Abstract

Recent scholarship in the decolonial and critical study of religion reveals that the category of “religion” from its emergence in the European thought of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely tied to European colonial expansion and to imperial governance. Religious classifications do not serve as neutral analytical concepts. Instead, they became a tool for imperial authorities to organise and rank colonised populations, often creating scales of “civility” and “barbarity.”

This paper examines how such dynamics have shaped scholarly interpretations of religious life in Central Asia among Turkic populations from the early nineteenth century, when the region began to be intensively colonised by Imperial Russia, to the present. Drawing on a corpus of academic literature in Russian and English, I analyse how successive generations of scholars have described and categorised local traditions and practices.

I argue that from the earliest imperial ethnographic and administrative writings to contemporary academic debates, the study of religion in the region has been deeply shaped by broader intellectual and political paradigms rather than by sustained engagement with local conceptual frameworks. In the nineteenth century, interpretations were informed by racial and colonial hierarchies embedded in imperial scholarship. During the Soviet and Cold War periods, research was reframed through the ideological narratives of class struggle, atheism, modernisation, and Islam’s potential role in the local population’s ability to adopt or resist communist ideology. In the post-Soviet period, many studies have increasingly adopted civilizational frameworks that continue to privilege externally derived categories of religion and identity.

By tracing these shifts in scholarly interpretation, this paper demonstrates how the religious landscape in Central Asia has repeatedly been “lost in translation”, as local cosmologies, ritual practices, and social institutions were recast through changing academic and political paradigms. This analysis contributes to ongoing debates in the critical study of religion by highlighting the importance of examining the intellectual history of scholarship when interpreting religious life in colonial and postcolonial contexts.