The nomadic people of Eurasia left behind rich treasures that rival those of sophisticated settled societies. Many of these precious items, which can be seen today in museums around the world, were made of gold, bronze, and silver with unique animal-inspired designs. They served decorative, practical, ritual, and spiritual purposes and were widely exchanged along the continent’s trade routes.

In this interview, Dr. Petya Andreeva from Parsons School of Design, New York, discusses some findings from her research into the decorative and funerary art of Eurasia.

An interview with

---

Petya Andreeva

Assistant Professor of Asian Art and Design History, Parson School of Design, New School

Petya Andreeva received her Ph.D. from the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her upcoming book entitled Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE will be publsihed by Edinburgh University Press in March 2024. The book draws from her dissertation, Fantastic Beasts of the Eurasian Steppes: Toward a Revisionist Approach to Animal-Style Art which received international recognition in the Best Asian Humanities Dissertation category at the International Convention for Asia Scholars (ICAS) in 2018. Professor Andreeva has broad research interests inlcuding funerary art in China and Inner Asia, arts of the Silk Roads, nomadic material culture, art of Soviet Central Asia, and the global history of ornament. Her main field of research is the cultural and artistic transmissions along premodern trade networks, namely the Silk Roads and their precursor – the Eurasian steppe. She is particularly interested in the display of portable luxury and the formation of collective memory in nomadic communities along the porous borders of sedentary empires (China, Persia and Greece). Her research aims to challenge Euro-centric narratives in the study of decorative and funerary art.

Originally from Bulgaria, she is fluent in Mandarin, Bulgarian, Russian and has a working proficiency in Japanese and Mongolian.

https://www.newschool.edu/parsons/faculty/petya-andreeva/

The decorative art of Eurasian nomadic peoples is a great subject to study. Going to the roots of this art, what do you think led to its development and the apparent love for exquisite decorations, given that nomadic people led otherwise simple lives and had to travel a lot?

This is a really important question. Contrary to traditional narratives that highlight the “monumentality” of sedentary empires (palaces, large reliefs etc.), early pastoral societies left behind numerous treasures that rival those of their settled neighbors. The majority of these valuable items are adorned with animal-inspired designs, which feature composites or what I call zoomorphic junctures. These are highly conceptual designs that we sometimes overlook, as we tend to focus on the large amounts of gold found in nomadic tombs and hoards. In steppe imagery, it is common to encounter an animal body combining deer antlers, a raptor’s beak, the mane of a feline, and the snout of a wolf—all elaborately rendered on gold surfaces via casting, hammering, soldering, and a number of other sophisticated techniques.

Species tend to be represented metonymically and then fused together; the resulting animal bodies are inverted in conceptually interesting ways that we would not normally encounter elsewhere in the ancient world. In my work, I have argued that these counterintuitive animal images were inspired by both political and ecological factors that are rooted in nomads’ exposure to diverse ecosystems and their anxiety about the inexplicable whims of nature. Environmental challenges led to economic concerns, which in large and reluctant nomadic alliances would have jeopardized the position of the super-elite (what I call the “elite nucleus”). As they were exposed to different ecological conditions at least semiannually, nomads started to visualize the fauna on which they staked their lives as being perpetually in flux—hence the hybrid, unstable bodies we encounter in the so-called “animal style” of the steppe. Eurasian nomads are still rarely mentioned in theoretical discourses on design concepts, but their image system was incredibly intriguing and complex and very indicative of how climate change and political instability might affect people’s creative products.

Across the five-thousand-mile Eurasian steppe network, we find a great number of metalworks—mostly gold and bronze (less often silver)—as well as felt textiles. These meticulous arrangements give us better insights into the curation and decorative scheme of the mortuary space, instead of just a glimpse into the individual objects. We often encounter images of the same hybrid animal body on the jewelry adorning the body, and on the textiles enveloping the floor of the tomb: in the Pazyryk culture of the Altai, for instance, bird heads attached to deer antlers are a particularly ubiquitous motif seen across media and modes of making. Animal-style designs were highly transferable and malleable, and so we encounter them on metalwork, woodwork, bone carving, felt, and other materials consistent with the nomadic lifestyle.

Most nomadic tombs contain portable items of great value. Many of these were used during the tomb occupant’s life on earth as currency exchanged for safe passage, for strategic commercial transactions with sedentary neighbors like China, or as a symbol of political clout within the diverse nomadic alliance. But once arranged inside the tomb and attached to the deceased’s body, they entered a new lifecycle and took on new functions. This is to say, what we often refer to as “decorative art” might also have fulfilled other important roles in political and economic decision-making in nomadic societies. During a burial, the body of the deceased noble and probably some parts of the barrow would have been exposed to the scrutiny of an excitable and possibly highly divided audience of members of different clans—and so the curatorial approach to the space and the body’s adornment were of paramount importance. The glittering gold would have been viewed by both allies and potential rivals of the deceased leader just as a new power vacuum opened in a relatively unstable confederation. And, ultimately, fluency in this complex visual language became a political tool used by a very small elite nucleus to define their agency in the reluctant alliance of different nomadic groups. It also helped the elite to manufacture collective bonds in these rather unstable nomadic confederations.

When we imagine the luxury and decorations of the Eurasian nomads, we mostly think of Scythian treasures and animal style. Can you elaborate on what happened later and how this art developed?

Animal style flourished along a far more extensive geographical, cultural, and temporal expanse than one might expect. It was present in every cultural sphere on the steppe, as well as adjacent regions, from the frontiers of China to the Hungarian plain. Indeed, the so-called Scythians have often been designated as the primary creators and carriers of the animal-style tradition. But there are a few caveats worth mentioning here. While it retains some usefulness as a category, “Scythian” has become something of an umbrella exonym in itself, often applied arbitrarily to ethnically or culturally unrelated nomadic groups on the Eurasian steppe. We often think of Peter the Great’s Siberian collection in the State Hermitage Museum as containing classic examples of “Scythian art,” but the objects are of unclear provenance and came into the tsar’s collection from plundered Siberian tombs at a time when looting and illegal excavation were especially frequent occurrences in southern Russia. There are, of course, a great number of Pontic Scythian tombs that fit Herodotus’ descriptions, many of which are in Eastern and Central Ukraine. Because of the intensive Greco-Scythian interactions in this region, we see a departure from zoomorphism and a higher proclivity for depicting human figures in these nomadic works.

But while we mostly associate animal-style design with Eurasian nomads—be they Scythians, Xiongnu, Donghu, Sarmatians, or otherwise—it is also true that these animal-inspired designs penetrated the porous boundaries of neighboring sedentary empires like China and Persia. This is significant because for far too long, nomads have been viewed as the passive recipients of the “enlightened” traditions and inventions of China, Persia, and Greece, or as mere intermediaries between those empires. Now we know that steppe-style objects appeared in the aristocratic tombs of major Eurasian empires, whose elites wanted to showcase their worldliness and access to the most “unconquerable” of domains. Indeed, while both the Greeks and the Chinese continued to indulge in labeling the nomadic Other as “barbarian” in their writings, their funerary and commercial practices tell a rather different story. As long as it did not overshadow the local, showcasing nomadic gold was a new status-defining token. This is why we see nomadic-style plaques and buckles in locations as distant as the tomb of the King of Nanyue in South China and China’s Lelang outpost in modern-day North Korea in the second century BCE.

In my forthcoming book, I study the politics behind the adoption of such motifs and objects by societies that, for the most part, viewed themselves as enemies of or superior to the steppe nomads. I even go so far as to suggest that grand structures in Achaemenid Persia, like the Apadana palace in Persepolis, feature animal combat scenes that were inspired by Scythian and Saka decorations and might have involved nomadic labor. This makes sense considering the defeats the Persians suffered at the hands of the Scythians (recorded by Herodotus) and all the Scythian prisoners of war taken by Darius. The Persians sort of “delimited” animal style in the grandness of the Persian relief: animal style was there to denote control over the “Barbaric Other,” but it did not feature prominently enough to overshadow the grandeur of the local format. This visual and political strategy is what I refer to as “governable Otherness.” Visual references to the Nomadic Other were helpful political tools as long as they were inscribed in a local monumental format.

Finally, animal style endured for much, much longer than previously acknowledged. We see traces of Iron-Age nomadic design in later periods, including some of the gold of the Tibetan empire in the seventh and eighth centuries—recently excavated examples of Tibetan gold come from Dulan county in Qinghai province in northwestern China. The Komi and Udmurt settlements in Western Siberia and the Ural lowlands have also yielded some great examples of possible “offshoots” of Iron-Age animal style (known in the Russian literature as “Permian animal style”), most dating to between the fifth and tenth centuries. I would argue that in the Migration period, these Permian motifs reached northern Europe, where they were subsequently incorporated into the designs of the Germanic tribes.

My most recent work has focused on an even later resurrection of animal style. In the westernmost segment of the Mongol empire, a return to this long-forgotten decoration might have been politically motivated. The Mongols of the Golden Horde had to reconcile two distinct identities: that of a worldly, astute trade partner and that of the legitimate successor to an uninterrupted, centuries-old nomadic tradition. It is therefore not surprising that some ancient animal-style designs feature prominently in the arts of the Golden Horde, which was centered on the Western steppe.

Trade was obviously a major factor in the exchange of goods. Can you tell us a little more about how trade influenced the value of these goods?

Yes, trade was certainly an important factor in the dissemination of animal-style art (and design). We can identify a few “commercial hotspots” on this steppe route, which was a precursor to the more widely known “Silk Road” network. On the western end, there were the commercial interactions between the Greeks and the Scythians (and later the Sarmatians). There is great evidence of this in the diverse inventories of royal Scythian tombs in Crimea. Herodotus mentioned cities like Olbia and Chersonesos, and in fact most of the Bosporan Kingdom centered around Crimea, a strategic trade center and hotbed of cross-cultural encounters. The archaeological record supports this. On the easternmost end of the steppe route, China bought into the increasingly lucrative nomadic market from around the fourth century BCE, even before the emergence of the first nomadic empire (the Xiongnu). There are textual records that the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty rewarded a stockbreeder in northern China who facilitated trade with the Rong nomads. We know that Chinese imperial workshops started to produce animal-style goldworks and export them to the nomadic market, receiving much-needed livestock in return. I have previously suggested that China was probably the only power player in Eurasia between the fifth and third centuries BCE to truly see and realize the great potential of the nomadic market. How they did that so successfully is a more complicated question that I explore in my book, but a major reason might be that Chinese art had been entirely zoomorphic from its inception, and likewise relied on abstract and composite animal designs. In other words, Chinese artisans were primed to embrace the zoomorphism of their nomadic clientele, whereas the Persians’ and Greeks’ designs concepts were much more reliant on human figures and narratives.

Is there any spiritual meaning to these decorations? Are they still heavily defined by an animal spirit?

Several trail-blazing studies have indeed proposed that the emergence of certain design motifs, chief among them the reindeer antler in South Siberia, might have been inspired by shamanistic practices. Shamanism is often the “go-to” explanation for the artistic innovations of ancient societies in Siberia and Mongolia. I certainly think that there is merit to these interpretations and do not reject the search for “meaning” behind these animal motifs. But I myself am more interested in the function (rather than meaning) of animal-style designs. This is necessary because my studies tend to adopt a “macro” perspective: I am dealing with an enormous geographical and cultural expanse inhabited by many diverse nomadic societies. There must be a reason for the incredible transferability and longevity of certain design idioms (like the zoomorphic juncture, for instance)—how did tropes like the bird with deer antlers travel so swiftly from the northern Chinese periphery to eastern and central Europe? It is highly unlikely that the motif meant the same thing in every single micro-zone on the Eurasian steppe route. So we have to ask a different question: could it be that these zoomorphic designs fulfilled a similar function in all these different nomadic confederations, which had some political and ecological concerns in common? The animal images in question present an alternative, skewed version of ecological reality. They feature fragmented, dissected, and reconfigured animal bodies, which are based on the signature anatomical parts of various real-life beasts—from stags to wild goats to snow leopards. These unstable anatomies, so to speak, indicate a very particular response to changes in the ecological environment, including environmental shifts bigger than just the seasonal migration patterns, which had profound consequences for many nomads. With this idiosyncratic image system, nomadic makers visualized an alternative and more manageable ecological system that was at their disposal and mercy. This was perhaps a coping mechanism that enabled them to deal with real-life environmental and political anxieties. Look, for instance, at the so-called Golden Man of Issyk in Kazakhstan, or the no less awe-inspiring Golden Woman of Taksai. Such warrior suits consist of thousands of elaborate gold adornments, most featuring animal-style designs. The wearer was seen as the master of this newly formed fantastical biota, and this helped them reaffirm their legitimacy to an awestruck audience. In short, animal images were much more than mere spiritual symbols or totems; they also served as important political tools for establishing a leader’s legitimacy. The body became praxis through which important political messages could be sent to the viewers of the burial-turned-spectacle.

Can you tell us about funerary art in China and Inner Asia? What items would usually go into a tomb and why?

I actually started my academic career as a Sinologist, and continue to work in both Central Asian and Early China studies. I have gained many valuable skills from my extensive Sinological training. My interest in Central Asia started in graduate school, where my professors inspired me to start exploring China’s relationship with its neighbors and long-distance trade partners, including the steppe people on its frontier, which Chinese texts often label as barbarians. Early Chinese chronicles tend to be the most detailed, even if not always reliable or nuanced, in their ethnographies of steppe peoples. As I mentioned earlier, I was curious to find out why we often find animal-style plaques in the inventories of early Chinese tombs.

In the Bronze Age, Chinese burials feature bronze ritual vessels as the highlights of their inventories. In the fourth and third century BCE, many bronze casters also gained skill in goldsmithing, at Beikangcun near Xi’an, and there is an excavated tomb of a Chinese bronze caster from the Warring States who was buried with tools and matrices for the production of both nomadic animal-style objects and Chinese ritual bronzes. Chinese burials from the Han dynasty (third century BCE to third century CE) embrace a more diverse repertoire. They tend to have elaborate murals featuring cosmological guides to the souls of the deceased, procession scenes, directional animals, and Confucian and Daoist narratives, among other images. Some members of the imperial family wore extremely rare and luxurious “jade suits”—burial garments made of hundreds of small jade pieces joined by gold wire or silk thread. This opulent personal adornment is in some ways reminiscent of the golden men and women of Kazakhstan.

Chinese tombs from the Han dynasty also tend to feature mountain-shaped incense burners, bronze mirrors, lacquer items, and “mingqi” spirit articles (architectural models, figurines of dancers, acrobats, servants, etc.). A great number of painted silks have also been found in Han dynasty burials. My all-time favorite tomb to teach and study is the famous Mawangdui burial complex of noblewoman Lady Dai and her family. The lacquer, silks, and brocades found here are really of top-notch quality and point to the ways aristocrats in China visualized and “regally ensured” their afterlife. Food vessels and even chopsticks, as well as cosmetic boxes – all made of lacquer—have been discovered there.

Even more interesting is the appearance of lacquer, bronze mirrors, and other Chinese imports in the tombs of Xiongnu elites north of the Chinese border. Clearly, diplomatic gifts and intensive trade defined the rather tumultuous relationship between the two entities. To cut a long story short, I am really fascinated by the opportunistic reciprocity between China and its northern neighbors—various steppe groups that, over time, became a growing threat to China’s hegemony in North Asia.

Your forthcoming book is entitled Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE. Can you tell us about this research?

I am thrilled that my first monograph is already under production with Edinburgh University Press and is scheduled to be published in March 2024. The book builds on my dissertation and explores hundreds of objects from every micro-zone on or adjacent to the Eurasian steppe route: the Mongolian-Manchurian grasslands, South Siberia, the northern Korean peninsula, the Kazakh steppes, the Ural lowlands, the North Caucasus, Crimea, and parts of the Hungarian plain. The main argument of the book is that due to concerns over political legitimacy, the elite nucleus in every nomadic alliance—from the Pontic Scythians and Sarmatians to the Xiongnu—embraced animal-style design as their de facto visual rhetoric in order to construct collective bonds in otherwise reluctant political alliances that were structured not around ethnic ties but rather around shared geopolitical goals and enemies. I also seek to understand why and how animal style entered the aesthetic systems of sedentary empires like China and Persia. Steppe nomads were consistently “othered” by their geopolitical enemies, but they were also increasingly recognized as worthy opponents and potential trade partners that power players like China needed to interact with if they wished to expand their economic influence in Eurasia. I am interested in the visual and material manifestations of this reluctant symbiosis, which never resulted in true reciprocity yet shaped much of the political landscape of Central Eurasia.

My second inquiry throughout the book is inspired by one of my academic idols, Ernst Gombrich: I am fascinated by the psychology and logistics of image-making. I am especially interested in the factors that contribute to abstraction. At what point do designs become “abstract” or “semi-abstract”? Early nomadic images do not fully embrace abstraction and are not entirely divorced from ecological reality, even if they feature fabricated hybrids. This changes dramatically with the later and more powerful nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu, who were well on their way to forming the first-ever nomadic empire and needed more standardized designs to make them more legible to various trade partners and rivals across an increasingly global Eurasia. In the book, I link abstraction to political and economic agendas as well.

I have invested years of research into this project, including fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Russia, China, Mongolia, South Korea, and my home country, Bulgaria. It was important to me to look at as many primary sources as possible from the cultural zones in question because of the study’s unprecedented geographical scope. To that end, the materials I present are combined with textual sources in Modern and Classical Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Mongolian, and Bulgarian.

What legacy did this decorative and funerary art leave for us today? Do we see it in contemporary art or commercial goods, fashion, jewelry, or furniture?

I really appreciate this question because far too often, the arts of ancient societies are viewed in a historical vacuum, as detached from modern-day developments, when in reality, they provide important antecedents and lessons for contemporary societies. This is especially true in the case of pastoral nomads, whose lifestyles can certainly add to our present conversations around sustainability and efforts to combat climate change. Also, the relationship between images, politics, and manufactured collective memory in these ancient nomadic confederations is quite relevant to present-day discourses around nationalism, borders, and cross-cultural exchange.

Traces of animal-style art have endured to this day. We certainly see the reliance on metonymically conveyed animal bodies in the textile production of much of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, parts of Xinjiang, and Mongolia today. I am thinking of the “shyrdak” and “ala kyiz” felts that one finds in many Central Asian bazaars. Producing these stitched and colored felts is a very labor-intensive collective process, and the skills behind these lived practices are usually transmitted from mother to daughter. Many of these traditional felts feature abstract deer antlers, which, interestingly can be found on much of the Pazyryk textile corpus from the Altai Mountains all the way back to the fourth century BCE. Clearly, this penchant for conveying animals through their antlers, beaks, horns, or other representative body parts (in a sort of “synecdoche”) can be traced back to the animal-style period.

I am also reminded of how animal-style design has been interpreted in Kazakh fashion in recent years. A great number of amazing designers from Kazakhstan have adopted references to ancient nomadic motifs in their own takes on “national costume,” reinterpreting deer antlers, goat horns, and other animal-inspired motifs through a modern lens, as well as drawing on the traditional manipulation of felt and fur. One can hardly overlook the famous Golden Men (and Women) of Kazakhstan. At least six such figures have been excavated from various parts of Kazakhstan since 1969. Many modern silhouettes in couture fashion in the country are inspired by the elongated and sumptuous figure of the Golden Man. So ingrained are these phenomenal discoveries in the collective consciousness of Kazakhstan that one can even find a statue of the Golden Man standing on a winged lion in front of the Kazakh embassy in Washington, DC (and its counterpart on Republic Square in Almaty).

All photos provided by 
Petya Andreeva

Ira Mukhoty is an Indian writer who writes about forgotten heroines of Indian history.

Two of her books—Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History and Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire—are about women who played outstanding roles in history but have not made it into textbooks as their male counterparts have.

In this interview, we discuss these female heroines of the Mughal Empire, from Babur’s mother and grandmother; to Gulbadan Begum, who wrote the biography of Emperor Akbar; to Sultan Raziya, the first and only female Sultan to ascend the throne of the Delhi Sultanate.

An interview with

---

Ira Mukhoty 

Ira Mukhoty is an Indian author. She studied natural sciences at University of Cambridge. Her book Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History (2017, Aleph Books: ISBN 978-9384067496) tells the tales of mythical heroines including Draupadi and Radha, and “six real women who played extraordinary roles but who weren’t written into textbooks as were their male counterparts”, including Jahanara Begum, Rani Laxmibai and Hazrat Mahal.

Her second book Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire which was about the disappeared women of the great Mughals, was published by Aleph Book Company on 25 April 2018. In 2020 she published Akbar: The Great Mughal (Aleph Book Company, ISBN 978-9389836042). A reviewer in the Asian Review of Books described it as “an ambitious work crafted with great imagination about how the past and the present intersect”.

In 2021, her debut novel Song of Draupadi was published. The book reimagines Mahabharata through the narration of its women characters, particularly Draupadi. 

How did you start researching female heroines of the Mughal Empire? How did it all begin?

My first book was a result of my thoughts. I had two small daughters, and I was just thinking of stories to tell them, and I was reading all the popular books that we have in India. I was looking at female role models and I realized that in our culture, a lot of the women are presented in a particular stereotypical, patriarchal way. They have to fit within the mold of being very good women according to the Indian system, which means getting married, having sons, and sort of propagating the male line. Somehow the end result is always that story. If we think of Sita from Ramayana, that is what is held up to us—that is the perfection of Indian womanhood. So that was troubling me a little bit and I thought there must be other women from history or maybe from the epics that are culturally Indian symbols, but a bit different from the ones we are normally shown.

That’s how I started looking at these women. My idea, when I was speaking to a publisher, was to find Indian women across a large span of time—maybe 2,000 years. The first woman I talked about was in the sixth century BC, the time of the Buddha; she was a courtesan who later became a nun.

I thought if we were to write about different sorts of Indian women and the different ways in which they had been able to live out their passions, fulfill their ambitions, become rulers or do something worthwhile, then maybe we could find a different model for being an Indian woman. Maybe we could show that you do not have to be like Sita—that obeying your husband’s commands and being sexually chaste is not the only way to be a good Indian woman. And that’s really how the idea started and that’s how I found Raziya Sultan, one of the great Indian women that we do not talk about enough considering how extraordinary she was.

Your books deal with women in Indian history in the pre-Mughal and post-Mughal periods. Generally speaking, how were women viewed in these periods? Did anything change with the arrival of Mughals?

I think throughout recorded history, in most societies, women have been constrained within patriarchal systems. From the age of the Buddha, we can note that it was with great reluctance that women were allowed to join the Sangha and become nuns. Even then, there were great strictures on them: they had to submit to male monks even if the monks were younger and less experienced than they, etc. With the rise of Brahminical Hinduism, women’s role was further circumscribed. Married women were respected in society, no doubt, but their role was to bear children so as to honor the memory of their ancestors. They were not educated or encouraged to do anything other than marry and have children. Then by the fifteenth century, Rajput women began to be put into purdah, because men’s honor was heavily dependent on the chastity of their women. And because the Rajput tribes were constantly warring with each other and with invaders from the north-east from the fifteenth century on, elite men encouraged a strict purdah for their women. With the arrival of the Mughals, and especially from the time of Akbar onwards, this system of purdah became de rigueur among elite women, Hindu and Muslim alike, because Akbar married into Rajput houses. These ideas also reinforced Mughal notions about women in purdah.

How are strong women depicted in Indian epics? Sita from Ramayana was a very tragic yet strong character. What other myths surround strong women in pre-Mughal India?

Besides Sita in the Ramayana, the other great Indian woman from the epics is Draupadi, from the Mahabharata. I am very interested in her story, because if we examine the writings on her, it is clear that unlike Sita, Draupadi rails against her fate and voices her anger with the men in her life very powerfully. I think this is important to remember, because female anger is very frightening to the patriarchy, and it is rare to come across such examples in the ancient texts. But Draupadi is acknowledged to be learned (she is called a pandita) and virtuous but also argumentative, dismissive and critical of her husbands, and volatile.

The heroines of the Mughal Empire come from Central Asia, and it was customary—at least in the Chingisid Empire—for women to be active in politics. But the women of the Mughal Empire are not only strong and political but also intelligent and knowledgeable. How did they become so educated?

The Mughals were not only Chingisid, but also Timurid. In fact, it may be said that they claimed their Timurid legacy more visibly than their Chingisid one. Timur himself put a great deal of emphasis on education, on culture, on architecture, and on urban etiquette, since he was adopting some of the Persianate culture. And so we have a legacy of highly educated Timurid women, including the mother (Kutlug Nigar Khanum), grandmother (Aisan Daulat Begum), and sister (Khanzada Begum) of Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty. The Mughals greatly revered these famous matriarchs, who enabled Babur to retain his throne and empire even when he was vulnerable and in great danger. As a result, generations of women would continue to receive a thorough education similar to that given to male Timurid elites.

Could you provide us with more information about these women? What do we know about their personalities, their bravery, and what set them apart?

I came across them when I was writing my book on Akbar (Akbar: The Great Mughal) and on Daughters of the Sun before Akbar.

On Babur’s mother and grandmother, I think he would probably not have managed to do what he did in India without the help of these women. The following story is told about his grandmother. She was married to a nobleman and they were always engaged in battle, and one day her husband lost and she was captured by the enemy. So the enemy captured her and the ruler gave her to one of his noblemen to be his wife. She spent one night waiting and she pretended to be very happy and accepting of all of this—and then when that man entered her room, she and all her maidservants got hold of him and threw him out of the window, and he hit the ground and he died. And the ruler was really shocked; he said, “What have you done?! You have killed my nobleman.” And she very proudly said, “I am already a married woman! You can kill me if you want, but I am already married.” And this ruler was so impressed that he sent her back with an entourage and made sure that she was returned to her husband.

So we see the physical bravery of these women, in addition to the fact that they understood their own value and they put a worth on their own value—they were not just there to be slaves or to be passed from man to man. I find that self-belief to be quite extraordinary.

Khanzad Begum, who was Babur’s sister, had a similar thing happen to her. She was captured by Shaibani Khan Uzbek. Shaibani Khan married her, then divorced her and married her to somebody else. For over 10 years, she lived in the court of Shaibani Khan. Then after 10 years, Shaibani Khan was killed in another battle, and Khanzad Begum was sent back to India, to Babur’s court. And amazingly, after all these years, Babur took her back into his court and he made her Padshah Begum—that is, she was the most senior woman of the Harem and she was the one who controlled the administration and the running of the Harem. And that was a position of power that showed great respect for the woman who she was. It almost came as a shock to learn this because in Indian society we usually view divorced and widowed women as somehow not deserving of the same respect as married women. That is just kind of an Indian/Hindu tradition, unfortunately.

