How many of you have had the pleasure of trying to convey a very basic understanding of Central Asia to a friend or acquaintance with no prior knowledge about the region? (”Yes, they are Muslims, no, they aren’t Arabs, etc.”) For those of you living in Central Asia, the answer is probably not a whole lot. But for outsiders like me, the reality is that many people have at best heard of Borat, or “some crazy guy” in Turkmenistan.

Given that most non-specialists aren’t going to invest a huge amount of time into a dense scholarly text, what is the best read to most efficiently and entertainingly gain an appreciation of Central Asia? I recently picked up Monica Whitlock’s Land Beyond the River to assess its purported merits for just that purpose.

The short answer is that it fits the bill. Monica Whitlock is a journalist, and as such, it is better written (and more engaging) than academic texts. Whitlock follows several historical figures from present-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century.

By tracing the Islamic scholar Hindustani, the intellectual Sadr-e Zia, and their descendants over the past century, Whitlock touches upon all of the century’s crucial historical events, focusing in greatest depth on the decade and a half since the breakup of the Soviet Union. Along the way, she brings events from secondary sources to life and contributes a lot of new information to the table from original reporting as well.

Though her treatment is relatively brief, I particularly enjoyed her depiction of the final days of the Bukharan Emirate through the eyes of Sadr-e Zia. Imprisoned by Amir Alim Khan for his intellectual pursuits (after the Amir threw his lot in with the Ulama), Zia spent three years from 1917-1920 in prison. He returned to a broken shell of Bukhara under siege by the Red Army, the architectural devastation presaging the dramatic lifestyle changes to come.

Whitlock also has some interesting information in the book about Central Asians in World War II, a topic about which there is practically nothing published. She follows the lives of ordinary Central Asians, initially sent to play support roles in the war — like digging trenches and cooking — but later, after the Soviets had taken considerable losses, sent to fight as well.

Other highlights — to name a few — include a history of the basmachis, a rather illuminating treatment of Tajikistan’s civil war, a skeptical introduction to Karimov’s war on extremism,

The lack of almost any information on Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Turkmenistan, and the fact that it has already been slightly dated since it’s publication in 2002, probably damage this book’s credentials as a stand-alone volume of mandatory reading for the initiated, but I am at a loss to suggest a substitute.

Does anyone out in the ’stanosphere have another suggestion for a single entertaining work capable of elevating someone from “Borat is funny” to differentiating between the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, and the Bukharan Emirate?

Event Report: Princeton History Professor Stephen Kotkin

Stephen Kotkin, Professor of History Professor and Director of Russian & Eurasian Studies at Princeton University, gave an excellent, and in many ways provocative, lecture at George Mason University several weeks ago. Kotkin’s lecture was largely based on an article forthcoming in Kritika, which you can access through this link (PDF). In his lecture, he challenged not only the direction of the field of Eurasian studies, but the term “Eurasia” itself. Instead, he proposed “political exchange” and “imperial legacy” as an alternative framework for analysis.

Does that sound like a lot of academic jargon? Read on and I will try to explain what he is getting at.
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The new issue of Steppe has been dispatched to subscribers and arrived in my mailbox this morning (Ollie in Berlin received his today, too). Like the first issue, the new one greets the reader with a splendid cover. No surprise here, as it’s one of Christopher Herwig’s magnificent snapshots.

The contents of the second issue are as varied as they were last time around. While I have only managed to flick through the 114 pages over coffee, this promises to be great leisurely reading. Among the highlights:

Hamid Ismailov rereads and rediscovers Aitmatov’s Jamilia thanks to a newly published English translation, David Chioni Moore retells black poet Langston Hughes‘ travels in Central Asia in the 1930s, Matthieu and Mareile Paley visit Kyrgyz nomads in the Afghan Wakhan Corridor, Andrew Lawler discovers Victor Sarianidi’s amazing excavations in Turkmenistan, and Gulnara Abikeyeva presents her top-ten Central Asian films of all times.

