[Book Review] Niccolò Pianciola and Paolo Sartori (eds.), Islam, Society and States across the Qazaq Steppe (18th-Early 20th Centuries), Wien Verlag der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenshaften, 2013 (original) (raw)
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The historical event rooting Islam among the Turkic population living in the territory of present-day Kazakhstan is the proselytism of the Sufi saint of Turkestan, Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi, to whom all dervishes and bakhsy (mediums) of Kazakhstan make reference during their summoning of the ancestral lineages. But the appearance of A. Yasavi during the 12 th century is the crystallization of five centuries of Muslim activities that occurred at the North of the Syr Darya from the first victorious expedition of the Arabs at the battle of Talas (751) to the reorganization of the Muslim communities during the rule of the tolerant but pro-Buddhist Karakitai (12 th c.). The diffusion of Islam on the territory of present-day Kazakhstan is connected with the acceleration of the urbanization, the development of trade and the appearance of a new way of life during the Samanid and Karakhanid rules. The centers of sociability of this new way of life were mosques, public baths, mausoleums, bazaars; craftsmanship played a much important role than before. The sources for the reconstruction of the early Islamization of Kazakhstan are historical, archaeological and literary. The historical material is coming from the Arab-Persian and Turkic accounts with and also the Chinese sources, very laconic, but with key descriptions found in the dynastical annals and traveler records. The archaeological sources are represented mainly by architectural remains (mausoleums, mosques and baths), ceramics and tombs but also by numismatic and epigraphic material. Finally, one of the richest sources of information is coming from the Khwaja hagiographical and genealogical histories of southern Kazakhstan, the "nasab-namas", which can be fruitfully compared with ethnographical sources. There are also interviews made during Soviet times and during the last decades of sufi masters and bakhsy describing their religious affiliation through chronological events sometime similar to well dated historical episodes. 1. The four phases of Islamization In our knowledge, the five centuries from the mid-8 th century to the mid-13 th century can be divided in four phases of Islamization. The first one is the Pre-Samanid phase (750-820) when Sogdian emigrants and heterodox Muslim schools of Mawarannahr find refuge in present-day South Kazakhstan. The second one is the Samanid phase (820-960)..
Shabley ancestors (äruaq),8 and the popularity of Sufi brotherhoods,9 just to name a few. These ongoing processes heightened the diversity of Islamic religious practices and shaped the religious elite that consisted of the Kazakhs10 (mullahs, khojas11) as well as the Tatar,12 Bashkir, and Central Asian ʿulamāʾ. All these religious groups and their leaders had different levels of training in Islamic sciences and varying experiences of interacting with fellow believers within the Russian Empire and beyond. Their perception of imperial influence on Islamic communities was likewise diverse. Still, many ʿulamāʾ and administrative institutions (for example, OMSA) were eager both to profit from the changes that followed the Kazakh steppe's integration into the Russian Empire and to preserve conventional Muslim traditions and communications. The differential interactions among the religious elites and imperial officials ensured that authority and power relations changed more dynamically and unpredictably in the colonial context than in societies not functioning under non-Muslim rulers.13 Appealing to sharīʿa is one way to facilitate the functioning of authority and power relations in Muslim communities. In the Kazakh steppe, such appeals involved a blend of behavioral modes and strategies: contrasting sharīʿa and ʿādat as a way of fixating differences between law (i.e., written rules) and "savage 8 Kazakh ancestral spirits came to be assimilated to, and to be known by the generic designation for, the spirits (äruaq < Ar. arwāḥ) of Muslim saints and prophets; the ontological proximity of these categories manifests itself clearly in those cases where the saints, much like the ancestral spirits, appear to humans in dreams.
Islamic Central Asia: An Anthology of Historical Sources
Central Asian Survey, 2010
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2016
The purpose of the article is the introduction and critical study of new materials about Qazaq political and commercial relations with the Central Asian khanates. This article is primarily based on the Bukharan narrative sources as well as archival documents in the Turkic and Russian languages from the Central State Archives of Kazakhstan (Almaty), which contain material not yet analyzed from our perspective. These primary sources contain the most important and comprehensive information on the various aspects of the history of the Qazaqs and their relations with the Central Asian principalities in the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries. Relations between Qazaq khans and other Central Asian khanates took various forms. The periods of military conflict between Qazaq Jüzes and Central Asian khanates and mutual attacks alternated with periods of peaceful neighbourly relations. Some Qazaq khans and sultans found in the Central Asian khanates a refuge from their pursuers; others maintained vassal relations with the Central Asian states.