And to see that the Mughals were so pragmatic about the fact that women could be captured in battle, married off against their will, and widowed, but that it was not their fault and there was no blame laid upon them—there was no unnecessary value placed on their sexual chastity—I thought that was a very powerful message to bring to India, as we often put too much emphasis on Indian women’s sexual chastity.

The fact about Gulbadan is also huge—we see that a lot of importance was accorded to women because they were educated. It was expensive to educate people—you had to call tutors, you had to get people in to teach them—and these women were extremely educated. For example, Gulbadan Begum wrote a biography. She was not just educated and literate, but she was able to write. So Akbar asked her to write a biography that could be included in a larger biography of his life by Abu’l-Fazl. She started writing it and she wrote all her memories of Humayun and Emperor Babur. I think it was one of the only cases of a Muslim woman of that century writing a biography from within the Harem. This is a woman who lived in a Harem, who lived a long life; she wrote from within that structure and was able to give us her insights into that life.

It is a unique document and very little use has been made of it. Historians tend not to use it as much as all the male sources of writing. Yet we know that these women were educated and were able to produce works like this. So this was also something that I thought was very important to talk about: that all this effort was made to educate these women.

In Central Asia we learn only a little about Sultan Raziya, the first and only female Sultan to ascend the throne of the Delhi Sultanate, and the only one of Turkic origin. What can you tell us about her?

Raziya ruled during a time of extreme effervescence in Hindustan in North Northern India. It was the time of the Slave dynasty. Her father was Iltutmish, and before him there was Qutb ud-Din Aibak. They came with Muhammad of Ghor from Central Asia. Muhammad of Ghor had brought his Turkish slaves with him, and in time these Turkish slaves rose to become kings. So there was a lot of turmoil at this time. There were always competing factions. After all, these were men who had come from Central Asia. There were other, local men who were opposed them. There were other Freeborn Turks and Persians who opposed them. So it was a time of great uncertainty and it was incredibly difficult to rule for any length of time because you had to balance all these different factions and manage to keep everybody more or less happy.

The first extraordinary thing Raziya Sultan did was to put her claim forward. So when her father, Iltutmish, died—he was on the throne for 25 years and then he died—his second son became the ruler automatically, his eldest son having already died. But he was a very bad ruler and his mother started playing politics in the Harem and all sorts of things. So Raziya appealed to the military: she said, “I would like to be king now that my father has passed away.” And I think that it is extraordinary that she was not limited by her gender. All the biographers who wrote about her in her time said that she was a great ruler, a just ruler—she brought justice, she brought stability and peace to the empire—and that it was just unfortunate that she was not a man.

I think the fact that she came from this nomadic background—from this Turkish slave background—is very important. It was this semi-nomadic background that made Timurid and Mughal women so, in a way, brave about being on an equal playing field with the men. They do not seem to find their gender to be any restriction because when you are a nomad or semi-nomad and you travel from place to place for most of the year, you are on horseback, or you are walking, or you are traveling with the king’s entourage—and under those circumstances, it’s very difficult to keep women completely hidden in purdah.

Even when Babur came to India for the first time, his mother and grandmother were extremely important sources of advice. I think he was 14 years old when his father died, so he was extremely young, very vulnerable, and anything could have happened at that time. But his mother and grandmother gave him military advice and accompanied him physically—went from place to place. So these women had that strength of character that came from their nomadic steppe background. They brought that to Hindustan, and I think that’s why we suddenly find these examples of strong women in the middle of Indian history. I mean, Raziya Sultan is the only Islamic woman to have ruled in India. She is remembered, but with not a great deal of detail. The same is true of Gulbadan—the early Mughal women were completely unknown. When I wrote Daughters of the Sun, I don’t believe there was another book on the Mughal women. We had heard about the men, of course, the men were extraordinary, but the women were completely ignored, especially the early ones like Gulbadan and Hamida Banu Begum. Only the more recent ones were remembered. But now there is more interest. A scholar called Ruby Lal, who is based at an American university, is bringing out a biography of Gulbadan this year. So I am very excited. She has already written a book on Nur Jahan, she has written an academic book on early Mughal women, and now she is releasing a biography of Gulbadan. So I am hoping that now people are more excited to find out about the feminine side of Mughal rule, as well as the men who are so well known.

What are your favorite heroines of that time? Can you share some of the unknown stories?

I am very partial to the story of Jahanara Begum, who was the daughter of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan. After the death of her mother, she became Padshah Begum (head of the harem) at the age of 17, and from that moment onwards became a very wealthy and influential woman. She left behind a great legacy in architecture—she built a caravanserai, the Chandni chowk, and the hammams of Shahjahanabad (old Delhi)—wrote Sufi texts, considered herself the soul mate of her brother Dara Shukoh, and experienced Sufi trances. She was, in the seventeenth century, arguably the wealthiest and most powerful woman of her time. All the European traders had to negotiate with her if they wanted to carry out trade in India. When her father was imprisoned by Aurangzeb, she gave up all her privileges and followed her father into exile in Agra. And yet today, her legacy is almost forgotten, her buildings having all been destroyed by the British following the uprising of 1857.

Generally speaking, how were women viewed in each of these periods? Did anything change with the arrival of the Mughals?

I think with the arrival of the Mughals, women were given more freedom. They were very used to this sort of nomadic lifestyle, they were used to being part of the political structure, and so we see this in the early women. Later on, especially from the time of Akbar, things started changing because he married a lot of Rajput women. Also, a lot of his courtiers and his main noblemen were Rajput men.

The Rajput system had already introduced the system of Zenana and putting women in purdah because Rajasthan is in the northwest of India, and there were a lot of raids from people outside of India into Hindustan at that time. So the Rajasthan clans felt the need to protect their women, and so they brought in purdah. So this system of keeping women veiled was already there with the Rajput, and then Akbar married these women and it became, in a way, crystallized in the Mughal Empire. It became part of the social structure for elite women to be kept in purdah. It became something to emulate. All the elite clans of India wanted to do the same thing. And they also started increasing the level of women’s seclusion. So unfortunately, even though Akbar himself very much promoted the education of women and had a lot of sympathy for the women that he saw, it became much more normal to keep women in purdah. And then with the coming of the British later on, they brought in their own Victorian values: European women of that era were very much kept at home and did not have much independence at all. Thus, things became very rigid in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as these Victorian values became part of our culture. So we lost a lot of the freedom that women maybe enjoyed in earlier centuries.

In Persia and the greater Central Asian region, two religions once fought for dominance. In the end, Zoroastrianism—which still enjoys adherents to this day—was forced to give way to the more powerful Islam. While at first some Muslims found ways to incorporate Zoroastrians into the empire of Islamic law, they subsequently had been less accommodating.

In this interview, Andrew D. Magnusson describes the interaction between Zoroastrianism and Islam and notes its flexibility. He also discusses how Zoroastrianism, which originally came from Central Asia, coexists with Islam in the Islamic Republic of Iran today and how it has influenced other religions.

Interview with

---

Andrew D. Magnusson

Andrew D. Magnusson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern history in the Department of History & Geography at the University of Central Oklahoma. Before coming to UCO, he taught at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Magnusson earned a Ph.D. in Islamic history at the University of California in Santa Barbara. 

 Bio

In your book Zoroastrians in Early Islamic History: Accommodation and Memory, you examine the historical inclusion and exclusion of Zoroastrians in Islamic society. What were the differences and/or similarities between the Zoroastrians and the ancient Muslims? Who were Zoroastrians really, according to your findings, and why have they had such a lasting legacy?

Zoroastrianism is a modern umbrella term for a group of religious beliefs that center around recognition of a prophet known as Zoroaster (Ζωροάστηρ) in Greek, or Zarathustra in Persian. This is a prophet who lived in Central Asia, probably near Balkh, what is today Mazār-e Sharīf in Afghanistan. Maybe as early as 1800 BCE, or as recently as 1200 BC — it’s a little bit difficult to determine Zoroaster’s time period. But in any case, Zoroaster was an Indo-European priest who taught people to worship Ahura Mazda. Central Asians at that time recognized a wide variety of angelic figures and demonic figures. But Zoroaster brought this message that Ahura Mazda was the one to focus on; he also taught that Ahura Mazda was engaged in a struggle with Ahriman, who was this force of darkness and the personification of evil. People who worshiped Ahura Mazda could engage in this struggle: they could weaken Ahriman by practicing purity in their lives. This was purity not only in the physical sense of washings and things like that, but also in the sense of moral behavior that conformed to the teachings of Ahura Mazda. This purity could be maintained by connecting with the priestly class—Zoroaster being a member of this priestly class, known as the Magi—who would perform rituals or liturgies. These liturgies were often hymns; they were later collected and now form a book that is today known as the Avesta. The Avesta is kind of the Zoroastrian book of scripture, if you will, although other books, commentaries, etc., have been added since then.

Zoroastrians built places of worship for the Magi for these ritual ceremonies. These were called “fire temples” in English. I would say Zoroastrianism really became established when, in the third century CE, the Sasanian Persian Empire made Zoroastrianism its official religion. Before that, it had perhaps been the official religion of various emperors, Persian and otherwise. But when it became the official state religion, that’s when Zoroastrianism began to spread, and we know that it had great influence from what is today Turkey to maybe as far as China—certainly in the Middle East, from places like Armenia all the way to Yemen. So it’s one of the great world religions and one of the most significant in the history of the world, but it’s not very well known today, in part because the number of Zoroastrians has declined significantly over the years. The reason for this decline is actually one of the mysteries that got me interested in this research.

We know that in antiquity Zoroastrianism is very influential and by modern periods there were relatively few Zoroastrians, so what happened in the middle? This is what my research looks at. There are so many stereotypes or assumptions about what happened to Zoroastrians in this middle period, and my research really tries to plug some of those holes with actual facts from the sources.

One of the interesting issues that comes up in the study of Zoroastrianism is to what extent Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion—that is, believes in one God—or a dualistic religion—that is, believes in two gods, because there are Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, of course. So one of the fun and difficult parts of studying Zoroastrianism is simply classifying it: Is it monotheistic, dualistic, or polytheistic? I would say most Zoroastrians today consider themselves monotheistic, which I think is an important thing to note.

Islam obviously started in the seventh century with the Prophet Mohammed in Arabia, who preached the idea that God is one—which is similar, in a sense, to Zoroaster’s message about Ahura Mazda being the singular deity to worship. The Prophet Mohammed provided a series of Arabic-language revelations or recitations that were later gathered into a book called the Quran. This message that Mohammed brought spread very quickly from Medina, where he was initially based and established his political power, to conquer Mecca, which was his hometown, where he had not originally been successful in spreading his message. Ultimately, Mohammed became the political leader of most of Arabia. But after his death, Muslims struggled about what to do next.

Mohamed was generally recognized to be the last prophet, and so after his death there was some question about the status of his political power. That tended to devolve to a Caliph—a successor to Mohamed. Then those Caliphs ended up spreading Islam all the way across North Africa into Central Asia. So looking at some of the similarities and differences between Zoroastrianism and Islam, there’s an emphasis on prophets. Although Muslims recognize Mohamed as the last prophet, they would not necessarily recognize Zoroaster as a prophet. There are different scriptural traditions: Muslims generally recognize Jewish people and Christian people as having legitimate books of scripture, whereas Zoroastrians have a book called the Avesta that is not always recognized by Muslims as legitimate scripture. So there are many similarities between Islam and Zoroastrianism, but not all of them are recognized as similarities. In fact, ironically, they are often emphasized as differences.

If you look at early Islamic history, Muslims were not the majority in the Middle East or anywhere for a very long time. So early on, I think there was much more of a sense of connection with other religions—for instance, Islam got its start in Arabia, where there were a lot of Jewish people and so there were some interactions. There were also some tensions and some problems there, admittedly. The same with Christianity: I think that Islam initially differed from Christianity, for instance, in saying that Jesus is not divine, but there was also a lot of praise for Christians in the Quran, in Mohamed’s life, and so on. So I think some of the tensions and some of the ideas that Muslims are different from all other believers may in fact represent modern understandings of Islam, or even just later understandings, but not this early period. This early period, I would say, is much more ecumenical in the sense that there is a shared connection between these groups that is generally recognized.

You write that some Muslims considered Zoroastrians pagans and sought to limit interaction with them, while others found ways to incorporate them into the empire of Islamic law. How did the final acceptance of the Zoroastrians happen, and why, according to Arab historians, is there no shared history between Zoroastrians and Muslims?

That’s a really great question. That’s the question that really motivated this history. And I think the title of the book gives you some insight into how I approached this question.

The title of the book is Zoroastrians in Early Islamic History: Accommodation and Memory. So I’m really looking at the encounter between these two peoples through two lenses: accommodation and memory.

Accommodation is the idea that powerful groups in society would give special privileges or exemptions to groups that were not normative—that didn’t fit the mold. I think Zoroastrianism fits this description because Muslims, as I said earlier, struggled to classify Zoroastrianism. Where did it fit? Were these people like Jews and Christians? Were they different? You might be familiar with the idea of “people of the book” —this is a Qur’anic term that generally refers to Jews and Christians, who read the Bible. Could Zoroastrians be “people of the book”? Well, they had a book, the Avesta, but that book wasn’t in the Bible. So Muslims struggled with that idea. The Quran says that “people of the book” are people that Muslims can interact with, can socialize with, can tax, and can marry. Could they do those things with Zoroastrians? That was the question that really perplexed a lot of early Muslims. So this is what I was studying as I was reading Quran commentaries and taxation manuals and judicial rulings.

I was looking for answers to this question: Can they interact? Can Zoroastrians be accommodated? And the answer that I found was “yes.” Muslims generally agreed that they could tax Zoroastrians, that Zoroastrians could exist in their empire and live side by side with them. But at the same time, Muslims generally agreed that they would not recognize Zoroastrians as “people of the book.”

So this is where the idea of accommodation comes in. Muslims decide to allow these people to integrate in their society, but at the same time do not recognize them as one of the acceptable classes theologically. And that, to me, beautifully describes accommodation. To accommodate means to extend a special privilege or exemption to a group in order to benefit from their useful endeavors.

So Zoroastrians could usefully pay taxes, which would help the Muslim empire thrive, but Muslims didn’t have to recognize them as “people of the book.” So that is the first way that I studied Zoroastrians and the Muslim encounter: through the idea of accommodation. Muslims are willing to be flexible in allowing these people in, but they’re not willing to compromise their standards.

The second way that I chose to look at this issue was through memory. Because even though there was this idea of flexibility in early Islamic history—recognizing Zoroastrians in some ways, but not in others—Muslim sources later remembered things very differently. As I read sources like local Persian histories, they didn’t talk about accommodation and flexibility when they described what happened; they said Islam arrived in Persia in the seventh century and destroyed all the religions that came before. And so those sources have a very harsh memory of this history. In the Central Asian context, for instance, we’re talking about Ta’rikhi Bukhara (“History of Bukhara,” by Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Ja’far al-Narshaxi), which says something along the lines of “Qutayba ibn Muslim came in—he was the first conqueror that came in—and he destroyed all the fire temples and built mosques on top of them, and then Muslims were in charge.” So those early sources talk about flexibility and accommodation and the later sources talk about inflexibility and conquest and domination.

And so what I try to do in the book is show that this Muslim-Zoroastrian encounter has different shades to it, and has different parts, depending on which sources you read. There are accounts that emphasize flexibility—I think those are the earlier sources—and there are accounts that emphasize domination—those are the later ones that are projecting memories into the past.

After the Arab conquest of Sasanid Iran, many Zoroastrians eventually converted to Islam. Under what conditions did ancient Zoroastrians live under Islamic rule? How severe were the restrictions on and the persecution of Zoroastrians? How did they manage to maintain their traditions, like the Nowruz celebration, which is probably the strongest Zoroastrian tradition that is still alive today?

As I mentioned earlier, I see in a lot of Islamic sources an accommodation of Zoroastrians. But accommodation has limits. There were areas in which Muslims were not willing to be flexible or compromise with Zoroastrians: Muslims allowed Zoroastrians to live in the caliphates, but never recognized them as “people of the book.” So what was the consequence of not recognizing them as “people of the book”?

The Quran says that Muslims can marry “people of the book.” The Quran says that Muslims can eat food, particularly meat, prepared by “people of the book.” But if Zoroastrians were never recognized as “people of the book,” then theoretically Muslims should not marry them and should not eat food, particularly meat, prepared by them. And so when you’re asking about what life was like for Zoroastrians under Muslim rule, there were lots of restrictions. In some cases, Zoroastrians suffered the same restrictions that all non-Muslims did: they had to pay an extra tax called Jizyah, they often had to dress differently than Muslims, they sometimes couldn’t build new houses of worship or other things. But Zoroastrians, because they were not “people of the book,” also had additional restrictions on them—that is Muslims could not marry them and could not eat their meat. And this has been well documented. One of the questions that I ask in the book, then, is: How effective were these restrictions?

Because it’s one thing to say, the law said something, but it’s another thing to say, what did people actually do? And so I started looking at some of the most common restrictions on Zoroastrianism. And if you dig a little bit deeper than just reading the laws, we find ways that Zoroastrians were not following those rules and that Muslims were not following them. This gets into the shared history that they have together. For instance, I mentioned that Muslims were not supposed to eat meat prepared by Zoroastrians. Interestingly, there are many Hadiths—these are statements attributed to the Prophet Mohammed—that permit Muslims to eat cheese made by Zoroastrians. Now cheese and meat are different things, but in the past, the way that people made cheese was they would slaughter an animal—let’s say a cow—that had milk curdling inside it, and then use that curdled milk to make cheese. And so meat and cheese are very similar objects in Muslim conceptions of food laws. So there were all these rules or statements attributed to Mohamed that said, well, it’s okay to eat Zoroastrians’ cheese. Michael Cook at Princeton University has found that these statements were often promoted by Muslim lawyers in places like Kufa, Iraq. Iraq was one of the places that had a large Zoroastrian population in antiquity. And so Michael Cook proposes, and I extend, the idea that Zoroastrians and Muslims interacted in the markets: they bought each other’s food and goods. And so Islamic law became flexible enough to include those goods, like cheese.

There is one more example that I deal with in the book because I don’t want to give the sense that life was just rosy for Zoroastrians under Islamic rule. Obviously, there were restrictions and some of those restrictions were enforced—and they were harsh at times.

One of the ways we know this is because I found a document called the Ahdnameh. It is a document that the Prophet Mohamed supposedly gave to Salmān al-Fārisī. Salmān al-Fārisī was one of the Prophet’s earliest companions. He was Persian, as his name implies, and some sources tell us he converted from Zoroastrianism to Islam.

And so we have this document that Mohammed supposedly gave to Salmān al-Fārisī. This document is not authentic, so let me be clear about that. But it is important as a historical record to see what it says about ways that Muslims and Zoroastrians imagined their encounter with each other. This document supposedly given by the Prophet Mohamed says that Zoroastrians have freedom from many stipulations in Islamic law.

So for instance, this document Ahdnameh says that Zoroastrians do not have to pay Jizyah­—the extra tax. This document says that Salman’s family, for instance, can control their fire temples and that Muslims should not go near their fire temples. This document says that Salman’s family doesn’t have to dress differently than Muslims.

And so a lot of the rules in Islamic law that were there to separate Muslims and Zoroastrians actually, in this document, were flouted. But again, just because we have this document doesn’t mean it was followed. So I’ve been able to study the history of this document and how it got passed down from generation to generation, and I have found that Muslims were very interested in this document. They consistently copied and transmitted this document all the way to the modern period. In fact, Muslims brought this document to India, where there was a small group of Zoroastrians living called Parsis, and Parsis copied this document, and that’s when this document became very famous among Zoroastrians.

So again, on this question of what restrictions did Zoroastrians live with under Islamic law, we have lots of rules, lots of laws, but we always have to ask to what extent they were followed. Because we have documents like Ahdnameh that say some Zoroastrians get exemptions. And then we have other things, like Zoroastrian cheese, that show that Muslims were keen to flout their own restrictions. And so we always have to ask to what extent these rules were enforced.

So how did they manage to maintain traditions like Nowruz?

I think that you’re right to identify Nowruz with Zoroastrianism. It was certainly a practice in the Sasanian Empire—probably earlier, probably as far back as we have Persian history. Nowruz is a celebration of the vernal equinox. It’s very much tied to agricultural cycles, to the position of the sun, which influences those cycles.

So we have Nowruz documented well before the Islamic period. Yet you are right to note that it is very popular as a holiday today in Iran and Central Asia—really, in any place influenced by Persian culture. So I think this again shows that one way that Muslims and Zoroastrians got along is that they found ways to combine their religions to draw on each other’s traditions.

So much so that today I think we would call Nowruz a Persian holiday as opposed to a Zoroastrian holiday or a Muslim holiday, even though Zoroastrians and Muslims both celebrate it. What’s the commonality? They all kind of celebrate Persian culture. This applies equally to Central Asia. Central Asia is a Persian realm—that is, Persian culture had a lot of influence there—and so Nowruz is very influential there as well. So this is a great example of ways that Muslims and Zoroastrians found to get along. There are customs that Muslims adopted from Zoroastrians that are well known and well acknowledged, and there are also customs that Zoroastrians adopted from Muslims.

Have you ever wondered how Zoroastrians’ situation changed with the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran?

I admit here, first, that I am an historian of the ancient world and not the modern world. So I apologize for not being as familiar. I also want to acknowledge that because I’m trained mostly in Middle Eastern studies, my knowledge of Central Asia is not always as deep. I’ll tell you what I know. But let me tell you about Iran, which is the area that I have studied the most.

Obviously, big changes came to Iran in 1979 with the revolution that overthrew the Shah. In the 20th century, Iran was very accommodating of Zoroastrianism. The Shah often promoted ancient Persian history as the basis of Iranian identity, and that included Zoroastrian symbols and customs.

Things changed with the revolution in Iran, when Shia (Shīʿa) Islam became the official religion of the new government. But there were spaces carved out for Zoroastrians in this new Islamic Republic. For instance, the Islamic Republic guarantees one seat in the Majles—the parliament—for a Zoroastrian representative. Other ways that Zoroastrians receive special accommodations are that Zoroastrians are allowed to worship in their houses, in their fire temples. They are allowed to mix with each other in mixed-gender groups, which is not possible for Muslims in Iran in the same way. Zoroastrians in Iran are also allowed to consume alcohol. These exceptions exist because they are not Muslim citizens of Iran and the state is explicitly Islamic. So this harks back in some ways to this idea that Muslims should make accommodations for people who are different. But that does not mean that Zoroastrians do not face a lot of difficulty in Iran today.

Let me emphasize just a few. There is a lot of discrimination in Iran, particularly in the areas of employment and education. Zoroastrians often get passed over for promotions or positions of leadership because they are not Muslim. It is also difficult for Zoroastrians to get into universities in Iran because the university entrance exams test your knowledge of Islam. But being Zoroastrians, they are not trained in Islamic theology. In fact, high school curriculums allow Zoroastrians to study their own religious history while Muslims study Islam. Yet when it comes to the admission exams, everybody has to be tested on their knowledge of Islam, which is inherently unfair. Those pose difficulties for Zoroastrians. There are other difficulties. Zoroastrian spaces have been appropriated by the Islamic Republic. So there is a large cemetery in Tehran that’s been owned by the Zoroastrian community for a hundred years, but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard has taken it over and uses it as a training ground. So Zoroastrians have a hard time burying their dead because they cannot get into their own cemetery at times. As a result, a lot of Zoroastrians have ended up migrating. They have left Iran. Many of them come to the United States. They’re able to get special visas related to religious persecution, among others. There are special agencies set up that make that transfer possible. So a lot of Zoroastrians have got out of Iran and the population of Zoroastrians in Iran is slowly decreasing. That represents one side of how Zoroastrians have dealt with this new situation in the Islamic Republic.

In Iran today, there’s a movement that’s slowly gaining ground to identify Zoroastrianism as the original religion of Iran. People who object to the current government of Iran—to its Islamic foundation—say, “Well, Islam is not really true to Persian identity. Persians were originally Zoroastrians. Therefore, if we want to be true to our religious faith, we should revert to Zoroastrianism.” And so there are movements among young people, for instance, to wear the Faravahar, which is a symbol of Zoroastrianism.

Is there anything exciting about Zoroastrians in Central Asia? It is known that the Sogdians were Zoroastrians and were able to spread the religion along the trade routes between East and West. Did they reach China with their religion? How did religious propaganda work in those times?

I like this question because it allows me to talk more about the Central Asian aspect, because I feel like we’ve focused mostly on Iran and other places, but I think this is really important.

I would say the most exciting thing about Zoroastrianism for Central Asia is that Zoroastrianism comes from Central Asia. It was originally born there, on the steppe, with Zoroaster in 1200 BCE in what is today Mazar-i Sharif in Northern Afghanistan, and it became one of the world’s most influential religions. And that’s very exciting because I think that brings a recognition to Central Asia that the region often doesn’t get. It’s too often overlooked. But it was the crucible that brought this religion to us.

I think you’re right to note ways that trade with Sogdians and others took Zoroastrianism beyond its original confines, because of course Zoroastrianism gets established in Central Asia with Zoroaster, then it’s taken to Persia and becomes the official Persian religion. Then it spreads even more broadly from there. And I think it does go all the way to China. And so this was an important point that you brought up.

The Sasanian Empire was the last Persian empire that Muslims conquered, and its last emperor in antiquity was Yazdegerd III. And he ran from Muslim forces as they chased him across Iran. He was ultimately killed in Merv, in what is today Turkmenistan. But his family continued running and they ran all the way to China. They ran to the Tang Dynasty in China and the Tang Dynasty hosted them. So there are a few documents—not many, and most of them are in Chinese—that describe these Persians living in China. And eventually the Tang Dynasty sent Yazdegerd’s son back to Persia. He lived on the frontiers of Persia, what is today Sīstān (also spelled Seistan)—kind of that border between Afghanistan and Iran—and for a while there was hope that he would restore the Persian empire, that he would defeat Muslim forces. Obviously, that didn’t happen, but that does show the interest and the influence of China in Central Asia all the way back to the eighth, seventh centuries.

Zoroastrianism, which comes out of Central Asia, influences almost every other religion in the world that I can think of, particularly the three biggest monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Zoroastrianism is probably the origin of the idea of a heaven and a hell as rewards for believers. Zoroaster emphasized that there’s this god of light, Ahura Mazda, and there’s also this god of darkness, Ahriman, that kind of separates rewards for believers here on Earth into two separate realms. This idea that there’s a malevolent tempter or a devil out there is very Zoroastrian in its origin. The idea that humanity will face a final judgment is straight out of Zoroastrianism. Also, for instance, Jewish people lived in Babylonian captivity for several generations before the Persian empire liberated them. And we now know that Jewish scripture has a lot of Zoroastrian influence in it. Then Christians picked up that influence as well—not only from Jewish people, but also because the Roman Empire interacted with the Persian Empire. These were the two great rivals: the Roman Empire had Christianity, the Persian Empire had Zoroastrianism, and they competed. And so places like Iraq were religiously mixed. Places like Armenia were religiously mixed. And that had an influence on Roman religion. For instance, there was an official kind of cult of Mithras in the Roman religion. Mithra is a Zoroastrian deity. So I think this is a really exciting thing for people to know about Zoroastrianism.