You can subscribe to Steppe here. Back issues are also available for sale I think, just drop them a line.

Update: The writers of the magazine read blogs, too. In Josh Abrams’ report about Nauruz, it says:

This [Rakhmon’s recent cultural policies] is raising new fears that the Tajik president is leaning towards the [..] governance style of Turkmenistan’s recently deceased president […]. At least Rakhmon hasn’t asked to be called ‘Tajikbashi the Great’. Yet.

Editor’s Note: What follows is part of a cross-blog survey about minorities in Central Asia. This post, written by Josh Foust, is cross-posted at The Registan.

What is there to say about a country that is, technically, all minorities? For not a single ethnicity in Afghanistan breaches the magical 50% mark to become a true majority, and this has created friction, at the least. Indeed, in one sense, the story of Afghanistan itself is really the story of how its minorities battle for control, power, and the right to live.

By any common definition, the Pashtuns are Afghanistan’s ethnic majority, though they are really only a plurality. And much of Afghanistan’s recent history is the story of their struggle for national and tribal independence. For any discussion of the Pashtun must include a discussion of its tribal divisions, which have played major roles in Afghanistan’s power relationships. As but one example, President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban’s erstwhile leader Mullah Mohammed Omar are members of the Popalzai and Hotak tribes respectively, both centered around Kandahar. The history of conflict between their two tribes reaches back centuries. In 1715, Mirwais Khan Hotak overthrew the local Persian governor of Kandahar, and his son formed an Empire that eventually sacked the ancient capital Isfahan. In 1747, Ahmah Khan Abdali, of Karzai’s Popalzai tribe, was crowned King by a tribal Jirga.

Put differently, much of the fighting in Afghanistan today can be seen as simply the latest stage in a centuries-long conflict between Pashtun tribes.

Reducing Afghanistan to tribal warfare, however, is too simplistic. Abdali (who took the name Durrani and created the royal heritage the Taliban lay claim to in 1994) was named King because the ruler of the Persian Empire, a Turkmen named Nader Shah, was murdered. Today, however, the Turkmen are a comparatively miniscule slice of Afghan ethnicity, whose biggest contributions were to Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance, first against the Soviets, and later against the Taliban.

Massoud is perhaps the gold standard of Afghanistan’s ethnic warriors. A Tajik, the so-called “Lion of the Panjshir,” fiercely defended his home in the Panjshir Valley just north or Kabul for decades, until the Pakistani-funded Taliban drove him north to Feyzabad. Massoud earned a name for himself, and became the pride of Tajiks in Afghanistan, by remaining resolutely independent in his struggle for independence. (more…)

Editor’s Note: What follows is part of a cross-blog survey about minorities in Central Asia.

In a 21st century where nationalism, separatism, and multiculturalism are as strong as ever, it is easy to overlook the inherent mutability of ethnicity. This is especially true in Central Asia where terms such as “Tajik,” “Kyrgyz,” and “Uzbek” meant something very different less than a century ago, and terms like “Sart” and “Teptiar” no longer have any meaning.

As part of neweurasia’s latest survey on Central Asian minorities, this post will look back on the deliberate process enacted by the Soviet Union to create ethnicities and nationalities with the ultimate intention of eliminating them entirely.
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Carleton College Professor Adeeb Khalid presented a his research on November 15th titled “Understanding Soviet Islam: Religion, Nationality and Citizenship in Soviet Central Asia” at George Mason University. His lecture was based on extensive research for a book coming out in January that will be the only narrative history of Islam in Central Asia during the entire Soviet period.

Khalid’s principle argument was that the Soviet Union had a profound impact on Central Asian Islam and made the region unique in the Muslim world. This point may seem intuitive, but was presented as a counterargument to an outdated understanding of Soviet Islam that argues: (1) the Soviets were fundamentally unsuccessful in their project of transforming Muslim consciousness; (2) Islam remained a force of opposition to Soviet ideology; (3) Soviet Central Asians were either Sovietized atheists or traditional Muslims outside the system.

