Post-Soviet Sufism: Texts and the Performance of Tradition in Tajikistan
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University
By
Benjamin Clark Gatling
Graduate Program in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
The Ohio State University
2012
Dissertation Committee:
Margaret A. Mills, Advisor
Richard M. Davis
Morgan Y. Liu
Ray Cashman
Copyright by
Benjamin Clark Gatling
2012
ABSTRACT
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Central
Asian republics, public Islamic religiosity has proliferated; new mosques have been constructed, forms of Islamic dress newly adopted, and previously proscribed Islamic literature published. Sufi circles of adepts (halqa) are key producers of nascent religious discourse within this so-called Islamic revival. Sufis in Tajikistan have revived their performance of public ritual and adopted new texts for ritual use. These texts, many of them manuscripts long hidden from Soviet authorities, have newly entered the religious imaginations of Tajik Muslims. The focus of this study is on the specific power of these nascent textualities, the processes of their replication and dissemination, and the discursive support for entextualizing processes that historical narrative and ritual performance provide within Sufi groups in post-Soviet Tajikistan.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan during 2010 and 2011, this study considers how nascent religious discourse becomes authoritative and how the new hagiographic and canonization process in Central Asia operates. I argue that in Tajik
Sufism there exist ongoing projects of textual canonization, historical valorization, and
ii general hagiographic construction for the express purpose of legitimating the life and practices of post-Soviet Sufism after the enormity of Soviet disjuncture.
At the center of this story of texts are their sites of their enactment, the interrelated contexts of their reading and performance within the intricate bounds of Sufi ritual. As such, this study analyzes specific speech events, such as halqai zikr, the ritualized, collective out-loud remembrance of the names of God, and darsi tariqat, formalized group teaching events, which model and shape conceptions of the grand Tajik
Islamic past and draw contemporary practitioners into a discursive relationship with past
Sufi masters. I demonstrate how in the tabula rasa post-Soviet religious environment historical narrative and ritual performance work to provide discursive legitimation to relatively new projects of Islamic piety. I further suggest that Sufi practitioners’ creative engagement with the Persian sacred past mitigates discourses of Islamic revivalism and that localized religious, poetical tradition works to open up emic heuristic space for critiquing dominant state strategies aimed at combating terrorism and extremism.
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DEDICATION
To
Mandy, Gray, and Aram
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The largest scholarly debt I owe is to my advisor, Margaret Mills. Her patience, encouragement, and enthusiasm have constantly guided me throughout my development as a folklorist of the Persian-speaking world and during the course of this project. She has been the model of a mentor, helping give voice to my scholarship, always encouraging critical analysis, and teaching me the ethics of ethnographic fieldwork. I also owe tremendous gratitude to Morgan Liu for his introduction to the anthropological study of post-Soviet Central Asia, his faithful guidance, and his example of what moral scholarly inquiry entails. I also want to thank Dick Davis for patiently enduring my readings of Persian literature, teaching me to love and appreciate the artistry of the
Persian language, and for his unwavering support and assistance. Finally, thanks are due to Ray Cashman, whose seminar in the ethnography of communication was formative for my development as a scholar of verbal culture and whose spirit never fails to encourage.
I am also grateful to the many organizations that funded and facilitated my research. Fieldwork in Tajikistan was made possible by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral
Dissertation Award from the U.S. Department of Education and a student research grant from Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies. A v
Presidential Fellowship from the graduate school at Ohio State University funded a year of dissertation writing. Thanks are also due to Carl Ernst and Shai Tamari of the
Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who provided a comfortable and collegial atmosphere in which to work while I completed my dissertation draft.
I also want to give my thanks to the many scholars who offered their generous assistance at various stages of the proposal, fieldwork, and writing process. Thanks go to
Mark Moritz, Khulkar Matchanova, Saeed Honarmand, Parvaneh Pourshariati, David
Edwards, Gabrielle van den Berg, Art Buehler, Sergei Gretsky, Ulrich Marzolph,
Snjezana Buzov, and Joyce Burkhalter-Flueckiger. I also benefited enormously from helpful comments on portions of my writing by various colleagues at the annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, the annual meeting of the Central Eurasian Studies
Society, Indiana University’s Association of Central Eurasian Students, the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Department of Anthropology, and the symposium on
Persian verbal culture held at St. John’s College, University of Oxford.
I owe even more appreciation to the countless individuals who assisted my work in Tajikistan. I am especially grateful to Dilshod Rahimov, Director of the Rudaki
Institute of Language and Literature of the Tajik Academy of Sciences, who provided academic affiliation in Dushanbe as well as introductions in Dushanbe and beyond. I also wish to thank numerous colleagues in Tajikistan who provided invaluable support during the course of my fieldwork, especially Ravshon Rahmoni, Taghoymurod Yorzoda,
Muhammad Ibrohimov, Mehmonsho Sharipov, Saidahmad Kalandarov, and Nasrulloh
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Muhammadyusuf. In spite of their copious advice, assistance, and helpful recommendations, all the mistakes and misinterpretations in the following pages remain my own. Thanks also go to all of the hardworking individuals in the office of cultural affairs at the U.S. embassy in Dushanbe, especially Shafoat, Rachel, and Mackenzie.
Thanks also go to Brian and Angela, Greg and Heather, Terry and Elena, Mac and Sarah, and Drew and Leslie for your friendship in Tajikistan.
I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all of the Sufis who generously devoted their time and energy to sharing with me the practices of tasavvuf in Tajikistan.
Regretfully, religious politics in Tajikistan prevent naming them all in this space.
However, I trust that they know who they are and that this project could not have been completed without them and their generosity of time and spirit. My hope is that this project in some small way begins to repay the debt owed to them.
Finally, thanks go to my family. To my parents, Will and Cathy, thanks are especially due for their unwavering encouragement and the ways they have always fostered in me a love for other cultures, histories, and literatures. The final and greatest thanks are reserved for my loving wife, closest friend, and inimitable confidante, Mandy.
She has patiently endured years of graduate study, living apart from friends and family, and her husband’s never-ceasing obsession with the peoples of Persian-speaking Central
Asia. She has sustained and encouraged me throughout the course of this project. To her, the greatest debt for this scholarship is owed. And lastly, thanks to Gray and Aram.
I love you both more than you could know.
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VITA
2003...... B.A. International Studies and Russian
Language and Literature, University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2008...... M.A. Near Eastern Languages and Cultures,
The Ohio State University
Fields of Study
Major Field: Near Eastern Languages and Literatures
Specialization: Ethnology/Folkloristics and Islam in Central Asia
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... ii
DEDICATION ...... iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... v
VITA ...... viii
LIST OF FIGURES ...... xii
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSCRIPTION ...... xiii
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Sufism in Tajikistan ...... 10
Texts and Contexts ...... 15
Ethnographic Representation and the Inscription of Esoterica ...... 19
Chapter Outline ...... 24
CHAPTER 2: “INTERPRETING” POST-SOVIET SUFISM IN TAJIKISTAN –
SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE AND SUFI COUNTER-DISCOURSES ...... 26
Towards an Anthropology of Islam in Central Asia ...... 31
The Islamic Revival in Central Asia ...... 35
Sufism and Islamic revivalism ...... 37
ix
Islam and the “Political” in Central Asia ...... 44
Sufism and Politics ...... 51
Typologies of post-Soviet Tajik Sufism ...... 70
Conclusion: Revivalism, the “Political,” and Discursive Tradition in Tajik Sufism .... 91
CHAPTER 3: SUFI TEXTS AND READING DISPOSITIONS ...... 94
Mavlavī Jununī ...... 99
Genealogies of Poetical Reception ...... 106
Reconstructing the Past: historical narrative and removing the Soviet veil ...... 119
“Reading” Mavlavī: dispositions of reading and the printed habitus of mystical
poetry ...... 150
Jununī’s Peers: Šayx Abdulhayi Mujaxarfī and others ...... 160
Conclusion ...... 164
CHAPTER 4: RITUAL CONTEXTS AND TEXTUAL PERFORMANCE ...... 167
Halqai Zikr ...... 172
Halqai Zikr in Performance ...... 186
Composition in/alongside/before Performance and Textual Aide-mémoire ...... 201
Interpolation, (Mis)attribution, and the Traditionalization of Ritual Speech ...... 218
Authoritative Performance: Persian Poetry and the Hegemony of Proverbial Speech
...... 233
x
“Understanding” Ritual ...... 237
Darsi Tariqat ...... 245
Conclusion: Tradition, Canonization, and Revivalism ...... 248
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ...... 251
GLOSSARY ...... 260
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 265
xi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Map of Tajikistan ...... 14
Figure 2: Billboard on Dushanbe Street ...... 58
Figure 3: Emomalī Rahmon at the shrine of Mir Sayid Alii Hamadonī ...... 62
Figure 4: The Eleven Names of Šayx Bahodir ...... 83
Figure 5: Manuscript of Jununī's Devon ...... 105
Figure 6: Mavlavī Jununī's mausoleum ...... 148
Figure 7: Mavlavī Jununī's grave ...... 149
Figure 8: Autograph of Abdulhay’s Mufizu-l-anvor ...... 162
Figure 9: Abdulhay's personal pen box and writing implements ...... 163
Figure 10: Zikr injunction at shrine near Dushanbe ...... 173
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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSCRIPTION
In this study, I utilize non-Latin script texts in Persian, Tajik Persian (Persian written using a modified Cyrillic alphabet), Uzbek, and Russian. For texts in Persian script, I have used the standard Persian transliteration scheme of the International
Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. There is no corresponding standard transliteration system for Tajik Persian. I have chosen to use the transliteration scheme of the now defunct Central Eurasian Studies Review (CESR). In contrast to other transliteration schemes, the CESR system, where possible, attempts one-for-one Latin correspondence to Tajik Cyrillic characters. As such, “gh” becomes “ǧ,” “sh” is “š,” “ch” is č, and the hard sign is represented by “ʿ.” For consistency’s sake, I have used CESR transliteration schema for both non-Latin script Uzbek texts and for Russian.
All specialized Islamic terms, regardless of language of origin, have been transliterated according to standard Tajik orthography. In transcriptions of colloquial
Tajik speech, I have attempted to preserve local pronunciation rather than imposing standard Tajik grammar and spelling. This should not imply narrators’ insufficient command of literary Persian convention, but rather that informal speech is a distinct
xiii register from literary Tajik Persian. The only exceptions to these rules relate to the use of words with established English spellings. For example, I use “Tajikistan,” rather than
“Tojikiston,” and “Dushanbe,” rather than “Dušanbe.”
In my transcriptions, I have attempted to retain some feel for the language as it was spoken. As such, each new breath segment is transcribed as a new line, and longer pauses between segments of speech are represented by longer line breaks. Some of these breaks function as paragraph markers, while other longer pauses mark transitions or the introduction of a new theme or character. So as not to clutter the page, I have not transcribed other features of the spoken text, either linguistic or paralinguistic. All remaining information relevant to my analysis is included within brackets.
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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
Early in the morning on August 23, 2010, twenty five high security detainees escaped from the State Committee for National Security’s (GKNB)1 detention center in
Dushanbe.2 The escapees’ alleged crimes ranged from membership in prohibited Islamic groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Hizbi Tahrir (HT), and affiliation with the Afghan Taliban to drug trafficking and advocating more general resistance to the government of the Tajik president, Emomalī Rahmon. Several of the detainees were relatively high-profile figures including the former head of Rahmon’s presidential guard and the state drug-control agency, Abdurasul Mirzoev, and Ibrohim
Nasriddinov, a former detainee at the U.S.’s Guantanamo Bay prison.3 In the prison break’s aftermath, state security forces quickly moved to a heightened state of alert. Mug shot posters littered street corners, buses, and government offices. State television and other media continuously covered the perpetuators’ alleged crimes and the government’s,
1 The “GKNB” is the successor organ to the Soviet-era KGB in Tajikistan. 2 Radioi Ozodī, “Firori mahbuson az bozdoštgoh tasdiq šud,” Radioi Ozodī, August 23, 2010, http://www.ozodi.org/content/article/2134764.html. 3 Alexander Sodiqov, “High-profile Convicts Escape from Prison in Central Dushanbe,” Central Asia- Caucasus Institute Analyst - Johns Hopkins University, September 3, 2010, http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5398. 1 they said, decisive response. Tajik police and army units were soon dispatched to the restive Rašt valley several hours drive northeast of the Tajik capital, the ostensible location of the escapees’ base of support and the region to which the Rahmon government alleged they had escaped.
The government launched a full-fledged assault in the valley rooting out the escapees’ supposed safe havens in addition to searching for civil-war era opponents to the regime. On September 19, a Tajik army convoy filled with newly-conscripted soldiers was fired upon in the Kamarob gorge of the Rašt valley killing twenty three soldiers.4
The Tajik government blamed the assault on two opposition figures purportedly hiding in the region, Abdullo Rahimov, better known as Mullo Abdullo,5 and Alovuddin Davlatov or Ali Bedakī. Abdullo had been an opposition leader in the United Tajik Opposition
(UTO) during the Tajik Civil War. Rather than surrendering his arms at the conclusion of the peace settlement which ended the war, instead he fled to Afghanistan.6 Dubbed the
“Tajik Bin Laden” by Tajik media, Abdullo has been a phantom figure in Tajikistan, in his exile allegedly masterminding numerous operations against the Tajik state.7 Upon his supposed return to the Rašt valley in 2009, the government launched a sweep, arresting
4 Rukhshona Ibragimova, “Tajik Militants Ambush Army Convoy; 23 Troops Confirmed Dead,” Central Asia Online, September 20, 2010, http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/caii/features/main/2010/09/20/feature-03. 5 Not to be confused with Sayid Abdullo Nurī, also commonly refered to as Mullo Abdullo. See Kamoludin Abdullaev and Shahram Akbarzadeh, Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 157. 6 John Heathershaw, Post-conflict Tajikistan: The Politics of Peacebuilding and the Emergence of Legitimate Order (New York: Routledge, 2009), 120. 7 Alpharabius, “What Is Going on in Tajikistan? Sewing a Pattern…,” Neweurasia.net, September 27, 2010, http://www.neweurasia.net/politics-and-society/what-is-going-on-in-tajikistan-sewing-a- pattern/#more-13255. 2 numerous alleged opposition figures, including many of individuals who would later flee in the jailbreak.
The government’s response to the September 19 convoy attack was to further escalate the conflict, closing the valley to all outside observers and apprehending
Davlatov’s brother, Husniddin, an elected representative serving in the local administrative council. Anecdotal evidence suggested that the male inhabitants of the valley virtually disappeared, fearing reprisals from state security forces with some perhaps even joining the assault against government forces.8 Before the operation ended, numerous Tajik conscripts had been killed including those in the convoy attack and in another high-profile incident on October 6 in which a helicopter carrying Tajik troops crashed in the valley. Numerous villagers were arrested, and many alleged opposition figures were killed.
The Rašt conflict slowly ended at the beginning of the winter of 2010-2011.
However, the anticlimax did not hold, as even more dramatically, Ali Bedakī was purportedly killed in the Rašt valley on January 4, 2011. Not long after, a cell phone video was leaked on Youtube purportedly showing an almost naked, visibly distraught
Bedakī in the rear of a Tajik police car answering questions from members of the Tajik security forces,9 implying that Bedakī was not killed in a security operation as the Tajik
8 Sophie Roche and John Heathershaw, “Tajikistan’s Marginalised Youth,” Opendemocracy.net, October 20, 2010, http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/sophie-roche-john- heathershaw/tajikistan%E2%80%99s-marginalised-youth. 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayjEzf-2lr0 3 government alleged, but rather that he was apprehended, tortured, and extra-judicially executed at the hands of Tajik security forces.10
Following the Rašt operation and in its aftermath, Rahmon’s security apparatus launched a full-fledged assault on Islamic practice in Tajikistan, ostensibly in response to the brazen actions of the escapees, their support among dissident elements within Tajik society, and the perpetrators alleged Islam-inspired motivations.11 Some of these actions included compelling young men to shave beards,12 collecting Islamic literature from bookstalls and carts in front of mosques, closing unregistered mosques, shuffling the imoms of registered mosques, and preventing parents from registering the births of children with “Islamic” names. In the midst of this assault, critics even accused
Rahmon’s government of burning down a popular women’s mosque in Dushanbe.13
Perhaps the most dramatic early response from Rahmon’s regime was to insist on the return of Tajik students studying abroad at foreign madrasas, chiefly in Egypt,
Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Rahmon issued a call to Tajik parents in the fall of 2010 urging them to bring their sons home, critiquing the quality of foreign religious education, and championing the value of Tajikistan’s state-sanctioned institutions of
10 Alexander Sodiqov, “Video Raises Questions About a Tajik Fighter’s Death,” Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Analyst - Johns Hopkins University, March 2, 2011, http://www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5511. 11 Sophie Roche and John Heathershaw offer perhaps the best and most concise argument for why the conflict in Rašt was not about Islam. See “Conflict in Tajikistan – Not Really About Radical Islam,” Opendemocracy.net, October 19, 2010, http://www.opendemocracy.net/john-heathershaw-sophie- roche/conflict-in-tajikistan-%e2%80%93-not-really-about-radical-islam. 12 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Tajikistan Launches Anti-Beard Campaign,” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, October 20, 2010, http://www.rferl.org/content/Tajikistan_Launches_AntiBeard_Campaign/2196546.html. 13 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Islamic Party Cries Foul As Tajikistan’s ‘Women’s Mosque’ Burns,” October 25, 2010, http://www.rferl.org/content/Islamic_Party_Cries_Foul_As_Tajikistans_Womens_Mosque_Burns/2200792 .html. 4
Islamic learning.14 Tajik embassy officials met with students studying abroad and
“encouraged” them to return home to Tajikistan, in some cases even arranging flights for returning students. By the spring of 2011, as many as 1500 students had returned while as many as 2100 ignored Rahmon’s warnings and remained abroad. The families of those students remaining abroad increasingly faced penalties, both criminal and administrative, for failing to bring their children home to Tajikistan.15
Subsequently, to further their control over the dissemination of Islamic knowledge in the country, the state’s Committee of Religious Affairs’ (Kumitai Din)16 next significant move was to issue a list of fifty two sermon topics approved for imoms to use during Friday prayers at Tajikistan’s mosques. In addition, they issued a decree limiting each sermon’s delivery to no more than fifteen minutes.17 Regarding the approved topics, a spokesman for the Kumitai Din said, “They are composed of Islamic teachings on ethics, on how to raise children and teach them honesty, trustworthiness, friendship, and other moral values.”18 The explicit goal of the approved list was to prevent clerics from engaging in any overt political criticism and to prevent the
“radicalization” of Tajikistan’s youth.
14 Alexander Sodiqov, “Mosques and Islamic Education Under Increasing Scrutiny in Tajikistan,” Eurasia Daily Monitor: Volume 8, Issue 41, March 1, 2011, http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=37582&tx_ttnews%5BbackP id%5D=512. 15 Sairaxmon Nazriev, “Na iuge Tadzhikistana budut sudit’ otcov, zapretivshix detiam poseshchat’ shkoly,” Azia-Plius, April 13, 2011, http://dev.news.tj/ru/news/na-yuge-tadzhikistana-budut-sudit-ottsov- zapretivshikh-detyam-poseshchat-shkoly. 16 The state’s Committee of Religious Affairs, (Kumitai oid ba dini Jumhurii Tojikiston) is colloquially referred to as simply the “Kumitai Din.” 17 Dilafruz Nabiyeva, “Tajikistan Limits Friday Prayers to 15 Minutes,” Central Asia Online, January 31, 2011, http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/caii/features/main/2011/01/31/feature-01. 18 Farangis Najibullah, “Tajik Government To Issue List Of Approved Sermon Topics,” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, January 10, 2011, http://www.rferl.org/content/tajikistan_government_orders_mosques/2271961.html. 5
The third far-reaching result of the Rašt operation was a move against some of the most popular and powerful Islamic clerics in the country, chiefly among them members of the Turajonzoda family. Turajon père, Ešoni Muhammad Rafʿi, better known as Ešoni
Turajon (1934-2005),19 was an influential member of the official clergy while serving as imomi xatib or prayer leader of the Friday mosque in the village of Rohatī, a small hamlet not more than 20 kilometers east of the Tajik capital. Ešoni Turajon’s son, Hojī Akbar
Turajonzoda (1954- ) served as qozii kalon or head Islamic official of the Tajik SSR in the late Soviet period and was an important figure in the UTO movement during the civil war. After the conclusion of the conflict, he was appointed Vice Prime Minister of
Tajikistan and later held a seat in the upper house of the Tajik parliament before finally being removed by Rahmon in 2010.
Hojī Akbar’s two brothers, Ešoni Nurriddin (1953- ) and Ešoni Mahmudjon
(1960- ), also influential clerics, similarly hold vast sway over members of the political opposition in Tajikistan. At the family’s mosque in the village of Turkobod outside of the city of Vahdat, thousands of congregants regularly attend Friday prayers,20 and Ešoni
Nurridin’s taped sermons are sold across the country and distributed on the family’s website.21 In late January of 2011, Ešoni Nurridin abruptly resigned from his post as
19 Ešon is honorific for religious figures in Central Asia. In its precise sense it is often used a synonym for sayid, males descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. However, in practice the term is applied to members of sayid families, Sufi lineages, and other assorted religious dignitaries. 20 Some estimates put the number of those attending Friday prayers at over 15,000. 21 In late 2010, the authorities forbid merchants from selling any of the brothers’ sermons. However, it seems that merchants regularly circumvented these regulations as I was able to find and purchase recordings of their sermons regularly throughout late 2010 and the first half of 2011. Also, in late May of 2011, the government issued a directive ordering Tajik internet providers to prevent access to the family’s website. The website allowed users to listen to sermons and ask questions directly of the Turajonzodas. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Tajik Authorities Criticized For Restricting Access To Religious Website,” Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, May 24, 2011, 6 imomi xatib of the family’s mosque,22 only to return as prayer leader several months later.
Rumors circulated that his resignation was forced and he was compelled by officials at the Kumitai Din to relinquish power to his younger brother Mahmudjon.
Later in the year, the Turajonzodas’ cotton warehouse was destroyed in an arson attack which many assume was masterminded by the regime as punishment for their political activities. Events came to head in late 2011 as the government accused the
Turajonzodas of celebrating Ašura,23 the festival commemorating the martyrdom of
Imom Husayn, in conflict with traditional Tajik Hanafī understandings of its observance, and issued an injunction against performing any prayers at the mosque. Finally, in May of 2012, a local court issued an order to close the mosque completely,24 thus abruptly cutting off the Turajonzodas from any public forum for their views, religious or political.
Of all of the Tajik state’s recent actions in the religious sphere perhaps the most severe was the proposal and eventual passage of a law entitled, “Ob otvetstvennosti roditelei za vospitaniye i obucheniye detei.” (On the responsibilities of parents for their children’s upbringing and education).25 The particular point of contention in the law, initially proposed in December 2010 and finally signed by Rahmon in August of 2011, was in section eight of the legislation in which the law reads, “Ne dopuskat’ uchastiya
http://www.rferl.org/content/tajik_authorities_criticized_for_restricting_access_to_religious_website/2419 5063.html. 22 Dzhaxongir Boboev, “Nuriddin Turadzhonzoda bol’she ne imam-xatib,” Azia-Plius, January 31, 2011, http://dev.news.tj/ru/news/nuriddin-turadzhonzoda-bolshe-ne-imam-khatib. 23 Temur Varki, “Turadzhonzoda nameren podat’ v sud na glavu Soveta ulemov,” Azia-Plius, December 9, 2011, http://dev.news.tj/ru/news/turadzhonzoda-nameren-podat-v-sud-na-glavu-soveta-ulemov. 24 Mexrangez Tursunzoda, “Mechet’ Sem’i Turadzhonzoda Mozhet Byt’ Polnost’iu Zakryta,” Azia-Plius, May 30, 2012, http://dev.news.tj/ru/news/mechet-semi-turadzhonzoda-mozhet-byt-polnostyu-zakryta. 25 Avesta.tj, “Prezident podpisal zakon ob otvetstvennosti roditelei za vospitaniye detei,” Avesta.tj, August 3, 2011, http://www.avesta.tj/goverment/9191-prezident-podpisal-zakon-ob-otvetstvennosti-roditeley-za- vospitanie-detey.html. 7 detei v deyatel’nosti religioznyx ob”edinenii, za iskliucheniem detei, ofitsial’no obuchaiushchixsya v religioznyx uchrezhdeniyax.” ([It is] not permissible for children to participate in the activities of religious associations, except for children officially enrolled in religious institutions.), thus limiting mosque attendance to those over the age of majority, eighteen, except for those few able to attend state-sanctioned Islamic schools.
Though the law ostensibly allows children to study in official religious institutions, in practice this too is a difficult proposition. In 2011, Tajikistan had only nineteen such officially-registered schools and one additional post-secondary institution of Islamic learning.26 In total, these institutions served a total of 7,500 students, a minuscule percentage of Tajikistan’s school-age population.27
My family’s arrival in Tajikistan to conduct fieldwork among Tajik Sufi groups coincided with these opening salvos of Rahmon and his government’s ongoing assault on religious practice. Indeed, we arrived less than twenty-four hours prior to the prison break which initiated and “legitimated” the military operation in the Rašt valley and
Rahmon’s government’s subsequent policy enactments. As such, the events in Rašt and the ramifications of tighter state control on any religious practice formally outside of their control form an indelible subtext to the study that follows. Prior to arriving in Tajikistan,
I had initially hoped to conduct an ethnography of the performance of Sufi ritual in
Tajikistan. However, the political situation proved to be too much of a challenge for building the requisite relationships with Sufi practitioners and attending the necessary
26 Tim Epkenhans, “Muslims Without Learning, Clergy Without Faith: Institutions of Islamic Learning in Tajikistan,” in Islamic Education in the Soviet Union and Its Successor States, ed. Michael Kemper, Raoul Motika, and Stefan Reichmuth (New York: Routledge, 2010), 330–333. 27 Alexander Sodiqov, “Tajik Authorities Impose Heavier Restrictions on Islamic Education,” Tajikistan Monitor, July 18, 2011, http://tjmonitor.wordpress.com/2011/07/18/restrictions/. 8 range of ritual events which were often held in primarily rural, village environments.
Sufi gatherings (halqa/mahfil), not public events at the best of times in Tajikistan, had become even more circumscribed, and a number of Tajik pirs had dismissed their disciples entirely until more agreeable political circumstances presented themselves.
These political exigencies forced a slight shift in my topical focus and analytical scope. In the midst of all of this political uncertainty, Sufi “texts” were still available for study. Indeed, Tajik pirs and their disciples encouraged my investigation of the poetry performed within their rituals, the hagiographic texts of Tajik Sufism, both of medieval and a more recent provenance, and the general literary history of modern Tajik Sufism.
Texts, in any of their multiple iterations, were considered “a-political,” devoid of controversy and an appropriate site of scholarship, as modeled by an earlier generation of
Soviet-era Orientalists. That is not to say that Tajik Sufis imagined their texts were open to all manner of interpretation, but rather that textual artifacts themselves were considered politically-neutral. It is the unauthorized teaching of such texts that is problematic and potentially threatening to state control of Islamic life in Tajikistan.
Encouraged in this direction, the focus of my work became the textual worlds of
Tajikistan’s Sufis. My ethnographic investigation thus morphed into an exploration of
Sufi texts and the interrelated social contexts of their production, reading, and performance. As my year of fieldwork progressed, I eventually was able to observe and record a number of the ritual events that I had initially hoped would provide the basis for my study, but the more significant site of investigation became the ways the textual
9 imaginations of Tajik Sufi groups were embodied and enacted within ritual frames rather than focusing on ritual itself.
Sufism in Tajikistan
Before continuing, I should make a few comments as to this study’s object; what do I mean when I speak of Tajik Sufism? Sufism, along with its Russian counterpart,
Sufizm, and the more specialized Tajik Persian terminology of tasavvuf, due to its simultaneous descriptive and prescriptive dimensions can be at times a problematic analytical concept,28 and when applied to Islamic life in Central Asia semantic issues perhaps become even more acute. It is at once the general English-language referent for the “mystical dimensions” of Islam,29 and the catch-all for the historical and institutional elaboration of these concepts. For Tajik Sufis, the prescriptive element is of foremost importance. One post-Soviet Tajik Sufi text simultaneously describes “tasavvuf” and
“Söfī” in fifteen different ways all predicated on abandoning (taxliya) the self and seeking to purify (tasfiya) ones spirit (röh).30
In contrast to the prescriptive dimensions of what Sufism in Central Asia entails, the descriptive, scholarly move often conceives of practice under the general rubric of tasavvuf in a contrastive dimension, e.g. in contrast to “normative” Islamic orthodoxy.
That is, Sufism is often taken as having a non-textual basis divorced from the textual tradition of Islam, as in opposition to Islamic modernist movements, as local,
28 Carl W. Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1997), 18–19. 29 Annemarie. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill. NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). 30 Ismoil Atozoda, ed., Kašf-ul-Asror: gulčini ǧazaliyot az devoni Šayx Abdurrahimi Davlat (Dušanbe: Humo, 2000), 6–8. 10
“traditional,” un-official, non-literate, pre-Islamic vestiges, shamanistic, or perhaps most polemically, as “not really Islam.” Sufism in Central Asia is often conceptualized as an iteration of the “every day,”31 “folk” Islam, or more precisely “vernacular” religious practice. In addition, the fact that Islam in Central Asia is also frequently conceived as distinct from its “orthodox” cousins from the Arabian Peninsula due to Central Asian
Muslims’ predilection with the performance of life-cycle rituals, conceptions of Islam as national identity, and shrine practices seemingly inconsistent with a notion of “Islam as studied system”32 causes even more difficulty in formulating an idea of Sufistic practices’ relationship to wider Central Asian Islam. That is, if Central Asian Islam is already the
“other” in regards to normative Islam, then Sufism in Central Asia is the other’s
“other.”33
That is not to say that vernacular practice is not a constituent of Tajik Sufism, however the everyday religious practices of Tajik Sufis are firmly enmeshed within historical institutional and official frameworks. While scholars have recognized the centrality of vernacular religious imagination within institutional structures and that categories of lived religion are deeply implicated and inextricable from categories of
“official” religion,34 folklore scholarship, as well as religious studies and the
31 Sergei Petrovich. Poliakov and Martha Brill Olcott, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992). 32 Dale F. Eickelman, “Inside the Islamic Reformation,” in Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, ed. Donna Lee Bowen and Evelyn A. Early (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 246–256. 33 I take this formulation from Sarah Kendzior’s extension and refinement of Edward Said’s Orientalism in relation to the countries of Central Asia. See Sarah Kendzior, “The Reverse Orientalism of Looking For an ‘Arab Spring’ in Central Asia,” The Atlantic, January 20, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the-reverse-orientalism-of-looking-for-an-arab- spring-in-central-asia/251663/. 34 Leonard Norman Primiano, “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife,” Western Folklore 54, no. 1 (1995): 37–56. 11 anthropology of religion, needs to continue to move beyond these dichotomous understandings of religious practice. While as a folklorist I am eminently interested in the everyday understandings and practices of Central Asian Muslims, and, indeed, I would argue that it is precisely the attention to such practice that should be the goal of the ethnographer of Central Asian religious life,35 I do not take Sufism/Sufizm/tasavvuf as merely a synonym for “vernacular” Islam in Tajikistan. Rather, my attention is devoted to the institutional and historical elaborations of such vernacular practices as manifested within Tajik Sufi groups. Practices of shrine visitation, ziyorat, devotion to living saintly individuals, and other personal ritual and healing practices are often associated with the institutional frameworks of transnational Sufi teaching hierarchies and as such figure in the following study, but this study is not focused on the anti-modern and non-orthodox for its substance.
Instead, in post-Soviet Tajikistan, the primary social context for the elaboration of ethical, religious (read, vernacular) orientations is still the tariqat (lit. the path).36 Tariqat are local iterations of historical, transnational teaching hierarchies tracing their origin back to an eponymous founder and subsequently back to the Prophet Muhammad himself. These relationships of a succession of pious masters, historical or otherwise, are
35 See for example, Deniz Kandiyoti, “Foreword,” Central Asian Survey 25, no. 3 (2006): 217–218; Nazif Shahrani, “Local Knowledge of Islam and Social Discourse in Afghanistan and Turkistan in the Modern Period,” in Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert L. Canfield (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 161–188. 36 “Tariqat” is the Tajik transliteration of the Persian-script Arabic “ṭarīqa(t).” However, in colloquial usage the final “t” is normally eliminated, becoming “tariqa.” For the sake of consistency, I have preserved standard literary Tajik orthography throughout this study, except when transcribing oral speech, where I have used “tariqa” instead. Often “tariqat” is translated into English as “order” or even “brotherhood” as somewhat analogous to Christian monastic orders. In the study that follows, I sometimes employ the terms “order” or “brotherhood” when referring to specific groups of (male) individuals engaged in common ritual practice in a Sufi lodge, but when thinking of the institutional framework of the tariqat, I conceive of tariqat more precisely as “teaching lineages.” 12 conceptualized as a silsila, a chain of descent, in which Sufi masters, pir/muršid/šayx, pass on spiritual knowledge to their initiates, murid/solik/šagerd.37 Sufi tariqat in
Tajikistan are organized around the charismatic figure of a pir into discrete halqa (lit. circles). Halqa is both the term most often used for each individual group of murids and for the general ritual and teaching events in which these same disciples gather.
This study is based primarily on interviews and participant observation conducted among several Sufi halqa in and around the distant suburbs of the Tajik capital,
Dushanbe, conducted between August 2010 and August 2011. These particular halqa all trace their teaching authority along silsilas in the Naqšbandiya and/or Qodiriya transnational teaching lineages, through primarily historical Tajik and Afghan pirs. Each of the groups I studied, while centered outside of Dushanbe proper, retain deep connections to the urban center of Tajik life; many murids live and work in Dushanbe while still preserving ongoing connections to their village pirs. 38 Similarly, many of the pirs routinely visit the city and some even maintain homes there.
Thus, in regard to geographic scope, this study does not consider the numerous
Sufi lineages with active branches in Tajikistan’s Farǧona (Ferghana) valley or Zarafšan
(Zaravshon) river valley, those in more rural, southern Tajik Xatlon (Khatlon), or groups in the Tajik Pamirs of Badakhshan. The halqa discussed in this study chiefly operate in an area corresponding most closely to the Tajik government administrative division of
37 All of these terms are used among Tajik Sufis. However, the most often encountered formulation is pir- murid, when referring to the specific silsila relationship. However, murids in the abstract are normally called solik(on) , devotee(s). 38 It should be emphasized that this is a Soviet and post-Soviet phenomenon. Prior to the Soviet period, Dushanbe was little more than a market town. Cities like Bukhara and Samarqand were much more important as centers of Islamic learning, commerce, and Sufi life. 13
Nohiyahoi tobeu jumhurī, the regions under republican administration, often colloquially referred to as Karategin (see figure 1).
Figure 1: Map of Tajikistan
Due to this limited focus, I make no claims as to the comprehensiveness of my study of Tajik Sufi tariqat. My views are of course limited to what I was able to observe and with whom I was able to speak and by extension are necessarily incomplete. Yet even in this ethnographic pastiche, I would argue that the uses of tradition, the discursive support for entextualizing processes, and the forms of religious understanding invoked are emblematic of the wider post-Soviet Islamic devotional project in which other Sufi groups beyond the groups I studied are also engaged. My claim then is not to universal
14 applicability or singular thoroughness, but rather that a common symbolic idiom pervades the textual and ritual worlds of the disparate Sufi groups I studied, while simultaneously blanket statements about “Sufism in Tajikistan” or “post-Soviet Sufism” are difficult to legitimate on the ground. For example, strict typologies of belief or practice are not abundantly evident, discrete intellectual and charismatic genealogies are similarly absent, and multiple and competing currents of thought are constantly intersecting with these processes.
Texts and Contexts
My conception of Sufi practice in Tajikistan is predicated on a notion of Sufi identity as both textual and contextual.39 It is both created, articulated, and experienced in the textual worlds and incumbent reading dispositions of Tajik Sufis and prefigured, or subsequently enacted, in the ritual environments of the Sufi xonaqoh (Sufi lodge). Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been a proliferation of religious publication, purportedly a constituent component of the Central Asian “Islamic revival.” These texts, many of them manuscripts long hidden from Soviet authorities, have newly entered the religious imaginations of Tajik Muslims. My focus here is on the specific power of these nascent textualities, the processes of their replication and dissemination,40 and the discursive support for entextualizing processes that historical narrative and ritual performance provide.
39 Robert Thomas Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-first Century Pakistan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 14. 40 Greg Urban, “Entextualization, Replication, and Power,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 21–44. 15
A related focus of my inquiry is how textualized conceptions of the past provide legitimation and authorization for current religious projects, e.g. questions of how nascent religious discourse becomes authoritative and how the new hagiographic and canonization process in Central Asia operates. By extension, I am interested in the particular dispositions of Tajik Sufi reading. That is, I am concerned with how Tajik
Sufis encounter these texts and their modalities of interpretation including within oral, ritual performance frames. I conceive of a dynamic site of interaction between texts, writ large, and rites.41 In Tajik Sufism, there exist ongoing projects of textual canonization, historical valorization, and general hagiographic construction for the express purpose of legitimating the religious life and practices of post-Soviet Sufism after the enormity of
Soviet disjuncture. Further, these projects actively create and maintain connections between contemporary practice and historical Tajik Sufism, irrespective of “authentic” strains of transmission, and actively use classical Persian tradition in the service of imagining new conceptions of contemporary Tajik Sufism.
At the center of this story of texts are their sites of their enactment, the interrelated contexts of their “reading” and performance within the intricate bounds of
Sufi ritual. It is precisely these multiple fields that help fashion new Sufi subjectivities, a redundancy of discursive routines that helps to constitute new modalities of Sufi belief and practice in the post-Soviet religious environment.42 Such texts’ contexts, i.e. specific speech acts, are also constitutive of these new Sufi reading dispositions. Events like
41 Catherine M. Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140. 42 Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 252. 16 halqai zikr, the ritualized collective out-loud remembrance of the names of God, and darsi tariqat, formalized group teaching events, both of which I discuss in chapter 4, model and shape conceptions of a grand Tajik Sufi past and draw contemporary practitioners into a discursive relationship to past Sufi pirs.
My approach to these and other issues is broadly folkloristic, focusing on a number of themes important to international folklore studies, e.g. tradition, transmission, the performance of verbal art, and aesthetic communicative processes. I conceive of tradition in the active sense,43 as a process of ongoing transformation and communicative potential and as a particular communicative resource enabling social action in the present via (re)imaginations of the past. The related issue implicated in any discussion of bodies of tradition and the temporal ideologies associated with them is how such processes move through social space, i.e. how they are transmitted. Responding to the connoted linearity of concepts of transmission, recent work in anthropology has shifted the focus from
“transmission” to that of “circulation.”44 It is precisely these relations of intertextuality45 and “communicability”46 that facilitate their repeated decontextualization and
43 By “active sense,” I am following in Dell Hymes’ well-trodden path relating tradition to the active dimensions of social life. As such, the processes of tradition and tradition as a verb, i.e. to traditionalize, become the prime site of exploration. See Dell Hymes, “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth,” Journal of American Folklore 88, no. 350 (1975): 353. 44 Debra Spitulnik, “The Social Circulation of Media Discourse and the Mediation of Communities,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6, no. 2 (1996): 161–187. 45 Charles L. Briggs and Richard Bauman, “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1992): 131–172. 46 Charles L. Briggs, “What We Should Have Learned from Americo Paredes: The Politics of Communicability and the Making of Folkloristics,” Journal of American Folklore 125, no. 495 (Winter 2012): 98. 17 recontextualization and that enable the movement of bodies of Sufi textual and performance tradition.47
Finally, one must consider the sites in which these processes of tradition occur and in which the movement/circulation of cultural forms are enacted, that is, the specific speech events and arenas in which discourse becomes traditionalized and traditionalizing discourse is situated. As such, a central point of concern in this study is the performance of such recontextualized, traditionalized discourse.48 Here, I consider the performative speech events in which Sufi textualities are embodied, put up for critical evaluation, and perhaps most importantly, “experienced” by Tajik Sufi adepts. My focus is on the meta- discourses of Sufi performers, the ways that performance acts as an evaluative frame for critiquing larger group processes, is constitutive of Sufi identity, and meta- communicatively offers Sufi interpretations of the post-Soviet religious present.
A related issue is that of the relationship of textual artifacts, oral tradition(alizing), and the accompanying situated, ideological practices of Tajik Sufi literacy (or “reading”).
The centrality of textual practices to the anthropological study of Muslim societies has been well-attested.49 This particular attention to Sufi textualities in Tajikistan shares an affinity with such wider work on the textual practices within Muslims societies.50 I view
47 Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, “The Natural History of Discourse,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1– 17. 48 Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1984).; Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 59–88. 49 Talal. Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Washington, D.C.: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1986), 14. 50 Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society; John R. Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 18
Sufi texts not as “abstract windows into belief,”51 but as living embodiments and agents for the creation of new Tajik Sufi subjectivities.52 By Sufi texts, I mean mystical poetry, including classical Persian poetry, newer Tajik verse, and intercalations of both, prose texts intended as instruction for adepts, hagiographies, sermon texts, prayer manuals, and commentaries on all of the above by Sufi pirs. This study considers the ways these texts have entered and circulate within Sufi halqa, their relationship to oral tradition and their current articulation in the oral sphere, and how such texts are experienced by Tajik Sufis.
Ethnographic Representation and the Inscription of Esoterica
As already mentioned, the political situation in Tajikistan during 2010 and 2011 severely limited my access to Tajik Sufi devotees and Tajik ritual environments. To a certain extent, of course, all ethnography is limited by issues of access, as ethnographers can only record what they are told and can only write about what they have seen. Earlier anthropological claims to comprehensiveness have given way to an ethnographic process of fragments and snapshots. Ethnographic methodology, limited by the contingencies and incompleteness of the fieldworker’s ethnographic present and the contingent knowledge of the ethnographic encounter, can only hope to offer fragmentary perspectives of its subjects’ life worlds. Such claims, while familiar to the poststructuralist ethnographer, have special resonance to the ethnographic study of Sufi groups. Specifically, issues of ethnographic positioning and the creation of ethnographic
51 Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society, 9. 52 Flagg Miller, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University, 2007), 10. 19 rapport are even more vital when the objects of study are groups which possess varieties of esoteric and layered knowledge.
Of course, positioning vis-à-vis ones ethnographic subject is a key concern of the ethnographer irrespective of the group being studied. Be it in regard to gender, age, familial situation, social group, money, etc. differential relationships and issues of power between the ethnographer and subject have significant bearing on the ethical conduct and reflexive dimension of the dialogical ethnographic project. However, when the experiential and discursive realms of the ethnographic subject are even more intricately interlaced with streams of esotericism, when even standard group discourse is layered and multiplex, and when there is an accompanying intricate set of rules and norms for group membership, intra-group communication, and comportment, standard ethnographic methodology presents heightened difficulties for access, the creation of rapport, and for the ethical presentation of the ethnographic subject. Yet again, I am not arguing that these are issues unique in kind to the study of esoteric groups, but they are different in degree from studies of other groups.
In the relatively recent past, a number of scholars have conducted fieldwork among Sufi groups closely related genealogically, geographically, or historically to the varieties of practice I discuss in Tajikistan. An often unstated subtext in many of these studies is related to issues of access, oftentimes existing as an un-reflected attribute of such authors’ otherwise hyper-reflexivity. A salient point with respect to the creation of ethnographic rapport in many of these studies is how the ethnographer gained the participant observer status central to his/her ethnographic methodology.
20
In many of these studies, access often comes serendipitously, as legitimated by a perceived miracle,53 as made possible by entering the group as (or subsequently becoming) a disciple of the šayx,54 already “being a Muslim,”55 or in a steady shaping of the researcher’s precepts to conform with her subject’s positions.56 In contrast to studies making use of these access paradigms and rapport-creating mechanisms, other studies of
Sufistic practice in the wider region have been relatively broad in the subjects they consider. I would tentatively suggest that such topical breadth may be the result of limits to in-depth ethnographic access. Further, to my knowledge, no study of Sufism in post-
Soviet Central Asia has comprehensively explored the experiential worlds of the halqa.57
If ethnographic access to esoteric groups is potentially fraught with political and ethical issues and access is often mediated by issues of ethnographic positioning, what recourse does the ethnographer of Sufism have? What if becoming a disciple, fully
“going native” in this respect, is not an option either due to external inhibitors, the political situation, etc.? Or, what if miraculous circumstances fail to legitimate your presence to members of the Sufi halqa? A potential solution, irrespective of the fact that ethnographic monographs are not hagiography, is that ones writing projects could then be
53 Rozehnal, Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-first Century Pakistan, 10–11. 54 Frances Trix, Spiritual Discourse: Learning with an Islamic Master (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).; Kenneth Paul Lizzio, “Saving Grace: Naqshbandi Spiritual Transmission in the Asian Sub-continent, 1928-1997” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1998), 44–62. 55 Silverstein, Islam and Modernity in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 22. 56 Katherine Pratt Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, and Islam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), xii. 57 I should emphasize that this is not a critique of the valuable scholarship on Central Asian Sufi life. My discussion is merely to emphasize that the dearth of scholarship, particularly as “Islam” has been a prime site of investigation, both ethnographic and otherwise, for scholars of Central Asia, suggests that access is still one of the primary reasons for the lack of ethnographic richness in studies of Central Asian Sufi tariqat. Instead, many studies have relied on investigations of other forms of vernacular Islamic practice put under the rubric of Sufi practice rather that in-depth, “thick” description of the social worlds of Central Asian Sufis or conversely some studies have substituted ethnographic richness for historical depth. 21 substantiated by keeping with a pir’s own projects for self-proclamation or as an extension of the group’s mission of daʿvat. 58 Yet, what if the group studied does not desire or welcome participation let alone a written product or is completely neutral to the enterprise? These questions raise issues of the ethics of outsider discourse, the exigencies of insider ethnography, and the problematics of ethnographic commensurability.
