Abstract

This article examines religious discourse in Kazakh aitys as a cultural-philosophical foundation for regulating public consciousness. It demonstrates that in both classical and contemporary aitys texts, religion emerges through religious riddles, sharia-based question-and-answer exchanges, arguments grounded in Quranic verses and hadiths, as well as didactic stanzas that call for piety and moral conduct. Although there are studies on religious aitys, religious riddles and the ideological functions of aitys, the specific ways in which «religion» as a discourse, articulated in aitys poetry, delineates the boundaries of «right–wrong» and «halal–haram» and thereby contributes to the regulation of public consciousness have not been systematically analysed. To address this gap, the article undertakes textual, discourse and hermeneutic analysis of the aitys between Shozhe and Kempirbai, Qabylysa and Tautan, Jusipbekqoja and Uazipa, as well as a number of aitys texts from the post-independence period. In addition, content analysis of stanzas drawn from different aitys is conducted, and in-depth interviews with ten contemporary aitys performers are examined. The findings make it possible to conceptualise aitys not only as an object of folklore studies, but also as an instrument for regulating national religious consciousness, thus contributing to broader debates at the intersection of religion and culture, tradition and modernity.