An Inquiry into Bukharan Qadîmism - Mïrzâ Sallm-blk BUKHARAN QADIMISM Contents Introduction 5 Focus and Scope 7 Patterns of Power and Poverty 11 The Political Arena 11 Emir Muzaffar's Men 14 Between the Russian Revolutions 17 The February Revolution 21 A Short Biography of MTrza SalTm-bTk 24 MTrza SalTm-bTk and the Umara 28 MTrza SalTm-bTk and the *Ulama 30 Mirza SalTm-bTk's Logosphere 33 Bukhara and Tashkent 33 Literary Production and Publications 38 The Beginning of' West-toxication' 45 Untimely News 49 The Progress Proxy 53 Conclusions 59 Bibliography 66 MTrza SalTm-bTk's Works and Publications 66 Other Published Sources 67 Other Unpublished Sources 72 Archival Sources 73 3 Bukharan QADIMism Introduction What would be a typical case of Brkharan qadimism, an opponent of the early 20lh century Central Asian Islamic reform movement usually called jadldism?' Would it be one among many hitherto unknown wild-bearded illiterate pedophilic qalandars (stray mystics...) who smoked opium, threw stones at passing trains, and called for jihâd against the Russian infidels from various madrasas (higher educational institutions) and half-ruined Sufi-convents on the Bukharan countryside, who not only knew nothing about social and technological progress in the West, but also knowing nothing about mainstream Sunni Islam? Or was he to be found in the capital, in the multitude of culamâ (Islamic scholars)? Would a typical case be the 'reactionary' qâzî-yi kalàn (chief judge), Burhân al-Dïn, who was allegedly one of the arch-enemies of the 'progressive' Muslim reformists, the Jadïds, when he served as qâzï-yi kalàn in the emirate between 1914 and 1920, and allegedly vehemently persecuted them after the abortive first serious call for reform in 1917, and again after the first Bolshevik attempt to invade Bukhara a year later? Fortunately, some pioneers have already begun to let the rat smell out from Bukhara's noise-abatement zones, and we can in all confidence state that the - isms are indeed falling; what seems to survive are dynamic solidarity networks and individuals who only have unwavering personalities for lovers and other extremists.2 Indeed we do not know what happened to 1 For qadimism in general, see Stéphane A. Dudoignon, "Qu'est-ce que la 'qadlmiya'? Eléments de sociologie du traditionalisme musulman, en islam de Russie et en Transoxiane (de la fin du XVIIIe siècle au début du XXe)," L'Islam de Russie. Conscience communautaire et autonomie politique chez les Tatars de la Volga et de l'Oural, depuis le XVllle siècle, eds. Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Dâmir Is'haqov, and Ràfyq Mhâmmàtshin (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1997); and by the same author "Status, Strategies and Discourses of a Muslim 'Clergy' under Christian Law: Polemics about the Collection of the Zakât in Late Imperial Russia," Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia (Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries), eds. Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Komatsu Hisao (London: Kegan Paul, 2001). 2 For the role of solidarity networks in Bukharan politics during the 1910s, see Adeeb Khalid, "Society and politics in Bukhara 1868-1910," Central 5 FRANZ WENNBERG all the qalandars after the establishment of Soviet government, but Burhan al-DTn's personality was 'enshrined' in Soviet historiography after he had been sentenced to death by a revolutionary court established after Mikhail Frunze's alleged liberation of Bukhara in 1920 and headed by one of Bukhara's wealthiest merchants, while one of his sons, Asli Burhonov, made a career as an actor in Tajikistan, and was not only awarded the title: People's Artist of the Republic, but was also the first to play the role of Lenin there. Although we have some excellent studies on jadtdism and those who supported the new-method schools,3 the same thing cannot be said about qadimism, especially not of Bukharan qadimism where the main sources are still S.adr al-DTn cAynT and Fayzullah Khwajaev's accounts, first codified after 1920. These accounts were integrated to in Soviet history through a number of other publications and the result was that the Qadims were deprived of a voice of their own. Studies of Bukharan qadimism were further complicated by an apparent absence of relevant sources; the handful of names of Qadims that the Bukharan Jadids have provided us with so far have not appeared as a signature of an original author or even as a copier of a manuscript, book or article. Asian Survey 19 (2000); Stéphane A. Dudoignon, "La Question Scolaire à Boukhara et au Turkestan, du 'premier renouveau' à la soviétization (fin du XVIIJe siècle - 1937)," Cahiers du monde russe 37 (1996); A.A. Semenov, Ocherk uslroislva tsentral 'nogo administrativnogo upravleniya Bukharskago khanslva pozdneîshego vremeni (Dushanbe: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk Tadzhikskoî SSR, 1954) 66; and cAbd al-Ra'ûf Fi{rat's work about the 1910s in which he provides some information about Burhän al-Dïn and his relatives: Fitrat, Dovrai Hukmroni Amir OHmkhon (Dushanbe: Palatai Davlatii Kitobho, 1991) 30. 