While my experience is limited to Sufi groups in Tajikistan, and to a much more limited extent to those in Afghanistan, I would submit that these observations may be more broadly applicable to the ethnographic study of Sufi groups in the wider Persian- speaking world, Central and South Asia, and perhaps even farther afield to Sufi groups in
Islamicate cultures at large. Groups organized upon the dissemination of bodies of esoteric knowledge present particular difficulties towards their ethnographic description.
When emic perspectives argue that “knowing” can only occur in relationship with the pir, not by outsider description, then one without this “proper” relationship has special difficulty in analyzing group practice.59 When insiders argue that the apparent outer reality does not properly index the interiorities of their mystical practice, how does the outside ethnographer accurately conceptualize his/her subject’s subjectivities? Is un- reflected (or unmediated) belief alone the final arbiter of interior states?60 What then of the ethics of fieldwork when the ethnographic subject insists on the ethnographer’s
58 Pnina Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 292. 59 Cf. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, “The ‘Deep Secret’ and Dangers of Karamat: Miraculous Acts, Revelation, and Secrecy in a South Indian Sufi Tradition.,” Comparative Islamic Studies 1, no. 2 (December 2005): 159–176. 60 Glenn Hinson, Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 327–334. 22 insufficient perspective for description? 61 I raise these issues at this point not to “solve” them and justify the ethical and conceptual grounds of the study that follows, but rather to emphasize a subtext of my discussion that for the most part is only implicit in the text that follows. Ethnographic access and the insufficiencies of the description of exteriority are subtexts of the entire study.
A related implication of the preceding discussion is the contextualization of my own practices of ethnographic inscription. While much anthropological literature takes the anonymity of its subjects as correct ethical practice for the fieldworker, folklorists, at least since the 1960s, have traditionally emphasized the identities of individuals at the center of their studies, giving the exemplary artists credit for their art.62 Because of the abundant political sensitivities of the subject, I have instead chosen to keep the identities of my interlocutors confidential, though many if not all emphasized their willingness to be named in this work. However, due to the ever shifting political winds of Tajik religious life, I felt it more prudent to shield my interlocutors from any potential, future harm. Thus, to the performer whom I consider at length in chapter 4, I give the simple pseudonym, Sufi. I have similarly endeavored to minimize identifying details of each halqa so as not to provide undue risk to the groups as a whole. In chapter 2 and chapter
3, I do name some of the important pirs with whom I spoke, since they are public figures and their comments were offered in public forums.
61 Pnina Werbner calls attention to some of these same concerns. After reflecting on the peaks and valleys of her fieldwork concerning one Pakistani Sufi group, she argues that such questions offer substantial critique to the project of dialogical anthropology. Werbner, Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult, 291–302. 62 Tom Mould, Still, the Small Voice: Narrative, Personal Revelation, and the Mormon Folk Tradition (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2011), 11–13. 23
In the same vein, it was challenging to record conversations with Tajik pirs and their disciples. Most of my interlocutors strongly insisted that their voices should not be recorded. One of the only exceptions was ǧazal or narrative performance. Some people I spoke with would allow me to record them as they were reciting a particular poem or telling a specific well-known story, but most always they insisted that I turn my recorder off after they had concluded the set performance piece. During group teaching events, I was expressly asked to refrain from recording. It was at this time that the Tajik security services were cracking down on any religious instruction beyond their control and had proscribed the distribution of any sermon recordings in the bazaar. Pirs justifiably feared the dissemination of recordings of their teaching events. Many of my collaborators saw the recording of conversational speech as generally inappropriate. Speech is ephemeral and only “performance” texts, explicitly marked for aesthetic evaluation were appropriate for recording.
Chapter Outline
This study is organized into four subsequent chapters. In chapter 2, I critique a number of the epistemological frames scholars and other outside observers use to interpret Islam and Islamic practice in the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia.
Specifically, I consider the utility of concepts of Islamic revivalism, the political potentialities of Sufi practice, tariqat identifiers, and the countervailing discourses proffered by Tajik Sufis related to these themes.
24
Chapter 3 explicitly explores the textual worlds and the pious reading dispositions of Sufi tradition in Tajikistan. My particular focus is the kind of textual and literary authorization given to the textual artifacts of Tajik Sufism and the ways processes of textual canonization implicate the larger Sufi project in the post-Soviet sphere. My analytical focus is on the creation of new, but traditionalized discourse, the entextualization processes it engenders, and the ways that both speak to new Sufi formations of religious identity in post-Soviet Tajikistan.
In chapter 4, my attention moves to an examination of the ways such orientations to religious texts and their incumbent reading dispositions are modeled within ritualized speech events among Tajik Sufi groups. The exploration centers on a performance analysis of halqai zikr, the ritualized recitation of the names of God, with some comparative perspective from group teaching events called darsi tariqat. My argument is that traditionalization processes, along with the redundancy of discursive routine that they create, are constitutive of the new textual canonization and further lend authority and legitimacy towards the nascent devotional project of contemporary Tajik Sufi groups by continually creating new relationships between the sacred past and secular Tajik present.
The concluding chapter discusses the implications of this study of Sufi texts and their performance contexts for understanding the nature of religious revivalism in post-
Soviet Central Asia and for the ways that tradition becomes a dynamic interpretative frame for helping Tajik Sufis interpret the disjuncture and political repression of post-
Soviet life.
25
CHAPTER 2: “INTERPRETING” POST-SOVIET SUFISM IN TAJIKISTAN –
SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE AND SUFI COUNTER-DISCOURSES
Bizan dasti talab bar domani pir, Bijunbad to Rasululloh zanjir. Ba maqsad merasad az zikri subhon, Šunav taʿlimi zikri naqšbandon.63 Mavlavī Jununī
Grasp the pir’s hem [with your] seeking hand, It will shake the chain [all the way] to the Prophet Muhammad. One reaches the goal through the remembrance of praise, Listen to the teaching of the recollections of the Naqšbandīs.
Be pir marav dar amonī.64 Emomalī Rahmon?
Don’t go without the protection of a pir.
Sufi brotherhoods have long been an important part of the social landscape of greater Central Asia. While early Soviet campaigns did much to disturb their cycles of
Islamic learning, political patronage, and the sanctity of their ritual environments, some
Sufi groups in Tajikistan did retain elements of private religious instruction, continued to transmit mystical and didactical texts, and still gathered in teaching circles (halqa/
63 Muhammad Hokiroh, Hazrati Pir <
Sufism (tasavvuf) encompasses of wide variety of actual practice with incumbent theosophical justifications and diverse sacred histories. Also in Central Asia, varieties of religious practice under the general rubric of tasavvuf are extremely diverse with similarly distinct genealogies and theosophical foundations. Historically, the vast majority of Sufi practitioners living within the territory of contemporary Tajikistan have subscribed to one of two global teaching hierarchies or Sufi paths (tariqat), the
65 Despite methdological issues, the most archive-rich source on Soviet campaigns against Central Asia tariqat is in Yaacov Ro’i voluminous text, Islam in the Soviet Union, see especially chapter 6, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). See also Shoshana Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). A recent article by Stephane Dudiognon offers a highly useful starting point to understanding continuities in Central Asian Islam during the Soviet period. “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de-Stalinization to Independence (1955- 91),” Central Asian Survey 30, no. 1 (March 2011): 53–80. 66 Beginning with the publication of Islam in the Soviet Union in 1967, among other things, the Bennigsen- school argued that Muslim nationalities in the Soviet Union held the potential for violent resistance to the Soviet state. In short, Sufi groups were believed to be the some of the sole remaining repositories of Islamic learning and held the organizational capacity by which to spearhead political resistance. Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1967).; Alexandre Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). In an interesting monograph, one recent interpreter of this body of scholarship has argued that Bennigsen, his students, and colleagues’ intellectual genealogy is more due to colonial situations in French Algeria and British India than objective analysis of Muslim minority populations in the Soviet periphery. Will Myer, Islam and Colonialism: Western Perspectives on Soviet Asia (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002). 27
Naqšbandiya or the Qodiriya. A small minority have also been affiliated with the Čistiya,
Söhravardiya, Kubraviya, or Yasaviya. In the areas surrounding the Tajik capital,
Dushanbe, along with its contiguous mountain areas, the majority of Sufi šayxs self- identify as Naqšbandī with a small minority also holding initiations into the Qodiriya.
Scholars have reached wildly divergent figures for the number of Sufi adepts and the extent of Sufi-inspired religious practice in the greater region. For example, Bruce
Privratsky outlines how Soviet authorities suppressed public zikr (the ritualized recitation of the names of God) in the 1930s, and how by the 1950s zikr had entirely ceased to be practiced in the Kazakh city of Turkestan.67 In contrast, Martha Olcott has recently argued that one particular šayx in the Fergana valley of Uzbekistan inspires allegiance from over 50,000 adepts.68 Such divergence in opinion suggests not so much that a more rigorous definition of Sufi practice in Central Asia has yet to be established, but rather such divergence demonstrates scholars’ reliance on streams of data out of touch with the everyday practice of Islamic life in Central Asia in addition to indexing real differences in patterns of Sufi practice across Central Asia.
In this chapter, I discuss some of the broad contours of Sufi life in post-Soviet
Tajikistan with particular attention on several key interpretative frames for examining the performance of Islam in Central Asia. I begin with a brief survey of anthropological literature on Islamic life and its relevance to the ethnographic data I gathered on Sufi life in Tajikistan. I next consider the standard scholarly and popular heuristic for interpreting
67 Bruce G. Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan : Kazak Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001), 105. 68 Martha Brill Olcott, Sufism in Central Asia a Force for Moderation or a Cause of Politicalization?, Carnegie Papers (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 29, http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/cp84_olcott_final2.pdf. 28
Islam in post-Soviet middle Asia, the “Islamic Revival.” I then narrow the discussion further to consider contemporary Sufi discourses of revivalism and Sufi understandings of the trajectory of mystical practice in the region. Tellingly, Sufis in Tajikistan firmly reject revivalist interpretations of the Islamic present stressing continuities of practice, lamenting the dearth of contemporary adherents, and nostalgically looking back on their understandings of the grand, mythic devotional past. While a component of revivalist discourse can also be the desire to save religious tradition at risk, my argument is that the triumphalism and meta-narratives of prolific growth that accompany discussions of Islam in Central Asia are discordant with Sufi understandings of their religious present.
Instead, many would argue that no “revival” has occurred, irrespective of their desire to see a return to pre-Soviet levels of Central Asian Sufi devotion.
Beyond revivalism, a parallel interpretative frame commonly thrust upon Islamic movements operating in post-Soviet space is political in nature. After a short critique of representative scholarship on the relationship of Islam to politics in the former Soviet
Central Asian republics, I narrow the focus again to consider the political discourses of
Sufi groups in Tajikistan and the ways Sufis in Tajikistan position themselves vis-à-vis the constellation of power and politics in contemporary Tajikistan as well as the agency they seek in relation to the hegemonic force of state discourse. The last interpretative frame for mystical practice I consider is tariqat identification and the taxonomic labels used to differentiate streams of Sufi thought and practice in Tajikistan.
As scholars, journalists, and even Central Asian governments continue to proffer a notion of revivalism in relation to popular Islamic practice, Sufism’s political legacy,
29 and the salience of historical, transnational silsila connections among Tajik Sufis, many devotees emphasize countervailing discourses predicated on devolution and decline, the inherent a-politicism of the mystical path, and the fluidity of tariqat identifiers. These sites of contention, in which etic and emic discourses collide, offer productive space to think through the social worlds of Tajik Sufis and Central Asian Muslims more broadly, and more specifically provide some conceptual ground for the chapters that follow in which I consider the textual products of Tajik Sufism and the ritual performance contexts of Sufi textualities. In a sense, I am arguing for the importance of ethnic genres of practice over standard analytical categories, as Sufi interpretative categories better account for differences among streams of mystical practice that fall under the rubric of tasavvuf in Tajikistan than do outsider paradigms.69 In total, Sufis in Tajikistan produce a counter-discourse in opposition to the prevailing analytical categories geared towards conceptualizing Sufi practice,70 and these Sufi conceptions emphasize the conscious ethical and experiential orientations at work in the active creation of nascent Sufi tradition in Central Asia. Specifically, such nascent Sufi tradition is embodied in the textual and ritual practices of the Tajik halqa which I discuss in the following chapters.
69 I am indebted here to Dan Ben-Amos’ terms, if not the subject of his work. See “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres,” in Folklore Genres, ed. Dan Ben-Amos (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1976), 215–242. Ben-Amos is writing about genre categories in the study of folklore. He argues for the identification of “ethnic genres” over the imposition of broad analytical categories. In much the same way, the preceding argument is that it is more fruitful to unpack the situated insider taxonomies of Sufi practice in Tajikistan rather than to impose broad analytical categories from the comparative study of religion such as tariqat labels. 70 While I make use of the Foucauldian terminology of “counter-discourse,” I do not deploy it towards his same ends. I conceive of “counter-discourse” in a much broader sense, as simply a(n emic) discursive stance in opposition to another (or other). As such, my use of the term should not imply an explicit examination of the relations of power in which such claims are embedded or a specific Foucauldian conception of agency (or lack thereof). 30
Towards an Anthropology of Islam in Central Asia
Talal Asad has usefully implored researchers to think of Islam as a discursive tradition, 71 in which lived Islam articulates a relationship to the past through the foundational texts of the faith, e.g. the Qurʿan and hadith of the Prophet Muhammad. In these terms, Islam is neither a collective diversity of various practices, nor is it a distinctive totalizing “way of life.” Instead it is a tradition related conceptually to a past, constituted in the present, and pointing towards a future.72 In the terms of Saba
Mahmood, this conception of Islam has much to offer approaches to religion situated in social life.73 For Mahmood, the question privileged by an understanding of Islam as a discursive tradition is, “How is the present made intelligible through a set of historically sedimented practices and forms of reasoning that are learned and communicated through processes of pedagogy, training and argumentation?”74
Asad’s seminal formulation and Mahmood’s more recent refinements and expansion of his work have done much to advance the theoretical underpinnings of anthropological scholarship directed towards understanding Muslim life, and I find such a conception of Islam very productive in thinking through the specifics of Islamic practice in Central Asia. Yet, in regard to Central Asia, their semantic net may not include varieties of social phenomena which surely must be conceptually linked to an Islamic
71 Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, 14. For a more recent treatment of the concept of discursive tradition and Islam, cf. Ovamir. Anjum, “Islam as a Discursive Tradition: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 3 (2007): 656–672. 72 Something about tradition here 73 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 115. 74 Ibid., 116. 31 tradition. Asad’s (and Mahmood’s) conceptual space, the post-colonial Arabic speaking
Middle East, limits their terms’ definitional scope.
Recognizing this, Brian Silverstein has helpfully noted that discourses of continuity inside Islamic traditions have become a much more problematic site of analysis due to modern disjuncture and the ruptures characteristic of the colonial and post-colonial experience.75 As such, he proposes a further Foucaldian corrective predicated on explicating relationships of power. That is, “governmentality” becomes the prime site of anthropological examination with respect to his investigation of Sufi groups in contemporary Turkey. While not adopting his Foucaldian frame, this work similarly critiques the narrowness of “discursive tradition,” but instead by expanding on Asad’s definition to include in analysis sites with a more symbolic connection to the textual objects at the center of Islamic “orthodoxy.”76
Without these caveats, popular religious ceremonies, certain shrine visitation practices, neo-Islamic movements, and numerous other forms of religious devotion which some practitioners hold as part and parcel of everyday Islam in Central Asia would necessarily be excluded from the anthropologist of Islam’s interpretative lens and conceptualized differently, i.e. considered “vestiges” of a pre-Islamic past, having a
“spurious” or “apocryphal” scriptural basis, or be attributed to new, particularly modern religious responses to unfortunate post-Soviet economic, social, and political eventualities.
75 Silverstein, Islam and Modernity in Turkey, 15. 76 In many ways, this formulation follows John Bowen’s adaptations of Asad’s framework. Bowen, Muslims Through Discourse: Religion and Ritual in Gayo Society, 10. 32
It is more than an understatement to say that Islamic practice and the “Islamic revival” of the past twenty years in Central Asia are multifaceted and diverse. For many
Central Asians, Islam is now understood merely as a synonym for national culture devoid of any implications of devotional practice.77 Still others maintain that Islam as practiced in Central Asia has deviated from some “normative” Islamic tradition, hence local elements of Islamic practice should be abandoned and the population should return to a more scripturalist interpretation of Islamic orthodoxy. Between these two poles, Muslims on the ground engage in numerous discursive practices with varying degrees of supposed orientation towards Islam as practiced in other parts of the world, among them, shrine visitation, varieties of Sufi-inspired mystical practice, votive meals, life-cycle rituals, etc.
As Mary Elisabeth Louw observed in post-Soviet Bukhara, for the vast majority of Muslim Bukharans, Islam was not concerned with any kind of religious orthodoxy nor was it connected to any sort of transnational spiritual movement, “Rather, [her informants] adopted down-to-earth strategies for regaining agency and a sense of social belonging.”78 Louw argues that these strategies were rooted in Sufi-inspired practices centered on the veneration of saints. Thus, for Bukharans the practices of shrine visitation, ziyorat, were central to their understanding of what it meant to be a Muslim.79
Johan Rasanayagam argues that in Uzbekistan state policy under the Soviets, and later under the independent Uzbek republic, had the effect of de-centering Islam from the mosque, and Islam, as engagement with Qur'an and Hadith traditions, became the
77 Maria Elisabeth Louw, Everyday Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia (New York: Routledge, 2007), 22. 78 Ibid., 41. 79 Ibid., 84–103. 33 province of a small, state-regulated elite. In contrast, “Most people developed their sense of Muslim selfhood through engagement in life-cycle rituals that created and confirmed them as members of their community.”80
In light of these considerations, this work argues that Islam in Central Asia is the discursive performance of Islam where such discourse is at least symbolically understood by its agents to be connected to the Prophet Muhammad's revelations in the seventh century. For the scholar of Islam in Central Asia, explicit identification with the Islamic textual tradition should not be a prerequisite for a practice to be considered “Islamic.” In view of the importance of performance for analysis of communicative behavior, it is the situational creation of what practitioners themselves understand as “Islamic” that matters more. Yet, it is also more than that. Islam is not merely a normative tradition, essentialized orthodoxy, nor is it a minimalist open-ended referent to which anyone can ascribe meaning. Instead, Islam is an ongoing negotiation and performed identity ever ready to be newly-situated in novel contexts, in which its practitioners understand their practice to be implicitly connected to a wider Islamic tradition. As Nazif Shahrani wrote just as the countries of Central Asia were newly opened to Western scholars some twenty years ago, “We must begin to direct our attention to the individual Muslim actors, the knowledgeable human agents who are the possessors and strategic utilizers of local
Islamic knowledge.”81 Islam in Central Asia is the performance of “Muslimness”
80 Johan Rasanayagam, “I Am Not a Wahhabi,” in The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and East-Central Europe, ed. Chris Hann (Berlin: Lit., 2006), 111. 81 Shahrani, “Local Knowledge of Islam and Social Discourse in Afghanistan and Turkistan in the Modern Period,” 182. 34
(whether locally termed musulmonī, musulmončilik, or musulmanchestvo) which is at least symbolically linked to the Islamic discursive tradition.
The Islamic Revival in Central Asia
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the independence of the Central
Asian republics, public Islamic religiosity has proliferated; new mosques have been constructed, forms of Islamic dress newly adopted, and previously proscribed Islamic literature published. For many, this so-called “Islamic revival” is allegedly an unveiling and manifestation of covert and circumscribed Central Asian Islamic life as practiced under the Soviet regime. As such, informed commentators use historical Central Asian religious practice prior to the October Revolution to evaluate and explain this present revivalism. From this vantage point, some facets of devotional practice come under the rubric of “traditional” Central Asian Islam and others are often criticized as imports, alien to the more ecumenical, Hanafī Islam historically practiced in Central Asia and by extension often dangerous politically and socially to the sensitive body politic of present- day middle Asia.82
Tradition in its many guises is thus used as an evaluative tool in positing either continuity or discontinuity to contemporary aspects of Central Asian religious life. So- called “folk” Islam and many other forms of vernacular religious practice are then described as vestiges of “traditional” Central Asian nomadic religious life or at the least a holdover from pre-Soviet era heterodoxies. In contrast, any inundation or infiltration of
82 Hanafī is one of the four major schools of Sunni jurisprudence and the school most predominant in Central Asia. 35
Islamist politics is seen as a “new” imported ideology incompatible with more traditional and mystically-inclined religious practice. Inside this interpretative frame, all religious phenomena are constantly evaluated diachronically in relation to the static heuristic frame of “traditional” Central Asian Islam and any dynamics of so-called religious revivalism are often judged vis-à-vis the religious experience of Central Asians living during the
Soviet period.
Critiquing the proponents of such bifurcated Islam in Central Asia has become de rigueur for many academic studies of Islam in Central Asia.83 Indeed, as the critics have noted, popular and academic discussions regarding Islam in Central Asia have often suffered from a kind of epistemological myopia privileging the supposed specter of transnational political Islam and an epistemic threat of violent Islamist politics.84 These commentators have foregrounded macro politics and ignored the micro dimensions and contestations of everyday life at the center of Central Asians’ religious practice.85 In contrast to these approaches towards Islamic practice in the countries of Central Asia, emic narratives frequently stress a more uninterrupted progression of religious sensibilities framed as continuous with the arc of Central Asian history and as a realization of proper “national” practice. For many practitioners, forms have remained
83 For one particularly cogent example of such scholarship, cf. Devin 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, no. 3 (2002): 298–330. 84 John Heathershaw and Nick Megoran, “Contesting Danger: a New Agenda for Policy and Scholarship on Central Asia,” International Affairs 87, no. 3 (2011): 589–612. 85 There have been exceptions to the rule, and thankfully the literature continues to grow. A few such recent studies, mainly anthropological, have emphasized the micro contestations of religious life in Central Asia by taking into account Central Asians’ own understandings of their religious life beyond politicized abstractions. Cf. Russell Zanca, “‘Explaining’ Islam in Central Asia: An Anthropological Approach for Uzbekistan,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 24, no. 1 (2004): 99–107. ; Kandiyoti, “Foreword.”; Louw, Everyday Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia.; Johan Rasanayagam, Islam in post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 36 constant and meanings transcendent, irrespective of temporal breaks in public consciousness and performance.86
Sufism and Islamic revivalism
While the public practices of Islam may have been reintroduced into the national consciousness of Muslims in the countries of Central Asia, countervailing discourses abound among Sufis in Tajikistan. Rather than celebrating the relatively recent return of the practices of public piety long proscribed by Soviet authorities, many Sufis instead offer two competing narratives: that of continuity between the Soviet period and the present epoch and, much more recently, of decline. Many followers of the Sufi path firmly reject celebratory discourses of revivalism and instead claim their present ritual practice, forms of knowledge transmission, and silsila relationships share a strict continuity with the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods. Yet, at the same time, as other facets of the Central Asian Islamic revival have been realized, e.g. new mosques built, shrines reconstructed, new access to previously proscribed literature, etc., they simultaneously argue that no true pirs remain inside of Tajikistan, that the number of adherents to the
Sufi path has decreased, and that the younger generation now shuns the mystical practice of their Tajik forebears.
This pessimistic orientation and devolutionary discourse of decline are most often deployed in regard to the status of Tajik Sufi pirs. As one adept noted, “Hozir dar
86 In a recent journal article Tim Epkenhans has illustrated how a widely-read example of Tajik Islamic literature has done just that. The author, Hojī Akbar Turajonzoda, offers a prescriptive picture of Tajik society in which an essentialized Islam exists within a timeless conception of Tajik national identity. “Defining Normative Islam: Some Remarks on Contemporary Islamic Thought in Tajikistan - Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda’s Sharia and Society,” Central Asian Survey 30 (March 2011): 81–96. 37
Tojikiston heč pir nest.” (Now in Tajikistan there are no pirs.). There is also an accompanying nostalgia for times past, a time when influential Tajik Sufi pirs like Ešoni
Abdurahmonjon (1920-1991) and Ešoni Turajon (1934-2005) were still alive. Many of
Abdurahmonjon’s disciples still call him their pir and have not given their oaths of allegiance (bayat) to any of his numerous xalifas. At the same time that members of historical Tajik lineages refrain from taking living pirs, members of Sufi groups with a more recent provenance strongly object to Abdurahmonjon’s disciples’ rejection of living spiritual authority. In relation to having no living pir, one Tajik devotee of the Afghan
šayx, Khawja ʿAbdulwakīl Bahodir, said, “Qanuni tariqat… piri zurtar yoftī, burö, bayat kunī.” (The rule of the tariqat… If you find a stronger pir, go, [and] give your allegiance
[to him].)
A related short narrative is often told among Sufi adepts in Tajikistan: the story of
Mahmud of Ghazni and his slave.87 It is said that Mahmud sent his slave across his realm to pay tribute in gold to the Sufi pirs living in his land. The slave returned to Mahmud with all of the gold with which he had originally set out on his journey. Mahmud asked him what had happened, why he didn’t give away the gold to the Sufi pirs of the realm.
The slave replied that all of the men who wanted to take the gold weren’t real Sufi pirs, and the real pirs wouldn’t take the gold. Some Tajik Sufis tell the story as an illustration of the state of Tajik spiritual authority. The ones claiming to be pirs, i.e. the ones willing to except gold as the Sultan’s largesse, are not truly Sufi šayxs, and the real Sufi pirs
87 The story does not seem to be attested in literary Persian, though, of course, Mahmud and his slave Ayaz are important figures in mystical Persian poetry. Also interesting intertextually is Mahmud’s largesse and patronage of Sufi pirs. Tradition relates that Mahmud quite stingily neglected to pay the poet Firdowsi what he had been promised to author the Persian epic, the Shahnameh. In place of each promised gold coin, Firdowsi received a silver one instead. 38 prefer to remain hidden by not accepting the offerings of their devotees. Thus, there are no pirs remaining in Tajikistan because the ones claiming to be the spiritual successors of
Tajik Central Asian Sufism are not “true” Sufis, and the “true” Sufis, if any still exist, remain in the shadows unwilling to accept patronage from Tajikistan’s Sultan Mahmud.88
In response to the prevalence of this kind of rhetoric, one Tajik pir asked rhetorically, “Who wouldn’t take money?” He said he takes his supporters’ money when they give it to him at the xonaqoh and holds it high for all to see so that it may be accounted for on the rozi qiyomat (the Day of Judgment). He further added, “Who puts their money in their pocket willy-nilly? No, you put five somonī with the five somonī’s.”89 In the same way, he added, he puts money in its rightful place to be used when necessary for the good of the tariqat. The pir’s point seems to be that while he does “take” money as his critics attest, he puts it in its rightful place and uses it for the good of his disciples and not for his own gain.
A related Sufi critique which mitigates standard discourses of religious revivalism in post-Soviet Tajikistan is the lack of Sufi disciples in comparison to times past. When discussing the difference between Sufi practice in the late Soviet period and the present,
Maxsumi Burhoniddin, an influential Tajik Naqšbandī pir, said that there is little difference in access to sacred literature, irrespective of the proliferation of publications now available in Dushanbe’s bookstalls, and very little difference in his group’s ability to meet together. The key difference, he noted, was that “Hozir nufusi ahli tasavvuf besyar
88 Carl Ernst notes that one common trope of mystical sainthood is self-effacement. If the mystical quest is about the annihilation of one’s ego, then how can one assert his authority over another? Thus, true saints may not even recoginize their own sainthood. The Shambhala Guide to Sufism, 62. 89 “Somonī” is the currency of Tajikistan. 39 kamand.” (Now, the number of Sufis is very small.) This refrain is common among Sufi groups in Tajikistan. Another devotee said, “Dar davrai Šuravī, zyadtar murid budand.
Hozir, nufusi Tojikiston mayli tassavuf nadorand.” (During Soviet times, there were more devotees. Now, the people of Tajikistan don’t have any inclination towards tasavvuf.)
One obvious cause for the “kam nufus” of Tajik Sufi groups in contemporary
Tajikistan is labor migration to other C.I.S. countries, chiefly to Russia, Ukraine, and even to Kazakhstan. Emblematic of the role of labor migration in Tajik life, in 2011
Tajikistan ranked as the most remittance-dependent economy in the world with as much as 50% of the country’s GDP coming from labor remittances sent home from abroad.90
Estimates range from between 600,000 and one million Tajiks laborers now working abroad, between 8% and 13% of the total population of Tajikistan works in other C.I.S. countries.91 The vast majority (as many as 95%) of labor migrants are men between the ages of twenty and forty,92 the very demographic that would ostensibly fill the ranks of the ahli tasavvuf of Tajikistan. Prior to the precipitous economic decline following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resulting Tajik Civil War, migration to other parts of the USSR for education, participation in mass development projects, or military
90 Sanket Mohapatra, Dilip Ratha, and Ani Silwal, Outlook for Remittance Flows 2012- 14, Migration and Development Brief (World Bank, 2011), 3, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPROSPECTS/Resources/334934- 1110315015165/MigrationandDevelopmentBrief17.pdf. 91 Erica Marat, Labor Migration in Central Asia: Implications of the Global Economic Crisis, Silk Road Paper (Johns Hopkins University - SAIS: Central Asia - Caucasus Institute Silk Road Studies Program, May 2009), 10. 92 Kazuhiro Kumo, “Tajik Labour Migrants and Their Remittances: Is Tajik Migration Pro-poor?,” Post- Communist Economies 24, no. 1 (2012): 87–109. 40 service occurred but not nearly to the same degree as in the post-Soviet period.93 The drastic decline in living standards following the civil war and the lack of employment opportunities in then newly-independent Tajikistan precipitated mass flows of labor migration mainly to urban Russia.
Those individuals now working abroad are one of the demographic groups which likely would have earlier comprised membership in Tajik Sufi groups. Though many labor migrants still maintain connections to local pirs and ešon, for most of the year they are absent from group teaching, ritual observance, and related life-cycle events in which
Sufis participate. Tajik pirs regularly offer blessings for members of their halqa working abroad. Similarly, many of the adepts I encountered had spent time working in Russia or
Ukraine, and I witnessed a number of migrant workers doing ziyorat to their pir upon their return to Tajikistan. From a demographic perspective, there is no doubt that the majority of able-bodied men younger than age forty are primarily working abroad and would not be available to participate in the life of Tajik Sufi orders as they may have been before. In general, now in Tajikistan the working population has decreased and this
“kam nufus” carries over into the life of the Tajik tariqat.
To a certain extent, discourses of decline, nostalgia for spiritual ages past, and a belief in the spiritual fecklessness of current exemplars of piety are common to the Sufi milieu at large.94 For Sufis, there is an inherent devolutionary concept always at work in which each subsequent pir is understood to be less mystically accomplished than his
93 Cf. Saodat Olimova and Igor Bosc, Labour Migration from Tajikistan (International Organization for Migration in Cooperation with the Sharq Scientific Research Center, July 2003), 11–12. 94 And, even more, to the post-Socialist milieu at large. Cf. Morten Axel Pedersen, Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 7–9. 41 master. Each prior pir, going all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad, is an ideal type to which his murid can only aspire. Similarly, such discourses of decline are modeled in medieval Persian Sufi literature only recently published in Tajikistan. In the
Tajik edition of the sixteenth century Naqšbandī text, the Rašahoti aynulhayot, the editors lament the lack of spiritual exemplars and the difficulties in finding “pire komil” (a perfect pir) in Tajikistan.95 The editors implore their countrymen to seek out such a figure, but then regretfully admit that they too have been unable to find such a man and thus remain without the guidance of a living pir.96 Strikingly, they also write how
Mavlono Alii Safī, the author of the five-hundred-year-old hagiographic text, also compiled his work as an example to his contemporaries of the spiritual devotion of ages past he argued now was absent from his present age. To the editors, the text provides a perfect analogy to the religious environment of post-Soviet Tajikistan. The millenarian impulse of Islamic spirituality, waiting in expectation for distant perfection after an intervening period of devolution and decline, prefigures the kind of discourse common among Tajik Sufis.
Beyond demographic challenges and the cultivation of standard religious rhetoric, it should also be emphasized that after a relatively short period of devotional freedom following the end to Soviet strictures on religious practice, the more recent Tajik past is littered with examples of tighter state control on religious practice that may also speak to
95 Mavlono Faxriddin Alii Safī, Rašahot, ed. Abduhalimi Husayn (Dušanbe: Irfon, 2009), 12. 96 An interesting parallel to this concept is found in the Persian poet Attor’s Conference of the Birds. Thirty birds set out in search of the simurǧ, the phoenix, the allegorical representative of the perfect pir. In the end, they find that there is no simurǧ (lit. thirty birds in Persian), but only thirty birds, just themselves. The perfect pir then is to be found not in a distant figure who can be sought out, but rather a perfect pir is only found in the collective as a whole. 42 the pessimism of contemporary Sufis discourse. Legislation like the draft law on parental responsibility of 2011,97 which limited mosque attendance to those older than eighteen years of age, the demolition of unregistered mosques, the forced return of students studying at Islamic institutions abroad, the control of topics to be discussed in Friday sermons, and other state efforts intended to limit the unrestricted practice of Islamic devotion have all severely curtailed the public practices of Tajik tariqat. As such, whatever renaissance of Sufi practice may have occurred at the end of the Soviet period and during the first years of Tajik independence is currently under greater pressure from state security organs than groups have experienced since before the time of Gorbachev’s glasnost’ and perestroika.
In contrast to standard scholarly and popular discourse related to the performance of Islam in the countries of Central Asia, Tajik Sufis much more pessimistically imagine present circumstance to be a mere shadow of historic Central Asian Sufism. Thus, they firmly reject the rhetoric of Islamic revivalism that frequently accompanies any discussion of mystical practice in Tajikistan and insist that “Sufism” instead suffers from
“kam nufus” (few people) and has a lack of living pirs possessing the requisite barakat
(blessing) and karamat (miracles) justifying their devotion. In that regard, Tajik Sufis’ deployment of discourses of decline may substantiate their claims about the continuity across the pre-Soviet/Soviet/post-Soviet eras in that their rhetoric has an historical, textual antecedent that antedates the modern experience of Central Asian Sufi practice.
97 See chapter 1. 43
Further, more than mystical convention, such counter-discourse might push adepts farther forward towards mystical perfection that attitudes of triumphalism might inhibit.98
Beyond revivalism, another related frame for interpreting post-Soviet Islam in
Tajikistan has been “Islam’s” relation to the political sphere. In the next section, I consider some of the problematics of literature concerning the relationship of Central
Asian Islam and politics and how Tajik Sufis conceptualize the political goals and tactics of their devotional projects.
Islam and the “Political” in Central Asia
The political question with respect to Islamic practice in the countries of Central
Asia has a long genealogy dating at least back to Cold War scholarship. In Soviet studies of Islam and in Western studies based on Soviet sources and informed by colonial anxiety, Islamic practice was often seen as a threat to Soviet modernity. In the Alexandre
Bennigsen school of thought, Islam was a vestige of traditional Central Asian society fundamentally at odds with the aims of the Soviet regime.99 Further, such studies perpetuated dualistic models of Islam in the Soviet republics, particularly in relation to
Sufistic practice.100 Thus, notions of an opposition between official and so-called
“parallel” Islam, normative and popular (or folk) Islam, clerical and mystical Islam,
98 Schimmel argues that in early Sufi thought, suffering and affliction were thought to speed one towards perfection. Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 137. 99 Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union. 100 Jo-Ann Gross, “The Polemic of ‘Official’ and ‘Unofficial’ Islam: Sufism in Soviet Central Asia,” in Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, ed. Frederick de Jong and Bernd Radtke (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 520–540. 44
“great” and “little” tradition, and so on and so forth have littered scholarly and popular treatments of religious practice in the region.
While for the most part recent scholars have abandoned the notion of a dichotomous Islam in Central Asia, the explanatory frame or rhetorical foil of Islam as
“tradition” or a sustained attention on the supposed continuities and discontinuities of present practice with the past has persisted. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in much of the literature concerning Islam in Central Asia “political” Islam is seen as a threat to the new national regimes and potentially a political de-stabilizer in the region.
In the most egregious cases, Islam is even seen to inherently lead to activist, and even, violent politics.
Numerous recent popular and academic titles have been devoted to the supposed specter of an Islamic threat to political stability in Central Asia.101 While it is beyond my purview to discuss a particular group’s potentialities towards violent political activism under the banner of an Islamic idiom, such authors’ writings do highlight a troubling epistemological construction which persists despite a legion of evidence to the contrary, namely that Islam necessarily leads to political activism and by extension any Islamic revival has implications for political stability, as Central Asia’s political future is predicated on either “ethnic nationalism as a binding force or whether Islamic fundamentalism would take its place.”102 In this somewhat Manichaean formation, there is an essential Islam and its competing twin, foreign Islamic ideology imported from the
101 See for example, Vitalii Viacheslavovich Naumkin, Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).; Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 102 Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, xxv. 45
Arabian Peninsula. “Traditional” Central Asian Islam is understood to be non-political, mystical, historically-adapted towards a syncretistic existence in accommodation with pre-Islamic “vestiges,” and finally, well-suited towards Central Asia's incumbent political incorporation into the wider “peaceful” Islamic world. In this conception, any Islamist political idiom is anathema to “traditional” and “tolerant” Central Asian Islam, and, thus it follows, that by extension it is a new importation likely brought on by the economic results of the failed Soviet experiment in the region. Further, unceasing political oppression by Central Asian oligarchs holds the potential to lead to an explosion of
Islam-inspired rage.
The apogee of such “threat” literature is in Russian scholarship on the supposed fundamentalist threat to the Russian heartland and its roots in Russia’s former colonial periphery.103 Alexander Knysh sees in the invocation of a “Wahhabi” threat “an intricate intertwining of discursive strands,” in which separate and diverse phenomena are taxonomically lumped into a single category understood universally to be the latest inundation of violent Islamist politics.104 “Wahhabism,” in this way, becomes a catch-all designation for any kind of political action using Islamic terminology. By virtue of its
“protean quality and vagueness of definition,” “Wahhabi” becomes the lowest common denominator for political Islam.105
In much of this literature, Islam and politics are synonymous. Islam is fundamentally seen to inspire believers towards political activism, and the connection
103 Alexander Knysh, “A Clear and Present Danger: ‘Wahhabism’ as a Rhetorical Foil,” Die Welt des Islams 44, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 3–26. 104 Ibid., 13. 105 Ibid., 24. 46 between the two is left without explication. Such studies frequently (mis)apply historical precedent of Islamic interference in the political sphere (the more polemical going as far as to begin their studies with a detailed-description of the early Arab conquests of
Transoxiana) or point to more recent political movements in the Muslim world.106 When brought into the present, Islam is in these terms a priori in conflict with Soviet and post-
Soviet modernity.107 This conception is rooted in a dichotomous reading of the Islamic discursive tradition. Thus, the “modern” is framed as opposing “tradition” which in turn is always synonymous with Islam. With a kind of social scientistic appropriation of mathematics’ transitive property, Islam becomes the enemy of modernization, a process which Central Asia is then understood to be ostensibly striving towards.
As Will Myer has outlined, the genealogy of these dichotomies goes at least back to the 1960s, beginning with analysts’ insistence that there existed a “parallel” Islam at odds with the public pronouncement of the Soviet Muslim religious boards.108 For some of the more forceful advocates for the political potential of “parallel” Islam, namely
Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay and later Bennigsen and Wimbush, the Sufi brotherhoods were the covert repositories and transmitters of Islamic knowledge during the Soviet period and also held the potential extraordinaire for overthrowing Central
Asia’s Marxist rulers.109 Their inherent organizational capacity, along with their history of violent resistance to Russian colonial overtures and their esoteric nature, solidified the fact that the “secret” tariqat would be the source of resistance to the Soviet state.
106 Mehrdad. Haghayeghi, Islam and Politics in Central Asia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 73–75. 107 Cf. Ibid., 209. 108 Myer, Islam and Colonialism: Western Perspectives on Soviet Asia, 180. 109 Bennigsen and Wimbush, Mystics and Commissars: Sufism in the Soviet Union. 47
Writing in the mid-1990s, Mark Saroyan traced eight dichotomies prevalent in scholarship about Islam in Central Asia: state and society, Soviet and Muslim, modern and traditional, artifice and authenticity, nationality and pan-Islamism, official and parallel Islam, illegitimacy and legitimate social authority, false ideology and true religion.110 I would add several more: rural and urban, settled and nomad, and mystical and orthodox. Myer has convincingly argued that this conception of Islam is based on the colonial experience of Cold War Europe.111 When European, and later American, theorists looked towards the Islamic “colonies” of the Soviet underbelly, they drew on analogous examples from their own colonial experience, namely nationalist discontent on the Indian subcontinent and resistance in French Africa. Thus, the experience of colonial administrators towards an Islamic native population in French Algiers became the frame with which to view potential cleavages in Soviet administrative and society-transforming capacity in Central Asia. Interestingly, in support of a Western fixation on political cleavages centering on Islam, in one volume dedicated to Islam in Politics in Central
Asia, Western contributors emphasized the role of Islam in the political sphere, while contributors from Japan treated Islam as a negligible factor in nation-building in Central
Asia.112
In the 1960s and 1970s, nationalism and national identity were perceived to be the chief threat to the political stability of the Soviet Union’s Muslim republics. After the
110 Mark Saroyan and Edward W. Walker, Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union (Berkeley, CA: International and Area Studies, University of California, 1997), 27. 111 Myer, Islam and Colonialism: Western Perspectives on Soviet Asia, 202. 112 Stephane Dudoignon and Komatsu Hisao, Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia: Early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries (New York: Kegan Paul, 2001), xv. 48
1979 revolution in Iran and the establishment of its Shiʿi theocracy and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and its mujohidin backlash, a concern with the threat of national identity shifted to a fear of Islamic activist politics. The conceptual leap was not that great in that in Central Asia specifically, Islam was firmly linked to national identity, even more so as a result of Soviet policy.113
The Bolsheviks, not long after their arrival on the Central Asian steppe, launched full-fledged assaults on Islam and on cultural practices they saw as anathema to the creation of a new-Soviet man. As such, waqf were dissolved and their assets put under the control of the state, manuscript collections were confiscated only to be studied by the new corps of Soviet Orientalists, centuries-old institutions of Islamic learning were forbidden to operate, and what knowledge transmission remained went underground.
Finally, shrines and mosques closed their doors; some even became new museums of atheism.114 More dramatically, the Soviets in 1927 began a campaign to end female veiling, polygyny, and outlawed the bride price.115 Concurrently, they established co- educational institutions, and women were encouraged to work outside of the home.
In short, the social fabric of Central Asian Islam was rent at the core, the majority of public ritual was forbidden, and Islam became subsumed into national tradition. In its place, the Soviets established a new Islamic spiritual directorate (SADUM) under the authority of the state. Religious functionaries were appointed by SADUM, and all forms
113 Adeeb Khalid, Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 93–95. 114 Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941, 141– 174; Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev. 115 Douglas Taylor. Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender & Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 12. 49 of Islamic education were put under their authority.116 Khalid argues that when public ritual, open Islamic education, etc. were obliterated, Islam became localized and what remained in its place was an emic understanding of Islam in which life cycle rites were closely tied to a popular conception of ethnic identity.117 Although religious ritual both in public and private continued, and numerous underground madrasas existed, for the vast majority of the population of Central Asia, Islam became synonymous with national identity while orthopraxy was subsumed into a Central Asian Muslim identity which more than anything acted as a marker of difference, separating Central Asians from their foreign political overlords. The second chief effect of the Soviet assault on Islam was a complete de-Islamization of public discourse.118 Instead, rhetoric was defined in the terms of universal Soviet progress, and what ritual remained occurred in an official climate of militant atheism.
While for many Central Asians, Islam and national identity became synonymous during the Soviet period, in scholarly discourse the conflation of the concepts “Islam” and “tradition” was further strengthened as theorists maintained that there existed a fundamental conflict between Islam and the modernizing policies of the Soviet Marxist regime. However, the evidence for this is even more dubious than the criticisms already leveled. Instead, Muslims during the Soviet period routinely interpreted Soviet ideology
116 Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union: From the Second World War to Gorbachev, 121–125. 117 Khalid, Islam After Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia, 82. 118 Ibid. 50 in light of scriptural precepts. Thus, for many Islam was seen as supportive of Marxist ideologies like just distribution of wealth, social equality, etc.119
Again, here Saroyan provides a useful counterweight to the mutual exclusivity between tradition (read parallel Islam) and modernity (official Islam) found in other studies of Soviet Islam. Saroyan argues that appointees of SADUM both incorporated
“fundamentalist” moves, advocating for a “return” to the textual traditions of Islam, and simultaneously put forward a notion of Islam which encouraged loyalty towards the
Soviet state.120 As such, the clerics were more than uncritical mouthpieces of Soviet propaganda. They instead reinterpreted state policies through the lens of “traditional”
Islam, both highlighting their active roles in ijtihad (independent reasoning in jurisprudence and theology) and refracting state criticisms which perpetuated the idea of a supposedly backward-looking and non-modern clerical establishment.121 In contrast to these political and historical meta-narratives from scholarly discourse, Sufis in Tajikistan marshal different strategies in their involvement with the “political” in Central Asia. In the next section, I discuss Sufi critiques of the interrelationships of politics and Islam in
Tajikistan.
