Introduction Devin DeWeese as a Scholar
The Golden Horde conversion legend alluded to in the title of Devin DeWeese’s Islamization and Native Religion describes the Sufi-shaman-saint Baba Tükles entering Özbek Khan’s red-hot oven and emerging unscathed, thus convincing the Mongol ruler to embrace Islam. “It is precisely this dramatic event,” he writes, “so replete with symbolism of ordeal and deliverance, that constitutes the ‘formative’ moment for the new community created by the conversion of Özbek Khan.”1 The contributors to this volume could say much the same thing about the impact of Devin’s scholarship on the study of Central Asian religion, for his pathbreaking theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to numerous constituencies within the field have truly made possible the cohesion of a community of scholars dedicated to grappling with the region’s history and sources in all their intricacy.
Devin DeWeese’s decades of research, publications, and presence in the field have influenced in as many ways every scholar who has read his work or who knows him personally. Devin himself has alluded – sometimes in detail – to his method, and to his theoretical and practical points of departure in several important articles constituting critiques of existing scholarship. The purpose of this brief essay is to situate his ongoing critique of the study of religion in Central Asia within the fields of Islamic and Soviet studies.
Perhaps the most effective and attractive aspect of Devin’s approach as a scholar is his ability to combine the methodologies of history, religious studies, and philology, while at the same time foregoing extended and self-indulgent deliberations on method that too often obscure, rather than clarify, understanding. Nevertheless, on closer inspection Devin’s theoretical and practical methods can be easily discerned from his works. At their core we find three interrelated strategies: 1) the discipline of religious studies, or, more specifically, the history of religion; 2) philology, in particular the study of the classical languages of Central Asia, Persian and Chaghatay, and their literary heritage, including their manuscripts and their compositional genres; and 3) history, above all his painstaking and critical analysis of the Islamic manuscript tradition.
His application of the discipline of religious studies, or Religionwissenschaft as it was originally known, is central to his approach. At its core, the idea of the religious stems from the proposition that religion – religious feeling, religious expression, and religious actions – is an irreducible human phenomenon, or, as Devin has put it, is something “natural” in people and their societies. This assumption constitutes the foundation of his critique of much of previous and ongoing scholarship on Central Asian religion, including ideologically informed Soviet approaches based on historical materialism, but also modernist and post-modernist approaches that downplay or isolate religion in its historical or social context, if they do not simply ignore it. The religious studies approach permeates all his work, but his 1994 study, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde, most clearly reveals the strength of this method to reevaluate, challenge, and define our understanding of Islam in Inner Asia through the problem of Islamization and its meanings.
A graduate student in Russian history once, tellingly, sought to distinguish Devin’s method as a historian (and that of his students) as “source-based history.” While a great deal can be “unpacked” from this statement intended as praise – little having to do with Devin’s method as a historian – it does reveal that his emphasis on uncovering primary sources, particularly manuscripts, and his research on these sorts of works, was distinctive, at least to some historians in the field. Devin’s mentor, Yuri Bregel, once disarmingly told a graduate student, “If you want to study Central Asian history, it’s easy. Just read the sources.” By putting rarely-used Chaghatay and Persian sources back at the heart of a field that had long privileged later Russian sources and “received wisdom,” Devin’s groundbreaking work challenged scholars in the field to themselves explore this historical literature, or at least take it into account (a challenge most enthusiastically accepted by the contributors to this volume).
