Adeeb Khalid

Russian History and the Debate over Orientalism

Nikolai Petrovich Ostroumov arrived in Tashkent in 1877 to take up the post of director of schools in the newly created province of Turkestan. He had been recommended to the Governor General Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman by Nikolai Ivanovich Il ¢minskii, the famous Kazan¢ missionary and Orientalist, whose student Ostroumov had been. Ostroumov had trained in Islam and Turkic languages, and this knowledge very quickly made him a confidant of Kaufman. Ostroumov retained this proximity to power all through the tsarist period. Until 1917, Ostroumov served the state in various capacities. In 1883, he was appointed the editor of the Turkiston viloyatining gazeti, the vernacular official gazette, through which he sought to shape the contours of local cultural debates in the direction of Russian state interests. He acted as a censor for locallanguage publications, and his opinion on “native” affairs was routinely sought by local administrators. At the same time, he produced a vast corpus of scholarly writing on the ethnography and history of Central Asia, and on Islam. Ostroumov translated the Bible into Chaghatay and wrote anti-Islamic polemics in Russian. His private papers include correspondence with fellow Orientalists in Russia and abroad, and his writings give ample evidence of his involvement in the international enterprise of Orientalism. Ostroumov’s use of the authority of his Orientalist knowledge and his easy embrace of imperial service brings to mind, of course, the work of Edward Said, who has argued for the close connection between knowledge and power in the imperial enterprise. Said’s critique of Orientalism has been immensely influential in the last two decades. Research agendas in many disciplines, from literary criticism through anthropology and history, have been redefined as a result of the concerns outlined in Orientalism. Given the immense diversity of the Russian

A SECULAR ISLAM: NATION, STATE, AND RELIGION IN UZBEKISTAN

The collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago engendered both hope and fear about the future of Islam in Uzbekistan (and Central Asia in general). Many Muslims from other countries hoped that, freed from the constraints of the Soviet regime, Uzbeks and other Central Asians would rediscover their religious traditions and rejoin the broader Muslim world. 1 Other observers feared that Islam would emerge as a political force and threaten the security of the region. 2 As the decade progressed and militant Islamist organizations appeared, fear tended to overshadow hope. The events of autumn 2001 in Afghanistan, when fighters belonging to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) played a prominent role alongside the Taliban, seemed to vindicate the darkest fears, 3 and to justify the unremitting campaign that the regime of President Islom Karimov has waged against “religious extremism” since 1998.

Introduction: Locating the (post-) colonial in Soviet history

How are we to think about Central Asia’s experience of the 20th century? What analytical sense are we to make of the seven decades of Soviet rule that dominated it? What relation—conceptual, analytical, metaphorical—does Central Asia have to the rest of what used to be called ‘the Third World’? What place does the Soviet Union occupy in the wider history of interactions between ‘Europe’ and the rest of the world? These questions have been pushed to the forefront of the scholarly agenda in the humanities and the social sciences by the ‘emergence’ of nominally sovereign states from under the rubble of the Soviet collapse. Empire as a category for analysing the Soviet past seemed to suggest itself in the circumstances. After all, Central Asia was a region conquered by a European empire in the 19th century which, unlike the rest of Asia, did not win independence in the mid 20th century. It was easy to see the emergence of the five new states in 1991 as delayed decolonization, with the experience of the new states directly comparable with those of the ‘Third World’, and the Soviet Union directly comparable with other European colonial empires. The fact that the Soviet collapse took place just as the field of colonial and postcolonial studies matured in Anglo-American academe and had begun to transform our understanding of the cultural and political work of empire proved felicitous, and ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, conceptual paradigms developed in the multidisciplinary study European overseas empires have posed extremely fruitful challenges to our conceptualizations of the modern history of Central Asia and of the Soviet Union at large. Empire also emerged as one of the most important questions in the post-Soviet historiography of the Soviet Union as a whole. During the political crisis that led to its demise, the Soviet Union came to be derided as an ‘empire’ from all points on the political compass—not just hostile foreign observers who had long characterized the Soviet Union as an empire, but also Soviet critics, Russian and nonRussian alike. Not only did national intelligentsias and political elites from the non-Russian republics of the union begin using the vocabulary of empire and colonialism to discredit the regime, but ordinary Russians did too. During the drama of the failed coup of August 1991, protestors, predominantly Russians, carried placards proclaiming, ‘Down with the Empire of the Red Fascists!’ Much of this Central Asian Survey (December 2007) 26(4), 465–473

Printing, Publishing, and Reform in Tsarist Central Asia

Scholars have long noted, often with disapproval, the tardiness of the introduction of printing to the Muslim world, but the consequences of that introduction on the production, reproduction, and transmission of knowledge in Muslim societies are only now beginning to be understood. For instance, the numerous movements for modernist reform that arose in the Muslim world in the 19th century were all propagated through the medium of print, yet the connection between those movements and the availability of printing seldom has been investigated. This neglect is all the more surprising in view of the fact that historians of early modern Europe have long emphasized the signal role played by printing in Europes transition to modernity. In her influential work, Elizabeth Eisenstein has written of a “printing revolution” unleashed by the invention and rapid dissemination of the technology in 15th-century Europe. There is, for Eisenstein, something inherent in the very nature of printing that revolutionizes the intellectual outlook of individuals and cultures with which it comes in contact. In a different vein, Benedict Anderson has pointed to the importance of “print capitalism” in creating a sense of shared community in the 19th century that made possible the rise of national ism in many parts of the world.

Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus to 1917

When the empires of Europe marched off to war in 1914, Nicholas II, Tsar of All the Russias, ruled over more Muslims than any Muslim sovereign. ‘Russian Muslims’ numbered over twenty million at the end of the imperial era, and could claim to be the second-largest confessional community in the empire, yielding only to Orthodox Christians in number. This was a bit deceptive, for this ‘community’ consisted of a vast array of societies with very different historical experiences of Russian rule and different relationships to the Russian state. Although many spoke of a ‘Muslim question’ in late imperial Russia, it is difficult to discern a single ‘Muslim policy’ followed by imperial authorities that would have encompassed all the Muslims of the empire. A survey of Muslim interaction with the Russian state of this breadth and scope therefore has to focus on diversity as its main theme. Muslims and the Russian state From the very inception of statehood in what is now Russia, Eastern Slavs have interacted with Muslims, as neighbours, rulers and subjects. Long-distance trade in silver from Muslim lands provided the impetus for the establishment of the first Rus’ principalities, and Islam arrived in the lands of Rus’ before Christianity. The rulers of the Volga Bulghar state converted to Islam at the turn of the tenth century, several decades before Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted his subjects to Christianity in 988.

The Bukharan People's Soviet Republic in the Light of Muslim Sources

The short-lived Peoples Soviet Republic of Bukhara is usually dismissed as a Soviet puppet state that served merely as a prelude to the Sovietization of the former protectorate. Recourse to the thick documentation in the Arabic script (mostly in Uzbek, some in Persian/Tajik) left behind by the republic and now available in the central state archives of Uzbekistan allows a much more complex picture of the republic to emerge. This article presents a preliminary assessment of these Muslim sources to reveal the way the Bukharan government saw its mission and how its members imagined the world. Seen through these documents, the Bukharan republic appears as neither a puppet state, nor as transitional, but as an attempt at creating a modern national state for the Muslim population of Bukhara. Against the odds, it struggled to establish national sovereignty in the political and economic realms, with an independent foreign policy and a national memory. The intellectual moorings (and bureaucratic practices) of the republic owed more to Muslim modernist discourses of the late Ottoman Empire than to the Russian revolution.

Ulama and the State in Uzbekistan

The fundamental fact about the religious landscape in post-Soviet Uzbekistan (and in post-Soviet Muslim societies in general) is the lasting impact of the Soviet legacy. The anti-religious campaigns of 1927–1941 in the USSR caused massive destruction to the infrastructure of Islamic learning and marginalized the authority of the ulama, subordinating them to those of both the state and the nation to an extent arguably not seen anywhere else in the Muslim world. For the ulama after 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the task has been to re-establish their authority within a political field still dominated by Soviet-era institutional structures of state control of religious activity and Soviet-era discursive modes that lead to a deep suspicion towards religion. This article focuses on the “de-Islamization” of the 1930s and then considers its implications for the ulama of today.

XX asr o'zbek adabiyotining Amerikada o'rganilishi [The study of twentieth-century Uzbek literature in America]

arguably simply a teleological reading of history from the perspective of a contemporary ideology of Kazakh national independence. Secondly, it is also disappointing that this volume has a very limited number of illustrations and photos, both of which could significantly help nonKazakh specialists, and a Western audience in general, to visualize the artistic universe of Kazakhstan. Nonetheless, Ideia nezavisimosti v izobrazitelnom iskusstve Kazakhstana should overall be considered a significant and novel contribution to the Kazakh discourse on the formation of the country’s artistic culture, reinterpreting artistic expression and symbols of the Soviet era, as well as building a new interpretation of the cultural bridges between the Soviet past and post-Soviet national awakening and search for national identity.

SCOTT C. LEVI, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002). Pp. 319.

This fine book provides the first comprehensive account of the Indian merchant communities that arose in Central Asia in the 16th century and continued to occupy an important niche in the local economy until the turn of the 20th century. The subject of Indias relations with Central Asia and Russia has often been addressed, but it has usually fallen afoul of methodological and linguistic boundaries that divide the historiographies of the two regions. This is the first work that is equally at home in both Indian and Central Asian history. Levis greatest contribution is to bring Central Asian sources to bear fully on his argument. He uses Persian-language narrative and documentary sources from Central Asia (housed in the manuscript collections of the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent) and the state archives of Uzbekistan to glean useful new information about life in the diaspora and the activities of its members. He backs these up with accounts of European travelers, which he has mined with great thoroughness for all references to Indian merchants.