Khoja in Southern Kazakhstan: History and Identity

This article considers the role of Muslim missionaries and their descendants in the formation of religious and ethnicidentity of the Kazakhs of Western Siberia. Investigation bases on materials of the Kazakh archeological ethnographic expeditions of Omsk Department of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography SB RAS in 2011, 2013–2014. Consisting of scattered kins and tribes, the Turks submitted to Islam hardly. The process of Islamization took several centuries. The missionaries played an important role in these processes. They were of Middle Asia descent, who integrated to the Turkic community. Most of them immigrated to Western Siberia in 16–18 centuries. Missionaries and their descendants leaded the Islamic lifestyle and brought up children in an appropriate manner. They have seen the reason to live in advocacy of Islam and its introduction to Kazakh community and have taught them the Arabic script, Sharia, recitation and Islamic mascot supply. No one family event didn`t happen without them: from the name nomination, rite of genital mutilation, the Muslim wedding rite – Neka, to realization of kurmaldyk and funeral rites. Their way of life and a social cachet infl uences over neophytes. The spread of Islam got underway a mechanism for internal and external consolidation processes. The development of religious identity hastened a process, which formed the Kazakh ethnicity. Activity of missionaries and their descendants generated the transformation of traditional culture associated with the formation of ethnic culture. They had been fully engaged in the development of ethnicity in Kazakh Middle Zhuz and had rewritten the Kazakh shezhire.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014

Finding the roots of ethnic Kazakh people is extremely complex, and is intimately connected with the study of ancient Kazakhstan and adjacent areas of Eurasia. Among the many aspects of the origin of the Kazakh people are two aspects: linguistic and anthropological. There is every reason to believe that the two processes in the area under parallel development, mainly for historical vertical. This approach allows us to trace the continuity and preserve the "ancestral" traits. However, in certain periods of history played a role and the development of the horizontal line. It is noteworthy that in the ancient indigenous monks region had a common linguistic and anthropological basis, and modern descendants of the genetic clustering generally corresponds to the linguistic. Kazakhstan's long history can be divided into two periods: the Indo-European and Turkic. The first period, in spite of their considerable time distance, appears as a real phase formed not only with strong economic and cultural traditions, but also a number of prominent ethnic groups. This article is an analysis of the ethnic processes in Kazakhstan.

2017

There are a number of either simplistic and stereotypic views about the Islamness doctrinal or theoretical Islam, formed by „ijtihads‟ („Ijtihad‟ means independent, based on reasoning, interpretation of the issues were not openly covered in the primary sources of Islam) and Muslimness (embodiment of doctrinal Islam or Islamness in a particular identity) of Kazakhs, historically a major Central Asian Muslim nomadic group. This paper, first, tries to shed light on a fact that Kazakh religious perceptions and identity are in line with core Sunni Islamic doctrinal understandings characterized by spirituality, xenophile and being depoliticized. Second, this paper searches for a nexus between inclusiveness of Kazakh Muslimness and historical and civilizational foundations of Kazakhness. Although the Muslimness of Kazakhs, like all post-Soviet ethnic groups bears heavy stain of Soviet period, the historical and civilizational Islamic heritage of Kazakhs could not be totally erased and tran...

Central Asian Survey, 2006

2017

This paper highlights problems of religious identity formation in Kazakhstan. The authors call attention to the genesis of religious tolerance as one of the main factors of the structure of religious identity in Kazakhstan. Pre-Islamic cultural layer in combination with different religious traditions has made the basis of the worldview with some elements of eclecticism and syncretism. Being most viable, Old Turkic religious faiths having joined Islam later created a tolerance basis of a religious worldview. On the whole, religious identity is a symbiosis of spiritual values in a polyconfessional society, where historically, Islam and Christianity played an important role. Religious identity in Kazakhstan is considered from the point of view of different forms of studies. The authors in their research raise the following issues: What is religious identity? What is its origin? What is the role of religious identity during different historical periods? Has its significance changed in t...

Identity is a vague and abstract concept. Like individuals, nations need to know who they are, their origins, their peculiarities, and how they resemble and differ from other peoples and states near them. 1 Only when a nation has a sense of its place in history, geography, and culture, it can begin to act with certitude.

All sudden political changes come up with a burden that leans from the top of the system to the bottom. All suffering does not affect all people equally, yet, suffer brings about its compensators that might effect the majority that belongs to a certain set of space and time.

Centre for Anthropological Studies on Central Asia: Framing the Research, Initial Projects, 2013

Central Asian Affairs

Thirty years after its independence by-fait-accompli, Kazakhstan, both as a polity and as a society, is still trying to manage the formation of its national and civic identity. Kazakhstan and the Central Asian region in general have somehow always been subject to clichés involving a 'hotbed of ethnic tensions.' During the period between 1985-1995, it was often assumed that the ethnic hyper-diversity that characterized the Kazakh Soviet republic and the deep societal crises caused by the decline and demise of the Soviet Union would inevitably result in open ethnic conflict, if not in the breakup of the country. Despite a series of local incidents, such a scenario did not materialize. This suggests the existence of a viable level of both state legitimacy and societal cohesion. The tragic events in Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, and Tajikistan in the 1990s might also have dissuaded Kazakhstan from large-scale unrest. To this day, however, the definition and practice of an identity-offered by the state and state-affiliated civil society-which all citizens, regardless of their ethnicity, are able to identify with is crucial, not only for the country's aspired international reputation, but also for internal cohesion and stability. The official statements about the success thus far of the multi-ethnic civic model of Kazakhstan, developed under its first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, are open for interpretation. However, the contributions in this article cluster suggest that the majority of the population somehow assesses this development as positive, or at least agrees that things could have been worse. There is no doubt that society and the state have become ethnically 'more Kazakh' in the years since independence. This is demonstrated by the composition of its population and the share of the titular Kazakh population, going from 40% in 1989 (a minority in their own titular republic) to 68.5% in 2020. This shift is also noticeable at the local level. Kazakhs now form majorities in cities and provinces that had clear non-Kazakh majorities or ethnically diverse populations dating back to 1989, the year of the last Soviet census. For example, if ethnic Kazakhs formed less than one-quarter of Almaty's population in 1989 (when it was still Alma-Ata, the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic), their share is now likely closer to two-thirds. In Atyrau on