Central to Devin’s scholarly output is a sustained “source-based” critique of the existing approaches to the history of religion in Central Asia. Devin’s career as a scholar took off during the last years of the Cold War, and already in his early works we can find an informed and convincing critique of some of the cruder Soviet approaches to religious history. More significantly, we find an enduring critique of assumptions in Western scholarship that sought to enlist the religious history of Soviet Muslims and their ancestors on the “Western” side of Cold War rivalry. Devin early on offered an alternative to a Sovietological approach that uncritically reproduced categories developed by Soviet analysts, freeing numerous young scholars, both in the West and in the ideologically and soon-to-be politically moribund USSR, from such constraints. He thus played a critical role in energizing a new generation of scholars to themselves try their hand at “source-based” history writing. In connection with his critique of Cold War frames of reference, and their enduring popularity among many scholars, his demolition of concepts such as “pre-Islamic survivals,” “Islamized shamanism,” the “religion vs. nationality” proposition, as well as his emphasis on the communal, collective, aspects of Central Asian religion analyzed through the prism of Sufi communities, have all enabled scholars to rethink and challenge much of the historiography of Central Asian Islam. In so doing, Devin, perhaps more than any other scholar, set in motion a new exploration of hagiography and literary sources. This new social, cultural and religious history stood on the shoulders of an important body of earlier work, most notably the writings of Wilhelm Barthold, Ol’ga Chekhovich, and Yuri Bregel, but now bringing in new methodological approaches, many of which are evident in the essays of this volume.
Devin’s scholarship not only offers an antidote to much writing that is ill-conceived or insufficiently “source based,” he reminds historians of Islamic Central Asia’s remarkable historical continuity. This continuity is both chronological and geographic. Devin’s deep reading of the manuscript heritage enables him to make meaningful connections between the modern and the medieval eras. He shows how religious debates and issues of the modern era had their antecedents in the medieval era, and how issues of religious community, religious power, and religious ideas sometimes reveal a direct line from the modern era to the medieval. Despite differences in material circumstances and political constitutions (indeed, even these differences can be overestimated), he has not only demonstrated this religious continuity, but he has also revealed that many Central Asians remain aware of it. On this point, Devin once advised a graduate student that it was important simply “to listen to people.” He emphasized that Central Asian Muslim voices were too often ignored, that their veneration of Muslim saints too often was interpreted as “really” a pre-Islamic survival, that hagiographical tales or conversion narratives were “actually” outlandish fantasies devoid of real meaning. “Listening to people” is clearly the first task of any cultural historian, and is a central feature of Devin’s scholarship.
Devin has also emphasized the region’s geographical and cultural continuum as an Islamic ecumene gradually split up by colonial powers and nation states. He has described the expansion and transformation of this medieval Islamic ecumene, eventually extending from the Volga-Ural region and Siberia to India and Afghanistan, and beyond. In particular, he has traced its expansion in the medieval era through its Islamization narratives, and the evolution of Sufism across its expanse. In so doing, he has encouraged younger scholars to extend his approach outside of Central Asia, to the Volga-Ural region, Daghestan, Siberia, India, Afghanistan, and Iran. Many historians and political scientists exclude modern Central Asia – that is, Soviet and even post-Soviet Central Asia – from consideration as part of the “Islamic world” on the basis of assumptions about religion and religiosity, and of the Soviet experience. By “listening” to what Central Asians say about their own heritage and communities, Devin suggests, scholars can conceptualize Islam as a discursive framework, i.e., as a foundation of communal affiliation, and as a body of actions and values that has endured among Central Asians since the medieval era. Under such circumstances, to deprive Soviet Muslim society of meaningful Muslim status betrays a failure to “listen.”
The chronological scope of the contributions in this volume testifies to the resonance of Devin’s scholarship for students of religion writ large. As a scholar whose research has primarily been rooted in the medieval and early modern periods from the 10th century CE to the end of the Soviet period, Devin has consistently, with characteristic modesty, qualified his observations about modern times with an insistence that the “heavy lifting” must be left to others, and that his reservations about much of the scholarship dealing with the contemporary era stem from an empirical grounding in earlier periods. This introduction’s authors, who are primarily engaged with Islam over the past three centuries, therefore have emphasized his pivotal role in shaping the study of Islam in recent times, and particularly in charting a radical new course for the study of Soviet Islam. However, his groundbreaking work on Central Asian Sufism, rooted in, but not limited to, the medieval era, has influenced these scholars’, and others’, work on the modern era by establishing, in concrete terms, an historical continuum generally elided in the few general works devoted to the region, in which the modern era is too often depicted as sufficiently “different” from the medieval that historians can simply dispense with efforts to find historical continuities.
