CENTRAL ASIA
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
Most Westerners know something of the origins of Christianity from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. Most also know something – courtesy Hollywood – of how cruelly Christians were persecuted in the eastern Roman Empire during the first centuries of the Common Era (CE) when they were burned alive, fed to lions, and slain by gladiators to entertain the masses. Most, however, know very little about Christianity in Africa, presuming it to be a more recent addition, introduced by colonial powers; and absolutely nothing about Christianity in Central Asia, a region they presume to have been beyond the Church’s reach. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As Catholic theologian and history Adrian Hastings writes: “There was no intrinsic reason why Christianity should be confined to the Roman Empire and it was so confined. Its universalist momentum was bound to take it well beyond the Empire’s wide frontiers.’ [Adrian Hastings, “150-550”, in A World History of Christianity, ed. Adrian Hastings, (London: Cassell, 1999), p58.]
This fact is illustrated in an ancient symbolic map, dating from the Middle Ages, which depicts the spread of ancient Christianity during the first millennium of the Common Era. The map has the appearance of a three-petaled flower, the life-giving centre of which is “Jerusalem”. Each “petal” represents a region into which Christianity had spread and become established. Stretching west from Jerusalem is “Europa”. Stretching south from Jerusalem is “Africa”. And stretching east from Jerusalem is “Asia”, including placenames such as Arabia, Damascus, Antioch, Syria, Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Armenia, Babylon, Media, Persia, India . . .
The Assyrian Church of the East – also known (incorrectly) as the Nestorian, Persian or Syriac Church – was established in Edessa (modern-day Urfa, in Sanlıurfa Province, southern Turkey), in the first century of the Christian era. The Assyrians had great missionary vision and by the end of the second century the Church in Edessa had four Gospels in Aramaic and was already engaged in spreading Christianity east through the Persian Empire. “It may well have been from Edessa,” writes Hastings, “that the faith was taken north into the kingdom of Armenia and on into Georgia, just as it was carried through Persia and on into India and, somewhat later [6thC], China.”
Historian R.G. Tiedemann elaborates: “As Nestorian Christianity spread eastward from Persia among the Turkic nomads of Central Asia and along well-established trade routes, it eventually came into contact with Chinese civilization, probably sometime in the sixth century.” [R.G. Tiedemann, “China and its neighbours,” in A World History of Christianity, ed. Adrian Hastings, (London: Cassell, 1999), 369 – 70.]
“Just as the rivers flowed out of Eden,” writes historian Philip Jenkins, “so the other patriarchs flowed forth from Mesopotamia . . . The natural home of Christianity was in Mesopotamia and points east.”
Indeed, far from being beyond the Church’s reach, Central Asia was both open and receptive. Just as merchandise moved freely along the Silk Road, so too did the Christian Gospel (good news). Merv (Turkmen: Merw; Persian: Marv) in today’s Turkmenistan was once one of the world’s great Christian centres. The city had a bishop by the 420s, and in 544 it became a metropolitan see (religious jurisdiction) of the Eastern Church. It retained a seminary for training Tatar believers up until around 1340.
While Islam’s arrival brought suffering, hardship, persecution and subjugation, it was not until the 14th century that Christianity collapsed all across Asia.
Recommended:
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia – and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins (Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)
Historian Philip Jenkins explains: “Within the [Byzantine] empire and beyond, Asian and African Christianity were still powerful forces in 1200, yet within at the most two centuries that presence had crumbled. In this brief time, some the most ancient Christian communities were all but annihilated.” (Jenkins, p115)
“The perpetrators,” he explains, “were Muslims, from the central Asian people of the Seljuk Turks . . . who subjugated the Armenian kingdom in 1064 . . .” and in the 1140s, captured Edessa, “killing or enslaving virtually its entire population, then estimated at forty-seven thousand.” (Jenkins, p116)
As if that were not enough, after the Turks came the Mongols, who invaded Central Asia in the early part of the 13th Century just as Byzantine power was collapsing. The Mongols’ subsequent conversion to Islam (late 13thC) resulted in a Christian crisis of monumental proportions.
