THE U WAYS I SUFIS OF CENTRAL ASIA JULIAN BALDICK IMAGINARY MUSLIMS IMAGINARY MUSLIMS The Uwaysi Sufis of Central Asia JULIAN BALDICK f I.B. TAURIS & Co Ltd Publishers LONDON - NEW YORK Published in 1993 by I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd 45 Bloomsbury Square London WC1A2HY 175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 In the United States of America and Canada distributed by St Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 Copyright © 1993 by Julian Baldick All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication card number: available A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 1-85043-497-2 Photoset in North Wales by Derek Doyle 8c Associates, Mold, Clwyd Printed and bound in Great Britain by WBC Ltd, Bridgend, Mid-Glamorgan CONTENTS 4 Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Part One: The background to the composition of the History of the Uwaysis 15 Part Two: The History of the Uwaysis: analysis, summary and commentary 41 Part Three: The book’s teachings and subsequent fate 203 * Conclusions 221 Notes 231 Bibliography 245 Index I: Brotherhoods, sects, etc. 248 Index II: Names of persons mentioned 249 Index III: Places 255 Index IV: Technical terms 258 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am extremely grateful for the advice given to me, in the course of writing this book, by Oleg Akimushkin, Simon Digby and Albert Hourani. I must also acknowledge the financial assistance of the British Academy and the USSR Academy of Sciences, which enabled me to work on manuscripts in the latter’s Institute of Oriental Studies (St Petersburg Branch). Many thanks are due for the kindness shown me by the members of the Middle East Department there, especially by Sergey Turkin. I must also express my indebtedness to the staff of I. B. Tauris and in particular to Anna Enayat; to the librarians of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and, above all, to my wife for her great patience and help. INTRODUCTION The word ‘Uwaysi’ designates a Muslim mystic who looks for instruction from the spirit of a dead or physically absent person. It is derived from the name of a legendary contemporary of Muhammad, Uways, who is supposed to have communicated with the Prophet by telepathy. Usually there are only isolated references to Uwaysis in Islamic literature, but around 1600 CE one Ahmad of Uzgen in what is now Kirghizia (in ex-Soviet Central Asia) wrote a History ofthe Uwaysis, in which he presented an evidendy imaginary brotherhood as flourishing from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries. Much of this ‘history’ is set in East Turkistan (now Xinjiang in north-west China). The book consists of a series of biographies, usually of people who never existed. It is a kind of imaginary history of Islam, which mirrors the religion’s spread and development, and is also intended to teach the reader to become an Uwaysi himself. The main aim of the present study is to analyse the History of the Uwaysis and see what can be learnt from it. This, then, is a book about another book. In order to make the analysis easier to follow, I have begun by providing a survey of the legend of Uways himself and of the Uwaysi phenomenon in Islam’s main mystical tradidon, Sufism. Then I have given a brief oudine of the sixteenth-century background to the composition of the History ofthe Uwaysis, looking at an Uwaysi movement in East Turkistan. After this I have analysed the book’s structure and summarized its contents, adding a commentary at the end of each chapter or section. Finally, I have considered the work’s treatment of the themes of women and death and its mystical doctrine, before proceeding to general conclusions about the ‘imaginary’, religious biography and the figure of the Uwaysi in Islam. First of all, though, it will be as well to make some general observations about Islam itself and then about Sufism, since these are subjects which have given rise to many prejudices and misunderstandings. In doing so we can anticipate some of the problems which both Islam and Sufism present for somebody wishing to become an Uwaysi mystic. It also seems advisable to give a general introduction to the region of East Turkistan, which, by virtue of its remote and isolated position, is almost completely unknown to the outside world. I have also judged it expedient to provide a preliminary explanation of the methods which I have used, since these are bound to strike some readers as unusual and, indeed, objectionable. ISLAM Islam is both a religion and a civilization. In the areas of its greatest concentration in Asia and Africa it has produced a shared cultural heritage, which is often far more important than regional or ethnic elements. Here, however, we shall encounter Islam mainly as a religion. The word islam is usually taken to mean ‘submission’ (to God). Muslims claim that their religion is that of the biblical pat­ riarchs and prophets, which the Jews and Christians have corrupted. It was restored in Arabia by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century CE. Muhammad, according to Muslim doctrine, is the last of the prophets. After him there can be no more revelation. The Qur'an, revealed to Muhammad by God via the archangel Gabriel, is final and definitive. Henceforth there can be only divine inspiration, communication on a level lower than that found in scripture, just as all other human beings are inferior to the prophets. Islam is most often represented as founded upon five pillars: bearing witness that there is no god except God and that Muhammad is his Messenger; performing the daily worship; paying the alms tax; fasting in the month of Ramadan; and making the pilgrimage to Mecca. But this apparent simplicity is misleading. The