Ex-Soviet Tajikistan has announced that all imams who received their religious training abroad will be sacked, a cull the Central Asian country's government hopes will help prevent radicalisation.
"The Committee for Religious Affairs has initiated the dismissal of all imams at mosques who received religious education abroad," a member of the committee told AFP today.
Around 20 mosque heads "have been brought to justice and convicted for involvement in extremist religious activities, the committee member said.
"These imams used the pulpit in their mosque to commit crimes," he charged.
The foreign-trained imams will be relieved from their posts in the next two weeks and immediately replaced by locally-trained clerics, he said.
Tajikistan currently has only one institution where citizens can receive training to become imams.
The Muslim-majority country's secular authoritarian government has carried out a series of crackdowns on religion, including widespread reports of forced beard-shaving.
Earlier this year the government held a month celebrating the country's colourful national clothing in what was seen as a top-down effort to discourage women from wearing Mideast- style niqabs and hijabs.
Tajikistan is the poorest of the former Soviet republics and shares a 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Afghanistan to the south.
Emomali Rakhmon, a former collective farm boss, has been the country's president since 1994.
He led the country out of a five-year civil war that began in 1992, almost immediately after the country gained independence from Moscow.
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