Chapter 6
Imagining the Nation
Awaken, o beloved nation
so that the love I have given won't go to waste
My thoughts are always tied up in the love of my nation
pale-faced and red-eyed, this is my picture.
Tawalla, 1914
The nation (millat ) was the locus of Jadid reform, and sentiments such as these by Tolagan Khojamyarov Tawalla suffuse the work of practically every Jadid writer. For the Jadids, their concern for the nation set them apart from others in their society who recognized only particular, selfish interests. However, such concern was something new: Traditional Central Asian visions of history had revolved around dynasties or tribes. Now new understandings of the world engendered new notions of identity. But if the nation was central to Jadid thought, its boundaries and the manner in which it was to be delineated remained in a state of flux, for the nation was imagined in complex ways that at first sight appear mutually contradictory. Nonetheless, all of them were modern, and all of them helped define how the Jadids acted in the world both before and after 1917.
Despite the overriding importance attached to questions of identity in current writing on Central Asia, pre-Soviet identities remain poorly understood. Most writers writing outside the Soviet paradigm hold one of two views about pre-Soviet identity of Central Asians. One asserts that Central Asians before 1927 lacked all forms of identity except the religious. As late as 1926 the renowned Russian orientalist V.V. Bartol'd could write, "The settled peoples of Central Asia are in the first place Muslims and think of themselves only secondarily as living in a particular town or district, to them the idea of belonging to a particular stock is of no significance."[1] Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-
[1] W. Barthold, "Sart," Encyclopedia of Islam , 4 vols. (Leiden, 1913-1936), IV: 176.
Quelquejay, whose work has been enormously influential, extended this to the Jadids as well: "In Turkestan and the two protectorates of Bukhara and Khiva, ... the national movement ... assumed, after the defeat of Russia by Japan, a fundamentally pan-Islamic character.... Educated for the most part in the conservative medresehs , the young reformist intellectuals moved rapidly towards the left. Their nationalism, inspired by the teaching of Jamaleddin al-Afghani, was fundamentally hostile to Russia and the Russians."[2] In a more blunt formulation, this becomes a situation where as late as 1917, "Muslims were victimised by their own backwardness [and] ethnic or tribal rivalries.... Their political development hardly embraced the idea of class or of nation, being centred round Islam and the tribe or clan."[3] One hesitates to attach a label to a view so characterized by absences, but one might call it the "Muslim" view.
The second view, particularly popular in Turkey but also widely held in European and North American academe, might be labeled "Turkist." It holds that Central Asians were part of a single "Turkish" nation that extended from "the shores of the Bosporus to the sands of Kashgar," that all Turkic languages were essentially one mutually intelligible language, and that relations between various Turkic-speaking groups were characterized solely by respect, solicitude, and a will to unity.[4] Rooted in the hopes of Crimean and Volga Tatar intellectuals (the most prominent of whom was Gasprinskii), this notion of Turkic solidarity was popularized by Turkic émigrés in republican Turkey, whose claims have too often been taken at face value.
Both these views see the emergence of distinct nations in the 1920s as the result of imperial fiat, a classic case of divide and rule, imposed by an omnipotent regime on a helpless victimized population. They both also share the view that Central Asian identities were focused elsewhere and that Central Asians were only passive participants in larger dramas being played out elsewhere.
[2] Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union , trans. Geoffrey E. Wheeler and Hubert Evans (London, 1967), 47. The authors present no evidence for their categorical assertion of the overriding influence of Afghani in Central Asia; they also exaggerate the "leftist" or revolutionary stance of the Jadids.
[3] Stephen Blank, "The Contested Terrain: Muslim Political Participation m Soviet Turkestan, 1917-19," Central Asian Survey 6, no. 4 (1987): 48.
[4] This position has never been explicitly formulated, but is often taken for granted; see, e.g., Nadir Devlet, Rusya Turklerinin Millî Mucadele Tarihi (1905-1917) (Ankara, 1985). Its popularity (and the passion that it arouses) is evident to anyone who has attended a gathering of Central Asian studies or seen the question debated on the Internet.
For its part, Soviet scholarship offered a different narrative of Central Asian identities. It asserted the "objective" existence of nations since time immemorial. History was the process of the elaboration and refinement of these national identities through processes such as ethnogenesis. This obviously romantic idea had, from the beginning, formed the basis of Bolshevik (and hence Soviet) understanding of the "national question."[5] This view of things, "naturalized" by the existence of statistical data on each nation, is also often adopted by many writers abroad without much curiosity about the origins of either the nations or the data.[6] Despite the often bitter polemics between the holders of the "national" and "Turkis," views, the two share certain fundamental assumptions. They both take for granted the ontological existence of nations, the assumption that nations are "sociohistorical organisms," sharing common origins ("ethnogenesis") and united by common "historical destinies." The difference is simply that whereas the Turkis, view insists on the existence of a single "Turkish" nation, the "national" view holds that there are several Turkic nations. The collapse of the Soviet Union has done little to challenge the belief in the reality of the nation among intellectual and political elites in formerly Soviet lands.[7]
All three views, for different reasons, largely ignore how Central Asians imagined their community and how those views evolved over time. This is especially true of the debates of the tsaris, period. Yet, those debates are crucial to understanding the transformations of the 1920s. Attention to them allows us to question primordial discourses of identity by examining how such notions evolved over time in concrete historical circumstances. The aim in this chapter is to rescue history from
[5] For an excellent examination of this fundamental trait of the Soviet polity, see Yuri Slezkine, "The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism," Slavic Review 53 (1994): 414-452.
[6] For a critique of this literature, see John Schoeberlem-Engel, "Identity in Central Asia: Construction and Contention in the Conceptions of "Özbek,' 'Tâjik,' 'Muslim,' 'Samarqandi,' and Other Groups" (Ph.D. diss, Harvard University, 1994), 44-72.
[7] The use made of such "organismic" views of the nation (and national destiny) by political elites in the newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union is not simply a matter of political calculation. Rather, it represents a dominant paradigm widely shared in the (formerly) Soviet world that remains strong in academic circles as well. A lengthy debate on questions of nationality and national identity m the Moscow journal Etnograficheskoe obozrenie (Anthropological Survey) between 1994 and 1996 produced views that ranged from asserting the "objective reality" of ethnicity (S. A. Arutiunov, "Ethnichnost'—ob" ektivnaia real'nost'," Etnograficheskoe obozrenie , 1995, no. 5, 7-10) to an attempt to replace "ethnos" or "nation" with "socio-historical organism" as "the most important category of historical science" (Iu. I. Semenov, "Sotsiosial'no-istoricheskie organizmy, etnosy, natsii," Etnograficheskoe obozrenie , 1996, no. 3, 3-13).
the hegemony of the nation by showing how the nation itself is the product of history.
All nations are imagined, but they may be imagined in a number of ways. Benedict Anderson has drawn our attention to the ways in which new means of communications and new regimes of power make possible new ways of imagining community.[8] However, his insistence that nationalism emerges only with the demise of broader notions of community diverts attention from the many different ways in which the nation may be imagined. Print, the census, and the globe made it possible for the Jadids to see themselves as citizens of a modern, interconnected world, of a community of Muslims within it, and of a community of Turks that overlapped with the community of the world's Muslims. As I show below, these various visions of the world coexisted, sometimes in a state of tension, until well after 1917.
Premodern Identities
"There is no Persian except in the company of a Turk, [just as] there is no cap unless there is a head to put it on" (Tatsïz Türk bolmas, bashsïz börk bolmas ), went a Turkic proverb recorded by the eleventh-century lexicographer, Mahmud al-Kashghari.[9] Maria Eva Subtelny has rightly used this to investigate the symbiosis of Turkic and Iranian (or Tajik) elements in Central Asia.[10] I wish to go further and suggest that the mutual dependence to which the proverb refers may be seen at a more fundamental level. Only the existence of a Persian made a Turk a Turk, and vice versa. The symbiosis of Turkic and Iranian in Central Asia was not the coagulation of two preexisting wholes; rather, it was the very encounter that shaped the two components of the symbiosis. Without the opposition, each side of the symbiosis remained a variegated expanse.
Iranian speech varied greatly, although the emergence of a high literary tradition had ensured a great degree of standardization of the written language, which tended to mask the differences in regional usages. The language was always referred to as Farsi , Persian, and never as Tajik . The differentiation of speech was much greater on the Turkic side, which
[8] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities , 2nd ed. (London, 1991), 12-19.
[9] Mahmud al-Kasyari, Compenduim of the Turkic Dialects (Diwan Luyat at-Turk ), ed. and trans. Robert Dankoff, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1982-1985), II: 103.
