Tajiks are a group of various Persianate Eastern Iranian peoples native to Central Asia, living predominantly in Afghanistan and Tajikistan with substantial minorities in Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Tajiks are the largest ethnicity in Tajikistan and the second-largest in both Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. They speak varieties of Persian, a West Iranian language. In Tajikistan, since the 1939 Soviet census, the small Pamiri and Yaghnobi ethnic groups have been included as Tajiks. In China, the term is used to refer to the Pamiri ethnic groups of Xinjiang, who speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages. In Afghanistan, the Pamiris are considered a separate ethnic group.
As a self-designation, the literary New Persian term Tajik, which originally had some pejorative usage as a label for eastern Persians or Iranians,B. A. Litvinsky, Ahmad Hasan Dani (1998). History of Civilizations of Central Asia: Age of Achievement, A.D. 750 to the end of the 15th-century. Excerpt: "...they were the basis for the emergence and gradual consolidation of what became an Eastern Persian-Tajik ethnic identity." pp. 101. UNESCO. . has become acceptable during the last several decades, particularly as a result of Soviet administration in Central Asia. Alternative names for the Tajiks are Fārsīwān (Persian-speaker) and Dīhgān (cf. ), which translates to 'farmer or settled villager'; in a wider sense, it means 'settled' in contrast to 'nomadic', and was later used to describe a class of land-owning magnates as 'Persian of noble blood' in contrast to Arabs, Turks, and Romans during the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. Historically, the term Tajik was used synonymously and interchangeably with Persian.
The Tajiks are of mixed origin and are primarily descendants of Bactrians, Sogdians, and Scythians, but also of Persians, Greeks, and various Turkic peoples of Central Asia,Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan : country studies Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, page 206 all of whom are known to have inhabited the region at various times. Tajiks are therefore mainly Eastern Iranian in their ethnic makeup but speak a Persian dialect, which is a Western Iranian language; they likely adopted the language in the seventh century AD following the Islamic conquest of Persia. This was when the Persian language consequently spread further east, leading to the gradual extinction of the Bactrian and Sogdian languages. The Tajiks and their ancestors have inhabited northern Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and other parts of Central Asia continuously for many millennia. Britannica Online Encyclopedia The culture of the Tajiks is predominantly Persianate but contains strong elements from other cultures of Central Asia, such as Turkic cultures, and is heavily infused with Islamic traditions.
History
The Tajiks are an Iranian people who speak a variety of Persian and are concentrated in the Oxus basin, the Fergana Valley (in Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan), and on both banks of the upper Oxus, namely the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan and north-eastern Afghanistan (Badakhshan). Historically, the ancient Tajiks were chiefly agriculturalists before the Arab conquest of Iran. Although agriculture remained a stronghold, the Islamization of Iran also resulted in the rapid urbanisation of historical Khorasan and Transoxiana, which lasted until the devastating Mongolian invasion. Several surviving ancient urban centres of the Tajik people include Samarkand, Bukhara, Khujand, and Termez.
Contemporary Tajiks are the descendants of ancient Eastern Iranian inhabitants of Central Asia, in particular the Sogdians and the Bactrians. They are also possible descendants of other groups, with an admixture of Western Iranian Persians and non-Iranian peoples. The latter group includes Greeks, who are known to have settled in the region of present-day Tajikistan and Uzbekistan before and after the conquests of Alexander the Great, some of whom were referred to as Dayuan by ancient Chinese chronicles.Watson, Burton(1993). Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian. Translated by Burton Watson. Han Dynasty II (Revised Edition), pp. 244–245. Columbia University Press. ; (pbk) According to Richard Nelson Frye, a leading historian of Iranian and Central Asian history, the Persian migration to Central Asia may be considered the beginning of the modern Tajik nation, with ethnic Persians, together with some elements of East-Iranian Bactrians and Sogdians, as the main ancestors of modern Tajiks.Richard Nelson Frye, "Persien: bis zum Einbruch des Islam" (original English title: "The Heritage of Persia"), German version, tr. by Paul Baudisch, Kindler Verlag AG, Zürich 1964, pp. 485–498 In later works, Frye expands on the complexity of the historical origins of the Tajiks. In a 1996 publication, Frye explains that many 'factors must be taken into account in explaining the evolution of the peoples whose remnants are the Tajiks in Central Asia' and that 'the peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them.'
Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:
The geographical division between the eastern and western Iranians is often considered historically and currently to be the desert Dasht-e Kavir, situated in the center of the Iranian plateau. "Western languages were located in the western portion of the Iranian plateau, separated by the Dasht - e Kavir and Dasht - e Lūt deserts from the Eastern Iranian dialects."