Sufism and Politics
119 Saroyan and Walker, Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union, 52. 120 Ibid., 44. 121 Ibid., 50. 51
One day Iskandar (Alexander the Great) was traveling with his cook (nonpaz),
Luqmani Hakim.122 A healer (tabib) approached Luqman with a special ingredient to bake inside Iskandar’s bread in order that Alexander might become a Sufi šayx, (piri tariqat). Luqman agreed and began to bake the bread. Each time that he attempted to put the piece of bread on the side of the tandir oven to bake, it fell off into the dirt.
Luqman eventually gave up trying to make the bread with the healer’s special ingredient and instead made a fresh loaf for Iskandar. Later in the day, Luqman ate the leftovers from Iskandar’s meal for his own dinner including the dirt-covered bread. Immediately,
Luqman’s eyes were opened, secrets were revealed (kašf kušoda). He was able to talk to plants and animals, he gained healing powers (tabib mešud), and he became a Sufi pir.
All of these wonders happened to the humble cook, Luqman, rather than to the healer’s intended recipient, the world-conquering Iskandar.
This story was told to me by a Sufi devotee as an illustration of why some Tajiks join Sufi groups and others shun the Sufi path.123 Even those who are the intended
122 Luqman is a composite legendary figure found in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish folklore. He figures in pre-Islamic Arabian myth, a Qurʿanic sura bears his name, and he later becomes an important figure in Persian and Turkish literature. In this instance, Luqman appears in a story associated with Iskandar (Alexander the Great), a legendary folkloric figure in his own right. The story, as told, does not seem to be in Nizami or Firdowsi’s versions of the Iskandarnameh. 123 A similar story about the “sagacity” of Luqman is found in Rumi’s Masnavī. Reynold A. Nicholson, ed., The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí: Edited from the Oldest Manuscripts Available: With Critical Notes, Translation, & Commentary, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Trustees of the E.J.W. Gibb Memorial, 1926), 299– 301. In Rumi’s related tale, Luqman’s master always seeks to eat the food that Luqman has left so that the master would become “enraptured.” One time, the master gave Luqman slices of melon. As Luqman ate the mellon, his rapture became evident. The master saved the last slice for himself. Yet, when he ate it, it was sour, like fire in his throat. The key thematic parallels between Rumi’s story and the story told by adepts in Tajikistan relate to the food Luqman ate and its power to reveal the hidden and give the eater gnosis. Another common narrative that shares some affinity to the story as told above is Iskandar’s search for the water of life. In most versions of the story, the prophet Khizr guides Iskandar through the land of darkness in search of the water of life. Khizr stumbles upon the water and drinks it. But when he attempts to lead Iskandar back to its source, he cannot find it. In other versions of the tale, it is merely an old man or even a cook who leads Iskandar. Minoo Southgate speculates that this story may even be one of the 52 recipients of God’s fayz may lack the opportunity to attain the gnosis the mystical loaf provides. The story telling’s immediate conversational context was inside a discussion related to the relationship between Sufi practitioners and the Tajik oligarchy. While many Tajiks have submitted to the guidance of a Sufi pir, many members of the political elite remain outside the bounds of Sufi halqa, and the Tajik government continues to be extremely hostile to any form of religious practice outside of their control, like the Sufi brotherhoods.
Yet, historically, Sufi brotherhoods in Central Asia have vigorously participated in the political life of the state. From the time of the first European Orientalist fascinations with Sufi orders, commentators have been fixated on the hierarchical organization of Sufi brotherhoods and their concurrent capacity for political organization.
The master-disciple relationship at the core of Sufi practice is assumed to be the most important idiom of Sufism. It is this linear power structure that is imagined to be a key resource geared towards political organization and activism. Indeed, the anthropologist
Abdellah Hammoudi argues that the organizational principles of the tariqat are oftentimes reflected more widely in patterns of political governance.124 That is, he argues that Sufi organizational paradigms have their direct reflection in the individual’s relationship towards the state.
Beyond the claims of the brotherhoods being covert repositories of Islamic knowledge in the face of hostile social policy, in Afghanistan bands of mujohidin did
sources of the story of Moses and the water of life in the Qurʿan. Iskandarnamah. A Persian Medieval Alexander-Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 209. 124 Abdellah. Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 53 coalesce around the personages of Sufi šayxs and some brotherhoods were often fertile and ready recruiting grounds to the mujohidin cause.125 However in the Soviet republics of Central Asia, many Sufi brotherhoods disbanded and knowledge transmission was severely curtailed during the Soviet period. While the political capacity of the tariqat and their articulation in other spheres may have been overestimated in the past, their role in the political life of the state continues to be of prime importance, be it in regards to the political and economic power of local Sufi šayxs or their patronage in various power centers. As such, Martha Olcott sees the potential for future political activism among
Central Asian Sufis and argues that while thus far Central Asian Sufi groups have not mobilized towards political ends, the precedent and potential exist.126
While I do not dispute the fact that Sufi brotherhoods have at times played an important role in the political life of the state, indeed in contemporary Tajikistan numerous Sufi families hold important positions in Rahmon’s government, are active in the Komitai Din,127 and frequently hold Rahmon’s ear on various items of national importance, I would maintain that the kinds of alarmist political observations that continue to be made by well-informed observers about the political potentialities of Sufi brotherhoods fundamentally operate with essentialist preconceptions of the nature of organizational Sufism. Olcott’s contention that the precedent and potential for political mobilization exist could just as well be applied to industrial farm workers in the former
Soviet Union or any other group with some mode of hierarchical organization. Indeed,
125 Olivier Roy, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 126 Olcott, Sufism in Central Asia a Force for Moderation or a Cause of Politicalization?. 127 The “Komitai Din” (the Religious Committee) is the state organ responsible for regulating religious practice in Tajikistan. The Komitai Din controls mosques, appoints imoms, manages the institutions of Islamic learning, etc. 54 during the Tajik Civil War that is exactly what happened: fighting groups coalesced around the boundaries of Soviet-era kolxoz.
The Islamic political question yet to be fully explored in Central Asia should not be offered at the geopolitical level favored by many of the scholars already discussed.
Instead, any study exploring the political potential of Sufi life must focus on, as Deniz
Kandiyoti has noted, “The micro-politics and everyday contestations surrounding the expression and practice of Islam.”128 And as such, the practices of everyday Sufi life, exemplified by textual practices and illustrated performatively in ritual, have direct relevance for explicating Sufi “politics.” By extension, here I am concerned not with the intersection of agency and politics or the macro-politics of religious control in which the
Tajik government engages. Rather, my focus is on how Sufi devotees understand the
“political” and the strategies they deploy towards its mitigation.
Some Sufi devotees insist on the a-politicism of their devotional projects and seek to gain the approval of the Tajik state, while conversely other groups seek to completely shun any participation in the political sphere. This is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of political orientations among Tajik Sufis, but rather emblematic of the political orientations of several groups in which I participated. However, these few means whereby the “political” is explored in Sufi talk is instructive as a vital corrective to the standard discourses of danger and extremism common to most talk about Islam in the countries of Central Asia. Here, I also am privileging an understanding of the political sphere closer to that Charles Hirschkind puts forward with respect to Islamic revivalist
128 Kandiyoti, “Foreword,” 217. 55 movements in Egypt.129 Hirschkind maintains that the political arena, more appropriately, should include sites of collective reflexivity and public interaction in which participants seek to shape “the conditions of their collective existence.” This is much more than the simple intervention in the political process, electoral participation, or advocating for policy enactment. Rather, these “political” discourses are oriented towards shaping group conceptions of what an “Islamic” society might entail.
If indeed the opening metaphor rings true and the Luqmani Hakims of Tajikistan, the poor servants of the political elite, have imbibed the morsels of mystical wisdom while the illustrious world conquerors have merely eaten the loaves uncontaminated by the detritus of mystical insight, then those in political power need only consume a morsel of spirituality in order to adapt their views towards those of Sufi groups. One Sufi group is actively pursuing this orientation towards the “political” sphere in Tajikistan. Since the public practice of ritual is de facto illegal (though many Sufis fear de jure illegality may soon follow), devotees believe that if the president could only learn about what zikr truly entails, and the non-politicism of group ritual, the president would quickly approve of their group meetings. To this end, one particular halqa has been preparing a DVD of their activities to send directly to the Tajik president. They intend to include recordings of zikr rituals, interspersed with supporting verses from the Qurʿan and other related
“naql” (story/narrative).
In this regard, they do not fear the Tajik state’s panopticon per se. Strikingly, to some extent adepts view government surveillance as inevitable and its effects negligible
129 Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 8. 56 and apparent in light of their pirs’ mystical insight. One disciple related that a KGB officer130 was a part of their halqa for six years, even going as far as attending the guli surx festivals in Afghanistan and making other pilgrimages with members of the group.131 When he reported back on the halqa’s activities to his superiors, his work was deemed “nokomī,” a disappointment/unsuccessful, because “hamaš zikru vazifa bud.”
(All of it was zikr and [mystical] tasks/duties.) In parallel, the adept told a story of a pir in Afghanistan. He said a member of the Afghan security services came to the pir wearing a recording device. Later, the pir met the official in the bazaar and asked to the official’s astonishment how his recordings had turned out. When the official went back to his office and listened to the tapes, all he found was silence. Members of the halqa explicitly argue that their activities should not be construed as political acts, in that they are not advocating for political change, membership in political parties, or for or against any specific enacted government policy. “Sufizm” is merely “zikru vazifa,” and as such need not concern the state.
In some ways, these orientations towards the political sphere are prefigured and encouraged in state propaganda, yet still the social innocuousness of the mystical enterprise is framed very differently. During 2010-2011, a prominent billboard featuring the Tajik president meeting with a number of white-bearded clerics towered over Ismoil
Somoni Avenue and, less prominently, on the northern reaches of Prospect Rudaki in
Dushanbe (figure 2). The caption to the billboard read, “Be pir marav dar amonī.”
(Don’t go without the protection of a pir.) The caption is the first half line a bayt of xalqī
130 “KGB” here refers to the successor Tajik security organ to the Soviet KGB. 131 “Guli surx” are the Persian New Years festivals held in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif. 57
(folk) poetry, the second half line of which reads, “Ki har čand Iskandari zamonī.”
(Because each one [of them] is the Alexander of the age.) The ostensible message of the billboard thus being that even the president of Tajikistan submits to the guidance of his elders.
Figure 2: Billboard on Dushanbe Street
“Pir” can be construed both as “old” and as the office of Sufi šayx. The unmistakable religious subtext to the half line of folk poetry is that Emomalī Rahmon submits not just to his elders, but that he submits to the guidance of Islamic clerics, ešon, and Sufi pirs because such figures are all the Alexanders of the present age. The
58 sentiment is broadly attested in classical Persian poetry. For example, an almost identical bayt to the one found on the billboard is often attributed to the Devoni Hofiz, “Be pir marav dar xarabot, ki harčand Iskandari zamonī.” (Don’t go into the tavern without a pir, because each of them is the Alexander of the age.) A bayt with a similar sentiment also headlines a readily available chapbook collection of Tajik poetry by the nineteenth- century Tajik poet, Mavlavī Jununī whom I discuss in more detail in chapters 3 and 4.
The line reads:
Javono! Gūš kun in guftai pir, Ki dodam bo tu az piston šir.132
Young people! Listen to this speech of the pir/old, “I have given milk to you from the teat of the soul.”
State rhetoric, like the billboard, coopts the symbols, rhetoric, and history of Tajik
Sufi groups, yet most always divorced from any discussion of actual practice and cloaked with a blanket endorsement of “ozodii vijdon” (freedom of conscience). As the Tajik president, Emomalī Rahmon, writes, there is complete “ozodī,” freedom with respect to
“intixob namudani din, ištirok dar ijroi marosimhoi dinī, fardan va yo dastjamʿī ijro namudani onho va toatu ibodat eʿtirof namuda.”133 (the choosing of religion, participation in fulfillment of the rites of religion, individually and/or the collective fulfillment of them, and the confession of prayer and worship.) This quote comes from
Rahmon’s collected writings concerning religion, compiled under the title, Dar Borai Din or About Religion. The book contains Rahmon’s selected speeches and articles concerning religion all organized chronologically. A version of Lenin’s collected
132 Komilxoja Qodirov, ed., Gulčine az <
Rahmon is more overtly sympathetic to the exercise of religious faith than Lenin is in his writings. However, Rahmon’s uncritical adoption of the Leninist interpretative frame bespeaks his similar heavy-handed outlook on religious “freedom of conscience” and the ways that Soviet ideology still operates and pervades state discourse on the religious sphere in the post-Soviet landscape.
Beyond the foundational rhetoric of “freedom of conscience” that pervades
Rahmon’s writings, his other seeming concern is education and the transmission of
Islamic learning. For example, he writes that in order to raise the level of Islamic discourse in Tajik society, “Tartib dodani kitobhoi darsī mutobiq ba barnomahoi nav mebošad.”135 (The organization of school books should conform to new syllabi.) By this logic, the state’s most vital task is controlling the sources of Islamic learning so as to prevent insecurity and to realize the legacy of Islamic forebears whom Rahmon frequently references. As he notes, “Guzaštagoni buzurgi mo, čun hazrati Xoja
Bahouddini Naqšbandi, Mir Sayid Alii Hamadonī, Muhammad Albuxorī, Jaloliddini
Balxī, Mavlono Yaʿqubi Čarxī, va dahho šaxsiyathoi möʿtabar dar rivoju gustariši dini mubini islom sahmi bebaho giriftaand.”136 (Our great ancestors have taken an incalculable share in the development and propagation of the religion of Islam, [figures] like his excellency Xoja Bahouddini Naqšband, Mir Sayid Alii Hamadonī, Muhammad
134 Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, O Religii (Moskva: Gos. izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1954). 135 Rahmonov, Dar borai din, 32. 136 Ibid., 57. 60
Albuxorī, Jaloliddini Balxī, Mavlono Yaʿqubi Čarxī, and tens of [other] esteemed individuals.) After invoking such illustrious personages from the history of Islam, all but one of whom was an important Central Asian, Persian-speaking mystic, he ostensibly takes upon himself their mantle in advocating for state policy geared towards the control of Islamic learning and practice.
Thus, just as Rahmon’s billboard illustrates the president’s allegiance and support from Tajik pirs, he similarly appropriates their selfsame religious heritage. For example, at Mir Sayid Alii Hamadonī’s shrine in the city of Kulob, the president’s visage greets visitors to the saint’s museum (figure 3). Rahmon’s framed quote merely recognizes
Hamadonī’s fame and influence on the people of Central and South Asia. This is precisely the kind of acknowledgement of historical Sufism and contemporary Sufi practice in which Rahmon and the Tajik state engage, calling attention to the fame and influence of historical Sufi exemplars, appropriating their images and symbols, while divorcing the content of their teachings from any contemporary relevancy.
In many ways, Rahmon’s use of the symbols of Sufism to promote and legitimate state conceptions of Tajik history parallels Laura Adams’ conception of the Uzbek president, Islam Karimov’s, symbolic politics. Just as in Uzbekistan, the symbols of national heritage, in this case the symbols of Sufism, are used to create what Adams calls,
“a spectacular state.”137 Rahmon’s government mobilizes Sufi idioms, often cloaked in spectacle, without an accompanying use or treatment of the symbol’s ideology.
137 Laura L. Adams, The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. 61
Figure 3: Emomalī Rahmon at the shrine of Mir Sayid Alii Hamadonī
62
As the imomi xatib of Yaʿqubi Čarxī’s shrine, an early and influential figure in the history of the Naqšbandiya, in the suburbs of Dushanbe told me, “Injada ahli tariqat nest.” (There are no Sufis here.) He added that he would not allow Tajik Sufis to practice zikr at the shrine or engage in any other kind of ritual. Such practice, he added, was širk, the sin of attributing some power or quality reserved for God alone to another figure.
The almost antiseptic feel of Mir Sayid Alii Hamadonī’s shrine in Kulob functions similarly, as more of a touristic stop than a place of spiritual pilgrimage and chronotrope of spiritual blessing.138
The state-shaped parameters of acceptable religious discourse celebrate the symbols and historical legacy of Central Asian Sufi practice all while denigrating its present practice. Johan Rasanayagam has called this common post-Soviet move “the practical hegemony of state discourse.”139 Rasanayagam’s point is not that the post-
Soviet state has the power to “determine subjectivities,” but rather that the state attempts and often succeeds in fixing the terms of debate. This phenomenon is similarly operative in Tajik groups, as the state continually constructs the discursive categories of who are and who are not proper Muslims. In short, bad Muslims are those who inappropriately interfere in the political sphere. Yet, at the same time authorities criticize Islamic activism, the state consistently speaks of the grand, Persian Islamic past. Even more, many of the symbols, places, and people celebrated in state rhetoric are representative of
Central Asian Sufi lineages. The frames of this debate, i.e. the symbolic Central Asian
138 Louw, Everyday Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia, 16. 139 Rasanayagam, Islam in post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience, 121. 63
Islamic past and its seeming a-politicism, are precisely those categories that Sufi groups also emphasize.
So despite the sterility of contemporary practice seemingly advocated by state actors with respect to Sufi rites, i.e. ritual practices under their direct control and support like ziyorat to the shrine of Mir Sayid Alii Hamadonī, the implicit connection made by some Sufis is that the Tajik state is familiar with and welcoming of mystical themes, and thus there exists the potential for state acceptance of their ritual practices. The adepts who are planning to send video recordings of Sufi rituals along with their accompanying textual justifications say that Rahmon “knows” Sufi practice (tasavvuf medana), and his use of the Sufi idiom, his appropriation of sacred mystical sites, and his assumption of the mantle of their heritage all similarly suggest an intimacy with Central Asian Sufism. For this reason, they believe there remains the possibility for adepts to be amicably received by the Tajik president, if only Rahmon was made aware of the “true nature” of their practice by watching recordings of Tajik Sufi zikr.
Another parallel path some Tajik Sufi groups take is complete isolation all while attempting to ignore state injunctions directed towards their ritual practices. Of course, putting off the entrapments of the mortal coil has been central to Sufi practice since its earliest iterations. The precise term these groups use for such an orientation to the worldly sphere is tavakkal, complete trust in God.140 Historically, such an attitude among
Sufi groups resulted in complete denial of earthly entrapments, regarding the world as
140 An alternate Persian spelling is “tavakkul.” While both spellings/pronunciations are accepted in standard Tajik Persian, “tavakkal” is more commonly used among the Sufi groups in which I participated. 64 thoroughly ritually unclean and unworthy of the mystic’s attention.141 Complete asceticism, eschewing earthly employment and familial attachments, and embracing poverty were emblematic of this approach. More often than not this mystical ideal became a spiritual attitude rather than a codified practice, as the social disruptiveness of wide-scale tavakkal would have had far-reaching implications for the life of Muslim societies.142 Yet still, the concepts embedded in even a more attitudinal orientation to tavakkal are still articulated among groups of Tajik Sufis.
Tavakkal is the professed political tactic of the disciples of Ešoni Timur Xoja, a
Naqšbandī pir of Dahbedī Samarqand descent. His home cum xonaqoh is a mountaintop redoubt several hours drive west of the Tajik capital. The total task of Timur’s adepts is to put off the “dunya” (the world) for the world of ʿišq (love). In one disciple’s words, this entails “Šab kam xob raftan, kam xordan, kam nošidan, kam gap zadan, besyar namoz xondan, besyar zikr kardan.” (Sleeping little at night, eating little, drinking little, talking little, reciting namoz often, doing zikr often.) Or as I heard the pir’s xalifa say to one seeker, “Salla pöš, rish daroz ko, tayyor ko jelak, adabī kun.” (Wear a turban, grow
[your] beard, prepare a robe, comport oneself appropriately.) The xalifa’s articulation of what “political” tavakkal entails highlights several interesting orientations. First, it is embodied in an adept’s modes of appeasing his earthly appetites and in complete focus on ritual enactment. These spiritual orientations are then modeled in bodily manifestations of the ideal inner spiritual state. Sartorial choices similarly index spiritual
141 Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 119. 142 Ibid., 120. 65 attitudes. Just as eating less,143 sleeping less, and talking less discipline one’s nafs to engender greater study, meditation, and prayer, so too conforming to a sartorial ideal disciplines ones outer self against the models of the world and symbolically indexes the inner spiritual reality.
The xalifa asked if I sought to take care of my wife and daughter and love them.
When I responded in the affirmative, he asked if my wife would likely marry someone else if I died. I said she likely would. “Would your daughter follow you to the grave?” he asked rhetorically. Answering his question, he said they would both mourn for a few days and then continue with their lives as if I had not lived. That is not love, he added.
“Xudovand mega, ‘Unhoro hurmat kuned, lekin, ina lekin, maro dost bedorī. Zan turo mepartiya, farzandat turo. Ma kati tu. Ma astum, diruni gor, dil. Dil nate to vai, ma-ra te.’” (God says, “Honor them, but, here but, give me love. Your wife will throw you away, your daughter [will throw] you [away]. I am with you. I am inside the grave, the heart. Don’t give your heart to them, give it to me.”) In much the same way, the political sphere is not the domain of the true solik (devotee). “ʿIšq kalon. Dunya mayda. Dar daruni dili banda kalon.” (Love is large. The world is small. Inside the heart of the slave
[love is] large.) The explicit statement of the pašmina pöš (wool garment wearer) Ešoni
Timur is that he “ba davlat kor nadarad.” (Doesn’t have any business with the government.)
143 One adept argued that this should be accomplished by regulating your eating to “yak roz se bor non, se angušt, haft luqma.” (In one day, eat three times [using only] three fingers and seven bites.) While in contrast the ahli šariat can eat with “panj angušt, luqma hisob namešavad.” ([eat with] five fingers and the bites aren’t counted.) Tajiks traditionally eat with their fingers. The adept argues that rather than using all five fingers to eat, one should use only three, and even more only eat seven finger-fulls during a meal. One should do this “ki najasat kama šavad.” (so the [ritually] unclean will become less.) 66
But all of that is not to say that Timur’s disciples are spiritual automatons singularly focused on the proper performance of ritual and embodied adab and that they uncritically adopt Timur’s dictates to the detriment of their own spiritual agency. Outside of the ritual frame, adepts often subvert the spiritual and insist on more mundane interpretations of their daily and spiritual lives. For example, during my year of fieldwork, Timur and his disciples were constructing a mosque adjacent to Timur’s home.
To construct the foundation, they rolled boulders off the mountainside down to the worksite to be cracked and formed into the building’s foundation. Even while working in the hot sun, devotees were expected to stay ritually pure and abstain from eating or drinking any more than required to satisfy their basic needs.
Each boulder required a tremendous effort to pry from the surrounding dirt and navigate down the mountainside. To increase their efficiency, they began to invoke the pir’s karamat. As such, with each pull they yelled, “ya alloh” (Oh God), “ya pir” (Oh pir), “ya piron” (Oh pirs), or more commonly a simple bismalloh. Eventually, one adept started joking that a particular boulder was “hu” and the next one “xayr” and so on, subverting the earlier invocation of the pir’s fayz. In much the same way, when a boulder landed at a favorable site near the construction site, one adept said, “Karamati pir bin!”
(Look at the pir’s miraculous power!) to nods of assent from all of the other workers.
Another devotee began quoting lines of spiritual poetry in praise of the pir as the men worked. After a few more boulders rolled down the mountain, another devotee sarcastically asked the poet if he knew any poems about sang kašī (boulder pulling) instead to laughter from all of the other workers. Similarly, a devotee told how one day
67 he was walking around his hovli reciting his Arabic grammar. His, “bibii kampir” (old grandma) asked him why he was walking around braying like a donkey and mooing like a cow. Again, everyone responded with shouts of laughter.
When it was time for a tea break, a disciple said, “It’s time to satisfy my nafs.”
Subsequently, the adepts sarcastically called each break, “Vaqti nafs.” (the time for earthly passions) Finally, a small boulder rolled over an unsuspecting disciple’s foot.
Amid cries of pain, he was carried down the mountainside to the pir for healing. He returned only a few minutes later saying that when the pir touched his foot, the pain went away immediately. In response, one of the other workers said that he had a cousin who they thought had broken his leg. They eventually took him to the hospital, and the doctor examined it. After the examination and an x-ray, the doctor said that there was nothing wrong with the leg. The man’s cousin said okay and got up as if nothing had ever been wrong. The adept said his cousin had just been joking the entire time. Again, the unmistakable connection is that the man’s foot may not have been instantly cured by the pir’s miraculous touch, but rather than the man’s cries may instead have been insincere and merely a performance of pain.
In sum, all these speech acts in some way to discursively subvert the explicit religiosity of their work at the pir’s xonaqoh. These practitioners, despite a firm insistence on the almost hegemonic influence of tavakkal, be it in relation to personal devotion, eating habits, or politics, still find space for subversion and implicit critique of the rigidity of tavakkal expectations. Even though complete tavakkal may be the ideal to
68 be sought after in ritual performance and spiritual discipline, individual Sufis still have space to assert and subvert their spiritual agency.
To a certain extent, the discourses of tavakkal and putting off the entrapments of the world in favor of submitting totally to God may function as discursive posturing amidst the dangerous and dynamic political environment of contemporary Tajikistan, and by extension, be intended to appease my inquiries about the political motivations of their halqa and the halqa’s responses to repressive state policy. For example, many pirs I encountered were loath to identify their disciples as “murid,” the technical Sufi term for a follower of a Sufi master. Rather, they preferred to call the men who visited them to perform ziyorat, their šagerd, (student) a more informal designation, implying no specific allegiance that might be construed politically. Similarly, many pirs did not openly call the place in their home were they received students, held mahfil, and performed ritual a xonaqoh (a Sufi lodge), preferring instead to designate it merely their home or the village mosque. Their attention to the specifics of language use calls further attention to the discursive politics of Sufi practice. Terminological choices did not shape the particulars of devotional practice, i.e. calling ones disciples “šagerd” instead of “murid/solik” did not indicate new conceptions of Sufi belief and practice, though Sufi pirs in Tajikistan often eschew technical vocabulary that holds the potential to raise the ire of the Tajik state. In total, discourses of tavakkal point toward a conscious goal of moral cultivation and a creation of an ethical self divorced from any political happenstance.144
144 That is not to say that moral cultivation is the raison d'être for membership in mystical brotherhoods in Tajikistan and for the new adherents of Islam in Central Asia. In contrast, much of the recent anthropological literature on Islamic revivalist movements across the Muslim world has emphasized ethics as a prime motivator of Islamic piety. For example, Brian Silverstein argues that in Turkey “participating 69
What both tactics discussed above share is a belief in the inherent a-politicism of their personal and group-minded mystical projects. Whether the goal is geared towards the phenomenological or towards the ethical, both groups still maintain that their attempts to practice ritual unimpeded, to observe correct standards of mystical comportment without being forced to change clothes or shave their beards, and to walk within their own understandings of their spiritual forebears’ legacies should be beyond the purview of the state. They explicitly deny that any of those behaviors are political acts and either attempt to remedy their situation by directly appealing to the beneficence of the Tajik president or attempt to completely ignore the political machinations surrounding the practice of contemporary Islam in Tajikistan, even to the point that some adepts believe that the Tajik president Emomalī Rahmon’s propagandistic rhetoric, as evidenced by his visual use of religious folk poetry, indexes his rightful support for the religious authority of Sufi pirs and ešon in Tajikistan. If only Rahmon would eat of the mystical loaf, he too would see the “true” political intentions of the halqa and the rightful purposes of their ritual practices.
Typologies of post-Soviet Tajik Sufism
Another common interpretative trope in examining mystical life is the creation of typologies of mystical practice along the lines of discrete transnational teaching hierarchies or tariqat label identifiers, e.g. Naqšbandī or Qodirī. In this section, I discuss
in these Sufi orders is a way for people to become the kinds of Muslim selves they want (or believe they are supposed ) to become and gives them techniques for understanding, defining, and reproducing a certain kind of ethical self.” Islam and Modernity in Turkey, 99. 70 the relevance of discrete tariqat identification on Sufi life in post-Soviet Tajikistan.
Depending on disciplinary perspective and research scope, scholars have reached widely divergent figures for the prevalence and influence of Sufism in the former Soviet republics. Some commentators include such diverse phenomena as shrine visitation practices under the rubric of Sufism, making Sufism’s scope relatively broad.145 Other studies have minimized their operational definition towards the other end of the spectrum, counting few adherents among Central Asian Muslims. While still other scholars have suggested Sufi orders in Central Asia still attract numerous disciples and hold enormous political and social influence in certain spheres.146 As already noted, such divergence of opinion does not so much suggest that a more rigorous definition of mystical practice in Central Asia has yet to be established, but rather it highlights scholars’ reliance on diverse sets of data, distinct methodologies, disciplinary frameworks, and sites of analysis.
Historically, the vast majority of Sufi practitioners living within the territory of contemporary Tajikistan have subscribed to one of two global teaching hierarchies or
Sufi paths (tariqat), the Naqšbandiya or the Qodiriya. A minority have also been affiliated with the Čistiya, Söhravardiya, Kubraviya, or Yasaviya. In the areas surrounding the Tajik capital, Dushanbe, along with its contiguous mountain areas, the majority of Sufi šayxs self-identify as Naqšbandī with only a small minority also holding initiations into the Qodiriya. In practice, these designations of tariqat affiliation may not
145 Oumar Arabov, “A Note on Sufism in Tajikistan: What Does It Look Like?,” Central Asian Survey 23, no. 3–4 (2004): 345–347. Yaacov Ro’i and Alon Wainer, “Muslim Identity and Islamic Practice in post- Soviet Central Asia,” Central Asian Survey 28, no. 3 (2009): 311. 146 Olcott, Sufism in Central Asia a Force for Moderation or a Cause of Politicalization?. 71 be altogether useful in creating typologies of Sufi practice and belief in post-Soviet
Tajikistan. Rather, varieties of ritual practice, adherence to unique forms of proper behavior and comportment (adab), relationships with other ulamo, exposure to distinct bodies of mystical literature, and inclusion in discreet circles of knowledge transmission may help to better characterize different streams of Sufi practice in Central Asia irrespective of practitioners’ self-identification into larger transnational teaching hierarchies. Even more, dual and concurrent initiations may now be (and perhaps historically have been) more characteristic of Sufi practice in Tajikistan than singular adherence to one specific teaching path.147
While all Sufi pirs in Tajikistan ostensibly claim a silsila relationship between them and distinguished spiritual exemplars from a specific (or rather several specific)
Sufi paths, most often verified by written teaching authorizations (xati iršad) and/or genealogical tables (šajaranoma) linking them directly to their spiritual forebears, more informal claims to group membership are more often proffered, predicated on discreet circles of knowledge transmission, irrespective of identification in specific transnational teaching hierarchies. For example, many Sufi figures living in and around the Tajik capital claim direct experience and teaching authorization from perhaps the most
147 Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, in regard to South Asian Čistiya initiation, suggest that multiple initiation is characteristic of much Sufi practice, and as they argue, it has “important implications for the social extension of Sufism.” Further, such fluidity and non-“zero-sum competition” is what makes, “Sufism a cumulative tradition.” Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 28. 72 prominent Soviet-era Tajik Sufi pir, Ešoni Abdurahmonjon ibni Ešoni Porsoxoja (1920-
1991).148
In a recent hagiographic publication, Abdurahmonjon’s disciples list forty three individuals who received a xati iršad from the šayx and 103 of his distinguished disciples.149 The lists read as a Who’s Who of Islamic notables hailing from both the
Soviet and post-Soviet periods in Tajikistan. Figures such as Qozidomullo Abdurašid, a qozii kalon (head Islamic official of Tajik SSR) of the Soviet era, and Hazrati Mavlavī
Muhammadjoni Quqandī, better known as Muhammadjon Hindustani,150 perhaps the most well-known “unofficial” cleric of Soviet-era Tajikistan, are listed along with many contemporary Islamic luminaries. In spite of the high number of individuals listed, many contemporary adepts argue that Abdurahmonjon only gave five such teaching authorizations, only to Domullo Hikmatulloi Tojikobodī, Maxdumi Muhammadikromi
Mujaxarfī, Maxsumi Burhoniddini Köktošī, Ešoni Muhtadii Kolxozobodī, and Domullo
Muhammadii Qumsangirī.
In much the same way, other contemporary Sufi figures link their teaching activities to the work of Abdurahmonjon even if not claiming to be a direct recipient of his teaching mantle. Disciples of Maxdumi Abdurauf in the Dushanbe suburbs say that when Abdurauf was a child he traveled to Abdurahmonjon’s home near Fayzobod to perform ziyorat. When Abdurauf was sitting on the pir’s knee, Abdurahmonjon tuned to
148 See also Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de-Stalinization to Independence (1955-91),” 66–68. 149 Hokiroh, Hazrati Pir <
Abdurauf’s father and said, “Koški farzandi ma rangi farzandi tu shava.” (I wish that my son would become like your son.)151 Though Abdurauf does not claim to have received a teaching authorization from the Naqšbandī pir Abdurahmonjon, but rather from his own father, who was Abdurahmonjon’s disciple, he also simultaneously is a murid of the
Afghan pir of the Qodiriya, Khawja ʿAbdulwakīl Bahodir. Yet despite his dual initiations, he maintains that he is singularly a Naqšbandī pir. In contrast, Abdurauf’s brother, Maxdumi Abduxalil, also sent as a child to the home of Abdurahmonjon, received his only xati iršad from Šayx Bahodir and claims exclusive teaching authority in the Qodiriya. Both brothers and their myriad disciples emphasize their historic relationship with Abdurahmonjon repeatedly telling the story of young Abdurauf sitting on the older pir’s knee, despite the fact that neither is a direct successor of
Abdurahmonjon’s teaching mantle in the Naqšbandiya, and neither can claim true successorship.
Beyond Abdurauf and his brother Abduxalil, some adepts of Ešoni Timur Xoja maintain a similar connection to Abdurahmonjon, but rather indirectly, through
Abdurahmonjon’s pir, Ešoni Abdurrahimi Davlat,152 known as Ešoni Buzurgvor. This even more spurious connection, seeing as Timur’s silsila is of the Dahbedī Samarqand line of Central Asian Naqšbandī Sufism and not from Naqšbandī Karotegin pirs, further asserts the legitimacy and far reaching influence of Abdurahmonjon’s teaching, irrespective of authoritative silsila connections. It is for this reason that membership is
151 Abdurrauf’s father, Šayx Hamrohi Šahrinavī, is one of the individuals, perhaps spuriously, listed as having received a xati iršad from Abdurrahmonjon. Hokiroh, Hazrati Pir <
This fluidity is further modeled in the textual artifacts of post-Soviet Tajik
Sufism, conflated teaching rubrics from both the Naqšbandiya and Qodiriya, shifting identifiers among some important Sufi families in Tajikistan, and disciples who regularly visit multiple pirs of different lineages. For example, in another hagiographic text dedicated to the life of the Naqšbandī Ešoni Abdurahmonjon, the authors include numerous quotes throughout the text from the works of the Tajik Qodirī pir, Mavlavī
Jununī.153 Jununī held multiple initiations, yet his primary orientation and likely almost exclusive orientation at the time of his death was in the Qodiriya.154
Some have speculated that the didactic use of Jununī’s couplets among Tajik
Naqšbandī groups suggests his importance prior to the time of his works’ post-Soviet publication. However, my interviews with Soviet-era pirs suggest that the use of his poetry is a relatively recent phenomenon influenced by more recent relative ease of access to his publications and the dearth of Sufi literature in Tajik, more generally.155
Even though Jununī’s devotional bent and predilection for ritual practices Tajik
Naqšbandī groups often decry make him a problematic source of spiritual authority, their
153 Šayx Qamariddini Darvozī and Mirzohusayni Badalipur, Zindaginomai Hazrati Ešoni Abdurahmonjon ibni Ešoni Porsoxoja (Dušanbe, 2003), 35. See chapter 3 for more information on the use of Jununī’s verse inside Tajik hagiography. 154 Mavlavī Junūnī, Ganj alʿāshiqīn, ed. Ismāʿīl ʿAbdulūhāb zādeh Qahārī (Dūshanbih, 2004), 39. 155 See chapter 3 for more information on the post-Soviet resurrection of Jununī’s legacy and literary output. 75 uncritical adoption of his copious literary output is further evidence for the textual fluidity and sometimes vague borders of tariqat identification in post-Soviet Tajikistan.
Similarly, Ešoni Abduxalil, a Qodirī pir, at his xonaqoh outside of the city of
Shahrinav tells stories of the exploits of Abdulqodiri Jelonī, the eponymous founder of his Qodirī order interspersed with an emphasis on the Naqšbandī latoʿif, the subtle centers, more common to the Mujaddidiya line of the Naqšbandī order.156 While the editors of Abdurahmonjon’s first printed hagiography included lines of poetry from the works of the Qodirī pir, Jununī, Abduxalil takes such borrowing further by explicitly intermixing Naqšbandī understandings of how one’s spiritual centers are activated inside a Qodirī teaching frame.
Another striking aspect of tariqat taxonomic flexibility is how some important
Sufi families like the family of Ešoni Turajon, an influential Soviet-era cleric and Qodirī pir, are called either Naqšbandī or Qodirī depending on the source. For example,
Svatopluk Soucek calls the Turajonzoda family Naqšbandī in his epic history of the region,157 Even Hojī Akbar’s (Ešoni Turajon’s son) own pre-civil war advisor and confidant at the UN-mediated peace talks at the conclusion of the civil war, Sergei
Gretsky, names the family as the successors of a Naqšbandī pir.158 Vitaly Naumkin rightly calls attention to the Turajonzodas’ affiliation in the Qodirī order, yet spuriously
156 See chapter 4 for more information about Tajik Sufi’s understandings of the latoʿif. 157 Svatopluk Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 307. 158 Sergei Gretsky, “Qadi Akbar Turajonzoda,” Central Asian Monitor 1 (1994): 16. In a much more recent article, Stephane Dudoignon also lists Hojī Akbar as a the son of a Naqšbandī ešon. “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de-Stalinization to Independence (1955- 91),” 75. 76 names their pir as, “Khaliljon, a famous pir from Kurghanteppa.”159 Also tellingly, Tim
Epkenhans writes that Hojī Akbar has indicated no formal affiliation with the Qodiriya in contrast to his brothers’ affiliations in the Qodirī order.160
In contrast to such textual equivocation, Ešoni Nurriddin (another of Ešoni
Turajon’s sons) did indeed succeed his father and received his teaching mantle in the
Qodirī, and when he deems politically prudent, practices Qodirī jahrī zikr.161 I would suggest that the discrepancies in tariqat identification depending on the textual source are not a result of academic or editorial carelessness on the part of the authors, but rather the
Turajonzodas likely did/do emphasize particular aspects of their biographies to different audiences depending on the circumstance. Though they and their father were all initiates into the Qodirī order and the successor of Mavlavī Jununī’s teaching mantle, they may also hold parallel initiations into the Naqšbandiyya, as did their spiritual ancestor Jununī.
In addition, the Turajonzoda family’s influential political and spiritual position, at times representative of Tajik Islam at large in both the civil war era and now as important figures in the Islam-inspired political opposition to the Tajik state, may have necessitated shifting emphases on their Sufi initiations. These shifting emphases are more than political marriages of convenience, as these potential parallel initiations are a common facet of Central Asian Sufi life.
159 Naumkin, Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle, 232. Olivier Roy also includes the same details of Turajonzoda’s biography in his book on post-Soviet Central Asia. The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 149. 160 Epkenhans, “Muslims Without Learning, Clergy Without Faith: Institutions of Islamic Learning in Tajikistan,” 335. 161 Junūnī, Ganj alʿāshiqīn, 39. 77
Another aspect of Sufi typology in post-Soviet Tajikistan is in the practices of ziyorat. Many Tajik Sufi adepts, who have been initiated into a particular teaching hierarchy and given their bayat (pledge) to a specific pir, regularly practice ziyorat to other pirs from different orders. On one occasion, two labor migrants recently returned from Russia came to a gathering of a Tajik pir’s disciples. After the mahfil had concluded, they approached the pir, saying they were disciples of an ešon in Moscow.
The pir asked them about which vazifa they were currently engaged in and then gave them instructions for additional vazifa, just as he had his other adepts gathered at the mahfil. It made little difference that the two men already had given their allegiance to another pir or what level of mystical knowledge they had reached. Tajik adepts often reject a kind of artificial fixity in tariqat identification and streams of mystical knowledge. For example, one adept shared with me some of the vazifa he had received from different pirs and saved on his cell phone. The first two read:
29.05.09 Naqšbandiya. Latoifi kalb. Nuraš zard. Taxti kudumi xazrati odam. (zikraš ollox).162
01.06.09 Kodiriya. Vazifai kalbi ollox. Lo iloxa illolox.
29.05.09 Naqšbandiya. The subtle center of the heart. Its light is yellow. It is the seat of the arrival of his excellency Adam. (Its zikr is “Olloh”).
01.06.09 Qodiriya. The task of the heart of God. “Lo iloha illoloh”
The devotee said that he had received the first one from a Naqšbandī pir and the second one from a Qodirī pir. To distinguish where he had received the two different
162 The typographical errors in the transcription are copied directly from the adept’s cell phone. Most Tajiks by necessity use Russian-language typeface on their cell phone and simply adapt the Russian script to the Tajik language. As such, “qalb” becomes “kalb” or “hazrat” becomes “xazrat.” 78 vazifa, he simply gave one a heading of “Naqšbandiya” and the other a heading of
“Qodiriya.” In his mind, there was no conflict between the two, nor was there any difficulty in completing vazifa from two separate pirs. Rather, he said “Hamaš ba xudo merasa. Farqaš zikr.” (All of them reach God. Their difference is [the type of] zikr.)
I should emphasize that the preceding discussion is not to say that there are no cleavages between Sufi groups in Tajikistan or that there are no firm boundaries between streams and varieties of mystical practice. Rather, I have already suggested that membership, both authentic and apocryphal, in discrete teaching circles is one key identifier of mystical practice in the country. Beyond identification in discrete teaching circles, another key cleavage among Sufi groups active in Tajikistan is between those groups advocating for more reformist inspired Islam and groups predicated on following more charismatic, saintly individuals.
Abdullohi Rahnamo, a prominent Tajik political scientist and erstwhile ally of
Islamic political activism in Tajikistan, argues that some pirs and their disciples, who previously were affiliated with Tajik Sufi groups, have turned to more Salafi-like religious opinions.163 The fundamental theological point of contention between reform- minded Islam and those more mystically-inclined is over the concept of širk, attribution, the sin of attributing undue powers or qualities to an individual that are reserved for God alone. Some clerics argue that traditional Tajik understandings of the master-disciple relationship and the devotion and love it inspires in adepts give undue credit to a pir that should be reserved for the divine.
163 Abdullohi. Rahnamo, Islom va amniyati millī dar Tojikiston (Dušanbe: Irfon, 2011), 139. 79
The specter of Islamic reformism with its sometimes militant attitudes to traditional Islamic life in Central Asia has been present since the late Soviet period. For example, by the middle to late Brezhnev era, groups of young mullos had begun calling for an end to traditional rites which they argued were incompatible with “authentic
Islam.”164 These young Turks of the Central Asian clergy were labeled “Wahhabist” by one of the most influential unofficial Tajik clerics of the Soviet era, Muhammadjon
Hindustanī, even though these clerics had no direct influence from or exposure to Saudi- inspired Islamic reformism.165 Terms like “Salafi” and “Wahhabi” gained wide currency as a result of Hindustanī’s influence, though the individuals themselves preferred the label, “Mujaddidiya.” (the renewers). It is precisely these clerics, many of whom hold initiations in the Naqšbandiya, whom Rahnamo accuses of turning to Salafi-like religious opinions. Specifically, he is referring to the controversy over the nature of saintly power
(viloyat) possessed by pirs in Tajikistan and a disciple’s proper position of respect and deference to such spiritual power. The “Salafi-like” pirs argue that the rituals of local
Hanafī Islam have been unduly influenced by local “cults of saints,”166 and are in need of reform.
The point of controversy and the marker of difference among Sufi groups relates to this question: are a pir’s abilities limited to the intellectual, e.g. his skills in qalam
164 Bakhtiyar Babadjanov, “Debates over Islam in Contemporary Uzbekistan: A View from Within,” in Devout Societies Vs. Impious States ? Transmitting Islamic Learning in Russia, Central Asia and China, Through the Twentieth Century, ed. Stephane A. Dudoignon (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2004), 49.; Parviz Mullojonov, “The Islamic Clergy in Tajikistan Since the End of the Soviet Period,” in Islam in Politics in Russia and Central Asia (early Eighteenth to Late Twentieth Centuries), ed. Stephane A. Dudoignon and Hisao Komatsu (New York: Kegan Paul, 2001), 228. 165 Babadjanov and Kamilov, “Muhammadjan Hindustani (1892-1989) and the Beginning of the ‘Great Schism’ Among the Muslims of Uzbekistan,” 209. 166 Babadjanov, “Debates over Islam in Contemporary Uzbekistan: A View from Within,” 49. 80
(dogmatics/theology), fiqh (jurisprudence), knowledge of the Qurʿan and tafsir (Qurʿanic commentary), or can a pir affect miraculous power (karamat) on behalf of his disciples?
Tajik devotees of the Afghan pir, Khawja ʿAbdulwakīl Bahodir, claim that merely reciting his “āsmāī-e mubārak,” the spiritual names associated with his saintly attributes, similar to the ninety nine names of God, can bring about Bahodir’s efficacious miraculous power and “ānshāʿāllah ū taʿālī mushkilāt-e ẓāhirī ū bāṭinī-e ān hal ū bar
āwurdih khair mīgiradad.” (God willing, the Most High will relieve the hidden and apparent difficulties of that condition and bring good.)