[10] Maria Eva Subtelny, "The Symbiosis of Turk and Tajik," in Beatrice Forbes Manz, ed., Central Asia in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Colo., 1994), 45-61-1 owe the reference to the proverb to Subtelny.
extended far beyond Central Asia to Anatolia and the Balkans in the west, the Volga and the Urals in the north, and the Gobi desert in the east. This vast array of dialects, gradually merging one into another, was united only in opposition to Iranian. In the period after the fifteenth century, two literary standards (Ottoman and Chaghatay) emerged, but their impact on spoken dialects was minimal, for skill in the literary form of either Turkic or Persian was a sign of culture and virtuosity, not a source of national pride. Indeed, a saying current in the late nineteenth century even asserted that "Arabic is honor, Persian baseness, [and] Turkic dirt" (lisan-i arabi sharafat, lisan-i farsi qabahat, lisan-i turki najasat ).[11] Each language had its appropriate range of use. Arabic was entrenched in the madrasa, whereas Persian remained the language of the chancery in Kokand and Bukhara until their respective ends (only in Khiva was Turkic used extensively in the chancery). Thus, there was no paradox involved in the fact, embarrassing to both Iranian and Turkic nationalists today, that Firdawsi composed his immortal Shahnama under the patronage of Mahmud of Ghazna, a Turk. At the everyday level, Iranian speech in Transoxiana acquired Turkic lexical and grammatical elements, while Persian models imbued all literary Turkic. Bilingualism was widespread even in the countryside, and the cultural capital of any cultivated individual included a knowledge of the high traditions in both idioms.
As labels for population groups, too, "Turk" and "Tajik" operated only on the most general level. Contrasted to "Iranian," "Turk" denoted all groups of Turkic speech in Central Asia, but it also had more specific uses. After the last wave of Turkic migration into Transoxiana during the Shaybanid conquest, "Turk" came to be used exclusively for the older Turkic population of the region; the newcomers were called "Ozbek." This narrower sense of "Turk" survived down to 1917.[12] Other tribal conglomerates, such as the Qazaq, the Qïrghïz, and the Türkmen, retained their distinctive identities, rooted in myths of origin that defined them against other groups in Transoxiana. There were also smaller, more localized groups (such as the Moghuls of eastern Bukhara and the Qurama of the Chirchik valley) that did not fit the various tribal federations neatly and therefore remained distinctive. Moreover, the "ethnic" sense of "Turk" and "Tajik" did not coincide with language use. It was quite
[11] Quoted by V.P. Nalivkin, "Shkoly u tuzemtsev Srednei Azii," Sbornik materialov dlia statistiki Samarkandskoi oblasti, 1887-1888 gg ., 1 (1889): 300-301.
[12] B. Kh. Karmysheva, "Etnograficheskaia gruppa 'Tiurk' v sostave uzbekov," Sovetskaia etnografua , 1960, no. 1, 3-22.
possible for groups to identify themselves as Ozbek while speaking only Persian, as was the case with many Ozbeks in Bukhara.[13] In 1949, the anthropologist Belqis Karmysheva found groups in Baljuwan who claimed descent from "Turk" tribes but spoke only Persian and considered themselves "Tajiks of Turkic descent [Tadzhiki roda tiurk ]."[14]
Urban dwellers, many of whom did not use tribal designations, were referred to variously as "Tajik," "Sart," or "Chaghatay," regardless of speech. The usage of these terms was neither constant nor universal (as nineteenth-century scholars were to find out to their chagrin), but varied over time and place. The term "Sart" was not used in Bukhara, for example, where the term "Chaghatay" had currency. Although Russian scholars were to distinguish between the two on the basis of language, the relation between Sart and Tajik, often mentioned as synonymous in Timurid sources, was far more complex. As late as 1880, Sulayman Efendi, the shaykh of the Bukharan Naqshbandi lodge in Istanbul, described "Sart" to his Ottoman audience as "tribes of Tajik and Persian origins living in Turkestan; also called Tat."[15] In practice, Sarts and Tajiks were marked as different by their urban status, not by common origin or language. A nineteenth-century history from Kokand used Sart (sartiya ) to oppose the sedentary population of the khanate to the nomadic (ilatiyya ).[16] To paraphrase John Schoeberlein-Engel, seeing the Sarts as an ethnic group or a nationality is analogous to seeing all town-dwellers of southern Europe as a nationality.[17] Nor did these label exhaust the diversity of the urban population, where groups such as Sayyids and Khojas asserted their distinctiveness on the basis of their sacred descent, even though they spoke the same language as their neighbors. The same held true, at the other end of the social spectrum, of the Loli, the "gypsies" of Central Asia, whose identity was defined by their profession.
[13] O.A. Sukhareva, Bukbara: XIX-nachalo XX v. (Pozdnefeodal'nyi gorod i ego naselema ) (Moscow, 1966), 129-139.
[14] B. Kh. Karmysheva, Ocherki etmcheskoi istorn iuzhnykh raionov Tadzhikistana i Uzbekistana (Moscow, 1976), 76.
[15] Seyh Suleyman Efendi Buharî, Lugat-i Cagatay ve Turki-yî Osmanî (Istanbul, 1298/1880-1881), 178.
[16] T.T. Beisembiev, "Tarikh-i Shakhrukhi" kak istoricheskii istochnik (Alma Ata, 1987), 78.
[17] Schoeberlem-Engel, "Identity in Central Asia," 141 (who makes this observation in examining a definition of Tajiks as the settled population of Central Asia). On Sarts as a social, rather than an ethnic, entity, see also Bert G. Fragner, "The Nationalization of Uzbeks and Tajiks," in Andreas Kappeler et al., eds., Muslim Communities Reemerge: Historical Perspectives on Nationality, Politics, and Opposition in the Former Soviet Union and Yugolslavia (Durham, N.C., 1994), 15.
Individuals felt themselves to be Ozbek or Turk or Tajik not through some abstract sense of belonging to a national group but through the concrete fact of being born in a family that was located socially in a ramified structure of relationships conceived in kinship terms. Tribal designations were far more significant to individual identity than broader categories such as "Turk" or "Tajik." There is no reason to assume that individuals classified by court chroniclers as "Turk" would have felt any affinity for each other, or that divisions between Turk and Tajik or Ozbek and Sart mentioned in the literary sources implied anything but divisions among the court elites. Among the sedentary population without tribal divisions, geographical designations played a similar role. Thus, the sedentary Turkic-speaking population of Khwarazm, called "Sart" in Khwarazm, were called "Urganji" (after the town of Urgench) in Bukhara.
Group identities in pre-Russian Central Asia presented a complex mosaic of fragmented identities intimately intertwined with the social and economic fabric of the land. Community was not conceived of as an organism. Nor were the various identities mutually exclusive: One could be a Sart, a Khoja, and a Turk at the same time. Genealogical explanations were used to assert the origins of groups or social practices; but there is little reason to take these explanations at face value (as indeed they have been by numerous scholars, who all too easily assimilate them into theories of "ethnogenesis"). Arguments based on the organic unity of populations with common genetic descent are hazardous enough at the best of times; they have even less applicability in Central Asia, with its centuries of migration, warfare, and social dislocation.
Islam and the Nation
The Jadids defined the nation in a number of ways. Take, for instance, this appeal addressed by the editor of Tojjar to his "compatriots" (watandashlar ):
In our time there is not a single nation that doesn't have tens or hundreds of newspapers and magazines m its own language, for the twentieth century deems any nation not having publications in its own language savage and uncivilized by time itself.... O compatriots! ... By virtue of the manifesto granted by our emperor on 17 October 1905, we too acquired ten or fifteen newspapers and magazines and thus became aware of the world.... But because these newspapers and magazines were in Turkish or Tatar [turkcha tatarcha ], and not in the pure language of Turkestan, it was generally not possible for the Muslims of Turkestan to benefit from them.... Now it is ob-
vious to any intelligent person that the solution to this is of course to publish a newspaper in the language of Turkestan, that is, in Chaghatay.[18]
The "we" refers in the beginning to the Muslims of the Russian empire, but then is quite explicitly narrowed to refer only to the "Muslims of Turkestan." At other times, Jadid authors referred only to "Muslims," but again the context made it clear that the intended audience did not comprise Muslims generally but only the Muslims of Central Asia. Similarly, when the protagonist in Haji Muin's play Old School, New School declaims, "At present, we Turkestanis are not sufficiently acquainted with religious and worldly knowledge,"[19] he clearly has in mind the Muslim population of Turkestan, local Jews and all recent settlers being implicitly excluded from the intended audience. Reference to the Muslims of Turkestan abound in Jadid writing of the period. If the Jadids were nationalists, they were so on behalf of a nation defined in both territorial and confessional terms.
The nation was rooted historically. It is significant that the history taught in new-method schools of Turkestan was that of Islam, not Turkestan or the Turks. The prior golden age of the nation with which the Jadids identified was that of Islam, or more precisely, of the glorious empires built by Muslim dynasties. Jadid writings are replete with references to this earlier age, which served both to highlight the degradation of the present as well as to justify the reforms they advocated. Thus, Nushirvan Yavushev claimed that madrasas in the glory days of Islam offered a full curriculum of worldly as well as religious sciences.[20] Usually, however, the historical legacy was delineated more precisely. The names of Bukhari, Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Ulugh Bek were invoked to highlight the past of a Central Asian Muslim nation.
This community had all the characteristics of a nation. We find the expression "Muslim language" (musul'manskü iazyk, musulman tili ) in both Jadid and official Russian discourse. Ingeborg Baldauf, the only scholar to have remarked upon this phenomenon, confuses the issue needlessly when she writes: "I do not dare to answer the question whether the introduction of a 'Muslim language' along with the existence of a 'Muslim nation' is to be regarded as a homage to the romantic identification of a nation with its tongue, and vice versa . We might,
[18] "Matbuat alami, yaki sabab-i ta'sis-i ghazita-yi 'Tojjar'," Tojjar , 21 August 1907.