believer requires guidance in the rest of his activities, and the Qur'an has to be interpreted and supplemented to cover them. Who is to give guidance? Here the Muslims are split into two main groupings. The larger is that of the Sunnis, so called because they try to follow the normative practice (sunna) of Muhammad, as transmitted, they believe, by his Companions in a corpus of Traditions, reports of his sayings and exemplary actions. The smaller is that of the Shiites, so called because they belong to the party (shi'a) of Muhammad’s family, in which they venerate a succession of infallible Leaders (Imams — a term usually left untranslated), commanding intense devotion and obedience. Now Islam recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, and thus is technically a form of Christianity. However, it sees him as a man and a prophet, not as God incarnate or God’s Son. It has no church or priesthood. Instead, there are jurists (in effect rabbis) and Sufi ‘elders’ (very like the startsy of Russian Orthodox monasticism), who provide advice to the faithful and answer their queries. Jurisprudence, not theology, is the ‘queen of the sciences’ in Islam. The conventional ‘theology’ which the Muslims possess (as opposed to the mystical theology of Sufism) is largely defensive, apologetic theology, and is seen as constituting a minor, ancillary discipline. Islamic law, by contrast, is all-important: it is supposed to regulate every detail of the believer’s life. Precisely because it concerns itself with so many details, it tends to be a rather dry and uninspiring branch of study. Usually it is based on the Traditions about Muhammad, and these do not really succeed in bringing the Prophet to life. By the late Middle Ages the mainstream, Sunni lawyers had given up thinking for themselves, and simply referred to their textbooks in order to repeat the decisions of their predecessors. Similarly, outside Iran and Iraq, where Shiism triumphed in the sixteenth century and protected theology and philosophy under its aegis, these disciplines died out in the Muslim world, and remained effectively extinct for centuries. The institution of the caliphate had previously provided a ‘deputy’ (‘caliph’, from the Arabic khalifa) for God among the Sunnis, reigning first as both a religious and a temporal sovereign. But the temporal power had soon slipped away, and after the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 the caliphate survived only as a pale shadow. ^ In the sixteenth century it disappeared completely. Thus, by c. 1600, when the History of the Uwaysis was written, the position of the individual Muslim was in many ways uncomfortable. The ‘Uwaysi’ tradition, namely the practice of looking for guidance to the spirit of a dead or physically absent instructor, offered many advantages. An Uwaysi could communicate direcdy with one of the - prophets. Not all of these were dead. One of them, Khidr (literally I ‘the green one’), the famous Green Man of ancient European and . Near Eastern folklore, was believed to be immortal. According to Muslim commentators he was to be identified with the anonymous K and enigmatic instructor of Moses in the Qur'an (18:59-81). Khidr could appear to a Muslim in the flesh, but an Uwaysi might believe that he was receiving instruction from Khidr in the ‘world of the unseen’ ('alam al-ghayb). Alternatively, one might, like Uways, communicate with Muhammad himself. Muhammad’s spirit would be envisaged as in some way pardy resident in his tomb at Medina, in central western Arabia. An Uwaysi could actually go there and hear Muhammad speak. Otherwise, he could legitimately engage u" in the common Muslim practice of deliberately preparing oneself to have a dream in which Muhammad appears and gives advice. The ancient practice of ‘incubation’, sleeping at a holy spot in order to see a divine adviser in one’s dreams, had continued in both Christian and Islamic adaptations. In this way the manifold difficulties presented by the Qur'an could be bypassed. The words of the Qur'an are extremely hard to understand, and Arabic is not vthe native tongue of most Muslims. Accordingly, the Uwaysi method had the advantages of overcoming barriers of time, space and language. It produced fresh utterances of Muhammad for the Uwaysi who heard him speak. The Uwaysi had no need to become a Shiite in order to find an infallible Leader - in any case, most Shiites believed that the last of their leaders, the twelfth in the line, had gone into hiding in the ninth century and was still waiting for the right time to reappear (so that direct communication with him would in any case have to be of an ‘Uwaysi’ type). In this perspective the Uwaysi tradition seems at first sight to fill a gap in Islamic, or at least Sunni institutions. Since Islam lacks the concept of a church, preferring that of a community, the individual has no obvious source of authority to which to turn. In the absence of a priesthood, direct instruction by a prophet has evident advantages. Islamic law is not easily adapted to the believer’s quest for spiritual self-fulfilment, and so the jurists were naturally challenged by the mystics as an alternative embodiment of religious guidance. The seventeenth century was characterized by open warfare between these two classes of Muslim, and the History of the ( Uwaysis contains colourful evocations of their mutual hostility. For the period between 1500 and 1700 was one in which lawyers and i Sufis vied for the patronage given by three great empires: the l Turkish Ottoman Empire, the Iranian Safavid Empire and the empire of the Moghuls in India. Within these empires, in contrast to the respectable, establishment men of religion, great popular appeal was exercised by wandering libertine mystics, noted for