A token of this power is embodied in a Persian-script copy of eleven of these names (figure 4). The page states that the names were revealed to a disciple of Bahodir in a dream, and that in their recitation they bring about God’s “lutf” (favor) for the šayx and by extension, God willing, the solution to the problems faced by the one who recites these “āsmā.” The list concludes with the signature of its author, a certain xalifa of the pir, in which he calls himself, “sag-e dargāh-e bahādiriyah.” (the dog of Bahodir’s court/threshold)
Many Tajik devotees display this list in a prominent place in their homes for the purpose of potentially receiving the pir’s ritual grace. Many of these same adepts have little practical literacy of the Persian script in which the names are written. While some may be able to recite portions of the Qurʿan from memory or even have the ability to read the text aloud, that functional literacy of Qurʿanic Arabic seems not to carry over into any literacy of literary Persian. Thus, many of the individuals who have prominently displayed the sheet of āsmā cannot “read” the text. As such, the specificities of the
81 theological controversy it embodies are not necessarily relevant to their daily practice.
Rather, its power lies in the physical link it provides to their silsila’s Afghan, Persian provenance. The Persian script gives the paper an authenticity as a religious token beyond what a Cyrillic-script paper might provide.
It is not then the āsmā’s recitation which evokes the potential for God’s healing power to work. Instead, its very visual presence reifies the abstract silsila connection between Bahodir in Kabul and his adepts in suburban Dushanbe. In this way, it is both a visual mnemonic for their spiritual initiation and a claim to Bahodir’s viloyat and qalamrav (dominion) active within their homes. The presence of the list of eleven names constantly reminds them of their link to Bahodir and simultaneously claims their physical space as under his spiritual jurisdiction. A kind a vernacular theology is implicated in the list’s presentation, however the ongoing theological dispute between reform-minded
Islam and the proponents of saintly power is not the modus operandi for Bahodir’s disciples’ display.
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Figure 4: The Eleven Names of Šayx Bahodir
83
Those influenced by Islamic reformist currents in Tajikistan criticize this type of rhetoric as širk. Maxsumi Burhoniddin,167 an influential Naqšbandī pir in the lineage of
Abdurahmonjon, when reading the sheet of paper, immediately criticized Bahodir’s disciples’ faithlessness. He said that Bahodir was, “Firebgar vai. Vai mega ki kasi padara az duzax kašida metana. Hamaš fireb. Vai ba xateri paisa, duruǧ gui. Ba vasila
Bahodir muškilat hol namesha.” (“He’s a liar/trickster. He says that a person can pull his father from hell. It’s all lies/tricks. He’s a liar on account of money. Problems cannot be solved through Bahodir.”) Beyond his disdain for Bahodir’s claims of saintly power, he was even more appalled at the xalifa’s statement that he was the sagi dargoh. That is all kufr (blasphemy/heresy), he said, and was further evidence of the weak state of Islamic knowledge in contemporary Tajikistan.
When I asked one of Bahodir’s Tajik devotees what he meant when he called himself Bahodir’s dog. He quoted a line of poetry:
Sagi dargohi Jelon šo, ču xohi qutbi rabanī, Ki bar šeron šaraf dorad sagi dargohi Jelonī.
If you want to be the axis mundi,168 become a dog on Jeloni’s doorstep, Because the dog in Jeloni’s court has the dignity of lions.
After reciting these two half lines of poetry, he said that the bayt has a story that
“explains” their meaning. The ostensible originator of the bayt, the eleventh-century
Persian poet and mystic Ahmadi Jomi (1048-1141 CE), was said have a lion that served as his protector and traveling companion. Whenever he reached a caravan stop, he
167 For more information on Maxsumi Burhonniddin, see Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de-Stalinization to Independence (1955-91),” 67–68. 168 “Qutbi rabanī,” (lit. pious/godly pole of the earth) is the living Sufi figure understood to be the most mystically advanced. See Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 200. 84 sought out the rich benefactors and Sufi šayxs of the town and enjoined them to provide his lion’s sustenance. One time, he reached the home of Ǧausulazam, better known as
Abdulqodiri Jelonī (1077–1166 CE), the eponymous founder of the Qodiriya. After introducing these two figures, the narrator began to tell the following story:
Ahmadi jomi kudam šahre meraft, 1 šayxash avliyaash yak muqaraman mekardand, ki šeri u buxoro, ki ser šawa. Baʿd, Jelon omad. Hazrati Ǧausulazam muroqiba kardand, didand, 5 čeqadar avliyaš, čeqadar huquq dora, čeqadar maqam daraja dora, či sohibi karamoti dora, 10 či xel ast, hamaša did. Muroqiba kad, did. Bayni in, dida nametana, ina dida metana.
Baʿd muridaša farmon dod. 15 Guft, “Bale.” Yak muqara did ki šeraš buxora. Vaqti ki avurd guft, guft ki i famid ki istodam. Guft ki i famid ki man avliyoam. Baroi ami muqarai kad, kamtar faqir kad. 20 injoda kamtar faqir kad.
Hazrati Ǧausulazam his karden čiza, faqri vaiya.
Baʿd yak sagča doshta dar xonaešon. 25 Sagčara nigoh kardan. Quvoi sag sad ta šera, dar bumi sag zad. Hazrati Ǧausulazam yak tavajjöh kard. Quvoi saga šera zad.
Saga rohi kard. 30 Ahmadi Jomī dar biruni šahr, dar yak xonaqoh šištagi budan. Šer da birun bud. Sag omad, heč hamla nakard šera. Lat, lat kard, partoft. 35 Hazrati Jomi baromad. 85
Dar röhi pošti šer, sag buromada, peš šišta.
Ayron šud. Šišt, muroqiba kad, heč čī nayoft. 40 Hazarati Ǧausulazam parda kašid ki nabina. Sag omada, šeri maro, ami xeli kard, šera. 45
Iro pursid, guft, “Goš kunen. I sagi ki? I sagi az kujo?” In muroqiba kard did, 50 ayvan ast, yagon maxluqi či nest. Ayvan, sagi i maxluq ai, ayvani sag. Guft, “I ki ast?” guft, “I hazrati Ǧausulazam, 55 Šayx Abdulqodiri Jiloni.” “Dar u odam da kujo?” guft, “Injo dar biruni šahri Jilon.”
“I sagi amu?” 60 Guft, “oh, sagi amu. ba avliyaš.” Baʿd guftan, “oh.” Baʿd girift u nevest. Kalam girift, daftar girift. Baʿd nevišt: 65 Sagi dargohi Jelon šö, ču xohi qurbi rabanī, ki bar shiran shiraf darad sagi dargohi Jelonī Baʿd raft peši poyi Abdulazam, ǧaltid. Guft, “Uzur, ma namedanist dar injoi.” Guft, “Uzr qabul.” 70
Peši šayx šer doštam. Sagi šomada mayda kard, šera nima kard. 75 Šeri nigoh karda, “Ba nomi alloh,” xest. Yakjoi šud, xest.
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[When] Ahmadi Jomi reached a city, 1 a šayx or saint would make an agreement with him to feed his lion, until it would be full. Then, he reached Jelon [present-day Northern Iran along the Caspian Sea]. He meditated and saw Ǧausulazam [Abdulqodiri Jeloni]. 5 [He saw] how great of a saint he was, how much was under his control, how many mystical stages he had attained, what kind of miracles he could perform, 10 what kind [of a saint] he was, he saw all of it. He meditated and saw [it all]. Inside it [his meditations], he saw what he could do [and] what he couldn’t do.
Then, he ordered one of his disciples. 15 He said, “Yes.” He saw the need, that his lion needed to eat. When he brought it, he said, He said, “He knows that I’m staying.” He said, “He knows that I’m a saint.” Because of this, he makes an agreement. He begs a little less. 20 In here, he begs a little less.”
Ǧausulazam sensed Ahmadi Jomi’s poverty.
Then, he [Ǧausulazam] had a little dog at his house. 25 He looked at the little dog. He struck the dog with the strength of a hundred lions. Ǧausulazam focused his attention on him and struck the dog with strength of a lion.
He sent the dog [to Ahmadi Jomi]. 30 Ahmadi Jomi was staying at a dervish lodge outside of the city. The lion was outside. The dog approached it. It didn’t battle with the lion at all. It hit it, hit it, [and] the lion fell. 35 Ahmadi Jomi came outside. The dog came out from inside the lion’s carcass and sat down in front of it.
Ahmadi Jomi was amazed. He sat and in his meditations he couldn’t figure anything out. 40 Ǧausulazam had pulled down a veil so he wouldn’t see. [He said to himself], “The dog came, my lion, 87
did this, to my lion.” 45
He asked someone. “Listen, Whose dog is this? Where did it come from?” 50 He mediated and saw that it was [only] an animal. It wasn’t the created one of something. It was an animal, his dog was created, An animal, the dog. He said, “It’s whose?” 55 [Someone said], “It is Ǧausulazam’s, Šayx Abdulqodiri Jeloni.” He said, “Where is that guy?” “Here, right outside of the city of Jelon.” 60 “It’s his dog?” He said, “Yes, it’s his, according to his sainthood. Then he said, “Oh.” Then he took and wrote, he took a pen and his notebook and wrote: 65 If you want to be the axis mundi, become a dog on Jeloni’s doorstep, Because the dog in Jeloni’s court has the dignity of lions. Then he went to the feet of Ǧausulazam [and] fell down. He said, “Forgive me, I didn’t know who was here.” He said, “Accept my apology.” 70
“Before the šayx, I had a lion. Your dog tore the lion to pieces. He ripped him into halves.” 75 [Ǧausulazam] looked at the lion. [He said], “In the name of God.” It got up. It went back into one piece [and] got up.
As the narrator states, the enigmatic bayt has a “story,” a narrative substrate that offers an interpretation of the verse’s curious subject and the context of its supposed
88 origin.169 The enigmatic quality of the verse’s topical focus in some sense necessitates such narrative elaboration, specifically to those unaccustomed to the rules of adab that accompany its assertion. As this devotee argued, everyone is a like a dog before the great saints of God.170 The narrative substrate of the mystical, poetic aphorism legitimates the pir’s requirements for proper comportment even in the face of criticism from those more reform-minded.
In regard to the telling’s immediate motivation in its conversational context, the narrator constructs discursively a connection between the religious present and an analogous religious past. Though Rahnamo’s “Salafi-like” Sufis criticize the devotion and ziyorat of Bahodir’s disciples, in narrative ones sees that the “dog on the doorstep/of the court”171 is more powerful than the lion of the opposing camp. Just as Abdulqodiri’s dog is more powerful than Ahmadi Jomī’s lion, so too with Bahodir’s help Sufi devotees in Tajikistan have the power to overcome even the strongest weapons of their reformist opponents. The narrator’s points is not that calling oneself a “dog” attributes too much divine authority to Bahodir, but rather its discursive enactment is a positioning move vis-
à-vis religious doubters among the Tajik religious establishment.
169 For more on Persian proverbial/aphoristic sayings with narrative substrates, see Margaret A. Mills, Rhetorics and Politics in Afghan Traditional Storytelling (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 282. 170 This sentiment, beyond as it is expressed in Jomī’s poetry and its popular narrative substrate, is a common expression among Qodirī and Čistī Sufis. 171 Another salient point is the multivalence of the poetic idiom. That is, “sagi dargoh” could be taken as either the “dog on the doorstep” or the “dog of the court,” in a royal sense. In the story, the dog is both. It is literally the dog resting on the pir’s doorstep which Ǧausulazam strikes, and it is the dog of his court, the place where Sufis meet. For example, the architect of the shrine to the Čistī saint, Khwaja ʿAbdullah Ansarī, in Herat, Qavam al-Din Shirazi, portrayed himself in the form of a dog at the “doorstep” to the shrine, similarly evoking the image of the bayt and its accompanying narrative elaboration. Margaret Mills, personal communication, May 2012. 89
The typology of Sufi practice in post-Soviet Tajikistan that the story and its telling evince is between two sometimes antagonistic camps: the lions and the dogs. The lions in this frame are the groups tracing real legitimacy from Soviet-era Sufi lineages, and the dogs are Sufi lineages with a more recent origin within the Tajik religious landscape. The related cleavage of reformist-inspired, “Salafi-like” Islam and more charismatic religious authority maps neatly onto this adept’s religious framework.
Tariqat identification is seemingly irrelevant for this adept’s taxonomy of Sufi practice.
The more salient identifier is related to association and relationship with specific personages and how one positions oneself towards spiritual authority. In the narrative this is embodied by Ǧausulazam and Ahmadi Jomī. In Tajikistan, this same cleavage can perhaps be better mapped onto the successors of Abdurahmonjon’s teaching mantle, both real and imagined, and those who trace their spiritual connections to groups abroad, like the halqa of Bahodir. I should also note that these competing affiliations and conceptions of “correct” Tajik Sufi practice have textual and ritual implications, which I consider further in the following chapters.
In post-Soviet Tajikistan, singular identification of Sufi groups along the lines of transnational teaching hierarchies may provide scholars little analytical value. Rather, relationships, be they “authentic” or “spurious,” with important past Sufi figures like
Ešoni Abdurahmonjon and an incumbent identification in their discrete teaching circles, may offer better typologies and genealogies of Sufi practice. In some ways, emic identifiers predicated on these figures work to position contemporary devotees vis-à-vis other related Sufi practitioners in the Tajik republic. In the post-Soviet religious
90 environment forged šajaranoma and ever-expanding subsequent editions of hagiographic texts are the norm. As one Tajik historian noted, “At the next printing of Hazrati pir, there will be 50 names [listed as receiving teaching authorizations from
Abdurahmonjon].”
As adepts move fluidly between pirs, taking vazifa from multiple pirs with varying initiations, as pirs teach amalgamated rubrics blending Naqšbandī theosophy with stories of the lives and exploits of Qodirī saints or use Qodirī poets to explicate on the intricacies of Naqšbandī devotion, as some Sufi families emphasize different facets of their spiritual biographies to different audiences at difference times, what becomes more salient than singular tariqat identification in defining broad types of Sufi practice in
Tajikistan is the degree of relationship to specific Central Asian Sufi figures like
Abdurahmonjon and a group’s comfort with traditional forms of adab and devotion embodied in practices of ziyorat and ʿišq for one’s pir. Again, ethnic genres of practice much better account for differences among streams of mystical practice that fall under the rubric of tasavvuf in Tajikistan than do many broad analytical categories that are often applied to Sufi belief and practice in the countries of Central Asia.172
Conclusion: Revivalism, the “Political,” and Discursive Tradition in Tajik Sufism
The preceding discussion has considered three sites of contention between standard scholarly interpretative strategies and accompanying Sufi counter-discourses of each strategy’s relevance. In this move towards the explication of situated ethnographic
172 Ben-Amos, “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres.” 91 meaning as understood by participants with respect to concepts of revivalism, politics, and tariqat identifiers, a common discursive trope has been the nature of Sufi “tradition” and “authenticity” and its articulation in post-Soviet space. With respect to typologies of
Sufi practice, the point of contention is tied to these issues of authenticity, i.e. who is the
“true” Sufi and how does the “true” Sufi’s spiritual practice relate historically to broad categories of Central Asian Islamic practice. This dispute over temporality may be over authentic silsila lineage, as in the case of Abdurahmonjon and his legion of successors, or over what practices the Islamic discursive tradition in Central Asia properly legitimates, as in the case over Bahodir’s āsmā.
It should also be noted that these particular issues and sites of contention are particularly embedded within the specific features of post-Soviet Tajik modernity. For example, as Babajanov has argued, controversies over “authentic” Islamic practice in the countries of Central Asia were/are directly linked to the conditions of Soviet rule.173 One further implication of the preceding discussion is that a necessary corrective may be to dispense with religious revivalism and political potentialities as explanatory paradigms for Muslim life in Central Asia.
Similarly, Sufi discourses of decline and devolution should not be dismissed as merely the discursive evidence for demographic realities or as simply a new manifestation of centuries-old Sufi rhetoric. Rather, Sufi groups’ firm rejection of revivalism as an explanatory device for their ongoing post-Soviet religious practice and the firm absence of mitigating ethnographic evidence that would legitimate the concept’s
173 Babadjanov, “Debates over Islam in Contemporary Uzbekistan: A View from Within,” 50. 92 use further suggest the insufficiency of that model’s relevance for understanding the social life of Tajik Sufis. It serves no purpose inside the halqa and if mentioned is roundly criticized.
Politics can also be a troublesome construction in the interpretation of Tajik
Sufism. While some commentators insist on the potential for political mobilization among Sufi groups and the influence of “political Islam” on their practice, Sufis in
Tajikistan insist of the a-politicism of their enterprise and the centrality of experience and ethics in their devotional projects. This stance in and of itself is also political position, in the sense that the political arena includes sites of collective reflexivity and public interaction in which participants seek to shape “the conditions of their collective existence.”174 And as such, a-politicism and the assertion of the political innocuousness of the mystical project in effect challenge state appropriation of mystical symbols and heritage and the state’s sycophantic support for Sufistic practice in Tajikistan.
This chapter has begun to highlight issues concerning the nature of tradition, which “traditional” practices Islam’s discursive tradition properly entails, and the broad uses of tradition as a communicative strategy amid novel (re)imaginations of the past.
These are the very issues that the following chapters discuss in more detail. The next chapter considers several related fields in which Sufi imaginations of the past are realized and in which concepts of revivalism are implicated: the creation of new post-Soviet Sufi texts and their accompanying pious reading dispositions among Tajik Sufi groups.
174 Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics, 8. 93
CHAPTER 3: SUFI TEXTS AND READING DISPOSITIONS
The process by which bright boys from even very poor families managed to acquire a formidable education through the schooling characteristic of Central Asia’s greatest center of enlightenment, Bukhara, and at the same time developed the penchant usual there for writing poetry in early adolescence, is evidenced in the record everywhere… Edward Allworth175
Rahnamoyi halq baʿd az Mavlavī, Ma’danul hol ast, ganji maʿanavī.176
The people’s guide after the master (Rumi), Is the Maʿdan-ul Hol, the treasury of spirituality. Mavlavī Jununī
Since Gorbachev’s glasnost’, there has been a concurrent explosion of publication from private manuscript collections hidden since the 1920s. The question for the observer of post-Soviet Islam in Central Asia is to what degree can this recent literary effervescence be attributed to latent tendencies that were ongoing throughout the Soviet period and to what extent these new publications are representative of particularly post-
Soviet sensibilities and the product of independence and more recent historical circumstances.
175 Edward Allworth, “The Changing Intellectual and Literary Community,” in Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, A Historical Overview, ed. Edward Allworth, 3rd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 350. 176 Mavlavī Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, ed. Asadulloi Abduxon and Tolibi Didor (Dušanbe: Safat, 2009), 881. 94
While certain facets of Islamic life continued throughout the social upheavals of the Soviet period, specific Sufi teaching hierarchies continued to exist and on a limited scale continued to transmit Islamic knowledge along traditional silsila lines from pir to murid,177 as attested in chapter 2. Ritual, too, in at least abbreviated form was still practiced.178 Post-Soviet hagiography celebrates the continued transmission and sometimes even covert state support for mystical initiation and religious patronage even in the height of official state campaigns waged towards their destruction.179 Yet, for the vast majority of Tajik citizens the public performance of Islam, beyond abbreviated life cycle events, remained off limits and the threat of punishment ever real.
Even more, access to centuries of Islamic knowledge was steadily abrogated as manuscripts were forcibly collected and destroyed, clerics arrested and killed, and finally new national alphabets created cutting off the following generation from any practical literacy of their literary heritage. What manuscripts that remained were buried, hidden away from Soviet authorities, and only read by family members of their earlier owners outside of the watchful eye of the state.180 These texts became tokens of family heritage, memorates of a previous epoch. Even to the present, Tajik villagers hawk manuscripts they have held since prior to the October Revolution, many now unable to decipher the nastaʿliq penmanship of their forebears. Yet some families have in the post-Soviet
177 Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de- Stalinization to Independence (1955-91).” 178 See for example, Muriel Atkin, The Subtlest Battle: Islam in Soviet Tajikistan (Philadelphia, PA: Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1989), 24. 179 Hokiroh, Hazrati Pir <
My particular focus here on texts and the situated practices of Muslim textuality shares an affinity with Talal Asad-like conceptions of an Islamic discursive tradition.181
Asad’s notion that the anthropologist of Islam should begin their work with texts is central to the discussion that follows. Indeed, this work is firmly situated within Asad’s call that, “An anthropology of Islam will therefore seek to understand the historical conditions that enable the productions and maintenance of specific discursive traditions, or their transformation—and the efforts of practitioners to achieve coherence.”182
Further, as may be clear, my conception of reading dispositions is indebted to Brinkley
Messick’s work on the nature of textual habitus and dispositions of writing, specifically in the work of what he terms, “redundancies of discursive routines.”183 It is this naturalization of specific orientations towards a new canon of texts reproduced in different domains and supported by narrative that forms the basis of my analysis here.
181 Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam, 14. 182 Ibid., 17. 183 Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society, 252. 96
The specific power of textuality, of textual replication and dissemination and the discursive support for these entextualizing processes provided by historical narrative, is a vital and ongoing feature of the Sufi devotional project in Tajikistan. My point is not that this textual fetishness presupposes some kind of technological determinism in which the written word enables new conceptions of religious sociability that oral discourse cannot or that the transformation of pre-Soviet tradition into a new post-Soviet written sphere fundamentally altered the affective capacity of Sufi poetics.184 Instead, I am much more sympathetic to more ideological interpretations towards the power of the textual artifacts.185
In this chapter, I first trace a lineage of textual sentience related to the poetical works of one nineteenth-century Tajik mystic and poet known by the penname Jununī
(the mad). My point in tracing these genealogies of textual sentience is not to purport an authoritative reading of this poet’s historical importance, nor is my goal to debunk the truth claims of his life as understood by his current devotees. Rather, by examining
Jununī’s presence or lack thereof as evidenced in prime textual artifacts leading up the post-Soviet period, one can better appreciate and contextualize the processes of contemporary canonization and hagiographic valorization ongoing in the post-Soviet environment in Tajikistan.
Indeed, Jununī and other poets like him may have been extremely renowned among pre-Soviet and Soviet-period Sufi groups. However, the textual record of literary
184 Walter J. Ong, “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, ed. Gerd Baumann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 23–50. 185 Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 97 scholarship in both the period leading up to the October Revolution and throughout the
Soviet period, in addition to recent oral history and ethnographic evidence, completely ignores or only offers a limited gloss on the extent of their literary output, their importance in the religious environment of their day, and the scope of their reception. In short, the textual genealogy suggests that their literary importance (including its oral performance dimensions) has only been derived in the relatively recent past, a century or more after their works were first penned to paper, and that these authors’ ascension into the pantheon of Tajik Persian literature owes more to the situation of post-Soviet
Tajikistan than to the social context of the poets’ lifetimes or to the century following their deaths.
Next, I examine the ways that contemporary Tajiks reconstruct Jununī’s legacy and spiritual authority through the narrative performance of historical legends and memorates associated with his life. Specifically, I examine three iterations of one particular historical legend which offer potential explanations for his lack of notoriety in the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods in order to think through the discursive means whereby canonization occurs and the pragmatic potentialities of such historical narrative. These narratives operate to root Jununī within a specific social, political, and religious milieu that already enjoys spiritual and literary prestige. In narrative, the past becomes a communicative resource enabling novel re-imaginations of Jununī’s place within the pantheon of mystical Persian masters. Narrative prefigures the work of canonization and offers coherent interpretative schemas for contemporary Tajik adepts to conceptualize their and Jununī’s revisionist Islamic past.
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Narrative cannot alone exhibit the potential for the moves of decontextualization that must occur for Jununī’s heretofore silent historical legacy to be reinvented in the post-Soviet period; iterations of new entextualizations further cement Jununī’s canonized authority. I also discuss the discursive realms of other textual artifacts in which Jununī’s poetry prominently figures. This textual ossification and the subsequent products of its repeated decontextualization and reinsertion into related and unrelated discursive domains further create new spiritual and literary legitimation and power. But looking at only the textual artifacts of Tajik Sufism provides only half the picture of textualized orientations and practices. I also discuss dispositions of Sufi reading in the post-Soviet environment with an analysis that brings texts and their reading practices/dispositions together by offering several ethnographic vignettes related to the means whereby Tajik
Sufis model these newly imposed textualities.
Finally, I demonstrate how the case study of Jununī is not an anomaly in the religious landscape of the present Islamic moment in post-Soviet Tajikistan by considering the works and newly historicized memories of other mystical poets living in the pre-Soviet era whose literary creations have similarly recently entered the Tajik religious marketplace. The religious textual field in Tajikistan is ever expanding and new manuscripts hidden since before the October Revolution are being introduced and integrated into the evolving Tajik Islamic imagination.
Mavlavī Jununī
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In contemporary Tajikistan some of the most popular religious texts are the various works of a nineteenth-century Qodirī Sufi šayx, Mavlavī Sayid Nasimxon
Qalandar binn Šohsohib Qandahorī (1810-1887),186 better known to most Tajiks as
Mavlavī Jununī. Though purportedly the author of at least seven extant works of mystical prose and poetry, during his own lifetime his literary output was likely unknown, save to his own disciples and to those within his village and kinship networks.
Similarly during the Soviet period, even fewer persons probably were aware of the details of his life or familiar with the nature of his extensive literary output. It was not until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the independence of the Central Asian republics, and the peace settlement following the Tajik Civil War (1992-1997) that any of his works
186 The dates of his birth and death differ depending on the source. The only internal evidence from any of his extant works comes in the epilogue of his masnavī, the Madan-ul Hol. This is suspect, too, as the epilogue is possibily a later addition to the text. In the epilogue, the author writes:
Īn kitāb-e maʿdan ālhāl-e kirām ʿaṣr-e sulṭān muẓafar şud tamām
This book, the noble Mine of Mystical States, Was completed during the reign of Sultan Muzaffar.
Mavlavī Junūnī, Maʿdan al-Hāl (Tihrān, 1376), 701.
A few lines earlier, he also writes: Raftī āz ʿumr-e junūn panjāh ū dū maʿdan alhālī biguft āz ʿişq-e hū
Fifty two years of Junūnī’s life had passed, [When] he spoke the Mine of Mystical States by means of the love of God.
Amir Muzaffar’s reign lasted from 1860 until 1885. Thus, Jununī could not have been born prior to 1808 or later than 1832. One of Jununī disciple’s sons remembers attending the funeral of the pir when he was twelve years old and related that Jununī had died at the age seventy seven. This individual, Sūfī Murzo, the son of Boboi Abdusalom, died in 1973 when he was ninety eight. This would mean that Junūnī passed away in the year 1887 with a birthdate around 1810. Saidaxmad Hodizoda Nodiri, “Mavlavi dzhuni i ego masnavi <
Jununī’s summa theologica, the Maʿdan alhāl (The Mine of [Mystical] States) was first printed in Tehran in its original Persian script during 1997.187 Written using a
Persian ma navī meter, its 16,422 lines divided into four books are reminiscent of the great thirteenth-century Persian mystic Jalal al Din Rumi’s magnum opus, the Ma navī- yi Maʿnavī. Like Rumi, Jununī’s narrative poetry includes stories detailing the lives and mystical exploits of the prophets of Islam, mystical parables, and other didactic couplets intended as direction for his disciples, all interspersed with explanatory lyric poetry. A complete assemblage of his mystical poetry, the Dīvān-e Junūnī (The Collection of
Jununī’s Poetry), also in its original Persian script, was published in Dushanbe during
2002.188
Two years later the third installment of his mystical oeuvre was released. This work, the Ganj alʿāshiqīn (The Lovers’ Treasury) is a prose text more explicitly discussing topics also found in his poetry such as life in a Sufi xonaqoh, specific comportment within the brotherhood, ritual formulae, and explanations of arcane terminology.189 Since their original Persian script printings, various Tajik publishing houses have also released numerous Tajiki Cyrillic chapbook editions of his Devon and selected poems from the Maʿdan, often in multiple printings and some even specifically tailored for secondary school teaching rubrics. Later in 2009, an authoritative and
187 Junūnī, Maʿdan al-Hāl. 188 Mavlavī Junūnī, Dīvān-e Junūnī, ed. Ismāʿīl ʿAbdulūhāb zādeh Qahārī and Hojī Dāmlā Mahmūdjān Tūrajānzādah (Dūshanbih, 2002). 189 Junūnī, Ganj alʿāshiqīn. 101 authorized Tajiki Cyrillic version of the Maʿdan appeared in Dushanbe.190 Beyond these three texts, Jununī was purportedly the author of four additional extant texts, the Devoni
Nodirī (The Collection of Nodirī’s poetry), the Vasiyatnoma (The Testament), the
Musammatot,191 and the Central Asian Turki text, the Zavqulmuhib (The Interest of the
Friend).192
The impetus, editing, and publication costs for the three original texts was completely borne by the family of Ešoni Muhammad Rafʿi better known as Ešoni
Turajon (1934-2005), an influential member of the official clergy who served as imomi xatib or prayer leader of the Friday mosque in the village of Rohatī,193 a small hamlet not more than twenty kilometers east of the Tajik capital. Ešoni Turajon was also a Qodirī
Sufi šayx in the lineage of Mavlavī Jununī, linked through his father Sufi Abdukarim, the successor of Jununī’s closest disciple, Sufi Pečifī.194 Not long after assuming the mantle of the brotherhood from his father, Turajon took possession of the surviving original manuscripts of Jununī’s works, which were then hidden from Soviet authorities by one of
Jununī’s granddaughters. Ešoni Turajon was known to have memorized the entire text and frequently quoted verses from it in his Friday sermons. Older men in the village still
190 Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol. 191 Textual sources and my informants differed on the title. One camp called the text the Muhammasot. Ibid., 13. Other sources referred to it as the Musammatot (That Which is Timely), eg. see Nodiri, “Mavlavi dzhuni i ego masnavi <
1970s.
The Turajon family perhaps gained even more notoriety when Ešoni Turajon’s thirty-four-year-old second son, Hojī Akbar Turajonzoda (1954- ) was appointed the qozii kalon or head Islamic official of the Tajik SSR in 1989.195 Hojī Akbar later served as
Vice Prime Minister of Tajikistan and held a seat in the upper house of the Tajik parliament. Hojī Akbar, along with his two brothers, Ešoni Nurriddin (1953- ), the heir and recipient of Ešoni Turajon’s teaching mantle in the Qodirī order, and Ešoni
Mahmudjon (1960- ), hold vast sway over members of the political opposition in
Tajikistan, and are oftentimes the most vocal critics of state policies perceived to be incompatible with Islamic mandates.
In the village of Qaryai Ismoil (also known as Turkobod) several kilometers beyond the district center of Vahdat not far from Dushanbe proper, their large mosque, in which Mahmudjon serves as the current imom, frequently hosts thousands of congregants for Friday prayers.196 Their influence extends beyond the religious and political sphere; their significant business interests also make them some of the richest people in
Tajikistan.197 The Turajonzoda family has used their financial resources to print, distribute, and promote the progenitor of their father’s teaching hierarchy and educate their own vast audience as to the particulars of his literary history. They do this regularly
195 Gretsky, “Qadi Akbar Turajonzoda.” 196 In mid 2012, a court ordered the mosque closed. At the time of writing, the mosque remained closed pending judicial appeals. See chapter 1. 197 Epkenhans, “Defining Normative Islam: Some Remarks on Contemporary Islamic Thought in Tajikistan - Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda’s Sharia and Society.” 103 in set weekly teaching events, during Friday prayers, and at the life cycle ceremonies they officiate.
The Turajon family also hosts a popular website devoted to their family’s religious teachings and on which they post videos of the performance of Jununī’s ǧazals and commentary inspired by Jununī’s works.198 In addition, the site includes biographies of Ešoni Turajon and his three sons, electronic copies of some of their writings, audio recordings of Friday sermons at their mosque in Turkobod, and a popular question and answer section, in which the brothers answer religious questions posed to them by their followers. In late May of 2011, the Tajik authorities moved to restrict access to the website, and to the time of writing it still remains blocked in Tajikistan.199
Besides two extant manuscripts of the Maʿdan held in the library of the Oriental
Studies Institute of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, the Turajonzodas possess the only surviving copies, and perhaps the only manuscripts ever created of all of his other writings (figure 5).200 Copies of Jununī’s manuscripts are not in any of the manuscript collections now controlled by the Tajik government in Dushanbe housed at the Firdavsi
National Library and the Oriental Studies Institute of the Tajik Academy of Sciences. As such, the Turajonzodas were the first agents of Jununī’s entrance into the post-Soviet
198 http://www.turajon.com 199 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Tajik Authorities Criticized For Restricting Access To Religious Website.” 200 The two manuscripts are catalogued as numbers 1563 and 2913. The first manuscript is dated 1907, and the second is assumed to be from the author’s own hand. No other information is given. A. A. Semenova, ed., Sobranie Vostochnyx Rukopisei Akademii Nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, vol. II (Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk UzSSR, 1954), 356. Tellingly, Jürgen Paul does not list either manuscript in his catalogue of Sufi manuscripts housed in the Library of Oriental Studies Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. Jürgen Paul and Baxtiyar Babadjanov, Katalog sufischer Handschriften aus der Bibliothek des Instituts für Orientalistik der Akademie der Wissenschaften, Republik Usbekistan (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 2002). 104 textual sphere. Their significance in both funding the initial runs of the three texts already published, disseminating the texts themselves, and finally reinforcing Jununī’s reputation through historical narrative, sermon allusions, and on the internet, should not be deemphasized. Without a powerful patron, who has both the financial means and the ability to circumvent state control of religious publications when necessary, Jununī’s works likely would not have moved beyond the keepsake boxes of his ancestors and the oral performance of the recipients of his teaching mantle in the Qodirī order.
Figure 5: Manuscript of Jununī's Devon
105
Genealogies of Poetical Reception
In the period leading up to the October Revolution, the Bukharan Emirate was awash with literati producing tazkiras or anthologies of their era’s poets. In earlier centuries, tazkiras had been an important facet of literary production in Persian-speaking
Central Asia, but starting in the mid-eighteenth century, there was a silence of tazkira production lasting for over one hundred years.201 Following this period, a relative deluge of manuscripts appeared in short order from the 1870s until the 1920s chronicling the exploits of literati within the emirate which had occurred since the late eighteenth century. These tazkira writers, some of them well-known poets in their own right, included Qorī Rahmatullohi Vozeh, Hojī Abdulazimi Šarʿi, Mirsidiqi Hašmat, Afzal-
Mahdumi Pirmastī, Abdulloxojai Abdī, Hojī Neʿmatullo Mötaram, and Sadri Ziyo.
Vozeh’s work is perhaps the most prototypical and a potential model for later compilers. In his tazkira, he listed the given names of the poets if he knew them, the poet’s penname(s), and a few sample lyrics. These poets included those who had written during the course of Vozeh’s life, poets who had died just previously to his lifetime or were beyond the years of their literary production during Vozeh’s career, poets who had studied in the madrasas of Bukhara or served in the amir’s court, and finally those poets who had just begun their careers and were still engaged in formal study within the confines of Bukhara’s many institutions of Islamic learning. While a tazkira like
Vozeh’s was Bukhara-centric (Indeed, the majority of the other tazkira writers also lived in the capital), he strove to include poets beyond the environs of amir’s court. Poets in
201 Rasul Hodizoda, Adabiyati tojik dar nimai duvvömi asri XIX: qismi avval (Dušanbe: Doniš, 1968). 106 his work hailed from as far afield as the mountainous regions of the eastern part of the emirate, places in modern-day Tajikistan like Uroteppa, Kattaqurgon, Xujand, Hissor, and Badakhshan.
In total, Vozeh included over 145 poets, in addition to sixty two other individuals he felt were important to the intellectual life of his age. The Soviet scholar, Rasul
Hodizoda argued that individuals included in Vozeh’s compilation could be divided into three distinct groups: poets and other literary professionals who had served at the court of the Amir of Bukhara, religious officials, and finally other figures well-known in the capital of the emirate. Of the second group, Hodizoda says:
Guröhi duvvöm šoironi mutasavvif, qalandaru darvešon, ešonhoi muridxör ba umuman röhonniyoni rasmii islom budand. Vozeh qarib dar hama jo masmuni söfiyonai ašʿori mutasavvifii in guna šoironro zikr mekunad. Čunonči, dar bobi Sirat menavisad, ‘Ba tariqai ahli tasavvuf va taarruf dohil, jamei suluki tariqai naqšbandiyai aliyaro tamom namuda.’202
The second group of poets was mystics, wandering mendicants and dervishes, ešons with disciples, and normal religious officials. Almost in every place, Vozeh mentions the subject of Sufi mystical poetry and this kind of poet. As such, in the chapter on Sirat he writes, ‘He was in the way of the mystics and knowledge seekers and had completed all of the rules of the Naqšbandiyya.’
Despite the inclusive impulse of Bukhara’s tazkira compilers, Jununī’s name is not to be found in any of their writings. He is completely absent from any of the tazkira of the pre-Soviet period. According to his Devon, he says that in his youth he used the taxallus (penname) of Nodir or Nodirī. Ziyo, Vozeh, and Abdī all list poets with that taxallus in their compilations, but the biographical details and samples of verse listed are not to be found in any of Jununī’s extant oeuvre. A recent Tajik scholar examined
202 Ibid., 27. 107 nineteen tazkira including poets of Jununī’s period and found no mention of him or any of his works. 203 Jununī’s absence from literary compendia continues into the Soviet period.
Not long after Tajikistan assumed administrative autonomy within the bounds of the newly created Uzbek SSR in 1924, the party establishment began to call for the
“reformation” of the Tajik language.204 The party turned to a Bukharan jadid reformer and prominent man of letters, Sadriddin Aynī, to draft a new compendium of Tajik literature which was to become the potential basis for the republic’s new literary heritage.
The Namunai Adabiyoti Tojik or A Sample of Tajik Literature (1926) was Aynī’s answer to their call. Aynī began his work with Rödaki, the earliest example of new Persian literature, and ended with a short section chronicling poets who were writing during the period leading up to the October Revolution.205 From the beginning, Aynī’s work was controversial.206 In arguing that Tajik literary heritage could be traced back to medieval
Iran and continued to share a common trajectory with that of Persian-speakers across southwest Asia, Aynī’s literary salvo argued not for the distinctiveness of the people of the mountains of the eastern Bukharan emirate, but rather that Tajik literature held more in common with that of the Persian-speaking urban centers of Middle Asia which were now subsumed into the new Uzbek SSR.
By 1930, Aynī’s work was banned and party orthodoxy demanded Tajik literati search for their origins in the poetry of the valleys of the new Tajik SSR. Terry Martin
203 Nodiri, “Mavlavi dzhuni i ego masnavi <
“Stalinist primordialism.”207 Earlier policies favored an emphasis on pre-Soviet
“classics” over specimens of less canonical national folklore. Aynī’s Namunai was much more in the earlier mode, intended to illustrate the historicity of Tajik national culture, but by appropriating geographically-suspect writers as emblematic of a kind of proto-
Tajik literary classicism.
The later Stalinist orientation towards the USSR’s official nationalities and in support of their official, national cultures continued to lionize the depth and artistry of prerevolutionary achievements, but this time rooted in a more organic frame celebrating the living representations of these national, primordial ethnic roots. As such, the new
Tajik SSR needed living or extant national literary emblems suitable for this new Stalinist frame. The difficulty with achieving this party goal was that the majority of literary production in the newly-codified “Tajik” language occurred outside the bounds of the
Tajiks’ new national titular republic. Scholars, thus, went to the people in their quest for the literary roots of the nascent Tajik nation, looking particularly for emblems of cultural production, including literature, which heralded a movement towards building socialism.208
As part of this drive to catalogue and delimit Tajik national literature in opposition to the “internationalist” impulses of writers like Aynī and new party prescriptions, scholars primarily as part of the Oriental Studies Institute of the Academy
207 The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 442–451. 208 Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 269–270. 109 of Sciences of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic set out to collect examples of mahallī209 or local poetry from across the mountains of the republic. This followed a much publicized injunction from the esteemed Soviet Tajik poet and scholar, Abdusalom
Dehotī. Dehotī, too, had attempted to remedy the aforementioned problems with Aynī’s
Namunai by authoring his own compendium (1940), under the exact same title, but this time without the same problematical politics. While not totally dismissing the value of classical Persian poetry, Dehotī emphasized the mountain provenance of Tajik literary origins and pointed his discussion towards a discussion and explication of its exemplary specimens.210
Perhaps echoing the earlier calls of a Soviet orientalist, linguist, and ethnographer,
S.I. Klimčickiy,211 in 1940 Dehotī implored his fellow scholars of Tajik literature by writing:
Maxalho, taʿrix ba tazkirahoro justujö karda, zinda gardonidani nomi šoironi köhistonii tojik va omöxtani ejodiyoti onho yake az vasifahoi muhimmi mo, xodimoni adabiyoti sovetii Tojikiston mebošad.212
One of our important duties as servants of Soviet literature of Tajikistan is to search out the places, history, and compilations, revive the names of poets from the mountains of Tajikistan, and to teach their works.
Numerous Tajik and Soviet scholars took up his charge, and by the mid-1990s, a series of poetry collections had appeared covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the creation of the Tajik SSR. The work began in earnest in 1957. A. Mirzoev of the Academy of Sciences of the Tajik SSR set out to collect the lost works of Tajik poets
209 “Mahallī” was often used interchangeably with “köhistonī” as the mountain valleys of the Tajik SSR were the appositive focus of Soviet ethnographers search for Tajik literature in exemplar. 210 A. Dehotī, Kulliyot: iborat az panj jild, vol. V (Dušanbe: Irfon, 1966). 211 A. Abibov, Doirahoi adabii Buxoroi šarqī (asri XIX va ibtidoi asri XX) (Dušanbe: Doniš, 1984), 14. 212 Dehotī, Kulliyot: iborat az panj jild, V:30. 110 from the last half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century using tazkira manuscripts and other writings that were part of the Oriental studies collections in Tashkent, Samarqand, and Dushanbe.213
The result of Mirzoev’s labor was the publication of a textbook of Tajik literature edited by Rasul Hodizoda which catalogued the works of 395 poets who lived in the greater environs of the Bukharan Emirate during the nineteenth century.214 Building on the work of Hodizoda, Amirbek Habibov (Abibov or Habibzoda), onetime director of
Dushanbe’s Institute of Oriental Studies, set out to move beyond the confines of the
Oriental Studies Institute’s manuscript collections and organized expeditions to collect those works and manuscripts which were in private hands and had escaped the campaigns waged towards their destruction in the 1920s and 1930s.215 Indeed, in one his works published in the relatively safe political climate after the fall of the Soviet Union,
Habibov says, “For this reason, the literature of this period has remained unknown like,
“Live coals [of a fire] banked under ashes.”216
Habibov’s first publication, Ganji Badaxšon or The Treasury of Badakhshan
(1972), was the result of his expeditions into the mountains of eastern Tajikistan. For the next twenty years and after subsequent expeditions across the Tajik SSR, he published
Merosi adabii šoironi Hisor or The Literary Heritage of the Poets of Hissor (1974),217
213 A. Abibov, ed., Ganji zarafšon (Dušanbe: Adib, 1991), 7. 214Hodizoda, Adabiyati tojik dar nimai duvvömi asri XIX: qismi avval. 215 Keller, To Moscow, Not Mecca: The Soviet Campaign Against Islam in Central Asia, 1917-1941, 107– 139. 216 “Az in sabab adabiyoti in davra čun otašporaho dar zeri xokistar nomaʿlum monad bud.” Abibov, Ganji zarafšon, 5. 217 Amirbek Habibov, ed., Merosi adabii šoironi Hisor (Dušanbe: Doniš, 1974). 111
Ganji parešon or The Treasury of the Afflicted (1984),218 Ganji zarafšon or The Treasury of Zarafshon (1991),219 and Az ganjinai adabii Hisor or From the Treasury of Literature of Hissor (1995).220 By Habibov’s estimation, his and his colleagues’ collecting efforts resulted in the discovery of fifty two previously unknown poets who lived and wrote within the boundaries of contemporary Tajikistan during the second half of the nineteenth century and leading up to the Soviet period.221 In toto, by 1995 Habibov recognizes 424
“sohibi devon” (owners of a book a poetry) from “viloyathoi tojiknišin” (provinces where
Tajiks live).222
Soviet-era scholars like Hodizoda, Habibov (Abibov or Habibzoda), Mirzoev, and their colleagues strove for completeness and maintained a rigorous program of collecting extant manuscripts for inclusion in their ever-increasing volume of catalogues.223 In the frame of the tazkiranavison (anthology writers) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Aynī, these scholars undertook to catalogue the taxallus, given names, and samples of the verse of all of the poets they discovered. Inclusiveness was their raison d’etre. They were not merely dispassionate observers of literary phenomena; they
218 Amirbek Habibov, Ganji parešon (Dušanbe: Irfon, 1984). 219 Abibov, Ganji zarafšon. 220 The general modus operandi and publication multiplication of Abibov and his colleagues parallels similar moves to catalogue and publish national culture across the Soviet Union. Cf. Dana Prescott Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 410–413.; Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folkore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990), 10–11. 221 Abibov, Ganji zarafšon, 13. 222 A. Habibzoda, Az ganjinai adabii Hisor (Dušanbe: Irfon, 1995). Jiří Bečka argues that as many as 450 authors were listed in the tazkira of the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries in Central Asia. “Tajik Literature from the 16th Century to the Present,” in History of Iranian Literature, ed. Jan Rypka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968), 525. This number seems suspect to me in that he cites the work of Rasul Hodizoda to arrive at his figure. Hodizoda claims only 395. Adabiyati tojik dar nimai duvvömi asri XIX: qismi avval.; Abibov, Ganji zarafšon, 10. 223 These collecting expeditions were often in conjuction with more general ethnographic and folklore- collecting drives. Cf. Howell, The Development of Soviet Folkloristics, 118–135. 112 imagined their efforts to be part and parcel of the Marxist-Leninist objective of building up the folklore and literature of the lumpenproletariat above the bourgeois literature of the Central Asian urban centers like Bukhara and Samarqand. Specifically, searching out mahallī poets who lived and wrote beyond the purview of urban literati contributed to this objective as well as focusing attention on an existence of an extant national literature of the new Tajik SSR. Mahallī poets helped reframe conceptually the literary dynamics of pre-Soviet Persian-speaking Central Asia moving the focus to the rural borderlands of the Eastern Bukharan Emirate and away from the literary center, now part of an Uzbek
SSR.