Devin’s contribution to the study of Central Asian Sufism (a field, as he and Jo-Ann Gross acknowledge, developed in a serious manner, relatively late, over the past thirty years) situates Central Asian Sufism firmly within the history of religion. Though Devin’s reliance on hagiographical sources broke new ground, perhaps his most influential contribution is his questioning of much of the language and terminology used in the study of Sufism. In particular, he illustrates the way key terminological choices, such as the term “Sufi order,” have concealed the fluidity of the function of Sufi communities, particularly over the longue durée. Such an approach has been particularly important for students of 19th and 20th century Sufism, where applying a terminological framework based on the medieval era becomes problematic for understanding phenomena that have evolved substantially.2 Needless to say, his work on the medieval era has obvious implications for the modern era.
Beyond his study of medieval and modern Sufism per se, with the publication of his magnum opus in 1994, Devin demonstrated the untenability of relegating engagement with the Islamic cultures of Central Asia to a long lost, and now irrelevant, “spiritual past” predating the twentieth century’s upheavals. As he noted at the time: “Much could be written, and ought to be, about the misconceptions and inappropriate assumptions about Islam among Inner Asian people, both in history and at present.” These misconceptions stemmed, he suggested, from an arbitrary detachment of continuities in Central Asia’s history from the present, a detachment attributable first and foremost to idées fixes. “In a sense a persistent fear and hostility toward Islam that color both scholarly and popular attitudes in the West, combined with general unfamiliarity with the Inner Asian world, have rendered Islam in Inner Asia the focus of Western hopes (that Inner Asian peoples are not very Muslim) and fears (that they are as fanatical as all Muslims, after all), both resting on the same general bewilderment about the origins, history, and significance of Islam in in Inner Asia …”3 In part these comments reflected Devin’s discomfort with the creeping entry into scholarship of geopolitical discourses emanating from the Afghan War that instrumentalized Islam, but the real source of his unease ran deeper, into the ongoing impact of modernization theories that emphasized secularization and the breakup of “traditional” family and cosmological structures. “Rilke speaks of angels,” writes Charles Taylor. “But his angels are not to be understood by their place in the traditionally defined order … We cannot get at them through a mediaeval treatise on the ranks of cherubim and seraphim, but we have to pass through this articulation of Rilke’s sensibility.”4 Devin has always emphasized that the premodern “cherubim and seraphim” are still very much with us, and that, especially in matters of religion, the dichotomy between rupture and continuity does little to advance our understanding of actual religious practice.
Islamization and Native Religion is a masterwork of such caliber that it is one of the few books, if not the only one, that the late Shahab Ahmed references with unqualified praise in his What is Islam?5 Yet Devin’s call for an ongoing engagement with Central Asia’s ancient religious cultures in the study of the tsarist and communist eras remained unheeded through the post-Soviet decades. Euphoria accompanying the Soviet collapse seemed to lend credence to longstanding Sovietological tropes: that spirituality, in any meaningful sense, did not “survive” antireligious violence, industrialization, urbanization and mass education; that Islamic ritual, to the extent one could find it all in the USSR, constituted a formulaic affair with little communal resonance; and that the apparently mushrooming popularity of Wahhabism in the newly independent republics reflected the deficiency of Islamic knowledge and authority under communism (especially among the Soviet ʿulama).
The tenacity of these sorts of unsubstantiated assumptions led Devin, in 2002, to publish a review article concerning Yaacov Ro’i’s Islam in the Soviet Union. It demonstrated that the vast majority of scholarship on Islam in the USSR advanced “an essentially reconstructed Soviet view of religious life.”6 The essay highlights the tendency of Sovietological scholarship on Islam to uncritically reproduce scientific atheistic and Soviet sociological statistics and assumptions about basic aspects of Muslim religiosity, notably with respect to the divide between “high” and “low” religion, and motivations communist-oriented observers imparted to Muslims observing rituals such as prayer, fasting, and especially shrine pilgrimage. Yet an arguably even more significant emphasis of the essay – in part because it served as the basis of Devin’s subsequent writings on the subject, and because it has so profoundly influenced a number of historians conducting research on Soviet Islam at present (including this volume’s three editors) – concerned the restricted definition of “religion” deployed by this scholarship.7 It was Devin’s decades-long study of Muslim cosmogony that nurtured his doubts about the utility of cut-and-dry pronouncements concerning belief, practice and identity under communism, and indeed about the legitimacy of the entire exercise of deciding whether Islam had “survived” the last century’s ravages.
