Abstract

This article deals with the factors that have sustained Islamic beliefs in combination with nomadic traditions. Existing studies have defined the phenomenon of nomadic Islam in Central Asia as folk Islam or syncretism. However, in cultural practice, there are conflicting views of nomadic Muslims as being either “untrue” Muslims or “authentic” Kazakh Muslims. To uncover a peculiar form of nomadic Islam, the study focuses on the context behind this phenomenon, postulating that the continued vitality of nomadic Islam—which has survived even in the Soviet era when religions were oppressed—was possible with a kind of customized Islamification dominated by their polytheistic worldview. To clarify this, the authors investigated how the existing nomadic culture and the incoming Islam located themselves and combined with each other, based on the ethnographic materials about Central Asia from the nineteenth-century imperialist era. Nomadic Islam, with heterogeneous elements combined on the solid basis of nomadic tradition, has persisted by being rooted in folk customs rather than in the orthodox monotheistic Islam.