IN A part of the world painfully inured to self-regarding eccentric leaders, the president of Tajikistan appears to be setting new standards in autocrat oddity.

In a series of decrees that seem designed to turn the clock back and shake off Russian influence, president Emomali Rakhmonov has banned lavish celebrations, outlawed gold teeth and ordered people to change their surnames.

Pupils have been told they can't travel to school in private cars, that they can't carry mobile phones and that they can't hold end-of-school parties to mark the completion of their secondary education.

Rakhmonov called the latter "pompous and excessive".

Lavish weddings have also been criticised and, though he hasn't formally banned birthday parties, Rakhmonov has expressed his displeasure of particularly showy festivities.

Instead, the immaculately coiffured 54-year-old president is urging his citizens to read his own book, a hefty tome about Tajikistan and his own life entitled The Tajiks In The Mirror Of History.

Rakhmonov, a former Soviet collective farm boss who has ruled his impoverished central Asian nation continuously since 1992, wishes to lead by example, and has announced that from now on he wants to be known simply as Rakhmon, dropping the "ov" from his surname.

He expects everyone else to follow suit: all newborn children should have surnames that do not end in the Russian-sounding "ov" or "ev", he has decreed, and adult Tajiks should consider shortening their surnames too.

Rakhmonov argues the changes will reinforce traditional Tajik identity. "It's about the spelling of names and surnames of children according to the historic traditions of Tajik culture," he said.

The president is keen to buttress his largely Muslim country's independence and sense of identity. The country of almost 7.5 million people, nearly half of whom are under the age of 14, speaks a language that is very close to Persian, spoken in Iran, and to Dari, spoken in Afghanistan.

Rakhmonov has been praised for providing Tajikistan with both stability and predictability. However, his micro-management of people's everyday lives and his appetite for self-promotion have raised eyebrows and drawn parallels with one of central Asia's oddest and most disturbing leaders - the late Sapurmat Niyazov, "The Great Turkmenbashi", in Turkmenistan, who died of a heart attack last December.

Both the late autocrat and Rakhmonov have a peculiar aversion to gold teeth, a popular hangover from the Soviet era when it was prestigious to have gold or silver fillings, which were seen as status symbols.

Rakhmonov banned the wearing of such fillings towards the end of last year after meeting a female schoolteacher sporting a gold filling.

"Schoolteachers are complaining about low salaries but their teeth are gold," he said.

"How can representatives from international organisations believe that we are poor when our teachers' mouths are full of gold? It's not out culture and it's not our tradition."

The president said he wanted anyone working for the state to remove any gold fillings, an edict that posed a problem since an estimated half of the country's workforce is estimated to sport at least one gold tooth.

Many of his decrees appear motivated by his desire to realign his country more closely with Iran and move away from Moscow's influence. That influence is considerable; it is estimated that each year migrant Tajik workers in Russia send $1 billion back home, more than double the annual state budget of a nation bereft of significant reserves of oil and gas.

Independent from the Soviet Union since 1991, Tajikistan was riven by a civil war, waged between its Moscow-backed government and Islamist fundamentalists, that lasted - on and off - until 1997.

Rakhmonov's position as father of the Tajiks looks assured for years to come. Last November he won 79% of the vote in a ballot that allows him to govern for another seven years.

The president shrugged off suggestions that the vote might not have been fair. "Tajikistan is a country where more than 99% of the population is Muslim. We have a different culture, and this has to be taken account of," he said.