Religion and History in Kyrgyzstan

Long before Islam reached the Tian Shan and Pamir-Alai ranges, the nomadic Kyrgyz herding culture held its own shamanistic and animist beliefs, traces of which survive today in mountain shrine veneration and in the oral epic of Manas, the centerpiece of Kyrgyz identity. Islam arrived gradually through Turkic and Persian contact along Central Asian trade routes, and by the modern era the Kyrgyz had become overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim of the Hanafi school, though folk practice retained pre-Islamic elements more visibly than in some neighboring societies.

Russian imperial expansion from the nineteenth century, followed by seventy years of Soviet rule, imposed state atheism, closed most mosques and suppressed open religious education, leaving a population that reidentified with Islam only loosely at independence in 1991. Religious practice has deepened considerably since, with mosque construction and Islamic schooling expanding rapidly. Kyrgyzstan has generally been regarded as the most religiously open of the five Central Asian republics, tolerating a wider range of Islamic practice and foreign missionary activity than its neighbors, a comparative openness its own government registration system has increasingly tested.