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Abstract:

My paper approaches the topic of Shi‘ah slavery in the 18th and 19th Bukhara and Khiva from a comparative perspective. During my PhD research, I came across different accounts on Shi‘ah slavery in feudal, colonial and national historiographies. For this paper, I compare these sources to shed light on understudied facets of Shi‘ah Slavery in Central Asia. A number of Khivan and Bukharan chronicles, and British and Russian travelogues are shortlisted and studied for this paper. On top of that these accounts are critically examined against the Soviet Tajik writer Sadr al-Din Ayni’s fictional work Ghulaman (the Slaves). Studying Shi‘ah slavery demystifies several historical problems concerning modern Tajik-Persian identity in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

My research findings suggest that Bukhara and Khivan (feudal) historical sources either take a legitimizing stance on Shi‘ah slavery or remain silent on the politics of slavery in Khiva and Bukhara. It is in colonial sources that we get to learn about Shi‘ah slaves, their origins, their social and political status in Bukhara and Khiva, and the entire political economy of slavery. Sadr al-Din Ayni’s Ghulaman is a fictional work that attempts to fill the historical gap preserved in the precolonial and colonial sources. Only here, we get a new perspective that Persian slaves were not necessarily from Qajar Persia or Shi‘ah faith. The Shia Persian slavery undoubtedly had consequences for early Soviet Tajik politics. When the unity of Shia and Sunni Persians was critical to fight Uzbek nationalists’ anti-Persianism, they remained fragmented. It is the preponderance of Uzbek elitist politics that Tajiks were redefined as Sunni Persian and Shi‘ahs as Iranians. It is again due to the dominance of elitist politics that Tajiks were further fragmented into subgroups with different names such as Sarts, Qizilbashes, Aymaqs, Dehgans, Chatraris, Badakhshis, Herawis and so forth.

With the regard to the wider implications of this research, I believe that this case study unravels the complexity of politics of marginal groups, their vulnerability against elitist politics. Due to methodological nationalism, often national identities such as Uzbek and Afghan are represented as natural champions of nation building processes. This study challenges methodological nationalism by demonstrating that it is actually national ideology which covers the hegemonic nature of the dominant group’s identity politics. One has to approach this issue from the margins to understand the true nature of nation building, in this case in Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

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My paper discusses the history of the Samarkand Kufic Quran, which claims to be the Quran of Uthman, the third Caliph. After the Russian Army conquered Turkestan and forcibly took the Quran from the Muslims of Turkestan back to the Imperial Library in Saint Petersburg, what was once exclusively a locally-recognized artifact used to legitimize a specifically-Turkestani set of Sufi practices become recognized as the authentic Quran of Uthman by Muslims all throughout the Russian Empire. Following the October Revolution, using an extensive set of Russian-language archival sources never-before used for historical research, I describe how various Muslim organizations (such as the Tatar-dominated Ufa Spiritual Assembly and the Jadids of Tashkent) varyingly competed with one another in appealing to the Bolsheviks in Saint Petersburg to secure a "return" of the Quran. Based on the varying circumstances of the Russian Civil War, the Quran was first "returned" to Ufa, and then later to Turkestan, where Soviet cadres sent down from St. Petersburg fought with local Muslim Communists as to the future role of the Quran, and whether it should be returned to a mosque for religious use or instead put into a museum as a historical artifact. Finally, once the Soviet center had firmly cemented its control over Turkestan, the Quran was indeed put into a museum as religious practice was suddenly severely curtailed. Nevertheless, the story of the Samarkand Kufic Quran did not end there, as the Quran almost simultaneously obtained an incredibly important role in Soviet diplomacy with the Muslim-majority nations of the global South, including with the Turkic Muslims of Xinjiang, who petitioned the Soviets for a facsimile copy of the Quran, which the Soviets put on display in their consulate in Tarbagatay for pilgrims to come worship. During these visits to the Soviet Consulate in Xinjiang, Soviet embassy staff delivered lectures to the local Muslims about the "falseness" of rumors circulating in Xinjiang about the oppression of Islam in the USSR.

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The paper explores the late imperial and early Soviet collecting and curatorial practices in the mountainous region of Georgia known as Upper Svaneti. This region is often imagined as an archaic space, preserving unique artifacts of Christian and Islamic art, all of them typically categorized as Church treasures. Inspired by Connal McCarthy’s central argument in his monograph on the history of colonial cultures of display, I aim to demonstrate that while collecting in the Caucasus was a colonial project, it was a multi-dimensional and contested endeavor and 'never an unchallenged tool of settler rule" (McCarthy, 2007). Questioning the traditional dichotomy of center vs. periphery, I argue that local agency was enacted through a network of actors, both human and non-human, pushing for or evading the museification of ancient treasures. According to Alfred Gell, art objects possess agency by acting as mediators in social interactions. While objects do not have intentions as humans do, they can still exert influence over human action (Gell, 1998). Furthermore, the supposition that material artifacts significantly contribute to the exercise of power, as Timothy Mitchell argues in his famous Colonising Egypt (Mitchell, 1988), could be applicable not only to the colonizers but also to the colonized. Here I examine the generation of nationally minded intellectuals, ethnographers, and historians from Tiflis who collaborated with imperial academic institutions surveying the region. I look at their collecting activities, as well as the engagement of various layers of Svan society that 'attempted to steer the process towards their ends” (McCarthy, 2007). In my analysis, I rely on a wide variety of sources, including archival documentation from Tbilisi and Mestia (Upper Svaneti), letters from family archives, reproductions from published catalogs, travelogues, my field notes, and a specific collection of objects assembled and preserved at the Church of Lagurka of Kala community in Upper Svaneti.