In your book, you draw an analogy between the problems of the ancient Zoroastrians and the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014. What is the link between these historical events?

I appreciate this question because it allows me to demonstrate the contemporary significance of this work. Sometimes people say, “You study ancient history, it’s all in the past, it doesn’t matter anymore,” but this is a very concrete way to show that this history matters today.

One of the things I do in the conclusion of my book is talk about the origins of the Islamic State. In 2014, when the Islamic State came out of Syria and invaded Northern Iraq, they began massacring the indigenous people that live in Northern Iraq. In the Sinjar region of Iraq, there are Yazidi people. Yazidi is a Kurdish religion that has a lot of different religious influences. I think it’s best to describe it as the indigenous religion of that region, but there are certainly some influences that appear to be Christian, some that appear to be Islamic, and some that appear to be Zoroastrian.

When ISIS came into Northern Iraq, they did not recognize the Yazidi religion as legitimate. They said, “Yazidis are not ‘people of the book,’ therefore we can kill them.” And so ISIS massacred Yazidi men and enslaved Yazidi women. It was a horrific scene. And ISIS justified this by reference to the idea that these people were not religiously legitimate.

One of the examples that I point to, then, is the ways that Islamic scholars have challenged this notion that Yazidis are not religiously acceptable. A lot of scholars issued an open letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—a self-proclaimed Caliph of the Islamic State—and called him to account. They comprised more than a hundred Muslim experts in Islamic law from places like Egypt and Malaysia, and even Uzbekistan, and they all wrote and they said, “No, Islamic law regards Yazidis as Zoroastrians and Zoroastrians were accommodated in the past. Therefore, ISIS killing and enslaving them is totally illegitimate on Islamic grounds.” And the arguments that these scholars use for saying that Zoroastrians should be accommodated are the exact same ones that appear in my book.

And so this was an exciting discovery for me: to see the ways that my research has uncovered an authentic Islamic past that people today recognize. And it’s a past that can be used to avoid some of the extremes of the present. If you do research, if you really look at the past, you will find ways that Muslims were accommodating, they were flexible, and they were able to incorporate non-normative groups into their society. I think that’s a valuable lesson for the present.

In his recent book, Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, Waleed Ziad examines the development of Muslim Sufi networks across Asia from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Ziad writes about the power and influence of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis, who inspired major reformist movements until the the early twentieth century. As Sufi saints, scholars, popular poets, and jurists, the Mujaddidis were called upon to mediate between elites, subjects, and communities. They led trade caravans, mediated negotiations, and conducted diplomacy. Their texts and mystical poetry helped to define the contours of Persianate Islam from Delhi through Peshawar to the steppes of Central Asia.

In this interview, Waleed Ziad discusses how Mujaddidi Sufis rose to this role and influence, some of them becoming particularly prominent figures in Central Asia; why a good king was a good Sufi disciple; the importance of Bukhara for Sufi networks; and what Central Asian coins tell us about regional connectivity.

An interview with

---

Waleed Ziad

Waleed Ziad is Assistant Professor and Ali Jarrahi Fellow in Persian Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Formerly a Research Fellow at the Abdallah S. Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School, Ziad has conducted fieldwork in over 120 towns across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.

 Website

“Hidden Caliphate” was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize, the most prestigious prize in Middle Eastern Studies (through the Middle East Studies Association), was shortlisted for the Bloomsbury Pakistan 2022 Book Award, and has recently been shortlisted for the British Association for South Asian Studies 2023 Book Award.

In your book, you focus at length on “a vast, intricate network of scholar-mystics known as the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi (literally meaning “revivalist”) order.” As you write, the Mujaddidis followed a comprehensive “exoteric” curriculum—ranging from Persian poetry, ethics, and logic to medicine and jurisprudence—before graduating to the higher “esoteric,” or “hidden,” sciences. Could you please tell us more about Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufism and its influence on the Muslim world from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries? Was the emergence of this order in some way a response by the Muslim intelligentsia to the end of the Islamic Renaissance?

To understand the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi network, we need to turn to the fountainhead of the tradition, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), from the town of Sirhind, located between Lahore and Delhi. His work, I argue, truly transformed Muslim societies from Istanbul to Indonesia. But his contributions are widely misunderstood today.

Sirhindi was part of the Naqshbandi order, which began in Bukhara, and his teacher was the Samarkandi Sufi Baqi Billah who migrated to Kabul and North India. Sirhindi was known as the Mujaddid, or reviver of the second millennium of Islam—and his followers were thus called the Mujaddidis. They became the most widespread Muslim network prior to the twentieth century. Sirhindi is a fascinating figure who in his early career worked with the Mughal administration. He became perturbed by the politicization of Sufism and the careless, cultic use of Sufi practices that he witnessed around him. He critiqued Sufi charlatans claiming spiritual authority, on the one hand, and corrupt, self-serving scholars with no spiritual compass, on the other. In response to these two currents, Sirhindi developed a revolutionary philosophical-practical system.

There are three of his many contributions that define the Mujaddidi order and which spurred the rapid expansion of its networks in the centuries to come. These were the key ingredients of the great revival, the building blocks of the Mujaddidi “hidden caliphate.”

First, Sirhindi was a synthesizer. He effectively bridged the gap between Sufism and sharia, the world of the mystics and that of the jurists. I will not be able to do justice to his philosophical works in this brief discussion, but we can say he insisted that Sufism had to be circumscribed within sharia, and likewise, sharia had to be understood through Sufism.

Second, he systematically laid out the path of Sufi spiritual wayfaring. This inspired a streamlined curriculum combining sciences from hadith studies, law, and logic to breathing exercises and meditation, bringing together the insights of multiple (mostly Central Asian) Sufi orders. His teachings were then disseminated through integrated educational institutions that served as both madrasas (colleges) and centers for Sufi practice. In other words, the worlds of the scholars and of the Sufis were reunited as integral parts of one system.

Third, he had some fascinating ideas on millennial revival and his own role in cosmic millennial transformations—namely that, a thousand years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (1602), the spirit of Islam required renewal, and Sirhindi and his students—the Mujaddidis—were its agents. So Sirhindi and his successors built a paradigmatic Sufi center at Sirhind, one so famous that the city itself became known as the “Abode of Guidance.” This took place over the course of the seventeenth century.

How did these philosophical and institutional developments translate into the public sphere? How did the Mujaddidi Sufis assume transregional socio-political leadership?

This has a lot to do with the politics of the eighteenth century in South and Central Asia. Older imperial structures broke down, many smaller states emerged from the fragments of the earlier empires, and European powers slowly began to encroach in places like Khiva and Bengal. Local ruling elites on both sides of the Amu Darya and Indus, like Bukhara and Peshawar, effectively entrusted scholastic and social services to Sufi orders, especially the Mujaddidis, whose popular authority appealed to the urban intelligentsia and tribal and rural populations alike. These Sufis then formed institutional networks quite separate from the fiscal-military institutions of the state and with a lot more resilience and longevity. Their Sufi centers, madrasas, and shrines formed a superstructure that enabled a transregional knowledge economy and provided coherence to the politically fragmented region. This coherence was made possible through a constant flow of texts, practices, and human capital. In tandem, their rural institutions and land endowments spurred agricultural production.

The Sufi centers were spaces where multiple ethnicities and classes came together. As in prior centuries, ruling elites did not confine themselves to a parallel “secular” space. Rather, they too spent time in the Sufi centers; their participation as patrons and disciples was inextricably tied to the practices of power. A good king was a good Sufi disciple.

As such, my work is an inquiry into the nature of the “fiber,” to use Joseph Fletcher’s term, that held together parts of Eurasia before the twentieth century.

How was this fiber fashioned? Relying on Sirhindi’s pioneering theological interventions—specifically with regard to reconciling and integrating divergent Sufi pedagogies and sharia—the Mujaddidis became a synthetic tradition, one that was both transregional and local. So they were quite easily able to adapt to faraway places and absorb older sacred communities and spaces. A diversified support and capital base meant that they were not restricted to any one region or dependent on localized sources of income.

They became the arch-intermediaries, the proverbial honest brokers. As Sufi saints, scholars, popular poets, and jurists, the Mujaddidis were called upon to mediate between urban and tribal elites and subjects, antagonistic polities, colonial and local authorities, and agrarian and highland communities. They led trade caravans across the Khyber Pass and the Amu Darya, and, when required, even raised armies. Their institutions became public spaces furnishing a suite of social services that went far beyond education, meditation, and popular religious rituals. They were soup kitchens, caravanserais, and safe houses, as well as loci for trade, negotiation, and diplomacy. They were also sites for the production and propagation of poetry and texts—didactic, polemical, and historical—that helped define the contours of Persianate Islam in this period.

With regard to your question about whether this was a response to the end of an “Islamic renaissance,” I would answer that it is more accurate to describe the Mujaddidi intervention as the next stage of intellectual-spiritual development in the broader Muslim world. This was a time when many sciences that had been forming in places like Bukhara since as early as the tenth century, from cosmology to law and literature, started coming together in a much more systematic, institutionalized way. This was a period that witnessed the growth of vast networks, an unprecedented exchange of scholars and scholarship, where students would travel from Siberia to Bukhara, where they would meet colleagues from Peshawar and Kabul.

At the center of your narrative is the very important question of how the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufis inspired major reformist movements and articulated effective social responses to the fracturing of Muslim political power amid European colonialism. Could you please elaborate on your answer to this question? There is a contrary view, at least in Central Asia, that Sufi Islam was a major obstacle to twentieth-century reformist movements such as the Jadids and Young Turks.

Throughout the course of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, virtually every major social movement and even anticolonial resistance movement in Central Asia and its neighbors was connected to the Mujaddidis.

My book focuses on the career of one particular Mujaddidi Sufi based in Peshawar and Bukhara, named Fazl Ahmad, who died in 1816. (In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Peshawar, now in northwest Pakistan, was one of the two capitals of the Afghan Durrani Empire founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani.) As I immersed myself in Fazl Ahmad’s story, and physically followed his footsteps across the Indus and Amu Darya, it appeared that he was connected to almost every major mystic, intellectual, political figure, and social movement in the Afghan Empire, Central Asia, Tatarstan, and India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The famed Uzbek state-builders of Bukhara, the kings Shah Murad and Amir Haydar, were not just his disciples but his licensed Sufi deputies, who were assigned by him to teach meditative practices to their own students. They reignited the Bukharan academic scene. Several Afghan kings were his disciples; they relied on Fazl Ahmad for transregional diplomacy and on his successors to help them mobilize against Britain. The notorious English agents and Great Gamers William Moorcroft and Alexander Burnes depended on Fazl Ahmad’s son to get them into Central Asia for the first time. These were the first English forays into Central Asia. Fazl Ahmad’s deputies in Peshawar led the charge against the Mujahidin movement in the 1820s. This is a fascinating moment: the Mujahidin movement was the first attempt to set up a Wahhabi-type puritanical state in the eastern Muslim world. And Fazl Ahmad’s deputies were successful in driving these radical ideologies out of the region and preventing their entry into Central Asia.

A third son, meanwhile, mobilized thousands of tribal auxiliaries in a decisive battle against the Sikhs of Lahore, who had looked poised to occupy Afghanistan in the early 1800s. Yet another disciple was the Akhund of Swat, an incredible ascetic of the Afghan highlands who set up a famous Sufi state in the mountains of the Swat valley in present-day North Pakistan and who led campaigns against colonial forces in the 1860s. The custodians of Mazar-e Sharif, the sacred epicenter of Central Asia, where Imam Ali is believed to be buried, were also disciples of Fazl Ahmad. One of them penned his biography. Several of the great Sufi-scholars of Siberia were likewise from his lineage. One of the largest madrasas in Xinjiang, the Chong madrasa, was part of his lineage via Osh in Kyrgyzstan.

And yet, Fazl Ahmad’s name is all but forgotten. Through his story—and he is one of thousands of these transnational Mujaddidi Sufi figures—it becomes clear that this vast Inner Asian world was entirely interconnected: the pastoral nomads of Central Asia, the urban centers, the ungovernable highlands, and the rural breadbaskets. So at the time of the fracturing of the great Safavid, Mughal, and Uzbek empires in the eighteenth century and the rise of small states, khanates, and the Afghan empire, Fazl Ahmad and his Sufi contemporaries were a force that kept this world together.

With regard to the Young Turks and the Jadids, it is true that many of their critiques centered around the role of Sufi orders in preventing progress. But we should keep in mind that Kursavi and Marjani were both Mujaddidi Sufi shaykhs. Plus, as scholars argue, major reforms in the late Ottoman empire, like the Gulhane edict that launched the Tanzimat reforms, directly reflected a Mujaddidi ethos. In addition, these modern movements inherited many of their critiques of corrupted Sufism from the Mujaddidis.

How do you see Sufis in general—as more of a political network or an intellectual (spiritual) one?

One of the key interventions that this book makes is recognizing that prior to the twentieth century, Sufism was at once spiritual, intellectual, and political. Although Sufis’ primary concern was spiritual development, their efforts reached much further.

First, of course, we have to rid ourselves of the notion of Sufis being recluses. Undoubtedly, all of the protagonists of my book spent a significant amount of time meditating and wandering. Most also passed through spiritually intoxicated phases, lost in contemplation of the divine. But the Mujaddidi Sufis—and, frankly, most of the Sufi schools—did not see God-intoxication and being reclusive as sustainable in the long term. The true guides were meant to be connected to the world and their communities. They were to be those who could practically guide others in their spiritual journey and their worldly affairs.

From the early years of Islam, Sufis and scholars provided leadership to the Muslim world and beyond. This is not a new idea. The notion of the Hidden Caliphate, which I introduce in my book, is a very old concept. For both Sunni and Shia Muslims, after the tragedy at Karbala, political and true spiritual authority were no longer fused. The rulers were not expected to be spiritual guides. Among most Muslims, there was an understanding that true authority lies with the ones of gnosis: imams, jurists, academics, and especially Sufis. These people of gnosis were the Hidden Caliphs, supposedly the true inheritors of the Prophet. The kings and khans were simply the Apparent Caliphate: they provided day-to-day governance and kept order, but purely in the temporal realm. The Hidden Caliphs were the ones who were supposed to guide hearts and provide moral leadership.

In your book, you pay great attention to Bukhara as the center of Sufi networks. Why did Bukhara remain at the center of these networks, what was so unique about it, and what is the legacy of the Sufi orders in this city?

Several chapters of my book concern Bukhara, which is a pivotal node in my study. The establishment of the Mujaddidi order in Bukhara in the late eighteenth century, via the Afghan Durrani Empire, transformed Bukhara into not just a center of scholarship and mysticism, but also a Sufi scholarly-cultural hub linking Siberia and Kazan with North India.

In the 1770s, the main protagonist of my book, Fazl Ahmad, settled in Peshawar, which was one of the two capitals of the Afghan Durrani Empire. From Peshawar, he embarked upon five journeys to Bukhara, where the celebrated khanate-builder of Bukhara, Shah Murad, and his son Amir Hayder became his devoted disciples. Contemporary sources tell us that Fazl Ahmad’s disciples numbered in the thousands on both sides of the Amu Darya, and he appointed over 600 deputies to run centers and manage communities of disciples. Many of these deputies belonged to ancient sacred lineages of Central Asia—Dahbidis, Ahraris, and Juybari Khwajas—thus forging scholastic bridges between Transoxiana and the Mughal and Afghan Empires.

In Bukhara, Fazl Ahmad witnessed Central Asia’s last scholastic renaissance. After decades of political and environmental crises in the early eighteenth century, the Manghit khans of Bukhara fought to reconsolidate Bukhara’s position as a political and academic capital. Starting in the mid-eighteenth century, Bukhara’s own scholarly class received considerable patronage. Students traveled from Bukhara (and Khoqand and Khiva) via reinvigorated trade routes to study with teachers in Afghan territories. Soon afterward, scholars from the Afghan and Mughal Empires came to Bukhara. These migrants included Fazl Ahmad, who was awarded the Mirakon Sufi center at Qarakul gate, where he met the young khan Shah Murad two years after his coronation in 1787.

The Bukharan sources tell us that Shah Murad was deeply committed to Sufism and hadith study. They tell us thatt he lived like a dervish, wearing patched garments, and engaging in manual labor; and that he even refused kingship until pressured by the community. The Peshawari sources, meanwhile, give us detailed accounts of his daily practices at Fazl Ahmad’s Sufi center. We learn that he spent up to four hours a day at the Mirakon Sufi center with his master, Fazl Ahmad.

The sources also give us detailed accounts of the range of sciences taught at this Sufi center, from jurisprudence and scriptural study to poetry, methods of meditation, and spiritual travel through the lata’if (metaphysical energy centers corresponding to points on the body).

Eventually, we are told, Shah Murad excelled in spiritual practices to the extent that he—and later his son Amir Hayder—would become deputies of Hazrat Fazl, with permission to guide their own students.

These sources also reveal that under the influence of Mujaddidi Sufis like Fazl Ahmad, a new ethos of kingship emerged in Bukhara. The kings in fact refashioned themselves as theologians and Sufis. We have detailed correspondence between Amir Hayder and Fazl Ahmad in which the king takes advice from his teacher on how to train his own disciples, on meditative practices, and on questions of adab.

At a library in Peshawar is a fascinating set of letters between Amir Hayder and Fazl Ahmad’s deputy in Peshawar, Hafiz Daraz, who was one of the foremost scholars of the Afghan Empire. Amir Hayder’s letter to this scholar contains 17 highly technical questions—ranging from logic and law to metaphysics and medicine—to which Hafiz Daraz responds.

Both Shah Murad and Amir Hayder patronized education, such that Bukhara boasted 80 madrasas by Amir Hayder’s time and sources claim that over 30,000 students were supported by the state. Amir Hayder often sent personal invitations to the principal scholars of the Afghan and Mughal Empires, like Bibi Sahiba Kalan, the great female scholar and the head of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi order in Qandahar, Afghanistan, who is the subject of my next book.

For their part, the Afghan kings began offering stipends for students to study in Bukhara, and by 1800 an extensive academic exchange had developed between Peshawar and Bukhara. Each city had 100 institutes of higher learning, drawing students from as far afield as China and Dagestan.

Fazl Ahmad began appointing his own deputies from the Mughal intellectual centers of Punjab and Peshawar to Balkh, Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva, where they were provided for by local elites. These include, among others, a scholar from Punjab who in a matter of years became known as La’l Beg Samarqandi. His shrine and that of his son were revered in Samarkand until the early twentieth century.

Besides Hidden Caliphate, you have written In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandhāran Shrines, which explores copper currency from the Sakra region in northwestern Pakistan, dated from ca. 550 to 1100 and corresponding to the Nezak, Turk Shahi, Hindu Shahi, and Ghaznavid periods. What motivated your research into Sakra coinage? Do you have any interest in Central Asian coinage?

This is actually a book about Central Asian coins! The very idea that Central Asia, and Central Asian empires, were somehow particular to Russian-occupied Central Asia north of the Amu Darya has prevented us from recognizing the scope and connectivity of states like the Kushans, the Hephthalites, the Western Turks, and even the Timurids.

The book focuses on a cave temple and associated sacred sites in the highlands in northern Gandhara (northwest Pakistan) that were inaugurated under the Central Asian Kidarite dynasty in the fourth century and persisted well after the Ghaznawids. This cluster of sacred sites produced hundreds of fascinating copper coins meant to serve as temple offerings for pilgrims; these combined Hellenistic, Saiva, Vaisnava, Zoroastrian, Middle Iranian, Turkic, and even Byzantine iconography.

The period that I cover in this book spans several great kingdoms, most of which had Turkic roots: the Kidarites, the Hephthalites, the Nezak, the Turk Shahis, the Hindu Shahis, and the Ghaznawids. The type of political and religious symbols that appear on these coins will be very familiar to any scholar of Central Asian coinage: tamghas, deities like Anahita, sacred animals that carry divine grace, the fire altar, and Sasanian-style three-quarters facing or facing portraiture of the kind that one typically finds in Sogdiana. Some coins even feature the tamgha of Sogdiana. In fact, one of the first coins I discovered from the site features a Hephthalite tamgha and a duck carrying pearls in its beak, surrounded by a beaded border. This is the earliest datable representation of this sacred animal, which famously appears on the murals of Afrasiab and is now a symbol you will find painted on walls in various locations across Samarkand. Like Hidden Caliphate, this book is also about cultural and religious exchange across what we now call the Turkic, Iranian, and Indic worlds.

How well do you think Central Asia is connected to South Asia, particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan? What is particularly interesting in our shared history? How might we strengthen our intellectual links?

In my work, I conceive of all these regions as one interconnected space. In fact, I would argue that treating them–following modern politics–as three separate geographies prevents us from adequately understanding the history of this vast interconnected and rich zone. Across this whole region, the Persian language was a binding agent, along with many vernacular tongues that were inspired by Persian literature. There were shared sensibilities around kingship, faith, and adab. I argue that Sufi networks sustained this sphere well into the early twentieth century.

So in order to understand the Durrani capital cities of Peshawar or Kabul, one has to look to Bukhara, Khoqand, and Yarkand. These regions have a deep interconnected past, whether in the Mughal period, the Kushan period, or the Achaemenid period. Scholars, priests, literary figures, and armies constantly moved back and forth.

All photos by
Waleed Ziad

Last month, an exciting photographic exhibition on Central Asia, entitled “Bound for Life and Education”: Sara Eshonturaeva and the Jadid Movement in Soviet Uzbekistan, was shown at Asia House in London.

Author

---

Zaynab Mukhammad-Dost

Independent analyst, specializing in post-Soviet Central Asian politics and international affairs. She holds a postgraduate diploma of SAIS Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s Degree in International Relations and Contemporary Political Theory from the University of Westminster.

Sara Eshonturaeva was one of the first professional actresses from Central Asia to become a major theatre star in Soviet Uzbekistan. The great Uzbek actress visited England in 1964 on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. In the fall of 2022, Eshonturaeva returns to the UK as a powerful memory and historical figure, prompting many questions not only about history, but also about the present and the future of her homeland.

Initially scheduled to run between October 25 and October 30, this exhibition of historical documents and photos that make up Eshonturaeva’s family archives, was extended until November 4 following a generous donation. The exhibits focused on Eshonturaeva’s life and career progression, but in so doing, they remarkably resuscitated Sara Eshonturaeva’s forcibly forgotten connection to the Jadids—progressive thinkers in Central Asia who were brutally repressed by Stalin’s killing machine in the 1930s. The exhibition also revealed the previously untold story of Eshonturaeva’s first love, as well as other challenges she had to endure during the totalitarian era.

As an Uzbekistan native, the more I looked at the documents and black-and-white images tracing Eshonturaeva’s life and extraordinary path, the more I felt they served as a reference point and a reminder of issues that still need addressing in Uzbekistan today.

The Idea

When asked about the initiative, curator Niloufar Edmonds explained to Voices on Central Asia how Sara Eshonturaeva’s granddaughter and entrepreneur, Nadira Khidoyatova, had exhibited part of her family’s archives at the National Bank of Uzbekistan Fine Arts Gallery in Tashkent earlier this year. This is where Esfandyar Batmanghelidj of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, “first discovered the Uzbek actress’s story and came up with the idea to exhibit these photographs in London,” said Edmonds.

The exhibition in London was based on both Eshonturaeva’s family collection and the archive of Oleg Karpov, a private collector from Uzbekistan. The UK event was fully sponsored by the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation, and Niloufar Edmonds, an arts and culture expert, was commissioned to work on a unique catalogue with fascinating details about Eshonturaeva’s life, career, and historical context.^[1]

Having agreed to meet for a coffee in leafy Chancery Lane in London prior to the exhibition, Edmonds spoke about her motivation to work on the project. “Only after a few hours looking at Sara Eshonturaeva’s archives, I knew there was a compelling story to be told about how photography and family archival material can shape a society’s collective memory of individuals long forgotten and inform the construction of a national identity,” she said. She also spoke highly of Nadira Khidoyatova’s efforts to preserve her family’s archive and personal energy for the project. The curator complimented her and all the present-day Uzbek women who care about restitutional justice and preserving the historical memories of their families, which the authorities attempted to erase from collective memory.

Who Were the Jadids?

The exhibition officially kicked off with a panel discussion on October 25 moderated by Esfandyar Batmanghelidj that included contributions from Dr. Adeeb Khalid, Professor of Asian Studies and History at Carleton College; curator Niloufar Edmonds; art critic Tim Dr Smith Laing; and Nadira Khidoyatova.

Dr. Khalid explained that Jadidism was a movement of cultural modernism originated in the aftermath of the Russian conquest of Central Asia in the 19^th century. “The Jadids had questions on why Central Asia had been conquered and what to do next. They had an agenda to adopt new styles of education,” he said. Dr. Khalid reminded the audience that at similar movements were happening in other Muslim regions of the Russian empire and around the world. “Jadids were hoping to reconcile Islamic tradition with the modern age. This question is still with us,” he added.

The Jadids sought to reform society and pursue development via education and the usul-i-jadid, a new method for applying phonetics to learning. Most importantly, they promoted the dramatic arts as vital to education and progress. In their efforts to reform society, the Jadids not only looked at Western plays, but also produced plays of their own. This can be seen from Sara Eshonturaeva’s early journey too.

Born into poverty in the Ferghana Valley, young Sara left her family to attend the Zebunniso boarding school for girls in Tashkent, as per catalogue. She missed her family very much and she found solace in the school drama club, taking a role in the play “Indian Revolutionaries,” written by none other than Abdurauf Fitrat, the Uzbek writer and renowned Jadid.

According to the exhibition catalogue and the panel discussion, the idea of using the arts for education and progress initially overlapped with the agenda of the Russian imperial and then the Soviet authorities. But this did not last. A critical confluence between the views on the use of arts and education of the Jadids and the authorities began in the late 1920s and by the late 1930s most of the reformists, including Fitrat and Cholpon, had perished at the hands of the ruthless NKVD—the security service that served as the killing arm of the Soviet regime. The Jadids were accused by the Bolsheviks of being “nationalist bourgeois” and were executed on the basis of these made-up charges.^[2]

For the young and talented Eshonturaeva (as well as for her future husband, Abror Khidoyatov), the political repressions and crackdown on freedom meant that she would spend years concealing her true feelings and sympathies in order to survive. This resulted in what her granddaughter Nadira Khidoyatova calls a “duality” that many Uzbek people, including her grandmother, had to live with throughout the Soviet era.