For Eastern Christianity, the 14th Century was catastrophic. A vulnerable minority within an Islamic Turco-Mongol super-Caliphate, the Christian communities of Central Asia were annihilated, their ecclesiastical institutions shredded beyond repair.
The killings peaked during the reign of Amir Timur, also known as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane. The genocidal Turco-Mongol warlord – who ruled from 1370 to 1405 – is believed to be responsible for the deaths of some 17 million people. Silk Road cities such as Bukhara or Khiva became centres of Islamic slave trading, where Russian and Armenian Orthodox Christian captives were routinely sold alongside Persian Shi’ite prisoners of war in Islamic slave markets.
During the eighteenth century, the insecurity caused by endless Islamic incursions and slave raiding in Christian lands evoked increasing Russian hostility toward the Central Asian khanates. Ultimately the situation compelled Russian expansion. By the late 19th century, Transcaucasia and much of Central Asia had been conquered and pacified by the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great and Tsars Nichols I and Alexander II.
Then, for much of the 20th Century, the republics of Transcaucasia and Central Asia were under the control of Soviet appointed, communist dictators.
During the Soviet era, the communists mercilessly crushed religion while advancing modernisation. Eventually, in the late 1980s, reforms ushered in by Soviet Communist Party chief Mikhail Gorbachev – in particular, glastnost (openness) – paved the way to religious revival.
When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Islam literally flooded into the Caucasus (North and South) and Central Asia. Funded mostly by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, mosques sprang up everywhere, missionaries poured in, and Qurans arrived by the tonne. It was not long before Azerbaijan, the North Caucasus and Central Asia were simmering with fundamentalist, pro-Sharia, pro-Caliphate, revolutionary and jihadist Islam. Throughout the region, conflicts erupted between nationalist Muslims (backed by Moscow) and trans-nationalist, pro-Caliphate Muslims (backed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and al-Qaeda).
While Central Asia’s Soviet-era dictators have gradually given way to a new generation of leaders, authoritarianism and corruption remain deeply entrenched, and destabilising poverty is rife. Despite (and often due to) severe (and often indiscriminate) crackdowns, fundamentalist, revolutionary and jihadist Islam remain a very real and present danger.
Despite the significant risk posed by intolerant fundamentalist Islam, and despite the exodus of millions of ethnic Russians, Germans, Koreans and other foreign Christians, an authentically Central Asian Christianity – comprised mostly of Central Asian Muslim background believers – has emerged, grown, and taken root throughout the region. Central Asian Christianity is back!
It is in this highly strategic region, the hub of Eurasia, that China’s Belt Road Initiative and Turkey’s pan-Turkic and neo-Ottoman ambitions converge in what has been dubbed “The Middle Corridor”.
See: Turkey’s Multilateral Transportation Policy,
Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
For Central Asian countries hoping to benefit from China’s Belt Road Initiative, the number one priority is maintenance of order.
Throughout Central Asia the greatest threats to a harmonious social order are: (1) pro-Caliphate Wahhabi Islam and the jihadist (i.e. al-Qaeda) and revolutionary (i.e. Hibz ut-Tahrir) movements that seek to overthrow the secular order; and local Muslim unrest or strife (fitna) that arises in response to Christianity.
One proven way to maintain social order is to enact repressive legislation that will lock out, and render illegal, everything the state deems ‘non-traditional’ and ‘foreign’ – i.e. Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam and non-Russian Orthodox Christianity – and to crack down hard on anything that could be deemed “proselytism”.
Case study:
Uzbekistan’s Religion Law: Currently Under Review
By Elizabeth Kendal, 2 September 2020
What Central Asian Christians seek is nothing more than their fundamental human right to believe and worship as their conscience dictates, and to live peaceably and securely as followers of Jesus Christ.
It is highly unlikely that aspiring hegemons – China and neo-Ottoman Turkey – will support that right. Indeed, both have appalling records when it comes to religious liberty and their treatment of religious minorities.
Recommended:
Forum 18 https://www.forum18.org/ (a Norwegian human rights organization that promotes religious freedom; with a special focus on the former Soviet Union).