[19] Haji Muin b. Shukrullah, Eski maktab, yangi maktab (Samarqand, 1916), 27-28.
[20] N.Y., "Eski musulman madrasalarinda nimalar oqulur edi?" Ayina , 15 February 1914, 256-259.
however, regard the musulmon tili as a 'pseudo-language.'"[21] There was nothing pseudo about the Muslim language. The expression again was a product of Russian usage. For Russian bureaucrats, anything written in the Arabic script or incomprehensible to all but the few trained orientalists among them was "Muslim." Thus, the administration granted separate licenses to booksellers for the sale of books po-rnusul'manski ("in Muslim"), regardless of the language. This usage was adopted by the local population, although it clearly meant the language of the Muslims of Turkestan. The newspaper Tojjar proclaimed on its masthead that it was published in "the Muslim language" (musulmancha ). But this usage was obviously understood in a strictly local context, as a language of the Muslims of Central Asia, for the same newspaper claimed in its first issue to be filling a gap created by the fact that the ten or fifteen newspapers that appeared in the wake of the October Manifesto of 1905 were all "in Turkish or Tatar [turkcha tatarcha ] and not in the pure language of Turkestan."[22] The Muslims of Turkestan were a nation, but that nation was not defined by its language in the romantic mold.
And the uses of the nation were entirely secular. As with any other nation, the Muslim nation of Turkestan existed alongside many others, and its essence was political rather than religious. The "others" could be conceived as religious or national entities, although given the realities of the time, the two tended to coincide. Jadid authors constantly pointed to the Jewish and Armenian communities as both sources of danger and models for emulation.
We Muslims have been left behind in everything. In matters of trade we are the prisoners of Jews. There's no place more important than unskilled labor or salaried work left for us local Muslims. Drivers, carriers, diggers, watch-men, in short, those performing menial labor are all Muslims, but their employers, the owners of large buildings, the masters of the stores are all Jews. The small Jewish nation [millat ], without any protectors, has taken all trade in its own hands.
We do not complain of the Jews, to whom we have no enmity. They have achieved this status through their own energy and expertise. Bravo! The fault is our own. We did not take the path taken by the Jews in trade and we did not learn the things learned by the Jews.[23]
For Hamza, the "most basic reason for their [Jews' and Armenians'] being able to command so much wealth so quickly ... is their knowledge of
[21] Ingeborg Baldauf, "Some Thoughts on the Making of the Uzbek Nation," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 32 (1991): 82.
[22] "Matbuat alami, yaki sabab-i ta'sis-i ghazita 'Tojjar'."
[23] 'A., "Tijaratimiz wa maktab," Turan , 30 December 1912.
the languages of Russia, and, indeed, their having perfected their knowledge of commerce in organized schools and universities."[24] These communities proved to the Jadids the truth of their general assertion that knowledge was the key to progress. At the same time, they were the perfect example of a Darwinian world in which survival was assured only by disciplined effort.
In many Jadid writings, the distinction between Islam as a faith and Muslims as a community disappears completely. Behbudi once urged his compatriots to educate their children to become "judges, lawyers, engineers, teachers, the supporters and servants of the nation, ... who would work for the true faith of Islam."[25] This was the new language of group survival, of progress and modernity. Similarly, Tawalla had in mind the progress and prosperity of the nation of Muslims when he titled a collection of his poetry The Splendour of Islam . Russian bureaucratic practices, which emphasized religious affiliation as a significant marker of classification, contributed to self-identification in this form. Although the nation of "the Muslims of Turkestan" was connected to other Muslim communities in the Russian empire and beyond, it remained a delineated, territorial entity in which ethnic identities were clearly subordinate to a more general, patriotic identity. The desacralization of Islam and the absence of theological debate, both noted above, meant that the Jadids' priorities tended to be the concerns of the community rather than of the faith.
Such secular confessional nationalism was hardly unusual at the turn of the century, as the rise of Zionism attests. In the Muslim world it arose in a variety of contexts, the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, in which the nationalisms of its subjects in Europe were all fueled by fervent anti-Muslim feelings, being the most significant. Ottomanist intellectuals, such as the Lebanese Druze Amir Shakib Arsalan, looked to Islam to provide a rallying point in their struggle against imperialism. In a different political context, the highly secularized Muslim elites of India found in Muslim "communalism" a node of politically significant loyalty. After 1917, the Tatar Mirsaid Sultangaliev was to advocate class war in defense of a proletarian Muslim nation.[26]
[24] Hamza, "Muallim afandilarimiza ulugh rijamiz," SF , 25 October 1914.
[25] [Behbudi], "Amalimiz ya inki muradimiz," Ayina , 7 December 1913, 155.
[26] William L. Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Muslim Nationalism (Austin, 1985); Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Les mouvements nationaux chez les musulmans de Russie: le «Sultanga-lievisme» au Tatarstan (Pans, 1960); Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Ideology for the Colonial World (Chicago, 1979).
The line separating the Muslims of Turkestan from those of other areas could be porous. In 1904, Tatar public figures began organizing a political movement that sought to represent all the Muslims of the empire in one organization. Although Turkestan and Bukhara remained largely marginal in this movement, the idea that the Muslims of the Russian empire belonged to one community was often invoked. Behbudi could claim, for instance, that "we Muslims constitute the second largest nation [millat ] in the Russian empire."[27] The affinity the Jadids felt with Muslims elsewhere in the world is obvious from the intellectual milieu in which they lived and worked.
But this was a very different matter than the "pan-Islam" whose dread filled the hearts of colonial officials all over the Muslim world. Russian officialdom spent a great deal of time worrying about pan-Islam and the dangers it posed to the stability of the empire. It located its sources in the "fanaticism" of Muslims, which needed only a spark to ignite. That spark could come, many in Russia feared, from agents of the Ottoman sultan, and the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police, assembled a vast archive on the subject. Its agents saw Turkish emissaries everywhere they looked, although none were ever apprehended. The kernel of truth on which these fears were based was provided by Ottoman attempts under Abdülhamid II to forge links with Muslim populations in the colonies of European powers primarily to provide his empire some diplomatic leverage. But the success of that enterprise was vastly circumscribed, and Ottoman intrigue does not explain the phenomena that worried the Okhrana.
Pan-Islamic sentiment was undoubtedly significant in Central Asia before 1917, but its sources lay not in the fanaticism (inherent, yet malleable by malign forces such as Turkish emissaries) of the Muslim masses, as colonial officials feared, but in Muslim elites' encounter with modernity. Pan-Islam was not (and could not have been) the result of manipulation from outside. During the last two decades of the tsarist regime, Russian officialdom was seized with the fear of "Turkish emissaries" roaming the empire and sowing seeds of fanaticism and separatism among its Muslim population. Yet, in those years the Ottoman empire faced immense problems externally and political instability domestically. It did not have the resources necessary to mount such an operation, and Ottoman archives
[27] "Sharq aqshamindagi nutq," Ayina , 2 April 1915, 285.
have yielded no evidence of it ever having been mounted.[28] Nor was it a throwback to some primordial sentiment traceable to the teachings of the Qur'an. Rather, pan-Islamic sentiment was rooted in modernity, which made it possible for the first time to imagine a community encompassing all the Muslims of the world. We have already seen the wide circulation of the printed word among Muslim elites throughout the world, which allowed new links to be forged. The Jadids belonged to perhaps the last generation of Muslim intellectuals who could communicate with each other without the use of European languages. Muslim newspapers of the period frequently quoted each other. The Jadid press (especially in the freer period of 1906-1908) gives evidence of a fascination with Muslims all over the world. There are numerous stories about the spread of Islam in Europe and extensive, optimistic coverage of an imminent explosion of interest in Islam in Japan, the one non-European power to have asserted its presence in the world.
This sense of unity was given a very visible form by modern geography and cartography. The novelty of this sense of the world is often not appreciated. Bernard Lewis, among others, writes that in the "Muslim world view the basic division of mankind is into the House of Islam ... and the House of War.... The one consists of all those countries where the law of Islam prevails, that is to say, broadly, the Muslim Empire; the latter is the rest of the world."[29] But the fact remains that the "House of Islam" was never imagined in a geographical sense, and the legal theory did not by itself bring about a consciousness of unity. (In any case, there is little evidence that legal theories influenced political and diplomatic practice as directly as Lewis asserts.) Rather it was globes, atlases, and postcards bearing maps of the Ottoman empire or the route of the Hijaz railway that allowed the Muslim ummah to be imagined as a geopolitical entity for the first time in history. Munawwar Qari's geography textbook, which provided a country-by-country account of all the major countries of the world, also included statistics on the number of Muslims in each country.[30]
Yet, this was very different from the pan-Islam that Abdülhamid II sought to use as a diplomatic tool against European powers, since it did not automatically serve Ottoman state interests, nor was it instigated by
[28] Hakan Kirimli, National Movements and National Identity among the Crimean Tatars (1905-1916 ) (Leiden, 1996), 190-191.
