Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Islam in Central Asia
With the exception of rapidly shrinking communities of Jews and Russian Orthodox
Christians, small minorities of Roman Catholics, Baptists and evangelical Lutherans,
and a few Buddhists among the Koreans of the Fergana Valley and Kyrgyzstan, nearly
everyone from the Caspian Sea to Kashgar is Muslim, at least in principle. The years
since independence have seen the resurgence of a faith that is only beginning to recover
from 70 years of Soviet-era 'militant atheism'.
Islam's Hitory & Schisms
In 612 AD, the Prophet Mohammed, then a wealthy Arab of Mecca in
present-day Saudi Arabia, began preaching a new religious philosophy,
Islam, based on revelations from Allah (Islam's name for God). These rev-
elations were eventually compiled into Islam's holiest book, the Quran.
Islam incorporates elements of Judaism and Christianity (eg heaven
and hell, a creation story much like the Garden of Eden, stories similar
to Noah's Ark), and shares a reverence for many of the key figures in the
Judeo-Christian faith (Abraham/Ibrahim, Moses/Musa, Jesus/Isa), but
considers them all to be forerunners of the Prophet Mohammed. While
Jews and Christians are respected as People of the topic (ahl al-Kitab),
Islam regards itself as the summation of and last word on these faiths.
In 622 the Prophet Mohammed and his followers were forced to flee
to Medina due to religious persecution (the Islamic calendar counts its
years from this flight, known as Hejira). There he built a political base
and an army, taking Mecca in 630 and eventually overrunning Arabia.
The militancy of the faith meshed neatly with a latent Arab nationalism
and within a century Islam reached from Spain to Central Asia.
Succession disputes after the Prophet's death in 632 soon split the
community. When the fourth caliph, the Prophet's son-in-law Ali, was
assassinated in 661, his followers and descendants became the found-
ers of the Shiite sect. Others accepted as caliph the governor of Syria, a
brother-in-law of the Prophet, and this line has become the modern-day
orthodox Sunni sect. In 680 a chance for reconciliation was lost when
Ali's surviving son Hussain (Hussein) and most of his male relatives were
killed at Kerbala in Iraq by Sunni partisans.
About 80% of all Central Asians are Muslim, nearly all of them Sunni
(and indeed nearly all of the Hanafi school, one of Sunnism's four main
schools of religious law). The main exception is a tightly knit community
of Ismailis in the remote western Pamirs of Gorno-Badakhshan in east-
ern Tajikistan.
A small but increasingly influential community of another Sunni
school, the ascetic, fundamentalist Wahhabi, are found mainly in Uz-
bekistan's Fergana Valley.
Practice
Devout Sunnis pray at prescribed times: before sunrise, just after high
noon, in the late afternoon, just after sunset and before retiring. Prayers
The word Islam
translates loosely
from Arabic as
'the peace that
comes from total
surrender to God'.
To learn more
about Ismailism,
try the scholarly
Short History of
the Ismailis: Tradi-
tions of a Muslim
Community,
or
The Isma'ilis:
Their History
and Doctrines,
both by Farhad
Daftary.
