Abstract

The spiritual consciousness of the 12th-century Sufi cleric Khoja Ahmad Yasawi spans hundreds of years of Central Eurasian history, among other things informing more than five hundred anti-colonialist and later anti-Soviet popular rebellions. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought a revival of Islamic discourse and thus an unprecedented opportunity for a public discussion of this thinker’s legacy. The discussion did not occur solely within a religious context. It also took place in secular institutions – in universities and publishing houses, in cultural organizations and mass media – as scholars sought to rescue Islamic tradition from decades of official campaigns against “religious obscuritanism.” They rethought Yasawi as a philosophical name to stand alongside Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Al-Khwarizmi.

This paper investigates the circumstances behind the first secular work on Islam to be produced by the post-Soviet RK Ministry of Education: "The Spiritual Heritage of Yasawi" by Aidar Abuov. Published thirty years ago under the title Духовное наследие Яссавы, the book was received as a landmark in the young nation’s effort to take ownership of its religious history as it emerged from more than seventy years of official state atheism. When situated in the context of secular Islamic studies, and of Central Eurasian studies as a whole, it can be seen as the beginning of an emic scholarship, “writing tradition from within.” The book was translated into English in 2024 and is searchable globally on WorldCat.

The paper will be co-presented by the book’s author, now a professor at the Kazakh University of Business and Technology in Astana, and by his English-language translator, Dr. George Rueckert of KIMEP University in Almaty. Although intended as an individual paper, it may also contribute to scholarship-in-progress forums, insofar as it draws from on-going research, including contemporary interviews with Abuov and his original collaborators and editors and a literature review of the book’s 1990s reception and commentary. "The Spiritual Heritage of Yasawi" was the first major scholarly attempt to redefine the place of Islam within Central Eurasian intellectual life, treating Yasawi as both a religious and a national figure and rethinking the Sufi tradition as an integral component of the region’s cultural identity. In tracing how the book took shape through the late-Soviet and early independence periods, our paper sheds light on broader processes: the revaluation of Sufi tradition, the search for national cultural foundations, and the emergence of an emic tradition of scholarship on Islam.