It is an absolute honor and pleasure to write a few words about Devin DeWeese and his intellectual trajectory, which has influenced and inspired all of the contributors to this volume, as well as many others. Beyond his formidable intellectual achievements as a scholar, the volume should reveal the admiration of his students and colleagues over the years for his kindness, good humor and attention. Those of us who have explored the fields of the history and religion of Inner Asia and Central Asia have done so taking into account Devin’s work, and always benefiting from his friendship, and drawing from his example as of what good scholarship should be.
Devin was born in 1956 in Indianapolis Indiana, into a family with roots in nearby Putnam County. His mother worked as a nurse, and his father owned a photography studio. Devin grew up in Speedway, a suburb of Indianapolis, and attended high school there. He benefitted from good math and English teachers in Speedway’s public schools, but it was the example of his father that first lured him toward appreciating the world outside of Indiana. Devin’s first learned of foreign cultures and history through the experience of his father, who served during the Second World War in India and Burma with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) training Burmese to take photographs behind Japanese lines. His father developed a keen interest in the beauty and complete unfamiliarity of India and Burma, where, drawn by his own curiosity he developed a taste for photographing the countries in which was stationed, and their inhabitants. After the war he brought home photographs of temples and villages which attracted him as something strange, enthralling and captivating. These photo albums made Devin aware that there existed different and fascinating worlds beyond the United States; but more importantly, his father’s natural curiosity served as an example that unfamiliar, and seemingly alien cultures, far from being something uninteresting or even vaguely threatening, were something to approach, admire, and perhaps even seek to understand.
Devin became interested in history, like many American boys, through family trips to Civil War battlefields – in his case through a trip to Gettysburg and Washington D.C. in 1962. However, he was also strongly interested in amateur astronomy. His introduction to religion was through his family’s membership a local Protestant church. Early on he became conscious of and attracted to the language of the church, and would later confess having “a religious bent.” His experience with Protestantism, and the church he was a member of, made him believe that religion was a natural aspect of humanity, and of human communities. Already in junior high school he was reading bible commentaries.
Through a friend of his older brother, Devin began familiarizing himself with non-Christian religious traditions. This friend, an “eccentric musician” was interested in music, philosophy, theater and religion, and together they visited the local Bahai community in Indianapolis. At that time, Devin bought his first book on religion, a survey of the world’s religions, which included a chapter on Islam, and expanded his reading to include English translations of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
In the fall of 1974 he began classes at Indiana University, Bloomington, and institution with which we would be associated his entire career. His declared major was astrophysics, but almost immediately he switched to a double major in Religious Studies and History. He later credited this switch to an introductory class on Eastern Religions with the Sri Lankan specialist on South Asian religions J. Patrick Olivelle. It was in 1975 that he began taking classes in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, initially with Denis Sinor and Larry Moses, as well as with the Russianist Charles Halperin. In addition to Olivelle, the undergraduate professor who was to have the greatest influence on Devin was Victor Danner, who taught the Religious Studies Department’s courses on Islam and Sufism.
Devin married his wife, Sandy, in 1976 (their daughter, Kate, was born in 1987, and their grandson, William, in 2020), and obtained his B.S. in 1977, after which he entered the Master’s program in the Uralic and Altaic Studies Department, where he worked initially with Denis Sinor. His study of Turkic languages began with Turkish classes with Ilhan Basgöz, and Ottoman classes with Gustav Bayerle. He studied Persian with Brad Martin. At that time 1980, Professor Sinor had brought Mary Boyce to the department, a major figure in Zoroastrian studies, who introduced Devin to the pre-Islamic religious traditions of Central Asia. Later, he studied Uzbek, Chaghatay, and Old Uyghur with Larry Clark. By January 1981 Devin had finished his course work and had passed his qualifying exams, but had not decided on a dissertation topic. At this point he had started familiarizing himself with the sources for Central Asian Sufism by consulting manuscript catalogs and taking extensive notes on the works of Vasilii Bartold.
It was in January 1981 that Devin first met Yuri Bregel, who was to come to Bloomington the following year to join the Uralic and Altaic faculty as its Central Asia specialist, and who would be the single most important scholarly influence on Devin, as well as his advisor, colleague, and until Professor Bregel’s death in 2016, close friend. Before Professor Bregel’s arrival, Devin later confessed, his own approach had lacked rigor, and, as he put it, “Yuri was totally instrumental in me getting serious.” At this point, Devin was aware that Islamic manuscripts that constituted the basis was of any serious study of religion, and history more generally, of Islamic Central Asia. He became actively engaged in obtaining manuscript catalogs and manuscript microfilms from archives and collections in Europe. Professor Bregel moved to Bloomington from Israel in October 1981, when they began working on Chaghatay. They agreed on Devin’s dissertation proposal based on the study of the Kashf al-Hudā, a medieval Chaghatay text on Sufism from Khorezm. The following spring, Professor Bregel obtained funding to systematically identify and collect copies of Central Asian manuscripts. It was also in 1982 that Devin applied and was accepted for a year-long IREX exchange to work in the manuscript collections of Tashkent and Dushanbe.
The exchange was almost cancelled because of the Soviet downing of a South Korean airliner in September 1983, however, he made it successfully to Moscow, and from there boarded a train at the Kazan Station, and travelled to Tashkent, via Kuibyshev, Orenburg, Kyzylorda, and Turkistan. In Tashkent he worked with Yelena Poliakova and Buri Akhmedov, among others, and had a very productive time reading manuscripts and establishing microfilm exchanges between Soviet institutes in Tashkent and Dushanbe, and the Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies (RIFIAS) in Bloomington. However, he also took advantage of his time in Uzbekistan to visit shrines, and observe first-hand religious life in Soviet Central Asia. It was his experience observing Central Asian religious life that made him begin to question the then-influential studies of Alexandre Bennigsen and his students, and that lay the empirical groundwork for his subsequent critiques of much of the scholarship on Soviet Islam.
He returned to Bloomington in the spring of 1984, and defended his dissertation the following year, after which taught his first lecture class, titled “Islam in the Soviet Union.” In 1986 he became a faculty member in the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, initially teaching Uzbek, and well as courses in Central Asian and Inner Asian religion. He taught in the Department from 1985 until his retirement in December 2019. During that time, in addition to teaching numerous courses on various aspects of the history of religion in Central Asia, he served as the director of the RIFIAS from 1997 until 2008, where he continued the work of identifying and collecting Central Asian manuscripts. During his time as a faculty member of the Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies (since renamed Department of Central Eurasian Studies), Devin published in 1994 his highly regarded and influential work, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition. His other major contributions include a collected volume (edited with Jo-Ann Gross), Sufism in Central Asia, further redefining and reorienting approaches to the topic.
Devin’s impact on his colleagues and students is to be found in the example he has shown for honesty and seriousness in scholarship. But above all, it is his generosity with time, his warmth, and his unfailing good humor and kindness that are the reasons for the enthusiastic support this project received as soon as it was proposed.
Allen Frank