Islam, Orthodoxy and Atheism: How Kazakhstan Believes

Kazakhstan is a majority Muslim country. In the 2021 census roughly seven in ten residents identified as Muslim, almost all of them Sunnis of the Hanafi school, while about one in six identified as Christian, overwhelmingly Russian Orthodox. The constitution defines Kazakhstan as a secular state with no official religion.

Religion Maps Almost Exactly Onto Ethnicity

In many countries, guessing someone's religion from their surname is a bad bet. In Kazakhstan it is close to a rule. Muslims are overwhelmingly Kazakhs, along with Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Tatars and Chechens. Orthodox Christians are overwhelmingly Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, whose ancestors arrived as imperial settlers, as deportees, or as workers during the Virgin Lands campaign of the 1950s. The line between the two faiths is essentially the line between two population histories.

That mapping also explains the demographic trend. Between the 2009 and 2021 censuses the Christian share fell by roughly nine percentage points while the Muslim share held broadly steady, and the reason is not conversion. It is emigration and differing birth rates: large numbers of Slavs and ethnic Germans left for Russia and Germany after 1991, while the Kazakh population grew and was topped up by oralman, ethnic Kazakhs repatriated from Mongolia, China and Uzbekistan under a state programme. Smaller communities of German Lutherans, Mennonites and Polish Catholics survive across the northern steppe as a residue of Soviet-era deportations.

Islam Arrived Slowly, by Caravan and by Khan

Talas, the Karakhanids and the Horde

Islam reached what is now southern Kazakhstan in the eighth century, its arrival conventionally dated from the Battle of Talas in 751, fought near the modern Kazakh-Kyrgyz border between Abbasid and Tang forces. But conquest is not conversion, and the process took centuries. The settled Silk Road cities of the Syr Darya valley Islamised first. The Turkic Karakhanid dynasty adopted Islam around the tenth century, making it the faith of a Turkic ruling house rather than an Arab import, and the Golden Horde converted under Ozbeg Khan in the early fourteenth century, carrying Islam decisively into the nomadic north.

Because the steppe converted through wandering Sufi preachers rather than through garrisons and madrasas, the Islam that took root absorbed much of what preceded it. Reverence for the sky-god Tengri, veneration of ancestral spirits known as aruakh, the ritual importance of fire and the hearth, and the practice of visiting the tombs of holy figures all persisted inside a Muslim framework. Kazakh Islam has historically been shrine-centred and light on formal clerical structure, a pattern suited to people who moved with their herds.

Yasawi and the shrine at Turkistan

The single most important religious site in the country sits in the small southern city of Turkistan. Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, who died in 1166, did more than anyone to make Islam intelligible in Turkic terms, preaching and writing devotional poetry in a Turkic vernacular rather than Persian or Arabic. His collected verses, the Diwan-i Hikmet, or Book of Wisdom, became foundational for Turkic Sufism across Central Asia.

Two centuries after his death, Timur ordered a colossal mausoleum built over his grave. Constructed between roughly 1389 and 1405 and left unfinished when Timur died, it carries the largest brick dome in Central Asia, and the scaffolding holes in its unfaced entrance portal are still visible today. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Pilgrims have travelled there for centuries, and a tradition long repeated in the region holds that three visits to Turkistan carry something of the merit of a pilgrimage to Mecca. The clergy have never endorsed that formulation, but it says a great deal about the shrine's standing. The underground mosque of Beket-Ata in the Mangystau desert draws visitors on the same logic.

Seventy Years of Official Atheism

The Soviet period is the reason religion in Kazakhstan looks the way it does today. From the 1920s the state pursued organised atheism as policy: mosques and churches were closed or turned into warehouses, clubs and cinemas, endowments were confiscated, Arabic script was replaced first with Latin and then Cyrillic, cutting a generation off from its own religious literature, and clergy of every faith were arrested, exiled or shot. The famine and forced settlement of Kazakh nomads in the early 1930s killed a very large share of the Kazakh population and destroyed the mobile social order through which steppe Islam had been transmitted.

Wartime pressure produced a partial retreat. In 1943 the Soviet leadership permitted a Muslim spiritual administration for Central Asia and Kazakhstan, based in Tashkent, and allowed the Orthodox Church to reorganise, creating a small licensed religious sphere under close supervision. That was the ceiling for the next four decades. What survived did so domestically: circumcision, Islamic burial rites, memorial meals for the dead, Orthodox baptism and Easter. By 1991 most Kazakhstanis had a religious identity and very little religious instruction.

Revival, and the Rules That Came With It

Independence in 1991 opened the taps. New mosques went up in nearly every town, the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Kazakhstan was established in 1990 under a Supreme Mufti, the Russian Orthodox Church rebuilt its structures and gained its own metropolitan district in 2003, and foreign missionaries arrived at once. Ramadan fasting, Kurban Ait, Orthodox Easter and the spring festival of Nauryz all returned to public life.

The registration regime

The state's enthusiasm for the revival had limits. A 2011 law on religious activity required every religious group in the country to re-register, imposed minimum membership thresholds that scale up from local to national status, restricted worship to approved premises, required missionaries to register annually, and subjected imported religious literature to review. The number of registered associations fell sharply, by roughly a third, as small congregations failed the thresholds. The same law names the historical role of Hanafi Islam and Orthodox Christianity in its preamble, an unusual move for a secular state and a clear signal about which traditions the government regards as native. Officials are openly hostile to Salafi currents, treating them as a foreign import and a security question, and disputes over headscarves in schools recur.

Mosques as statecraft

Religious architecture in the capital doubles as diplomacy. The Hazrat Sultan Mosque, opened in Astana in 2012 and named in honour of Yasawi, was among the largest in Central Asia when it was built, with room for roughly ten thousand worshippers under white marble and blue-tiled domes. The far larger Astana Grand Mosque followed in 2022. Nearby stands the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a pyramid designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2006 to host the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, a triennial gathering first convened in 2003 that has drawn senior Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu figures to the capital, including Pope Francis in 2022. Kazakhstan markets religious pluralism abroad while regulating it firmly at home.

What Belief Looks Like Day to Day

For most Kazakhstanis, religion is strongly felt as identity and lightly observed as practice. Survey work consistently finds that a large majority of Kazakhs call themselves Muslim while a much smaller minority pray five times a day or fast the whole of Ramadan. Alcohol is common at celebrations, headscarves are a minority choice among Kazakh women, and the rites people will not skip are the ones tied to family: the naming of a child, circumcision, a Muslim burial and the memorial meals that follow at set intervals.

The Orthodox pattern is comparable. Ascension Cathedral in Almaty, a tall wooden church completed in 1907 that famously came through the 1911 earthquake, fills at Easter and Christmas with people who are not weekly attenders. Kurban Ait is a public holiday, and Orthodox Christmas on 7 January has long been marked as one too. Nauryz, on 22 March, is celebrated nationally as a cultural rather than religious festival, which is exactly how a secular state prefers it. Three decades after the Soviet collapse, Kazakhstan has two large traditions unmistakably present in its landscape, closely mapped onto who your grandparents were, and held with a lightness that seventy years of enforced atheism goes a long way to explaining.