ABSTRACT

Central Asia played a major role, often overlooked today, in the formation of many of the central religious, political, and cultural features of the Islamic world as a whole. In the initial era of the Arab conquest, it was the scene of important debates over the nature of membership in the Islamic umma. From the tenth to the twelfth century, it was a major center of scholarship and learning in the worldly and religious sciences, playing a key role in the development of the classical cultural profile of the Islamic world, and in the same period experienced the impact of the Turks, as they became part of the umma and began their millennium-long military and political domination of the central Islamic lands. In the thirteenth century, what has often been portrayed as a pivotal and destructive setback for Islamic civilization, the Mongol conquest, was experienced somewhat differently in Central Asia. The legacy of Mongol rule and the Islamization of the Mongol rulers led to a creative synthesis that shaped the region (with ramifications stretching into Iran, South Asia, and the northern and eastern frontiers of interaction with, and later imperial conquest by, the Russian and Chinese states) down to the twentieth century. And more recently, the experience of colonial rule was shared with much of the Islamic world, though in Central Asia it was shaped in distinctive ways by the specific trajectories of the Russian conquest and the Soviet experiment.