The Tajik SSR needed its own literature, separate from the literary salons of
Bukhara. Mahallī poets filled this lacuna. Even more, most of these local poets from the mountains of Badakhshan, the valleys of Darvoz, and the Karategin and Zerafšon river valleys wrote in a simplistic style distinct from the so-called sabki hindī (Indian style)224 of many of their urban contemporaries.225 Even though many of these newly emblematic rural literati were various kinds of religious functionaries, mullos, ešon, or other members of the rural ulamo, and their writings reflected these problematic religious orientations, they were still held up as paragons of their class backgrounds even as the subject matter of their writings was criticized as bearing “feudal” qualities and representative of the pre-
Soviet social order. Indeed, despite political problematics and censorship restraints, these scholars did not shy away from including poets whose politics were anathema to their
224 “Sabki hindī” is the standard, though problematic, term for Safavid-Mughal Persian poetry, normally typified by its density of poetic imagery, odd syntax, and sometimes indecipherable metaphor. See Paul E. Losensky, Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 1998), 3–4. 225 Bečka, “Tajik Literature from the 16th Century to the Present,” 529. 113 own. However, that is not to say that overtly religious poetics were included in their compilations. As for other poets, in the compendiums that were published such problematic verse was redacted in accordance with the political climate of its publication.
Neither the name Saīd Nasīmkhān, the taxallus Jununī, nor examples of Jununī’s verse are anywhere to be found among the more than 424 poets catalogued or
“discovered” by Soviet-era scholars. As already mentioned, both the tazkira compilers of the pre-Soviet period and Soviet-era literary scholars strove for inclusion and comprehensiveness. Indeed, Hodizoda even brags about the number of poets he was able to include. Even though perhaps the majority of the included poets’ verse was politically suspect being in that the poets wrote in a religiously-tinged literary environment, they still were listed in tazkira and Soviet-era anthologies. Even more, Hodizoda drafted a textbook of Tajik literature in the 1960s that lists Sufis and other religious personnel as a key group of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century poets.
The final Soviet-era compendium of Tajik literature and culture, the three-volume
Enciklopediyai adabiyot va sanʿati Tojik (The Encyclopedia of Tajik Literature and Art) also neglects to mention Jununī.226 There are six poets listed with the taxallus Jununī, none of whom is the poet Saīd Nasīmkhān.227 Even Aynī, the father of modern Tajik literature, in his youth wrote for a time under the same taxallus.228 Interestingly, one of the poets listed in the encyclopedia is “Jununii Qandahorī,” but this Jununī lived during
226 A. Qurbonov, ed., Enciklopediyai adabiyot va sanʿati tojik, 3 vols. (Dušanbe: Sarredakciyai ilmii enciklopediyai Sovetii tojik, 1988). 227 Ibid., vols. 3, pg. 497. 228 Jiří Bečka, Sadriddin Ayni: Father of Modern Tajik Culture (Naples: Istituto universitario orientale, Seminario di studi asiatici, 1980), 66. 114 the sixteenth century. So, why was Jununī not listed in any of the pre-Soviet or Soviet- era collections? Dehotī writes:
Albatta, ejodiyoti onhoro az yak yo du-se ǧazal iborat ast gufta gumon kardan durust nest. Ammo, sababi asosii nomašhur mondan va ba tazkiraho nadaromada, gum šuda raftani digar asarhoi in šoiron az muhiti adabī va as markazhoi ilmi dur budani onho boyad bošad.229
Of course, it is not correct to suppose that their creations [only] consist of one or two or three ǧazals [and that is why they are not in tazkira]. But, the main reason they have remained unknown and did not enter the tazkira must be that that their writings were lost and that they were far from the centers of learning.
For Dehotī, if poets were not listed in the copious tazkira collections of pre-Soviet
Persian-speaking Central Asia, it was because of their distance from the literary salons at the center of the emirate’s urban centers. Dehotī’s view became orthodoxy among later scholars of Tajik literature. Habibov and Hodizoda both echo the reason for non- inclusion, i.e. non-proximity to Bukhara proper. More specifically, this non-proximity means more than domicile. Habibov argues that it is the poets who did not study in
Bukhara that are the most neglected by the tazkiranivison.230
Dehotī’s (and his disciples’) reasoning also has political motivations. It is precisely, this distance that lends value to their efforts. It is in their “kambaǧalī”
(poverty) and “xorī,” (meanness) that make them emblematic of the proletarian literature to which the Soviet writing establishment is striving.231 Commonness is a virtue, while pre-Soviet notoriety is necessarily to be suspected. Too, the voice of these mahallī poets is seen as “ozodtar” (freer) or “demokratī” (democratic), both seen as euphemistically
229 Dehotī, Kulliyot: iborat az panj jild, V:30. 230 Abibov, Doirahoi adabii Buxoroi šarqī (asri XIX va ibtidoi asri XX), 31. 231 Dehotī, Kulliyot: iborat az panj jild, V:30. 115 virtuous by Soviet scholars in contrast to the perceived shackles of the pre-Soviet feudal epoch.232 Further, these poets’ verse is “az sarčašmai ejodiyoti dahanakii xalq” (from the sources of the verbal creations of the people). This verse is not, then, channeled through the pre-Soviet power structures, a product of the amir’s court and patronage, but a direct reflection of the people’s political consciousness in support of the free path to pure socialism.
Moreover, it is the oral dimension of their literary output that distinguishes them from those included in the written collections. As Dehotī argues, their poetry, “Fakat az dahon ba dahon guzašta šinoxta šudaand,” (Only have become known from [being transmitted] from mouth to mouth).233 This oral dimension, the fact that “dar bayni mardum šūrat yofta, bis’yor [sic] ašʿoru ab’yoti [sic] onho az tarafi hofizon suruda mešavad,”234 (They have found fame among people, their poetry and literature are sung by singers),235 is also why Soviet ethnographers need go beyond the halls of the Academy of Sciences to collect specimens of this literature existing among the people, and which is still being sung until the present day (i.e. 1984).236
Yet, of course Soviet scholars still recognized that one of the key reasons they were not able to study mahallī poets, poets who were beyond the purview of the tazkira compilers, was due to the machinations of Soviet-era politics which had prevented their open access to extant manuscripts and hastened this literature’s move into the oral sphere
232 Abibov, Doirahoi adabii Buxoroi šarqī (asri XIX va ibtidoi asri XX), 12. 233 Kulliyot: iborat az panj jild, V:29. 234 Abibov, Doirahoi adabii Buxoroi šarqī (asri XIX va ibtidoi asri XX), 12–13. 235 Define Hofiz 236 “Hofizon to kunun ham mesaroyand.” Abibov, Doirahoi adabii Buxoroi šarqī (asri XIX va ibtidoi asri XX), 12. 116 as lauded above. While oral performance and memorization were characteristic of pre-
Soviet Persian pedagogical practices, there too existed a parallel, interdependent written tradition on which oral performance and memorization depended. It was precisely this facet of pre-Soviet Islamic knowledge transmission and private, religious manuscript production which early campaigns against “superstition” leveled in the name of “militant atheism” specifically targeted. Manuscripts were forcibly gathered from homes and destroyed or sent to the locked Oriental studies collections of the titular republics or even as far afield as Moscow or Leningrad, precisely those collections which Soviet-era scholars used to compile their own compendiums of Tajik national literature. Habibov’s post-Soviet imagery of the manuscripts being like, “Live coals [of a fire] banked under ashes,” is particularly apropos to the fate of numerous writings during the early Soviet decades.237 Further, where manuscripts in private hands have survived, rescued from the flames as it were, he recognizes that their owners are often not willing to part with their ancestors’ creations. He says:
Sababi digari kam mavjud budani asarhoi badeiyu adabī boz dar on ast, ki az röi anʿana šoiron va olimoni guzašta hamai ejodiyoti xudro hamčun moli šaxcī ba avlodonašon meros guzoštaand. Avlodoni onho kitobhoro hamčun merosi muqaddasi boboyoni xud donista, ba ahli ilmu adab dastras namekunand.238
Another reason that few works of fiction and literature exist is that poets and passed scholars according to tradition have passed all of their creations like private goods as an inheritance to their descendants. Their descendants, thinking
237 Interestingly, in an earlier publication during a more politically fraught epoch, he attributes this destruction to anti-Soviet forces, a common trope for Soviet-era Orientalists. He says, “Ilova bar inho, dar solhoi jangi graždanī va muborizahoi šadid bo bosmačiyon bis’yor nusxahoi nodir va kitobhoi xub dar nitijai söxtor va ofathoi digar az miyon raftaand.”(In addition to these, in the years of the border war and fierce struggles the Basmači destroyed many rare manuscripts and good books by burning or other kinds of disaster.), Ibid., 31. 238 Ibid. 117
of the books as the sacred inheritance of their grandfathers, do not make them available to scholars.
Habibov’s frustration with his not being able to collect all extant manuscripts of the pre-Soviet period is palpable in his writing. His drive towards inclusiveness and comprehensive treatment of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Tajik literature is being impeded by political realities, even as late as the early 1980s. These political realities imbue the descendants of mahallī poets with real fear that the corps of Soviet- trained Orientalists would trample upon their ancestors’ legacy, or perhaps even subject them to potential punishment for their possession of such reactionary literature. Habibov continues by saying that while he has striven to include every last source he could find, he knows that, “It is without a doubt that, with respect to collecting, other literary sources will be found in the future.”239
Habibov’s prediction has obviously held true; in the literary detente of post-Soviet
Tajikistan, privately-held manuscripts have been published and Tajik literary scholars now have access to the works of poets hidden to them and the reading public at large since the beginning years of the twentieth century. While contemporary scholars of Tajik literature bemoan the politically-infused environment in which they began their careers, many also strongly claim that Soviet-era politics did not impede their access or study of manuscripts of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature. Rather, the period’s political environment merely limited what they could write about said works. Contemporary literary scholars in Tajikistan profess their ignorance of Jununī’s literary works until they
239 Ibid., 32. “Šubhae nest, ki dar natijani justujöyho boz dar oyanda baʿze sarčašmahoi adabī paydo gardand.” 118 were finally published beginning in the late 1990s. They claim his absence from their scholarship was not due to overt political pressure, their ideological preferences, or even the result of topical censorship dictated by party officials. Rather, as one don of the Tajik
Academy of Sciences simply noted to me, “Inja šaxsan man xabar nadoštam.”240
Reconstructing the Past: historical narrative and removing the Soviet veil
As both pre-Soviet and Soviet-era scholars were so meticulous in their cataloguing efforts, Jununī’s non-inclusion in any of their copiously-footnoted collections presents contemporary admirers of his literary output with potential problems. At the least, it begs the question as to whether Jununī during the space of his own lifetime or in the period immediately following his death enjoyed the renown among religious Tajiks that he shares today or indeed to what extent historical renown is relevant to the supreme devotional status that he is recognized as having in contemporary Tajikistan. In this frame, his absence must be accounted for. Emblematically, one recent Tajik dissertation writer argues that Jununī was left out of Soviet-era collections because of the religious content of his verse. He says:
Šoyad sababi asosii in hol dar on bošad, ki Mavlavii Jununī qabl az hama šaxsiyati mazhabī va az zumrai buzurgoni tariqati Naqšbandiyai tasavvuf buda, šöhrati mazhabii ö ba sari hirfai šoiriaš soya afkanda bošad.241
Perhaps the main reason for this state [i.e. his non-inclusion in nineteenth and twentieth-century tazkira] is that Mavlavī Jununī was first among the religious personnel and the group of great ones of the Naqshbandiyya way and his religious reputation cast a shadow over the craft of his poetry.
240 “Here we didn’t know about the individual [Jununī].” 241 Nodiri, “Mavlavi dzhuni i ego masnavi <
In this section, I similarly consider Jununī’s reputation, but I do not share the dissertation writer’s contention that Jununī’s lack of notoriety can be attributed to his religious reputation. Rather, I discuss contemporary narrativized conceptions of Jununī’s historicity and the pragmatic potentialities of these narratives’ creation and circulation.
My aim is not to evaluate the historicity of Tajik Sufis’ historical claims about Jununī, but rather to unpack the socially-situated circumstances of these narratives’ tellings. I am not concerned with what “really happened” as such, but rather I want to understand how particular historically-referenced events act as meaning-making resources for Jununī’s contemporary devotees and prefigure the processes of canonization ongoing in post-
Soviet Tajikistan.
Issues of origin are perhaps more severe in relation to places where violence and disjuncture are characteristic of the recent historical experience. As such, in Tajikistan with its contentious twentieth-century history characterized by upheaval, conflict, and cultural revolution, the power of hegemonic narratives and their constituent counter- positioning are extremely rich. The Soviets were actively engaged in creating new national narratives for their titular republics. These narratives included new historical trajectories, philosophical exemplars, and revisionist understandings of historical relevance. It is in this climate, in the midst of one of the last stanzas of the Tajik Civil
War, that Jununī’s most important work was published. Issues of provenance, historical relevance, and historical counter-narratives were particularly relevant at the time of its printing. Recognizing the novelty and new potentialities for access to previously
120 proscribed literature, the editors of Jununī’s Maʿdan write in the first sentence of the book’s introduction:
Zimāmdārān-e zamān-e shūravī mā rā nah tanhā qaṣd-an āz mīrā -e ghanī-ye guẕashtihāmān dūr nigāh mīdāshtand, balkih taḥmīl nīz mīkardand, kih āz bakhshhā-ye āz ān ṣarf-e naẓar namāyīm ū ānhā rā tadrījan bih dast farāmūshī bispārīm.242
The heads of government during the time of the Soviets not only intentionally kept us far away from our rich past heritage, but they also asked that we would relinquish parts of it and gradually we would hand it over to forgetful hands.
The publication itself is heralded as a salvo in a new kulturkampf, in which Tajiks can now “remember” a past not long ago relegated to the dustbins of their supposed new progressive history. While Soviet-era politics contributed to Tajiks’ ignorance of the weight of their own religious history, the editors claim that there has been a willful relinquishment of Tajik literary religious heritage which their publication rightfully remedies. Tajiks have thus forgotten Jununī and his contemporaries. His lack of notoriety is not only due to overt Soviet machinations aimed at wiping him and his ilk from Tajiks’ memories, but that the Tajik volk has willfully forgotten their cultural heritage. In Islam, forgetfulness/heedlessness (ǧaflat) is a basic human sin. As such, the editors’ accusations have all the more resonance as a culturalist echo of an Islamic principle. In this frame, the editors replace Soviet primordialism as discussed above with a static, timeless essentialized concept rooted in their notions of Tajik Islamic heritage.
Now that Soviet strictures have been released, this history must be remembered, recovered, and revived. Jununī’s new publication is a not a novel act, a new imposition
242 ʿAbdālnabī Sitārzādih and Tūrahjānzadih Maḥmūdjān, “Mavlavī Junūnī ū kitāb ʿishq īshān,” in Maʿdan al-Hāl (Tihrān, 1376), j. 121 of post-Soviet eventualities. Rather, it is a return to past practice and a resurrection of past literary renown.
The editors argue that their work’s publication is positioned into this point of opportunity as a correction and reorientation of Tajik national heritage, yet their discussion is firmly within Soviet interpretative frames. That is, the editors take Soviet ideas of Tajik nationhood for granted, given, and one might even add primordial. Except in their revisionist accounting, Islam is a vital component of that enterprise, what Tim
Epkenhans refers to as a new, “normative Islamic hegemony.” 243 The editors’ rhetorical force here is oriented to an essentialist rendering of “national culture.” Similarly,
Mahmudjon’s older brother, Hojī Akbar, echoes this sentiment in his Šariat va jomea
(Sharia and Society). Hojī Akbar writes:
Yake az ravandhoi muhimmu sarnavisštsoze, ki jomeai mo imröz az sar meguzaronad, ravandi bozyoftu bozšinoxti farhangi asili millī mebošad.
Yake az masʿalahoi mehvarii ravandi bozšinoxti farhangi millī dar jomeai Tojikiston bozšinoxti naqš va joygohoi dini mubini islom va arzišhoi islomī dar tarkibi farhangi millii tojikon mebošad.244
One of the important and fateful movements that our society is beginning is the movement to rediscover and to become again acquainted with the original national culture.
One of the key examples of the movement to rediscover national culture in Tajik society is the re-acknowledgement of the plan and place of the true religion of Islam and the value of Islam in the composition of the Tajiks’ national culture.
243 Epkenhans, “Defining Normative Islam: Some Remarks on Contemporary Islamic Thought in Tajikistan - Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda’s Sharia and Society,” 87. 244 Hojī Akbar Turajonzoda, Šariat va jomea (Dušanbe: Nodir, 2007), 9. See also Epkenhans, “Defining Normative Islam: Some Remarks on Contemporary Islamic Thought in Tajikistan - Hoji Akbar Turajonzoda’s Sharia and Society,” 86–87. 122
Here, Hojī Akbar offers some contextualization to the movement of which his younger brother, Mahmudjon, imagines the publication of Jununī’s to be constituent.
There indeed is an “original” Tajik national culture, but in addition to Soviet conceptualizations, Islam is a vital and core component of it. In a later Cyrillic-script publication of the work (2009), the introduction has been modified.245 The earlier turns of phrase need no longer be offered. By 2009, the editors believe that their readers know too well why the “mardoni rohi haq”246 are unknown to their Tajik readers. Indeed, using Jununī’s own phrasing, they write:
Šukr va siposi bepoyon Xudoi Buzurgro, ki bo guzašti solho va faroham omadani šaroiti musoid baʿze az osori mardoni haq, ki bo sababhoi maʿlum zeri pardai kitmon qaror doštand, az nav ehyo, zinda va pešnihodi xonandai zakī va millati farhangdöstu tamaddunparvari tojik magardand.247
Thanks and unending gratitude to great God that in past years favorable conditions have come together for some of the writings of the men of the path of God, that for clear reasons have been resting under a hidden veil, to be newly resurrected, revived and offered to keen readers and the culture-loving and God- praising Tajik nation.
Their project, this time the Cyrillic-script publication of Jununī’s Maʿdan-ul Hol, is even more explicitly a return to the pre-Soviet era, a fortuitous “unveiling” for the
Tajik millat (nation). The authors take for granted their readers’ notions of the reasons behind his “hiddenness” and no longer need be chided for their “forgetfulness” as they did twelve years previously. Interestingly, the editors have also resurrected Jununī’s own phrasing in this regard. Quoting Jununī they write:
Mardoni haq ba pardai kitmon guzaštaand,
245 Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, 3. 246 Ibid. “The men of the path of God.” 247 Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, 3. 123
Bo ranju faqru foqa azizon guzaštaand.248
The men of God have passed to a hidden veil, The dear ones have passed with pain, destitution, and want.
In the context of Jununī’s text, one can imagine he is referring to past Sufi masters.249 The hidden veil, specifically, in that context would denote fano (annihilation) and the afterlife. They had passed into the gnosis lying beyond the current mortal sphere.
In the context of the Maʿdan, in which Jununī discusses the avliya and the feats of spirituality associated with them, the bayt offers a poetic gloss on the poverty which often accompanies devotion to the divine, while utilizing the standard poetical trope of the poet as beggar in need of the sovereign’s patronage and largesse. Now, after Jununī’s death and his own imagined passing beyond the veil and absorption into the divine, the “pardai kitmon” (hidden veil) becomes an apt metaphor for the spiritual situation in post-Soviet
Tajikistan as perceived by the text’s editors. Jununī has become the object of his verse.
He is now one of the mardoni haq passed on, as opposed to one of the perpetuators of godlessness during the Soviet period or one of their progeny in the post-Soviet era.
Similarly, his legacy was not fame and renown, but rather his poverty and destitution resulted in ignominy during the period after his death.
In contrast to the ignominy of the Soviet era, narratives of Jununī’s nineteenth- century fame abound among Sufis in contemporary Tajikistan. These revisionist accounts work to resituate the forgetfulness of Soviet-era Tajiks and resurrect Jununī’s spiritual legacy to that of those that he is compared, the very themes to which the text’s
248 Ibid. 249 The editors neglect to provide a reference to this bayt from Jununī’s text. I was also not able to locate it in the text. 124 introductions speak.250 In what follows, I discuss three iterations of one legend associated with Jununī’s importance in the spiritual life of the Bukharan emirate in order to think through the discursive means whereby canonization occurs and the pragmatic potentialities of such historical narrative. These discursive realms support the possibility of “revivalist” post-Soviet Sufism in Tajikistan and these temporal assemblages work to lend spiritual legitimacy and authority to the pre-Soviet social order and connect contemporary devotion to national historical antecedents. The chief discursive move of these narratives’ telling is to situate Jununī within the power structures of his day. Such positioning, I argue, is particularly necessary in the case of Jununī where the vast majority of contemporary adherents were ignorant of his historical legacy prior to the end of the Tajik Civil War.
These narratives begin the work of “resurrecting” this legacy and laying the groundwork for the processes of canonization to begin. Ignominy may be appropriate for
Persian classical poetic rhetoric and the attainment of spiritual gnosis that is the goal of the wandering mendicant, yet it holds some difficulty in linking pre-Soviet spirituality to the present epoch. The archetypal Ibrohim ibn-Adham of mystical tradition, who forswears earthly power and wealth and commits himself to God alone, seems not to be the type to which contemporary Tajik Sufis aspire. After the disjuncture of the Soviet period and the political upheaval of the first decade of independence, contemporary Sufis
250 Vernon Schubel writes that this repositioning or “countering” is a common trope in post-Soviet hagiography. “Post-Soviet Hagiography and the Reconstruction of the Naqshbandī Tradition in Contemporary Uzbekistan,” in Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia: Change and Continuity, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 80. 125 in Tajikistan understand the amirs of Bukhara and their ulamo to be the prime exemplars of pre-Soviet devotion and spirituality.
The forms of authority ascribed to the poet traverse several temporal and political domains. First, he is positioned within the realms of political and spiritual authority of the Bukharan Emirate of the late nineteenth century. As such, in these revisionist accounts Jununī interacts with Amir Muzaffar, is vetted by the ulamo, deemed their mystical superior, and the amir proposes to disseminate his works across the realm. After his death, rather than complete obscurity as the previous section catalogued, his poetry is sought out by the prime actors of the Soviet-era literary establishment. In short, they argue that Jununī was central to both the literary and religious milieu of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, irrespective of the fact that the textual record suggests otherwise. God-fearing Tajiks, then, must engage in an exercise of “bozšinoxtī” (re- acknowledgement) and “bozyoftī” (rediscovery) of this “history.”
The three historical narratives discussed below are in kernel form, not fully elaborated and still fully embedded within their conversational matrices. In this regard, the generic possibilities of their performance are perhaps more limited than they may be in some kind of full narrative performance. Each of the three narratives is oriented towards “answering” issues of Jununī’s historical relevancy and legacy, i.e. implicitly responding to his absence from pre-Soviet and Soviet-era anthologies. Specifically, each story offers a potential revisionist account of how Jununī was received by spiritually- legitimate authorities of his own day and by extension why this reception is not preserved in the form of any extant textual artifact.
126
In the vein of Charles Briggs, the “past,” the historical core of the narrators’ performative moves, acts as a communicative resource, “providing a setting and an expressive pattern for discussions that transform both past and present.”251 The past and present are put in dialogue vis-à-vis each narrative rendering. Discourse itself works to
“transform” contemporary religious understandings. As Ray Cashman has argued, “It is precisely the comparison of past and present in order to evaluate the status quo that gives rise to historical discourse.”252
The first narrator is a descendant of Jununī still living in Jununī’s ancestral village. He says:
Dar davrai amir Muzaffarxon, hozi mo prezidenti mo Tojikistonay, un zamon prezident dar Buxoro bud.
Šumo Buxorora šundagī a?
Amir Muzaffarxon in boboi amir Olimxon mešan, boboan. Amir Muzaffarxon in dar Buxoroi šarif budan. hamin mulloho a röyi hazrati Mavlavī šikoyat menavisan, ki yak šoir buromdan. Baʿd hazrati mav… amir Muzaffarxon xudašon hazrata daʿvat mekunand. Az Buxoro meoyand.
Unja darborba olimo budan, kitoboša az nazar meguzaronand, ki hama dar vasfi Xudo, yagon xatogiye kitob nest. Hazrati Muzaffarxon hamin hazrati Mavlavida murid šudand. Yaʿne ina pir giriftand. Va un olimoyam pir giriftand. Va hazrati Mav… Muzaffar čī guftan ba, hazrati Mavlavī guftan, ki šumo hamin Buxoroda isted. Haminja darborba kor kuned. Ki hazrati Mavlavī naxostand.
251 Charles L. Briggs, Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 99. 252 Ray Cashman, Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border: Characters and Community (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 117. 127
Vay ki pir šudī, ina majbur kardand, ba ǧazab omadand, omadand hami rohatiro ixtiyor kardan. Hamunja mondan. Va dar in jo ham hazrati Mavlaviram kam kam ǧam dodand. Misol, hazrat misrahošda mega, ki: Navišti maskani mo bayni munkiron aftod, Ki hayfi poyi Jununī dar in diyor aftod.
Ba har kas az zamoni be neh… dast bar sar memolam, Ba dastam az kulohi naxvataš sözon šavad paydo. Yaʿne har kasa saraša sila kardanam sözan zadan ast.
Jununī dar hayataš mexurad sangi malomatro, Ba mardum qadri in šaydo pas az murdan šavad paydo. Vaqte ki man murdam mega, baʿd šumoda ba qadri man merased. Inamin xelay, odama baʿdi murdanuš čī merasan.
During the reign of Amir Muzaffar Khan, now our, our president of Tajikistan, at that time the president was in Bukhara.
You’ve heard of Bukhara?
Amir Muzaffar Khan was the grandfather of Olim Khan, his grandfather. Amir Muzaffar was in holy Bukhara. These mullos wrote a complaint against his excellency Mavlavī [Jununī], that there’s a poet that’s come. Then, his excellency Mav… Amir Muzaffar himself invited his excellency. He came from Bukhara.
There the ulamo were in the court [of the Amir]. They looked through his [Jununī’s] book [to see] that all of it was consistent with God, That there wasn’t any error in the book. His excellency Muzaffar Khan became a disciple of his excellency Mavlavī. That is to say he took him as a pir. And those ulamo also took him as a pir. And his excellency Mav… Muzaffar what did he say to [him]? He told his excellency Mavlavī, that he should stay here in Bukhara, work right here in the court. But his excellency Mavlavī didn’t want to. He, when he had become a pir, he compelled them. He became irate. He came to Rohatī. He preferred to stay here. And here they also gave him a little bit of trouble. For example, in one of his lines of poetry, he says: You wrote that my abode would fall among the apostates,
128
That for shame, the foot of Jununī would fall in this land. 253
For everyone from the time of without (?)… I rub my hand on the head. Burning will come from my hand to his prideful hat.254 Meaning, caressing the head of each one is also setting it on fire.
During his life, Jununī ate the stone of blame, After his death, the power of this witness will be made manifest to people.255 When I am dead, he says, then my worth will reach you. It’s like this a lot, after his death it reached people.
This narrative works to contextualize historically Jununī’s life. The dialectic between sacred past and religious present is foregrounded in the narrative’s telling, specifically in regards to political authority. The contemporary political situation is framed as potentially analogous to nineteenth-century political realities, at least with respect to interpretative cues. Just as now, there is a “president,” then the amir ruled from Bukhara. Similarly, just as present-day Tajiks must judge the religious merits of
Jununī’s writings only now recently published, so too Jununī was evaluated by his society’s contemporary ulamo. Further, the narrative hinges on the derivation of authority, and two such loci are posited: Amir Muzaffar and the religious scholars serving in the amir’s court.
Some kind of spiritual legitimacy and authority being attributed to the amir is not unique to the narrator’s telling. More broadly, in post-Soviet Tajikistan harkening back
253 “You wrote” refers to the fate of God. According to Jununī, it was by the fate of God that he would eventually live in Rohatī, presumably the apostates being those not mystically-inclined. 254 This is perhaps the most enigmatic of the three bayt quoted, such that the narrator feels he must offer his own gloss. Ostensibly, the bayt seems to refer to God’s power made manifest in the saint. He can make one “burn” with divine passion by merely directing his tavajjöh, by “touching” a murid, or rather an “apostate,” with God’s fayz. 255 The contrast here is between the trouble Jununī claims he suffered during the course of his life and the renown he predicts he will hold after his death. The “stone of blame” is a mystical expression referring to the typical scorn that mystics are said to encounter with respect to normative ulamo. 129 to the pre-Soviet era, an age uncontaminated by Soviet state atheism and in which political and spiritual legitimacy were more closely intertwined, offers a source to which contemporary devotion can point. A pre-Soviet provenance renders Soviet disjuncture somehow less jarring and the reintroduction of religion in the public sphere more interpretable. Novelty alone is suspect, while clear genealogies make post-Soviet Islam palatable to generations bereft of such religious heritage. Establishing discursive relationships between the seat of pre-Soviet Persian-speaking Central Asian Islamic authority and contemporary religious practitioners is one means whereby group status is legitimated.
Margaret Mills and Ravshan Rahmoni discuss the performance of another historical legend in post-Soviet Tajikistan in which legitimacy, spiritual and otherwise, is substantiated on the basic of connecting lineages to the Bukharan amirs.256 In the case
Mills and Rahmoni consider, contemporary representatives of sayid groups debate the amir’s support and possible membership in pre-Soviet lineage groups considered to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Mills and Rahmoni’s informants express ambivalent attitudes towards the amirs and their own purported common descent.
Irrespective of their ambivalence, it remains that in post-Soviet Tajikistan contemporary spiritual legitimacy needs real genealogical legitimation. In this case, such legitimation was ascribed to the Bukharan amirs. This image of the pious amirs in support of traditional Central Asian Islamic life shares some historicity with the impression the amir
256 Margaret A. Mills and Ravshan Rahmoni, “Gashtak: Oral Performance and Literary Memory in Tajikistan,” in Orality and Textuality in the Iranian World, ed. Julia Rubinovich and Shaul Shaked (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 130 attempted to cultivate in the face of ever-growing Russian political and economic dominance in the region.257
The potential for rivalry and quarrels breaking out between the Bukharan ulamo and the rural pir, Jununī, and in need of adjudication by the amir in Bukhara also shares some affinity with the historical climate of late nineteenth-century Bukhara. Political and dogmatic factionalism between competing elements of the Bukharan religious elite characterized much of life within the madrasas of Bukhara and the amir’s court. One key cleavage was framed in geographic terms between those hailing from within the central areas of the amir’s realm and those from the more recently annexed regions at the far eastern edges of the emirate, areas contiguous to Jununī’s sphere of likely influence.258
Theological controversy, dogmatic rivalry, and jockeying for political favor and patronage within and among the Bukharan elite of both urban and rural extraction were characteristic of the interaction between the ulamo and amir. The narrator’s historical legend similarly privileges analogous domains. In this way, the texture of his narrative performance holds a historicity, a “truthiness,” that would prevent its summary dismissal by contemporary Tajiks.
Beyond sharing a source of spiritual authority with other historical narratives in post-Soviet Tajikistan, the narrator’s story also shares historical and rhetorical similarities with memorates related to the exploits of his literary contemporaries. Sadriddin Aynī
257 Adeeb Khalid, “Society and Politics in Bukhara, 1868-1920,” Central Asian Survey 19, no. 3/4 (2000): 370. 258 Stephane Dudoignon, “Faction Struggles Among the Bukharan Ulama During the Colonial, the Revolutionary and the Early Soviet Periods (1868-1929): a Paradigm for History Writing?,” in Muslim Societies: Historical and Comparative Aspects, ed. Sato Tsugitaka (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 62–96. 131 was similarly summoned to the amir’s court, this time Amir Abdulahad, not long after gaining some recognition as a poet.259 According to John Perry and Rachel Lehr, Aynī initially refused the amir’s patronage. But after legal action was threatened against him, he relented and for a period regularly composed eulogies for the amir. The parallels between Aynī and Jununī’s experiences at court speak again to the historicity of the narrator’s plot and a well-regarded poet’s standard honor in the life of the amir’s court.
However, the parallels may even run deeper; the narrator is a schoolteacher and teaches
Tajik literature. As such, he is well-versed in the biography and works of Aynī, a key component of Soviet-era and post-Soviet Tajik curricula, and thus knows the model of patronage normally proffered in the amir’s court.
Besides the narrative’s intertextual connections to Aynī’s experience with the amir, its topical center also bears some relationship to Persian folk motifs. Later in the same day that the narrator told this legend, I was walking with him towards Jununī’s burial place. He offered further clarification on Jununī’s interaction with Amir Muzaffar.
He said, “Amir Muzaffar šagerdi avvali hazrati Mavlavī šud.”260 Not only, did the amir submit himself to Jununī’s guidance and spiritual authority, but the amir became Jununī’s most-devoted disciple, in effect the spiritual descendant and mantle-carrier of Jununī’s mystical legacy. This added flourish to the earlier narrative even more firmly emphasizes the high regard in which Jununī was purportedly held in the eyes of his days’ political and spiritual authorities, however it also bears similarity to common folk tropes.
259 John R. Perry and Rachel Lehr, “Introduction,” in The Sands of the Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1998), 10–11. 260 “He became the number one disciple of Jununī.” 132
This model of a person of political power becoming the chief disciple of the pious is well-attested in folk literature and specifically in bodies of folk literature within the
Persianate cultural sphere.261 Rather than denigrating the “invented-ness” of the narrator’s elaborations, this commonality between his historical anecdote and folk literature more broadly attests to the hermeneutical deftness of the narrator and the power of cogent interpretative schemas active among members of his audience. As with Mullo
Nasruddin, displays of spiritual power, be they miraculous as the folktales may attest or, in the case of Jununī, more mundane demonstrations of scholarly erudition and mystical understanding, have affective dimensions. The dialectical nature of these displays implies that they envisage a response. Displays of mystical prowess necessarily invite the recipient to respond. One cannot encounter the divine and leave with intellectual or spiritual neutrality. So, if Jununī indeed was the mystical wunderkind contemporary hagiography implies, any interaction with the forces of spiritual and political authority must necessarily have resulted in furthering his renown.
However there is a curious juxtaposition in the narrative, the enigmatic contrast between acceptance at the amir’s court and the obvious poverty of Jununī’s existence, as evidenced by the relics of his life remaining in Rohatī and the Tajik literati’s seeming ignorance of his copious and only-now valued oeuvre. In addition, a surface reading of the narrator’s quoted bayt would also belie any conception of Jununī’s historical renown.
If indeed Jununī was held in such high esteem by the amir, then why would he have
261 Stith Thompson, Motif-index of Folk-literature; a Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-books, and Local Legends., vol. 4 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1955), 82. In Thompson’s motif-index, he lists this as, J.1169.8, “The prophet’s first disciple.” One particularly relevant source for this tale type that Thompson lists is Albert Wesselski’s 1911 text, Hodscha Nasreddin. 133 endured so much suffering in Rohatī? To a certain extent, the solution to this seeming quandary may be better attributed to the standards of poetical rhetoric rather than a literal reading of the poet’s biography evident in his verse. However, the issue is more complicated in that the narrator “reads” his biography as true. The narrator does not merely assess biography as evident in verse as artistic examples of Jununī’s deft command of poetic rhetoric. Rather, it is precisely biography within verse that is in need of explication and the chief substance of his narration.262
On another occasion, Mahmudjon Turajonzoda similarly elaborated on Jununī’s interaction with the amir. He said:
Ešon, ešon solhoi asro nuzdara oxirhošon solhoi masalan faraz mekunem haštod hay… yaʿne hazoru hašsadu haštod, zamone, ki amir Muzaffar dar Buxoro dar amorati Buxoro masalan, saltanat merondand,
ba Buxoro šarif (or tašrif) ovarda budand, unam bo daʿvati amir. Baʿze muborizho išona da amir siyo kardand, ki osorhoš masalan, ziddi islomī hastu ziddi šumo hastu… bad ešona daʿvat karda budand hamin Maʿdanihol baʿze kitobošona burda budiyan hamun zamon.
Az nazari ulamoi darbori amir Muzaffar meguzarad, mebinand hama xub ba ešon bo töhfahoi ziyodi amir metyan, anaaa…. Binobar hamin, oxirhoi asri nuzdah mešavad ešon guzašta bošad. Šoyad ba hamin xotir, boz bolotar az in ešon osorhošona dar un zamon ijozati tabʿu našr hudašon nadoda budan. Guftan kitobhoi man, navištahoi man maxsusi hamin muridu muxlisoi xudam ast. Hatto dar Maʿdan-ul Hol meguyad: In kitob ahli dardi ošiq ast,
262 Of course, poverty and anti-materialism are well-attested mystical themes. See Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 120–124. However, as mentioned earlier, the anti-materialism of a figure like Ibrohim ibn-Adham is not the type to which contemporary Sufis aspire. 134
Na baroi didani har fosiq ast.263 Gufta hatto masalan suxano došt. Uno baroi hamin xudašon rozī nabudiyan, ki kitobošon muntašir šavad. Baʿd, ba hamin xotir šoyad našr našud, yaʿne zikr nagaštaast.
The ešon, the ešon, in the years at the end of the nineteenth century, the years, for example, purportedly eighty, one thou… rather 1880, the time that Amir Muzaffar in Bukhara, for example ruled the Bukharan emirate, was brought to holy Bukhara (or was brought in honor to Bukhara), that was also by the invitation of the amir. Some of his warriors had slandered him in front of the amir, [saying] for example that his writings were against Islam and against the amir… After that he was invited, at that time he brought this here Ma’dan ul Hol and some of his books.
The religious scholars in Amir Muzzafar’s court looked through and saw that all of it was good and they gave to the ešon lots of gifts from the amir…. Because of this, the ishon passed away at the end of the nineteenth century. Perhaps because of this, and more important than this, at that time he himself didn’t give permission for his works to be published. He said, my books, my writings are especially for my own disciples and devotees. He even says in the Ma’dan ul Hol: This book [is for] the lovesick, Not for every indecent person to see. For example, he even had a saying. Because of this, he himself didn’t agree that his books should be published. So, perhaps for this reason they weren’t published and mentioned.
In addition to similar claims of spiritual authority and historical importance,
Mahmudjon’s orients his narration somewhat differently than Jununī’s descendant. This contrasting perspective reflects the social roles that Mahmudjon inhabits that the previous narrator lacks. The first difference is the contrasting role of the ulamo in Mahmudjon’s telling. While the first narrative foregrounds inter-religious conflict between the urban
263 Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, 881. 135 ulamo of the amir’s court and the rural Sufi šayx, Jununī, the second one blames the amir’s “champions” for denigrating Jununī’s mystical treatises. The ulamo figure in the narrative’s plot, however they provide merely an adjudicative role, judging the religious merits of Jununī’s work. In that Mahmudjon and his brothers are firmly entrenched in the world of Tajik ulamo, their lack of villainy approximates his own social standing and view on the religious elite of which he is a part.
Another key point of difference between the two narratives is that Mahmudjon focuses his narration on the publication of Jununī’s writings. Again, the orientation of
Mahmudjon’s narration points towards his own role in resurrecting Jununī’s legacy. All of Mahmudjon’s hedging in the narrative, the abundance of “perhaps,” also may index some uncertainty in the narrative. Though Jununī received the amir’s largesse and the ulamo reviewed his writings and judged them to be religiously sound, Jununī did not allow them to be published during his lifetime. They were not to be distributed broadly to those not initiated into a mystical order and without the requisite spiritual knowledge with which to interpret them. Yet in spite of Jununī’s injunction, Mahmudjon and his brothers offered Jununī’s works for the perusal of the “indecent.” In justification of his actions, he says:
Xub, aknun mo didem, ki manf...
kitobaš xele kitobi mufid ast baroi tarbiyai axloqii mardum muhim ast. Az hamin xotir mo saloh didem, ki hay fast, ki čunin kitobi, čunin osori čunin suhanhoya masalan, tabʿ našuda, našr našuda pušida az nazari mardum boqī monad.
Well, now we saw that the negat…
136
His book is very useful. It is important for instructing people in morality. Because of this, we deemed it advisable, that it would be a waste if such a book, such a work, such speech, for example, was not printed, was not published, would stay hidden from the view of people.
Mahmudjon couches his and his brothers’ disregard for Jununī’s explicit wishes about the acceptable audience for his writings as appropriate in that they prevent Jununī’s wisdom from going to waste. In this frame, Jununī’s absence from pre-Soviet and
Soviet-era anthologies and literary compendia is due to Jununī’s modesty and his explicit wishes that the pearls of his mystical knowledge would not fall unto uninitiated swine, rather than that the lack of publication indicates Jununī’s spiritual and literary marginality during his own day.
On a different occasion, another of Jununī’ descendants also mentions the reason for the lack of wide distribution of Jununī’s writings prior to the post-Soviet period. This narration also illustrates the degree to which Jununī’s non-publication is problematic for his contemporary devotees, in addition to demonstrating variation within narratives of the same event, specifically with respect to the use of quoted, poetic speech. He also positions Jununī in some contrast to the canon of Tajik literature. He says:
Ina Hofiz šerozī, Rödakī, Saʿdī dar ki… adabiyotand. BG: Bale, bale… Lekin hazrati Mavlavī yak čiza faromöš karda moned, Vaqte ki amir Muzaffarxon guftand, ki biyo, kitobhoi šumoya man čopba tiyam. Ba monandi Saʿdiyu Hofizu Bedil kitoboi šumoya čopba tiyam. Hazrati Mavlavī ina naxostand xudašon. BG: Čaro? Guftand, ki in kitobi Mavlavī: Malam baroi dardi dili ošiqon ast, Na baroi sanjidani fosiqon ast. In misraya göš kuned. In kitob baroi ošiqon ast guft. In baroi hama nest. Misol girem, hama ina qadraša nemedonand. 137
Baroi hamin kitoba nadodan. Va vaqte ki Šöravī dar Surhob budan rusho injada Buxoroda sözondand. Kuštand. Misol girem, angliso burden kitoboya, kitoboi Saʿdī, Xayyom, boigarii mora az Buxoro burdand. Kitoboi Malavī bisyoraš suxt.
This, Hofiz of Shiraz, Rudaki, Saʿdī, that are in literature. BG: Yes, yes. But, his excellency Mavlavī… You have forgotten one thing. When Amir Muzzafar Khan said come and said I’ll give your book to the press, I’ll give it to the press like Saʿdi, Hofiz and Bedil. His excellency Mavlavī himself didn’t want this. BG: Why? Mavlavī said it in his book: My goods are for lovers’ heartsickness, Not to be tested by the lewd. Listen to this line. This book is for lovers, he said, it’s not for everyone. Let’s take for example, that not everyone knows of his worth. Because of this, he didn’t give his book. And when the Soviets were in Surxob, the Russians here burned Bukhara. They killed. Let’s take for example, the English took books,264 the books of Saʿdi, Khayyam. They took our wealth from Bukhara. Many of Mavlavī’s books were burned.
While Hofiz, Rödakī, and Saʿdi fill the tomes of Tajik literature he teaches in school, Jununī is absent. The distinction is that Jununī’s works have not enjoyed the same written reception that the other famous poets have enjoyed. He then reports on the same short narrative that Mahmudjon told, even to the extent of quoting the same bayt from Jununī’s oeuvre explaining the lack of written artifacts of Jununī’s verse. This particular bayt comes at the end of Jununī’s Maʿdan after the statement, “Poyoni kitobi
<
(The epilogue of his excellency Mavlavī Jununī’s Maʿdanul Hol and his thanksgiving,
264 His reference in the narrative to “the English” is curious. It seems that he is referring to colonial British forays into Central Asia, the stuff of the so-called “Great Game.” 265 Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, 877.; Junūnī, Maʿdan al-Hāl, 703. 138 the mercy of God be upon him) and “Dar bayoni sarguzašti hazrati Mavlavī Jununī rahmatullohi alayh” (The description of his excellency Mavlavī Jununī’s life, the mercy of God be upon him), numerous details of his life are listed, the only such biographic details in the entire work. For example, details like his place of birth, education, and the places he lived and worked are included. While it is not unusual for Persian poets to write something about the circumstances of their writing or personal biographical details at the end of their works, what distinguishes the last few pages of the Maʿdan from standard Persian poetical rhetoric is that in the Maʿdan’s epilogue Jununī is described in the third person. Normally, Persian poets write personal details in the first person.266
Because I was not able to examine the autograph of the Maʿdan held in Tashkent, I cannot definitively argue whether these last pages were written by Jununī’s pen or are a later addition to the text. However, it seems likely that a disciple of Jununī added these bayt at a later date after the poet’s death.
Legitimating authority is not limited to narratives concerning events which occurred prior to the October Revolution and the forceful integration of the mountains of eastern Bukhara into the new union of Soviet republics. Historical narratives are also told related to the ways Jununī and his works were perceived during the Soviet upheaval.