Participating in the Asia House panel discussion via Zoom late at night in Tashkent, Nadira Khidoyatova recalled her surprise upon finding out that her grandmother, a self-described “communist,” had been praying in the later years of her life. Similarly, Eshonturaeva could not speak freely about the influence the Jadids, so-called “enemies of the state,” had had on her formation. “Grandmother shared with me the secrets she’d kept hidden in the Soviet times. She really wanted to share these with future generations,” Khidoyatova said.

The first image of Sara Eshonturaeva to greet those entering the exhibition is the one of her graduating from college in Moscow. It was a rather sad day for the young actress due to her first heartbreak, we’re told. She had to say goodbye to her first love Ibrahim Agdarov who also studied with her. But the expression on her face may also reflect a premonition about the challenging days to come. While Sara was among the first 17 Uzbek students to become professional actors, their fate would be uneasy given the growing tensions between the Soviet authorities and the Jadids.^[3] Upon graduating in 1927, Sara already lived in a country set on a rather sinister course.

Theatre

The purges of the 1930s had a direct impact on the works that Eshonturaeva and others would perform in theatres. She could not star in original plays written by Jadids. Instead, the Soviets started using theatre—and Eshonturaeva herself—for their own propaganda. Significantly, however, having scrapped the Jadids’ original plays, the authorities had no trouble using these victims’ ideas and work—including Abdulhamid Cholpon’s translations of William Shakespeare’s work into Uzbek—to further their own interests.

During the panel discussion, Dr. Tim Dr Smith Laing, a UK-based writer and art critic, explained that Shakespeare’s work was permitted by the Soviet authorities, who (quite interestingly) had come to perceive this English writer as a “founding father of Soviet socialist literature.”^[4] The English writer’s work and ideas were, naturally, adjusted to fit the agenda of the Soviet Union. The topic of patriarchy and the need for daughters to be obedient to their fathers seems to have resonated with the Soviets, including Uzbek society. During the discussion, Dr. Dr Smith Laing pointed out that Desdemona had been punished for not listening to her father (i.e., authority) and marrying a “Moor,” who then took her life.

Seeing “Othello” from this perspective reveals a clear parallel between how theatre was used by the Soviets and how Eshonturaeva was indeed “bound” by the Soviets, as the title of the exhibition suggests. Whereas the Jadids saw theatre and the arts as means of promoting freedom of thought and education, the Soviet authorities seem to have favored a particular type of plays. Many Uzbeks today know that Eshonturaeva played Desdemona a staggering 400 times, across from her stellar spouse, Abror Khidoyatov, who played Othello, the Moor. The play was a major “hit” in Soviet Uzbekistan: while they both performed in numerous plays, this was the one that turned them into stars. But as an Uzbek woman myself, I cannot help but ask why Eshonturaeva was not put forward to play Caterina in “The Taming of the Shrew”? The answer is obvious. After all, in the latter Shakespeare play, the woman’s open disobedience does not result in a tragic finale…

Women’s Agenda

It is broadly claimed in Uzbekistan^[5] that the Soviet power alone “liberated” the women of Uzbekistan. Photographic exhibitions based on historical archives as well as scrupulous historical research may prove otherwise. As Dr. Khalid mentioned during the discussion, modernist movements were indeed forming in Central Asia and in the world. This process was taking place independently of the Bolsheviks. The Jadids of Central Asia had raised the issue of women’s illiteracy, the woes of polygamy, and the need to modernize Islam to pursue much-needed development. Let us recall Abdulla Qodiriy’s stance on polygamy as relayed in his famous novel “Bygone Days”. Another example is Abdulla Badriy’s drama “Juvonmarg,” which condemns domestic violence against women.

On the one hand, the so-called “liberators”—the Soviets—did enshrine women’s equality in law, abolish the veil, and ban polygamy, but on the other hand, they did not allow women (or men) to live freely as citizens. It should therefore come as no surprise that having Sara Eshonturaeva play Desdemona—a woman who is killed by a man, who symbolizes power and authority—fitted their agenda better than having her play Caterina, a daring female rebel who is “tamed” and…rewarded with love.

Sara’s friend Tursunoy Saidazimova was murdered in 1928 by her husband due to jealousy.

This is where I see the paradox of women’s emancipation in Uzbekistan come to the surface again. Born into a world where women covered their faces and were even killed for performing as dancers or actresses, Eshonturaeva got educated and rose to stardom in Soviet Uzbekistan. She traveled, saw the world, and became involved in multiple social endeavors. She was free to dress as she liked, yet she was not free to speak about her vanished friends and mentors – the Jadids. She was bound to perform and act in a certain way, keep her thoughts private, and collect photographs and documents in secret until the day came that she was no longer afraid to share them.

Legacy of the Jadids

Like many, I wonder about the relevance of Jadidism and its modernist ideas for today’s Uzbekistan and Central Asia as a whole. Given the Jadids’ preoccupation with social woes, including illiteracy, lack of social justice, and women’s issues, it would be useful to reflect on the lessons to be learned from their legacy.

Khidoyatova remains hopeful things can get better due to the post-Karimov thaw and an ongoing social discussion about people’s state of mind. “Progress-orientated people both within and outside of Uzbekistan, who hadn’t lost their links with [the] motherland, find beneficial ideas in the agenda and philosophy of the Jadids. These ideas fit those who believe in Islam and those who are not practicing any religion,” she said. According to her, the main idea is the pursuit of education following European standards, with the aim of integrating the country into the developed world. “It is a spiritual awakening, and an understanding of the Western world, while preserving one’s authentic national identity. The entire Islamic world needs to find a way and employ religion to serve as a stimulus for development, as opposed to an obstacle,” she elaborated.

New Reformist Movements?

The Jadids as a topic are rather popular in modern Uzbekistan. Activists of all kinds seem to be interested in remembering the early reformists’ legacy, applying their knowledge, and even identifying as a new type of Jadids in an attempt to pursue development. In summer 2022 the word “neojadid” started trending on Uzbek social media. So, who are the “neojadids”?

“We already see some people who call themselves ‘neojadids,’ while others may not openly identify as such, but they do think as Jadids. For now, this is not a consolidated group of people,” Nadira Khidoyatova said. “Maybe I could count myself in and so could my sister Nigara Khidoyatova, a historian who studied the liberation movements of Turkestan. There are enthusiastic people, such as Maksud Askarov, who self-finance exhibitions and research the Jadids’ work. Others, including businessmen, such as Zafar Khashimov, invest in education. There is also a state center—a group of people under the leadership of Bakhtiyor Khasanov who have access to the state’s special archive; they work on a great project of reviving the history and the ideas of the Jadids. Our talented journalist Shukhrat Babadjanov also considers himself a Jadid. Amongst women, I’d like to mention Shakhnoza Soatova, who relentlessly studies and spreads the progressive ideas of the Jadids amongst the women of Uzbekistan. I see a future in these ideas: they can be a life-saving opportunity to cure society and serve as a lighthouse for the Turkic and Persian worlds,” she added.

British Imaginations

I asked Niloufar Edmonds about the impression the exhibition and the panel discussion had on UK imaginations of Uzbekistan and its women. She believes it has presented a more nuanced narrative of Uzbekistan to the British public that goes beyond orientalist paradigms of its connection to the Silk Road. According to her, by exploring Uzbekistan’s Soviet past as well as its connection to the Jadid movement, the exhibition has conceptualized Uzbekistan in a way that is entirely new for many Britons.

“What is really interesting is that whilst 100 years ago Eshonturaeva was forced to sever ties with her intellectual lineage to the Jadids for self-preservation, her granddaughter, Nadira Khidoyatova, is reconciling this rupture by pioneering a movement amongst young Uzbeks, and Uzbek women in particular, to identify with the Jadids. I think sharing her family’s archives allows her to finally speak the truth about many events that were shrouded in mystery or erased for so many years. I hope this exhibition will encourage others to come forward and share their individual family stories and photographs, to weigh in on this conversation around collective memory and erasure,” she said.

Conclusion

Sara Eshonturaeva was an actress whose career became a reality due to the efforts of the Jadid movement. She became the national pride of Uzbekistan, making it normal for an ethnic Uzbek woman to act on stage. Eshonturaeva was also a product of politically repressed teachers and had to speak her truth via art, not openly. As a woman, she also witnessed the misogyny around and even lost a dear college friend, Tursunoy Saidazimova to domestic violence. Yet, Eshonturaeva played Desdemona over 400 times! It must have been hard for her to do it and keep it all inside for so long. But the fact that she did provides further evidence that Eshonturaeva was a great actress committed to her destiny and purpose.

Eshonturaeva was not known as a Jadid, but she was their student and an important medium for their original idea to transform a society via art and education. Her dedication to theatre and her mission—her life-long intellectual commitment to collecting all the relevant documents and pictures and even her final “testament” about the first innocent love she had to let go of—may be indicative of her desire for future generations to remember their roots, history,^[7] and purpose as they move toward their own future. In this sense, Eshonturaeva may have been an educator—i.e., a Jadid—too.

It is hoped this exhibition provides an opportunity for more people to come forward and reclaim truth and justice. Most importantly, I also hope we will hear more female narratives such as Sara Eshonturaeva’s. Stories told by women need to continue being heard in Uzbekistan and beyond, and become an integral part of the formation of a future Uzbek identity. Any reformist movements would be incomplete and not sustainable without women having an equal say in them.

[1] A printed version of the catalogue is not yet available to order, however, a PDF is available. Please inquire for further details.

[2] This was the fate of many Jadids in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. See “Ispoved” by Masud Rasuli, O’qituvchi, Tashkent, 2000. Republished and updated version (2022) available at https://reader.bookfusion.com/books/2417609.

[3] https://mailchi.mp/bourseandbazaar.com/bound-for-life-and-education-exhibition

[4] From Dr. Tim Dr Smith Laing’s article in the catalogue, we discover that William Shakespeare was admired by Karl Marx which may have contributed to such a warm reception.

[5] It is a popular cliché among many Russian-speakers, including Uzbeks, that the Russians “civilized” Uzbekistan and the region. This “white man’s burden” narrative is also frequently encountered in pro-Kremlin media in Russia. As of February 2022, if not earlier, Tashkent must be somewhat uncomfortable knowing of yet another “liberating” mission that Moscow may pursue in an undesired turn of events. The government in Tashkent must be walking a tightrope trying to balance things out.

[6] Soviet Uzbek politician, First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party between 1937 and 1950.

[7] Sara Eshonturaeva is the mother of Goga Khidoyatov, a prominent Uzbek historian. At the opening of the exhibition at Asia House, a short film was played that showed Sara Eshonturaeva, in later years, watching archival footage of her fellow actors in their younger days. She smiles and exclaims, “Show this to my son, please, let him watch it!” prompting appreciative laughter from the audience.

Ayşe Zarakol’s book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders challenges our understanding of the history of international relations and makes sense of the apparently chaotic and brutal conquests of the nomadic warriors from the Mongol steppes. As Professor Zarakol explains, the influence of the Mongols and of their thirteenth-century leader, Genghis Khan, has extended beyond the borders of their empire, beyond politics, and beyond their era. They introduced a new type of sovereignty and empire-making that can still be seen today and that laid the foundations for a history shared by many people of both the East and the West.

In your book Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, you discuss how Asia first became unified through Genghis Khan’s conquest of the world and highlight the high level of centralization of the Chinggisid model of sovereignty. Tell us, please, what was Genghis Khan’s role in the formation of Eastern civilization? How did the civilization of the Mongol Empire determine the specific history of Asian civilization? How do you argue your conclusions?

The basic argument I make in the book is that even though Asia or Eurasia had been a connected space before the thirteenth century, the thirteenth century is still a turning point for this continent because this was when much of the space came under the rule of the same empire, the same person. The Mongol Empire played a role in Asian history similar to that of the Roman Empire in European history, because being under the same type of governance structure has a very significant influence across Asia and Eurasia that we can trace for decades and centuries to come.

Although some of the practices and institutions I study in the book predate the Mongol Empire, the Mongols played a role in spreading and diffusing them. As a package, they became attached to the person and the story of Genghis Khan. His example became very significant, and others aspired to be like him. Even in regions that were not under his direct rule, you can see the influences. I am an International Relations scholar, and I argue that Genghis Khan’s empire essentially created a world order similar to our modern international order, because it covered much of the known world at the time. Its sovereignty model, as we call it—the kind of statehood model that they introduced—spread and influenced other geographies beyond Central Asia. That was a major contribution. At least for the next four centuries, until the seventeenth century (and perhaps even beyond), you can see empires in different parts of Asia that are clearly influenced by the Mongols.

Interview with

---

Ayşe Zarakol

Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge, where she also has an appointment as a Politics Fellow at Emmanuel College. Her research is at the intersection of historical sociology and international relations, focusing on East-West relations in the international system, the history and future of world order(s), conceptualizations of modernity and sovereignty, rising and declining powers, and Turkish politics in comparative perspective. Her new book, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which advances an alternative global history for international relations focused on (Eur)asia, was published by Cambridge University Press in March 2022. In this book, Dr. Zarakol re-theorizes sovereignty, order, and decline from a more global perspective.

The book looks, first, at the Mongol Empire and the four Khanates as one world order. Then I have a chapter that is dedicated to studying the Timurid Empire, together with the early Ming Dynasty (of China), as empires influenced by the Mongols; this is easy enough to see in the case of Timur, but the early Ming dynasty, I argue, was also very much influenced by the Mongol model.

In the next chapter, I look at the influences of the Mongol Empire on the great Islamic empires of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the Ottomans, the Safavids, the Mughals, and also to some extent the Shaybanids—between them they covered much of the world in the sixteenth century. Finally, I have a chapter looking at the influences of that world on Europe, on Moscow, Russia—places that we call the West today were also influenced. So that’s the historical story, essentially.

How did you come to your conclusions?

I work on sovereign evolution of statehood and the evolution of international order-making. In International Relations so much of our work in that areas has traditionally focused on Europe and the European trajectory. I was trying to come up with some comparisons outside of Europe—how the story of sovereignty unfolded elsewhere. I was working on the Ottomans originally, because that case was more familiar to me, and I started seeing historians arguing that the Ottoman conceptions of law and sovereignty in the sixteenth century had very clear Timurid, and even Mongol influences and origins. Then I thought, well, if the Ottomans were influenced by the Mongol Empire so many centuries later, others directly ruled by them must have been as well. Thus, I started pulling that thread across Eurasia.

I discovered that historiography of each region is very specialized. Historians usually study very specific countries and regions. But in recent years, historians of different parts of the world had separately been arguing that the Mongol Empire influenced their part of the world, countering more narratives that they had only engaged in destruction.

For example, even though the Ming were not Mongols—that they rejected the Yuan Dynasty and all the Mongol stuff—in recent years, historians of the early Ming have shown that the early Ming emperors did not act like traditional Chinese emperors. They were warrior emperors, they were interested in military campaigns and external recognition, they centralized power…and you cannot explain that except by reference to the Yuan/Mongol legacy.

What I did in the book was to bring all these separate accounts of different parts of Asia and Eurasia together into one big, connected story. I rely on the work of the historians who discovered these facts for their own regions. But as an International Relations scholar, I can focus on the big picture and tie it all together.

We are particularly interested in Central Asia. As you know, some countries—like Kazakhstan—consider themselves the heirs of the Golden Horde, but at the same time, statehood or khaganates existed long before the Mongol invasion, which led to the destruction of many states and cultural monuments during the thirteenth century (which was the Golden Age of Enlightenment of the Islamic World in this region). What is the legacy of the Mongols in Central Asia?

Many things predate the thirteenth century and have a long history, including various Turkic practices. I do not claim in the book that Genghis Khan invented everything. Central Asia was connected to the Persianate world, which was very advanced, and to China, the Sinosphere. The difference was that in the thirteenth century is that Eurasia was very fragmented politically. The Mongols of Genghis Khan were essentially able to unite different parts of Asia. They could even have brought Europe into the mix, by the way, but they stopped — and Europe at that point remained peripheral. But by connecting East and West Asia, the Mongols supercharged development on the continent because they were able to take some practices from East and export them to the West, and some practices from the West and export them to the East, and everything in-between. The connection is really what facilitates this moment of legacy making.

The initial conquests were quite brutal. I’m not an apologist for Mongol conquest—I’m sure it was terrible to live through them—but at the same time, once the conquests had been completed, the empire did have this function of, as I was saying, connecting different parts of Asia. They had an advanced postal system reliant on horses that spanned the whole continent and facilitated trade as well the movement of people (artisans, traders, and so on).

Some historians call this the Genghisid exchange—similar to the Columbian exchange that brought New World goods to the Old World (and vice versa). You can see the influence on Islamic art for instance. Islamic art was very different before the Mongol conquests, but as a result of the Mongol Empire you have the very clear Chinese influences on tile-making. Again, I don’t want to come across as an apologist for the Mongol empire (or any empire), but at the same time, we have to acknowledge that a lot of things that we consider to be great achievements of civilization would not have been possible without it.

The same thing with the Timurids—again, the influence on art and architecture in Timurid cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara is visible to this day. After the collapse of the Timurid Empire, many of the artisans and intellectuals that they sponsored ended up traveling to Anatolia and Iran, and of course with the Mughals they went into Indian subcontinent. Both the Mongols and the Timurids ended up really influencing those subsequent empires. Beyond what I talk about in the book—the political influences, the influence on the type of sovereignty and the type of empire-making—there are major influences on art, architecture, political theory, literature, and all that.

Even in China—I was talking about the early Ming previously—we can see this. To give one example, one of the things the Mongols were very interested in was the study of skies. This probably predates them—it’s not just a Mongol practice, it’s a Turkic practice—but they spread the idea that governments/ruling dynasties should sponsor astronomy/astrology. Wherever we see the influences of Mongol-style empire-making, you can see ruling dynasties sponsoring observatories. Samarkand is a good example of this. The early Ming empire also sponsored astronomers (often Muslim astronomers, interestingly). So there are all sorts of unexpected positive influences, but of course also terrible violence. It is a mixture.

How did Mongol political order influence China and Russia in particular? For Russia, the question of belonging to East or West was always a crucial one, and maybe for China too?

I discuss this quite a bit in the book. So what I argue in the book is that this is a type of centralized rule where the Khan—or whatever the leader is called in the local context—is the ultimate law-giver. That’s an unusual claim to authority because even though there are many kings and rulers across history, they are often accountable to religious authority, the things they say have to be approved by the ulama, the church etc. In the context of China Confucianism was a check on centralized authority. Before the Mongols come on the scene, the emperors were not that powerful (with the exception of much earlier history).

By contrast, what Genghis Khan essentially says is: I am the lawgiver, I’m not responsible to anybody because I’m a world conqueror, so I make all the laws. What we see in places influenced by this model is essentially great centralization of authority. That’s why sixteenth-century Ottoman or Mughal rule, for instance, is unusual in contrast to earlier Islamic models of governance: suddenly you have the rulers essentially saying they know better than the ulama (jurists) what the laws should be and making laws that seem to supersede sharia (religious law) — and that’s a direct line to the Mongols.

Similarly, in China their influence is one of centralization. As I said before, before Mongols takeover, the Chinese emperors were not so powerful. The Yuan Dynasty, direct descendants of Genghis Khan, change that dynamic. The Yuan emperors, as well the early Ming emperors, and also, I suppose some of the early Qing emperors (though I do not discuss the Qing in the book), were all centralizers—as I said, they aspired to be world-conquerors. As the Mongol influence fades in the Ming period, you start seeing in the growing influence of Confucianism and isolationism, by contrast, and the emperors become more symbolic and withdrawn.

In the Russian case, or really in the case of Muscovy—it’s better to say Moscow than Russia because while Moscow was ruled by the Golden Horde, it also benefited from that rule at the expense of other Russian cities—there is a very direct influence that we can see, and historians of Russia have written about it. Their conception of sovereignty was also rather changed by their experience under the Horde. People may know that there were references to in the sixteenth century to the idea that Muscovy was a third Rome, hence the title of Tsar (Caesar). But historians have also shown that the Russian Tsars in this period were acting more like the Mongol khans. In other words, you see a much more extreme centralization of authority both with Ivan III and, especially, with Ivan IV. I discuss these influences in the book. However, I also argue that some of the intolerant excesses of Ivan IV for example cannot be laid at the feet of the Mongols. After all, the Mongols, as I said, were brutal, but they were relatively pluralist in their rule vis-à-vis cultural and religious practice—they did not try to control their subjects’ religious faith and so on. They were generally relaxed about such things. Efforts to police the boundaries of religion, persecute witchcraft, and so on are more rooted in European and Christian history. In the excesses of Ivan the Terrible, I think we see perhaps a combination of the centralizing power of the Mongols with the Christian persecution of divergent practices, paranoia about witchcraft, and so on. We cannot blame the Mongols for all the terrible things their successor states do.

The Mongols were generally fine with pluralism. Even when the Genghisid sovereigns converted to Islam or other religions, they never—unlike their European counterparts—became religious zealots. Not because they were outstanding liberals but because they saw themselves as above it all, including religion.

Let’s move on to the concepts of East and West. What do you think belongs in the category “East” and what belongs in the category “West”? And how does the study of “Eastern civilization” help the study of the West, history, and/or contemporary politics? If we just substitute the Eastern lens for Eurocentrism, do we risk seeing another imbalanced picture?

When I talk about the rise and fall of the Eastern world orders, I’m not trying to suggest an unchanging essence to the East. Instead, what I’m trying to assert is the idea that the European trajectory is not necessarily always generalizable, and Europe was not always dominant, and the histories of other places also deserve to be told. Furthermore, if we want to think about what the future may look like, there is no guarantee that it’s going to look like the last 100 or 200 years. This means we need more historical examples to think with, different examples that can better spark our imagination about what may be next. That’s what I’m doing.

I think there are certain similarities in the time period that I am studying that make it comparable in some ways to modern international relations. For instance, my focus is on centralization; the nation-state is also organized around centralized sovereignty. It’s not centralized around the person of the ruler. It’s centralized, territorialized sovereignty. All the empires I look at aimed to be world empires—they had universal claims. So that’s similar to modern international order which also aims for universality. At the same time, of course, there are differences as well: if you were living in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth century, you would not think Europe was the center of the world, you would think “Asia” (whatever you called it) was the center of the world. That’s where the excitement was, economically, culturally, politically.

So these are the points that I’m trying to make, but not in a jingoistic manner. And I am not trying to advocate for Asia-centrism in the place of Eurocentrism. What I am saying is the more we fill out the missing parts of the historical picture, the more balanced it will be. And then hopefully others will talk about Africa and the Americas (and other time periods as well).

Your book is praised for introducing new concepts and debates—such as order and decline—into international relations. Could you please tell us more about this contribution?

What I argue is that the discipline of International Relations focuses only on great-power rise and decline because it studies European history from the seventeenth century onwards, which is a story of European regional order becoming global. From that vantage point the international order itself seems to be always expanding and it’s only the specific great powers that rise and decline: the Netherlands, then Great Britain, the US, etc. What I say in the book by contrast is that if we take a bigger-picture view—if we study history at a more macro level—we realize that it’s not only great powers that can rise and decline, but international orders themselves. Even beyond that, in the book I have this notion of what I call “the ecumene,” such as deep norms, deep cultural understandings that underwrite world politics. For instance, we now take the nation-state for granted, but there were no nation-states in history. The deep belief that nation-states are natural things is part of our ecumene. We think nation-states were always around and will be here forever, but the people who lived in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth centuries likewise thought the way they did things was going to last forever. Even those deep norms themselves can decline and change. The gist is that we need to separate great power vs order vs ecumene decline from each other and look at how orders fragment, how deep norms shift. We shouldn’t just look at great powers, we should study the deeper fabric of world politics as well.

We are currently witnessing an attempt to unite Turkic states, and it is not only Turkey that is taking the initiative on this, but also other countries with Turkic languages, including Central Asian countries. Is the creation of a union of Turkic states one of the geopolitical scenarios for a future world order? What are the prospects of such initiatives?

I know that there are efforts around this, but personally I don’t think it’s the way to go. I don’t believe it would even work. I’m not against some kind of collaboration. What I was trying to do in the book is tell a bigger story of connection that goes beyond ethnicity—the connection of Asia and Eurasia. It’s kind of remarkable to realize that Moscow, Beijing, Ankara, and so on were all under the control of the same empire at some point. And then of course their successor states took those models to India and so on. I obviously don’t advocate for Mongol-style rule, but I believe those of us in Eurasia should remember that there is a shared history that ties us—one that is not rooted in nationalist ideas because it dates to a time before nationalism. At any rate, the Mongols didn’t really care for nationalism, they didn’t have a notion of it—I mean, they used the word ulus, but it wasn’t the modern sense of ulus as a nation (as it is understood in many Turkic languages today), it was “me and my house (relatives).” Competing aristocratic Mongol houses would have no difficulty destroying each other. It goes without saying that regular people had no rights to begin with and nothing in common with the rulers except perhaps some linguistic ties.

In other words, if anything should bring Asia together, it’s not some kind of ethnic or linguistic tie but the fact that we have shared histories and experiences, just as Europeans do. Asia is not just East Asia: there is a bigger space that has been connected for centuries. We should remember that—and maybe remembering that can help us develop a more robust Asian identity. Why can’t I, as somebody from Turkey, say I’m Asian—which sounds ridiculous because that’s not what we do, but why not, right?!

Interview by Elvira Aidarkhanova, Analyst, PhD in International Affairs

Two seas—the Aral Sea, now almost non-existent, and the Caspian Sea—encircle the great Turan plain, where constant migrations and ethnogenetic contacts between nomadic and sedentary peoples have taken place over the last few millennia. In the Middle Ages, tribes that roamed from the Western Aral Sea to the South-Eastern Caspian Sea and back settled the civilizations of ancient Khorezm, Hyrcania, Margiana, and Parthia. Modern Turkmens can reasonably be considered their descendants. These historical regions were, at different times, part of several empires of the ancient and medieval world, but even as they gained and lost their independence, they remained small oases surrounded by vast deserts.

What traces have they left within the borders of the contemporary state of Turkmenistan? There are many such traces, but little is known about them outside a narrow circle of specialists. Only three archaeological parks on the territory of modern Turkmenistan have become well known and been included on the World Heritage List in different years. Each of them is undoubtedly unique and deserving of recognition.

Author

---

Ruslan G . Muradov

Architectural historian, Professor of the International Academy of Architecture (Moscow Branch), Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the International Institute for Central Asian Studies (Ashgabat, Turkmenistan). 

