Four Religions Across One Steppe

Few language families have carried as many religions in as short a time. The oldest layer recoverable from Turkic sources is Tengrism, the veneration of Tengri as the sky, attested directly in the Orkhon inscriptions where a khagan attributes his rule to Tengri's favour, and accompanied by a body of practice around sacred mountains, ancestor spirits and shamanic specialists. In the eighth century the Uyghur khaganate adopted Manichaeism as a state religion, the only state anywhere ever to do so, and Manichaean texts in Old Uyghur are among the most important surviving witnesses to that religion.

Uyghur communities in the Tarim basin were also substantially Buddhist, and translated a considerable Buddhist literature. From the tenth century onwards Turkic peoples took up Islam in large numbers, and the Turkic-speaking dynasties then carried it into Anatolia and, through the Delhi sultanate and the Mughals, into South Asia, which is how a family from the Siberian forest edge became one of the principal vehicles of Islamic expansion. Some Turkic-speaking peoples of Siberia, and the Chuvash on the Volga, kept older practice into the modern period, and Tengrism has been revived in several Turkic republics since 1991.