Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan is overwhelmingly Muslim, around 96 percent Sunni Hanafi by most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Orthodox Christian, Jewish and Shia minorities remaining from the Soviet and earlier periods. The region historically known as Transoxiana was a leading center of Islamic scholarship after the eighth-century Arab conquests, producing figures central to the Sunni tradition including the hadith scholar Imam al-Bukhari, born near Samarkand, and the philosopher-physician Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna; Bukhara and Samarkand ranked among the great cities of Islamic learning, art and architecture for centuries under Timurid and later Central Asian rule.

Sufi orders, especially the Naqshbandi order founded in the region in the fourteenth century, shaped popular religious practice deeply, and Bukhara's ancient Jewish community, tracing roots to the Babylonian exile by local tradition, maintained a distinct Bukharan Jewish culture until most emigrated to Israel and the United States after Soviet collapse. Seventy years of Soviet rule after 1924 suppressed religious education and closed the great majority of mosques and madrasas, a suppression from which religious infrastructure only began rebuilding after independence in 1991.

Since independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has maintained tight state control over religious life through a Muftiate that vets and licenses imams and mosques, requiring registration of all religious organizations under laws that for decades banned unregistered worship outright and criminalized proselytism and the import of unauthorized religious literature; independent estimates suggested many thousands of people were imprisoned in the 1990s and 2000s on charges connected to unauthorized Islamic study or suspected extremism, often under a broad legal category targeting so-called Wahhabism regardless of an individual's actual beliefs.

Reforms since President Shavkat Mirziyoyev took office in 2016 have eased some restrictions, releasing a number of religious prisoners, removing thousands of people from a long-standing informal blacklist of suspected extremists, and permitting expanded religious publishing and mosque construction, changes the US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report has credited while still noting continued restrictions on independent religious practice outside state-sanctioned structures. The government maintains particular vigilance against transnational Islamist movements, including Hizb ut-Tahrir and groups linked to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which waged an armed insurgency in the late 1990s.