3 I am primarily thinking of Stéphane A. Dudoignon's Lectures de la Modernité en ¡slam Centra/asiatique. La réforme des institutions d'enseignement éthique, théologique et juridique dans le monde tatar et en Transoxiane, du "premier renouveau" à la soviétisalion (1767-1937) diss., Paris 3, 1996; and Adeeb Khalid's The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform. Jadìdism in Central Asia (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: U of California P. 1998). 6 BUKHARAN QADIMISM Focus and Scope This study focuses on a servant in the fiscal administration, one of the so-called umara. He was known as Mirza Sallm-blk,4 and reached the peak of his career between 1917 and 1920, i.e. during the years when the Jadids had their toughest time before the heyday of Stalinist salvation. Sallm-blk was thus no admirer of jadidism, at least not during this period, so this is a tentative, albeit hopefully also a rather circumspect attempt to write a biography of a Bukharan Qadim, although admittedly, maybe not a very typical one.5 The point of departure is the political arena and its key actors during the protectorate era. Most other studies on the domestic politics in Bukhara during this time have been removed from the accounts of the culama, while the umara have largely been ignored. One explanation for this is obviously that the 'progressive' Jadids came mainly from the culama, and almost all Soviet research on the political struggle in Bukhara has been based on their accounts. However, the umara cooperated far more closely with the tsarist authorities, and they seem, in general, to have been considered as far more reliable than the culama who underwent a different socialization, and were 4 Some research has been done on Mirza Sallm-bik already. Alexandr Alexandrovich Semenov wrote a hitherto unpublished paper called Bukharskii istorik poslednego feodal 'nogo perioda khanstva (Mirza Mukhammed Salim-bek "parvonachi"), which today is kept in the archives of Presidium of the Academy of Sciences in Dushanbe, Semenov's archive, op. 21, ex. 24. L.M. Epifanova wrote about SalTm-bTk in her Rukopisnye islochniki Instituta Vostokovedeniya Akademii Nauk UzSSR po istorii Srednei Azii perioda prisoedineniya k Rossii (Bukhara) (Tashkent: Nauka, 1965). Nairn Norkulov has written two articles and a kandidat dissertation: '"Ta'rikh-i Salimi' kak istoricheskii istochnik," Obshchestvennye Nauki v Uzbekisiane [Tashkent] 4 (1966); "Mirza Salimbek o Bukharskikh sobytiyakh 1918 goda," Obshchestvennye Nauki v Uzbekisiane [Tashkent] 4 (1967); 'Tarikh-i Salimi' - tsennyi istochnik po istorii Bukharskogo emirala (1860-I920gg.), kandidat-diss., Tashkent State U, 1968; A.B. Vil'danova 'Tsennyi istochnik po istorii Bukharskogo khanstva," Malerialy po Vostoku (Tashkent: Nauka, 1966). 5 Mirza Sallm-bik has, as far as I know, never been referred to as a Qadim, but Nairn Norkulov wrote that he belonged to the reactionary circles, something which points towards Qadimism (Norkulov, 'Tarikh-i Salimi' - tsennyi 5). 7 FRANZ WENNBERG frequently regarded as group of fanatics, pan-Islamists, and pan- Turkists (the Jadids included). The relationships between the umara as well as between the culama and umara have escaped attention since the early 1920s. However, before the revolution the umara were given a much larger focus, not only by the Russian authorities, but also in the Russian press. I propose that the political struggle between the main actors in the two administrative divisions (i.e. between the umara and the culama) was the most significant political struggle in the emirate between 1908 and 1918. Moreover, in this struggle, die- hard Qadims and Jadids were merely the instruments of political actors with far more important political aims, i.e. their survival as the most powerful political actors in the emirate. 