In 2014, Devin applied these critiques of the existing literature to a research article that remains the only comprehensive treatment of Sufism, and with it the social history of Islam, in the longue durée spanning the period from the eighteenth century to the late Soviet era. “Shamanization in Central Asia” effectively sets the agenda for a new methodological orientation in the study of Soviet Islam that combines (rather than rejecting) the long-dominant priorities and narratives of political history with the critical need to undertake serious examination of the social lives of Muslims under communism, practicing and otherwise. On the basis of tsarist and Soviet ethnographic observations (including Shikhberdi Annaklychev’s 1961 study of Sufi rituals among Turkmen gas workers, a work never before cited by any scholar, or observer, of Soviet Islam), Devin argues that a diffusion of Sufi practices (notably the dhikr and jahr) into larger swathes of Central Asian public practice under Late Socialism reflected the culmination of a transformation in religious life originating in the early modern period. This diffusion, he suggests, signifies that “public manifestations of religiosity with roots in ‘Sufism’ continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, not merely as part of an unchanging ‘tradition’ that is sometimes posed as an alternative to ‘modernity,’ but as part of an ongoing negotiation about religious propriety that had deep roots in Muslim society in Central Asia.” Devin argues that such a diffusion “had been ‘activated’ at various times by political and social shifts, but continued to unfold, dynamically and (we might say) ‘innovatively,’ within new social, political and religious frameworks entailed first by Tsarist rule, and then by the Soviet state.”8 This argument’s significance for the study of Soviet Islam rests in its articulation of a research agenda rooted in the middle ground, or points of overlap, between political, social and religious history – fields which, though nominally devoted to the very same groups of Central Asian Muslims, have been pulled in opposite directions by the larger exigencies of Islamic Studies and Soviet/Russian history. One way to transcend disciplinary insularity, he suggests, is to look at practices on their own terms, while charting the ways in which religious communities interacted with and responded to state interference and mobilization.
The contributions to this volume are organized in roughly chronological order, and all touch upon problems in sources and methodologies analyzed in Devin’s scholarship. Peter Golden opens the volume with an examination of the origins of the ethnonym Türk and its manifestations in a wide range of documentary, and historiographical sources from across the Eurasian landmass, from China to Greece. By means of a painstaking analysis of the linguistically complex and chronologically expansive source material, Golden emphasizes the complex relationship between ethnic and political groupings on the steppe in the early medieval period, and the issues of their categorization by their sedentary neighbors, particular among Chinese and Muslim authors. His article problematizes essentialist notions that the first “Türks” were necessarily even Turkic speakers.
The next contribution, by Jürgen Paul, questions, in a similar way, assumptions regarding the manifestation and meaning of administrative nomenclature as it applies to supposedly “ethnic” groupings. He examines the political and administrative term aymaq as it appears in 16th century Persian documents from Bukhara linked to descendants of a Sufi community, in this case khoja communities claiming descent from Ahmad Yasavi. Paul cautions that similar terminology in Safavid and Özbek sources contained different meanings. and that the use of the term aymaq as it was applied to Central Asian communities precludes necessary associations with “tribal” groupings or structures.
Ron Sela’s contribution continues the theme of exploring the manifestation of ethnicity and language in Central Asian cultural history through the lens of Turkic “vernacularization” in Central Asia in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sela examines this process as both a political project, particularly sponsored by Shïbanid sovereigns, and as a broader cultural development manifested above all through the promotion of Turkic literary production, but also through other cultural practices and ceremonies that were associated specifically with Turkic speakers. Here, Sela brings into question the idea that Turkic “vernacularization” was a necessarily modern phenomenon, usually credited to jadid or Soviet culture, and traces its origins to 15th century Khorezm, thereby demonstrating the historical continuity of ideas that reappeared in the 20th century.
