Islam reached the Turkic peoples from the tenth century, and the manner of its arrival shaped what it became. Devin DeWeese's study of the Golden Horde argues from internal narrative traditions that conversion was carried by Sufi figures and was remembered as such, so that the tomb of a saint, the lodge of an order and descent from a holy man are the load bearing institutions rather than the formal schools alone.
Ahmad Yasawi, whose shrine at Turkistan in present day Kazakhstan was rebuilt by Timur, stands at the head of that tradition. The Yasawi and later the Naqshbandi orders carried Islam across the steppe and into Anatolia, and the mausoleum, the pilgrimage and the veneration of ancestors sit alongside the mosque rather than in competition with it.
Anatolia produced a further distinctive strand. Alevism, examined by David Shankland and by Markus Dressler, has its own gathering, the cem, its own ritual leaders and a devotion to Ali, and its relation to Sunni and to Shia Islam is a matter of live argument, including among Alevis themselves. Soviet rule then suppressed religious institutions across Central Asia for seventy years without ending shrine visiting, and since 1991 the independent Turkic republics have each negotiated their own settlement between an official Islam, a revived Sufism, and the older layer that never quite disappeared.