[29] Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York, 1982), 60-61.
[30] Munawwar Qari, Yer yuzi (Tashkent, 1913).
Ottoman agents. Nevertheless, as the last Muslim state left in the high age of European imperialism, the Ottoman empire took on a great symbolic value to Muslims living under colonial rule, and its travails, especially during the second constitutional period, provoked sympathy among Muslims worldwide. The wars in North Africa and the Balkans were assiduously followed by the Muslim press of Russia (including the TWG ) and provoked much angst. We have not had the means to enter the private world of the Jadids during this period, but a personal letter from Sadriddin Ayni I found serendipitously provides a first glance. Writing to a friend in March 1913, while Balkan armies laid siege to Edirne, Ayni has this to say: "The news from the war is very bad.... [But] the second war is altogether more cheerful than the first. Even women are present in the service of the wars and the soldiers. The unbelievers are united in their attempts to destroy the Muslim world, whether through war or through peace. The difference is that if they destroy it through peace, the Muslim world will be destroyed disgracefully [razilana ]; if they destroy it by war, we will be martyred with honor [namus ]."[31] Ayni sent along pictures from the press of Sukru Pasa, the defender of Edirne, and a group of Tatar women doctors who had volunteered to serve in Ottoman field hospitals. He also wrote an ode to Sukru Pasa in Turkish. The same sense of impending doom was evoked three years earlier by Fitrat, who concluded his Debate with an impassioned appeal to the amir to act before "the enemies of our faith of Islam conquer all Muslims ... and demand that we renounce our religion ... and replace our imams with priests, our call to prayer with bells, and our mosques with churches."[32]
Before we rush to declare these statements expressions of age-old Islamic fanaticism, we might do well to remember that the language of honor used here would not have been alien to anyone in Europe at that time. Nor should we forget that the anti-Muslim sentiment that had fueled every Balkan nationalism was commonplace in contemporary Europe. The plea to do something before all mosques are turned into churches evokes this experience, which was very current to people in Istanbul. Moreover, pan-Slavic sentiment was widespread in Russia during the Balkan wars, as numerous societies emerged to aid the struggle
[31] Private letter dated 10 Rabi' II 1331/7 March 1913, in the possession of Dr. Elyor Karimov, Tashkent, to whom goes my gratitude for allowing me to quote from it.
[32] Fitrat Bukharayi, Munazara-yi mudarris-i bukharayi ba yak nafar-i farangi dar Hindustan dar bara-yi makatib-i jadida (Istanbul, 1911), 65. This plea was excised from the Turkic translation published legally m Tashkent in 1912.
of fellow Slavs against Muslim oppression, and anti-Muslim sentiment remained an integral part of official Russia's self-perception.[33] Nor was the role of print incidental in understanding how a Bukharan mudarris came to write poetry in honor of a foreign general defending a city the author had never seen. Pan-Islam was located squarely in the twentieth century.
For the mass of the population, Islam continued to be embedded in everyday practices mediated by men or women of learning. Pan-Islam as a phenomenon of the reading or hearing public remained a matter of elite concern. Different elites in different Muslim countries looked at Muslim unity through the prism of their own struggles (within their own society as well as with colonial authorities). No organizational structure for pan-Islamic unity ever existed.[34] In Central Asia, it was rooted in the anxieties of the Jadids themselves, which alone shaped their activities. More importantly, even for the intellectual elites, pan-Islam was never the sole identity or course of political action.
Romantic Nationalism
The idea that humanity is divided into discrete nations united by a language and common descent through history arrived in Central Asia in full force from two different directions. In the eighteenth century, the Russian state had become interested in knowing more about its subjects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the major axis of classification had come to be the nexus of race, nationality, and language. From the beginning, Russian officialdom had looked to anthropology to render Central Asia comprehensible by classifying its inhabitants. These new classifications, created to understand and control the local population, became integral to bureaucratic practice in Central Asia, and from there entered local understandings of identity.
[33] On the eve of world war in 1914, an official publication claimed: "The majority of the people of the East were Muslims or inclined to this faith (Tatars, Kirgiz, Bashkirs). Sometimes among them appeared emissaries of the Turkish sultan. Already in the seventeenth century, Russia's role as the main and most dangerous enemy of the Mahomedan world had been defined, and therefore the Mahomedan world attempted to unite for a more successful struggle with Russia." S.M. Seredonin, "Istoricheskii ocherk zavoevaniia Aziatskoi Rossii," in Aziatskaia Rossita , 2 vols. (St Petersburg, 1914), I: 26.
[34] The several international Muslim congresses did, after all, not amount to much; see Martin Kramer, Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses (New York, 1986). The first such congress, held in Cairo in 1907, at the initiative of Gasprinskii, failed to excite even the Okhrana; the disappointingly slim dossier is in GARF, f. 102, op. 238, d. 289.
The same understanding of community underlay the vision of the various nationalist movements in the Russian and Ottoman empires, even though the political aims of these movements were often diametrically opposed to those of officialdom. Romantic ideas appealed to Turkic intellectuals in the two empires, who began to reimagine their histories toward the end of the nineteenth century. Given the nature of the romantic nation, and the fact that they tapped into common sources (new findings in history, Turkology, and anthropology)[35] and common sensibilities (enthusiasm for romantic nationalism under the influence of pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism), these groups soon discovered mutual affinities, and the idea of a broader pan-Turkic nation emerged. The study of these various Turkisms (Tatar and Crimean nationalisms in Russia and Turk-ism in the Ottoman empire) has been long been overshadowed by an emphasis on the purely political side of pan-Turkism, with the result that the complex connections and contestations between them are poorly understood.[36] The writings of Turkic émigrés from Russia in the Ottoman empire, such as Yusuf Akçura, Agaoglu Ahmed and Huseyinzade Ali, brought the most extreme versions of the two currents together in pan-Turkism, which professed the goal of the political unity of those who belonged to the Turkic race/nation. Such pan-Turkism, however, was not synonymous with the variegated discourse of Turkism. Pan-Turkism may have had limited success as an intellectual movement, but the more basic idea of the affinity of various Turkic groups, and the knowledge of their Turkness, rapidly suffused all notions of identity in the Turkic world.
Central Asia was of great importance to Turkists, both as the original homeland of the race/nation (the Turan celebrated most famously by Ziya Gokalp as "the homeland of the Turks, neither Turkey, nor Turkestan / but a great and eternal land: Turan"),[37] and also as the home of a large Turkic population. Turkist intellectuals in both empires (although in vastly different conditions) produced a vast corpus of litera-
[35] The most concise account of the origins of Turkism in nineteenth-century discoveries in orientalism and Turkology remains that of Ziya Gokalp, Turkculugun Esaslari (Ankara, 1923), 5-10.
[36] The British Admiralty's A Manual on the Turamans and Pan-Turanianism (London, n.d. [1918]) remains an iconic text in any discussion of pan-Turkism down to today. The brief account in Jacob Landau, Pan-Turkism , rev. ed. (London, 1995), chs. 1-2, is deeply flawed and peppered with factual and interpretive inaccuracies. The only comprehensive account of Turkism in both empires is again by a participant: Akcuraoglu Yusuf [Yusuf Akçura], "Turkculuk," in Turk Yili 1928 (Ankara, 1928), 288-459. See also Paul Dumont, "Le revue Türk Yurdu et les Musulmans de l'empire russe, 1911-1914," Cabiers du monde russe et soviétique 15 (1974): 315-331.
[37] Ziya Gokalp, "Turan," Kizil Elma (Istanbul, 1914), 7.
ture that depicted Central Asia as part of a much larger community marked by race and language. This literature was widely read in Central Asia, and although no Central Asians contributed to it, its fundamental premises seeped into Jadid thinking about community and shaped the manner in which they imagined the world and their place in it.
Sart and Tajik
The romantic idea of the nation wreaked havoc on older notions of community and identity. Armed with an understanding of the world that saw it divided into discrete groups, amenable to rigorous, "scientific"' classification if only sufficient "objective" data could be obtained, Russian officials and scholars proceeded to find the objective reality behind every label they encountered in their new domains. The enumeration and classification of the population that ensued created new understandings of old labels. The complexities of Central Asian identity were nowhere better demonstrated than in the case of the "Sarts." The career of this label in the half-century of Russian rule demonstrates the forces at work in shaping identities in Central Asia.
For reasons that remain unclear, "Sart" became the term most commonly used by the Russians to denote the sedentary population of Central Asia after the conquest. It was used in several different ways. "In common parlance and every day life," a German geographer wrote in 1914, "the Russians use 'Sart' in much the same way as British colonists would speak of 'niggers.' It is applied to all and sundry 'natives' whose dress does not single them out at once (Jews, Turkmen, Kirghiz) or who are not evidently foreigners (Europeans, Afghans, Chinese, Hindu, etc.)."[38] Officials and scholars sought to use the term in a more precise manner, to apply it only to the "real" Sarts. The precise demarcation of the community united behind the label remained in question, but officials and scholars never doubted that the acquisition of sufficient objective information would provide the answer. The Sarts existed as an organic entity; the problem was to define them precisely. The answers could be sought in the realms of science or history, but not social practice, for how the people defined themselves was of very little importance to the concerns of "science." For physical anthropologists, craniological measurements provided a key to the Truth that was often clouded by social
[38] W. Rickmer Rickmers, The Duab of Turkestan: A Physiographic Sketch and Account of Some Travels (Cambridge, 1913), 5
conventions of naming. Similarly, although orientalists exhaustively examined the etymology of the term and its occurrences in historical texts, they did not deign to look at how the term was used in actual practice (but then that has never been the concern of orientalism).