Khalid began the lecture by dispelling several common myths about Soviet Islam. First, he said that Islam used as a label so totalizing as to be almost useless as a term; there are infinite possibilities of interpretation and practice. Radically opposed ideologies can be equally rooted in legitimate Islamic sources. He noted that this is also true of any other religion, and in fact, because Islam has no formal church or clergy, diversified opinions and practices are even more common.

Secondly, it is commonly believed that Soviet Central Asia was completely isolated from the outside world. According to Khalid, this is fundamentally untrue. Many Muslims from neighboring countries studied in Central Asian cities such as Tashkent, though it should be noted that they were carefully selected by the Soviets and were predominantly studying science and engineering.

He began the main part of his lecture by positing that the Soviet experiment was actually far more successful than many give it credit for. His narrative was divided into three main periods.
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The recent, and the first visit of Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan has drawn attention to a possible cooperation between Japan and two Central Asian countries. In particular, Koizumi’s visit before stepping down as a prime minister was supposed to secure oil, gas and uranium deals for his country.

Few know though about the connection between Japan and Central Asia that existed long time ago, after the second World War, when several thousand Japanese war prisoners were sent to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for forced labor.

Japanese army had never participated in demolition of Soviet cities and villages (it had only fought in the environs of Lake Hasan), but the Japanese POWs were involved as labor force at construction sites throughout Uzbekistan. 20, Yakassarai Street in Tashkent is an address mentioned in all reference books on Central Asia published in Japan. This is a museum dedicated to the presence of Japanese POWs in Uzbekistan in the wake of World War II.

Both in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Japanese laborers were involved in major post-war construction projects. In Uzbekistan, they built the Navoi Theater and Mukini Theater, the textile factory, the telegraph station, building of the Ministry of Culture in Tashkent, and factories in Chirchik. In Kazakhstan, the Japanese who lived in barracks behind Panfilov street in Almaty, built the airport, Turksib house with original towers, the building of the Academy of Sciences, and posh “dachas” for NKVD and MVD workers.

“Studying archives for data on Japanese POWs, I noticed that they have their backs to cameras on most photos,” founder of the museum Jalil Sultanov said. “Officially, all these objects including the dam across the Syrdarja and others were constructed by local personnel and the Japanese were not supposed to be there.”

Being friendly and hardworking, the Japanese war prisoners established good relations with local communities. Kids exchanged apples and sweets for buttons and toys created by the Japanese, as LJ user megakhuimyak remembers from his dad’s stories in his entry about Japanese in Balkhash (RU). The “Lifestory of a Young Akkordeonist” by Satubaldy Narymbetov, a Kazakh film director, made in the 1990s, at the peak of the so-called “New Wave” movement in Kazakh film industry, features a story of about 300 Japanese who came to a Kazakh village for work. The main character’s father was put in prison accused of spying for the Japanese, as a result of their joint tea and vodka sessions. That was one of the versions of what could happen when members of two distant communities are brought together by a random turn of the history.

This is the last part of a series that tried to shed some in-depth light on the process of national delimitation which created the majority of Central Asia’s present-day boundaries. While often said to be an arbitrary process directed by Moscow in order to quell unrest - the reality was by far more complex. The involvement of local elites, while usually largely neglected, seems to be much larger than taken granted before. Let’s have a look at the two most disputed stretches of land: The Ferghana Valley and the Tajik AO.
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After having discussed the need for national delimitation, the underlying ideology, and the year 1924, this post will look at problems connected to national delimitation and their differing interpretations. (more…)

The last two parts of this series looked at the apparent need for national delimitation in Soviet Central Asia and the ideological principles behind it. The third part will look at the year the process of redrawing Central Asian borders took place - 1924. (more…)