 Academia

Margush—Margiana—Merv—Mary

The Murghab River, which flows down from the low western slopes of the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan and loses its waters in the sands of the Karakums, was much more abundant in ancient times, and from the third millennium BC gave life to oases in its periodically changing delta. At different times, these oases were called by different names, yet all had the same root: Mouru (or Margush) in Old Persian, Margiana in Ancient Greek, Merv in Arabic, and Mary, as it is currently known in Turkmen. A probable center of this small kingdom is referred to in the modern toponymy as Gonur Depe.

Gonur is located deep in the Karakum desert, almost 90 kilometers from the airport at Mary. It is the largest of the more than 300 identified Bronze Age sites in the old Murghab delta. According to archaeological data, it originated in 2,300-2,250 BC and lasted for about 600-800 years. The central part of the monumental structures of the Gonur complex had stretched to about 25 hectares by the time people left it in the middle of the second millennium BC. Another 10 hectares were devoted to the urban necropolis. The funerary objects and jewelry of the people buried here are striking in their elegance. These are high-quality artistic products made of stone, metal, ivory, and, of course, clay, which served as a dough for skillful potters and sculptors, who created the finest ceramic vessels in exquisite forms, as well as figures of deities in the pagan pantheon. The countless artifacts that accompanied the lives of Gonur’s inhabitants are now exhibits in Turkmen museums. Recently, they traveled to German cities as part of a large traveling exhibition dedicated to the art of Margiana.

For almost 40 years (1974-2013), Gonur, Togolok, and some other sites in this oasis were excavated by Professor Victor Sarianidi, who led the Margiana expedition. During his lifetime, thousands of people came to see the ruins of a previously completely unknown ancient oriental kingdom and talk to the legendary academician in his field camp. The river valley, where urban life boomed 4,000 years ago, is now a desert, and the ancient settlements discovered by archaeologists are slowly being swallowed up by the sands or leveled by local farmers—unpunished invaders of protected land who are eager to discover new lands for irrigation. Thus is history disappearing before our eyes, its priceless testimonies often being lost before they have even been catalogued and included in the scientific canon.

Ancient Merv, declared a State Historical and Cultural Reserve back in 1988 and included on the World Heritage List since 1999, is an example of how monument conservation authorities are trying to counteract the greed of entrepreneurs and the ignorance of the local authorities. Neither archaeologists nor ancient orientalists would dare to state exactly when the settlement at the site of Merv emerged. There is indirect evidence that it occurred around the seventh century BC, on the site now known as Erk-Kala, which towers over the entire area. At that time, it was only one of the numerous settlements; it was far from the largest or the most important. Yet it was destined to become an important political center: under the Achaemenids, it became a powerful citadel, and after the campaign of Alexander the Great it became known as Margiana Alexandria. In the Middle Ages, Merv was an important Islamic capital that boasted great architecture and intellectual minds. This lasted until the summer of 1222, when Merv was destroyed by the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan. In the early fifteenth century, Tamerlane’s son Shahrukh tried to revive the uninhabited city by building Abdullakhan-Kala fortress two kilometers south of Sultan-Kala. To this, later in the same century, was attached the Bayramalihan-Kala fortress. But in subsequent centuries Merv’s buildings drifted with the receding water. The remaining ruins are almost intact despite their age, having been subject to no modern intrusion, a reality that now greatly facilitates the work of archaeologists.

Erk-Kala is the ancient core of Merv. It was later complemented by a Hellenistic square city, Antiochus of Margiana (now Gyaur Kala), which flourished under the Parthians and Sassanids. After the Arab conquest, a new city was built close to Merv, namely Sultan Kala. Merv became the Seljuk capital in the mid-eleventh century. It was a magnificent city center founded by the legendary Abu Muslim, who led Abbasid supporters to Merv in 748 to proclaim a new dynasty, which soon defeated the Umayyads in the struggle for power in the Arab Caliphate. Settling in Merv, he moved the seat of government from the old city, Gyaur-kala, and built a new one where the Sultan-kala later grew. Abu Muslim’s palace, known as Dar-al-Imara and built around 750, was a pretentious building that—according to the Arab geographer al-Istahri, who saw it a century and a half later—featured a domed auditorium, four aivans, and a courtyard. This fusion of Sassanid architectural forms (dome and aivan) defined for centuries Islamic architecture in this part of the world—not only civil, but also iconic.

The first large structures that greet visitors today are the two mud castle ruins (köshks, in local terminology) of Greater Kyz Kala and Lesser Kyz Kala, with their severe, tightly pressed semi-columns forming corrugated facades. There are various speculations about the age of these giant dwellings. The English researcher Hugh Kennedy recently argued that they could well be Tahir’s buildings. And if the peculiarities of their construction and building materials cannot serve as exact indicators, the presence of mihrab in one of the premises of the Greater Kyz Kala clearly indicates that the building was constructed during the Arab period.

Corrugated köshks are typical of Central Asian architecture: they are numerous not only in Merv and its surroundings, but also in Khorezm; they have also been found in Bukhara and Termez, but they are completely absent in Iran. It is clear that they are a purely local architectural type that dates back to pre-Islamic times and was reproduced until at least the twelfth century, not only in mud but also in burnt bricks. A vivid example of the latter is Rabat-i Malik, steppe residence of the Karakhanids in Bukhara oasis.

The tenth and eleventh centuries were an era of an unprecedented cultural boom, when the best minds of the Muslim world—poets, painters, and architects—flocked to Merv, leaving their immortal works to their descendants. Among them were Omar Khayyam and Fakhr ad-Din Gurgani, the author of the romantic epic Vis and Ramin, who lived here for many years.

Exactly 1,000 years ago Merv became the largest city in Central Asia and one of the largest in the whole Muslim world. Merv and its suburbs covered 1,800 hectares and its population numbered 150,000 people. Considering that the bulk of cities at that time had between 2,000 and 5,000 inhabitants, you can imagine the scale of Seljuk Merv.

At the end of the eleventh century, during the reign of Sultan Melik Shah, the wall of rabad, the central square of Sultan-Kala, was built or completely reconstructed. About 200 semicircular towers were placed along the wall’s perimeter. The mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar was built in the mid-twelfth century (not later than 1152), almost on the same site where the palace of Abu Muslim was located. We lack the information that would be necessary to reconstruct the image and determine the place of the mausoleum, but testimonies of contemporaries bear witness to its dominating aspect: “…a dome of blue colour rises above it and is visible at a distance of one day’s travel” (Yaqut al-Hamawi, thirteenth century); it is “the greatest building in the world” (Rashid-ad-Din, fourteenth century); it is “one of the greatest structures of the universe, so strong that damage cannot touch it” (al-Isfizari, fifteenth century).

Even in its current state, the Sanjar Mausoleum is impressive: it is an enormous cube crowned by a dome 17.28 meters in diameter. The original outer dome, covered with tiles, has not survived, but it was rebuilt in 2004. The design of the dome preceded by 150 and 300 years, respectively, the similar designs visible in the Oljeytu-Hodabende mausoleum in Soltanie (northwest Iran) and the well-known Florentine cathedral designed by Filippe Brunelleschi.

The small memorial mosque to Muhammad ibn Zaid, built in the suburbs near the ceramicist quarter between 1112 and 1113, also speaks to Merv’s high standard of architecture. It is stylistically similar to another monument from the first quarter of the twelfth century, known later as Hudainazar-öwliya. The latter became in 2022 the subject of a restoration project funded by the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFSP). Another mosque, the Talkhatan Baba, built around 1095 in a small village 30 kilometers west of Merv, is a classic expression of the architectural and artistic achievements of the Seljuk era. It is a whole building made of burnt brick. Every facade and interior has virtuoso ornamental masonry made of paired bricks with “bows” and other figurative inserts. Such uniformity of internal and external decoration creates an impression of the building’s exceptional integrity.

The Parthian Fortresses of Nisa

Nisa, which emerged some 22 centuries ago as a royal sanctuary for a dynasty of descendants of Arsak the Great, the founders of the mighty Parthian empire, is located on the western outskirts of Ashgabat. It consists of two impressive fortresses: Könenusay (Old Nisa) and Täzenusay (New Nisa). The entire area between them was once occupied by a medieval town, but this was completely buried in the twentieth century by a modern housing development. Both fortresses are now steep hills near a small river, almost at the foot of the Kopetdag Mountain. A fertile plain stretches from the natural elevation on which they were founded all the way to the Karakum desert. The beautiful landscape that can be observed from the high fortress walls of Old Nisa is marred by the high-rise buildings of Ashgabat, despite the fact that the Nisa forts are included on the World Heritage List not only as historical monuments, but also as “cultural landscapes” thanks to many years of work by the first State Historical and Cultural Preserve of Turkmenistan, established in 1980.

In the fourth century BC, the Achaemenid Empire collapsed under the blows of the Greek-Macedonian forces. Under Seleucus, the successor of Alexander the Great, and his descendants, the independent states of Bactria, Parthia, and Khorezm were founded. Parthia, which existed for nearly 600 years (from the third century BC to the third century AD), had a particularly brilliant history and had become a formidable rival of Rome by the first century AD. This was a vast empire that, at its zenith, stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to north-west India. Its cradle and original core was Partava, a historical area inhabited by the Parthians and bisected by the Kopetdag mountain range. It roughly corresponds to the territory of the modern Akhal velayat in Turkmenistan and the northern regions of the Iranian province of Khorasan. The aparn (or parn) tribe, led by their leader, Arsak, united the nomads in the Karakum desert and invaded Partava (Northern Parthia) before 247 BC. The Greek governor of this Seleucid satrapy was assassinated and Arsak declared himself king of independent Parthia. He then occupied Hyrcania, on the southeastern shore of the Caspian Sea. Around the same time, Parthavnisa was founded as the administrative and economic center of the Arsacid dynasty’s possessions in their ancestral lands. The latter corresponds to the New Nisa site, which included a citadel encircled by a fortified wall. To the south, on the edge of the suburb, a royal fortress, now called Old Nisa, was built. Thanks to written documents found during excavations, the exact name of the fortress has been established: Mitridatkirt.

Based on a thorough analysis of all archaeological materials obtained, as well as by comparing Nisa buildings with other architectural monuments from the Parthian era in Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria, most researchers have concluded that the main buildings of Old Nisa were associated with Zoroastrian cults. There was a tradition here of venerating deified kings and heroes who became famous in battles; this developed not so much as the result of borrowing from the Greeks as due to the development of local ideological systems based on Avesta.

The life of Nisa was not confined to the Parthian era. Unlike Mitridatkirt, where the ruins of the ancient period were hardly covered by later strata, Nisa existed as an urban citadel for many centuries after the fall of the Arsacid Empire. In 651, Nisa became part of the Arab Caliphate. In the ninth and tenth centuries it was prosperous, as many travelers and geographers of that time testify. Development of the city continued until 1220, when Nisa, like other large cities of Central Asia, suffered a catastrophe: a multi-day siege and destruction by Genghis Khan’s troops.

Scientific study of Nisa was begun in 1930 by the pioneer of Turkmen archaeology, Alexander Marushchenko. It was he who managed to establish the true age of Nisa and determine the places where Parthian temples had once stood. In 1946, the South-Turkmenistan Archaeological Complex Expedition (YuTAKE), headed by the academician Mikhail Masson, was established. Over the years, it made a succession of major scientific discoveries, some of them sensational. It was here, in the autumn of 1948, that archaeologists discovered a whole collection of the now-famous rhytons: large horn-shaped vessels made from elephant tusks and decorated with sculpture, gilding, and an inlay of precious stones. YuTAKE excavated almost all presently known buildings of New and Old Nisa and reconstructed the cultural history of Northern Parthia. The research into Parthian fortresses at Nisa was continued by Dr. Victor Pilipko from the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Antonio Invernizzi from the Turin Centre of Archaeological Excavations, and Dr. Carlo Lippolis, who also carried out work on the study and preservation of Parthian monuments in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria.

Kunya Urgench: Town of Masters

Like many ancient cities whose origins are lost in the darkness of a too-distant past, the chronology of Kunya Urgench can be reconstructed only on the basis of archaeological finds. Arabs arrived here at the beginning of the eighth century, bringing with them a new religion: Islam. And if essentially nothing is known about ancient and early medieval Gurgandja, the Muslim period of its history has largely been reconstructed, thanks to the priceless testimony of contemporaries, collected first in Arab sources and then in Persian and Khivan ones. The political history of the rise of Gurganj, which from the beginning of the eleventh century began to overshadow the city of Kät (the capital of the southern part of Khorezm) and became the center of the united dominions, is covered in many historical works.

In the history of the city, two most glorious periods—immortalized in architectural monuments—stand out. The period between 1097 and 1231 marked the rule of the Khorezm Anushtegin dynasty, during which Khorezm, with its capital at Gurganj, emerged as the largest empire in the Middle East. The defeat of this state by Mongol invaders—accompanied by the death of the last Khorezmshakh, Jalal-ad-Din, who led the struggle against Mongols for 10 years—ended the dynasty. The second period is associated with the incorporation of Khorezm into the Golden Horde under Jochi Khan, the eldest son of Genghis Khan, and his dynasty. A century after the defeat of the city, in the early fourteenth century, there was a new flowering under Emir Kutlug-Timur, the Golden Horde viceroy of Urgench. Soon thereafter, an independent local dynasty of Sufids gained power in the city: they let its creativity continue until 1388, when its development was interrupted and it faced new destruction at the hands of Timur, the ruler of Samarqand. After that, the city lost its former importance and steadily degraded. In the seventeenth century, a water shortage forced its inhabitants to leave the city and move on to New Urgench (on the territory of modern Uzbekistan). Since then, the ruins of the former Gurgandj have become known as Old Urgench (Kunya Urgench). In 1831, after a canal was dug, the Khorezm Turkmens re-settled to the north of the ruins of the medieval city.

The eleventh-century minaret, which is the highest in Central Asia, and four mausoleums are the main attractions of Kunya Urgench. The oldest is the tomb of Khorezmshakh Il Arslan (second half of the twelfth century). This miniature monument has no pronounced portal, as other Muslim mausoleums do, but the main entrance is accentuated. It is divided into three deep arched niches and decorated with carved terracotta tiles with a floral pattern and an epigraphic band. The twelve-sided tent above this mausoleum is decorated with glazed sky-blue bricks, which make a simple geometric ornament. The mausoleum of Khorezm Shah Tekesh has almost the same components, but on a more monumental scale. Of particular value are rectangular plates in Arabic lettering entirely covered with blue glaze. Some of these plates have long since been lost, and several copies are in the collection of the Oriental Department of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Another unusual building is the khanaka of the famous Sufi sheikh Najm ad-Din al-Kubra. The well-proportioned portal of the main façade was once completely covered with majolica tiles with epigraphy and floral ornamentation, typical of Khorezmian architectural ceramics. But the main attraction is inside the building, in the gurkhan. There, the monumental cenotaph—the tombstone above the imaginary grave of the sheikh—has survived, though in a badly damaged state. It, as well as the portal, was entirely faced with majolica tiles with intricate ornaments in the blue-and-white palette traditional to Khorezm. This shrine dates from the fourteenth century. Since then, it has been the epicenter of the city’s religious complex and the object of constant pilgrimage by the faithful.

But the most fascinating structure of Kunya Urgench is Turabek-khanym mausoleum. Behind a high and deep portal is a small domed foyer, followed by a hexagonal hall with an area of about one hundred square meters, the walls of which are richly decorated with a carved mosaic. An inverted spherical bowl seems to be floating above the hall, on which a mosaic panel of the finest brightly colored girih appears—a geometrical pattern of stars and polyhedrons filled with flowers and vegetation. The outer sides of the mausoleum are decorated with four deep and slender arched niches with large arched windows between them. The building is crowned by a blue glazed tent of conic shape, of which only a small piece remains. There are no exact data regarding the time of erection of this remarkable monument, but it is closely connected with the name of Turabek-khanym, the wife of emir Kutlug-Timur, who died in 1335.

The monuments of Kunya Urgench, included on the World Heritage List since 2005, show a striking variety of techniques and decoration of Islamic architecture in Central Asia. There are constructions made of raw and burnt bricks, simple single-chamber domed buildings dating back to the ancient chartaq, and buildings that are complex in their composition, sometimes with a long history of development, repairs, and alterations. There are also early types of courtyard mosque, which had the form of a hypostyle hall, but have long been buried underground. The monuments represent various types of construction, with distinct forms of domes and roofs, as well as the evolution of building decoration to include key Islamic architectural styles like the muqarna—a decorative vaulting system composed of tiers of small niche-like elements resembling stalactites of honeycombs. Local artists mastered this technique to perfection. Finally, the best monuments of this town are highly decorative. They provide brilliant examples of classical arabesques in monochrome terracotta and bright, colorful enamels. The unrestrained play of colour precedes the total polychromy of the much later monuments of Samarqand, Shakhrisyabz, Herat, Isfahan, Khiva, and a number of other Asian cities.

Dehistan, or Mashad-i-Misrian

From ancient times to the thirteenth century, the vast Misrian plateau, now a desert zone between the Caspian Sea and the western spurs of the Kopetdag, was a blooming, populous oasis with many fortified towns and villages built in the midst of wheat fields. Their impact on the terrain can still be seen today when viewed from above using Google Earth. The inhabitants of what the Greeks and Parthians called Hyrcania and the Persians called Dehistan, which literally means “country of villages,” created an extensive irrigation system. As long as it functioned, farming flourished here. The main waterway was the Atrek River, the natural boundary between Turkmenistan and Iran, which has now grown shallow.

The largest center of Dehistan was the eponymous town, often also called Mashad-e-Misrian or simply Misrian. Its central part, encircled by a double fortification wall with semi-circular towers and a moat, occupied an area of about 200 hectares. It was adjoined by a vast rabad, or suburban area, consisting of artisan quarters, where one can still see many remains of pottery workshops and the foundations of several mosques and caravanserais. The southern rabad was home to parks and gardens and a market square, while the western rabad shows traces of dense residential development. The high level of urban culture in Dehistan is evidenced by its landscaping: water supply and sewage systems, bathhouses, and brick pavements were all present there. The ruins of only a few buildings remain, but these show considerable artistic value and Islamic culture. They include the portal of the recently reconstructed mosque of Mohammed II, and two minarets next to it, as well as several medieval mausoleums in the ancient cemetery seven kilometers from the settlement. Among these, the memorial mosque of Mashad Ata, which is positioned on a high platform and features a magnificent mihrab of very fine workmanship dating from the 9th century, stands out.

The Dehistan monuments are not yet included on the World Heritage List, but that is only a matter of time. In terms of their architectural merit, historical uniqueness, and state of preservation, they meet the basic criteria for sites of this kind. Indeed, they have perhaps the most important thing: each building is authentic and has been carefully restored in a way that avoids turning medieval structures into contrived decorations imitating antiquity.

In her book entitled Modernization of the Early Soviet Era in the Fate of Women of Kazakhstan, 1920–1930: Monograph (Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, 2017), Janat Kundakbayeva, Doctor of Historical Sciences and Professor of the Department of History of Kazakhstan at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University explores the gender aspect of the formation of Soviet identity in Kazakhstan: how the ideological construct of a “new Soviet woman” was created and how it was reflected in the fates of early-Soviet-era women in Kazakhstan. This construct prescribed new moral norms, different standards of behavior, and new roles in the family and society. A Soviet Kazakh woman was supposed to think differently, speak differently, and even look different from her predecessors. 

Interview with

---

Janat Kundakbayeva

Doctor of Historical Sciences and Professor of the Department of History of Kazakhstan at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University

 Full bio

What was women’s status and what were attitudes toward them like in the Kazakh aul (village) in the pre-revolutionary period (the nineteenth century and the twentieth century before 1917)?

As is known, before the revolution the Kazakhs had their own social organization, with clearly demarcated gender roles and a high level of symbolic content. This was based on a patriarchal agreement between a man and a woman. Here I rely on Deniz Kandiyoti’s theory. In accordance with it, I consider patriarchal relations in Kazakh society not as a relationship of dominance and subordination, but rather as a mechanism for balancing the system of social relations under the conditions of a nomadic way of life. As is known, before the revolution the Kazakhs had three types of households: nomadic, semi-nomadic, and semi-sedentary. But all farms had a high degree of cooperation because they were extremely labor-intensive. The most intensive activity was supplying water for livestock. But winter grazing also required physical effort, since it was often necessary to clear pastures after heavy snowfall in order to give the cattle access to natural grass. All members of the community had to participate in this labor. Only some children, the elderly, the sick, and women in labor did not participate.

There was a division of labor in traditional Kazakh society. Wandering with the herd, feeding, watering cattle, castration, vaccination and slaughtering, digging wells, and constructing outbuildings were considered men’s occupations. Within these tasks, men were assigned different roles according to their status and age. For example, older men were responsible for planning and making decisions about livestock, while younger men and boys performed most of the physical labor.

For their part, women took care of the young animals; produced livestock products (including milk, butter, and cheese); and were responsible for fuel (including making it from manure), handling wool and animal hides, and preserving meat. In addition, women were in charge of the entire household: they cooked, sewed, cleaned, washed, and put up and dismantled yurts. Children, the elderly, and young animals were entirely in the care of women.

Women actively participated in the household (they had the daily needs of the family on their shoulders: cooking; milking cattle; processing dairy and meat products; and creating such objects of material culture as felt carpets, carpets, clothes, woven items, etc.), but in general they were under the care of their husbands. A woman had the right to be supported by men: by her father in childhood and her husband in marriage, according to the norms of adat. One of the justifications for the dissolution of a marriage was a husband’s refusal to support his wife for 6 months and 13 days.

A woman had no property rights: she shared property with her husband but had no right to dispose of it. The rights to the herd and livestock products belonged to the male representatives of the clan; the privileges belonged to the elders of the clan. Another factor behind men’s level of responsibility for women in Kazakh society was the extremely low level of endogamy in Kazakh marriage practices, which led to the complete absence of links between a bride and her relatives. Because of the strict observance of the taboo on marriage for up to seven generations, a married Kazakh woman was akin to a foreigner in China due to the long distances between nomads of different clans and the high degree of separation from her relatives.

What forms of adaptation to male dominance did Kazakh women develop?

The gender order in Kazakh society was regulated by social norms. A peculiarity of Kazakh society was that informal social control was provided by public opinion in the form of social condemnation or approval. The harshest punishment a person could receive was contempt or condemnation from members of the group, while the highest reward was others’ approval.

A woman built her life strategies in accordance with social norms. From childhood, she learned the prescribed norms of behavior, her rights and duties, her position in the team, and her place in the hierarchy. The Kazakh woman observed the rules of the game—that is, she had no right to vote and no freedom of action—in exchange for which the man took full responsibility for the welfare of the family. In Kazakh tradition, disobedience by a wife—her opposition to the will of her husband—was regarded as a vice. In accordance with this, a woman did not flaunt her influence over her husband or his relatives; instead, she showed obedience.

That being said, as noted by many pre-revolutionary researchers, Kazakh women had considerable freedom compared to the women of the normative Islamic culture. In daily life, they did not cover their faces, were not secluded (as dictated by the norms of Sharia), and were not legally deprived of the right to communicate with members of other families without the permission of their husbands. These provisions were fixed by adat. Often, a woman took an active part in solving family problems, and when her husband was absent during long seasonal migrations, she was the head of the family. But this leadership was always hidden, not only within the husband’s family group, but also within the immediate family. This was expressed, for example, in supporting the father’s authority in interactions with the children, using such everyday expressions of submission as “as the father decides, so it will be” and “you need to ask your father’s permission.”

In general, a woman’s social status always depended on the status of her husband and sons. Officially, women’s main duty was to give birth and raise children. Therefore, having many children gave a woman a higher status in society. The husband’s family-kin group had control over a woman’s fertility. In patriarchal Kazakh society, the preservation of the clan, the male line, and property was an absolute value. Therefore, sons—as perpetuators of the clan and family line—were highly desirable. Girls were treated differently because they left the family after marriage. Therefore, the mother of many sons had the highest status.

The woman was excluded from formal political institutions. All decisions regarding nomadic routes, conflict resolution, and relationships with neighboring tribes were made by men, with the eldest in the family enjoying the greatest rights. Women could not take an oath in court and could almost never be present in person in court; their interests were protected either by their husband or by their husband’s relatives. One of the taboos in Kazakh society was women’s presence in the public sphere.

Kazakh etiquette clearly defined the norms of male and female behavior—that is, there was clear gender differentiation in society. This etiquette supported male supremacy in every way. For instance, the internal space of the yurt was divided into three parts: the right part was for men; the left part was for women; and the central part was for the head of the family, elders, and guests. There were also restrictions on women’s behavior related to their physical condition—such as pregnancy, postpartum bleeding or menstruation. These restrictions prohibited her from stepping over rifles, tackle, traps, saddles, or whips. The etiquette of displaying emotions was also spelled out in detail. Thus, it was considered normal for a man to show anger, rage, stubbornness, or impatience, but never for a woman to do so. The image of the ideal man in Kazakh society was harsh, stingy with affection, and laconic. The image of a woman, meanwhile, featured such qualities as humility, care, and endless patience. A woman was destined to be a hearth-keeper who guarded and protected her children; a devoted and faithful wife; an assistant to her husband. Deviation from the traditional stereotype—whether due to childlessness, an inability to manage the household, or infidelity—was regarded as a violation of custom.

A woman only had the right to show her emotions in the ritual cases of wedding, maternity, and funeral rites. Inga Stasevich, the author of a book about the status roles of a Kazakh woman, described the bodily canon of a woman mourning the death of her husband. Every aspect of a woman’s behavior during funerals and memorials was meant to indicate her despair (self-inflicted bodily injury—that is, scratching her face, arms, and chest), powerlessness (a state of emotional trance, to which she must have brought herself), and defenselessness (loud crying with textual, structured lamentations). The pose of the mourning woman and her spatial location was also expressive. She had to sit facing the hearth with her right leg tucked under her and her left leg bent at the knee. This posture is extremely uncomfortable; the sitting person’s legs fall asleep and her back hurts. Afterwards, her legs cannot hold her weight. Thus, this pose is a symbol of powerlessness, the collapse of life for the woman who has lost her supporter. Meanwhile, according to Kazakh funeral etiquette, a man was to mourn his deceased relative standing on his feet; leaning on a stick; restraining his crying; and not keening but mumbling individual phrases, all of which indicated his steadfastness, vitality, and responsibility.

In everyday life, etiquette for women depended on the woman’s age and social status. Women of each age group had a prescribed status and strictly adhered to norms. For example, a young married woman had a number of new norms of etiquette and prohibitions on her behavior: she was prohibited, for instance, to call her husband’s father, her husband’s brothers, and even her husband by their names.