Modern history During the Soviet–Afghan War, the Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e Islami, founded by Burhanuddin Rabbani, resisted the Soviet Army and the communist Afghan government. The Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud successfully repelled nine Soviet campaigns aimed at capturing the Panjshir Valley, earning him the nickname 'Lion of Panjshir' ().
Etymology
According to John Perry (Encyclopaedia Iranica): The most plausible and generally accepted origin of the word is Middle Persian tāzīk 'Arab' (cf. New Persian tāzi), or an Iranian (Sogdian or Parthian) cognate word. The Muslim armies that invaded Transoxiana early in the eighth century, conquering the Sogdian principalities and clashing with the Qarluq Turks (see Bregel, Atlas, Maps 8–10) consisted not only of Arabs, but also of Persian converts from Fārs and the central Zagros region (Bartol'd [Barthold], "Tadžiki," pp. 455–57). Hence the Turks of Central Asia adopted a variant of the Iranian word, täžik, to designate their Muslim adversaries in general. For example, the rulers of the south Indian Chalukya dynasty and Rashtrakuta dynasty also referred to the Arabs as "Tajika" in the 8th and 9th century.Political History of the Chālukyas of Badami by Durga Prasad Dikshit p.192The First Spring: The Golden Age of India by Abraham Eraly p.91 By the eleventh century (Yusof Ḵāṣṣ-ḥājeb, Qutadḡu bilig, lines 280, 282, 3265), the Qarakhanid Turks applied this term more specifically to the Persian Muslims in the Oxus basin and Khorasan, who were variously the Turks' rivals, models, overlords (under the Samanid Dynasty), and subjects (from Ghaznavid times on). Persian writers of the Ghaznavid, Seljuq and Atābak periods (ca. 1000–1260) adopted the term and extended its use to cover Persians in the rest of Greater Iran, now under Turkish rule, as early as the poet ʿOnṣori, ca. 1025 (Dabirsiāqi, pp. 3377, 3408). Iranians soon accepted it as an ethnonym, as is shown by a Persian court official's referring to mā tāzikān "we Tajiks" (Bayhaqi, ed. Fayyāz, p. 594). The distinction between Turk and Tajik became stereotyped to express the symbiosis and rivalry of the (ideally) nomadic military executive and the urban civil bureaucracy (Niẓām al-Molk: tāzik, pp. 146, 178–79; Fragner, "Tādjīk. 2" in EI2 10, p. 63).The word also occurs in the 8th-century Tonyukuk inscriptions as tözik, used for a local Arab tribe in the Tashkent area. These Arabs were said to be from the Taz tribe, which is still found in Yemen. In the 7th-century, the Taz began to Islamize the region of Transoxiana in Central Asia.
According to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, however, the oldest known usage of the word Tajik as a reference to Persians in Persian literature can be found in the writings of the famous Persian poet and Islamic scholar Jalal ad-Din Rumi.C.E. Bosworth/B.G. Fragner, "Tādjīk", in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Online Edition: "... In Islamic usage, [Tādjīk] eventually came to designate the Persians, as opposed to Turks [...] the oldest citation for it which Schraeder could find was in verses of Djalāl al-Dīn Rūmī ..." The 15th-century Turkic-speaking poet Mīr Alī Šer Navā'ī, who lived in the Timurid Empire, also used Tajik as a reference to Persians.Ali Shir Nava'i Muhakamat al-lughatain tr. & ed. Robert Devereaux (Leiden: Brill) 1966 p6
Location The Tajiks are the principal ethnic group in most of Tajikistan, as well as in northern and western Afghanistan, although there are more Tajiks in Afghanistan than in Tajikistan. Tajiks also constitute a substantial minority in Uzbekistan, as well as in overseas communities. Historically, the ancestors of the Tajiks inhabited a larger territory in Central Asia than they do today. The term Tajik does not refer to a cohesive transnational ethnic group.Nourzhanov, K., & Bleuer, C. (2013). Forging Tajik Identity: Ethnic Origins, National–Territorial Delimitation and Nationalism. In Tajikistan: A Political and Social History (pp. 27–50). ANU Press. Link: Brasher, Ryan. "Ethnic Brother or Artificial Namesake? The Construction of Tajik Identity in Afghanistan and Tajikistan." Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 55, 2011, pp. 97–120. JSTOR, Link: . Accessed 15 January 2025.
Tajikistan
Tajiks make up around 84.3% of the population of Tajikistan. This number includes speakers of the Pamiri languages, including Wakhi and Shughni, as well as the Yaghnobi people, who in the past were considered by the Soviet government to be separate nationalities from the Tajiks. In the 1926 and 1937 Soviet censuses, the Yaghnobis and Pamiri-language speakers were counted as distinct nationalities. After 1937, these groups were required to register as Tajiks.
Afghanistan