Turkic Peoples

The oldest Turkic religious statement is carved in stone. The Orkhon inscriptions of the early eighth century, raised in Mongolia for the rulers of the Second Turkic Khaganate, open with the blue sky above and the brown earth below and the sons of men between them, and they attribute the ruler's power to Tengri, heaven, and to a female earth and water power. Peter Golden's history sets those texts within the wider record of the steppe.

Around that framework sat the ordinary apparatus of steppe religion: spirits of place and of ancestors, sacred mountains, offerings of horses, and specialists who dealt with the spirits. The Tungusic word taken into Russian and from there into every European language as shaman came from this world, and it has since been applied to religious specialists on every continent, a generalisation the atlas treats with caution because it flattens what the word originally named.

Turkic peoples then adopted, at different times, most of the religions of Eurasia. The Uyghur khaganate took Manichaeism as a state religion in the eighth century, others took Buddhism, Christianity of the Church of the East spread widely among them, and the Khazar elite adopted Judaism, an episode whose extent is still argued over.

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.