Thus, Kazakh society had clearly delineated gender roles and stereotypes of behavior that maintained the gender order based on the patriarchal bargain between man and woman. The man bore the function of breadwinner and the woman showed submissiveness and care in return.

There is an opinion among historians that when Kazakhstan became part of the Russian Empire, the courts began to be filled with women’s claims against men and women’s struggle for their rights gradually began. How much does this correspond to reality?

I think this period was too early to talk about women’s struggle for their rights, since the Russian Empire did not fundamentally change the economic way of life of the Kazakhs. Yes, because of the withdrawal of Kazakh lands for the resettlement fund, pasture lands had been reduced and nomadic routes had broken down. But the Russian Empire did not break the traditional economic structure based on seasonal migrations. Forced settlement and the destruction of nomadic production occurred only in the 1930s. Therefore, in the conditions of nomadic reproduction, it was impossible for anyone to survive outside the community, especially a woman.

What role did the “women’s departments” play in Soviet policy on women’s issues in Kazakhstan?

In the process of writing this book, I studied all documents that were left by the Department of Workers and Peasant Women under the Kirov Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Such departments were established everywhere in 1919 under the central and local party committees. The idea was that these departments would direct all work on the education of women in the spirit of socialism. Moreover, they had to organize their work in such a way as to make women different. Women had to understand and accept the ideas of socialism, they had to allow themselves to work, to be in the limelight, to have a voice. Women had to understand that marriage and divorce, childbearing and childbirth, housekeeping and the possibility of public work were all now in their hands. Assessing the work of the women’s departments (active from 1919 to 1930) today, many scientists believe that it was declarative in nature. The heaps of documents left behind by these departments are considered paperwork. But I believe that the women’s departments—both in Kazakhstan and throughout the Soviet Union—did a tremendous amount of work that had no immediate impact, but rather effects of a delayed nature.

Women’s departments appeared in 1921 and functioned until 1930 in Kazakhstan, when the Women’s Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU (Bolsheviks) was abolished and reorganized into a women’s sector of the agitation and mass campaigns departments of the party committees. This persisted until 1934. Thus, women’s departments in Kazakhstan functioned for about ten years. It should be emphasized that in addition to general difficulties (understaffing, financial issues), there were also difficulties conditioned by the specifics of Kazakhstan. It was a huge territory with regions that had their own specifics. For example, women’s departments in the Ural Province had to work with Kazakhs (in the nomadic auls), Russian women, and Ural Cossack women. But in southern and southeastern Kazakhstan (Syrdarya Region, Alatau District, and Karakalpak Autonomous Region), annexed to the KASSR as a result of the demarcation of the lands of Central Asia in 1924, there was an extremely mixed ethnic composition (there were many Uzbeks, Taranchis (Uighurs), and Dungan women), a different way of life and cultural environment (the dominance of Islamic customs and traditions). Simply put, there were many women who wore a burqa.

Despite the difficulties, women’s departments in Kazakhstan took into account the socio-economic and cultural specifics of Kazakhstan. Much of the credit for this goes to the women in charge of these departments. At the local level, they became supportive bodies for women, places they could come in search of justice. It was not a question of how well they managed the main task—to get all the women of Kazakhstan to accept the Soviet power—or how successful they were in eliminating illiteracy, or how many child care centers appeared in the late 1920s. The women’s departments of Kazakhstan did an excellent job in their basic mission of conveying the basic ideas of the Bolsheviks—that is, the ideology of the Communist Party—to every single woman.

For a certain segment of women, they became a launching pad and a springboard for their future activities. And finally, the women’s departments helped every woman to realize her rights and place in society. Of course, as throughout the country, in the 1930s there was some formalism in the activity of the women’s departments. But in general, in the pre-war period, the activities of the women’s departments were already reaping results: a layer of women who held positions in state institutions, mastered professions, and even gained education was formed.

What were the methods for modernizing family and marriage attitudes and instilling new educational, hygienic, and medical practices in Kazakh women?

As I said, the Kazakhs had their own system of family and marriage relations. We know about it from the works of Russian researchers who described them. For example, A. Levshin emphasized that until the kalym[1] is paid, the wedding does not take place. L. F. Ballyuzek, the military governor of Torgay Region, highlighted two features of marriage relations among the Kazakhs. The first feature is the forced nature of the marriage. The second is the payment of kalym as a basis for marriage. In addition, everyone knows that polygamy was allowed among the Kazakhs, and there was also amengerism.[2] The Bolsheviks understood the purely material aspects of kalym: “from the cradle sold and bought for kalym.” They saw in polygamy an unequal relationship between a man and a woman, “a slave to the shameful customs of polygamy,” and the quintessence of powerlessness was the custom of amengerism: “as a thing passed on after the death of her husband through the family line.”

Upon coming to power, the Bolsheviks began to fight the old customs in the sphere of family and marriage relations by adopting a number of legislative acts. In Kazakhstan these included the Decree of the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the KASSR “On the Cancellation of Kalym” (1920), the Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the KASSR “On the Marriage Law of the Kyrgyz” dated January 17, 1921, and the Law “On the Punishability of Polygamy” (1920). By the mid-1920s, the Bolsheviks had established legal liability for forced marriage (1922), for bigamy and polygamy (1924), and for marriage with underage individuals, abduction, and amengerism (1925).

But the Bolsheviks clearly realized that it was impossible to change the attitudes of the Kazakhs in the field of family and marriage relations in a short time through punishment. Moreover, the Bolsheviks saw the weakness of Soviet justice in the face of longstanding Kazakh customs. They understood that great efforts were required to change the attitude of society—and, above all, women—toward these remnants of tradition. Finally, the Bolsheviks were fully aware of the degree of economic dependence of Kazakh women on men under the conditions of nomadic production. Therefore, in the fight against old marriage attitudes, they skillfully used various forms of agitation and propaganda.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks developed a core project, part of which was to influence mass consciousness through mass festivals. It should be noted that the culture of so-called “red festivals” had always been an effective weapon of the Bolsheviks. Malte Rolf, the German scholar who is the author of a book on Soviet holidays, noted that holidays were both political because they “served to popularize ideas” and a specific form of domination because they were a means of “manipulating people,” as well as “one of the channels through which regime policy was carried out.”

So, to familiarize women with the ideas of socialism, a holiday was introduced on March 8, namely the International Day of Women Workers, “a symbol of the emancipation of proletarian women.” It was introduced to the calendar in 1921; it began to be celebrated in Kazakhstan in 1923 but did not find resonance with the population. Therefore, from 1924 a new holiday was introduced: January 1, 1924, was announced as Kalym Cancellation Day. The organization and conduct of the “Kalym Cancellation Day” campaign was carried out in accordance with general trends in the development of the Soviet festive culture. There was careful preparation and in everything they followed instructions from the center. The women’s department was in charge of everything. First there were meetings, then solemn demonstrations—so-called “red feasts”—were held in Kazakh auls.

With the help of this campaign and through symbolic actions, the Bolsheviks “hoped to conquer emotionally” Kazakh women. But its introduction into the calendar of holidays shows that before the Great Breakthrough, the Bolsheviks “took into account the established cultural practice” and the ethno-cultural attitudes of the Kazakhs. This is evidenced by the fact that by introducing the holiday, they struck at the custom of payment for the bride, which was considered the basis of Kazakh family and marriage relations. In addition, it is impossible not to take into account the political and psychological impact of the campaign. It had not an immediate, but a delayed result. But its implementation was an important link in the integral policy of the Bolsheviks.

As for instilling new educational, hygienic, and medical practices in Kazakh women, they should be seen as part of an integral and elaborate Soviet project of modernity. The fact is that central to this project is the creation of common symbols that would be shared by all. One of these new symbols in society was “culture.” The Bolshevik understanding of culture was explained by Sheila Fitzpatrick, a famous American researcher of Stalinism. She identified three levels of culture that the Soviet man had to master. The first level was the culture of personal hygiene and basic literacy. The second level was the rules of conduct at the table and in public places, as well as the treatment of women. The third level was good and correct speech, neat clothes, and the ability to understand literature, music or ballet. In accordance with this common standard of culture, the Bolsheviks began to transform Kazakh women. For this purpose, they used a vast arsenal of propaganda and agitation methods, including a mobile agitation station, the Red Yurt (Kzyl Otau), specially developed for Kazakhstan. Moving from aul to aul, the Red Yurt not only acquainted women with communist ideology (conversations in the Red Yurt corner on ideological topics, reading newspapers and magazines), but also with new forms of life and other standards of hygiene and sanitation. The Red Yurt had medical workers on its staff who examined women and gave lectures on contagious diseases. They gave talks on hygiene, health, rules of child care, contagious skin diseases, and sexually transmitted diseases. It should be explained that immediately after the 1917 revolution, the principles of hygiene became part of state policy in the field of medicine. Thus the Bolsheviks declared the fight against “backwardness and inertia of life.”

Paramedics became the conduits of this policy in Kazakhstan. Of course, the texts created by paramedics (who were mostly Russians) had a pronounced tinge of “cultural colonialism.” They conveyed to the Kazakhs ideas about the modernization of medical practice based on preventive medicine by maintaining cleanliness in everyday life and social hygiene. As medical attendant Vasilyeva wrote in her report: “Here is what our yurt teaches: to wash laundry and children, bake bread, make good cheese and butter, go after cattle, plant vegetable gardens, read a book, raise tasks and cooperation practice, write and even think, and speak to women.”

Here I would like to emphasize that the discourse on purity should not be understood literally. It should be understood as a symbol of unity, a symbol of cleansing of old meanings and introducing new meanings, as if to purify and change people’s consciousness. It would seem that the paramedics were intent on introducing the principles of hygiene that they had been taught. But the intentions of the Bolsheviks ran much deeper. After all, in order to lead a different life, the Kazakhs first needed to settle down. The Kazakhs were introduced to new forms of yurt decoration through the Red Yurt: its column of vehicles contained such new household items as a table, chairs, cupboards, and washbasins.

It is known that the entire life of the Kazakhs was adapted to a nomadic lifestyle. They had a limited set of household items, but this does not mean that they were “dirty.” Simply put, the Kazakhs had different cultural practices of housekeeping. They stored food in the living space and ate from a common dish with their hands; they had neither tables nor chairs in the household. That is, the Kazakhs had their own norms of culture and hygiene, which were based on nomadic traditions and normative Islamic culture. We draw our knowledge of the ethnographic features of the Kazakhs from the notes of travelers, participants in academic expeditions, and officials within the apparatus of the colonial regime. They were unanimous that the sanitary and hygienic norms of the Kazakhs were quite high. It is possible to dispute the degree of implementation of normative Islam in the everyday life of the Kazakhs. But one thing is beyond dispute: the Kazakhs were guided in their everyday household practices by the cleanliness norms of Islam.

As the famous Turkologist V. V. Radlov wrote: “Undoubtedly, it is due to the influence of Islam that the Kyrgyz have great order in clothing and housing, cleanliness, orderly family relations, and better ethical principles.” From an early age, the Kazakhs were inculcated with the idea that the Creator loves only clean and tidy people. Knowledge of the rules of hygiene, as well as compliance with the rules of personal hygiene, was a symbol of worship and a guarantee of receiving a reward from the Almighty. From a young age, Kazakhs learned the sanitary norms of Islamic culture and knew the rules for how to clean the body, hair, ears, nose, throat, and teeth, as well as how to take care of the beard and nails in everyday life and before offering namaz.

Obligatory hygiene included shaving body hair, circumcision of the umbilical cord and foreskin, and a prohibition on keeping animals in the same room as people. The norms of Islamic hygiene that were strictly observed by the Kazakhs included a list of defilements: bad, unfit things that pollute a person if they touch them. These “unclean things” included: urine, feces, semen, vomit, blood, dead flesh, pork, dog saliva, alcoholic beverages, and the sweat of camels and other animals. If we consider the discourse of purity through the lens of this cultural understanding, then the Bolsheviks’ introduction of new principles of hygiene and cleanliness looks like an intention to cleanse, first of all, the consciousness of Kazakh women of old meanings and habits.

How did the Bolsheviks want to use the press and Kazakh literature to promote new relations between men and women, as well as the image of a new Soviet woman?

Patterns of gender relations among the Kazakhs immediately became an object of attention for the Bolsheviks. They wanted to break this system. In doing so, the Bolsheviks first looked at gender relations as part of the old social order among the Kazakhs. Subsequently, they consciously prescribed new roles for both women and men. The Bolsheviks wanted to remake women into working mothers. In their view, a woman was to work, “produce future generations of workers,” and run the household. The state provided their protection and independence because it gave them work. As Russian researcher I. Tartakovskaya emphasized, this project was based on the idea of “freeing women from the power of patriarchal family relations in order to subordinate women, as well as men, to the power of the state.” The roles of men also changed. The function of head of the family was taken over by the state, while men were to lead the construction of the communist system and manage the new state. Thus, a man could show his dominant role in the public sphere. But his dominance at home now depended on his social status, not his gender.

The state had an alliance not with men, but with women, on whom it relied as agents of social transformation. This was a direct challenge to male power. First, the mass involvement of women in social production affected private gender relations, as it gave women economic and social freedom from men. Second, the politicization of motherhood and the relative neglect of fatherhood legitimized women’s control over children and undermined men’s position in the family. Third, women gradually became disciplinary agents of the state, as they helped the state control men’s behavior. There was a conflict of different understandings of the male role in Soviet society. A man’s word was no longer law; a woman had the right to protest her husband’s shortcomings. Moreover, women were dissatisfied with men’s non-participation in domestic life and the fact that men no longer fulfilled the role of a breadwinner.

The Bolsheviks skillfully used agitation and propaganda, as well as the press, to force members of society to accept this new gender order. First of all, through the press, agitation, and propaganda, they broke the stereotype of the Kazakh woman as the mother of a large family, whose economy she skillfully managed. The woman of the past now appeared humiliated, deprived of rights, and crushed by everyday life. She was contrasted with the image of a new—free, liberated, working, and educated—woman. In the 1930s, male dominance was no longer claimed, and men’s private power was regarded with suspicion. This distrust was reflected in silence about men in the public sphere. Mothers were glorified, women were written about, but male figures were silenced so that there was no competition with fatherly public figures. There was also a symbolic exclusion of men from the private sphere; there were no pictures of men with their wives and children in home and family settings.

Authors were also assigned canons. Above all, they had to describe the old customs, traditions, values, and attitudes as something horrible. In literature, the woman of the past should be described as destitute, deprived of all rights, sold for kalym, in an unequal marriage. Females of the pre-Soviet era were depicted as bent from the weight of the world; their figures expressed despair, even the desire to die. Soviet-era women, by contrast, straightened their shoulders and saw other perspectives of life.

In the book, I also looked at how the first Kazakh women’s magazine helped the Bolsheviks create a new image of the Soviet Kazakh woman. The target audience of the magazine was a simple Kazakh woman from a village. The magazine imposed a completely different paradigm of existence on Kazakh women, in accordance with which they had to build their lives. The new Kazakh woman had to be literate and educated. She had to adhere to Soviet hygiene standards in everyday life. According to the Bolsheviks, the new Soviet woman had to be an active member of society and participate in the construction of a new socialist state.

At the same time, the magazine was as close to its reader as possible. This is evidenced by the “friendly and unaccented” manner in which it communicated with its readers. The magazine does not contain the directive strategy of agitational publications, with their rigid business style. On the contrary, the tone of the articles was emotionally colored and personal; articles were written in a subjective manner and included individuals’ letters. The atmosphere of trusting care created in the pages of the magazine made the frightening changes of the new Soviet reality more comfortable for the Kazakh woman.

What was the attitude of Soviet Kazakh authors of the early Soviet era to the Soviet gender order?

Authors were instructed to consolidate through literary images the new gender order of the Bolsheviks. But how did they embody it? In my book, I conducted a literary analysis of a number of works by acknowledged Soviet authors who did not work against the canon. I analyzed a number of works by G. Musrepov (“Ulpan Is Her Name” and the cycle of short stories “Mother’s Courage”: “Mother’s Song,” “Mother,” “Man’s Mother,” “A Mother Who Won Death,” “An Angry Mother,” “Mother’s Advocacy,” “Mother’s Courage,” and “Mother’s Mother”), as well as the story “Communist Raushan” by Beyimbet Meilin, the short story “Sholpan’s Transgression” by M. Jumabayev, and a number of short stories by Saken Seyfullin. On the one hand, Soviet Kazakh authors played by the rules. They showed that they accepted the new order, including in gender relations. On the other hand, these authors used artistic means to express their latent attitude toward the new roles of men and women, as well as the new vision of patriarchy in which the state took over the role of patriarch. I will give just one example: the story “The Nights of Aijan the Shepherd” by G. Musrepov. At first glance, this literary work looks like a story about the courage and fortitude shown by Aijan the shepherd during a three-day blizzard, when she was left alone in the pasture to save a flock of sheep, two horses, and a camel. In fact, the rhythm system of the short story and its composition immerse us in a halo of endless condemnation of the new patriarch, a state that would sacrifice women on the altar of building socialism. Thus, the author showed how a small defenseless woman with a flock of sheep (600 sheep)—accompanied by two horses, a laid-back camel, and two faithful dogs—found herself at the mercy of the elements for three days. She faced a fierce snowstorm in the middle of the vast desert, which was plunged into darkness; bitter cold; and an attack by three starving, emaciated wolves. The author also condemned Aijan’s husband for leaving her alone in the pasture when he knew that another shepherd had asked for two days off. At a stroke, he showed him to be careless. First, he wrote that the guy was cheerful, always optimistically humming: what else did a guy need except a fast horse and a beautiful wife? But then he added that in fact the horse was far from fast and the wife was far from beautiful. He also condemned the authorities: the head of the agricultural department, who had no face in the story, but only a cracking and creaky voice, and the soulless farm manager, who asked the exhausted, silently crying heroine with a frostbitten and black face whether the cattle were intact in the final part of the story.

In this book, I addressed only a small part of the works of Soviet Kazakh authors of the pre-war period. But even this analysis allows us to draw some conclusions. On the one hand, Kazakh authors followed the state’s orders. On the other hand, they used artistic means to express their subjective attitude toward the new gender order, the new roles of men and women, and the new vision of patriarchy—where the state became the patriarch and subjected both men and women to itself.

In the last chapter of your book, you looked at women’s life stories based on documents authored by women. How did different categories of women change under the influence of the Soviet government’s gender discourse?

There is a chapter in my book about the extent to which the Soviet project was reflected in the lives of specific women. How did the rapid changes that took place in Kazakh society during Soviet-style modernization affect the lives of women? How did they feel within themselves during this difficult time? To what extent did they let the revolution and Soviet ideology in? Finally, how did they define their place in the Soviet system? I had to find texts that came from the hands of women themselves to answer these kinds of questions. But there were extremely few of them. This part of the book is the most difficult for readers who are not professional historians to understand.

Fatima Gabitova’s diaries, letters, memoirs, essays, and sketches, which her descendants have preserved and published, proved to be extremely valuable. This was the voice of a woman who belonged to the narrow circle of Kazakh creative intellectuals, which suffered most severely from the Stalinist repressions. Who was Fatima? How did she assess herself? In her autobiography, Fatima Gabitova appears as a unique woman, both in her beauty and in her innate qualities. She appears to us as extremely talented, educated, and extraordinarily persistent. A sociostructural analysis of Fatima’s texts shows that she distanced herself from the official and ideological language. This was her peculiar survival tactic: not to think nor write about what bothered her in public life, but to withdraw into the world of private life.

The second group of texts came from activists of the women’s movement. Women activists could not think of themselves outside the language of ideology, even at retirement age. Having passed through the party’s programs, they soon became an ideological force themselves, acting on par with the party leaders. The paradigm of their biographies is a hagiographic model in which attention is focused on the heroic. Their profession required them to write, but they wrote organically from the position of a participant in the construction of socialism. In these texts, the “inner man” is constantly transformed into “we.” The world of big politics is closely intertwined with the authors of memoirs. They work for government bodies. The state and the authorities occupy too much space in their memoirs. They are constantly involved in and discussing socially relevant events, even at retirement age. Their leisure time exists in the framework of communist performance. The resource of literacy and culture is high, but stereotyped.

Fatima Gabitova’s texts represent a diametrically opposed subjectivity. Her entry into modernity took place earlier and under different conditions. She is characterized by gender relations and modern parenting. A new-type family is not patriarchal and is based on friendship and equality. Terms with evaluative, emotional coloring are always used to describe her husband. She often writes about him using “He” with a capital letter, expressing that he is at the center of her universe. Her relationship with her husband is one of friendship-love. For her, the private is synonymous with the personal. The concept of “self” is clear: the “self” is hers and only hers. Her alienation from power is clearly marked in her writings. Power, which she calls in an abstract way “Soviet power,” never became part of her. Her diaries and memoirs demonstrate conscious and unconscious practices of dealing with ideological narratives. Fatima Gabitova shows empathy, solidarity, and narrative identification with other victims of terror: the families of Saken Seyfullin, Beimbet Meilin, and thousands of other innocent victims of the system.

Undoubtedly, Fatima Gabitova lived in the modern world. Both women activists and Fatima Gabitova were subjects reflecting “self” who consciously positioned themselves in historical time. They understood and analyzed the moment of time about which they wrote as part of a universal integrity. Unfortunately, the voices of ordinary, illiterate women are difficult to hear today, due to the lack of sources produced directly by them. To some extent, oral histories and interviews with descendants can fill this gap, but this will be the subject of other studies.

What were the differences between women’s status/rights and attitudes toward women in Soviet Kazakhstan and in other Central Asian republics during the period of history under study?

As many researchers have noted, prior to the revolution Kazakh women had considerable freedom compared to women with a normative Islamic culture. They did not cover their faces in everyday life, were not secluded as mandated by Sharia law, and were not legally deprived of the right to communicate with members of other families without the permission of their husbands. These provisions were fixed by adat. Islamic norms prevailed in the southern regions of Kazakhstan.

The Bolsheviks were well informed about the peculiarities of the position of women in Kazakh society. They therefore took these peculiarities into account when working in each region. In regions where gender relations were regulated on the basis of Islamic norms, the removal of the burqa became a symbol of women’s liberation. This happened in Uzbekistan when on March 8, 1927, on the initiative of Isaac Zelensky, First Secretary of the Central Asian Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), thousands of Uzbek women took off their burqas, put them in a pile, and set fire to them in Samarqand’s Registan Square. A similar thing happened in Azerbaijan, where in 1929 about 270,000 Azerbaijani women gave up the chador. Some Tajik women, like Uzbek women, used to wear the burqa, a garment that completely covered a woman’s face and body. This type of clothing was characteristic of the northern, flat part of modern Tajikistan, namely Khujand and its surroundings. (Women could also throw other types of coverings over their heads.)

After the Soviets came to power in Turkmenistan, the struggle was just against wearing a borik.[3] The campaign was called “Down with the Borik.” During the massive campaign, cartoons in magazines, as well as medical articles, said that the headdress was heavy and therefore harmful to the posture/back and health in general; satirical songs about it also used to be aired on the radio. The final knell sounded in the 1970s, when collective farmers began to receive passports. One had to be photographed without a headdress for a passport photo. The desire for a passport was stronger than the urge to cover one’s head. This accelerated and eased the process of giving up the borik.

In Kazakhstan, the removal of the burqa affected only women in the Syrdarya Region. It was not women’s seclusion that led them to cover their bodies and faces, but the extent to which Islamic norms and customs prevailed in gender relations.

Today, one often hears that the process of women’s emancipation (that is, granting women equal rights in public, labor, and family life) began much earlier in the West than in the Soviet Union. Is this really the case?

Today, actually, everyone—feminist activists, scientists in the field of gender relations, politicians—is almost unanimous that Soviet women were “emancipated on average 50 years earlier than Western ladies.”

Soviet women gained access to education, the opportunity to work, and the chance to have their own source of income—that is to say, the chance to be economically independent of their husbands. In Austria it was not until 1975 that a law was passed stating that a woman no longer needed her husband’s permission to go to work, whereas in socialist Hungary such a law had been passed one generation earlier. Or take the right to get a credit card without a husband’s permission. Even Hillary Clinton recalls being denied a credit card in the 1970s. “I got a letter saying I couldn’t apply for my own credit card, I had to use my husband’s one.  And it’s not some ancient story,” she said in an interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “I was making more money than he was, and I was really ready to have my own credit card.”

Soviet women gained the right to attend university, the right to pursue professions in science and technology, mathematics, and the natural sciences. Ivy League universities did not admit female undergraduate students until the second half of the twentieth century.

We can take family law as another example. Soviet women almost immediately received the right to divorce, the right to carry their name after marriage, the right to abortion, and the right to have custody of their children after divorce. Meanwhile, in Austria, the law granting a woman the right to keep her name after marriage was adopted only in 1995. Or take the right to terminate a pregnancy. In socialist countries, the right to decide to terminate a pregnancy was given much earlier than in capitalist countries. For example, in the USSR, the relevant laws were adopted in 1920 and then in 1954. Abortion was permitted only in 1967 in England, in 1973 in the United States, in 1974 in Austria, and in 1979 in France.

Feminists today talk as if emancipation under socialism descended upon women from above and as a result, women were given control by the state (the state became a patriarch) instead of by their husbands. Kristen Godsey, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania known for her contributions to the field of post-socialist gender studies, responds: “The radical lesson is that the state intervened and did some good things on behalf of women, such things that markedly changed their lives were day care, abortion rights, etc. Feminist activism, the way it looks in the West with painted posters and rallying cries, did not achieve these things. The bureaucrats did it.”

Another feminist criticism of the socialist emancipation of women is that it resulted in women bearing a double burden: they performed the functions of both breadwinner and household slave. Godsey replies: “As soon as women stopped depending on their husbands for their basic needs for food, housing, and medical care, they gained some control over their own lives, even under regimes where political rights were restricted. Isn’t that one of the fundamental goals of feminism: to give women control over their lives?”

Thus, the answer to your question would be that Soviet/Communist women had a degree of education, economic independence, and legal status that their Western counterparts only received much later.

[1] Kalym—a groom’s gift to a bride in the form of a dowry, which remained at her disposal even after the wedding (and in the event of a subsequent divorce).

[2] Amangerism—marrying the widow of the deceased brother, or custody of the husband’s brother’s family in the event of his death.

[3] Borik—a big fur hat.

Translated from Russian Модернизация ранней советской эпохи в судьбах женщин Казахстана, 1920-1930 годы. Интервью с автором монографии

Tatiana Krupa, a Ukrainian archaeologist, historian, and restorer, has extensive experience studying fragments of fabrics that date back to the Golden Horde era. She has done work on fabrics that have been found on the territories of both modern Kazakhstan and Ukraine. This land was once home to Scythians and a lot of textiles were imported from China—particularly silk. In this interview, she talks about her finds and discoveries, as well as her recreation of the costume of a Golden Horde princess.