These similar legitimizing claims put forward evidence of Jununī’s reputation and renown during the time when figures such as he were still firmly behind that “pardai kitmon” (hidden veil). Domullo Ismoil, the Turajonzoda brothers’ brother-in-law and an
Islamic scholar in his own right, says:
266 Dick Davis, personal communication, June 2012. 139
Ba fikri man, mo kudak budem, saraš in solhoi šastum bošad, Mirzo Tursunzoda omadaast. Mirzo Tursunzoda…
Bale, hamin šoir vaqte mešunavand az hamin čizi Jununī mexohand, ki hamina čop kundand. Xob, xob…
Ammo dar on zamon čop mekardand, in hama čizoi diniša mepartoftand.
Unja senzura bud… Bale, bale… Kitoboi atomi Hofizy Jomiyu hamino ki čop mešud dar zamoni Šöravī, kujoe, ki nomi Xudo bud, una mepartoftand.
Bale, bale Ino, mulhid budand, yaʿne bedin, ki budand, hamin čizoya dust namedoštand. Az hamin sabab guftan ne nadodan kitoba va kori xub kardand. Agar dar on zamon in kitoba čop mekardand, čizoi diniša meparoftand, dar nazari mardum beqadr mešud kitobo. Qurbi xudša gum mekard.
I think that I was a child, it was the beginning of the sixties that Mirzo Tursunzoda came. BG: Mirzo Tursunzoda,
Yes, this poet, when he had heard about this thing of Jununī ,wanted to publish it. BG: Good, good.
But at that time that they were publishing, they were throwing out religious things.
There were censors. BG: Yes, yes. The books of Attor, Hofiz, Jomī, and the like that were published in the time of the Soviets, wherever there was the name of God, they would strike it out.
BG: Yes, yes. They were heretics, that is to say that they were atheists. They didn’t like these things. For this reason, not telling [them] and not giving them the books
140
was a good deed. If this book were published at that time, they would have censored the religious parts, and it would have seemed worthless to people, the book. Its value would have been lost.
Here, Ismoil again ascribes legitimacy to Jununī, but this time, more specifically, a literary legitimacy rather than the spiritual and political ones to which the other narratives attest. Too, this short narrative shares a historicity with the previous stories.
As evidenced above, Soviet-era scholars searched across the Tajik SSR for poets and other emblematic artifacts of national culture to add to their catalogues and anthologies.
Habibov and his other colleagues at the Academy of Sciences meticulously gathered any surviving evidence for pre-Soviet artistry that they could find. Yet, in this instance
Ismoil does not mention these specific cataloging efforts. Rather, the scholar who came specifically looking to read Jununī’s poetry was Mirzo Tursunzoda (1911-1977), the national poet of Tajikistan, not some dowdy Soviet ethnographer. Tursunzoda was an important figure in both the political and literary life of the Tajik SSR. A prolific poet, novelist, libretto-writer, and scholar, Tursunzoda was the chair of Union of Tajik Writers, held a prominent position in the Tajik Academy of Sciences, and was a member of the
Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR.267 In his death, he still enjoys the reputation of being a
Tajik state hero, and even the one somonī currency note bears his picture.
Beyond the fame of Tursunzoda, again the narrative has a historical resonance that Ismoil’s listeners would find readily interpretable. Tursunzoda treasured the folk poetry of Tajikistan, and his own poetry reflects this influence, a fact not lost on the products of Tajikistan’s educational system who are the object of his narrations. Though
267 Bečka, “Tajik Literature from the 16th Century to the Present,” 577–579. 141 he valorized a folk aesthetic, Tursunzoda vilified the religious content of much of its expression. His militant atheism extended to much of his work of creating a new Soviet, national literature. Ismoil’s historical anxiety about how someone like Tursunzoda and the establishment he represented would treat the legacy of their mystical forebear is of course well-rooted in the historical circumstances of Soviet-era religious politics. Yet, it is similarly curious that the “godless” Tursunzoda would seek out a village šayx’s religious verse, and that if such a figure did indeed come to Ešoni Turajon demanding he turn over the manuscripts in his possession, that Turajon, then a mere village imom, could have refused.
Ismoil’s narrative asserts a legitimacy to which the previous narratives also alluded. Jununī was not only an important religious and literary figure in the nineteenth century, or as Nodirī claims, “Qabl az hama šaxsiyati mazhabī,”268 but his reputation also carried over into the period of state secularism and atheist literary sensibilities in the century following his death. Even the well-regarded Soviet poet Tursunzoda recognized
Jununī’s artistry and desired to share his verse with the Soviet public at large. Again,
Jununī was not an unknown entity, as the textual silence implies, but even during the height of religious oppression, Jununī’s renown could not remain hidden.
This historical positioning also extends to other persons of authority recognizable to Tajiks at large. For example, Jununī for a time in his youth was the disciple of
Abdulhasani Panjakentī.269 Panjakentī is well-known in Tajikistan and particularly popular in the districts of Aynī and Zarafšon near Samarqand from which he hailed. One
268 “First of all of the religious personnel.” 269 Junūnī, Ganj alʿāshiqīn, 38. 142 of the post-Soviet administration subdivisions (jamoat) of the Panjakent region is even named for him. The legitimation provided by connecting Jununī to the eponym of a state administrative division further puts Jununī into a coherent historical frame to which authority has already been naturalized.
Thinking of the three narratives holistically, it is fruitful to consider the functions of variations within these narratives’ content. In some regards the generic possibilities of historical narrative enable narrators to vary the content of their narrations maximally according to each unique context or narrative iteration,270 unlike other forms of discourse more dependent on quoted speech and more rigid morphological constructs. In this frame, variance between the three tales may be better attributed to generic form and each tale’s situated conversational context, rather than any kind of indictment on the efficacy of each narrator’s historical memory.
Historicity in any kind of purely absolutist rendering is irrelevant, whereas the narrators position their truth claims toward the conversational needs of each embedded performance. In this sense, there is a kind of minimized textuality, even as quoted lines of poetry are included in several of the narratives. But, even when such “quoted” speech is almost proverbially offered, there still is variation even when different narrators make use of the same bayt. In this frame, consider the slight variation of the lines of Jununī’s poetry between the first and second narratives. The use of quoted speech, Jununī’s bayt would imply a kind of maximal textuality for these historical narratives. However, each
270 Cashman, Storytelling on the Northern Irish Border: Characters and Community, 109. 143 narrator’s own interpolations of the same lines of verse illustrates how even quoted speech can become malleable within the conversational context of historical narrative.271
It may also be worthwhile to consider the pedagogical capacity of the narrators’ chosen generic form in regards to this dialogic enterprise. Each occasion of recorded speech above was intended to help “educate” me and others in attendance about Jununī’s life and his historical legacy. These were not occasions of idle talk or merely instances of legend report.272 Instead, these were pedagogical performances of a heightened register in which formalized, stylistic features such as interspersed recitations of memorized lines of verse and elaborated performances of religious erudition are included within a conversational frame. Also, it is worth emphasizing that there is no such thing unmotivated legend performance. Every performance has its motivation(s), even if they are tacit or more routine. That is, to some degree didacticism may necessarily be an inherent generic quality of historical legend performance, as legend itself uses past events in order to evaluate the greater performance context. The evaluative dimension of legend performance is explicitly or implicitly necessitated by the narrator’s understanding of the performance context.
These narratives are analogous to the kinds of texts Briggs discusses as exemplars of Cordovan historical discourse. Specifically, he attends to the poetics of “amorphous” conversational texts,273 texts which other observers may hesitate to term artistic because of their deep embeddedness within their conversational matrices. Yet like Briggs’ texts,
271 See discussion of this bayt in chapter 4. 272 Dell Hymes, “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Poetics (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 84. 273 Briggs, Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art, 65. 144 the narratives here evince a structure, besides shared topical orientations, that sets the quoted elements above off from their conversational contexts. To a certain extent this can be seen in differential uses of speech effects, literary attributions being one, i.e.
Jununī’s bayt. These implicit claims of speech prestige elevate the quoted elements above and beyond their more mundane speech contexts and elevate their broader speech context beyond the standards of normal conversation.
Similarly, the specific narratives are framed as a coherent unit to be evaluated differently than the rest. In the case of Jununī’s descendant’s narrative, the first text discussed above, the framing device for his historical performance is the mention of the biography of Yusuf from the Qurʿan. Just as Yakub had many sons, but Yusuf was his favorite and the most mystically-inclined, according to Sufis. Jununī was the favorite of his father’s sons and the one to inherit his mantle as pir of the tariqat. He then narrates
Jununī’s biography including his literary output before concluding with a list of Jununī’s descendants connecting the narrative to his own authority as narrator, offering a kind of family genealogy cum silsila though divorced from mystical attainment and the receipt of
Jununī’s teaching mantle. After this extemporaneous narration, not elicited by any specific query, the narrator finally invites me or others gathered to interact verbally and seek further elaboration or clarification on the points of Jununī’s biography. This section of speech was not amorphous conversation, but rather historical narrative performance didactically-oriented to educate me directly, and the others in attendance more indirectly, as to the nature of Jununī’s rightful canonicity.
145
Historical recollection and historical narrative performance are always in this way a dialogical enterprise.274 This perhaps somewhat pedestrian observation is not to diminish each narrator’s imagined historical reality, however rather to emphasize that each narrative’s telling enacts discursively as a unique oral commentary on the nature and genealogy of contemporary Central Asian Islamic devotional projects and thus holds the potential to lend power to the nascent textual artifacts of Tajik Sufism. In total, these narratives root Jununī in an interpretable history to which secondary sources of legitimating power, be they reinforcement in Tajik school curricula, the hegemonic legitimating functions of government administrative frameworks, or the historical resonance of reiterating the immutable relationship between the amirs of Bukhara and the pre-Soviet ulamo. Further, the historicity of the narratives enables the narrators’ audiences to situate Jununī and his life within their own ongoing historical imaginations be it related to cogent paradigms of power, sainthood, literary prowess, or political legitimacy.
The key social work being accomplished in these narratives’ tellings is resurrecting Jununī’s legacy. This revisionist discourse begins to open up the possibility of his textual canonization in the post-Soviet environment. If the intervening decades had not been “accounted for” by these or similar means, he could not assume the place he has in the pantheon of post-Soviet Tajik literature and among Tajik Sufis. Moreover, his humility and rejection of the esteem of the political and religious establishment of his age even further cementing contemporary understandings of his saintly disposition and
274 Ibid., 81. 146 mystical credentials. This lack of earthly renown, while rhetorically important for
Persian poets, has some difficulty translating into post-Soviet spiritual authority. Saints in the post-Soviet context are not dervishes; they must have a social recognition that confirms their mystical initiation and their possession of irfon (mystical knowledge). In the tabula rasa textual environment of post-Soviet Tajikistan, textual resonance necessitated narrative support. Jununī’s interaction with the amir and his ulamo, being a disciple of Panjakentī, and Tursunzoda’s search for his manuscripts discursively validate his revivalist legacy and provides the rhetorical glue to begin the process of his further lionization and canonization into the pantheon of Persian literary masters.
Reflecting on the creation of Jununī’s legacy in the post-Soviet period and his works’ newfound popularity, one of Habibov’s Soviet-era colleagues said to me,
“Mordumi xeši Jununī da invaqta megöyan, ki nomi u da taskirae nabud bo xotiri yakkasa, qissa mekunad.” (People of Jununi’s family say now that his name wasn’t in any tazkira because of one story that they tell.) And, then he goes on to report the tale narrated twice above, the story of Jununī in Amir Muzaffar’s court. His legacy is supported by a qissa, a story. Narrative, then, is a key component of new post-Soviet religious and literary canonicity. The oral sphere needs legitimate textual authority.
147
Figure 6: Mavlavī Jununī's mausoleum
148
Figure 7: Mavlavī Jununī's grave
149
“Reading” Mavlavī: dispositions of reading and the printed habitus of mystical poetry
Beyond the narrative means that work to ascribe authority to Jununī and his literary and spiritual legacy, the act of printing, of ossifying these decaying personal manuscripts by moving them into a new Tajik textual field, is an act of reification of the poet’s importance and spiritual legitimacy, especially when those new textual artifacts are held alongside and tacitly offered for evaluation in comparison to texts already possessing spiritual legitimacy and authority. In this section, I discuss how Jununī is represented in textual artifacts beyond the publications already mentioned and how his and his works’ portrayal similarly helps “reconstruct” his legacy and further cements the salience of his message and his place in the pantheon of Tajik Persian literature and Sufi spirituality. Framed differently, this section is about the means whereby new discursive conceptions of Tajik history are created and the effects of these new discursive formations on creating new reading dispositions among religious Tajiks. Here, ideas of the Tajik Sufi past, as embodied in the textual artifacts already described and in their legitimation through narrative, are further strengthened in related discursive routines.
These mutually reinforcing routinizations help constitute new Sufi approaches to Jununī’s importance in textual encounters, what I have called “reading dispositions.”
The quick period of written canonization of Jununī and his works began in earnest, as noted above, in 1997 with the first Persian-script publication of any of
Jununī’s writings. Within the span of only six years, even prior to the issue of any authorized Cyrillic-script edition of his verse, Jununī had already attained a vital role in post-Soviet hagiography and the religious imaginations of devout Tajiks. Two murids of
150 perhaps the most well-known Soviet-era šayx of the Naqshbandiyya in Tajikistan, Ešoni
Abdurahmonjon (1920-1991), penned a short biography of their pir in 2003.275 Firmly rooted in the Sufi hagiographic tradition, besides general biographical details like date and place of birth and naming his ancestors and descendants, the work focuses on the pir’s mystical exploits and Sufi pedagogy. As such, the authors offer introductory remarks on the history of the Naqshbandiyya in Central Asia, the fundamentals of mystical practice and ritual, and eulogies for their deceased pir.
Interspersed throughout their short celebratory work are couplets of Persian verse.
Bayt from Rumi (here, Mavlavii Balxī or Mavlono Rumī), Hofiz, Bedil, Saʿdi,
Abdurrahmoni Jomī, Muhammad Iqbol, and finally verse attributed to Bahoyddini
Naqšband, the eponymous founder of the Naqšbandī order, and Mir Sayid Alii
Hamadonī. The authors use their couplets as explanatory glosses and nuggets of canonical wisdom to help explicate their own prose. For example, when discussing the daily devotional habits of their pir, they finish by quoting a couplet of Hofiz related to the poet’s own disciplines of piety. These bayts function aphoristically within the slim volume.276 Their glosses legitimize and authorize the author’s injunctions. Interestingly,
Qurʿanic allusions within the text function similarly, but unlike mystical verse they are quoted indirectly in the text but with citations, sura (chapter of the Qurʿan) and oyat
(verse) number noted. Poetry in contrast, is not similarly cited, except to an author.
There is no text or page citation. This could possibly imply that the verse comes from
275 Darvozī and Badalipur, Zindaginomai Hazrati Ešoni Abdurahmonjon ibni Ešoni Porsoxoja. 276 See chapter 4 for further discussion of the relationship to Persian mystical poetry to proverbial speech. 151 oral memory, but it also illustrates the differing degrees of attribution required for these separate bodies of texts.
Alongside these lions of mystical renown, indeed the list includes founders of global teaching hierarchies, national heroes, and internationally-recognized literary luminaries—Mavlavī Jununī’s poetry stands as an equal. Verse from his Maʿdan is quoted repeatedly and at length. Moreover, with Iqbol as the exception, he is the only poet of the modern era included at all in the work. The authors use Jununī’s verse to explain proper adab towards one’s pir and the stages of the mystical path,277 and they include an extended section from the Maʿdan in order to explicate the ritual prescriptions associated with the subtle spiritual centers in the body, the latoʿif.278
The authors clearly present Jununī as the spiritual and literary equal of the masters of Persian Sufism. His work is held alongside that of the other poets without any elaboration or necessary explanatory gloss. While the narratives discussed previously attribute an authoritative spiritual and literary legacy to account for his absence from earlier generations’ historical consciousness, in volumes like Darvozī and Badalapur’s hagiographical text (2003) including Jununī verse cements his reputation and puts forward his legacy to be interpreted as that of poets and mystical masters to whom legitimacy, spiritual authority, and canonicity is assured. For those familiar with Jununī, the text uncritically reasserts the earlier historical narratives and further cements the canonicity of Jununī’s pronouncements. For readers as yet unaware of their late countryman’s mystical prowess, the text works to invite evaluation in the frame reserved
277 Darvozī and Badalipur, Zindaginomai Hazrati Ešoni Abdurahmonjon ibni Ešoni Porsoxoja, 15–16. 278 Ibid., 35–37. I discuss the latoʿif at length in chapter 4. 152 for poets more familiar. These texts work to build a new assemblage of mystical renown and tacitly ascribe equal authority to the newly-familiar poet Jununī and the classical
Persian masters. Quoting Jununī also provides a localization of mystical history that the verse of the other poets does not provide.
The earlier entextualizing moves of the Turajonzoda brothers allowed for Jununī’s poetry to be decontextualized from its original textual framework and to be reinserted into new discursive constructions like Abdurahmonjon’s hagiography.279 These re- contextualizing moves then hold the potential to be carried over further. In the case of the hagiography, the Qodirī šayx, Jununī is used to legitimate the theosophical musings of a Naqšbandī pir. Even while Jununī forcefully advocates for zikri jahrī as opposed to only the xufī preferred by Abdurahmonjon and his cohort, his verse can still provide a localized linkage of mystical import between the geographically and temporally distant spheres of the medieval Khorasan of the classical masters and contemporary Tajikistan.
Once decontextualized and imbued with mystical authority, the work continues and opens up its potential to carry over into other related discursive fields. So, Jununī’s written prescriptions and proscriptions intended only for his disciples and their progeny can be reinserted into parallel contexts like contemporary hagiography to provide authoritative “proof” for Abdurahmonjon’s exemplary life and mystical devotion. But this power construct is circular and mutually reinforcing; its very inclusion presupposes its legitimacy, and with each further entextualizing move it becomes further legitimated.
Its each ossified iteration is a unique act of canonizing authority. Once textualized again,
279 Briggs and Bauman, “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power.” 153 it can, decontextualized from its prior textual iteration, traverse other domains and be reinserted into new discursive frames. So, Jununī’s poetry can be used in support of general Islamic ethics and eschatological fervor or be simply lauded for its verbal artistry when broadcasted on Tajik state television.280
These mutually-reinforcing streams of textual authority are evident in other textual iterations of Jununī’s verse, even those far divorced from the Islamic context of the original texts. One of the most widely-sold series of chapbook Persian-language
Cyrillic-script poetry available in Tajikistan is “Sadu yak ǧazal,” (One Hundred and One
Ǧazals). The series includes lyric poetry from the giants of classical Persian literature, as well as editions of early modern Tajik poets and examples of the works of important
Soviet-era poets. Published by one of the Tajik state publishing houses, the series is compulsory reading for schoolchildren and acts as a supplement to poetry selections found in state-published Tajik literature textbooks. Students are often required to memorize selections from these chapbooks as part of their school exams. In their totality, the chapbooks represent an almost encyclopedic compendium of Tajik-Persian lyric poetry from its earliest beginnings up to its later Soviet-era imitations.
Jununī has his own unauthorized volume in the series, excerpted from the
Maʿdan.281 According to the Turajonzodas, the text, along with a short commentary and footnotes, was lifted directly from their edition of the Maʿdan without their permission and without any acknowledgement of their critical work in adapting the manuscript text
280 Šayx Davlatxojai Mirzohojai Raštī, Dunyoi fonī va uqboi [sic] boqī (Dušanbe: Devaštič, 2005), 198– 214.; Qori Zubaydulloh, Ǧazalho az ejodiyoti Mavlavi Jununi DVD, n.d. 281 Mavlavī Jununī, Sadu yak ǧazal (Dušanbe: Irfon, 2010). 154 to Cyrillic Tajiki. Jununī’s inclusion is this canon speaks to the high regard in which he is held by contemporary Tajiks, both religious and not, and is further evidence of his quick ascension from literary oblivion into the pantheon of Tajik cultural exemplars.
Further, though Jununī’s contribution to this series is excerpted from his Maʿdan, the modus operandi for the series is explicitly a-religious. Jununī is not included because he is a paragon of saintly virtue and Sufi wisdom, as he was in Abdurrahmonjon’s hagiography. Instead, he has become a bearer and transmitter of timeless literary heritage and a pillar of Tajik-Persian literature worthy of academic emulation. Once textualized, his poetry holds the potential for traversing even a-religious textual domains.
In toto, these textual artifacts create a textual paradigm, a reading disposition in which textuality is fetishized above other discursive realms and in which textualized spiritual authority is sometimes a priori viewed above the personal dimensions of the master-disciple relationship. Thus, to further illustrate the means whereby entextualization processes prefigure canonicity and the accrual of spiritual and literary authenticity and authority, I discuss two short ethnographic vignettes in which Sufi reading dispositions are modeled.
On a warm, spring day I sat with three Sufi murids at their teashop in the distant suburbs of Dushanbe. We discussed the halqa that had occurred the previous night. We casually talked about which ǧazals they had found particularly moving and each of their subjective impressions of general ritual efficacy. I had brought along my copy of Šayx
Abdurrahim’s Kašf-ul-asror282 in order to get their opinions on it and to see if they could
282 Atozoda, Kašf-ul-Asror: gulčini ǧazaliyot az devoni Šayx Abdurrahimi Davlat. 155 help me understand some particularly difficult sections of Persian prose. One offered that he was in possession of an older copy of the text, but with a different cover and introduction. The other two had never seen it before. The one who was familiar with the work confidently extrapolated on the šayx’s biography and the nature of his mystical exploits. We opened the chapbook together and read two half lines of poetry which headlined the text’s introduction. We read together:
Har kī xohad hamnišinī bo Xudo, Gö nišinad dar huzuri avliyo.283
Anyone who wants to be companions with God, Tell [them] to sit in the presence of [God’s] friends.
The lines are then signed Mavlavī. One of the murids, visibly moved, copied down the lines verbatim on his mobile phone so he could commit them to memory later and also share them with his fellow adepts. Next, he commented on the great wisdom of
Jununī to nods of assent from the other two Sufis gathered. Confused at the connection he was making, I asked him to clarify. These two lines written by Jununī, he said, were very important for Tajiks to understand. That if their countrymen wanted to truly know
God, then they must become the disciple of the šayx.
When he read the lines of poetry with the attribution in the text to “Mavlavī,” he straightaway interpreted the Mavlavī as referring to Mavlavī Jununī, not the much more famous Mavlavī Rumī who indeed is the author.284 For this adept, there is only one
283 Ibid., 3. 284 In Nicholson’s edition, it comes in line 2162 of the second book with two slight differences. Nicholson records no “bo” in the first misraʿ and instead of “gö” he includes a “ta.” Mavlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Masnavī-ye Maʿnavī, ed. Reynūld Nīkolsūn (Tihrān: Paymān, 1380), 227. Nicholson translates the line, “Whoever wishes to sit with God, let him sit in the presence of the saints.” 156
“Mavlavī”; and that poet is the nineteenth-century Tajik Qodirī master, Sayid Nasimxon, not the thirteenth-century Anatolian mystic and author of perhaps the most famous mystical treatise in the course of Islamic history. My intention is not to lampoon the adept’s ignorance of more global spiritual frameworks, but rather to emphasize the degree to which localized understandings of mystical practice and history are predominant in adepts’ understanding of Islamic spirituality and how the textual dimensions already discussed are constitutive of these religious dispositions.
Hagiographic equality with devotional models of ages past, narrative reinforcement in oral hagiography associated with Jununī, and the reiteration of these new dominant schemas across unrelated textual fields all contribute to creating a reading disposition in which Jununī’s canonicity is presupposed. When Jununī’s canonicity becomes a feature of the adept’s mystical habitus and the adept has internalized the discursive frameworks which have previously reified Jununī’s textuality, Jununī becomes as central to the history of Sufism in Central Asia as Rumi. Jununī in much the same way also prefigures these new reading dispositions in his poetry. He writes:
Rahnamoyi halq baʿd az Mavlavī, Ma’danul hol ast, ganji maʿanavī.285
The people’s guide after the master [Rumi], Is the Madan-ul Hol, the treasury of spirituality.
Interestingly, this bayt is somewhat incongruous with Jununī’s supposed modesty and refusal of worldly fame as attested in historical narrative. Yet, it remains that to
285 Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, 881. 157 some degree Jununī (or a subsequent disciple) textually prefigured his canonicity as understood by contemporary Tajiks.286
On another occasion I was sitting in the taxicab of a devout disciple of Ešoni
Timur Xoja, a Naqšbandī pir who guides his disciples from an almost inaccessible mountaintop redoubt not far from the Tajik capital.287 The talk turned to the nature of the
Naqšbandī tariqat. He insisted the key to understanding the nature of the Naqšbandī path could be found in in the “kitobi rašahot,” a book that he stated held descriptions of the deeds of 530 avliyo. By reading the text, I would understand. By reading the examples of these individuals that had passed along the path before and possessed divine grace, I would finally comprehend what tasavvuf really entailed. We went together to the bookstalls near Dushanbe’s main mosque to purchase a copy to read together.
The text, the first Cyrillic-script edition of the Rašahoti ayn-ul hayat (Drops from the Fountain of Life), 288 a sixteenth-century hagiography of the Xojagon-Naqšbandī lineage, includes the exploits and the recorded mystical musings of Xoja Ahror and other saints of the Xojagon line. The book in hand, he quickly scanned it for the passage he had in mind. In a section towards the beginning of the text in which each “rašha” (drop) of the Xojagon are individually explicated, he found the ruboī (quatrain) he was searching for, one attributed in the text to Xoja Ahror. The quatrain describes the mystical life as
286 This bayt comes in the epilogue of the text. As already discussed, the authorship of these last few lines may not be best attributed to Jununī, but rather to one of his disciples. Regardless of whether they appear in Jununī’s autograph or not, contemporary adepts still believe Jununi is the author and thus that he did textually prefigure his post-Soviet canonicity. 287 See also Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de-Stalinization to Independence (1955-91),” 61–64. 288 Safī, Rašahot. 158 laughter without showing teeth, traveling without using the eyes, and walking around the world without moving.289 He urged me to read further, saying “this book is tasavvuf.”
For this devotee, spiritual authority and mystical truth were available for individual explication within the discipline of reading, at least for those initiated into the mystical lineage and under the guidance of a pir. The text encapsulated the ongoing conversation in which we had been engaged for the previous months. Though he admitted that the lines of prose still included items of esoterica that without submitting to the pir I would never understand, he still offered reading, encountering textuality, as a goal to which I should aspire. As I hope has been clear, I am not suggesting an almost
Protestant understanding or even a more Islamic reformist conception of textual authority, in which textual authority can be divorced from embodied tradition and the work of interpretation graspable for even the most humble seeker. Rather, my point is that authority is naturalized and assured when framed in its textual products. That is not to say that the work of interpretation is self-evident, that each devotee has the capacity for creating their own singular hermeneutic. Texts, specifically those newly introduced to the Tajik Sufi reading public are necessarily authoritative, but interpretation is premised on a relationship with a pir. Yet at the same time, if further state restrictions take effect and the political present becomes the political future, textual models of knowledge transmission hold the potential to transform Sufi life in Tajikistan. Texts are prime sites of religious encounter in Tajikistan, and as severe restrictions have been put on the pir- murid relationship at the historical core of Sufi practice they may become even more vital
289 Ibid., 38. 159 to the transmission of Sufi learning. While access to ones pir can be limited, reading, as of yet, has not.290
Jununī’s Peers: Šayx Abdulhayi Mujaxarfī and others
Jununī and his works are not alone in their quick ascension into the canon of
Tajik-Persian literature and contemporary spirituality. Other mystical poets of the pre-
Soviet era have similarly been catapulted into not before known fame and literary renown. These poets and the story of their legacies deserve space and consideration in their own right akin to the sketch of Jununī’s historical legacy I have provided above.
However, here I do not present a full reading of their historical import and the implications of textual canonicity which their stories provide. Rather, I include them to illustrate further the textual field of post-Soviet Tajikistan and offer even more contextualization to my account of Jununī above.
Like Jununī, Šayx Abdulhayi Mujaxarfī (1867-1931) lived within the bounds of the eastern regions of the Bukharan Emirate during the nineteenth century. He, too, purportedly studied in Bukhara and settled back into his village home, in a tight glacial valley near the intersection of the Mujaxarf and Surxob Rivers near contemporary Rašt in
Tajikistan, as the village mullo. During his youth, he also had been initiated into the
Naqšbandī order and continued his mystical development throughout the course of his
290 Vernon Schubel has noted that in Uzbekistan not long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Sufism had become divorced from the pir-murid relationship and had become in many ways a “literary, intellectual tradition.” “Post-Soviet Hagiography and the Reconstruction of the Naqshbandī Tradition in Contemporary Uzbekistan,” 85. While the situation in Tajikistan is somewhat distinct (more than ten years later), it remains that there are also severe restrictions on religious practice, though perhaps not to the same degree as in Uzbekistan, many Soviet-era pirs have passed without their xalifa taking their places, and at the same time literature on historical Sufism is abundantly available to the Tajik reading public. 160 life, eventually obtaining a xati iršad and setting up a xonaqoh in his village. After the
October Revolution as the Soviets were solidifying their hold on the mountain strongholds of the eastern reaches of the former Bukharan Emirate, the basmačion
(partisan fighters who resisted the new Soviet regime) routinely clashed with Soviet troops. Šayx Abdulhay’s oldest son, Abdulfattoh, after skirmishing with the Soviets, was forced to flee to Afghanistan. The Soviet authorities in Dushanbe arrested the then sixty- four-year-old Naqšbandī pir in order to force his son to return to Soviet territory.
Abdulfattoh did not return, and Šayx Abdulhay was executed in retaliation in 1931.291
During the course of his life, Abdulhay penned at least eight works of mystical poetry and prose ranging from lyric poetry to masnavī and even prose. During the course of his lifetime, not one of his works saw circulation outside of the bounds of his family and kinship networks. However, in the post-Soviet era three of his works have been published with the patronage and support of Buri Karimov, a Soviet-era chairman of the council of ministers of the Tajik SSR, prolific novelist, and sometimes politician-in-exile who early-on represented newly-independent Tajikistan in CIS committee capacities.292
These three works include both a Persian script and Cyrillic script edition of the Mufizu-l- anvor and Devoni ašʿor (The Giver of Lights and the Collection of Poetry) and the Dalīl- e alsālikīn (The Guide for the Devoted). 293
291 Nazrullo Muhammad Yusuf, “Abdulhayi Mujaxarfī va ašʿorišon” (Dissertation, Akademiyai Ulumi Tojikiston, 2010), 42–44. 292 Aleksandr Trofimov, Buri Karimov: zhizn’ dlia liudei (Moskva: ITDN, 2002). 293 Abdulhayi Mujaxarfī, Mufuzu-l-anvor va Devoni aš’op (Moskva: Intransdornauka, 2003). ; Shaykh ʿAbdālhay Mūjakharfī, Dalīl-e alsālikīn (Dūshanbih: Akādimī-e ʿulūm-e jumhūrī-e tājīkistān, 2009).; Shaykh ʿAbdālhay Mūjakharfī, Mufīż alānvār ū divan-e āshʿār (Dūshanbih: Dānish, 2010). 161
Figure 8: Autograph of Abdulhay’s Mufizu-l-anvor
162
Figure 9: Abdulhay's personal pen box and writing implements
Unlike Jununī, during the Soviet-era, Habibov and his colleagues collected extant specimens of Abdulhay’s verse from hofiz still singing his poems in his Karategin valley home. After hearing his verse in oral tradition, they came to Abdulhay’s son, Ešoni
Muhammadikrom, and forcibly took several manuscripts of his poetry. They published excerpts of this work in two of the collections already mentioned, Ganji Parešon294 and
Doirahoi adabii Buxoroi šarqī.295 Tellingly, both collections mention nothing of his status as a Naqšbandī pir and executed enemy of the state, and instead note that he lived
294 Habibov, Ganji parešon, 207–216. 295 Abibov, Doirahoi adabii Buxoroi šarqī (asri XIX va ibtidoi asri XX), 112–117. 163 happily into the Soviet period, dying peacefully in 1951 as a supporter of the Soviet regime.
In addition to Šayx Abdulhay’s works, several other collections of mystical verse have been published from private manuscript collections in the span of the last decade.
Works like the Kašf-ul-asror (The Revelation of Secrets) of the Naqšbandī pir
Abdurrahimi Davlat (1881-1947) and the Mabdai nur (The Discovery of Light) of Hojī
Sayid Abdujalilxoja similarly present mystical ǧazals, instruction on Sufi adab and ritual, and revisionist historical commentary.296 All of these new texts, Jununī and Abdulhay included, share many features of the post-Soviet new canon of Sufi literature. Each work was published with the support of important and powerful patrons, and the Tajik reading public knew nothing of the works during the poets’ lifetimes or later during the Soviet era. To some degree, they all represent new textualizing moves and new attributions of spiritual and literary legitimacy, and as such the texts similarly work to reify new religious dispositions of reading.
Conclusion
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, numerous Sufi texts have entered the religious marketplace of post-Soviet Tajikistan. Many of these texts were virtually unknown to Tajiks living in the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods. It has only been in the span of the last two decades, since Tajikistan’s independence and the conclusion of the
296 Atozoda, Kašf-ul-Asror: gulčini ǧazaliyot az devoni Šayx Abdurrahimi Davlat. Hojī Sayid Abdujalilxoja, <<Šohmašrab>>: ǧazalho az kitobi <
For Tajik Sufis these texts have become some of the most important markers of new post-
Soviet Tajik identity. As embodiments of Tajik Sufi sacred history, establishing historical connections between them and present practice has been fundamental to post-
Soviet Sufi devotional projects. Yet after periods of enormous social disjuncture, the result of over seventy years of Soviet rule, spiritual and literary authority must be ascribed to these textual artifacts to enable them to wield such social power. It is the performance of historical narrative and the repeated decontextualizations and recontextualizations of these texts mediated through publication that has helped to accomplish this goal. 297 Now, such orientations have been naturalized to the extent that
Sufi adepts take Jununī’s importance in the history of Central Asian Sufism to be self- evident.
It should be emphasized again that the publication of these texts was not coincidental. Rather, each body of texts was published with the support of a powerful patron as in post-Soviet Tajikistan the costs of publication are prohibitive for all but the wealthiest individuals and because connections are still needed to navigate the bureaucracy of state censorship. Tellingly, these patrons are reflective of Soviet-era power structures, not of pre-Soviet. So, rather than Sufi reading practices returning to pre-Soviet models with Tajik Sufis reading the same texts revered by their ancestors in the eastern regions of the Bukharan Emirate, instead new texts have come to the fore, e.g. the works of Jununī or Abdulhay.
297 Richard Bauman, A World of Others’ Words: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 146. 165
In the tabula rasa environment of post-Soviet religious publishing in Tajikistan, access to a certain extent has defined ideology. That is, it is these new texts that are available in bookstalls around Dushanbe, not the texts of classical Persian mysticism
(with a few exceptions) and not the manuscripts of well-regarded Sufi šayxs from the pre-
Soviet period. It is the manuscripts of the family, kinship, and village networks of those at the center of power at the end of the Soviet period, e.g. Hojī Akbar Turajonzoda and
Buri Karimov, which have begun to shape the post-Soviet Tajik Sufi imagination. The
Soviet experience has left an indelible mark on post-Soviet Tajik religiosity. It is the texts of the post-Soviet victors, most of whom held power at the end of the Soviet period, that have become the texts of Tajik Sufism.
The establishment of a textual basis, a perceived static locus of spiritual authority, for post-Soviet Sufism in Tajikistan has been vitally important. Sufis needed both local and recent historical legitimation for their nascent religious projects as during the Soviet period they saw an elimination of Sufi pirs, the destruction of their texts, and subsequent generations were forcibly divorced from their religious and family heritage. Figures like
Mavlavī Jununī have filled the lacuna left by Soviet redaction and cultural destruction.
Tajik Sufis have actively reclaimed their religious past via the introduction of Tajik Sufi texts and legitimate these nascent practices through historical narrative and discursive routinization. In the next chapter, I consider additional speech events in which these Sufi textualities are further enacted, offered for evaluation, and further routinized among Tajik
Sufis.
166
CHAPTER 4: RITUAL CONTEXTS AND THE PERFORMANCE OF TEXTS
Hušyor šav ba zikr, ki umrat dubora nest, Kun vahmi rözi marg, ki görat guvora nest.298
Be alert in zikr because your life doesn’t happen twice, Fear the day of death because your grave is not a time of enjoyment.
Xez, ey solik, ba šab dar zikri Haq bedor boš, Rahravi rohi haqī, ǧofil mašav, dar kor boš.299
Rise, oh devotee, at night be awake in the zikr of God, Traveler on God’s path, don’t be forgetful, [but] be at work. Mavlavī Jununī
Though numerous chapbook editions of Jununī, Abdulhay, and others’ poetry may be available for purchase in Dushanbe’s bookstalls, the majority of Sufi adepts in
Tajikistan do not encounter poetry in the process of personal study. Rather, Jununī’s poetry lives in ritual performance and within the intricate rules of Sufi pedagogy. To a certain extent this is more a feature of textual practices in wider Tajik culture than a requirement of Sufi comportment within a particular šayx’s lodge. Booksellers in
Dushanbe often lament that in Tajikistan few read books. One might better add that with
298 Jununī, Sadu yak ǧazal, 30. 299 Ibid., 70. 167 an average annual income of $780 USD,300 luxuries like books are beyond the means of all but the most privileged Tajiks. While chapbook editions of Jununī’s poetry normally sell for the equivalent of $2 USD, hardback copies of the Maʿdan can sell for as much as the equivalent of $10 USD. Moreover, Persian script editions of such texts often sell for even more, taking into account greater transportation costs from either Iran or Pakistan and customs duties both formal and informal levied on printed matter.
In addition to the mystical poetry of Mavlavī Jununī, Tajik Sufi poetry chanters, the hofiz, 301 use mystical verse from Rumi’s Ma navī-ye Maʿnavī, portions of Rumi’s
Dīvān-e Shams, selected poems from the Dīvān-e Ḥāfiẓ, and occasional unique creations or adapted verses from the devon of the Indo-Persian poet Bedil within ritual. While abridged chapbook editions of these poets’ works are widely available in Cyrillic print, most are reprints of Soviet-era heavily censored editions; editions in which specific lyrical poems in praise of the Prophet Muhammad or ideologically-suspect devotional content have been redacted. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, complete printings of these poets’ works have been made available, but most often in Persian script or in ornate, expensive printings, again beyond the meager budgets of ordinary Tajiks. As such, many Sufi adepts exclusively encounter these new Sufi textual products aurally as sung during ritual occasions or as quoted in half lines by Sufi pirs during specific group teaching events.
300 World Bank, “Gross National Income Per Capita, 2010, Atlas Method and PPP,” World Bank, July 1, 2011, 3, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GNIPC.pdf. 301 The office of hofiz among Tajik Sufis is somewhat analogous to the munshid in Arabic contexts , cf. Earle H. Waugh, The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), x., and in some regards to the qawwal of South Asian Sufism. Regula Qureshi, Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), xiii. 168
The relationship between oral ritual performance and the texts already discussed is two way. Not only is Jununī’s written poetry introduced into oral tradition through ritual performance and Sufi group teaching events, but according to Jununī’s editors, his verse first originated in the poet’s nightly zikrs and only during the day was finally put down onto paper. Turajonzoda writes, “Šabona ba zikr mašǧul budu rözana kilki qalamaš fikru zikru öra röyi koǧaz sabt mekard,”302 (Nightly, he was occupied in zikr, and in the day his reed pen recorded his thoughts and zikr onto paper.) The words of his verse were thus prefigured in ritual performance prior to their iteration onto the poet’s parchment.303 Here in this chapter, I discuss how the words from these textual artifacts exist in oral performance and tradition, or rather how the textual orientations already discussed are enacted, modeled, and performed within the bounds of ritual performance and other related speech events.
The study of the living oral performance traditions of classical Persian literature is still yet in its infancy, as the relationship between oral tradition and Persian classical poetry is a relatively recent topic of scholarly interest. 304 The vast majority of scholars working within the strictures of early Orientalist or later literary-studies models have
302 Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, 12. 303 This oral and ritual prefiguration is somewhat analaguous to Rumi’s compositional process. Hagiographical tradition relates that Rumi composed his verse while engaged in the ritual practice of samo. Franklin Lewis, Rumi: Past and Present, East and West; the Life, Teaching and Poetry of Jalâl al-Din Rumi (Boston, MA: Oneworld, 2000), 172. 304 Several notable exceptions are Gabrielle van den Berg, Minstrel Poetry from the Pamir Mountains: a Study on the Songs and Poems of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004); S. Manoukian, City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History and Poetry (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011); Margaret A. Mills, “Folk Tradition in the Masnavī and the Masnavī in Folk Tradition,” in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam: The Heritage of Rumi, ed. Amin Banani, Richard Hovannisian, and Georges Sabagh (London: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 136–177; Zuzanna Olszewska, “‘A Desolate Voice’: Poetry and Identity Among Young Afghan Refugees in Iran,” Iranian Studies 40, no. 2 (April 2007): 203–224. 169 concentrated almost exclusively on the textual worlds of classical Persian texts and ignored the active dimensions of their life and performance within Persian oral tradition.
Indeed, since new Persian verse was first penned to paper, the vast majority of its
“reading” public has been in the aural sphere. While Persian-speakers have historically had a great appreciation and respect for verse, it was memorized and transmitted in oral environments apart from the written traditions in which it first appeared. Yet, until the modern period, literacy was almost exclusively the province of only a small urban elite consisting of government officials and religious functionaries in the regions in which literary Persian predominated.305 As such, the public’s encounters with Persian literature were limited to the performance of epic storytellers, didactic verse within sermons, or in one of the other oral performance genres of Persian-speaking southwest and Central Asia.
The Soviet regime succeeded in promoting almost universal literacy among Tajik
Persians, yet they still severely limited access to centuries of Persian literary heritage.
While there may be a dearth of research into the living dimensions of Persian literature, poetry, long an important cultural idiom in the Muslim world, has recently become a site of keen interest for ethnographic investigation. Some important recent studies have considered poetry performance in the Arabian Peninsula,306 cassette poetry circulation in Yemen,307 and the interconnections of history and poetry in contemporary
Iran.308 This chapter builds on that work by considering the social work of poetry performance within Tajik Sufi halqa, its experiential capacity for creating and enacting
305 Cf. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, 132–157. 306 Steven C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990). 307 Miller, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen. 308 Manoukian, City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History and Poetry. 170 new dispositions of religious sensibility, and finally the ways these processes implicate the Sufi devotional project in Tajikistan.
Specifically, I consider two key performative speech events in which Sufi devotees aurally encounter Jununī and others’ poetry and in which the textual processes discussed in the previous chapter are enacted: the collective, loud ritualized remembrance of the names of God called halqai zikr and group teaching events or darsi tariqat. Specifically, my focus is the ways that performance registers implicate textual practices, the means whereby these new discursive iterations and new entextualizations of
Sufi pedagogical routinizations are offered for evaluation to Tajik audiences, and the specific ways performance works pragmatically in conjunction with other “redundancies of discursive routine” to help constitute new modalities of Sufi belief and practice in the post-Soviet religious environment.
I begin with an analysis of a typical performance of halqai zikr, exploring the affective dimensions of performance, the uses of traditional poetic discourse, and the broader generic features of zikr performance. Next, I use the performance analysis to consider the modes of poetical composition at work in Tajik brotherhoods with particular attention on issues such as authorship, the textual technologies of performance, and the nature of the Sufi textual tradition in post-Soviet Tajikistan. The following section investigates modes of poetic attribution, interpolation, and the discursive power of these poetical formations. I suggest that the power of (mis)attribution lies in the ways nascent religious discourse is traditionalized during the performance event. I then further consider how the generic features of the poetic performance register lend particular
171 authority to the poetry chanter’s discursive project. Lastly, my discussion turns to the specific ways the message of zikr is “understood” by the ritual audience. Before concluding, I discuss one other speech genre which further models Sufi approaches to text, performance modes, and message transmission, darsi tariqat or group teaching events.
Halqai Zikr
Halqai zikr, literally “circles of remembrance,” in the context of Tajik Sufism are the weekly gatherings of Sufi adepts to “remember” or recite the names of God out loud.
Ritualized “remembrance,” separate and distinct from the five daily prayers, is perhaps the key historical feature of Sufi devotional practice, distinguishing the mystical path from forms of non-mystical Islamic piety. Though the individual practices, formulae, and ritual prescriptions are distinct among devotees of the different Sufi paths, recitation of the names of God is one distinctive feature that defines global Sufism. While the specific Sufi practices of zikr date back to the eleventh century,309 Sufi adepts root their practice in Qurʿanic sanctions, in which the Muslim is enjoined “to recollect God often.”310 At one shrine in Dushanbe, a sign reads, “Buzurgtarin suxan in zikri Xudost va ba paygambar [sic] Muhammad (sav) sallavot guftan ast.” (The greatest speech is this zikr of God, and [also] saying blessings for the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him).
