Introduction

The specifics of Islam and Islamic authority and leadership in Central Asia have been shaped by the region's ancient civilizational core, the early arrival of Islam to the Ferghana valley (Transoxiana) situated between the Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya (Jaxartes) Rivers, and its sedentary-nomadic dualism. Long before the birth of Islam, the wider Central Asian region, centred on the Ferghana valley and historical Khorāsān – the territory of which encompassed today's north-eastern Iran and Afghanistan – harboured a developed Iranian sedentary civilization dating from the third millennium BCE. The bulk of its Persian-speaking urban and agrarian inhabitants were either direct descendants of or borrowers from materially, culturally and spiritually sophisticated Persian empires, including the Achaemenid Empire (550 BCE–330 BCE), the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE) and the Sasanian Empire (224 CE–651 CE). In the seventh century their main civilizational successors were Sogdia (Sogdiana) and Khwārazm (Khoresm), which territorially corresponded to most of present-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. For many centuries they played a central role in the lucrative Silk Road trade between China, Iran, India, the Hellenized Middle East and Europe. Among the enduring reminders of the region's Iranian cultural matrix are, for example, its Iranianspeaking Tajiks and Badakhshanis, as well as the widespread celebration of the ancient Iranian spring holiday of Nowruz.

As in southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan, Islam was introduced to Ferghana valley by Prophet Muḥammad's Companions in the middle of the seventh century. As discussed in Chapter 1, Arabs successively included the Ferghana valley, which they referred to as Mawarannahr, into the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. Throughout history, the introduction of Islam in the region by members of the first Muslim generation has been of great importance to Central Asia's official and popular Islamic leadership and authorities, especially to the Ṣūfī sheikhs who have continued to claim their legitimacy from their perceived descent from the Prophet, his Companions (Ṣaḥābah) or Four Righteous Caliphs (Rāshidūn). However, despite the Arabo-Islamic lineage of some Central Asian Muslim ‘ulamā’ and Ṣūfī sheikhs the region's Islamization occurred along Persian-Islamic, rather than Arabo-Islamic lines.