* Tajiks return from "dubious" religious schools--official * Many of them could embrace radical Islam, opposition warns
By Roman Kozhevnikov
DUSHANBE, Nov 23 (Reuters) - Hundreds of Tajik students have left "dubious" religious schools abroad and returned home after a call from Tajikistan's leader worried by the rise of radical Islam in his Muslim state, a state official said on Tuesday.
"In the last two months, more than 1,000 students have returned to Tajikistan from Iran, Pakistan and Egypt where numerous religious schools are concentrated," Tajik Foreign Ministry spokesman Davlatali Nazriyev told Reuters.
He said that until recently about 1,500 Tajik students had been studying in religious schools, but there was no talk about their full repatriation. "We bring back only those students who study in dubious educational institutions -- very often these are underground madrasas," Nazriyev said.
In August, President Imomali Rakhmon urged parents to withdraw their children from religious schools abroad, saying most of these schools were actually not religious.
"Your children will become extremists, terrorists, and will turn into enemies and traitors of the Tajik nation," he said at the time.
The Central Asian state, which lived through a civil war between the secular government and Islamic opposition in the 1990s, remains the poorest of the former Soviet republics and lies on a drug-trafficking route out of next-door Afghanistan.
Analysts say that deepening economic hardship, social problems and a Soviet-style official crackdown on Islam are pushing Tajiks toward radical Islam, sapping stability in the otherwise secular nation of seven million.
Tajik government troops have fought since September against Islamist rebels in a mountainous area in the east of the country -- a traditional stronghold of the Islamic opposition. More than 40 soldiers and about 25 rebels have been killed in the clashes.
The opposition Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan warned that some of the returning students could embrace radical Islam after finding no good alternative to study religion at home.
"Such official pressure will lead some young people, who were not allowed to receive good education and were not informed that terrorism and Islam are two incompatible things, to adhere to radical movements," Khikmatullo Saifullozoda, a party leader, told Reuters.
"Tajikistan wants to become 'a country of pure Islam', but (young people's) heads are empty. You can't live in isolation without communicating with Islamic states and their schools." (Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; editing by Mark Heinrich)
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