309 Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism, 92. 310 Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 167. 172
Not only does the Qurʿan exhort the faithful to remembrance, zikr is beyond all other speech as is calling down blessings for the Prophet Muhammad.311
Figure 10: Zikr injunction at shrine near Dushanbe
In regards to Central Asian Sufi practice, the mystical injunction of perpetual remembrance is perhaps the most popular aphorism attributed to the eponymous founder of Naqšbandī and Central Asian Sufi spirituality, “Dast ba kor, dil ba Yor.” (The hand at
311 This “calling down blessings” is distinct from the formalized poetical genre of naʿati šarif, praise poetry to the Prophet Muhammad. At the shrine, pilgrims are enjoined to recite the names of God using the tasbeh, prayer beads, or specific suras from the Qurʿan, rather than more overt displays of devotion to the Prophet and the ahli bayt. In the zikr performance which follows, the performance trajectory similarly follows the progression modeled in this injunction: the performance begins with specific praise to God and concludes with praise for the Prophet Muhammad. 173 work, the heart with the Friend) That is, though the Naqšbandī Sufi devotee remains in the world engaged in his profession and not always outwardly participating in spiritual exercise, the inner nature of the adept must be in constant remembrance of God and engaged in the ritual prescriptions of zikr practice as given by his spiritual guide. Indeed, the constant remembrance of the divine, the central devotional feature of global Sufism, cannot be accomplished without the guidance of the proper spiritual director. The specific formulae and all other ritual prescriptions must be carefully controlled by one’s spiritual master.
For Tajik Sufis, zikr encompasses two distinct but related practices: zikri xufī and zikri jahrī or silent and loud zikr respectively. While in principle, silent zikr can be performed at any time and place, loud zikr assemblies or halqai zikr (circles of remembrance) can only be initiated by a pir and celebrated under certain prescribed circumstances. As already discussed, the majority of Tajik Sufis self-identify as
Naqšbandī. One of the most defining features of Naqšbandī spirituality both historically in Central Asia and in its worldwide diaspora is its strong opposition to loud zikr. Indeed,
Naqšbandī practice is often characterized by its sobriety and close ties to “normative”
Islamic ritual practice, as opposed to the “intoxicated” spiritual exuberance of other
Central Asian Sufi tariqat like the Qodiriya and Čistiya, both of which practice the loud zikr shunned by their Naqšbandī brethren. Even so, in Tajikistan several self-identifying
Naqšbandī halqa, in addition to Tajik Qodirī groups, regularly practice halqai zikr.
Naqšbandī zikr assemblies in which devotees are encouraged to recite the names of God silently yet as part of a larger group also do occur in Tajikistan.
174
For other Naqšbandī Sufis, such practice often acts as a shibboleth of spiritual authenticity, immediately discrediting the spiritual attainments and accoutrements of their ostensible coreligionists who have denied the supposed ritual positive prescriptions of their order’s eponymous founder.312 Despite these discourses of authenticity inherent in such diverse ritual environments, the Naqšbandiya in Central Asia have at times practiced loud zikr,313 in the caravan cities of Central Asia,314 in neighboring Afghanistan315 and in the Fergana valley.316 Indeed, Hamid Algar notes that vocal zikr has been commonly practiced by Naqšbandī groups across the Islamic world irrespective of the normative proscriptions of traditional Naqšbandī spirituality.317
Zikr in both of its prime forms is central to Tajik Sufi devotion. At the xonaqoh of one Tajik pir, two laminated posters in the qiblagoh offer support to the centrality of zikr ritual to group spirituality. One is a narrative in Persian script taken directly from a website telling the story of Abdulqodiri Jelonī, the eponymous founder of the Qodirī order, and his personal practices of zikr. The second is a detailed diagram describing the five “latoif” [sic] of traditional Naqšbandī practice and each of the corresponding ritual
312 For a discussion of the history of zikr within the Naqšbandiya, see Hamid Algar, “Silent and Vocal dhikr in the Naqshbandī Order,” in Akten des VII. Kongresses für Arabistik und Islamvissenschaft (Göttingen, 1976), 44–45..and Itzchak Weismann, The Naqshbandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2007), 27. 313 Isenbike Togan, “The Khafī, Jahrī Controversy in Central Asia Revisited,” in Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia: Change and Continuity, ed. Elisabeth Özdalga (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999), 17–45. 314 B.M. Babadzhanov, “Zikr dzhaxr i sama’: sakralizatsiia profannogo ili profanatsiia sakral’nogo,” in Podvikzhniki Islama: Kul’t svyatyx i sufizm v Sredney Azii i na Kavkaze, ed. S.N. Abashin and V.O. Bobrovnikov (Moskva: Vostochnaia literatura, 2003), 237–250. 315 Personal observation, December 2005. 316 B. Pasilov and A. Ashirov, “Revival of Sufi Traditions in Modern Central Asia: Jahri Zikr and Its Ethnological Features” 87, no. 1, Oriente Moderno (2007): 163–175. 317 Algar, “Silent and Vocal dhikr in the Naqshbandī Order.” 175 practices intended for their “activation.” Activation of one’s latoʿif (subtle centers)318 is the fundamental method whereby one can begin one’s progress along the path of mystical attainment, and knowledge of their specifics is what separates “nastoiashchii sufizm”319
(real/authentic Sufism) from mere imitators, according to one pir. Discussing another
šayx in the region, he said that this particular guide did not even know about the latoʿif.
How then, he asked, could he take disciples? “Rangi in nastoyašiy sufizm nest,”320 he added.
Each subtle center has a physical essence located within the body in addition to a spiritual connection through a specific spiritual exemplar and distinct ritualized formulae intended for zikr remembrance. The six centers and their corresponding bodily locations are xufī (the secret place),321 the right upper part of the chest, sirr (secret, mystery), the upper left part of the chest, ixfo (hiding), in the middle of the chest, röh (spirit), the lower right quadrant of the chest, qalb (heart), two finger lengths below the left part of the chest, and nafs (the soul), the forehead.
Respectively, each latif is represented by a spiritual exemplar to whom specific zikr formulae are to be directed and guided, along with a uniquely colored radiance
318 Arthur Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 103. 319 Though “nastoiashchii” is a Russian word, one often encounters it used within colloquial Tajik. In some specific speech events, such code switching between Tajik Persian and Russian may be relevant to explicating group social processes. However, in this case, the pir uses it in a more generally, as a substitute for “real/authentic.” 320 “This type is not real Sufism.” 321 Among Tajik Sufis, the preferred term is “xufī.” See Atozoda, Kašf-ul-Asror: gulčini ǧazaliyot az devoni Šayx Abdurrahimi Davlat, 26. However, the standard Naqšbandī term is “xāfī,” the secret place, or what Buehler terms, “the arcanum.” Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh, 105. 176
(svet).322 The prophet Isa (Jesus) and black for xufī, Musa (Moses) and white for sir, the
Prophet Muhammad and green for ixfo, both Ibrahim (Abraham) and Nöh (Noah) along with red for röh, Odam (Adam) and yellow for qalb (heart), and finally the color brown but no corresponding prophet for nafs. Above the qiblagoh, the pir had hung a diagram with the names of the latoʿif, prophets, colors, and bodily locations listed. Pointing out the chart, the pir said when one’s heart, tongue, and thoughts “Ba sui xudovand zikr mekuna, nur mešava bolo meravad, darvazai kušoda meša.” (Doing zikr directed towards God, the light goes above, the door is opened.)
To a new initiate, he similarly directed the murid’s attention to the poster after having accepted the man’s bayat (oath, allegiance) for the first time. The man had come to the pir seeking to receive “dars” (lessons). Having taken the aspiring devotee’s hand into his own, the pir first said a short, almost silent blessing in Arabic. No murid would later share the specific Qurʿanic sura or prayer formula given, calling it a secret.
Traditionally, Naqšbandī pirs in South Asia have recited Sūrat al-ikhlāṣ or al-fātiḥa.323
Then, the new devotee repeated lines after the pir, expressing his allegiance to the specific pirs in his lineage, his repentance of sins (istiǧfar), and his intention (niyat) to abstain from the future exercise of sin.
The ritual oath complete, the pir gives him his first “vazifa” (duty/task), the zikr of the heart. Pointing slightly below left side of the man’s chest and subsequently
322 Again, the standard term in Naqšbandī parlance is different than that colloquially used among the Tajik Sufis I encountered. The standard term for the uniquely colored radiance of God’s fayz is “nur,” though Tajik Sufis do sometimes use “nur,” cf. Atozoda, Kašf-ul-Asror: gulčini ǧazaliyot az devoni Šayx Abdurrahimi Davlat, 25. 323 Cf. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh, 158–159. 177 gesturing to the diagram on the wall, the pir instructs him to recite the zikri qalbī, “lo ilohoh illaloh” (There is no God but God) while putting his tavajjöh (attention/focus) on the “taxti qudumi hazrati Odam.” (The seat of arrival of his excellency Adam) Zikr is thus the first task given to the new devotee, and along with the spiritual exercises of muroqiba (meditation),324 form the key devotional practice of Tajik Sufis.
Yet while zikr may be the foundational spiritual exercise in which the disciples must engage and first master before they can proceed along the mystical path, for many
Tajik Sufi groups, both of Qodirī and Naqšbandī persuasions, it is the ongoing group practices of zikr that are also much more efficacious for the attainment of spiritual reward than the quiet exercises of personal devotion. One pir argues that each time the name of
God is recited in silent, personal zikr, the angel sitting on one’s right shoulder325 records it to ones credit as savob (a good deed), but each time one engages in group remembrance within the bounds of halqai zikr, the same angel records each recitation of the name of
God one thousand times over. The pir then comments on the ritual efficacy of zikr with two lines of poetry, both of which he attributes to the Devoni Hofiz. He says:
Voizon čun jilva dar mihrab u minbar malaka mekunad, Xud ba joii degar kori degar mekunad.326
The angel makes preachers jump about327 at the prayer niche and pulpit,
324 The standard Persian spelling is murāqabat. However, Tajik Sufis instead use the spelling muroqiba. Cf Atozoda, Kašf-ul-Asror: gulčini ǧazaliyot az devoni Šayx Abdurrahimi Davlat, 109. 325 The two angels are the kiromin kotibun (the honorable scribes), angels who record the deeds, both good and bad, of all people. 326 The original line from Hofiz reads, “Vāʿiẓān-e kāīn jilvah dar miḥrāb ū minbar mīkunand, chūn bah khilvat mīravand ān kār-e dīgar mīkunand.” (The mortal preachers are resplendent in the prayer niche and pulpit, [but] when they go to into their place of retreat they do something different.) Khawājah-e Shamsuldīn-e Mahmad Ḥāfiẓ-e Shīrāzī, Dīvān-e Khawājah-e Shamsuldīn-e Mahmad-e Ḥāfiẓ-e Shīrāzī, ed. ʿAbdulraḥīm Khalkhālī (Tihrān: Ḥāfiẓ, 1380), 111. 327 Among Tajik Sufis, “jilva” is the outward evidence of ectasy realized in ritual. It can consist of small movements or cause initiates to flail on the ground. 178
They themselves at another place do a different thing.
And then he quotes:
Nabarī gumon ki mufti ba xudo rasida boshī, Tu z xud narafti birun ba kujo rasida boshī.328
Don’t suspect that the religious leader has made it to God. If you have not left yourself, where have you arrived?
The simple intertextual connection between the pir’s ongoing discourse on zikr and the quoted line of verse is the reference to the malika, the angel, presumably the selfsame angel he had just referenced. Interestingly, in its textual form the subject of the line is reversed. Rather than the angel as agent, Hofiz’s multifarious voizon, the preachers, are the ones causing their own hypocritical public displays of religious exuberance and in private behaving quite differently. While the poet likely intended the bayt as a stinging indictment of the religious hypocrisy of the clergy, the pir morphs his quotation into a kind of authoritative textual support for his commentary on the role of angels in zikr. He then follows with another bayt closely related to the first. This time, the bayt similarly comments on the difference between the public and private behavior of religious functionaries, while simultaneously sanctioning the kind of ritual observance which the pir is explicating. The goal is not imitation of the mufti, analogous to Hofiz’s preachers, but rather the point is that one needs go beyond self through the disciplines of mystical observance. Yet interestingly, the second quoted bayt is not found in the Devoni
Hofiz as the pir indicated, but instead is in Bedil’s poetry. The textual version does not
328 Again, the original line reads slightly different. The textual version is, “Tū zi khūd naraftih bīrūn bah kujā rasīdih bāshī, Nabarī gumān kih yaʿnay bih khudā rasīdih bāshī.” (You who have not left yourself, where have you gone? That is to say, don’t presume that you’ve reached God.) Mavlānā ʿAbdulqādir Bīdil Dihlavī, Dīvān-e Bīdil-e Dihlavī, ed. Ᾱkbar Bahadārvand (Tihrān: Nigāh, 1384), 1389. 179 include the word, “mufti,” but rather the bayt is directed at the reader, like the second half line in the pir’s version.
To conclude his explanation of zikr, the pir comments on one of the purposes of public, loud zikr performance. He says, “Halqai zikr kasro ba tariqat taklif mekunad.”
(Zikr circles invite one to the tariqat.) He clarifies by noting that just by attending zikr an observer will be “attracted” (jazb). It is the affective dimension of performance, the attraction caused by the emotional intensity and enthusiasm of the ritual event, which distinguishes group zikr from the silent piety of normative Naqšbandī zikr prescriptions.
Even the critics of halqai zikr in Tajikistan recognize the affective potentialities of halqai zikr performance.
Another šayx, firmly rooted in normative Naqšbandī ritual paradigms, commented that the only savob aspect of loud zikr was its potential for “bringing disciples”
(awurdani solikon).329 Yet, despite the good that may come from exposing new disciples to the mystical path, the dangers of loud zikr outweigh its potential benefits, according to this pir. Namely, the space it provides for intemperance and the manifestation of one’s animal spirit (röhi hayvonī) renders the possibility of expanding the brotherhood moot.
The rhetorical controversy between these two pirs is rooted in the benefits of “taklif”
(invitation) and the danger inherent in transgressing the boundaries between sacred and profane. The potential for inauthenticity, for not truly being “mast” (drunk) in ritual, but only in seeming drunk at the instigation of the animal spirit, the very spirit one is
329 The affective capacity of group zikr was recognized early by Sufi devotees and lauded as such by early proponents of the mystical path. See Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 175. 180 attempting to control and supersede through mystical exercise, is ever present and to be avoided at all times.
It is the intertwining of the affective and aesthetic components of ritual that offer this inherent danger. The capacity to create space for group cohesion, new formations of group communitas,330 can simultaneously open one up to the animal spirit’s machinations. It is this power and hazard intrinsic to the performance frame that offer the possibility for both positive and negative movement along the mystical path. This is in some ways analogous to what J.L. Austin calls the “infelicities” of performative utterances.331 Thus, in Austin’s terms while the speech act may be “achieved” in the case as I have described above, the “insincerity” of some participants renders it merely
“parasitic” on the intended event as a whole. This “parasitism” is precisely what performers hope to avoid and the possibility of which makes some Sufis shun its practice in its entirety. Webb Keane complementarily argues that ritual speech in particular,
“compels speakers to be aware that their words are not fully in their control but are vulnerable to misunderstanding, misattribution, or misfire.”332 I would add to Keane’s list of the hazards of performative speech that ritual language also opens up a greater possibility for inauthenticity and insincerity. In short, performance is a site of transforming potential, and it is precisely because of this potential that is must be severely regulated or even completely proscribed.
330 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1969), 96–97. 331 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 14. 332 Webb Keane, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 24. 181
Those Sufi groups that do practice halqai zikr meet together weekly and on significant dates in the Islamic calendar such as the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, both
Id holidays, and nightly during the month of Ramazan. Members of the tariqat gather at least once per week for night prayers (namozi xuftan), depending on the time of year this can vary from as early as 7:00pm to as late as 10:00pm. All of the groups I encountered met either Tuesday evening or Thursday evening with supplemental group gatherings to commemorate and celebrate important life cycle events within the adepts’ own families, such as circumcision ceremonies, engagements, weddings, and funerals.
Time figures prominently in zikr; zikr ritual itself is predominately past-oriented.
Its singular purpose is “remembrance,” remembrance of the divine, remembrance of sacred history, remembrance of bygone Sufi masters, and more. However, meaning is not relegated to the sacred days of yore. Rather, its social import also derives from its present practice. Zikr ritual works as a discursive framework whereby the past, or rather remembrance of the past, is negotiated in the present ritual frame. As such, poetry within zikr is often traditionalized discourse. I use the term “traditionalized” to stress the social imaginaries implied within its performance. There of course exists a canon of classical
Persian verse from which the hofiz draws. The verses he recites are not composed purely in situ in performance or in some kind of oral-formulaic fashion. However, at the same time, the hofiz’s recitations do not always strictly correspond to the canonical, authoritative lines of verse found in the devons of the great Persian masters
Poetic adaptation, variation, and interpolation are key features of ritual performance. More importantly than these “authentic” chains of poetical genealogy,
182 mystical poetry sung in ritual is necessarily interpreted as the direct speech of authoritative and accomplished Sufi masters. Indeed the singing of the mystical taxallus, be it Shamsi Tabrizī, Jununī, or another, alerts the gathered murids to “who” is indeed the originator of the quoted speech. That is to say, that the text as performed becomes the authentic(ated) poetical form.
In performance, time is also collapsed.333 The intervening centuries between the time the poet composed his ǧazal and its present performance context vanish as in performance the poet himself is welcomed into the pir’s xonaqoh. Master and disciple, the simultaneous emic and etic explanatory paradigm used to describe everything from the political capacity of the tariqat to organizational structure to conceptions of history and tradition, thus are continually perpetuated within ritual performance. That is, both members of Tajik Sufi groups and outside observers emphasize the centrality of the master-disciple relationship, and traditionalization of poetry serves the purpose of perpetuating a kind of mythic master-disciple relationship. Performance creates a direct silsila relationship between the poets sung and those gathered in the pir’s presence at the zikr event. So as the poets’ words are recited, or verses recited are apocryphally attributed to them, in practice the poet becomes the brotherhood's present teaching pir.
In many ways, this focus on the relationship between time and ritual practice, i.e. the ways that ritual embodies a sacred past, brings past lived realities alive in its enactment, and that past masters are resurrected as their words are recited is resonant
333 Nile Green suggests something similar in regard to historical Sufi textual tradition in South Asia. He argues that Sufi texts create “transcendence” and a “sacred community” irrespective of temporal leaps between their time of reading and the events they depict. Nile Green, “Emerging Approaches to the Sufi Traditions of South Asia: Between Texts, Territories and the Transcendent,” South Asia Research 24, no. 2 (2004): 139. 183 with other scholars’ conceptions of Islamic memory and practice in the post-Soviet sphere. Bruce Privratsky has argued that many Kazakhs conceive of Islam in the form of a “collective memory,” with the affective dimensions of such remembrance lending memory its semantic force. 334
Similarly, Maria Louw’s use of Bakhtinian chronotropes likewise resonates with the conceptions of Tajik Sufism I have outlined above. Louw argues that for Bukharan
Muslims religious memory and sacred space are intertwined, that through inhabiting sacred precincts, e.g. shrines, mosque landscapes, etc., Muslims in Uzbekistan are able to transcend the constraints of contemporary irreligious time and enter time worlds in which proper religious conduct was de rigueur.335 In much the same way, my argument is that ritual performance enables mystical masters long past to directly speak to the gathered adepts. Remembrance in this frame is not a staid, passive activity. The past, as in my discussion of historical narrative, again becomes a communicative resource. This time, the past is the direct speech of accomplished mystical practitioners. In this case, time and space are not what is fused, but instead time and event.
I should emphasize that I am making a distinction between Sufi Uwaysī initiations and the melding of time and event, the active dimensions of sacred, historical speech, and the relationship of past pirs and contemporary adepts in contemporary Tajik Sufism. The
Uwaysī mystic is one who has received initiation into the Sufi path not from a living pir, but from a historically important Sufi šayx or even the Prophet Muhammad himself.336
334 Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan : Kazak Religion and Collective Memory, 248. 335 Louw, Everyday Islam in post-Soviet Central Asia, 16. 336 Julian Baldick, Imaginary Muslims: The Uwaysi Sufis of Central Asia (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992), 7. 184
Most often figures like Beyazid Bistami, Al Hallaj, or the prophet Khizr serve as the initiate’s muršid.337 In Tajik Sufi ritual, the active “direct” speech of long dead masters within the performance frame does not accomplish something akin to Uwaysī initiation, but rather inside ritual past masters become the teaching pir of the present ritual event.
Initiation still comes from living Sufi masters, i.e. the living pir present at the ritual event.
Despite its centrality to Sufi theosophy and to the creation and maintenance of group communitas, regrettably, few studies have considered the social work of group zikr within Sufi communities.338 Even fewer have entertained the specifics of ritual language practice within Sufi orders and its indexical capacities to shape Sufi worlds, transmit conceptions of Sufi epistemologies or considered the creative dimensions of ritual practice to construct new social realities and work anew formations of Sufi spiritual tradition. In what follows, I consider one specific ritual poetry performance to help explicate the nature of Sufi tradition and the processes of traditionalization at work within present-day Tajik Sufism. Halqai zikr offers an instructive site by which to judge the role of tradition and the situated practices of textuality discussed in the previous chapter. By extension, performance analysis, and particularly a focus on the traditionalization
337 Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 105. 338 There are a few notable exceptions. Michael Gilensan’s 1973 seminal work on Egyptian Sufism was perhaps the first to take zikr as a prime exemplar of social processes within Sufi brotherhoods. See Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt (London: The Clarendon press, 1973), 156–187. Two other scholars have conducted detailed fieldwork and produced notable monograph-length studies of zikr performance, both in the Arab world. Waugh, The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song; Earle H. Waugh, Memory, Music, and Religion: Morocco’s Mystical Chanters (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2005); Michael Frishkopf, “Sufism, Ritual, and Modernity in Egypt: Language Performance as an Adaptive Strategy” (PhD diss., UCLA, 1999). 185 processes at work in zikr ritual, can help to begin to interrogate the features of the nascent religious project of Tajik Islam.
Halqai Zikr in Performance
The typical halqa begins as the murids file into the pir’s xonaqoh for one particular namozi xuftan. Namoz having been completed, the rigid rows of the ritual prayer relax as murids more comfortably sit facing the direction of Muslim prayer and their seated pir. The hofiz, Sufi,339 begins the ritual proceedings by musically chanting one ǧazal. In total, the hofiz will sing portions of three mystical ǧazals in the course of the gathering: one incorrectly attributed by taxallus to Rumi’s Dīvān-e Shams, the other an amalgamation of stock phrases from various bodies of mystical literature including the poetry of Rumi, Hofiz, and Bedil, and lastly a ǧazal of Mavlavī Jununī. The first two are recited and/or composed directly from the hofiz’s memory. The third is “read” from a chapbook edition of ǧazals from Jununī’s Maʿdan.340
After the pir indicates that the zikr can begin, the hofiz begins to sing:
Du olam joyi darvešon, 1 Namedonam kujoī yobam.
Ba man behtar buvad az har, Du olam joyi darvešon. 5
339 The name of the hofiz has been changed. 340 Because of space constraints, I have limited my examination to one “typical” performance. In other zikr performances in which I was present, the hofiz always began the performance with the same opening ǧazal, the one I examine above. Most often, he would follow on with two additional texts. But depending on the specifics of the ritual event, he would deploy different texts suitable for the particular ritual occasion. Even though these texts sometimes varied from the ones I have included in this chapter, they still derived from the same sets of mystical literature. Namely, he performed Rumi’s ǧazals, poems from the Devoni Hofiz, texts attributed to both of these poets, his own creations, and even more often, Jununī’s poetry. 186
Base dard, base domodi payǧambar, Vale in murtazo payvast base domodi payǧambar. Hama bebahs čī xuš medon, manam mevloi darvešon, (2X) Ba darvešii darvešon Muhammad fahr medorad. (2X) 10 Base oyad firistoda Xudo dar šoni darvešon, (2X)
Dar on soat, ki darvešon šarobi šavq menūšand, (2X) Xudi hozir buvad onjo, šavad mehmoni darvešon. (2X) Alo, vay šamsi tabrezī, kuju šahdu šakar rezī, (2X) 15
Tu az havoi darvešon. Hayoti jovidon yobī, tu az havoi darvešon.
Mebarad ǧam az dilho, lo iloha ilalloh. (2X) 20 Zinda mekunad dilho, lo iloha ilalloh. (2X) Dar zamin hamin ǧavǧo, dar falak hamin sado. (2X) Ey luqoi mahfilho, lo iloha illaloh. (2X) Dar labi rahī tanho, dar kuja zanī onjo. (2X) Bar zabonu dar dorho, lo ilohu ilalloh. (2X) 25 La iloha illaloh.
I don’t know where I’ll find, 1 The two worlds of the dervishes.
For me it would be better than anything, The two worlds of the dervishes. 5
There’s enough pain, enough (for the) son-in-law of the Prophet. But this chosen one was bound. Enough (for the) son-in-law of the Prophet All who are without quarrels know what happiness, as I’m the master of the dervishes. (2X) Muhammad gives honor to the dervish nature of the dervishes. (2X) 10 The one sent by God comes in the glory of the dervishes. (2X)
At the time the dervishes drink the wine of desire, (2X) God will be present there, becoming the guest of the dervishes. (2X) Oh, he’s the sun of Tabriz, where the honey and sugar is pouring. (2X) 15
From the love/sound of the dervishes, you, Will find eternal life, from the love/sound of the dervishes.
It removes pain from hearts, [the] “There is no God but God.” (2X) 20 It makes hearts come alive, [the] “There is no God but God.” (2X)
187
On earth this tumult, in heaven this voice.341 (2X) Oh, rogue of the gatherings, there is no God but God. (2X) You are alone at the verge of the path. What door will you strike there? (2X) On the tongue and in the courts [of God], there is no God but God. (2x) 25 There is no God but God.
This first ǧazal is unique in that it is an adaptation of a poem normally attributed to Rumi’s Dīvān-e Shams-e Tabrīzī. However, it is not in Faruzanfar’s authoritative edition,342 nor could I find it in any online collection of Rumi’s poetry. Rather, its singular identifying feature, in addition to multiple mystical phrases common to Persian classical literature in general, is the interpolated taxallus, Shams-e Tabrīzī. Even so, the hofiz’s version is a unique creation mixing in specific elements of praise to the Prophet
Mohammad along with the hofiz’s unique radif (la iloha illaloh) in addition to lines from the ǧazal (mis)attributed to Rumi.
As the intensity of the ritual event increases in both its aural and somatic dimensions, the hofiz moves from the slow rhythmic repetitions of the interpolated ǧazal he attributes to Rumi’s Dīvān-e Shams to a more fluid melismatic amalgamation of mystical phrases common to Persian poetical tradition at large. This improvisation or in common Tajik usage borrowed from the Russian, improvisatsia,343 continues for only six half lines all repeated at least twice and punctuated by the first half of the šahoda or the
341 The contrast here is between “ǧavǧo” (tumult/uproar) and “sado” (voice). On earth it is unorganized tumultuous speech, nothing more than noise. In Tajik, “ǧavǧo” can also be the bark of a dog. Yet, in heaven, the uproar is received as voiced, “sado.” Thus, the ritual exuberance and cries heard within halqai zikr are more than just noise when they reach heaven. Instead, they are rightly received as the emotive outcries of those properly “struck” by God’s grace. 342 The only instance of a similar turn of phrase and the taxallus Shams-e Tabrizī comes in ǧazal 2578 in Furuzanfar’s collection. However, here it reads, “shams alhaq-e tabrizī janra chih shaker rezi.” Mavlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Kullīyat-e Dīvān-e Shams, ed. Badīʿ al-Zamān Furūzānfar (Tihrān: Nashri Rabi, 1383), 914. 343 Sufi consistently adopts Russian terms to explain mystical processes. While instances of code switching could potentially be a productive site of analysis, here I lack the space and comprehensive data to explore the differential uses of Persian and Russian with respect to Sufi discourse. 188
Islamic declaration of faith, “la ilaha illaloh,” or “There is no God but God.” He adds this radif derived from the šahoda to each subsequent half line.
J.T.P de Bruijn argues that the chief effect of the end rhyme is “to provide semantic coherence to the poem in spite of the kaleidoscopic variety of the imagery.”344
The hofiz’s radif in this case does exactly that. It focuses the adepts back on the primary goal of their cycle of remembrance, the Prophet and the divine, even as the imagery of each half line varies widely. In the case of the radif here, the šahoda further provides a theological orientation beyond a simple “semantic coherence.” Specifically, as Sufi practice in Tajikistan and elsewhere is frequently accused of potential heterodoxy by its reformist critics, the radif cements the ritual exuberance and any other poetic license firmly within an Islamic orthodox milieu and offers explicit cues for ritual interpretation.
The half lines of poetry such as, “Mebarad ǧam az dilho,” (He takes sadness from the hearts), “Zinda mekunad dilho,” (He makes hearts alive), “Dar zamin hamin ǧavǧo,”
(This uproar on the earth), and “Dar falak hamin sado,” (This voice in all of the heavens) all continue a rhythmic cadence with ever increasing enthusiasm and intensity. Just as the majority of the assembled congregants have begun to sing the šahoda radif in almost ecstatic unison, the hofiz ceases repeating the lines of his unique composed innovation, and instead slowly repeatedly echoes the šahoda alone.
A šahoda radif is a common trope of zikr ritual beyond the Tajik Sufi environment. However, the particular musicality of the radif in this ritual performance shares a broader affinity with the recording, “Eid Song,” by the popular British musician,
344 J. T. P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry: An Introduction to the Mystical Use of Classical Persian Poems (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1997), 54. 189
Sami Yusuf.345 The chorus of Yusuf’s track includes an extended rendition of the šahoda with an almost identical prosody to the hofiz’s zikr radif. Many members of the halqa share an appreciation for Yusuf’s pioneering efforts at transnational Islamic stardom and a high regard for the affective power of his lyricism. One adept who works for a United
Nations office in Dushanbe said as part of his daʿvat he introduced his Japanese coworkers to Sami Yusuf’s music. Now, one was working in the Sudan and in his emails used terms like inšalloh and mašalloh. The adept noted, that, “I don’t know if he’s a
Muslim, but.” During the course of my fieldwork, Sami Yusuf held a series of concerts in Dushanbe. Tajik radio highlighted his music, and ringtones based on specific tracks proliferated among my religious friends. Even, it would seem, Tajik zikr ritual was influenced by the music of this British songwriter.
After reciting the interpolated ǧazal and Sami Yusuf’s musical rendition of the
šahoda, for approximately the next ten minutes, the hofiz sings little other than this first half of the Islamic declaration of faith, occasionally punctuated by the jazb and exuberant outcries from certain murids. In Sufi tariqat the jazb, literally “attraction,” is the primary outward manifestation of the pir’s power. In zikr, when the pir directs his attention or tavajjöh on a particular adept, jazb will be evidenced in uncontrollable shaking, cries of ecstasy (vajd), or even in episodes of fainting. The hofiz says that these jazb are what alert him as to whether the proper hol or ritual mood has been achieved and whether he should continue in the vein he was going or whether he should appropriately modify his choice of ritual texts to elicit a contrasting ritual mood.
345 Sami Yusuf, My Ummah compact disc (Awakening Records, 2005). 190
Before long, the šahoda chants are even further abbreviated leaving only the
“illaloh” from the earlier “la ilaha illaloh.” Again, after several more intense moments, it is shortened even more until the murids are chanting nothing but “alloh” in almost complete unison with only a few murids opting for more melismatic multiple syllabic chants carrying over the two syllables of the word. One murid even sings overtop the other unified voices, “Mo dar du jahon ǧayri xudo yor nadorem.”346 (We don’t have any friend in the two worlds except for God.)
After almost ten more minutes and after the attendant intensity has calmed to a degree, the hofiz abruptly begins a new zikr formula again with the adepts singing along in unison. This time, it is, “Nuri Muhammad saloloh,” (The light of Muhammad is the virtue of God). Having sung this for several minutes, the hofiz switches again, moving to, “Bodī margī xayrulloh, hastī raftī jallaloh,” (If you’re alive or dead, it’s [by] the grace of God. If you are here or gone, it’s [for] the glory of God). The next formula sung just as the previous zikr is, “Antal hodī antal haq, laysalhodī illohö,” an Arabic phrase approximating, “You are the guide. You are the truth. God the guide, deliver.” This particular zikr formula, invoking two of God’s names, al-Hadi and al-Haq (The Guide and the Truth), is distinct from all of the other formulae recited within the zikr performance as it is the only Arabic phrase used, discounting the šahoda radif.
346 This hemistich is attributed to Rumi. Jean During catalogued a more elaborated version of this same zikr bayt in Baluchistan. See Jean During, Musique et mystique dans les traditions de l’Iran (Paris: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 1990), 259–261. 191
Following another approximately ten minutes of collective chanting, the hofiz stops just as abruptly as he had before.347 As the adepts quickly stop their zikr following his lead, the hofiz begins the last ǧazal of the evening and the poetic coda for the ritual event:
Bar gesūi muškinu sumansoi Muhammad, 1 Ay šohi rasulho. [all in unison] Jiddestu jaxd ast tamošoi Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. (8X) [unison] (simultaneously one man calls out loudly… Allo) 5 Har šab sarafrozi taʿzimi xudomard, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Kursist ba bolišti tamonnoi Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Xuršed girift xūšae az xirmani husnaš, 10 Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Makru karomu sarzado as poyi Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. (7X) [unison]
Tašrifi zaminaš hamaro volo namuda, 15 Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Tašrifi zamon jumla ba ǧavǧoi Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Šud gulšani olam ba misoli rūyaš, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] 20 Ayši hama bulbuli gūyoī Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. (7X) [unison]
Omad ba tanaš hilʿati laʿlo Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] 25
Toje ba saraš qavcu obad hastī qaboyaš ba muzammil, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Bahri zafari hasm ba fatahnoi Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. (7X) [unison] 30
347 Each of these abrupt shifts is dictated by the pir. By nodding his hear, he indicates to the hofiz when to shift the performance text. To a certain extent, abrupt shifts in performance text may function to regulate participants’ hol. The pir properly recognizes when the height of emotive potential has been realized and when the ritual requirements dictate a shift in register or performance texture. 192
Fardo ki kunad jilva ba bozori qiyomat, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Mahšar šavad on rūz ba tamošoi Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] 35 Az bahri šafoat ba hama ummati osī, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Bandad kamari himmatu aʿloi Muhammad, Ay šohi rasulho. [unison] Xoki qadamaš surma ba čašmoni jununī. [abruptly ends] 40
On Muhammad’s musky and jasmine-scented locks, 1 Oh, King of the Messengers. [all in unison] It is endeavor and it is effort to gain vision of Muhammad, Oh, King of the Messengers. (8X) [unison] (simultaneously one man calls out loudly… Allah) 5 Every night there is honor and reverence from the man of God, Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] It is a throne348 with the desire for Muhammad as its pillow, Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] The sun took [just] one cluster from the gathered crop of his beauty, 10 Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] There are wonders, miracles, and revelations at the feet of Muhammad, Oh, King of the Messengers. (7X) [unison]
Honoring his land has made everyone exalted, 15 Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] This time of honor is all for the tumult of Muhammad, Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] The world has become a flower-garden because of his face, Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] 20 The joy of every nightingale is [in] the speech of Muhammad, Oh, King of the Messengers. (7X) [unison]
A ruby robe of honor came upon Muhammad’s body, Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] 25 A crown[ is] on his head, you are [his] arch and abode, his garment [is] Sura Muzammil, Oh, King of the Messengers. [unison] With victory over the enemies by the triumph of Muhammad, Oh, King of the Messengers. (7X) [unison]
348 The “throne” being the highest seat of God. 193
30 Tomorrow, when one jumps up on the day of resurrection, Oh, King of the Messengers, [unison] On that day, all will gather at the place of judgment to see Muhammad. Oh, King of the Messengers, [unison] For the sake of intercession for all downtrodden people, 35 Oh, King of the Messengers, [unison] He ties the belt of Muhammad’s nobility and greatness. Oh, King of the Messengers, [unison] May the dust of his [Muhammad’s] feet be the collyrium in Jununī’s eyes. [abruptly ends]
This time, the ǧazal is not a ǧazal of a long dead Sufi master, nor is it a unique interpolation of lines of Sufi esoteric knowledge as before. Rather, the hofiz holds a small chapbook and slowly begins singing a ǧazal from the Tajik Sufi pir, Mavlavī
Jununī.349 Though this time the hofiz may hold a booklet, preferring to “read” a canonical ǧazal rather than relying on memory or improvised poetic creativity, this ǧazal too is morphed to meet the requirements of the ritual event. He does not read the entire poem, nor does he take selections in the order they come in Jununī’s text. Rather, he chooses particular lines appropriate to the mood he is attempting to create; ones that are intended to elicit the most vocal identifications and the most perspicuous to the increasing of ritual fayz or the grace said to emanate from the seated pir.
The pir’s tavajjöh (lit. attention) is what transmits this ritual grace to the gathered adepts.350 Murids frequently liken the transmission of fayz to the transmission of electricity. Just as a power plant produces electricity, so too fayz originates and is produced by the divine. High voltage transmission lines allow the electricity to move to
349 Jununī, Sadu yak ǧazal, 33. 350 An interesting parallel to the functioning of tavajjöh within zikr is the Hindu concept of darshan, or “seeing.” In worship, blessing is accomplished through the simulateous sight/radiance (darshan) between diety and devotee. Margaret Mills, personal communication, May 2012. 194 smaller substations. To keep with the analogy, these substations are akin to Sufi pirs.
Finally, electricity travels from the substations along smaller lines to individual residences. This is the final tavajjöh of the pir being transmitted to the gathered adepts in zikr. In performance, if certain lines, half lines, or other poetic stock phrases do not hold the capacity for achieving this goal, the hofiz eliminates them from his recitation, editing, redacting, and interpolating the Tajik Sufi master’s words inside his performance.
In some cases this redaction is explicitly encouraged by the pir, as he argues on the basis of his muroqiba (meditations) that portions of Jununī’s devon have been interpolated by their editors, and by extension are in need of restoration to their authentic, original versions.
At this point in the performance, in the mold of the earlier zikr formulae, the hofiz introduces a new radif to Jununī’s poetry, “Ay šohi rasulho” or “Oh, King of the
Messengers/Prophets!” This time while the hofiz chants the first line adapted from
Jununī, the gathered adepts call this new radif in response. Every few lines as the hofiz breaks the cycle, some seemingly by intension of the hofiz and one occasioned by the hofiz losing his place in the text (line 4), the adepts continue the radif zikr in the place of the earlier poetical hemistiches. In total he recites nineteen lines from the total twenty two lined original; he sings thirteen in their entirety, elides two together (line 27), and five lines are modified (lines 1, 3, 6, 17, and 19), some more than others.
Moreover, the potentialities of poetic discourse are of course not the final arbiters of ritual efficacy. Rather, the pir’s fayz which is said to imprint (doǧ) on the murid’s hearts is what finally must inhibit or realize emotive efficacy. It is a kind of dialectic
195 between these two causative realms which results in any ritual exuberance. The adepts understand ritual efficacy to be determined both by their own individual spiritual understanding and progression along the mystical path, i.e. their internalization of mystical adab, and the pir’s intentionality within the ritual frame. Jazb does not occur without cause; it only emanates from the pir’s tavajjöh. Lack of perceived proper ritual response is then indicative of spiritual deficiency and the pir’s tacit recognition of ones lack of inner of mystical attainment. As such, there is considerable performance anxiety among the adepts. If one cannot respond appropriately, then his fellow adepts will question his spiritual maturity. Yet at the same time, the murids note that jazb cannot be faked. If one were to call out in ecstasy without the pir’s direct tavajjöh, then all of the other adepts would immediately recognize the imposter’s spiritual charlatanry.
Not long after the hofiz began performing ǧazalxonī in the halqa, he nervously approached the pir about his lack of jazb during zikr ritual. He worried that the lack of emotive energy he exhibited was due to the pir’s lack of confidence in his mystical attainment or perhaps more seriously, evidence that his heart was not attuned at all towards the transmission of divine grace. The pir told him not to worry, “Jazbat tamkin kardam,” (I put your jazb under my control), the pir said. If he had not done so, the pir added, the hofiz would have been so consumed by the pir’s fayz that he would not have been able to sing a single half line of verse. His anxiety thus relieved, the hofiz has continued to sing in zikr without any evidence of emotive jazb.351
351 A somewhat analaguous phenomenon is active among South Asian qawwals. While their goal is to elicit the vajd of their audience, they do not seek to bring it about for themselves. The contrast here is that qawwals are professionals while the Tajik hofiz is a devotee himself. 196
Jazb or lack thereof is contentious beyond the inner workings of one’s spirituality in the halqa. It is also a key point of dispute between more normative oriented and ecstatic Sufi groups in Tajikistan.352 These episodes of mystical exuberance, physical manifestations of normally hidden spirituality, and outward evidence of divine authority and interaction are all debated hotly among Islamic practitioners in Tajikistan. Critics of vocal zikr charge the pir with charlatanry, saying he is firebgar, a trickster, or perhaps even more seriously, that he is a jodugar, engaged in sorcery. The attraction of the pir’s adepts is framed as the work of evil spirits conjured by the heretical pir or merely a lie, false evidence of spiritual workings.
Emic performance models include one important mode of disputation in the face of these critics, a kind of embedded disclaimer of performance.353 Mystical speech and its interpretation are thought to be impossible to understand for the uninitiated. It is logic defying, or in the phrase most often uttered by adepts, “Aql toǧri namigirad.” (Reason cannot grasp it correctly). The hofiz and other adepts all characterize mystical speech within zikr as asror, secrets. This esotericism is of course characteristic of the Sufi enterprise at large. Only those who have repented of their pride and sought their istiǧfor
(forgiveness) can move beyond the limits of reason to imbibe the mysteries emanating from the pir. At the same time, poetic speech, whether mystically-oriented or not, is multivalent. This inherent ambiguity, or put in the terms of Tajik Sufis, these asror, help offer the potential for even more multivalence and the perpetuation of theological esotericism.
352 See chapter 2 for more discussion of these typologies of Sufi practice in Tajikistan. 353 Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 21–22. 197
The final ǧazal having been sung, the event closes as abruptly as it had begun with the pir offering a final benediction, asking for blessing by the intervention of the past pirs of their tariqat for their own members and families, the government of their country, and their countrymen at large. He prays:
[inaudible Arabic, including Surat al-fātiḥa]
Muslimini baxšida hadya kardem savob, samari oyathoi kalomi allohro ba rozigii haft haqi baroi puršuköhi muqaddas Muhammad mustafo [one murid yells out simultaneously] (alloh) Sallallohu alayh, [in unision]
Az odami safiyu hotamu lo habibulloh to ba injo hadya kardem. Rohati jamil [simultaneously] (alloh) payǧambaron duo kardem čoriyonon, sohibagon, sohibagoni komili komilin, imom, imomi Aʿzam, sufii rahmatullohi alayh, mušohidon, muštafikon, piron, pironi tariqai naqšbandiya, qodiriya, čistiya, suvardiya, [omitted]354
Ba padaron, modaron, bekasu bečoragon, benavoho, duotalabon, befarzandon, ǧaribon, darmondagon, našʿamandagon.
Pironi kibor, xususan hazrati Mir Said Alii Hamadoni, hazrati Sultonvaysi Qaralin, hazrati guzaštagoni piri mo hastī, [omitted],355 vali guzaštagonaš va harčī muršidi mo.
Xudovand još jannat bo mururi mo mušarraf bigardonad poku parvardigoro. Alalxusus, ba röhoniyati janini guzaštagono hamin ahli jamoat, ki dast ba duo me.. [unclear] (alloh, alloh)
354 At this point in the prayer, the pir continues praying in the name of the past pirs in the specific sub- lineages to which this particular halqa belongs. I have omitted these last phrases so as not to compromise the anonymity of the halqa. 355 Name of pir omitted. 198
Guzaštagono in podšohi mo Emomalii Rahmon (alloh) poku parvardigoro dar Tojikistoni mo sulhu osoišta ba vositai in šaxs guzaštagihoša padaru modaraša rahmat bigardonad.
Poku parvardigoro ahli tariqatro fardo ruzi livoi qiyomat dar zeri livoi ahmad hamai moro poku parvardigoro az šafoati Qurʿon az šafoati rasullulloh bo nasib bigardonad. Bo husnu jalolat yo alloh mo muštoqi majnunem mušarraf bigardonad. Omin. (omin, omin) Ollohu Akbar.
For forgiven Muslims we ask for the gift of righteous favor, the result of the verses of the word of God according to the will of the seven rights for the splendid, holy Muhammad Mustafo. [one murid yells out simultaneously God] Peace be upon him, [in unision]
We ask from the pure and virtuous ones and the beloved of God. We pray for the good repose [over top, God] of the prophets, Of the four ones,356 the masters, The most perfect of perfect masters, The imom, Imomi Azam, The Sufis, may they rest in peace, the witnesses, the sympathetic, the pirs, the pirs of the path of the Naqšbandiyya, Qodiriyya, Čistiya, Sövardiya, [omitted].
For fathers, mothers, those without kin, the destitute, those seeking prayer, the childless, strangers, the pained, addicts.
The great pirs, Especially, his excellence Mir Said Alii Hamadonī, his excellence Sultonvaysi Qaralin, Their excellences, our past pirs, [omitted], yet not passed and still our master.
May the Lord at our passing grant us paradise, oh pure God. Especially, By the faith of the passed ones of this congregation who have raised their hands in prayer. [unclear] [God, God]
356 The four successors of the Prophet Muhammad: Abu Bakr, Umar, Usman, and Ali. 199
For the ancestors, of this ruler of ours, Emomalii Rahmon, [God] Oh pure God, in our Tajikistan peace and quiet by means of this individual, Grant his ancestors, his father and mother, repose.
Oh God, Grant a reward for all of us, the people of the path, tomorrow a day of the flag of resurrection underneath the banner of Ahmad, Oh God, from the intercession of the Qurʿan, from the intercession of the messenger, Grant us, the enthusiastic, enamored ones, honor, by your grace, Oh God. Amen (amen, amen) God is great.
