military has been fighting armed groups on the border with Afghanistan.

Dushanbe (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Tajikistan is recalling all its students attending Al-Azhar University, considered by most as the greatest place of learning in the Islamic world. For months, Tajik authorities have been trying to get Tajik students to come home fearing they might joint Islamic terror groups.

“On Monday . . . Tajik Airlines returned about 134 young Tajiks to the country from Egypt, where they were studying,” a spokesman for the Tajik Ministry of Religious Affairs said.

About a thousand Tajiks are studying at al-Azhar, and Tajik authorities want all them to come home. However, Egypt has only repatriated those who had entered the country illegally, and had no valid residency permit.

In August, Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon went on television to urge families to stop sending their children to foreign religious schools (pictured madrassah), fearing they might be recruited by Islamic terror groups.

On 4 September, dozens of students and professors on an Iranian plane waiting on the tarmac of Dushanbe International Airport were forced to disembark because they failed to provide the Ministry of Religious Affairs with adequate information about the reasons for their trip to Iran.

Funded by Saudi Arabia, Al-Azhar has tried to distance itself from Islamic fundamentalists.  In 2001, it branded the perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Centre as heretics. But its alumni include many militants, such as Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence in the United States for his role in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombings; Hassan al Banna, one of the founders of the banned Egyptian group, the Muslim Brotherhood; and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, one of the founders of the Palestinian Hamas.

Tajikistan is the poorest of former Soviet republics. It faces a terrorist threat, the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which claimed responsibility for an ambush on a military convoy in September that killed 28 troops. Tajik authorities also blame terror groups for a suicide car bombing the same month.

Since September, Tajik forces have been engaged in a sweep operation against militants in the Rasht Valley on the border with Afghanistan.

The two countries share a border of about 1,300 kilometres that Tajik troops are unable to fully control.

A civil war in the early 1990s is still fresh in people’s memories. At the time, supporters of President Rakhmon defeated Muslim extremists but at the price of tens of thousands of dead.

An Islamic university and about 20 official madrassah exist in the country. However, thousands of students travel to Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries for an education. Unofficially, at least 4,000 students attend religious schools in Pakistan alone.

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• egypt
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• fundamentalism
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