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Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, the celebrated saint of Central Asia who lived most likely in the late 12th century, is perhaps best known as a Sufi shaykh and (no doubt erroneously) as a mystical poet; his shrine in the town now known as Turkistan, in southern Kazakhstan, has been an important religious center in Central Asia at least since the monumental mausoleum that still stands was built, by order of Timur, at the end of the 14th century. While Yasavi's shrine, owing to the predilections of Soviet scholarship, was extensively studied by architectural historians and archeologists, its role in social and religious history has received scant attention; at the same time, Ahmad Yasavi's legacy as a Sufi shaykh has itself been the subject of considerable misunderstanding, resulting from two related tendencies in past scholarship: to approach the Yasavi tradition as little more than a sideline to the historically dominant Naqshbandiyya, and to regard it as a phenomenon definable in "ethnic" terms, as limited to an exclusively Turkic environment. Even less well known in the West, however, is one aspect of Ahmad Yasavi's legacy that is of increasing significance in contemporary Central Asia, as the region's religious heritage is recovered and redefined in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse—namely, the distinctive familial communities that define themselves in terms of descent from Yasavi's family, and have historically claimed specific prerogatives associated with Yasavi's shrine.

From the 12th to the 14th centuries three major Sufi orders took shape in Central Asia: the Yasavīyah, derived from Khoja Ahmad Yasavī of the town known later as Turkistan; the Kubravīyah, founded by Najm al-Dīn Kubrā in Khwarazm; and the Naqshbandīyah, named after Bahā' al-Dīn Naqshband of Bukhārā. Of the three, the Yasavīyah remained an almost exclusively Central Asian ṭarīqah with particular appeal to the Turkic population, while the Naqshbandīyah became a truly international order active throughout the Islamic world, rising to phenomenal power and prestige within Central Asia and spreading far beyond its confines, most dynamically to India and the Ottoman lands. The Kubravīyah, however, found its greatest development outside Central Asia, and indeed, by the end of the 16th century, was almost entirely displaced in its native region by the increasingly dominant Naqshbandīyah.