Nicholas Walmsley’s submission a critical appraisal Mawlānā ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn, a 15th century Naqshbandi shaykh active in Herat, and the subject of a hagiography. While Mawlānā ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn has remained a relatively obscure figure, he was nevertheless recognized as a spiritual authority in Heart, and his hagiographical treatment reveals not only his role in Herat’s Sufi environment, but the broad geographic spread of his successors.
Jo-Ann Gross’ contribution examines the image of the Ismaili Islamizer of Badakhshan as reflected in a variety of compositional genres produced before and during the Soviet period, revealing how Soviet Muslims expressed the histories of local religious communities as stories of continuity rather than necessarily rupture. This continuity, as Gross elegantly reveals, conceptually flows from the semi-mythical sacred era of Islamization, through the medieval era, to the present day. At the same time, she offers an informed analysis of the functions and religious peculiarities of the major compositional genres, comprising genealogy, genealogical charters, and hagiography.
Maintaining Gross’ focus on Badakhshan, but shifting to the dynamics of Sufi communities in the medieval era, Daniel Beben addresses some of Devin’s work on the Kubravi tradition in Central Asia. In tracing the decline and ultimate eclipse of the Kubraviya as an institutional presence in Badakhshani Sufism, Beben endorses his arguments touching upon the Kubraviyah as they applied to Central Asia as a whole. However, he proposes that the Kubraviya may also be distinguished from the Naqshbandiya – who eventually replaced them – by a greater willingness to engage with non-Muslim environments (the presence of powerful non-Muslims being a permanent feature of Islam in Central Asia). Beben uses the figure of the Sufi ʿAli Hamadani to illustrate the political and religious ramification of these tendencies.
In the next contribution, Jeff Eden focuses on an East Turkistani hagiographicaly as a means of exploring the theme of “grave discovery,” a common motif in Central Asian sacred narratives. Eden is particularly interested in what hagiographies can tell us about the social and political history of Central Asian Muslim society, and to this end provides a translation and analysis of the tazkira of the Seven Muhammads. In his article, he describes the phenomenon of “grave discovery” and sacralization of local space as a means of solving certain problems of East Turkistani religious communities, including, among others, geographic remoteness from the sacred centers of the Islamic world, and providing religious meaning to local landscapes, creating a locus of religious and political meaning for local Sufi and political dynasties.
Jamal Elias’ article examines the interplay and relationship of sacred compositional genres, in this case Qur’an commentary (tafsir) with poetic commentary. To achieve such a comparative analysis, he looks at the works of the Ottoman Sufi and legal scholar Ismaʿil Haqqi Bursawi, who composed a tafsir, the well-known Ruh al-bayan, as well as a commentary on the poetry work Maṡnawī-yi maʿnawī of Jalal al-din Rumi. Elias emphasizes the commonalities in Bursawi’s method in both these works, while calling into question the utility of identifying this tafsir, or tafsirs compiled by Sufis in general as “Sufi tafsirs.”
Michael Kemper’s contribution shifts the focus to the Volga-Ural region, where he examines the complicated relationship between Sufis and religious reformers, in this case discussing how the reformist legal scholar and historian Rizaeddin Fakhreddinov represented, and to a degree manipulated the image and legacy of the prominent Tatar Sufi ʿAli Tuntari. Kemper bases his analysis on a manuscript of the third volume of Fakhreddinov’s important Turkic biographical dictionary, Athar. He shows that in his biographical treatment of Tuntari, Fakhreddinov seeks to depict Tuntari, retroactively, as a Sufi who nonetheless shared Fakhreddinov’s own ideological orientation as an Islamic scholar skeptical of kalam, and effectively a sort of proto-Salafist. Ironically, Fakhreddinov’s account includes elements familiar to students of Sufi hagiography, including a sort of conversion narrative, in which Tuntari experiences a spiritual crisis following which he conclusively rejects kalam, suggesting that Sufi narratives could affect discourse, even among Salafists.
