In the span of a month, Nilufar herself had been stopped three times by authorities for wearing a hijab in public. “Nowadays, as soon as you go outside, you can actually feel how the raids have intensified,” Nilufar said in a recent interview in Dushanbe, providing only her first name because of fear of retribution. With a population of 10 million, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, Tajikistan has many challenges that counter-extremism experts say make it an incubator for extremism: poverty, poor education, high unemployment and grievances against an autocratic government that severely restricts the practice of religion. In the face of these challenges, critics say, Tajikistan has continued to restrict how Islam can be taught and practised and increasingly implemented superficial policies regulating head scarves and beard lengths. The country came under global scrutiny after four Tajik men were charged as the assailants in the worst extremist attack in Russia in two decades, which killed 145 people and injured more than 500 at the Moscow concert hall.