Religion and History in Kazakhstan

The Kazakh steppe was a place where religions passed through as well as settled. Tengrism, addressed to the eternal blue sky and to ancestral spirits, is the oldest attested layer; Nestorian Christianity, Manichaeism and Buddhism all had communities along the Silk Road cities of the south. Islam arrived from the eighth century and spread among the nomads slowly and largely through Sufi teachers rather than by conquest, which is why Kazakh Islam absorbed rather than erased older practice: the veneration of ancestors, respect for sacred springs and trees, and the use of amulets continued alongside it.

The central figure is Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, a twelfth century Sufi whose Turkic language poetry made Islam intelligible on the steppe and whose order shaped Central Asian practice for centuries; the mausoleum Timur built over his grave at Turkistan is the country's most important monument and a place of pilgrimage that some regard as a lesser hajj. Russian colonisation from the eighteenth century brought Orthodox settlers, and Soviet policy brought closures, executions of clergy and mass deportations of Germans, Chechens, Koreans and others into Kazakhstan, which is a large part of why the country is religiously and ethnically mixed today.