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Abstract

The Russian conquest of Central Asia brought face to face two very different worlds: very traditional local culture and technologically much more advanced European one. Greatly diverging reactions emerged all along the line of the contact. By default, those who were able to collate the traditional religious and ethnic identities of Central Asia with new technological and economic realities gained most out of this historical collision. With the problem posed this way, the first thing that comes to mind is Jadid movement. Yet before this broad political and cultural stream formed in Central Asia, there were multiple individuals who tried to solve the very same problem of collating two different tendencies in their lives. Some of them quite early found solutions that were to became norm in the later Jadid movement. These historical figures can be considered the first “enlighteners” of Central Asia.

According to the figurative expression of Devin DeWeese, "It was a Dark and Stagnant Night (‘til the Jadids Brought the Light)", and I mostly agree, with a little modification - 'til the Enlighteners Brought the Light. Here we will enter the little-known period of pre-Jadids Enlighteners and try to clarify the situation by using the example of Muslim judge Sattarkhan.

Sattarkhan (known in literature mostly as Sattarkhan Abdulgafarov) was a significant figure already before the Russian conquest. He completed his religious education in Tashkent and eventually became the mufti of Chimkent. After the Russian conquest of Kokand Khanate, he was made the Qazi of Kokand. Subsequently, he taught at a Russian-language school for indigenous Central Asians (Russko-tuzemnaia shkola). After years of service, Sattarkhan retired with an administrative rank of Governor Secretary (Gubernsky sekretar). It would be, however, a grave mistake to describe Sattarkhan's career as a simple transition from the position of Muslim spiritual leader to that of Russian bureaucrat.

Contradictory opinions about Sattarkhan expressed in literature are often based on isolated documents and ignore cultural and political discourse of the 19th century Central Asia. I propose revisiting all available documents authored by Sattarkhan and his contemporaries. The documents cover a broad spectrum of Sattarkhan's opinions and career, which themselves reflect the number of changes that occurred in Central Asia during the end of the 19th century. Most importantly, the documents reveal not only what changes occurred, but how the population of Central Asia thought of and reacted to them.

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Abstract

Aži Dahāka, both the mythical creature and an evil foreign tyrant recorded in the scriptures of Zoroastrianism, descended from the Proto-Indo-European dragon-slaying stories, is considered the king of Babylon in the Avesta and gradually ruled the land of Arabs during the period of Middle Persian. The direct reason for such change is based on the knowledge about the Babylonians and the Arabs of the Zoroastrians. However, the conception and knowledge between 'foreign' and 'domestic' remain two questions: Is Zoroastrianism a national religion? How did Zoroastrians consider the difference between realistic and ideological territories? Also, the memory descended from the shared myth of Indo-Iranian people influenced the acquaintance with the foreign worlds. With the help of studying the change of the territory of Aži Dahāka recorded in scriptures and literary works, this paper aims to study the views about territory, politics, and the relationship between religion and nation between the time of Indo-Iranian period and the Arab Conquest, from the Zoroastrians chronologically. Although there were several times reign changes, the knowledge and memory of understanding the remembrance of the mythological and religious ancestors helped build an important historical understanding for the Zoroastrians, which might also be their opinions for the national people to learn about their history.

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Focusing on Türkiye's recently declassified diplomatic archival records for the years 1933-1950, this works explores how that nation-state positioned itself geopolitically and otherwise toward Xinjiang region ''Turkic Islamic Republic of East Turkistan (TIRET)” and ''the Second East Turkestan Republic (SETR)”. During this period, China was at its weakest—struggling to protect its borders, and having lost a significant part of its territory to the Empire of Japan. This was also a time when Türkiye was trying to establish itself as a secular republic on the ashes of the Islam-based Ottoman Empire. Türkiye’s endeavor to establish itself as a secular republic involved a concerted effort by the Kemalist state to revolutionize the country at every level.

The diplomatic records studied here indicate that, culturally, Türkiye wanted to spread the new Turkish alphabet consisting of Latin letters and to collect works written in Turkish from the Xinjiang area; geopolitically, it wanted to establish and sustain respectable relations with the Republic of China without disturbing its relations with the USSR. While trying to carry out its social and cultural activities in the region in coordination with the Chinese authorities, Türkiye attempted to maintain its distance from Xinjiang's separatist movements, which it viewed to be radically religious. Türkiye also considered these movements to be a tool that other countries had been using to manipulate it as well as China--including in regard to one another.