1, thus, find it necessary to focus more on the umara and especially the tensions among the higher echelons of the administration. Such tensions might demystify the QadTms and, along the way, also explain many of Mlrza SalTm-blk's political decisions and why he later came to denounce the Jadids so vehemently. The second part of this paper is an inquiry into MTrza Sallm- bTk's personal convictions and his discursive opposition to jadidism. Since the central political classifications in use in Bukhara during the 1910s dealt with time, i.e.jadid (new) and qadim (old), it seems worthwhile to focus on the conceptualisation of historical time. After all, the concept of progress was central to the Jadld discourse; something stressed by Adeeb Khalid who frequently refers to the Jadld discourse as "the discourse on progress."6 The Jadids clearly saw themselves as the promoters of progress, Taraqqiparvars. However, the modern concept of progress was absent in pre-20lh century Bukhara, and as the Jadid discourse, to a large extent, was 'imported,'7 it seems possible to assume that those elements less prone to reforms (the Qadims) were more inclined to adhere to a discourse on 'non-progress.' From the writings of those who sooner or later were classified as Jadids, we know that many, but probably not all of the Jadids, 6 See Khalid, Jadidism 107-113. 7 See Komatsu Hisao, "Bukhara and Istanbul. A Consideration about the background of the Munazara," Islam and Politics in Russia and Central Asia, eds. Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Komatsu Hisao (London: Kegan Paul, 2001). 8 BUKHARAN QADIMISM possessed modern concepts of historical time, and we also know that at least one prominent Bukharan Jadid, cAbd al-Ra'uf Fitrat, accused his antagonists of not recognising the importance of making progress, saying that their acts would lead to a general decline, and that they had no idea that this 'time' was very different from others. He claimed that they did not recognise any temporalities other than the present and the hereafter, and that they were engaged in predicting the Last Day.8 As a matter of fact, Fitrat's account and later Soviet historiography are contradictory. What Fitrat in fact wrote was that the Qadims lacked modern concepts of historical time, while Soviet historiography frequently made the implicit claim that the Qadims possessed modern concepts of historical time but that they projected them in a diametrically opposite direction. The latter was very much in harmony with prevalent Eurocentric and ahistorical approaches in Soviet social sciences where the Qadims were not uncommonly classified as reactionaries living in the Middle Ages. In fact, without concepts like progress, regress, temporalities and con-temporalities, the whole ideological struggle between the Jadids and Qadims seems to lose its central terminology, at least in much of the Soviet historiography.9 As in all intense political struggles there was probably a profound semantic radicalisation and confusion in the tense political climate prevalent in Bukhara during the 1910s, especially against a background of fairly rapidly coined appearing modern political catchwords. Can we assume that we also had a discursive rupture in Bukhara at this time? If so, would it be reasonable to assume that this rupture was best 8 See Abduraufi Fitrati Bukhoroi, "Robari Najot", Sadoi Sharq [Dushanbe] 9(1992)25,35. 9 This division of the Bukharan Muslims in terms of progressive and reactionary elements were very much a part of the Russian discourse on Central Asia. The division became a part of the Soviet historiography at an early stage, like Fayzullah Khwajaev who in his Bukhoro Inqilobining Tarikhiga Maieriallar claimed that under the classification jadid all promoters of progress could be gathered, while all the reactionaries were gathered under the classiflcaition qadim. (Tashkent: Fan, 1997). Part of the problem is obviously also anchored in the careless attitude many researchers have shown in making a distinction between their research language and the language of those studied. 9 FRANZ WENNBERG reflected by the various political factions' subscriptions to different concepts of historical time? Did the Jadids use modern concepts which were, in essence, time-producing, focusing on progress primarily achieved through human agency; while the Qadims used time-killing prophetical concepts, focusing on divine intervention and the end of the world? Was this the main difference between the discourse on progress and the prophetical discourse? In other words, was there any truth in Fifrat's above- mentioned claims, or were the Qadims rather deliberate reactionaries? Another question arises from this which in many ways seems to be timeless; to what extent did this new discourse (in this case the discourse on progress) merely provide the traditional struggle for power with a new mode of expression? Let us begin this study with a description of the administration and of some of the main political actors in Bukhara between the Russian conquests (1869-1920) before we turn to the ups and downs of MTrza SalTm-blk and his worldview. 10