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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.