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Abstract

Recent scholarship in the decolonial and critical study of religion, drawing on cases from Japan and India as well as Africa and the Americas, has demonstrated that the category of “religion”, as it emerged in European thought during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was inseparable from colonial expansion and imperial governance projects. Rather than serving as a neutral analytical concept, “religion” has functioned—and continues to function—as a classificatory technology through which imperial and post-imperial powers organise, regulate, and hierarchically rank colonised and marginalised populations, often producing scales of “civility” and “barbarity.”

Despite these advances, Central Asia remains under-examined in this body of scholarship. This paper addresses this gap by applying critical frameworks from the study of religion to scholarly interpretations of religious life among Turkic populations from the early nineteenth century, when the region became a focal point of Russian imperial expansion, to the present. Drawing on academic literature in Russian and English and combining intellectual history with discourse analysis, it examines how successive generations of scholars—not only in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union but also in the Anglophone world—have reinterpreted, rather than simply described, local traditions and practices.

I argue that the study of religion in Central Asia has not merely reflected but actively reproduced shifting imperial, ideological, and epistemological regimes. Nineteenth-century scholarship was embedded in racialised and colonial hierarchies that positioned local populations within evolutionary schemes. During the Soviet and Cold War periods, these frameworks were reconfigured through narratives of class struggle, state atheism, and modernisation, in which “religion” was recast as both an obstacle to and a variable within socialist transformation. This period also saw the emergence of two influential and often competing interpretive traditions—Soviet and Anglophone—each shaped by distinct ideological commitments. In the post-Soviet period, with the decline of Soviet paradigms and the ascendancy of Anglophone scholarship, civilisational frameworks have rearticulated earlier logics, continuing to privilege externally derived categories of religion and belonging.

By tracing these transformations, especially focusing on the works of Vasily (Wilhelm) Barthold, the Bennigsen School, Devin DeWeese, and Adeeb Khalid, this paper demonstrates that the religious landscape of Central Asia has been repeatedly “lost in translation” not as passive distortion, but as an effect of historically specific regimes of knowledge production. It therefore calls for a fundamental rethinking of how “religion” is conceptualised in Central Asian studies and highlights the epistemic consequences of translating local lifeworlds into externally imposed analytical categories.