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Abstract

This paper analyzes the religious identity of Kazakh society through the prism of the Hajj, focusing on its internal perception within the community, its interpretation by external observers, and the social significance of pilgrimage in the Steppe region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The study draws on four little-studied primary sources: an anonymous pilgrimage narrative, a printed marsiya (elegy) dedicated to the merchant Bekturgan bin Karazhan-khazhi, a marsiya devoted to the volost administrator Kozybay-khazhi, and a verse chronicle (qissa) recounting three pilgrimages by Ondirbay-Khalfe. Methodologically, the research combines content analysis of religious terminology and poetic formulae within a corpus of commemorative texts with a comparative reading of colonial administrative sources that characterized Kazakhs as “insufficient Muslims.” Particular attention is paid to genre differentiation: marsiya and qissa represent written elegiac forms of Arabo-Persian origin, whereas zhoqtau constitutes an indigenous Turkic oral lament. These genres are treated as complementary yet distinct historical and ethnographic sources.

The analysis demonstrates that Kazakh society possessed a coherent and well-developed culture of pilgrimage that does not conform to colonial representations of the superficiality of steppe Islam. The genres of marsiya and qissa encode the Hajj as a central axis of social identity: notably, the title Haji al-Haramayn precedes personal names and genealogies in two of the four texts, while the ritual of public farewell (rasim) including almsgiving (zakat), communal gathering, and collective prayer—appears as a stable social institution rather than a private act of piety. The pilgrim’s return and possible death en route are consistently sacralized, indicating that the Hajj was understood not as a formal obligation but as a transformative spiritual experience capable of sanctifying death.

Finally, the circulation of marsiya in printed form in Kazan and Orenburg suggests that the genre functioned not only as a medium of mourning but also as a vehicle for publicly asserting the image of the Kazakh elite as exemplary Muslims an important register of self-representation overlooked by imperial administrators. The paper contributes to revisionist historiography on Islam in Central Asia, critiques the notion of “nominal Islam,” and advances the comparative study of Islamic commemorative literature.