International Fund of al-Imam al-Bukhari Friedrich Ebert Foundation

part of the 20
th
 century, and by the newly begun process of building
the so-called “new world order”, has completely changed the attitude
of the scientific community towards this problem, pushing it into the
ranks of the most intensively studied scientific problems as demanded
by the times themselves. This fact is based, all else aside, on the
psychological effect produced by the geopolitical changes and
manifested in part in the activisation of different forces with their
political, ideological and other ambitions.
However, the lack of specialised research on the issue of the
formation of the rational balance between religiosity and secularity in
the scientific heritage of Islamic scholars by no means implies the
absence of this problem in the life of traditional societies in the Muslim
East. In actual fact, this issue has always occupied an important place
in the process of the practical organisation of life in a traditional
society such as Central Asia. In other words, in practically all the
states of medieval Central Asia a constant invisible struggle was waged
between those political forces which asserted a limited role for the
Muslim clergy restricted to the sphere of spiritual life and moral-ethical
questions, and those who fought for the overwhelming role of religion
in the organisation of life in traditional society.
2
 This is attested to by
numerous facts from the life of the states of this region and even the
empire established by Amir Timur (1370-1405) in the last decades of
the 14
th
 century.

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The search for rational balance between religiosity and secularity
255
As the founder of one of the most powerful centralised states of
the Middle Ages, Amir Timur, particularly at the dawn of his political
activity, faced pressure from the clergy represented by Sufi leaders,
which exerted their influence on the tribal aristocracy, for instance in
one of the main religious centres of that epoch – Termidh. This, in