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.

Seventy years of official atheism produced a distinctive result in Kazakhstan: a population that identifies as Muslim in overwhelming numbers while observing at rates far below those of neighbouring countries, and for whom Islam functions substantially as ethnic identity. Independence in 1991 was followed by a decade of near total religious freedom, during which foreign missionaries of every description arrived, and then by a sharp reversal. The religion law of 2011 required every religious association to re register under raised thresholds, fifty members for a local group, five hundred across at least two regions for a regional one, and five thousand across all regions for a national one. The number of registered religious organisations fell by roughly a third, and the number of registered denominations fell from dozens to seventeen. Unregistered religious activity is an administrative offence, missionaries must register annually, and religious literature may be sold only in approved outlets and must pass state expert review.

The state also maintains the Spiritual Administration of Muslims, which appoints imams and controls mosque registration, and has prosecuted Salafi teaching as extremism. Jehovah's Witnesses and unregistered Baptists appear repeatedly in fine and detention records. The government presents the framework as a response to the flow of fighters to Syria and Iraq and to attacks in Aktobe in 2016; critics observe that most of those prosecuted are quietist believers rather than militants.