The earliest Russian observers often saw no difference between the terms "Sart" and "Tajik." Iu. D. Iuzhakov, arriving in Central Asia with the armies of conquest, reported that the two terms were synonymous and both referred to the sedentary population of the region. His informants, most likely Tatar or Qazaq interpreters, had apparently told him that this population had descended from Jews and Iranians, an explanation he found convincing. Iuzhakov felt he knew the natives well enough to report, "In their terrible greed for money and their thievery, they exceed even the Jews. In their manners, the tone of their conversations, their cowardice, in the pettiness of their interests, and in the complete absence of political tact, they are, precisely, Jews." The fact that some Sarts spoke "their own language ... a mixture of Turkic and Persian in which the Turkic element strongly predominates," whereas others spoke a variety of Persian, was not of sufficient importance for him to override the common genetic origins as a marker of identity.[39] The stereotypes Iuzhakov used continued to be invoked down to the end of the old regime, but the linguistic distinction, so unimportant to him, soon emerged as all-important, and "Sart" came to be applied in Russian bureaucratic practice exclusively to the Turkic-speaking parts of the sedentary population of Central Asia, while "Tajik" was reserved for those of Iranian speech, the widespread bilingualism ignored for being too cumbersome.
Such a definition of "Sart," which distinguished Sarts from Tajiks on the one hand and other Turkic-speaking Central Asians on the other, proved difficult to establish in practice. Science came to the rescue. A. Bogdanov used craniological data to argue that Sarts and Ozbeks were distinct peoples.[40] The anthropologist N.A. Aristov suggested a narrower definition of "Sart" to rescue the term from popular misuse. Real Sarts were, for Aristov, "sedentary Turks and Turkicized natives who have already lost their tribal way of life and the tribal divisions connected with it," and the term should only be applied to them.[41] The notion of
[39] Iu. D. Iuzhakov, "Sarty ili Tadzhiki, glavnoe osedloe naselenie Turkestanskoi oblasti," Otechestvennye zapiski 173 (1867): 398-400.
[40] A. Bogdanov, "Antropometricheskie zametki otnositel'no turkestanskikh morodtsev," Izvestiia Obshchestva liubitelei estestvoznaniia, antropologii i etnografii , 1888, no. 5, 85-87.
[41] N.A. Aristov, "Zametki ob etnicheskom sostave tiurkskikh plemen 1 svedeniia ob ikh chislennosti," Zhivaia starina 6 (1896): 429. Precisely this notion has been resurrected in the only post-Soviet discussion of the Sarts: O.M. Bronnikova, "Sarty v etnicheskoi is-torn Srednei Azii (k postanovke problemy)," in Etnosy i etnicheskie protsessy: pamiati R. F. Itsa (Moscow, 1993), 151-158.
"Turkicization" also evoked racial admixture (already foreshadowed in Iuzhakov), which proved compelling to the romantic imagination and soon became a characteristic trait of the Sarts.[42] Orientalists, on the other hand, sought the answer in philology. Perhaps the most influential view was formulated by Bartol'd. For Bartol'd, "Sart" was an old Turkic term, of Sanskrit origin, meaning "merchant," which in the post-Mongol period came to be used as a synonym for "Tajik" in referring to bearers of the Persian Muslim culture of the towns, in opposition to the nomadic Turkic culture of the steppe. The distinction between Turk and Tajik was of little interest to the Ozbek conquerors of Central Asia, and after the sixteenth century, "Sart" distinguished the sedentary population of the conquered territory from the conquerors and their allies. Gradually, "under the influence of the conquerors," the town-dwellers began to call themselves Sart, "but the tribal differences between Turks and Tajiks were so great that the representatives of both peoples could not call themselves by the same name. Since the majority of the settled population now spoke Turkic, urban Turks began to be called 'Sarts,' in contradistinction to not just the nomads, but also the Tajiks."[43]
This approach was in many ways typical of the orientalist enterprise. The etymology of the term "Sart" was the key to the business of understanding who the Sarts were. Similarly, if the term appeared in historical sources, then Sarts must exist as "a people," and today's Sarts must have something to do with the Sarts mentioned in those sources. Much of Bartol'd's evidence comes from a few scattered references in historical sources, all produced at court and usually referring only to court elites, which he sees as proof of his fundamental assumption that stable labels refer to stable communities, which retain their organic unity through the ages.[44]
[42] This explanation especially found wide acceptance m more popular works; see, e.g., A. Kruber et al., eds., Aziatskaia Rossua: illiustrirovannyi geograficheskii sbornik 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1910), 189; or V. I. Masal'ski,, Turkestansku krai (St. Petersburg, 1913), 392-393.
[43] V. V. Bartol'd, "Eshche o slove 'Sart'" (1895), in Sochineniia , 9 vols. (Moscow, 1963-1977), II/2: 310-314; see also Barthold, "Sart," 175-176.
[44] This is also the approach taken by Yuri Bregel ("The Sarts in the Khanate of Khiva," Journal of Asian and African History 12 [1978]: 120-151), who on the basis of literary references to a division of notables among "Sarts" and 'Uzbeks" in Khiva concludes that Sarts "were definitely considered by the Uzbeks as a different ethnic group, a different people." Bregel's insistence that the Sarts were distinguished by a specific political position defined "by the role of their [sic] leaders in the government" makes it seem as if the Sart notables who laid claim to certain positions at court actually represented other Sarts m the affairs of government. This betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of both power and community in premodern Central Asia, for there is no reason to believe that Sart notables felt any affinity for, or were capable of mobilizing, peasant Sarts in the rest of the country.
One person not daunted by the complexity of the problem was Ostroumov. In a work titled Sarts: Ethnographic Sketches , he reviewed the "scientific" literature on the question for forty pages, but then concluded simply that "Sarts are the sedentary natives, predominantly of the Syr Darya and part of the Ferghana oblasts."[45] (Ostroumov clearly never paused to wonder at the neat coincidence of ethnic distribution with recently created administrative boundaries.) What Ostroumov thought was important, however, because his control of the TWG and his stature as an orientalist allowed him to elaborate a Sart language, distinct from Ozbek and other Turkic dialects, as a literary language. Russian orientalism knew the Turkic speech of the sedentary population of Transoxiana as "Sart," and in addition to Ostroumov's exertions at the helm of TWG , grammars and dictionaries of the Sart language made their appearance.
"Sart" also appeared as a category in the all-Russian census of 1897. The census made a brave attempt to reduce the empire's ethnic complexity to the simplicity of numbers. Although the census did not have a category for "nationality" as such, it did classify people according to native language, which was believed to be the primary attribute of a nation. The purpose was largely defeated in Central Asia. The census counted Ozbeks and Sarts separately but left a large part of the population classified simply as "Turkic" (tiurkskii ) (see Table 7). This could have been an attempt to distinguish between "Ozbek" and "Turk"—the census does not make this clear—but since the same classification was used in other regions of the empire for very different groups of Turkic speakers, it confounded not only local statistics but also those at the all-Russian level.[46] (There were other instances of less than consistent usage: In some tables, Tatars were counted separately, but in others they appeared only as speakers of "Turko-Tatar languages." In any case, "Tatar" covered the Turkic languages of the Volga, Urals, Crimea, and
[45] N. P. Ostroumov, Sarty. Etnograficheskie materialy (obshchu ocherk ), 3rd ed. (Tashkent, 1908), 3.
[46] See comments by Guido Hausmann m Henning Bauer et. al., Die Nationalitaten des Russischen Reiches in der Volkzalung yon 1897 , 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1991), 1: 244-245.
TABLE 7 | ||||
Ferghana | Syr Darya | Samarqand | Total | |
Tajik | 114,081 | 5,558 | 230,384 | 350,023 |
Sart | 788,989 | 144,275 | 18,073 | 951,337 |
Ozbek | 153,780 | 64,235 | 507,587 | 725,602 |
Turk | 261,234 | 158,675 | 19,993 | 439,902 |
Kirgiz | 201,579 | 952,061 | 63,091 | 1,216,731 |
Tatar | 852 | 5,257 | 450 | 6,559 |
Russian | 8,140 | 31,900 | 12,485 | 52,525 |
Others | 43,559 | 116,437 | 7,958 | 167,954 |
Total | 1,572,214 | 1,478,398 | 860,021 | 3,910,633 |
SOURCE : Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis' naselenna Rossiiskoi Imperii 1897 g ., vols. 83, 86, 89 (St. Petersburg, 1905), table 13. | ||||
The basis of classification was native language. "Kirgiz" included both Qazaq and Qirghiz; "Tatar" included Volga, Crimean. and Transcaucasian ("Azerbaijani") speech. | ||||
Transcaucasia.) Nevertheless, enumeration produced new understandings of community. To say that in 1897 in the three core oblasts of Turkestan there were 951,337 Sarts who were only Sarts and nothing else transformed the meaning of the term by abstracting it from the contours of local relations and oppositions.