Paolo Sartori’s article makes the case for developing a hermeneutics of Soviet antireligious documentation, with a focus on ethnographic materials and the massive output of the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC). After discussing the origins of the idea of reading historical materials “against the grain” in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Carlo Ginzburg, and engaging with uses of this concept by the late anthropologist Sonja Luehrmann with respect to CARC materials, he discusses a 1957 article by the prominent Soviet ethnographer Gleb Snesarev. Sartori’s explication of the insights about Muslim piety that can be extracted from a nominally atheistic source such as Snesarev’s analysis of shrine pilgrimage in Khorezm sets the stage for the centerpriece of the contribution, which is a close analysis of a speech delivered by CARC’s representative in Uzbekistan, Sharif Shirinbaev, in June 1960. Sartori brings to light important historical, ethnographic and even architectural insights contained in Shirinbaev’s often shrill remarks to make the case that CARC’s output in Central Asia needs to be treated primarily as a Central Asian Islamic source base, since its personnel hailed from Muslim communities and were intimately acquainted with Islamic rites, institutions, and personnel. Sartori includes a translation of the speech that will be of value to scholars of Soviet Islam.
In the next article, Eren Tasar examines Qazaq, Turkmen, Tatar, and Uzbek publications to offer the counterintuitive argument that religious conceptions specific to Central Asian and Volga-Ural Muslims influenced the production of official atheist publications in the late Soviet era, which he tentatively labels “Muslim Atheism.” To distinguish this body of literature from the sorts of “generic” works produced in Moscow for the Soviet public as a whole, Tasar looks at what Central Asian atheists sought to impart to their Central Asian readership, and how they sought to do it in a meaningful way, while keeping in mind what Central Asian readers expected to glean from these works. He also contrasts how ideas of nationality, and ethnic peculiarity, alongside communal concepts of religiosity, shaped each work individually. Tasar argues that these materials can offer us an alternative to the idea that atheism and religion in the Soviet Union, particularly in the later period, was necessarily a sort of confrontation, and that in the Soviet Union atheism itself could be as much an object of Islamization as Islam could be one of Sovietization.
Stéphane Dudoigon’s article takes us to post-Soviet Tajikistan, and examines the impacts on sacred geography of Soviet population movements inflicted on rural communities and of the Tajik civil war. Dudoignon describes a range of cultural, literary and religious practices among specific groups of Tajik Muslims that are fully familiar to students of earlier periods, and fully consistent with the historical trajectory of Sufism in Central Asia. At the same time, he highlights the ways in which Soviet demographic policies and population transfers within the Tajik SSR had a particular influence on the development of hagiographies in the region.
The volume closes with Allen Frank’s essay devoted to the theme of animals in Sufi hagiography. In this case, he examines a Qazaq verse hagiography devoted to the life of Sayaq-Ata, a Qazaq saint thought to have lived in the 16th century. Using this source, Frank examines the theme of antelopes as a sacred animal in Qazaq hagiography, and of related animals in Central Asian hagiography more generally. Challenging the ahistorical idea that the sacralization of these animals necessarily reflected “pre-Islamic” religious practices, he argues that the sacralization of such animals appears in narratives as a consciously Islamized leitmotif.
Taken as a whole, these these essays reflect Devin’s wide-ranging influence as well as his brilliant and lasting contribution to the study of Central Asian religion. They illustrate the many ways in which his scholarship has opened up new possibilities and avenues in the study of the region’s religious history.
D. DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994): 243.
The continuity of various aspects of Sufism in Central Asian cultural and social history is most directly addressed in Devin’s “Re-Envisioning the History of Sufi Communities in Central Asia: Continuity and Adaptation of Sources and Social Frameworks, 16th–20th Centuries,” Sufism in Central Asia: New Perspectives on Sufi Traditions, 16th–21st Centuries, D. DeWeese and J. Gross, eds., Handbuch der Orientalistik, vol. 25, (Leiden: Brill 2018).
D. DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994): 4.
C. Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007): 353.
S. Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017): 127–128, 304, 323–325.
D. DeWeese, “Islam and the Legacy of Sovietology: A Review Essay on Yaacov Ro’i’s Islam in the Soviet Union.” Journal of Islamic Studies, 13:3 (2002): 315.
Ibid.: 319.
D. DeWeese, “Shamanization in Central Asia.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 57 (2014): 358.