Interview with

---

Tatiana Krupa

Researcher at the Research Laboratory of Experimental Archaeology and Head of the YMAI International Research Laboratory of Pavlodar State Pedagogical University,

For several years, you have been studying fragments of fabrics found in Kazakhstan that date back to the Kimak-Kipchak and Golden Horde times. You have examined around 100 samples found in Pavlodar province. Tell us about these fabrics—what are they like (in terms of structure, decoration, color, and dye composition)?

I have been studying Kazakh textiles since 2009, when I first came to Kazakhstan. My studies are not limited to archeological textiles. I studied samples of a unique and one-of-a-kind historical textile taken from the old coverlet of the legendary Sufi leader Akhmet Yasawi. I took these samples and studied them more closely in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where at that time I was the head of a small grant at V. Karazin Kharkiv National University. The results that we obtained allowed us to establish when the mausoleum and the khanaka were built.

As for my studies of archaeological textiles and Kimak-Kipchak and Golden Horde-era finds from the Irtysh Steppe, I first saw these textiles in March 2018, when I went to the international forum “Izdeu” and met with my current colleagues. These materials affected me so strongly that in June 2018 I went to Pavlodar for a month to study them. And in 2019, at the invitation of the Pavlodar Pedagogical University, I moved from Ukraine to Kazakhstan.

Since then, I have managed to get acquainted with and study materials from the Irtysh Steppe region and beyond. Among the most interesting finds of the Golden Horde era in Kazakhstan, it is worth highlighting finds from the excavations of the Bolgan Ana mausoleum, which is part of the complex of Dzhuchid mausoleums of Ulytau. These fabrics are all very different! There are fabrics of simple weave, there are brocades, there is damask… Their colors: red and yellow, polychrome… The vast majority of these fabrics are silk. However, this is not surprising. After all, silk is the most durable fabric in terms of preservation in archaeological sites.

Bolgan Ana mausoleum is part of the Ulytau National Historical, Cultural and Natural Reserve-Museum in Karaganda region of Kazakhstan. It also features the mausoleums of Zhoshi Khan and Alash Khan, Zhuban-ana, Duzen, Ayakkhamyr, Dombaul, Khan Ordasy, as well as nine medieval settlements and fortified settlements.

In one interview, you said that the fabrics found in Kazakhstan are similar to those found during archaeological excavations in Ukraine. Tell us about these fabrics—do they also date back to the Golden Horde era? And where in Ukraine were they found?

I am a citizen of Ukraine, and as mentioned above, I moved to Kazakhstan because of my Kazakhstani colleagues’ interest in my research. I am very grateful for this!

I have been working with archaeological costumes and fabrics since the second half of the 1980s. As a historian and archaeologist of antiquity by education, until 2008 I worked on the excavations of Tauric Chersonesus. Antique costume is also the topic of my diploma. And since I am also a bit of a fashion designer, sooner or later I took an interest in archaeological textiles. At one time I worked in the Kharkiv branch of the National Restoration Center of Ukraine. Therefore, many archaeological fabrics from finds in Ukraine passed through my hands. These include materials from the Bronze Age, and Chernigov, and Chersonesus, and the monuments of the Saltov period (8^th-10^th centuries), as well as materials from the excavations of the burial grounds of the late medieval nomads (11^th-14^th centuries) found on the territory of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Zaporozhye region. All of them have been analyzed and the studies published.

Interesting material was also provided by the Ust-Alma burial ground, which dates from the first centuries AD and is associated with Crimean Scythia. For example, the material found in one of the graves made it possible to make a graphic reconstruction of women’s costume of that time. I remember that when I worked with these materials back in the second half of the 1990s, I was struck by the cut of the sleeves and the seam with which women’s costumes were made. An interesting headdress, a calaf, was also found there. It was very fine work!

Scythian textiles from earlier times are also known to us—for example, a red woolen fabric from the barrow of the Caravan barrow group near Kharkiv. Both the barrow and the fabric date from the 7th century BC. I think that the fabric was imported.

Among the interesting finds of the Scythian period, one can name white linen fabric from the mound Bliznets-2 (on the outskirts of the city of Dnipro), which researchers associate with Orik Arimastides (a representative of the royal Scythians). This fabric covered the top of the wooden structure of the burial chamber.

Very bright textiles come from the Middle Ages! I want to note that the centers of textile production (judging by the finds) clearly correlate with the geopolitical interests of that time. For example, at ancient Russian sites (Chernigov or Novgorod-Siversky), we find fabrics of Byzantine production. Silk silver brocade from Chernigov is well known. A feature of this find is the presence on the fabric of an interesting bone button wrapped in silk. If we talk about the monuments of the Steppe belt, which correlate with the nomadic component, then there is Chinese-technology silk. Such finds are familiar to us from the monuments of the Saltovian time (8^th-10^th centuries), including the Netailovsky burial ground (Kharkiv region), or the Golden Horde time (Zaporozhye or Dnipropetrovsk regions).

The Kazakh finds echo existing material from the rest of Eurasia. And this should come as no surprise: all textile production is related to the functioning of a single entity, namely the Great Silk Road.

Perhaps the most extensive collection of archaeological textiles on the territory of Kazakhstan is located in Pavlodar. Chief among these are the excavations of T.N. Smagulov, the director of the Margulan Center of Pavlodar Pedagogical University. There are also archaeological textiles of the Kimak-Kipchak period (9^th-11^th centuries) from the Baidala burial ground (a suburb of the city of Pavlodar). Of interest here is the prevalence of Chinese silk. Even though the mound itself, in which several dozen samples were found, was robbed in antiquity, the remaining finds still allow us to create an impression of the dress that the buried woman wore.

Although research on this material has not yet been completed, we can assume that her dress corresponds to the so-called fashion of East Turkestan and was strongly influenced by the Uyghur Khaganate.

Another interesting finding by our archaeologists was a female headdress from the Mukyr burial site (Pavlodar region). Although the attire itself dates back to the Golden Horde period, after carefully studying it, we came to the conclusion that it is older than the burial site by 100-150 years. Now we are talking about a special type of framed headdresses, which in the Horde period are correlated with the so-called bokka—headdresses of Yuan type. If the latter appeared in our latitudes in the epoch of Ulus Jochi, the find from Mukyr (as well as the famous find of F. Arslanova, the “silver bokka,” which is now stored in Pavlodar) predates it.

Besides Pavlodar finds, I would like to note the unique finds of Kazakh archaeologist A. Kesenalin as a result of the excavations of Bolgan Ana (Ulytau) mausoleum. In this mausoleum, according to scientists, was buried the closest relative of Jochi Khan. Therefore, the study of preserved textiles can shed light on the palace fashion of the Golden Horde. Although the extensive materials themselves are still in the process of preservation, we have made a copy of the preserved elements of the dead woman’s costume from modern materials as close to the originals as possible.

If we are talking about a single type of brocade and silk fabrics circulating across the vast expanse of the Golden Horde, is there any information about who made such fabrics, how, where, and what these fabrics were called? Who wore them?

Who wore them? Given the cost of silk, of course, clothes made from such fabrics were worn by the nobility. In the Byzantine sources of the era of Vasileus Justinian, it is noted that the cost of silk was three times higher than the cost of gold. And even if during the period of Ulus Jochi the market was already more saturated with silks than in the 6th-7th centuries, its cost remained high. In the era of the Horde, we know of several centers for the production of silk fabrics. Such fabrics were made in Chinese trading posts along the main routes of the Great Silk Road—for example, I am currently conducting research that links the current smooth silks in Margilan (Uzbekistan) with the legacy of such production. However, other textile researchers agree that “Chinese technology” does not necessitate their production in China. There are also fabrics of Byzantine origin; indeed, significant space in the famous Byzantine Book of the Eparch is devoted to their production. Such fabrics have been found in ancient Russian monuments, for example in Chernigov. There is another well-known silk production center—Sogd—although not all researchers recognize it as a separate center.

A far more interesting question, in the context of a discussion of ancient brocade fabrics, relates to the technology of manufacturing gold threads. These fabrics are exquisite. Here we know of two technologies: Middle Eastern and Chinese. And they are both fantastic! I have been studying them for a long time using scanning electron microscopy. And in 2009, I was even the head of a grant at the Foundation for Fundamental and Applied Research of V. Karazin Kharkiv National University devoted to this topic. The difference between these technologies is in the way the gold threads are made. Middle Eastern ones are just a strip of metal (with an average thickness of 5-6 microns) made on a thread-base. Chinese threads are made by rolling a strip of metal out on an organic substance (the serous membrane of the intestine of an animal) and only then winding it onto a warp thread. By the way, the average thickness of the metal of these threads, according to scanning electron microscopy, is 0.6 microns.

In the Kipchak Khanate burial site of Guva-2 (Kalmykia), elements of samite costume with images of apostles were found. Finds made of samite (including with the faces of angels and apostles) were also found in other Kipchak Khanate burials (Korotokh, Chechnya, etc.). Do you find samites/aksamites or another type of fabric in your finds? If so, how are they different? Have samites been found during excavations in Ukraine and Kazakhstan? If so, where?

Samites are just a variation of twill fabrics with a pattern. They are well known throughout Eurasia. I have already mentioned the fabrics with which I worked. Of course, there were also so-called samites. At the same time there were a lot of fabrics with golden weft (brocade) and of simple weave. And in Bolgan Ana Mausoleum in Kazakhstan, one can find silk kamka.

It is known that Louis XIV’s clothes were made from spider thread and in 2012 a spider silk dress was woven and sewn especially for the Albert & Victoria Museum. Do you know of any attempts to recreate fabrics similar to those of the Golden Horde era? Perhaps such attempts are being made in Kazakhstan?

Antique written sources mention fabrics (namely linen) made of thread produced by some mollusks. We are talking about linen. This is mentioned, for example, by Josephus Flavius. Silk is different. When we talk about silk, we primarily mean cultured silk, which is produced from the cocoons of mulberry silkworms. But there is also the oak silkworm. Unlike its fully domesticated mulberry colleague (the mulberry silkworm is the only domestic insect in the history of mankind), this wild species has a completely different protein formula of silk. In my practice, I have found such silk once in Ukraine. So Louis XIV was not unique. The materials that date back to the Golden Horde and that I had in my hands are exclusively cultured silk. As for the recreation of fabric, this is complicated. Working with silk is very difficult and requires experience. That is why when silk production centers die, they are not restored.

In 2010, when I first visited Taraz in Kazakhstan, I suggested that silk production could have taken place here in Chinese factories. However, it is not possible either to prove nor to deny this hypothesis. It is connected with the specificity of archaeological sources as such. Simply put, what could archaeologists look for? The cultivation of silkworms? But this is a very simple technology: racks on which mulberry branches and caterpillars are placed. As you know, to find such finds is a rarity. And even finding them is not a 100% guarantee that silk production occurred.

All photos by
Tatiana Krupa

The lives of women in Central Asia before Russian colonization are often portrayed in a miserable light. European travelers did not leave much visual evidence about local women. Women in large cities (Bukhara, Samarkand, and others) did not dare to be photographed with bare faces and were often confined to female quarters. While there are some black and white photos of the Kazakh or Kyrgyz people of that era, which show women dressed in white dresses and elaborate headdresses, there is rarely a smile on their faces. Instead, they look strict and preoccupied. This is no wonder, as they are most often depicted actively engaged in manual labor, busily carrying huge bales and saddling horses.

Author

---

Askar Alimzhanov

Askar Alimzhanov graduated from the journalism department of the Kazakh State University named after S. Kirov. From 1986, he worked as a correspondent for the daily republican newspaper Leninskaya Smena. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the news service of the TV company “Tan.” In 1991, he worked as a reporter for the daily Cape Cod Times in Hyannis, Massachusetts. For a series of articles about Kazakhstan in the foreign press, he received an award from the Union of Journalists of Kazakhstan.

From 1997, he worked as editor-in-chief of the news service of the Khabar agency. Later, he held various positions in the administration of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Mazhilis of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Embassy of Kazakhstan in the Russian Federation, the TV and radio corporation “Kazakhstan,” the Interstate TV and radio company “MIR,” and private analytical centers. He is currently the director of the Central State Archive of Film, Photo Documents, and Sound Recording of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

This virtual gallery is made possible by the generous collection provided by the Central State Archive of Film, Photo Documents, and Sound Recording of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The lives of urban women and the inhabitants of the steppes and mountains were equally difficult. Yet the turn of the twentieth century brought many unexpected changes. In Kazakhstan, specialized women’s educational institutions emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus began emancipation in the steppe. And already at the very beginning of the twentieth century, the first women’s rallies began to take place. In Semipalatinsk on March 18, 1907, the first women’s rally in Kazakhstan advocated for the charter of the emerging society of working women. The full equality of the rights of men and women was officially established by the Bolsheviks at the First All-Russian Congress of Women Workers, held on November 19, 1918. As they wrote then: “Soviet Kazakhstan joined the large-scale campaign to liberate the women of the East.” By 1924, universal suffrage had already been fully implemented in Kazakhstan. This is only four years later than women in the US got the right to vote—and much earlier than in Switzerland, where women won the right to vote in federal elections only in 1971.

The Bolsheviks envisaged mass labor involved in industry—and women were included in this vision. An increasing number of educational institutions began to appear, allowing women to master many professions that had previously been closed to them. Nevertheless, before the start of World War II, most women were employed in agriculture. This was due to the traditional way of life of the Kazakhs and undeveloped industry in Tzarist era.

Starting in 1941, when war broke out between Germany and the Soviet Union, industrial production in Kazakhstan picked up sharply, as the largest plants and factories were evacuated from the western part of the USSR to Central Asia. Workers were needed to man these new factories, and with most men going to the front, women had to take on these jobs.

The role of women during this period cannot be overestimated. Many Kazakh women fought and became heroes! Alia Moldagulova, Manshuk Mametova, Khiuaz Dospanov, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of women like them showed unparalleled courage in the face of a brutal war. Those women who lifted industry and agriculture on their shoulders in these most difficult years can likewise be called heroes. People were malnourished, but they sent everything to the front.

After the end of the Second World War, women’s lives did not improve. The happy photographs of that time—provided by the Central State Archive of Cinema, Photo Documents, and Sound Recordings of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Kazakhstan—are mostly staged. This is in line with the general tenor of the times. Only what was carefully censored was published. Photos of happy workers and their families occupied the central pages of newspapers and magazines. The mass media had to convince people that the country was on the path to prosperity and, of course, personal happiness! People needed to believe that the new world was in the making, all at the hands of the Communists, Komsomol members, and, as they wrote then, representatives of the intelligentsia.

In their parallel reality, women faced many problems. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, food supply was uneven. If in rural areas women could get by thanks to subsistence farming, the situation was more difficult for women living in cities, who faced queues for groceries, a shortage of high-quality consumer goods… The women of that era raised several children while working full-time in Soviet institutions and even advancing science! According to the 1989 census, the average Kazakh woman had five children. Thus, between 1959 and 1989, the population of Kazakhstan increased from 9.2 million people to 16.4 million. (As of 2021, Kazakhstan’s women had an average of three children, and in 2022, the population stands at 19.2 million.)

All these figures, of course, indicate that the well-being of the population has been slowly but steadily increasing—and the photos speak for themselves. As the lambs become larger, working women acquire new uniforms. Brand new tractors appear, as we see in the photo of Hero of Socialist Labor Kamshat Donenbayeva. And finally, in the 1970s, fashionistas arrive! How else can one understand the appearance of photographs of the beautiful Bibigul Tulegenova and Gulfairuz Ismailova looking at the Polish fashion magazine Uroda (“Beauty” in Polish)?

Of course, over the time that photography has existed, the lives and work of women in Central Asia have undergone dramatic changes. Today, the lives of women in Kazakhstan are not much different from those of women in any other country. They face all the same problems: love, family, health, children, work…

All photos by
the Central State Archive of Film, Photo Documents, and Sound Recording of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

The Central State Archive of Film, Photo Documents, and Sound Recording of the Republic of Kazakhstan

– http://kfdz.kz/

was set up almost 80 years ago but has recently expanded to include new collections available in digital form, allowing it to reach wider audiences. How does it strive to present the visual and audial history of Kazakhstan? Askar Alimzhanov, director of the Archive, explains in this interview.

Interview with

---

Askar Alimzhanov

Askar Alimzhanov graduated from the journalism department of the Kazakh State University named after S. Kirov. From 1986, he worked as a correspondent for the daily republican newspaper Leninskaya Smena. He also served as the editor-in-chief of the news service of the TV company “Tan.” In 1991, he worked as a reporter for the daily Cape Cod Times in Hyannis, Massachusetts. For a series of articles about Kazakhstan in the foreign press, he received an award from the Union of Journalists of Kazakhstan.

From 1997, he worked as editor-in-chief of the news service of the Khabar agency. Later, he held various positions in the administration of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Mazhilis of the Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Embassy of Kazakhstan in the Russian Federation, the TV and radio corporation “Kazakhstan,” the Interstate TV and radio company “MIR,” and private analytical centers. He is currently the director of the Central State Archive of Film, Photo Documents, and Sound Recording of the Ministry of Culture and Sports of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Please tell us about the archive itself. What period does it cover, how was it assembled, what categories does it have? What is the access to the materials?

The Central State Archive of Film, Photo Documents, and Sound Recording of the Republic of Kazakhstan has the objective of ensuring the acquisition, storage, and use of film, photo, video, and audio documents that form part of the National Archival Fund of our country. Simply put, we collect, store, process, and restore everything that is of value in photo, film, video, and audio media. Despite the scale of its tasks, the archive is small and compact.

The archive was founded during the most difficult years of war. In 1943, by governmental decree, an archive of film and photo documents of the Kazakh SSR was established. Perhaps one of the drivers of the creation of such an institution was the evacuation of the leading figures of cinema to Alma-Ata. If you recall, that was when the TsOKS (the central united film studio of the country) was created. Initially, the archive was run by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs: the Soviet police and secret police) archive department. And since that time, every documentary film about Kazakhstan that appeared onscreen, every picture published on the pages of newspapers and magazines, photo albums, collections, radio broadcasts or events of historical significance captured on magnetic film—all of them, in theory, should have found a worthy place on the shelves of the archive. But you know, this is an ideal. In real life, not all documents ended up on archival shelves, for different reasons: this remained in private collections, that was not transferred to the archive in time—and there’s a human element to this as well. Nevertheless, a huge heritage of audiovisual material on the history of Kazakhstan has been preserved. In terms of the number of film, photo, and sound documents, our archive ranks first in Central Asia.

In the first days of the archive, the first 30 direct positives were received here. And today there are about 300,000 units of storage of audiovisual documents that are of particular importance for the history of the country.

Next year the archive will celebrate the 80^th anniversary of its establishment. So it brings together more than a century of illustrative history of the country in motion and sound! And all this wealth is in the public domain. You can register on our website and explore the entire catalog. Without leaving your home, you can place an order and receive all the materials you are interested in.

The history and culture of Kazakhstan is often represented in the museums and archives of other countries. Are there any plans for cooperation with foreign archives—especially in Central Asia and Russia? How challenging is this?

Yes, you are absolutely right, many interesting and important audiovisual documents are located abroad.

There are many reasons for that. The fact that it was established in what once was a single large country and the fact that, it must be admitted, the art of photography, audio, and cinema came to us much later than, for example, Europe. Kazakhstan is currently implementing a comprehensive program, Archive 2025, that was developed as the result of a well-known article by the country’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, on the problems of studying Kazakhstan’s heritage. The program was approved by governmental decree in 2019 and essentially funds the technical re-equipment of the archive industry.

The same program also provides for research in the archives of foreign countries of documents that are important for the history of the country. Our employees travel to the largest archives in Russia, where, for obvious reasons, there are many interesting documents. We also plan trips to other countries.

This year, our archive has been replenished with a new collection of digital copies of phonograms made on wax cylinders, which are stored in the Berlin Phonogram Archive of the Museum of Ethnology and Visual Anthropology. This is the earliest audio recording of Kazakh folk music, made in 1905 by the German ethnographer R. Karutz on the territory of Western Kazakhstan. The history of this collection is fascinating and reflects almost all significant events of the twentieth century.

Already this year, the archive has signed cooperation agreements with a number of major film, photo, and audio archives, so our plans are ambitious!

Tell us more about the work to reconstruct photos and other materials.

Of course. This is one of our main tasks. Technology has advanced tremendously. When I was a student, we studied video recordings on VCR devices that weighed over 800 kg. (I know, because we dragged the machine to the third floor!) Then there were VHS, SVHS, Betacam, DV, DVCPRO…and now a simple mobile phone is sufficient to take 4K pictures. Our archive preserves the entire documentary film stock of the Kazakhfilm and Kazakhtelefilm film studios. Film stock can become moldy over time. Before digitizing such material, it must be cleaned. Here we have some of the finest technologies—I won’t go into detail. And all this is restored, restored, and even digitized for longer and more reliable storage. Our specialists (without false pathos, I can say this is the pride of the industry) can convert the original film material into 4K format, which is most in demand today. By the way, almost 40% of the total volume of stored documents have already been digitized. And this work continues.

Occasionally, public activists and private collectors may also help collect photographs, private photos, postcards, and other materials. One such project is https://ca-photoarchives.net/. How do you feel about such collaborations?

Most of our archive is made up of private collections. We are open to any collaborations because people should see this heritage, study and use it not only for scientific purposes. Moreover, we encourage people to bring us interesting documents of historical or artistic value. We will digitize the source materials and return the originals, if necessary. It is usually impossible to store rare photos or videos or audio materials at the right temperature and in special conditions at home, while our archive could ensure that your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have the opportunity to see it!

In general, do you agree that there is a lack of materials on the visual history of Kazakhstan? Do you think that these should be available to the public (sometimes it is difficult to find even a photograph of the decoration of a yurt in the public domain)? Could the opening of archives contribute to the popularization of Kazakh culture at home and abroad?

To be honest, I don’t quite agree that there is a lack of materials in the visual history. It seems to me that the term “lack” is not quite applicable. The visual story is what it is. What is preserved is preserved. Another thing: maybe it is not how we would like to be represented in the virtual space. Here we can agree. But many collections of major archives have been digitized and are already in the public domain—including ours. You just need to go to the website and go through the registration procedure to start your journey into the past. So the archives in our country are open and accessible. It seems to me that the issue is a lack of demand. A real serious story is yet to be uncovered. So far, so-called folk history and myth-making are popular. Claims that everyone descended from the Kazakhs, that our history has been carefully rewritten and hidden, are very common … And it would be fine if it were only on social networks, but we even publish books that claim to prove that Genghis Khan, Attila, Tomiris, and even the Golden Man were purebred Kazakhs. It’s funny, of course, but what will it lead to? I really hope that these are the growing pains of our society.

What interesting collections have you discovered in the archive? What topics do you think could be explored more with visual materials?

To be honest, I started my job quite recently. But before my appointment, I had many projects where I had to conduct research in the archives of different countries. And then we were surprised that few people are genuinely interested in these collections. Take, for example, a yurt donated by the Kazakhs to the then-future Emperor Nicholas during his famous journey from Japan. It has never been exhibited in Kazakhstan! Or take the aforementioned wax rollers from Berlin. After all, no one was interested in them. The ethnographic records of Akhmet Zhubanov, which he made in his student years, are still not in demand by anyone. And there are many such examples.

As for the interesting collections of the archive, have you ever heard the voice of Mukhtar Auezov? His 1965 radio speech dedicated to the freedom-loving people of Ukraine and Taras Shevchenko is simply amazing in its relevance! Have you ever seen the youthful joint photograph of famous Kazakh writers A. Tazhibaev and B. Momyshuly? The arrival of the first steam locomotive in Alma-Ata is a spectacle in no way inferior to the Lumiere brothers’ famous documentary “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”! So there are many topics for research. But all this requires knowledge and serious preparation.

Kazakh culture and Central Asian culture (which often overlap) are very visually impressive. What else can we do to promote them to the rest of the world?

I agree that a unique culture has developed in Central Asia. But to be honest, I am a supporter of a slightly different approach. There is no need to insist that the world recognize our culture. Our culture is self-sufficient. And it will become interesting to the rest of the world only when we ourselves become immersed in it. After all, culture is not only concerts and exhibitions abroad, not only the publication of expensive volumes and expensive shows. Culture is, first of all, a process of self-knowledge. As soon as we rethink ourselves in culture, realize ourselves as part of a vast and diverse world, stop being isolated in our cocoon, then we will become interesting to others. We often try to make the world look at us, but in my opinion, we must first learn to look at the world with our own eyes!

A revolutionary spirit, an opponent of imperial and Soviet power, and a supporter of the idea of an independent Ukraine, Fyodor Shcherbina was one of the first scientists sent by the Tsarist regime to study the colonized Kazakh steppe. Even though his study was well-grounded and thoroughly researched, it led to the wrong conclusions. As forced Russification continued, along with the gradual stripping of lands from local people in favor of the Russian peasant-settlers, the tensions in the Kazakh steppe grew until they erupted in 1916.

Author

---

Pavel Shabley

https://chelyabinsk.academia.edu/PavelShabley

Dr. Pavel Shabley – Associate Professor of the Kostanay branch of the Chelyabinsk State University. He is specializing in the history of Muslim societies, he published articles on the regional and confessional policy of the Russian Empire in relation to internal Asian territories in such journals as Ab Imperio, Islamology, Acta Slavica Japonica. His joint book with Paolo Sartori “Эксперименты империи: адат, шариат и производство знаний в Казахской степи” [Experiments of the Empire: Adat, Sharia and the Production of Knowledge in the Kazakh Steppe] was awarded by Ab Imperio in 2019. 

“The History of Russia Is the History of a Country that Is Being Colonized”

Vasily Klyuchevsky (1841–1911), Russian imperial historian

The advance of the Muscovite state, and then the Russian Empire, to Siberia, the Far East, and Central Asia was only natural. The cultivation of new agricultural lands, as well as the pacification of new subjects by turning them into settled residents and converts to Orthodox Christianity, was seen as a necessity for the state and part of Russia’s civilizing mission [1]. The Kazakh steppe was no exception. After the accession of the Younger and Middle Zhuzes in 1730 and the Senior Zhuz in the mid-19th century, the authorities put significant effort into the administrative and legal integration of the new territories and their economic colonization. The resettlement of a significant number of Russian peasants from the inner provinces of the empire was supposed not only to solve the issue of land deficit, which had led to food shortages and hunger, but also to establish a new pro-government social base in the newly colonized regions.