It is difficult to judge whether the official use had any resonance among the population itself. To be sure, official favor for the term "Sart" led to its use, especially in bureaucratic contexts, and the TWG helped popularize the new understanding of the term. This usage was also accepted by Tatar writers, who found the notion of racial admixture as the explanation for the origins of the group quite compelling. The Jadids of Central Asia, however, were resolutely opposed to the label.
Criticism of the official use of the term came as early as 1893, when concern that Russian functionaries should learn local languages led to the creation of language courses for them. One of the languages scheduled to be taught was Sart. Sher Ali Lapin, whom we will encounter again in Chapter 8, an interpreter in the chancellery of the governor of Samarqand oblast and a Qazaq himself, argued in a lecture that "there is neither a Sart people, nor a Sart language." Rather, the word was a contraction of sarï' it , "yellow dog," a derogatory appellation used by Qazaq and Qïrghïz nomads for all sedentary people, regardless of ori-
gin. "We have no basis for calling the language of the Sarts 'Sart,' since the language of the Sarts includes both Tajik and the language of the sedentary Ozbeks; therefore the language should be called . . . the Ozbek language, in the dialect of the sedentary Ozbeks."[47]
Lapin was taken to task by Bartol'd, then working on his doctorate in Tashkent, who was surprised that "Mr. Lapin decided to speak with such aplomb about things with which he apparently has not the slightest acquaintance." Rejecting the explanation of the origin of the term put forward by Lapin as mere folk etymology, Bartol'd fixed the explanation in the proper realm of high culture, citing references to the term in the literary and historical sources of the post-Mongol period.[48] When Lapin had the temerity to reply in print, Bartol'd heaped further condescension on him. Writing in Turkestanskie vedomosti , where Lapin had responded, Bartol'd presented a long list of faulty citations and misquotations committed by Lapin, before concluding: "In printing Mr. Lapin's article, the editors proceeded from the opinion that the inclination to scientific work on the part of a native in any case represents a gratifying phenomenon that must be supported by every means. No one disputes this; but no one expects native writers to attain at once the scientific standards established by European science as a result of long experience."[49] Having crushed the native beneath the weight of the long experience of European science, Bartol'd went on to indulge in orientalism's fetish with literary etymologies, elaborating in the process his theory of the origins of Sart. No more was heard from the native side for a decade and a half.
When the issue arose next, it was taken up with the Tatars, who used the term routinely. In 1911, Behram-bek Dawlatshaev, the highest-ranking interpreter in Bukharan service, broached the topic in Shura , perhaps the most respected magazine in the Tatar world. "Are we Sarts or Turks?" he asked the editors in the regular question-and-answer section of the magazine. Turkestan means "the land of the Turks," he asked, "so why is it that we are called 'Sarts'? Is it that in earlier times Turks lived in this 'land of the Turks,' but later left it, leaving their name behind? If so, then where did the people called 'Sart,' that is, us, come from and when? . . . And how is it that we inherited Turkic literature? Did the Turks
[47] Quoted in Bartol'd, "O prepodavanii tuzemnykh narechii v Samarkande" (1894), m his Socbineiia? ?, II/2: 303-304.
[48] Ibid.
[49] Bartol'd, "Vmesto otveta g-nu Lapinu" (1894), in Sochineiia , II/2: 508-309.
leave it to us? Or did we take it, and the land, from them by force?"[50] And so forth. No Tatar writer responded, but Behbudi joined in with a lengthy article in which he argued that the origins of the word "Sart" were unknown and that it was used pejoratively only by the northern neighbors of Central Asia (Qazaqs and Tatars, from whom the Russians took it). "Upon asking Qazaqs 'Whom do you call a "Sart,'" I usually received the answer, 'Those who travel around our steppe' (meaning all traders)." The term was not used by those labeled "Sart" themselves, Behbudi further argued: "Those who have no interaction with the Russians or are unfamiliar with the press think it is the Russian word for 'Muslim.'" Finally, Behbudi noted, there were ninety-two tribes in Turkestan, but none was called Sart.[51]
Behbudi was backed by his friend Baqa Khoja, who in a long article denied the existence of a Sart people. "The inhabitants of Turkestan, that is, Turan and Transoxiana, are, from the point of view of race and nationality [jinsiyat wa qawmiyat ], predominantly Turks and Tajiks." The opposition of Turk and Tajik had become a metaphor among "oriental poets," but neither old Arabic, nor Persian histories, geographies, or dictionaries contained the word "Sart." Quoting Russian authors in the original, he went on to show the many, often contradictory, explanations given for the word. "To call the Ozbek Turkic inhabitants of the five oblasts of Russian Turkestan and the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva 'Sart' is an injustice, the despotism of opinion, the cause of doubt and division; [in short,] a huge mistake."[52]
The same conclusions were reached by Dawlatshaev when he himself answered the question he had raised. The matter was simple: "We Turkestanis are Turkic Ozbeks who belong to more than one hundred tribes [awmaq ] of the Mongol people [qawm ] and the Turkic race [urugh ]." The proof was simple and lay in the Turkic speech and literature of the region, as well as in its ruling dynasties. The 92 tribes "renowned from olden times to the present" had increased to over zoo, he argued, and he appended a list of 111 tribal names then current. "Now, if foisting the name 'Sart' on [the population of] Turkestan, composed of 'more than a hundred Turk-Mongol tribes,' whose history, literature, language, and
[50] Sbura , 15 August 1911, 504.
[51] Mahmud Khoja bin Behbud Khoja, "Sart söze majhuldur," Shura , 1 October 1911, 581-582.
[52] Samarqandi Baqa Khoja bin Sayyid Hadi Khoja, 'Sart söze asïlsizdïr, Shura , 15 December 1911, 754-757.
customs are Turkic, is not an injustice, what is?"[53] The debate flared up again, but this time in Behbudi's Ayina , in early 1914, in response to an article by the young Bashkir historian Ahmed Zeki Velidi in which he spoke of "Sarts." Behram-bek Dawlatshaev again expressed his displeasure with "those writers who, not knowing that we Turkestanis belong to over a hundred Turkic tribes, call us 'Sart,' as well as those who, knowing full well that we are Turks, call us 'Sart' by way of insult."[54] Two weeks later, Ayina published an open letter with seven signatures expressing displeasure over the use of the term "Sart" when "everyone knows that the population of Turkestan is composed of Ozbek, that is Turkic, Tajik, that is, Persian [Fars khalqi ], and Arab (Khoja) groups."[55] Behbudi took this opportunity to republish the 1911 articles from Shura in modified form.[56]
Beyond such "ethnographic" debates, "Ozbek" also appeared occasionally in Jadid literature as synonymous with the nation. In a poem published in 1916, for instance, Hamza used Turkistan eli ("the people of Turkestan") and Ozbek eli ("the Ozbek people") interchangeably in exhorting the nation to "not sleep in this age of progress."[57]
Not everyone in Central Asia shared the Jadids' position. Not surprisingly, TWG took the lead in criticizing the Jadids. A student from Osh wrote in 1913 to criticize those who wanted to protest the use of the term on two counts. First, "Sart" was not a pejorative term but rather carried connotations of "royal descent" and "philosopher." Second, the author asked if a change in terminology would make the people of Turkestan stronger or more developed?[58] Other writers argued that this search for roots was a form of nationalism and divisive of the Muslim community and that labels were not important, since "the name of the renowned and developed Nemets [German] nation comes from the word nimoi , which means 'mute.' But they respect this name and do not worry about changing it. They have not lagged behind because of this name, but are the most developed; the cause for their renown is not their name, but their good morals."[59] An author, writing under the pseudonym "Sart,
[53] Behram-bek Dawlatshaev, "Turkistanlilar," Shura , 1 January 1913, 12-15.
[54] Behram-bek Dawlatshah, "Sart masalasi," Ayina , 19 February 1914, 300.
[55] "Tashkanddan gila=opka," Ayina , 1 March 1014, 354.
[56] "Sart sozi majhuldur!" Ayina , 22 March 1914, 314-315; 29 March 1914, 338-340; 5 Apr, 1914, 362-365; 12 April 1914, 386-388; 19 April. 1914, 478-480.
[57] Hamza, "Dardiga darmon istamas," in Tola asarlar toplami , ed. N. Karimov et al., 5 vols. (Tashkent. 1988-1989), II: 29-30.
[58] Mirza Qadirjan Qabiljanbayev, "Haqqamyat," TWG , 10 January 1913.
