Source: silkroadreporters.com

Islam entered Kazakhstan during the 8th century when the Arabs arrived in Central Asia, little more than a century after the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. Islam is now Kazakhstan’s predominant religion. A 2009 national census found 70.2 percent of the population consisted of Muslims of 24 nationalities, predominantly Sunnis of the Hanafi school, with Shia Ahmadi Muslim minorities. The Hanafi school is the oldest among the four established Sunni Islamic schools of legal thought, which emphasizes on the role of reason in Islam while approving of indigenous people’s customs and traditions which do not conflict with Shari’a law.

Kazakhstan contains nearly 140 ethnic groups and more than 40 religious communities. Of Kazakhstan’s 17.9 million Muslims, after the Kazakhs the country’s second major Muslim population is Uzbeks, followed by Uyghurs, Tatars, Kyrgyz, Bashkirs, Tajiks, Azeris, Dugans, Turks, Chechens and Ingush, along with a scattering of primarily Sunni migrants from Muslim countries.

The first years of independence saw the wide-scale construction of mosques, churches and synagogues as the government sought to preserve the nation’s traditional moderate and tolerant Hanafi traditions. In 2013 there were 2,500 mosques in Kazakhstan, compared to 63 during the Soviet period. In a nod to Kazakh religious tolerance, in 1991 the Vatican established a Catholic episcopate in Kazakhstan.

Fostering religious awareness among those who could not read Arabic or other foreign languages, the Quran was published in Kazakh and Russian translations, Kazakh versions of the Bible (“Injil”) became available, religious periodicals began to be published and specialty shops selling religious literature were opened. Beginning in 1997 the monthly Islam Elemi (“Islam World”) and the newspaper Nur Shapagat (“The Light of Mercy”) were published.

Enshrining Kazakhstan as a secular state, the 1993 constitution specifically forbade religious political parties, ensuring the separation of religion from politics. The 1995 constitution went further, outlawing organizations that sought to foment racial, political, or religious discord and authorized the government to closely monitor and restrict if necessary the activities of foreign religious organizations from outside the country. Unique in the region, Kazakhstan is the only Central Asian state whose constitution does not assign a special status to Islam.

The year 1995 also saw the establishment by presidential decree of the Assembly of Peoples of Kazakhstan (AKP). According to the assembly’s website, “The main task of the APK is ensuring the consolidation of the interests of ethnic groups on the basis of … read more at silkroadreporters.com