Central Asia

Central Asia is the belt of oasis cities and mountain passes between Persia, China and the steppe, and almost every religion of the Old World passed through it.

Buddhism went east along these roads. Monasteries in Bactria and the Tarim basin housed the translators who carried Indian texts into Chinese, and the pilgrim Xuanzang travelled the same route westward in the seventh century and left a detailed account of what he found in each kingdom. The colossal buddhas cut into the cliff at Bamiyan, destroyed in 2001, belonged to that world.

Manichaeism spread from Mesopotamia along the same corridor, was adopted as the state religion of the Uyghur steppe empire in the eighth century, and survived longest in Chinese Central Asia; a great deal of what is known about it comes from manuscripts recovered from Turfan, in several languages and scripts. The Church of the East ran bishoprics along the route and reached China by the seventh century. Zoroastrian communities were established throughout, and Sogdian merchants carried all of these traditions as part of their trading networks.

After the Arab conquests the region became one of Islam's great centres of learning. Bukhara and Samarkand produced hadith collectors, jurists and philosophers whose work is standard across the Muslim world, and the Naqshbandi Sufi order, which became one of the most widespread anywhere, began at Bukhara in the fourteenth century.

The modern religious history of Central Asia is dominated by two imperial projects with opposite intentions and comparable effects on institutions.

Russian expansion brought most of the region under tsarist rule in the nineteenth century. The policy toward Islam was not straightforwardly hostile: Robert Crews has argued that the empire deliberately used Islamic institutions as instruments of government, appointing and funding muftis, giving state backing to religious courts, and thereby making itself an arbiter in Muslim disputes. Believers learned to appeal to the tsar's officials against their own clergy, which entangled the state in doctrinal questions it had no interest in.

Soviet policy after the 1920s was to end religion altogether. Mosques and madrasas were closed in enormous numbers, endowments confiscated, Arabic script replaced first by Latin and then by Cyrillic, cutting a generation off from the written tradition, the pilgrimage and the fast discouraged or banned, and clergy imprisoned or killed. A single officially recognised board was left to administer what remained. Popular practice continued around shrines and lineages, which is what survived best.

Since independence in 1991 the five republics have rebuilt mosques and reopened institutions while regulating religion tightly, registering congregations, restricting foreign missionary activity and treating unauthorised religious organisation as a security matter. Nomadic and shamanic traditions have also re-emerged, and Tengrism has been promoted in several places as a pre-Islamic national heritage.