Abstract
The aim of the study was to examine how spiritual practices of the Sunni tradition and Sufi disciplines were conceptualised as mechanisms of moral formation and how these mechanisms were represented in the Yasawi model of moral education in Central Asia, with a focus on Turkestan (Yasi) in Kazakhstan. The Yasawi tradition was examined as a historical case encompassing its medieval formation and subsequent institutional development, particularly from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries. The study therefore analysed textual representations and historical models of moral formation rather than the lived practices of contemporary religious communities. The study was conducted as a sequential conceptual-theological analysis involving the operationalisation of key categories, followed by a structural-functional typology of practices, a hermeneutic interpretation of Sufi moral psychology, and a case-oriented historical-cultural reconstruction of the institutional forms of the cult of Ahmad Yasawi. As a result, it has been established that moral formation in an Islamic context can be usefully described as the relationship “norm→practice→virtue”, where iman, ibadat and akhlak interact through the discipline of repetitive actions, a regime of time and self-observation, whilst the mechanism of tazkiyah al-nafs functions as a long-term process of replacing problematic qualities with virtues through the regular correction of motives and behaviour. The typology of practices into two groups (obligatory and supplementary) has made it possible to systematise at least eight practices and identify their typical mechanisms of moral influence: temporal regularity and the renewal of intention in ritual prayer; controlled restriction of needs and discipline of speech during fasting; institutionalisation of aid and social accountability in zakat; the experience of ritual equality and behavioural discipline in pilgrimage; reflective articulation of motives in du’a; restoration of ethical categories through repeated engagement with the text in recitation; early detection of negative states through self-observation; inhibition of automatic reactions in the remembrance of God. Using the case of Ahmad Yasawi, three levels of the formation of the Yasawi tariqa have been reconstructed (doctrinal-normative, pedagogical-communicative, cultural-linguistic). The practical significance of the study lies in the possibility of using the proposed model for describing moral formation and the typology of mechanisms of influence of spiritual practices for comparative religious and cultural studies, as well as for the development of educational and awareness-raising materials on the ethical and educational potential of ritual discipline and mentorship in Islamic traditions.