Nomadic Culture in Islamic Central Asia
Authors: Prior Daniel 
Published: December 2024

Nomadism, horse-mounted mobile pastoralism on grasslands, played a special role in Central Asia that distinguishes the history of nomad–sedentary interactions in that region from more-studied cases in the eastern and western steppes. The region’s interpenetrating geographic and cultural borders between steppe and sown placed Turkic nomads and Iranian sedentary agriculturalists and townspeople in complex, long-term relations with one another, which led to assimilations in both directions. This persistent cultural ecosystem gave rise to an abundant, multilingual source base on nomadic culture in Central Asia, especially throughout the Islamic period. Although most written sources come from the region’s sedentary cultures, there are also rich but methodologically challenging records of the nomads’ oral knowledge systems. Central Asian nomads may be classified ethnolinguistically according to three branches of the Turkic language family, which correspond to five modern ethnonational groups: Oghuz (represented by the modern Türkmens), Qïpchaq (Qazaqs, Qïrghïz, and Qaraqalpaqs), and Qarluq (Uzbeks). None of these groups is still nomadic; processes of sedentarization and assimilation to Iranian and eventually Russian and Chinese cultural patterns have been on-going throughout the Islamic period.

Scholarship on nomads has often assumed that their history is a function of their culture. Nomadism as a way of life is based on exploiting the low biomass of grasslands by grazing herds of ungulates along migratory routes of seasonal pasturage. This could be combined with limited agriculture or the acquisition of goods from sedentary areas by trade, raiding, or a nomadic regime’s extraction of wealth from areas it controlled. Nomadic societies, kin-ordered and broadly tribal in their structures, tended to have less pronounced or fixed socioeconomic inequality than in sedentary societies. Slave status was known, though exploitation of slave labor had only a modest economic profile, except in nomad raiders’ sales of slaves to Central Asian markets. Women could enjoy notable status and respect, especially among elites.

Nomads’ political agency tends to be viewed in terms of their ability or inability to form, maintain, or be subjects of states. Beyond these preoccupations in the historiography, nomadic culture and its tendencies toward statelessness have been a noteworthy element in the political history of Islamic Central Asia. Nomad political economies were typically based on using a potentially universal soldiery of adult males as cavalry and extracting wealth by raiding to subsidize the militarized elite. Nomadic imperial traditions found in Islamic Central Asia arose outside the region: Turkic (Qarakhanid) and Mongol; the latter’s Chinggisid lineage defined the template of khanal authority until the 19th century, even as Turkic tribal chieftains appropriated power.

Central Asian nomads’ material culture relates to their mobility and social world, as exemplified by the yurt and its furnishings. Oral traditions transmitted nomads’ customs, creativity, and, in narrative form, what has been called oral historiography. Taken together, Central Asian nomads’ oral genres constitute abundant and chronologically deep materials for historical analyses. Since the Islamization of Central Asian nomads began in the 10th century, they have expressed Muslimness through Sufi ritual, shrine veneration, and genealogical constructions of sacral communities, as well as sharia.