Uzbekistan is overwhelmingly Muslim, around 96 percent Sunni Hanafi by most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Orthodox Christian, Jewish and Shia minorities remaining from the Soviet and earlier periods. The region historically known as Transoxiana was a leading center of Islamic scholarship after the eighth-century Arab conquests, producing figures central to the Sunni tradition including the hadith scholar Imam al-Bukhari, born near Samarkand, and the philosopher-physician Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna; Bukhara and Samarkand ranked among the great cities of Islamic learning, art and architecture for centuries under Timurid and later Central Asian rule.
Sufi orders, especially the Naqshbandi order founded in the region in the fourteenth century, shaped popular religious practice deeply, and Bukhara's ancient Jewish community, tracing roots to the Babylonian exile by local tradition, maintained a distinct Bukharan Jewish culture until most emigrated to Israel and the United States after Soviet collapse. Seventy years of Soviet rule after 1924 suppressed religious education and closed the great majority of mosques and madrasas, a suppression from which religious infrastructure only began rebuilding after independence in 1991.