Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Islam in Contemporary Central Asia 1 3 5these policies, new meanings of Islam and of being Muslim emerged in CentralAsia: Islam became a facet of national identity even as Islamic norms of behaviorlost their authority over the public realm. This represents a new chapterin the very long history of Islam’s presence in Central Asia. It also provides av e ry important contrast to other traditionally Muslim societies, where Islam interactswith nationalism and modernity in different ways.Islamization of Central AsiaCentral Asia has long been an integral part of the Muslim world. Arab armiesconquered the cities of Transoxiana in the early eighth century, turning the regioninto the frontier of the Muslim world. Over the next two centuries, theurban population, mostly speakers of Persian, converted to Islam, and thecities very soon became connected to networks of Muslim culture and of Islamiclearning. Indeed, some of the most important figures in Islamic civilizationoriginated from Transoxiana. After the Qur’an, the second most importantsource of Islamic law are the h a d i t h , the written traditions of the Prophet.Sunni Muslims hold six compilations of h a d i t h to be authoritative. Two of thesix compilers, Imam Abu Isma‘il al-Bukhari (810–870) and Abu Isa Muhammadal-Tirmidhi (825–892), were from Transoxiana, as were the influential juristsAbu Mansur Muhammad al-Maturidi (d. circa 944) and Burhan al-DinAbu’l Hasan al-Marghinani (d. 1197). So too were the great scientist Abu Nasral-Muhammad al-Farabi (d. circa 950), known as “the second teacher” (afterAristotle), and the rationalist philosopher Abu Ali Ibn Sina (known in theWest as Avicenna, 980–1037)—all of them figures of central importance in theh i s t o ry of Islamic civilization in its so-called classical age. They were part ofbroader networks of travel and learning, which served to make the cities ofTransoxiana part of the heartland of the Muslim world. This position was furthercemented by the emergence, at the end of the tenth century, of Bukharaas the seat of the independent Samanid dynasty, which patronized the developmentof “new Persian” (written in the Arabic script) as a literary language( F rye 1965).The surrounding steppe, with its largely Turkic-speaking nomadic population,remained a borderland. Conversion to Islam was a gradual process thatlasted into the eighteenth century, although the fourteenth century was of crucialimportance. Conversion to Islam on the steppe was the work of Sufi masterswho made Islam meaningful to the population by synthesizing Islamicthemes with nomadic myths of origin. Observers have conventionally held thissyncretism to be evidence that steppe nomads were only “superficially Islamized”or that they were Muslims in name only. This view has resurf a c e dforcefully after the collapse of the Soviet Union and is sometimes applied to all