[59] Mulla Alim, "Po povodu pis'ma o siove 'Sart'," TWG , 20 January 1913.
son of Sart [Sart oghli sart ]," contended that "we Sarts do not hate the name, since our faith does not consider names and lineages important."[60]
Nevertheless, the Jadids' opposition to the term "Sart" was significant for various reasons. In disowning it, the Jadids were as far from the pre-Russian usage of "Sart" as a social marker as were Russian scholars and functionaries, but whereas the latter searched for the nation hiding behind the label, the Jadids rejected it because, they argued, there was no nation there. Nations were objective identities, but their objectivity was defined by race; hence the concern with biological origins, which made Tajiks into Iranians and Khojas into Arabs. The fact that Behbudi, with his cosmopolitan tastes, moderate politics, and Muslim education, was so prominent in demanding the use of the "proper" names for the people of Central Asia indicated how far Turkism had crept in around the edges into local discourses of identity. "In our age, the 'national' [milliyat ] question has taken precedence over the question of religion among Europeans," wrote a writer who unfortunately remained anonymous, "so there is no harm if we too occasionally discuss the 'Sart' question, which is considered a national question, and thus remember our nation."[61] Indeed, the Tatar writer Abdurrauf Muzaffar made the point, quite popular in Ottoman circles at the time, that "religion exists only on the basis of the nation and national life A religion without a nation is destroyed."[62]
It is equally important that criticism of the use of "Sart" was directed against Turkist authors. The discourse of Turkism was polyphonic, and the debate described above was an attempt by Central Asian writers to define their own version of Turkism. More significant, especially with hindsight, is the fact that the distinction between "Ozbek" and "Turk" disappears entirely. The ninety-two tribes mentioned by Behbudi were the ninety-two tribes of the Ozbek confederation in the aftermath of the Shaybani conquest of Transoxiana and did not encompass the entire Turkic-speaking population of the region. No wonder, then, that they turn into "more than one hundred tribes" in the hands of Dawlatshaev. Ozbekness became, for the Jadids, a defining feature of the Turkic-speaking population of Central Asia. We are reminded of Wickmer's ob-
[60] Sart oghli Sart, "Otvet zhurnalu 'Aina'," TWG , 27 April, x and 4 May 1914. The pseudonym is significant, since this form was popular with Turkist authors m the Ottoman empire.
[61] "Sart sozi, ma'lum bolmadi," Ayina , 19 July 1914, 923.
[62] A. Muzaffar, "Din millat, millat milliyat ila qaimdir," ST , 26 November 1914; 2 December 1914; 10 December 1914.
servation that "Sart" was used to denote all "unmarked" Turcophone groups of Central Asia. In Jadid parlance, that meaning of "Sart" was being translated into "Ozbek." This also applied to the name of the language, which was often equated with Ozbek in this period. In the early 1920s, all the "marked" groups of Central Asia (Türkmen, Qazaq, Qïr-ghïz, and, eventually, Tajik) were carved away from Turkestan, and the remaining Turcophone population became the modern Uzbek nation. The roots of these momentous changes are to be found in local discourses before 1917. The modern nations of Central Asia were not simply the work of an imperial Soviet regime bent on dividing its subject populations, the better to conquer them; rather, their origins lie in new ways of imagining the world and Central Asia's place within it. Similarly, the abolition of the term "Sart" in the early Soviet period was not "evidence of [the] ignorance of those who governed Turkestan at that time," as Yuri Bregel snidely claims, but rather the outcome of very real politics surrounding Central Asian identity in a revolutionary age.[63]
The insistence on the "proper" identification of peoples led to the disaggregation of the sedentary population along newly drawn ethnic lines. The most difficult disentanglement was that of the Tajiks. The longstanding dichotomy of Turk and Tajik was invested with new meaning. Now the difference was seen to reside in the realm of nature and was described in a new language, such as in this description of the Tajiks of Bukhara that appeared in Sbura : "Although the Tajiks are Iranian and their language Persian, their religion is Sunni. Their name emerged from their animosity toward the Shi'is .... Their faces are straight, their women renowned for their beauty. They are assiduous and masters of commerce, but [also] deceptive and have low morals."[64] The low levels of morality and general effeteness of the Tajiks, taken whole cloth from contemporary European anthropology, appear quite frequently in Jadid writing. Criticisms of the maktab often carried an anti-Iranian subtext. A Jadid schoolteacher complained that although old-style maktab teachers "are Turks, [they] do not know their mother tongue and do not teach it, but rather look upon it... with hatred. Instead, they waste the poor children's time with Persian fairy tales and puzzles, whose harmfulness in the present day is quite obvious."[65]
[63] Bregel, "The Sarts of the Khanate of Khiva," 121n.
[64] "Bukhara mamleketi," Shura , 1 February 1910, 101.
[65] Dada Mirza Qari, "Muallim wa shagirdlar," Ayina , 14 December 1913, 183-4.
This re-visioning of identity remained an exercise in exclusion , since we have little evidence of any parallel assertion of Iranian or Tajik (or Aryan) identity among the Iranophone population of Central Asia. The few instances in which romantic notions of Iranianness appeared in print were all connected with the Turkist enterprise. The Transcaucasian editor of Bukhara-yi sharif published a language tree that placed Persian in its "proper" Aryan context. In another issue we read: "There are [between] 10 million and 12 million Muslims in Turkestan, Transoxiana, Bukhara, and Khiva. Approximately 7 million of them are Ozbeks, Turkmens, and Qïrghïz Qazaq, who belong to Turanian nations [umam-i turaniya ], and are Turks; their national language is Ozbek or Chaghatay Turkic. The remaining [sic] z million are Tajiks, who belong to the Aryan nations [umam-i ariyaniya ], and are of Iranian origins; their literary language is also Persian."[66] Beyond this, however, there was little discussion of Tajik or Iranic identity in Central Asia until well into the 1920s.
Watan
Patriotism (watanparwarlik ) was also an important virtue for the Jadids. Abdullah Awlani placed it in the realm of nature when he suggested that even animals and birds love the place where they are born. Because of this natural feeling, Arabs continue to live in their blistering hot deserts and Eskimos in the cold north, "just as we Turkestanis love our homeland more than our lives."[67] In its traditional meaning, the term watan meant merely one's birthplace. By the period under consideration, however, it had been attached to the nation, although its boundaries remained ambiguous. The Jadids used the term in many different ways. The most common use of "watan" was to denote Turkestan in the Russian administrative sense of the term. At other times, its extent was vaguer, incorporating the protectorates and even Chinese Turkestan, and after the outbreak of war in 1914 "watan" often meant the Russian empire. But these were all purely territorial designations. The millat and the watan defined each other in the most common designation of the nation, the Muslims of Turkestan. Similarly, the term "Turan," which became quite popular in the early twentieth century in Central Asia (it was borne by three different newspapers, and Awlani used it for
[66] B. Kh., "Amarat-i Bukhara," Bukhara-yi sharif , 28 March 1912.
[67] Abdullah Awlani, Turki Gulistan, yakhud akhlaq (Tashkent, 1914), 36.
a reading room and a theater troupe he organized) did not carry the baggage attached to it by Turkists elsewhere. Rather, in Central Asia it signified "Russian Central Asia" (Turkestan, Bukhara, and Khiva), as when Behbudi wrote of "the 20 million Muslims in Russia, of which half are us Turanis."[68]
But romantic discourses had begun to encroach on this notion and to impart to it a new meaning. In its extreme formulation, this new understanding of Turkestan as the homeland of the Turks differed markedly from its premodern usage (which in Persian had connoted the land where Turks, as opposed to Iranians, predominated, just as there was an Arabistan and a Hindustan), for it now came with claims of political primacy (and ultimately sovereignty) and cultural hegemony for the nation to whom the homeland "belonged." As such, it was profoundly subversive of the symbiosis of Turks and Iranians that had existed in Transoxiana for several centuries. This was explicitly stated by the Istanbul Turkist journal Tü>rk Yurdu , which criticized the fact that Bukhara-yi sharif was being published in Persian "when [Bukhara's] people are entirely Turks and children of Turks [Türk oglu Türk ]."[69] Elsewhere, the same journal expressed the hope that "since the Bukharans are all Turks, the situation [of Persian being the official language] will change in the near future. The official language and the publications of [this] Turkic state will of course be Turkic, and the Persian language will be used, to an extent proportionate to their numbers, only for the few Tajiks who have immigrated from Iran."[70] This argument was reproduced almost intact by Dawlatshaev, who claimed that Turan, the land north of the Amu Darya, had always been Turkic, and that the prevalence of Persian speech, limited in any case only to the three cities of Bukhara, Samarqand, and Khujand, was the result of forced migrations of Iranian population by the Turkic Ozbek khans of Bukhara in previous centuries, and of the high esteem for Persian literature among urban sophisticates.[71] The claim was preposterous, of course (and perhaps because of this it has resonated ever since in nationalist discourses in Central Asia) but, given the basic premises of the new notions of identity, logical in its own way. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that although the essential Turkicness of Turkestan was thus asserted, it did not automatically imply that it was
[68] "Sada-yi Turkistan, Sada-yi Farghana, yakhud Turanning ekizik=tuwwam farzandlari," Ayina , 12 April 1914, 392.
[69] "Buhara-yi Serif Gazetesi," Turk Yurdu , 1 (1912): 376.
[70] "Turan Gazetesi," Turk Yurdu , 2 (1912): 631.
[71] Dawlatshaev, "Tukistanlilar," 14.
the homeland of all Turks or that all Turks had equal claims to it. The Central Asians might be Turks, but for the Jadids they were so on their own terms. Even as they discovered common ties with other Turkic peoples, the Jadids drew lines marking themselves off from them.
