Ahmad Yasavi

The Islam that reached the Turkic peoples of the steppe came through Persian-speaking cities, and its books were in Arabic and Persian. Ahmad Yasavi is the point at which it begins to be transmitted in Turkic, in verse, in a metre and idiom an audience on the steppe already used.

The Divan-i Hikmet, the book of wisdom, is a collection of short poems of instruction, repentance and mortality, addressed to ordinary people and built for recitation and memorisation. It is attributed to him and it is the foundation text of Turkic Sufi literature. The attribution needs care. Every surviving manuscript is centuries later than the twelfth century, the language of the collection as we have it belongs to a later stage of Turkic than his own would have been, and specialists treat the corpus as a tradition that accumulated around his name rather than as a book he wrote and left. That does not make it a forgery. It makes it a school.

His own training was orthodox and urban. He studied at Bukhara under Yusuf Hamadani, in the line of the Khwajagan masters from which the Naqshbandiyya also descends, and then returned to Yasi. The Yasavi practice is a vocal remembrance, the dhikr-i arra or sawing dhikr, named for the sound of the breath, and it is the loud counterpart to the silent method the Naqshbandis later fixed.

Ahmad Yasavi died at Yasi in 1166 and was buried there. The town, now Turkistan in southern Kazakhstan, sat where the settled world of Transoxiana met the steppe, and the grave became a place of visiting almost at once.

In the 1390s Timur ordered a mausoleum built over it. What went up is among the largest structures of its kind anywhere: a domed complex with a great hall, a mosque, a library, wells and an enormous bronze cauldron for distributing water to visitors. It was left unfinished when Timur died in 1405 and never completed, and the scaffolding sockets are still visible on the front. Building it was a political act as much as a pious one, since Timur was asserting a claim over the steppe and its saints, and it worked. The site is the principal pilgrimage place of Kazakhstan and stands on the World Heritage list.

The order named after him spread through the Turkic world and fed into later movements. The Bektashi tradition of Anatolia and the Balkans traces part of its descent through Yasavi channels, and the wandering dervishes of the Turkish and Central Asian countryside were often described as Yasavi. Under Soviet rule the shrine was closed to worship and treated as a monument. It reopened after 1991, and Ahmad Yasavi now functions in Kazakhstan as a national figure as well as a religious one, which is a further layer on a life about which very little is independently documented.