Kyrgyz

The Manas is the reason Kyrgyz appears in an atlas of religion. It is an oral epic of enormous length, running in the fullest recorded versions to hundreds of thousands of lines, and it is performed by manaschi, specialists who typically describe their calling as arriving in a dream in which Manas or one of his companions instructs them to recite. That dream is not a literary convention; it functions as an initiation, and a manaschi who has not had one is understood to be reciting rather than transmitting.

The epic follows Manas, his son Semetey and his grandson Seytek, and it carries a layer of belief older than the Islam that the Kyrgyz have professed for centuries: the sky, the spirits of ancestors, the horse, and the protective powers attached to particular places all operate in it alongside Muslim vocabulary. Recitation is not a fixed text. A manaschi composes within a formulaic tradition, so no two performances are the same and the printed editions represent particular singers rather than the epic in itself. Kyrgyz national life since independence has made the Manas a public and political possession as well as a religious one, with a state prize, a monumental complex and a mausoleum traditionally identified as that of Manas himself in Talas.

Kyrgyz has been written in three alphabets within living memory, and the sequence is a compact record of how state policy reaches into religious life. Before the Soviet period it was written, where it was written at all, in an Arabic script adapted for Turkic sounds, the same script in which the Quran was read and in which the clerical class was literate.

A Latin alphabet was introduced in 1928 as part of a wider Turkic latinisation that cut the reading public off from the older religious literature at a stroke. Cyrillic replaced Latin from 1940. The result is that a Kyrgyz reader today reaches the pre-revolutionary religious and epic manuscripts only through transcription, while Kyrgyz communities in Xinjiang, who never went through either change, continue to use a modified Arabic alphabet and can read them directly.

The language itself is Kipchak Turkic, close to Kazakh and Altai, with vowel harmony and a rich system of participial constructions that the epic style exploits heavily. Its Islamic vocabulary is largely Arabic and Persian in origin, arriving through Chagatai, while the vocabulary of the older sky and ancestor religion is Turkic and native, and a manaschi moves between the two registers in a single passage.