Mass migrations of Russian peasants to the Kazakh steppe began in the 1880s, in parallel with mass confiscation of land from the Kazakhs. In its efforts to accelerate the process of peasant colonization, the government paid little attention to the social tensions between settlers and local nomads. This is not, however, to suggest that the Russian government behaved recklessly: before embarking on peasant colonization, the government undertook careful study of the characteristics of local land use to determine the scope of the so-called “free land.” This study was carried out by a special commission headed by the well-known zemstvo statistician Fyodor Shcherbina.

Fyodor Shcherbina and His Entourage: A Social Portrait against the Backdrop of a Difficult Era

Fedor Andreevich Shcherbina was born on February 13, 1849, in the Cossack village of Novoderevyankovskaya (formerly part of the Black Sea Cossack Host). After graduating from the Black Sea Theological School and the Caucasian Theological Seminary, he joined the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy. A supporter of socialist ideas, Shcherbina was once an activist opposing the imperial order: he participated in student protests and led revolutionary agitation among the common people (the so-called “going to the people”). As a result, he was arrested and sent into exile in the Vyatka and then in Vologda province (1877–1880).

While in exile, Shcherbina delved into science. He was interested in the life of the Russian peasants and the structure of their communes, and published his observations in such well-known publications as Otechestvennye Zapiski and Russkie Vedomosti. Following his release, he was accepted into the service of the Voronezh Zemstvo as a statistician [2]. During his career, Shcherbina authored more than 100 works. The most significant among them include: “Peasant Budgets,” “Free Collection,” “Kyrgyz Nationality in Places of Peasant Resettlement,” and “Explanatory Note to the Data on Surplus Lands used by the Kyrgyz in the Northern Part of the Kustanai District” [3].

In 1886, Shcherbina became the head of a special commission sent to the Steppe Territory. Paradoxically, the government selected a person with an anti-imperial political reputation to perform a task of extreme importance. Indeed, his opinion was to play a decisive role in the colonization of the eastern regions of the empire. His expertise was considered extremely important: in the service in the Voronezh province, Shcherbina had developed a pioneering “budget” method for studying the peasant economy that made it possible to assess the financial consumption and costs of individual farms [4]. Moreover, when the government hired political exiles, it did so not only because there was a shortage of qualified professionals; they also wanted to create a new language—not burdened with bureaucratic concepts—to describe social and economic processes. N.M. Yadrintsev described well this situation: “It was a time when the administration and bureaucracy willingly resorted to the help of writers, scientists, and researchers. The atmosphere of bureaucracy was thus ventilated by access to fresh air and an independent look” [5].

Unsurprisingly, the Shcherbina expedition included people from a wide intellectual, social, and ethnic circle. To collect materials about the traditions and customs of the Kazakhs, he engaged members of the Kazakh intelligentsia, led by A. Bukeikhanov, a prominent Kazakh politician and scientist who was the leader of the Alash party and a member of the First State Duma. Among the other members of the expedition were such talented scientists and politically unreliable personalities as L.K. Chermak and A.F. Gusev. A.N. Sedelnikov, a member of the Russian Geographical Society who was a great expert on the steppe region, also took part in the survey of the Kazakh steppe [6]. Altogether, T.P. Petrova estimates that the expedition was made up of about 200 people, excluding translators [7].

Expedition

Between 1896 and 1901, the Shcherbina expedition studied the twelve counties of the Steppe General Governorship: Omsk, Petropavlovsk, Akmola, Kokchetav, Atbasar, Semipalatinsk, Pavlodar, Karkaralinsky, Ust-Kamenogorsk, Zaisansky, Kustanai, and Aktobe. The study completed a comprehensive household census of the entire Kazakh population of these regions. It also managed to assess the area devoted to pasture for nomadic aul communities.

An extremely important task of the expedition was to produce a budget accounting of the food consumption of the average Kazakh family. This entailed studying not only economic needs, but also local resources: terrain, soil, vegetation, water sources. The area of each surveyed nomadic camp was assessed in accordance with the seasonality of camp movement: winter, autumn, spring, summer. These areas were grouped according to common qualitative characteristics. For each group, it was necessary to estimate the amount of land each Kazakh household needed to feed livestock and thus the total area needed for one Kazakh household. By comparing these data with the land areas used by the Kazakhs before the work of the expedition, conclusions were drawn as to whether there was a land surplus or shortage in each district.

The total area of the counties surveyed by the expedition amounted to 45,889,000 acres. Of these, the Kazakhs were offered 23,297,000 acres, while slightly less (22,592,000 acres) was allocated to Russian peasant-settlers [8].

In its studies, the expedition pursued two fundamental goals: a) to outline the future of the Kazakh steppe under Russian rule; and b) to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the effect of economic colonization. In this regard, the expedition members concluded that colonization could bring benefits not in the short term, but in the long term; forced rates of colonization could lead to the destruction of the Kazakh economy and a reduction in the population as a whole. Second, due to the peculiarities of local natural and climatic conditions, a settled agricultural culture could not be ubiquitously enforced. It was therefore proposed to preserve nomadic pastoral farms in a number of regions of the Kazakh steppe [9].

Shcherbina himself spoke about the importance of this work: “The most important results obtained by the expedition were expressed primarily in the fact that the expedition firmly established the forms of Kyrgyz land use.”

The findings of the expedition were published as “Materials from the Study of Kyrgyz Land Use and Economy Collected and Developed by the Expedition for the Study of the Steppe Regions.” The volume contained materials covering 8 of the 12 counties studied: historical and ethnographic information; demographic and socio-economic data; information on the development of animal husbandry; agricultural and agrotechnical information; land use data; and topographic, hydropathic, and geobotanical data.

Shcherbina himself spoke about the importance of this work: “The most important results obtained by the expedition were expressed primarily in the fact that the expedition firmly established the forms of Kyrgyz land use. Before the work of the expedition, neither in the Steppe Order [signed in 1868 – P.Sh.], nor in the practice of local institutions, there were indications of the existence of a land community among the Kyrgyz, with the corresponding areas of actual land use in living border tracts. Before the work of the expedition, there were also no materials on this subject” [10].

A few words should be said about the contribution of the Kazakh members of the expedition, who were critical of the colonization projects of the Kazakh steppe and expressed alternative points of view. Alihan Bukeikhanov conducted research work in Omsk, Pavlodar, Karkaralinsky, and Semipalatinsk counties. In particular, he studied the volosts of Kyzyltau and Altybai, as well as the Pavlodar district. Studying the tribal structure of Kazakh society, Bukeikhanov compiled a table of county clans, established when the Kazakh population began to settle in the region, and marked on the map the settlements of the existing clans [11]. He also collected materials on the oral folk art of the Kazakh steppe. Bukeikhanov expressed disagreement with the conclusions of the research. He was against the policy of Russification, but still advocated the gradual transition of nomads to a settled way of life. He thought the simultaneous development of nomadic pastoralism and agriculture were unacceptable, as they could lead to a crisis among Kazakh households [12].

Outcomes: “Impeccably Done” and/or Significant Shortcomings

One of the most important achievements of the expedition was the development of a new methodology for economic research: the sampling survey method. With the help of this method, Shcherbina produced a formula to determine the needs of the family-household and the amount of land normally required to meet these needs. To describe the specifics of Kazakh life, the expedition produced a detailed monographic description of individual auls and entire community-aul groups.

The scientists comprehensively studied the history, socio-economic and economic structure of the land community; conducted a census of the population; looked at the structure of zhuzes and clans; explored the development of cattle breeding depending on climatic conditions; established the location of Kazakh clans and tribes and compiled a map of their traditional location on the boundless expanse of the steppe; described steppe culture; and discussed the features of land ownership and land use. Contemporaries spoke highly of the budget data obtained by the expedition. A.A. Kaufman, who inspected the activity of the expedition, wrote in his report that he considered this part of the work to be “impeccably done, with the skill that one would expect from such an expert on budget studies as F.A. Shcherbina, and I do not have the slightest remark about it” [13].

Yet the results of the Shcherbina expedition were revised over time and even subjected to critical evaluation. It all started in 1901, when the Ministry of Agriculture and State Property found the norms of land allotments proposed by the expedition to be inflated towards the Russian side. The government decided to give the Kazakhs not 23,297,000 acres, as suggested by F.A. Shcherbina, but a little more: 29,121,000 acres [14]. All this indicated that the government thought it was necessary to re-study the features of land use in the Kazakh steppe.

Local Kazakhs, too, seem to have found the expedition’s estimates too low. On May 8, 1908, an article entitled “The Muslim Agrarian Project and Its Principles” was published in the journal Siberian Question. The author of the work (writing under a pseudonym) stated that the land norms proposed by F.A. Shcherbina were calculated not to propose the land allotment to the nomad, but to fix them and thus “protect the existing forms of nomadic economy” from the future land withdrawals[15]. The government, in turn, did not follow the recommendations of the expedition and, following the Stolypin agrarian reform of 1906, launched a massive seizure of Kazakh lands [16].

Geniuses or Villains of the Preceding Era: The Fate of Fyodor Shcherbina

At the turn of the twentieth century, Fyodor Shcherbina resumed social and political activity. In March 1902, he became one of the members of the liberal opposition. This led to renewed arrest and exile. This time, he was exiled to his native lands in the Black Sea province. In 1907, Shcherbina was elected a deputy from the Kuban Cossack army. He headed the Cossack faction in the State Duma. But Shcherbina opposed the October Revolution of 1917 and the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power. He even took part in the armed resistance: on February 28, 1918, he joined an armed force under the command of Colonel V.L. Pokrovsky, known to history as the “ice campaign.” In 1920, Shcherbina emigrated as part of the Kuban delegation to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. From 1921 he lived in Prague. He worked as a professor at the Ukrainian Free University, serving as its rector from 1924 to 1925. Not only was Shcherbina interested in scientific activity, but he also became famous in the literary field. He wrote poems in Ukrainian, including “Chernomortsy” and “Bogdan Khmelnitsky.” He died in 1936 in Prague and was buried at the Olshansky cemetery [17].

Conclusion

Shcherbina’s life and the activities of his expedition marked an important period in the economic, political, and social history of the Russian Empire in general and of the Kazakh steppe in particular. A revolutionary, a scientist, a writer, an opponent of Soviet power, and a supporter of the idea of an independent Ukraine, Shcherbina was a product of his time—with all its contradictions and limitations. He followed the regime’s orders to study an unknown region out of a desire for knowledge and discoveries, to serve the interests of society and the people. Shcherbina’s revolutionary views did not, however, conflict with his approach to the analysis of the future of the Kazakhs under imperial rule. Here, he was a supporter of the policy of Russification and the gradual withdrawal of local lands in favor of the peasant settlers from the interior provinces.

His expedition had some other important points. As a result, the authorities became aware of the benefits to be found in developing the field of statistics and a number of applied sciences related to agriculture and economics. Significant funds were allocated from the state budget to finance other scientific projects closely related to the study of the natural-climatic, economic, and ethnographic features of the eastern regions of the Russian Empire. In this regard, one can even agree with Francine Hirsch that expert research (not necessarily only ethnographic research, as in her study) had a direct impact on the design of state policy in relation to different ethnic and social groups [18].

References:

1. Khodarkovsky, Michael. Essay. In Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Indiana Univ. Press, 2004, pp. 8-12

2. Dmitriev, A., Koritsky E., Shcherbina F. (edited by E.B. Koritsky). Экономисты русской эмиграции. Учебное пособие [Economists of Russian Emigration]/ St. Petersburg, 2000, pp. 56-61.

3. Tasilova, N. «Материалы по киргизскому землепользованию…» – как источник по истории Казахстана (конец XIX в. – начало XX в.) [Materials on Kyrgyz land use… – as a source on the history of Kazakhstan (end of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century)]. Almaty, 2022, p. 18.

4. Campbell, Ian W. Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731/1917. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017, pp. 130-131.

5. Remnev, A., Suvorov, N. Колонизация Азиатской России: имперские и национальные сценарии второй половины XIX – начала XX века [Colonization of Asiatic Russia: Imperial and National Scenarios of the Second Half of the 19th – early 20th centuries]. Omsk, 2013, pp. 136-139.

6. Tuleuova, T. “Алихан Букейханов и русская демократическая интеллигенция конца XIX – начала ХХ веков: точки соприкосновения и взаимовлияния” [Alikhan Bukeikhanov and the Russian democratic intelligentsia of the late 19th – early 20th centuries: points of contact and mutual influence]. Accessed May 14, 2022. http://human.snauka.ru/2016/10/17036.

7. Tasilova, N. «Материалы по киргизскому землепользованию…» – как источник по истории Казахстана (конец XIX в. – начало XX в.) [Materials on Kyrgyz land use… – as a source on the history of Kazakhstan (end of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century)]. Almaty, 2022, p. 76.

8. Myrzakhmetova, A. “Исследовательская деятельность переселенческого управления в Казахстане в начале ХХ века” [Research activities of the resettlement administration in Kazakhstan at the beginning of the twentieth century]. Accessed May 14, 2022. http://articlekz.com/article/5120.

9. Campbell, Ian W. Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731/1917. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017, p. 133.

10. Tasilova, N. «Материалы по киргизскому землепользованию…» – как источник по истории Казахстана (конец XIX в. – начало XX в.). [Materials on Kyrgyz land use… – as a source on the history of Kazakhstan (end of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century)]. Almaty, 2022, p. 45.

11. Tuleuova, T. “Алихан Букейханов и русская демократическая интеллигенция конца XIX – начала ХХ веков: точки соприкосновения и взаимовлияния” [Alikhan Bukeikhanov and the Russian democratic intelligentsia of the late 19th – early 20th centuries: points of contact and mutual influence]. Accessed May 14, 2022. http://human.snauka.ru/2016/10/17036.

12. Tasilova, N. «Материалы по киргизскому землепользованию…» – как источник по истории Казахстана (конец XIX в. – начало XX в.) [Materials on Kyrgyz land use… – as a source on the history of Kazakhstan (end of the 19th century – beginning of the 20th century)]. Almaty, 2022, p. 71.

13. Kravchenko A. Бюджетные исследования Ф.А. Щербины [Studies of the Budget of F.A. Scherbina]. Academy, 2016. No. 6, p. 61.

14. Myrzakhmetova, A. “Исследовательская деятельность переселенческого управления в Казахстане в начале ХХ века” [Research activities of the resettlement administration in Kazakhstan at the beginning of the twentieth century]. Accessed May 14, 2022. http://articlekz.com/article/5120.

15. Аden, A. Критика мусульманского аграрного проекта 1908 года [Criticism of the Muslim Agrarian Project of 1908]. Accessed May 14, 2022. http://e-history.kz/ru/news/show/32468.

16. Abdurakhmanov N. “Негативные стороны аграрных преобразований в Казахстане в период столыпинской реформы и их последствия для казахского населения” [Negative Aspects of Agrarian Transformations in Kazakhstan During the Period of the Stolypin reform and their Consequences for the Kazakh population] Accessed May 14 2022. http://articlekz. com / article /18396.

17. Nesmachnaya, S. Федор Андреевич Щербина [Fedor Andreevich Shcherbina]. Stavropol Chronograph, 1999. pp 50-55.

18. Hirsch, Francine. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005, pp. 14-21.

Monomakh’s Cap used to crown the Russian tsars. Created in the early fourteenth century, the cap is topped by a simple gold cross, inlaid with precious stones, and trimmed with sable. Its origins are debatable, but Guzel Valeeva-Suleymanova argues that the symbolic crown of the Russian tsars was originally a Tatar female wedding headdress made by Golden Horde craftsmen in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.

Interview with

---

Guzel Valeeva-Suleymanova

Sh. Marjani Institute of History, Kazan

Guzel Fuadovna Valeeva-Suleymanova– Soviet and Russian scientist; Doctor of Arts, Professor, Honored Scientist of the Republic of Tatarstan (2007). Chief Researcher at Sh.Marjani Institute of History of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences

Research interests: history of Tatar decorative and fine arts, architecture; Muslim art in the Volga-Ural region; studies of ethnic arts. Author of many scientific works, including several monographs.

 Wikipedia

The cap is composed of eight triangular gold plates with the apex cut off and with holes at the edges to fasten them to each other. It has a velvet lining. The plates are decorated with a sophisticated pattern using applied filigree and granulation made of the finest gold wire and inlaid with rubies, emeralds, and pearls. Originally, it had pendants descending on the forehead (according to the memoirs of Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, Ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, who visited Moscow in 1517) and the cap was topped with a rod. In the sixteenth century, this rod was replaced with a cross, and in the seventeenth century the sable fur trim appeared.

The ornamentation of the cap (a lotus, a six-pointed star with a 12-petal rosette inscribed in it, a seven-petal rosette, leaves, and guilloché ornament), the technique of applied filigree (when framed spiral patterns are combined with scrolls twisted from left to right and on both sides of a plant shoot ornament), and the granulation technique – all are present the family of artifacts of the Volga region and Crimea from the fourteenth century. They are visible evidence of the Golden Horde’s school of jewelry craftsmanship. Details (ornamental motifs, the shape and method of stone setting) of women’s headdresses from the Simferopol hoard show affinity with the Monomakh’s Cap and its ornamentation; the filigree technique used on items found in excavations and hoards in Volga Bulgaria; and the so-called “Bukhara plaque,” all of which are jewelry works attributed to the Golden Horde. The ornamental motifs (lotus, six-pointed star, and guilloché ornament) can also be seen in works of Mamluk art of the Golden Horde Khanate period.

A certain principle is revealed in the decoration of the cap: four of the eight sectors feature a lotus motif, three of them in the front. The other four sectors bear the motif of the six-pointed star. Gold kolt pendants (an element of female headgear that hung at both temples and was common in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries as a sign of a family’s wealth) with a filigree openwork pattern in the form of a lotus flower from the city of Bolgar are the closest analogue to this motif; other lotus images appear on architectural tiles found in Bolgar, Saray-Batu, and other Golden Horde cities

The six-pointed star motif, for its part, appears in the ornamentation of architectural monuments in Bolgar city (the Sufi khanaka “Black Chamber”), Bulgar tombstones of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, pottery, and bracelets. The flower rosette motif, meanwhile, can be found in Bulgar metalwork from both the pre-Mongolian and the Golden Horde eras. Thus, the complex of ornamental motifs used in the cap’s décor are integral parts of the art of the Golden Horde and can be found on items belonging to the nobility of the city of Bolgar, as well as other cities of the Volga region and the Crimea. They also appear in Mamluk art.

We can find mention of the cap in the will of Ivan Kalita (1288-1340): “And of my clothes, to my son Semyon a red pearl jacket, a golden cap (…)” Kalita is known for his diplomatic relations with the Horde. In your opinion, could the cap have been a gift of Uzbek khan to Ivan Kalita or did it belong to the Mongol Princess Konchaka (baptized as Agafia), sister of the Uzbek khan and wife of Ivan’s brother Prince Yuri Danilovich? In other words, what is known about the origins of Monomakh’s Cap?

The cap was first mentioned in the 1340s among the expensive clothes and various precious objects owned by Moscow Prince Ivan Danilovich (known as Ivan Kalita), the grandson of Alexander Nevsky, who ruled from 1325 until 1341. According to one chronicle, Ivan Kalita blessed his elder son, Simeon Ivanovich (nicknamed Proud), with a golden cap. This cap is mentioned, among other written sources, in the spiritual letters of the Russian tsars as movable property to be left to the heirs. From Simeon, the eldest son, the headgear passed to his wife, and then to Simeon’s brother Ioannes II and his son, Dmitri Ivanovich Donskoy. Dmitry passed it on to his son, Vasily Dmitrievich. Thus, the golden cap was bequeathed by the great princes of Moscow to their eldest sons, starting with Ivan Kalita. In 1462 the headgear is mentioned by Vasily II, nicknamed Dark. Under Vasily III there emerged a legend that the cap was donated to Kiev Prince Vladimir Monomakh by Byzantine Emperor Constantine Monomakh (the latter died 50 years before Vladimir became prince). In 1498 Ivan III crowned his grandson Dimitry with golden headgear called Monomakh’s Cap.

The cap became a symbol of the centralized power concentrated in Moscow; it evidenced the might of the Russian state, which by that time had rid itself of subjugation to the Tatar khans. All Russian tsars up to and including Peter the Great were crowned with it. In 1721, when Peter the Great proclaimed Russia an empire, he changed the ritual of the crowning ceremony: the cap was carried ahead of the coronation procession.

How did the cap come to be inherited by Ivan Kalita? In my view, it occurred as a result of the marriage between khan Uzbek’s sister Konchaka and Ivan’s brother Yuri Danilovich. Having married Prince Yuri, Konchaka converted to Orthodoxy and became Agafia. In 1317, Yuri brought his wife Konchaka from the Horde and received the title of khan’s son-in-law. As the historian Solovyov reports: “Not without reason did Yuri live in the Horde […], he was able to get close to the khan’s family and married [the khan’s] sister, Konchaka, who was called Agafia when she was baptized… The khan’s son-in-law returned to Russia with strong Tatar ambassadors” (Soloviev S.M. Istoriia Rossii s drevnejchikh vremen, Spb.,1851-1879: 907). Konchaka met a tragic fate: after losing the battle with the Tver prince Mikhail Yaroslavich in December 1317, her husband Yuri Danilovich fled and Konchaka was captured in Tver, where, according to rumor, she was poisoned (Ibid: 308). According to chronicles, Konchaka-Agafia was buried near Rostov.

The khan granted Yuri Danilovich a label of the Grand Prince of Vladimir in 1318 but Yuri Danilovich was assassinated in 1325 by Tver prince Dmitry Mikhailovich, who, to justify himself, told Uzbek khan that Yuri had collected tribute and held it for himself. As he had no children, Yuri’s heir could only be his brother: Ivan Danilovich (Kalita). Thus, the assumption first expressed by the American scholar George Vernadsky—that Monomakh’s Cap belonged to Uzbek khan —has a solid foundation. The only thing that was not taken into account was the cap itself, which originally had a slightly different appearance: it featured pendants descending to the forehead, it was not furred, and it was not topped with a cross. In my opinion, the cap was Konchaka’s wedding headdress and was adapted from a female headdress into royal regalia.

How justified is the claim that Monomakh’s Cap was a woman’s headdress?

This is evidenced, first, by the pendants, as Ambassador Herberstein, who saw the cap, states: “The pileus (hat of a conical shape) is called a shapka in their language; it was worn by Vladimir Monomakh. The shapka is adorned with precious stones and wonderfully made of gold plates that wriggle like a snake” (Zapiski o Moskovii barona Gerbershtejna, Spb 1866: 37). The pendants are a must-have attribute of Turkic women’s headgear. Second, this version of events is supported by new archaeological and ethnographic materials describing the art of Volga Bulgaria, the Golden Horde, Crimea, the North Caucasus, the Tatars of the Volga-Ural Region, and kindred Turkic peoples (Nogais, Turkmens, Chuvash).

Important evidence includes details of Golden Horde female headdresses from the famous Simferopol hoard, which is in the collection of the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Fragments of a golden female headdress and a silver headdress top decorated with pearls and precious stones have been found in the hoard. The similarity between the headdresses from the aforementioned hoard and Monomakh’s Cap in terms of the way in which the stones are affixed to the top and to the sockets of the shatons, as well as the ornamentation of the shatons with scalloped scrolls in the form of circles, is striking.

The head ornament from the Simferopol hoard consisted of 19 shaped plaques sewn onto a now-defunct cloth base. Like Monomakh’s Cap, it was decorated with pearls, sapphires, amethysts, and emeralds. The positioning as well as the fastening of the metal cylindrical rod on the top of the two caps is similar, which allows us to conclude that the rod on the top of Monomakh’s Cap always belonged to it and was not, as Mark Kramarovsky has claimed, a later addition to it. The cap’s top and its ornamentation do not mesh stylistically with the rest of the decoration of the cap. Whereas peacock and owl feathers were placed on the top of Turkic female headdresses, a cross was inserted in the top of Monomakh’s Cap instead of the pre-existing feathers.

Shaped as a truncated hemispherical cone, the cap with pendants corresponds to Turkic female headdresses—taqiyya for Tatars and takhya for Turkmens; it can be found among the Chuvash, Udmurts, Bashkirs, and Turkmens. Such a headdress, with sewn-on coins and a silver cupola reinforced on the top, was known to the Nogai as a maiden’s cap. Its main decoration was kupba, a silver top in the form of a dome with a rod (for holding the feathers of an owl) and silver pendants. Such a headdress was worn before marriage; it was replaced after a girl’s wedding with women’s headgear. If a maiden’s cap had no feathers, it meant that the girl was betrothed. The tradition of decorating headdresses with owl feathers, also known to the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and semi-nomadic Uzbeks, is connected, according to researchers, with the Kipchak ethnic background of these peoples.

Ibn Batutta, an Arab traveler who visited the cities of the Golden Horde, reports that “noble Tatar women wore a golden circle on top of their hats, decorated with peacock feathers and studded with precious stones.” The Spanish ambassador Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, who visited Timur’s headquarters, left a description of the headgear of the eldest queen, Sarai-Mulk-khanim. It was a kind of tall helmet beautifully decorated with different gems, above which was “a little arbor” with three rubies, from whence proceeded a tassel of white sultan feathers tied with gold thread and with stones and pearls at the end. This description calls to mind Monomakh’s Cap, the top of which is likewise inlaid with gemstones.

The excavations of the Belorechensk kurgans in the North Caucasus, which date to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, revealed pointed female headdresses with a cone-shaped crown and a lunula on a rod, with pear-shaped pendants on chains. The tradition of crowning female headdresses with bird feathers is connected with the influence of Kipchak fashion, although the appearance of hemispherical headdress with plaques, coins, and pendants relates to the ancient Sarmat-Alanian or (according to Sergey Tolstov) Scythian/Sarmatian culture. This tradition was developed in the Saltov culture of the Volga Bulgars in the tenth to twelfth centuries, as well as in the ethnographic materials of the peoples of the Volga-Ural region and some Turkmen tribes.

In “response” to my article “Korony russkikh tsarei—pamiatniki tatarskoi kul’tury” (Crowns of the Russian Tsars: Monuments of Tatar Culture), published in 1997 and proving the Golden Horde origin of the headgear, archaeologist Natalia Zhilina published her book Shapka Monomakha. Istoriko-kul’turnoe i tekhnologicheskoe issledovanie (Monomakh’s Cap: Historical, Cultural, and Technological Research). In her book, the author seeks to prove the Byzantine origin of the cap, describing its origin as “eastern,” not Golden Horde or Turkic-Tatar. The author does not use any ethnographic materials on headdresses of Turkic peoples, nor take into account serious arguments concerning the history of the headgear’s design changes. Therefore, the arguments for the Tatar origin (made by Spitsyn, Vernadsky, and Kramarovski) and the headgear’s status as a female headdress (Konchaka’s wedding headdress) remain legitimate even today.