Central Asian Sufism

Central Asian Sufism is the Sufism of the region historically called Transoxiana — the land beyond the Oxus River — together with neighboring Khorasan and the steppe territories north of them. In modern terms: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, parts of Afghanistan, and the Xinjiang region of western China. This is the ground from which Rumi's family emigrated, from which the Naqshbandi order emerged, and through which Islam reached the Turkic peoples of the steppe.

The region holds one of the oldest continuous Islamic scholarly traditions outside the Arab heartland. Bukhara — "the Dome of Islam" — was home to Imam al-Bukhari (810-870), the compiler of the most important Sunni hadith collection, and to centuries of madrasas, libraries, and teaching circles. Samarkand hosted its own tradition of scholars and saints. Herat, Balkh, Termez, Tashkent, and Khiva each developed their own networks of mosques, shrines, and Sufi gathering places. The orders grew up inside this dense institutional ecology.

The signature lineage is the Naqshbandiyya, founded by Baha-ud-Din Naqshband Bukhari (1318-1389) and taking its name from him. The Naqshbandi path emphasizes silent dhikr — the remembrance of God carried entirely in the heart, without vocalization — along with engagement in the world rather than withdrawal from it. The order's principle of "solitude in the crowd" (khalwat dar anjuman) captures the approach: maintain inner stillness while fully participating in ordinary life.

Alongside the Naqshbandiyya sits the older Yasawi order, founded by Khwaja Ahmad Yasawi (c. 1093-1166) in the city of Yasi (now Turkestan in Kazakhstan). The Yasawi path carried Islam into the Turkic steppe using Turkic language and cultural forms, and produced the Diwan-i Hikmat — a collection of mystical poems that shaped the Turkic spiritual imagination. Yasawi's influence extended as far as Anatolia, where his disciples are said to have included figures in the lineage that produced Haji Bektash Veli.

The Sufi tradition in Central Asia emerged from the broader flowering of Islamic learning in the region during the Samanid period (819-999). By the 11th century, a line of masters known as the Khwajagan — "the Masters" — had taken shape in Khorasan and Transoxiana. Abu Yusuf Hamadani (1049-1140) is often cited as the founding figure of this chain; his students included both Khwaja Ahmad Yasawi, whose lineage became the Yasawiyya, and Abdul Khaliq Ghijduwani (d. 1179), whose lineage eventually produced Baha-ud-Din Naqshband.

Ghijduwani formulated the "Eight Sacred Words" — eight principles of practice, stated in Persian, that the Khwajagan transmitted to their students. Baha-ud-Din Naqshband, born near Bukhara in the 14th century, added three more principles, making eleven. These short aphoristic formulations — remembrance with each breath, watching one's steps, the inner journey, solitude in the crowd — became the core syllabus of the Naqshbandi way.

The Mongol invasions of the 13th century devastated Central Asian cities. Bukhara, Samarkand, Balkh, and Merv were sacked. Libraries burned. Scholars fled. And yet within a few generations, the survivors and their descendants rebuilt the tradition. The Timurid period (1370-1507), centered at Samarkand and Herat, saw a renaissance of Sufi scholarship, architecture, and art. The grand madrasas of Samarkand's Registan, the shrine complex at Gazurgah near Herat, and the Shah-i Zinda necropolis outside Samarkand all date to this flowering.

The Naqshbandi order in particular gained political influence. Khwaja Ahrar (1404-1490), based in Samarkand, became the spiritual director of much of the Timurid ruling class, accumulated enormous wealth through donation, and redistributed much of it to mosques, madrasas, and the poor. After his time, the order spread across the entire Islamic world — to Mughal India through Khwaja Baqi Billah (1563-1603), to Ottoman Turkey through multiple branches, to the Caucasus through Khalid al-Baghdadi, and as far as the Volga-Ural region and what is now Xinjiang.

The 19th century brought Russian conquest. The khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand were absorbed into the Russian Empire; the Transoxian lands became the Turkestan Governorate. Sufi orders initially coexisted with imperial rule and sometimes led resistance — the Andijan Uprising of 1898 was led by the Naqshbandi shaykh Muhammad Ali Madali, known as Dukchi Ishan. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the creation of the Soviet republics brought a much more sustained assault. Collectivization, antireligious campaigns, the closure of mosques and madrasas, and arrests of shaykhs in the 1920s and 1930s drove the tradition underground.

For much of the 20th century, Central Asian Sufism survived as "parallel Islam" — transmission in private homes, pilgrimage to shrines maintained quietly, recitation of dhikr within trusted family circles. The Soviet state tried to suppress shrine visitation; it never succeeded. After 1991 and the independence of the Central Asian republics, the tradition began to reopen. Shrines have been restored. The shrine of Baha-ud-Din Naqshband outside Bukhara, carefully rebuilt, is one of the major pilgrimage destinations in the Muslim world.

Central Asian Sufism in the 21st century is in a cautious revival. Seventy years of Soviet antireligious policy thinned out the institutional structure of the orders but never erased the shrines, the pilgrimage traditions, or the family transmissions that kept the practice alive. Since 1991, each post-Soviet state has taken a different approach to managing the return of organized religion.

Uzbekistan has restored the major shrines — Baha-ud-Din Naqshband's complex outside Bukhara, the shrine of Qusam ibn Abbas at Shah-i Zinda in Samarkand, the tomb of Imam al-Bukhari — with significant state investment, framing them partly as religious sites and partly as heritage. Tajikistan and Kazakhstan have taken similar approaches. Shrine visitation (ziyarat) continues at a high volume, particularly at the cluster of sites around Bukhara and at Yasawi's mausoleum in Turkestan, Kazakhstan.

Living masters and orders operate with varying visibility. Some states allow registered religious activity under careful oversight; others restrict any organized practice outside state-sanctioned structures. The Haqqani-Naqshbandi lineage, with its global network centered in Cyprus and traced through the Khalidi branch, draws part of its spiritual authority from the Central Asian Naqshbandi chain. The Tajik-Afghan borderlands retain active shrine cultures and quiet teaching circles. And the books remain — Rumi, Jami, Baha-ud-Din's biographies, the Diwan-i Hikmat of Yasawi — all now available in print again after decades of suppression.

What the region still offers the tradition globally is the original source material of much of it. Every Naqshbandi practitioner anywhere in the world inherits a chain that runs through Baha-ud-Din, Yasawi, and the Khwajagan. The old cities hold the graves and the teaching places where that chain was formed. Pilgrims from Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, and the Caucasus come back to them because this is, in a direct historical sense, where the contemporary global Naqshbandi tradition began.