Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Uzbekistan gathers three Silk Road cities that between them made Central Asia a center of Islamic scholarship and Sufi devotion, layered over an older mix of Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Manichaean and Church of the East communities.

Bukhara, traditionally honored as Bukhara al-Sharif, Noble Bukhara, was one of the great centers of Islamic scholarship in Central Asia, home city of the ninth century scholar al-Bukhari, whose Sahih al-Bukhari is the most authoritative Hadith collection in Sunni Islam. Just outside the city stands the shrine of Bahauddin Naqshband, who died in 1389 and founded the Naqshbandi Sufi order there, one of the most widely spread Sufi orders, its tomb complex still an active pilgrimage site. The historic center, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993, includes the Kalyan Minaret, whose scale reportedly impressed Genghis Khan enough that he spared it during the Mongol destruction of the city in 1220.

Samarkand held Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Manichaean and Church of the East communities before becoming a center of Islamic learning; the tomb of the hadith collector al-Bukhari lies outside it. Under Timur and his successors the city acquired the madrasas of the Registan and the Shah-i Zinda necropolis, built around a shrine attributed to a cousin of Muhammad, and the observatory of Ulugh Beg produced star tables used for astronomy and astrology far beyond Central Asia.

Khiva became capital of the Khivan Khanate in the sixteenth century, and its walled old town, Itchan Kala, grew over roughly six centuries into one of Central Asia's most complete surviving assemblages of Islamic mosques, madrasas and mausolea, including the Pahlavan Mahmud Mausoleum and the eighteenth century Djuma Mosque with its forest of more than 200 carved wooden columns.