Language
If the rhetoric of the homeland marked Central Asians off from other Turks and Muslims implicitly, debates over language did so quite explicitly. At bottom lay the brand-new idea that (as a local author put it) "every nation takes pride in its language."[72] Language had never served as a marker of identity in Central Asia, and the idea that an individual should work and feel pride in his or her native language would have been incomprehensible a generation earlier. Romantic notions of nationhood were partly the cause, but the real change came with schooling. If functional literacy was a desired goal, it had to be achieved only in the child's native language. A central point in the Jadids' criticism of the old maktab was that a number of texts used in it were in Persian, which the children could not understand. The need for textbooks written in the vernacular led to the elaboration of a modern literary Central Asian Turkic language.
The fact that the maktab did not teach language as such now came to be seen as a major shortcoming. Before it could be taught as a subject, however, language had to be abstracted from lived experience and rendered into an object of study. This process began with the publication in 1916 of a volume on orthography by Ashura Ali Zahiri.[73] At the same time, the Jadids hoped to simplify the written language and bring it closer to speech. The process was not simple, of course, as models, both lexical and grammatical, were borrowed indiscriminately from Tatar and Ottoman.[74] Jadid authors began to use new letters to represent the phonemes
[72] S.A., "Har millat oz tilidan fakhr etar," Ayina , 21 June 1914, 836-838.
[73] Ashur Ali, Zahiri, Imla (Kokand, 1916).
[74] A. K. Borovkov, Uzbeksku literaturnyi iazyk v period 1905-1917 gg . (Tashkent, 1940).
with their more popular (Turkic) equivalents, using the sign of equality as a punctuation mark, but there was little interest in a more thoroughgoing purification of the language.[75]
The logic of simplifying and rendering the written language closer to the spoken led to the crystallization of distinct literary standards. The history of the transition of numerous Turkic dialects from speech to print languages is a contentious matter. Turkists insist that all Turkic languages are essentially a single language, arguing that the distinction between Turkic and Turkish does not exist in Turkic languages and that the distinctions between the "dialects" have been imposed by the divide-and-rule policies of the Soviet regime. The argument is specious, since it misrepresents the situation until the nineteenth century and refuses to acknowledge the transition from spoken to print language undergone by all Turkic languages since then.
Historically, Turki/Turkcha referred not to a single language but to a range of dialects sharing a common grammatical structure. Until the nineteenth century, two literary standards coexisted, each with its own orthographic conventions and rules of syntax. However, because literary standards were as much about virtuosity as about communication, their connection with spoken speech was minimal. The roots of the Turkist contention lie in the late nineteenth century, when Gasprinskii, motivated by the hope of bringing about the unity of deed, thought, and language (Ishte, fikirde, dilde birlik , in his words) among the Turks of the world, sought to create a common literary language out of the numerous dialects that had begun to appear in print. This hope became a fundamental plank of Turkist thought, for if Turks were a single nation, then they had to share a common language. Terjüman , written in a simplified form of Ottoman, was widely read throughout the Turkic world, but the rapid rise of Tatar as a literary language at the end of the century put paid to the hope of creating a common Turkic language. The Transcaucasian press also retained peculiarities of local speech in its orthography. Written in the Arabic script, which concealed differences in vowels, all these variants remained mutually comprehensible in written form, but clearly local variants had emerged as full-fledged languages. The market and the ideal of schooling in the vernacular (with the emphasis on comprehension and literacy) combined to create new literary languages out of mere dialects. For literary languages are not a product of nature but are cre-
[75] Indeed, Behbudi ridiculed very modest suggestions in ST for the purification of language; see his "Til masalasi," Ayina , 2 April 1915, 274-277; 16 April 1915, 306-311.
ated historically through complex interactions of states, markets, and academies. Ultimately, the best analogy for the development of the Turkic languages is to be drawn with the manner in which imperial courts, national markets, and (later) academies marked off ranges of Romance dialects into the national languages of today. Some, such as French, Spanish, and Italian, became "national" literary languages, while others, such as Catalan and Provençal, remained (at least until recently) dialects. The Soviet period was different in the systematic manner in which languages were delineated one from another, but the process had begun well before 1917.
In Central Asia, where the spoken language was close to the literary standard of Chaghatay Turkic (which has the same relation to the Uzbek of today that Ottoman has to modern Turkish), the debates about the creation of a common language around a modified Ottoman, so dear to Gasprinskii, had little appeal. The only trace of this debate in the Jadid press of Central Asia is a short piece by Haji Muin. Titled "On Language Unity," the piece is notable more for its brevity and casual tone than for its content. There was little to indicate that the article addressed a burning issue of the day. Haji Muin wrote: "In my opinion, the first step in this direction would be to replace the words not understood by most Turks with those understood by all." He went on to provide a list of words that Tatar authors might replace with their Chaghatay equivalents.[76] The problem would be solved if the Tatars deferred to Central Asians.
The language of Central Asia might have been called "Turkic" (turki, turkcha ), but it was always qualified as "Turkestan Turkic" (Turkistan shewasi, Turkistan shewa-yi turkiyasi ). Similarly, primary school textbooks in Central Asia were avowedly written in "Turkestani Turkic" (Turkistan shewasida, achiq tilda ), as was prominently displayed on their title pages. This was to be a common language for all of Turkestan but not one common to all of Turks of the world. Local authors whose writings bore Tatar or Ottoman influences were criticized for not writing in Central Asian Turkic. A reader criticized Awlani on this count: "Only a person who knows Ottoman [usmanlicha ] can understand his poems. Now, at least Ottoman is a delicious and very literary dialect [lehja ]; but what do we have to do with Tatar, which neither our literati, nor our stu-
[76] Haji Muin ibn Shukrullah, "Til birlashdurmaq haqqinda," Ayina , 4 January 1914, 259-260.
dents know?"[77] There were instances when local newspapers refused to print articles because they were not in the local language.[78] Reviews of theatrical performances published in the Jadid press often criticized Transcaucasian Muslims and (especially) Tatars, who were prominent in the first years of modern theater, for declaiming in their own languages, which, according to the reviewers, were not easily understood by the audience.[79]
But what was the "Turkestan Turkic" to be? Behbudi's Ayina was published, according to the Turkic inscription on the title page, in "Turkic and Persian [turki wa farsi orta shewada ];" the Russian inscription on the same page, however, described those languages and "Ozbek and Persian [na uzbekskom i persidskom iazykakh ]." Much as the Jadids had come to see the "unmarked" Turkic population of Central Asia as Ozbek, so they saw its Turkic speech as Ozbek. The roots of modern Uzbek predate the Soviet regime.
The Muslims of Turkestan
"Of course," Behbudi concluded his article criticizing the use of the term "Sart," "they will ask, 'What should we call you if we can't call you Sart?' The answer is very easy: the Ozbeks of Turkestan, the Tajiks, Arabs, Turks, Russians, Jews of Turkestan. If they say, 'We're unable to distinguish the Turks, Arabs, and Persians [Farsi ] of Turkestan from one another, and need a name common to all,' we say, 'Write "the Muslims of Turkestan [Turkistan musulmanlari ]."'"[80] The Muslims of Turkestan constituted the Jadids' nation. It was a secular nationalism in which concern for the welfare of Muslims firmly took precedence over questions of religious doctrine. Jadid affinities extended beyond Central Asia, and the Muslims of Central Asia were part of larger communities (the Muslims of Russia and the Muslims of the whole world), nonetheless the politically significant identity remained the local, territorial one. The Muslims of Turkestan were to form the most significant node of solidarity in 1917.
[77] Rasuli, "Shair wa milli she'rlarimiz," Ayina , 14 February 1915, 214. Such disdain for Tatar was not unusual; Behbudi once called it "a corrupt and base dialect": "Khatirat-i Farghana," Shuhrat , 8 January 1908.
[78] See, for example, the editorial response to M. Mirza Hamidzada (probably a Transcaucasian Muslim) in SF , 9 October 1914.
[79] "Samarqanda [sic] tiyatir," Ayina , 1 February 1914, 262; "Bukharada milli tiyatir," Ayina , 22 March 1914, 326; "Katta Qorghanda tiyatir," Ayina, 29 March 1914, 349.
[80] Mahmud Khoja [Behbudi], "Sart sozi majhuldur," Ayina , 19 April 1914, 480.
At the same time, romantic notions of community had seeped deep into Central Asian discourses. The Jadids professed profound interest in their "national" origins. Acts of implicit exclusion came to define the Muslims of Turkestan primarily as Turks, and those Turks primarily as Ozbeks. However, these acts remained implicit until late 1917, when events forced a changed. In the meantime, the territorial, confessional, and national identities coexisted, as the following "Categories of Islam," taken from Munawwar Qari's primer for new-method schools, show: "Arab Turk Fars Ozbek Noghay Tatar Bashqurd Persiyan [sic] Cherkes Lezgin Tekke Turkman Afghan Qazaq Qirghiz Qipchaq Tungan Taranchi Hahafi Shafi'i Maliki Hanbali Ja'fari. All of them believe in the existence and unity of God and the prophecy of Muhammad, on whom be peace."[81]
[81] Munawwar Qari, Adib-i awwal (Tashkent, 1912), 30.