The halqa includes items of both older and relatively new provenance, all with varying degrees of temporal consistency and innovation. 357 Indeed, all three ǧazal portions sung in the ritual have varying degrees of relationship to the sacred past. The interpolated ǧazal from Rumi, while likely not written down by Rumi or his famous scribe Husamiddin, still harkens back to a mythic Persian Sufi past, far removed from today’s secular Tajik republic. In addition, the hofiz was not the interpolator of the poet’s pen name, and the ǧazal may have existed for centuries in the oral and/or written imaginations of Central Asian Sufis. On the other hand, Jununī’s fame has only been derived within the span of the last generation. But within that time, he has assumed his place among the pillars of Persian Sufism alongside figures like Rumi. Indeed, because of a kind of iterative profundity, or rather a redundancy of discursive routine, the result of the past years of weekly repetition within halqai zikr and group teaching contexts, murids
357 Strikingly, the general order of service from these two zikr performances conforms to the basic structure of zikr events observed in other Persian contexts. See for example Ian Richard. Netton, Sufi Ritual: The Parallel Universe (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000), 36. 200 have internalized his importance and centrality to Central Asian Sufism. For one adept, he is “the last great Central Asian Sufi.”358
Just as older poetical tradition is incorporated into present ritual anew and newer poetical discourse is traditionalized in the vein of the Persian masters of old, so too the ritual context contains competing dialectics between traditional form and innovative practice, both with varying degrees of relationship to an “authentic” Tajik Sufi past.
Many Sufis in Tajikistan maintain there has been a consistency of ritual practice from the pre-Soviet era. As one adept poetically said, throughout the Soviet period the, “Hus could be heard as far away as the farthest sovxoz.”359 While a degree of posturing is evident in his bravado, recent oral history suggests that specific teaching hierarchies were maintained and groups continued to meet and engage in ritual.360 While the particular group discussed here only began meeting after the fall of the Soviet Union, specific members of the brotherhood did participate in similar ritual occasions during the Soviet period. Thus, the ritual form is also an amalgamation of temporal frames and different strands and genealogies. To begin to explicate the specifics of this temporal assemblage in ritual form, I turn now to poetic modes of composition.
Composition in/alongside/before Performance and Textual Aide-mémoire
358 The implication of his statement being that Jununī is the “last” as in the “most recent great Central Asian Sufi.” 359 The “hus” about which he is speaking are the loud zikr of “hu,” one of the names for God, literally in Arabic “he.” The sovxoz were Soviet state farms. 360 Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de- Stalinization to Independence (1955-91).” 201
One hot summer afternoon, Sufi and I were sitting on a raised platform overlooking his garden. I was attempting to piece together the silsila relationship between Sufi’s pir and another well-known Tajik Sufi pir, if any existed. To aid my memory of the ahli tasavvuf of Tajikistan, I used the silsila lists in my newly acquired copy of the text Hazrati pir,361 a hagiographic text chronicling the life and mystical exploits of perhaps Tajikistan’s most well-known Soviet-era pir, Ešoni Abdurahmonjon.
Sufi began flipping through the volume looking for interesting poetry glosses. He eventually started reading a short maddoh (panegyric) to Aböhanifa, the founder of the
Hanafī school of Islamic jurisprudence:362
Imomi muttaqin Aböhanifa, Siroji ahli din Aböhanifa. Buvad imomi mazhab maxzani ilm, Muini ahli din Aböhanifa. Nadida hamču ö čašmi zamona, Ba taqvo hamqarin Aböhanifa. Mutei ö sarafroz ast bešak, Šifoi mujrimin Aböhanifa. Hama ilme, ki paydo ast dar fiqh, Buvad aslaš yaqin Aböhanifa.363
Aböhanifa is the sure Imom, Aböhanifa, the lamp for the people of the faith.
361 Hokiroh, Hazrati Pir <
This reservoir of knowledge would become the Imom of the religion,364 Aböhanifa, the defender of the people of the faith. The eyes of the age didn’t see anyone like him, Aböhanifa, associated with virtue. Without a doubt, his obedience is honored, Aböhanifa, the cure for sinners. All of the knowledge that is found in fiqh,365 The source of it is assuredly Aböhanifa.
Having read these few lines, Sufi quickly began composing his own lyrics for a zikr based on the poem. Chanting the lines quietly to himself, he composed in situ a new radif refrain, “Imomi azam366 imomimost, mazhabi pokast mazhabimost.” (The great imom is our imom, it’s a pure religion, it’s our religion.) He inserted this newly created radif after the first and fourth bayts of the original poem. Clearly satisfied with his work, he sang it several times out loud ensuring that his new radif matched the meter of the original poem. Finally sure of the metrical and semantic integrity of the zikr, he pulled out his halqa notebook to record the creation, saying, “I’ll sing this one during the next halqa. His excellency, the pir will be pleased.”
In the Tajik Sufi poetical tradition discussed to this point, I have described the ongoing inter-dynamic and interdependent relationship between oral and written tradition. I have emphasized the means whereby oral texts have been canonized into textual artifacts and disseminated, as well as the specific reading dispositions devotees take towards these new products of post-Soviet Islamic creative energy. The previous section considered how these texts enter the performance sphere. Here, I want to turn to the specific modes of poetical authorship of zikr texts with special attention on how
364 Here, the “religion” (mazhab) refers to one of the schools of Islamic jurisprudence of which Aböhanifa is the founder. 365 “Fiqh” is Islamic jurisprudence. 366 “Imomi azam” is the epithet of Aböhanifa most often used in Tajikistan and Central Asia at large. 203 previously written texts are adapted for the oral performance arena and on the particular technologies of performance.
The particularities of authorship in oral poetical traditions have been a key site of scholarly inquiry particularly following Albert Lord’s monumental study on Yugoslav epic traditions and the oral origins of Homeric epic.367 More recently, Parry and Lord’s
Oral Formulaic Theory and the intricacies of oral composition have been applied by numerous scholars to varied traditions and historic and linguistic environments.368 The particular applicability of Lord’s theories to Tajik Sufi halqa performance is that these are poetical texts based on formulaic units, oftentimes learned orally, performed orally, and transmitted primarily in oral/aural channels. What distinguishes Sufi performance practices in Tajikistan from those of Lord’s epic bards are the modes of composition.
Lord’s principle of the simultaneity of composition and performance in his definition of what oral poetry entails meant that “oral poetry” must necessarily be composed orally. 369 It made little difference the streams of tradition from which the text derived or which medium facilitated its transmission.370 In the case of the Tajik Sufi poetical performance tradition, poetical texts are not purely composed at the time of their performance in the manner of the epic texts Lord studied. Tajik hofiz do not create the texts based on formulaic units simultaneously as they sing them. In another aspect, most
367 Albert Bates. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 368 John Miles Foley’s now somewhat dated text methodically outlines many such developments to the late 1980s. John Miles Foley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). 369 Lord, The Singer of Tales, 5. 370 I find Ruth Finnegan’s emphasis on the role of prior memorization in the performance of oral texts a productive heuristic for conceptualizing the oral-written dynamics in Sufi performance. Oral Poetry: Its Nature, Significance, and Social Context (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 73–86. 204 hofiz would likely deny any active element of “composition” at work in texts completely.371 That is, the words they recite are decidedly not their own.372 They derive from classical Persian poetical tradition, from the pens of spiritually mature poets.
Performers and producers are distinct offices with separate means towards their qualification. A producer must have recognized mystical credentials authorized most often by lineage, scholarship, and/or charisma. In contrast, the hofiz must chiefly be a willing channel for the pir’s fayz in addition to possessing some requisite musical skill.
Sufi’s musical skill came from his own study at the state philharmonic institute in
Dushanbe during the late Soviet period and from his father, an accomplished master musician in the Central Asian šaš maqam musical tradition.
The distinction between compositional and performance modes also calls attention to the fact that while composition can often be attributed to mental processes, performance oftentimes is not. That is, the process of adapting a new text happens outside of the performance space, while performance is mitigated by the hofiz’s channeling of ritual grace inside the ritual frame.373 Yet while the hofiz may deny his active role in the composition of his performance texts, he does retain some creative license within the performance arena predicated on the particular situated needs of a
371 Cf. Waugh, The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song, 186.; Michael Frishkopf, “Authorship in Sufi Poetry,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics no. 23 (January 1, 2003): 78–108. As Joel Kuipers has argued with respect to Weyewa ritual speech, “textual performances deny their situated character.” Joel C. Kuipers, Power in Performance: The Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 4. 372 I should note that Lord’s poets also argued for a certain textual fixity, that the text was never “changed” in performance. 373 Cf. Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988), 288. 205 ritual event. Sufi’s adaptations speak to how older verse can be used as a communicative resource and tool for new ritual performance.
Sufi kept the general integrity of the verses, including their order. His interpolations did not alter the general semantic field of the poem; indeed, in contrast his new radif further amplified the original textual core of the poem. He merely substituted
“Imomi azam” for “Aböhanifa,” and reemphasized the poet’s choice of words, “mazhab”
(religion) and “imom.” Perhaps what distinguishes Sufi’s creations from more explicit modes of Persian poetic imitation is the intentionality of his poetic allusion, whether
Sufi’s utterances are “conscious allusions” to a specific prior work or whether he is merely making use of the Persian poetic dialect. 374 In that regard, whatever
“composition” Sufi engages in, I construe as the latter rather than the former, and that is what separates Sufi’s poetic practices from the formulized genres of intertextualities in
Persian poetry. Seen from the outset, prior to performance, the processes of composition help to interpret how Sufi uses written texts and his elements of composition can then be inferred back onto the other poems in zikr using this model. Sufi’s artistry is a hybridized performance form alternating between a strong appreciation for canonistic textual fixity and a predilection for formulaic oral repetition all while expunging problematic author word choice.
But even such a hybridized model of poetic creation would likely be swiftly denied by many Tajik hofiz and Sufi poets. Rather, the ultimate originator of speech is always the divine. In regards to how a poem for ritual use is composed, one pir said,
374 Losensky, Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal, 102. 206
“Xudovand dar dilash doxt.” (The Lord sewed [the poem] in his [the poet’s] heart.) To illustrate, he asked his xalifa seated next to us to compose a ǧazal. The xalifa replied that he could not. The pir said to me, “Didī?” (Did you see?) “Loiqi vay, yaʿne sir kušoda kard. Ba sababi zabon unamu ba avliyo kušoda kard. Rangi bulbul gap mizanim.
Xudovand mega ki tö donišmand nestī, suxan besyar kardid.” (Fit for him [the xalifa], that is to say, he revealed secrets. He revealed secrets to the friends375 for the sake of language. We talk like the nightingale. The Lord says, ‘You are not learned, you talk
[too?] much.’”
He concludes his illustration by saying how “beadabī” (imprudent/against the rules of Sufi comportment) it is to even be sharing these “secrets” with me, that only God can reveal secrets, and finally, “Xudovand olim.” (God is the teacher.) While it is difficult not to read the pir’s statements as an indirect indictment on the ethnographic project in which I was engaged, with its attendant quest for knowledge and its constant questioning akin to the nightingale’s persistent chatter, the explicit theme of his statements is poetic authorship. The pir argues that the text of ǧazal performance, though authored by a poet, always originates with God. They are secrets only revealed to his closest “friends.”
If the poetical texts themselves are mysteries and secrets, then what kind of symbolic resonance do the textual objects which record them invoke? Here, I want to emphasize the technologies of Sufi’s performance, specifically the role of writing and the
375 “Avliyo,” literally “friends of God,” is often translated into English as “saints.” In the Sufi context, “avliyo” are the exemplary individuals who have travelled along the mystical path and achieved the mystical knowledge of the higher stations. These individuals are those closest to the divine, and thus hold more “secrets” in their possession. 207 use of textual artifacts within oral ritual performance. The prime textual artifacts used during halqa performance are Sufi’s chapbooks of mystical verse and Sufi’s notebooks.
A notebook of ǧazals is in many ways analogous to the ṭūmār of traditional Persian storytellers.376 Sufi himself never uses the term, rather he refers to his collected writings merely as his tetrad’, Russian for notebook.377 The notebooks contain oral verse he has copied down from other hofiz, his own unique poetical creations, and finally ǧazal portions collected from written editions of poetry. He most often encountered the latter from borrowed books and editions in the pir’s library.
To a certain extent, this textual economy is due to the relative scarcity of texts and the financial barriers for impoverished villagers to purchase the expensive volumes of poetry available in Dushanbe or those imported from Iran and Pakistan. Some of the borrowed works were even more mediated in that the pir’s collection included many
Persian-script editions which Sufi could not read without assistance. The pir read the poems and Sufi would copy them into his notebook using Tajik Cyrillic script. Sufi’s quick adaptation of the poem in praise of Aböhanifa in the Hazrati pir text illustrates another stream from which newly encountered verse enters Sufi’s notebook.
For traditional Persian storytellers, acquisition of the tradition would have entailed both aural and written components. In addition to hearing their master’s stories
376 Mary Ellen Page, “Professional Storytelling in Iran: Transmission and Practice,” Iranian Studies 12, no. 3–4 (1979): 198.; Kumiko Yamamoto, The Oral Background of Persian Epics (Boston, MA: Brill, 2003), 20–51. 377 I never heard the Sufi or any other hofiz use the term, ṭumār. Benjamin Koen says that among Pamiri Ismailis in Tajikistan, ṭumār refers to prayer amulets. Benjamin D. Koen, Beyond the Roof of the World: Music, Prayer, and Healing in the Pamir Mountains (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 139. In contrast in Tajik Badakhshan, poetry singers or madahkhwan use the term, bayaz, for similar objects to the ṭumār of the Iranian naqqalī tradition. See Gabrielle van den Berg, “The classical Persian ghazal and Rumi in the oral poetry of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan,” in Mais comment peut-on être Persan?, ed. C. van Ruymbeke (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 6. 208 and committing them to memory, storytellers would copy their master’s ṭūmār as part of their apprenticeship.378 Similarly, by copying down the pir’s dictations Sufi is likewise writing down his master’s text, although mediated through the Persian-script editions of mystical verse. Unlike the storyteller’s ṭūmār, Sufi’s notebooks do not involve the strict episodic logic and divisions of the prose which Kumiko Yamamoto catalogued from the prose storytellers of Iran. Rather than evincing any other pragmatic organizational principle, the internal cohesion of Sufi’s notebooks reflects a more serendipitous organization predicated on the active force of God’s will and all mediated through the pir’s direction in muroqiba and explicit teaching sessions. Chronological progression hinged on poetic serendipity drives which ǧazal comes first and all of the poems that follow in his notebooks, while temporality does not seem to be factor in which ǧazal he chooses for performance.
One could also argue that Sufi’s organizational logic is predicated on the progress of his own spiritual journey within the halqa. Simultaneously, Sufi’s notebooks are a kind of collage or scrapbook somewhat analogous to similar texts called majmūʿat compiled by Islamic intellectuals across the Persian and Turkish-speaking worlds.379
While they share an affinity with such texts, Sufi’s educational process is somewhat distinct from traditional educational models in the Islamic world in which students were expected to master a text in its entirety, from an authorized teacher, before subsequently
378 Yamamoto, The Oral Background of Persian Epics, 23. 379 Mansur Sefatgol, “Majmūʻahʼhā: Important and Unknown Sources of Historiography of Iran During and in the Late Safavids : the Case of Majmūʻah-i Mīrzā Muʻīnā,” in Persian Documents : Social History of Iran and Turan in the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Nobuaki Kondo (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 73–84. 209 moving on to another text.380 Rather, Sufi’s bricolage is centered on mystical thematics and a poem’s suitability for ritual rather than emphasizing its discrete textual source.
This focus further cements the relative insignificance of “authentic” authorship by moving Sufi’s emphasis to ritual pragmatics as opposed to origin.
The key point of comparison between Sufi’s notebooks and traditional ṭūmār is the dialectic between oral and written tradition within the oral performance of Persian traditional texts. What Sufi’s notebooks share with traditional Persian ṭūmār is a written collection of performance material, mediated by oral performance and previously written tradition, and subsequently used as a token inside performance. Further, the interplay of written and oral tradition within Sufi’s performance does not imply an end to traditional oral poetics. Framed differently, the textualizing moves catalogued in the previous chapter are not premised on subsuming pre-Soviet and Soviet-era oral tradition into a new post-Soviet textual field. Rather, the textual artifacts used within ritual performance hold the potential for affecting/effecting new oral transmission. That is, technologies of writing in halqa enable earlier iterations of oral performance and written mystical tradition to enter the oral sphere again and transmit mystical epistemological constructions to adepts who can further orally transmit this new nascent textual tradition.
As Yamamoto argues in relation to the oral dimensions of Persian epic tradition,
“Contrary to the common assumption that writing was the major factor destroying oral culture, in Persia at least, writing served to spread oral culture across a wider
380 Cf. Richard W. Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 13–22. 210 audience.”381 Just as nineteenth and early twentieth-century naqqāl used newly acquired technologies of writing to aid in the furthering of oral Persian tradition, so too writing in halqa does not preclude new oral transmission, and the new textualized artifacts of Tajik
Sufi tradition do not necessarily inhibit the oral dimensions of traditional Sufi pedagogy and performance.
Sufi’s notebooks serve at least two related purposes: one, as a kind of textual aide-mémoire, and two, as a material token of his speech’s mystical authority.382 In regards to the former, Sufi uses the notebooks to guide his memory during the performance of halqa. Rather than purely reciting the ǧazals from memory, Sufi most always “reads” from the notebooks during the course of his performance. He turns the pages to his chosen ǧazal and keeps his eyes on the page as he sings. Sufi insists that he always reads the ǧazals from his notebooks so as to not “forget” (zabyt’)383 the texts.
This purported maximal textual conservatism operates to the extent that even when he has memorized the ǧazal’s lyrics in their entirety, as he often does, he still keeps the words on the page in front of him during the course of his performance. It is at this point that the notebooks become more than a simple aide-mémoire, and instead they act as tokens, symbols of authoritative, directly-quoted speech extrinsic to the mental production of the performer. This materiality of the mystical speech contributes to
381 Yamamoto, The Oral Background of Persian Epics, 22. 382 Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 50–57. 383 Here again Sufi substitutes a Russian term, zabyt’, for a Tajik Persian one. 211 rendering the abstractness of mystical authority a physicality it lacks as verbal art alone.384
On another occasion, Sufi related to me a vision he had received during his personal meditations (muroqiba). A page from Jununī’s Maʿdan had come before him, and he began to sing the ǧazal just as it was on the page in his vision. When he opened his eyes, he realized that the book from which he was reciting was not real and that it had only been a vision in muroqiba. However, even though the book was no longer in front of him, he was still able to sing the ǧazal from memory even though he had not known the ǧazal previously. He said, “Medana ki ast, ammo aql toǧrī namigirad.” (You know that it exists, but the mind can’t grasp it.)385
Even further, he noted that it is not only the words from the page that exist, but that in zikr there is a physicality in the spiritual sphere to the lyrics of the zikrs he recites.
If one had pure spiritual insight, that is one had attained pure gnosis, the goal of the mystic, one would, “Oškor mibinad ki zikr burdan migirad, šahri röšanī mibinad, harfaš mibina istodaī.” (See clearly that zikr is carrying it taking it, would see the city all alight, would be seeing the words.386) And, he motioned as if the words were suspended in midair moving up from the site of zikr into the realm of the highest heaven and the abode
384 Stuart Blackburn observed a similar phenomenon at work in Tamil ritual. The story text as inscribed onto palm leaves had to be present at the time of a ritual performance in order for it to be efficacious, even to the point that lithographed copies of the same text were insufficient. Stuart H. Blackburn, Singing of Birth and Death: Texts in Performance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 31–47. Margaret Mills, personal communication, May 2012. 385 This statement on the inexplicability of the spiritual dimensions of mystical practice was a common refrain for members of the halqa. In many spheres of mystical experience, the practicioner knows that a particular event has occurred, yet ones aql does not hold the capacity to understand how events transpired. 386 “Would be seeing the words,” approximates the, “Harfaš mibina istodaī.” “Istodaī” with a verb is a present progressive verbal construction unique to Tajik varieties of Persian. See John R. Perry, A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 274–276. 212 of angelic beings. Here, Sufi’s understanding of the relationship between the textual artifacts of his performance and the aural and oral components of his speech is beautifully illustrated. Words, even when spoken, have a physical existence, even when their source text is not present in the physical realm. As zikr is sung, the recited words could be seen by the spiritually mature ascending into the heavens.
The textual artifacts of his performance, the notebooks, chapbooks, and other texts that form the basis of Sufi’s performance repertoire, always exist as material objects, be they as words on the page in front of him as he performs or as suspended in midair during the course of performance. Thus, when Sufi “knows” his chosen performance text and has tacitly or explicitly committed it to memory, the textual artifacts lying before him as he sings are no longer textual aides memoires, instead they have become tokens of speech, symbols of the inherent materiality of his speech and a visible assurance that the words he sings are not his own but rather are the authoritative quoted speech of (long-dead) spiritually-accomplished Persian masters. These technologies of zikr performance illustrate to the adepts gathered that the speech being uttered has an authoritative antecedent and that they are not merely the words of the hofiz alone.
The symbolism of Sufi’s notebooks is analogous to Richard Firth Green’s “tokens of trothplight,”387 items that render the abstract a “thing-like physicality.” In the case of
Tajik Sufism, the abstract is the effervescence of mystical speech, and symbolic visibility renders it concrete. The token text in front of the hofiz helps render the abstractness of
387 Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England, 50. 213
Sufi’s performance a materiality it lacks. It is a kind of mnemonic for other devotees of the extrinsic quality of Sufi’s ǧazals. Thus, they exist beyond the single performance context as textual products and presumably authorized by the pir. Sufi’s notebooks are just as much “symbols to be witnessed,” as the intricate idioms of legal officialdom in
Ricardian England. 388 At the same time, both cases emphasize how literacy practices are imbedded within the material world. Spirituality, or more precisely, sacred speech, is only one limited venue in which the intersection of material practices and literacy, or the tangible and intangible in orientations towards literacy, is implicated.
Green’s particular distinction between the symbolic properties of magic and the magical properties of symbol is similarly relevant. In the realm of the “magical,” that is to say when a specific facet of social life is imbued with extra-sensical dimensions in which agency is ascribed to forces often beyond the perception of the uninitiated, the symbolic dimensions of textual objects are even more important to the functioning of group communicative processes.389 In the halqa, a forum in which the “Harfaš mibina istodaī,” the causative realm must be realized in symbol, and as such it is the symbol itself that may be said to be imbued with almost magical-like, sacred-creative properties.
The textual artifact is what authorizes the mystical performance, and it is the particular authority of its printed words which are efficacious for the potentiality of spiritual encounter.
388 Ibid., 53. 389 I should make a distinction here between the “magical” and “religious.” Green’s focus on the “magical” particularly resonates with ideas of how symbols with the tariqat operate. They themselves are imbued with an extra-sensory agency. However, in Persian usage, “jadu” or “magic” implies a dark force. Here, I do not conceive of the extra-sensory dimensions of Sufi practice in the same Persian frame, though Tajik critics of the tariqat might. 214
Some of the symbolic resonance of textual artifacts in halqa perhaps also derives from the centrality of the Qurʿanic text and the aural dimensions of its reception both historically and in the present and the parallels between reading dispositions of the core textual tradition of Islam and the performance of halqai zikr in Tajikistan. That is,
Muslims first encounter the Qurʿan as recitation, memorizing the lines and inculcating the beauty of Qurʿanic Arabic irrespective of their knowledge of the specificities of
Arabic grammar and tafsir (commentary). Further, the Qurʿan as textual object is also experienced visually in the artistry of calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts, or iconically as the visual focus of the guestroom of religious Tajiks. The internalization of such schemas and approaches towards the scriptural text as material object no doubt resonates with the ways ǧazal textual artifacts are similarly received. If the Qurʿan is first a visual token, primarily ingested aurally among Tajiks non-conversant in the particulars of
Qurʿanic Arabic, then to a certain extent the same model of textual orientation may be extended to other textual products of the Islamic discursive tradition such as the texts Sufi performs in halqai zikr.
Beyond the medium of performance and means of circulation, what Sufi’s artistry shares with other orientations towards oral tradition highlighted by scholars working with
Oral Formulaic Theory is what John Miles Foley calls, “traditional referentiality.”390
Sufi’s poetical rhetoric shares a metonymic relationship with Persian classical poetical tradition at large and develops a meaning making capacity from it. I would submit that thinking of the meaning-making capacity of ritual poetry performance as episodes of
390 John Miles Foley, Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 7. 215 situated metonymy helpfully reframes the issue away from the semantic fields of individual morphemes to a more holistic understanding of the texts’ oral reception and how the message is carried for maximal ritual cognizance. As Foley argues, “Each element in the phraseology or narrative thematics stands not simply for that singular instance but for the plurality of multiformity that are beyond the reach of textualization.”391
Each constituent utterance in the performance event represents not the individual meaning of its morphological construction, but rather indexes poetical tradition writ large. When Sufi first read the maddoh text and began to adapt it for inclusion in his performance repertoire, he stumbled when encountering the word, “maxzan.” (treasure, reservoir) He later admitted that he did not know its meaning. This lack of comprehension did not prevent him from appreciating the specific poem or continuing his adaptation. Similarly, his adaptation of Jununī’s ǧazal in the halqa evinces a kind of semantic simplification and avoidance of problematical word choice. Sufi’s lack of concern for the discrete units of the text highlights the ways that individual words operate metonymically and that the totality of Sufi poetical tradition circulating in the pir’s xonaqoh confers inherent meaning on individual performance pieces irrespective of the text’s constituent parts.392 Yet, at the same time, the hofiz still does choose texts for ritual performance. It is not that the constituent parts make no difference for ritual efficacy.
Rather, the specific morphemes used in a particular ǧazal and the halqas’ knowledge of
391 Ibid. 392 Ibid., 8. 216 their meanings and literary connotations are not the primary determinants of the hofiz’s choices.
With regards to authorship, theories of oral composition are even more apropos to understanding aspects of Sufi’s halqa performance. Sufi is not at all preoccupied with individual poetic authorship.393 In effect, it is this totality of tradition which in some ways acts as his texts’ author. As such, Foley calls the performer, the “nominal author.”394 In calling attention to the agency of holistic oral tradition in the composition of oral works, Foley almost dispenses with the individual artistry or unique poetic contribution and authorship of the performer. While I appreciate Foley’s emphasis on the role of “tradition” in the formation of the poet’s art, Sufi is much more than the
“nominal” author. Though he may make use of traditional formulae and Persian classical rhetoric, he is the active shaper of the discourse and as such deserves more credit for his artistry than “nominal author” implies.
For Sufi it is not relevant who “originally” composed the poem, for what purpose it was composed, or the original textual context of its publication.395 Its textuality renders it re-iterable and de-contextualizable.396 After copying it and his newly composed radif into his notebook, he does not similarly write down the name of the poem’s author, nor does he pause to consider any other aspect of its appearance in the complete text of
Hazrati pir. The new text can be more properly understood as an intercalation of the
393 Compare toEarl Waugh’s statement about Eyptian munshudin, “He introduces material on the basis of theme; source is secondary to the message he wishes to deliver.” Waugh, The Munshidin of Egypt: Their World and Their Song, 126. 394 Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning in Traditional Oral Epic, 8. 395 Interestingly, the poet was Ihrommiddin Mujaxarfī, the grandson of Šayx Abdulhay Mujaxarfī discussed in chapter 3. 396 Bauman and Briggs, “Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life.” 217 original poet’s words with Sufi’s new radif and repetitive frame added to the earlier poet’s work.397
Even more, Sufi’s formulaic radif shares an affinity with Persian poetical tradition more broadly. Taken together, authorship of the new performance text would be shared by the originator of the written poem, Sufi, and formulae derived from traditional bodies of mystical Persian literature, something akin to Bakhtinian heteroglossia. In toto, poetry performance within halqai zikr ritual exhibits unique orientations towards these new compositional frames. Yet still, the kinds of authorial acknowledgements necessarily attributed to mystical ǧazals due to the generic requirements of taxallus in some ways force the amalgamated text into an authorial rigidity lacking in its original provenance.
Ǧazals must be “signed,” though of course they can be “signed” inauthentically as well.
As such, within oral poetry performance, the particular site of attribution retains enormous rhetorical weight and holds the potential for performative manipulation.
Because of this performative potential and the importance of implicit or explicit “real” attribution in ǧazal performance, in the next section I deal in more detail with the specifics of authorial attributive practice in Tajik Sufism.
Interpolation, (Mis)attribution, and the Traditionalization of Ritual Speech
Issues of ascertaining genuine authorship with respect to Persian poetry significantly predate oral performance studies of Persian verse. Textual criticism and the craft of paleographers have aimed to authenticate extant manuscripts and autographs of
397 Such intercalation is a common mode of authorship is Sufi texts across the Islamic world. See Frishkopf, “Authorship in Sufi Poetry,” 5. 218
Persian texts with respect to understanding which components of a particular poet’s oeuvre emanated from the exemplary artist or secretary’s stylus and which were later interpolations, accretions, and the excreta of scribal exuberance over subsequent centuries. The Persian poetic genre that forms the bulk of Sufi ritual performance repertoires is the ǧazal.398 One of the generic features of the ǧazal is a poetic signature.
At some point in the last bayt of the poem, the poet includes his penname, his taxallus, phrased as self-praise or rather as simple identification. Yet, these poetic signatures cannot always be taken at face value. The phenomenon of spurious attribution is common in Persian poetical tradition at large.399
In regards to Persian oral tradition, significant bodies of Persian texts in oral circulation within Tajikistan are spurious in their authorial attributions. Gabrielle van den Berg found a full 71% the poems she collected in Tajik Badakhshan which were attributed to classical Persian poets were spurious in their attributions.400 Similarly,
Benjamin Koen found that verse orally recited for devotional healing purposes attributed to the masters of classical Persian verse, Rumi, Hofiz, Saʿdi, Sanoʿi, and others, had a much more tenuous relationship to their literary counterparts than is perhaps explicit to the performers themselves.401 Even more, Francis Trix in her detailed ethnography of
Bektashi pedagogical practice in an expatriate Albanian tekke in Michigan also observed
398 Sufi oral performance repertoires include, of course, much more than ǧazals. Didactic masnavī are also very common among Tajik Sufi groups. 399 I distinguish “spurious attribution” from “taqlid” in general and other manner of Persian poetic practices predicated on modes of imitation and response, e.g. istiqbāl and javābgūī. See Losensky, Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal. 400 van den Berg, Minstrel Poetry from the Pamir Mountains: a Study on the Songs and Poems of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan, 112. 401 Benjamin D. Koen, “Devotional Music and Healing in Badakhshan, Tajikistan Preventive and Curative Practices” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2003), 197. 219 the mystical and fluid use of oral verse. Baba, the šayx of the tekke, wielded and transformed Persian-derived verse from the Turkish poet Neyazi Misri to suit his own didactical intent.402 Further, Jean During observed how Čistī Sufis in Pakistan similarly alter canonized Persian mystical verse to uniquely suit their own musical and ritual ends by often adding spurious attributions to their newly improvised poetical creations.403
Poetical plasticity, intercalation, interpolation, and spurious attribution within the space of Tajik Sufi halqai zikr are constitutive of a number of larger social processes at work within the halqa. Despite the rigidity of textual artifacts extant within Tajik brotherhoods, in performance canonized written texts are modified towards performance ends. Poetic interpolation at some points serves the purpose of merely simplifying complex theological concepts,404 mystical vocabularies, and archaic performance registers which are beyond the comprehension of those in attendance at the ritual event.
In the first zikr described in this chapter, the hofiz significantly alters the last
ǧazal he performs. Significantly his redactions work to simplify some theological complexity and specificity from the original ǧazal. The hofiz eliminates allusions to the
Prophet’s night journey, a reference to Sura Muzammal from the Qurʿan, and an even more esoteric reference to the circumstances in which the Qurʿan was revealed to
Muhammad as narrated in the scriptural text. The Qurʿanic reference comes from Surat an-Najm, verse 9. In A.J. Arberry’s translation it reads, “Two bows’ length away, or
402 Trix, Spiritual Discourse: Learning with an Islamic Master, 69. 403 During, Musique et mystique dans les traditions de l’Iran, 183. 404 Cf. Walter Feldman, “Mysticism, Didacticism and Authority in the Liturgical Poetry of the Halvetî Dervishes of Istanbul,” Edebiyât 4, no. 2 (1993): 263. 220 nearer.” 405 The two bows are the length the angel Gabriel was from the Prophet
Muhammad as the Qur’an was revealed to him. In Jununī’s poem, he directly quotes the
Arabic, “Qavs av-adnoi Muhammad,” (The two bow lengths of Muhammad).406 Instead of quoting Jununī in his entirety, Sufi combines the first half of one misraʿ with the second half of the second misraʿ of the same bayt (line 27). The result is a layering of metaphor that it difficult to render into colloquial English. His combination changes “the bow” in the Qurʿanic reference, qavc, to its more colloquial Tajik meaning of “arch” in combination with the word “obod,” or abode.407 In another case, the hofiz’s adaptations of one line eliminate the common Persian mystical trope of “heaven” and the “throne”
(arš and kursi) (line 6 and 8). He substitutes “har šab” (every night) for “arš,” (line 6) so in the second misraʿ of the bayt, “kursi” (line 8) becomes less the “throne of heaven” than simply a chair to be ornamented with Muhammad as its pillow.
Interpolation in this instance serves the purpose of simplifying comprehension.
The hofiz says that an important aspect of achieving the requisite ritual hol is the comprehension of those in attendance. Indeed, their full and complete participation is vital to zikr. They must echo the hofiz’s radif, and as mentioned earlier their jazb is what alerts the hofiz as to whether the proper hol has been achieved. As such, the hofiz says that if one were to sing a complete ǧazal from the devon of Bedil, no one would
405 A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 244. 406 Jununī, Sadu yak ǧazal, 33. 407 Flagg Miller observed similar kinds of adaptation among Yemeni poets. They often adapted “written style” poems to conform with the “oral style” of their audience. Thus, literary complexity was simplified towards colloquial speech registers. Miller, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen, 320. 221 understand the meaning of the verses.408 However, that is not to say that the murids necessarily must “understand” the esoteric meanings behind each line of the ǧazal, but rather that the referential content of individual half lines is merely plain enough to the gathered murids to allow the invocation and emotive potential of their jazb to be realized.
It is significant that this particular ǧazal is excerpted from Jununī’s Madan-ul
Hol, and in its original context it acted as an explanatory bridge (šahr) and commentary between sections of more explicitly didactic couplets. Those verses directly engage with the allusions found in the ǧazal. In the ritual event, those same themes have not been broached, and as such their explanation is not necessarily relevant for the ritual to be efficacious. So, to help ease ritual cognizance, lessen the potential for his singing’s semantic ineffectualness, and because those verses have little intertextual connection to the ritual event at large, the hofiz improvises on Jununī’s verses, elides to join two verses together, and eliminates two altogether. Such adaptation of canonized text serves to simplify poetical complexity and subordinate poetical intent towards the larger goals of the ritual event.
Just as in the previous section I discussed how meaning is often derived holistically apart from the individual meanings of any specific morphological construction, the selfsame performance register can also lend potential difficulties to message transmission. While Tajiks of all social groups appreciate the artistry of Persian poetry, colloquial Tajiki interspersed with Turkisms and Russian vocabulary and syntax,
408 Bedil (1644-1721) is the foremost poet of the sabki hindi or the Indian style of Persian poetry. Bedil’s poetical style includes dense metaphors and other opaque constructions that are extremely difficult for contemporary casual Tajik readers to grasp (Moazzam Siddiqi, “Bīdel, ʿabd-al-qāder,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, Online Edition, December 15, 1989, http://www.iranica.com/articles/bidel-bedil-mirza-abd-al- qader-b.) 222 is distinct from literary Persian, specifically when such literary Persian is laden with sabki Hindi-esque poetical sensibilities. Thus, when asked about how adepts
“understand” poetic discourse, Sufi quickly added that he could not recite a ǧazal of
Bedil due to its complex language. Things like basic literary constructions, the richness of Persian vocabulary, and the presence of multiform Arabisms hold the potential to limit a ǧazal’s effectiveness as a ritual vehicle. As such, Sufi says:
Aknun guš kuned, Mana, man, manaminda čeni xudum mefahmam, Čeni mefahmidagī tahlil mekunam.
Yak xalifačai mefahmidagī xudaš tahlil mekunad. Lekin ǧazale da inja ast, ki dar halqai zikr hečki namefahma. BG: Hečki namefahma?
Hazrati Bedila tamoman heči namexarad. Vaya xonī, hamtu mešinī meguī, ki čī gufsodī? BG: Ho.
Aqlaš namegira, namefahma. Namefahma in čī gufsoday. Fahmiden? Baroi hamin az röyi in soda, yah sodaša judo mekunī, mexonī, ki vay fahmo.
Now listen. Here, in here, I understand a portion [of it] myself. I teach the portion I understand.
A learned disciple of the pir409 teaches [what he knows]. But there are ǧazals in here that no one in halqai zikr understands. BG: No one knows?
Absolutely no one buys [the works of] his excellency Bedil. Read him. You would sit and say, ‘What did it say?’410
409 Here, “learned disciple” is the “xalifača.” Literally, “representative” or “successor,” within the tariqat “xalifača” are attendants to the pir, his inner circle of disciples. The diminuitive “ča” suffix distinguishes them from the pir’s few immediate assistants. 410 I have translated “čī gufsodī?” as “What did it say?” “Gufsodī” is a contraction of “gufta istodagī,” Tajiki’s unique present progressive participle. Literally, the line might read, “What did it stand around saying?” Perry, A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar, 274–276. 223
BG: Yes.
His brain couldn’t grasp it. He wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t understand what is it he’s saying. You understand? Because of this, accordingly, you separate out a simple one or a simple one of his so that it will be understood.
Sufi argues that the meanings of many poetical texts are beyond the understanding of many devotees present at halqai zikr. So, Sufi accordingly “separates” out ǧazals that are simple, “soda.” Simplification, then is one function of poetic plasticity within ritual the bounds of ritual performance. Poetry is to be received and understood, and thus if a line, half-line, or word could potentially present problems for its intended audience, it can be excised.411 In the following sections, I discuss further what is communicated in performance and how adepts within ritual “understand” poetical texts.
Beyond simplification, at other points, poetic variation and hagiographic attribution are more programmatic and aimed towards specific pragmatic ends such as theological consistency or the exigencies of musical adaptation. As such, van den Berg argues that one facet that may have contributed to the Pamiri practice of poetic misattribution is the Ismaili practice of taqiyya, precautionary dissimulation.412 Due to overt political and social pressure, Ismaili Muslims living in Badakhshan were frequently forced to adopt theological orientations incompatible with Ismaili dictates. Accordingly,
Sufi verse with its mystical outlook was deemed at least superficially compatible with
Ismaili understandings of Islamic philosophy. So, Pamiri Ismaili Muslims have historically appropriated Rumi, Hofiz, Sanoʿi, Attor, and others into their own poetic
411 Compare to interpolations of this type in the Shahnameh manuscript tradition. Dick Davis, “Interpolations to the Text of Šāhnāmeh,” Persica 17 (2001): 38. 412 van den Berg, Minstrel Poetry from the Pamir Mountains: a Study on the Songs and Poems of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan, 109. 224 tradition and assumed their verse to be theologically consistent with Ismaili orthodoxy or even that the poets were also engaged in taqiyya and by extension in reality Ismailis in disguise. In short, the cultural capital of traditional Persian poetry is subsumed into the
Ismaili tradition even where its spiritual themes and attributes could be construed as in conflict with other group ideals.
Benjamin Koen argues that the existence of poems attributed to certain poets not found in written collections and poems with varying degrees of resemblance to written forms are due to a kind of performative pragmatism on the part of ritual performers.413 He says, “Improvisation here facilitates the function of maddah (prayer, meditation, worship, praise) and is a tool to maintain or preserve a given state of consciousness or mood.”414
The performer, in constant awareness of the level of emotive power his poems elicit, abandons or alters ineffective portions, repeats other sections, and with his own additions attempts to enhance the ecstatic experience of the entire speech event. On another level,
Koen observes a kind of maintenance improvisation. If a performer forgets the words of a certain poem, he may stop the recitation midstream, start again from the beginning, or intersperse portions with other forms of religious expression, e.g. a prayer or Qurʿanic recitation.
Frances Trix’s study of religious discourse among expatriate Bektashi Sufis observed similar poetical alterations geared towards the pragmatics of the wider speech event in which the poetry was embedded. Her muršid, Baba, conventionally taught his
413 Koen, “Devotional Music and Healing in Badakhshan, Tajikistan Preventive and Curative Practices,” 177. 414 Ibid., 191. 225 murids via the recitation and explication of mystical verse called nefes. He drew such poetry from Arabic, Turkish, and Persian literary sources, as well as from his significant repertoire of orally-learned poetical forms. Rather than always reciting them verbatim just as he had learned them or reading them from a text, he sometimes altered nefes to fit his own didactic intentions. If a line, or partial line, did not resonate clearly with the situation at hand, there was the freedom to adapt the verse to achieve a desired effect.
Since such interpolation and improvisation were peripheral to the object of Trix's study, she does not attempt to link each of Baba’s poetical utterances to their literary counterparts. However, in one case after explicating the characteristics of a “perfect murshid,” Baba recites a couplet on the same theme from Šayx Neyazi Misri, a sixteenth- century Turkish šayx of the Naqšbandiyya. In the second hemistich of the first line, he modifies Misri's line to fit a line of a narrative told earlier in the speech event.415 It was not until later that Trix was able to recognize Baba's adaptations. For my purposes here,
Baba’s interpolations serve to reinforce the fact that written Sufi poetical forms are often malleable and are altered in performance to fit the specific orientations of the performance event.
The kind of improvisatory poetical work both van den Berg and Koen observed in
Tajikistan and Trix described in Bektashi circles is also present in Pakistani Čistī samo.
The ethnomusicologist Jean During recorded similar poetical interpolations in Čistī performances of Persian verse. During credits the revised and altered verses to their
415 Trix, Spiritual Discourse: Learning with an Islamic Master, 69. 226 subordinate role within samo ritual.416 The specific function of Persian poetry is subordinated to the music it accompanies. In the Čistī context he studied, the ecstasy
(vajd) inducing capacity of the text of the poems helps ornament the music but is not the raison d'etre of the gathering in and of itself. The idiom of Persian verse is thus changed to fit the metrical requirements of its attendant musicality.
To some extent, interpolation and poetic variation can at times be inadvertent or the result of ignorance of the written canon from which the poem derives. For example, in two of the historical narratives discussed in chapter 3, the narrators, Mahmudjon
Turajonzoda and Jununī’s descendant, offered poetic glosses to communicate how Jununī was received by the amir, his ulamo, and the other literati of his day. Here are the two bayt:
Molam baroi dardi dili ošiqon ast, Na baroi sanjidani fosiqon ast.
My goods are for lovers’ heartsickness, Not to be tested by the lewd.
In kitob ahli dardi ošiq ast, Na baroi didani har fosiq ast.
This book [is for] the lovesick, Not for every indecent person to see.
The bayt reference the same text from Jununī’s Maʿdan.417 In the written version, the bayt much more closely approximates the second version. The only textual difference is an ezafe between “kitob” and “ahli.” Yet despite this variation, each bayt retains a semantic coherence, and the specific variations are not necessarily indexed by the bayt’s
416 During, Musique et mystique dans les traditions de l’Iran, 183. 417 Jununī, Kulliyoti Ma’dan-ul Hol, 881. 227 larger speech context, i.e. the historical narrative in which they are embedded. That is, the difference between “test” and “seeing” does not hinge on the details of each narrative,418 nor does the shift to “goods” from “book” reference a wider evaluation of
Jununī’s import beyond the contents of his mystical poetry in the first narrative that the second narrative later limits to the contents of his writings alone. It would seem evident that the differences between the two lines of poetry can be better attributed to inadvertent modifications or to an unrefined command of Jununī’s works on the part of his descendant, in contrast to Mahmudjon’s greater intimacy with the text that Jununī’s descendant may lack.
When During encounters such spurious verse evident by its supposed simplicity he easily dismisses it as apocryphal. He attributes the poets’ simplicity to the non-native
Persian speaking Pakistani poets’ insufficient and uncertain grasp of the Persian poetic tradition. He says, “A cela s'ajoutent les faiblesses des transmetteurs qui souvent, faute d'en saisir tout le sens, altèrent des mots et des vers ou y introduisent des interpolations incongrues.”419 During's example and reasoning, particularly his questioning of the literary merits of oral Persian verse and the transmitters’ capacity for complex composition are no doubt somewhat incongruous to Tajik Persian poetical tradition. The
Tajik linguistic register much more closely approximates classical Persian verse than does Baluchi. The broader relevance of During’s comments is the relationship between the lexical dimension of classical verse and its performance register. There can be a
418 The lone exception might be the connotation of “weighing/evaluating” in “sanjidan,” perhaps unconsciously evoking the censorship of the Soviet period. 419 During, Musique et mystique dans les traditions de l’Iran, 183. “Added to this are the weaknesses of transmitters which often alter words and introduce incongruous interpolations because they could not understand fully.” 228 striking difference between the two. In both During’s case and in the performance of
Tajik Sufi halqai zikr, the lexical components of the canonistic text can be less important than affect, i.e. an efficacious ritual hol. The point remains that Sufi poetry by the great medieval Persian poets is often fundamentally altered in mystical performance, and relatively recent poetical creations in the forms of older verse can in turn be spuriously attributed to the same poets, sometimes due to an unfamiliar grasp of canonized Persian literary tradition.
Beyond simplification, pragmatic orientation, and inadvertent modification or variation due to poetic ignorance, the much more compelling reason for the presence of interpolated taxallus, poetic variation, and spurious attributions is the authority-lending nature of ascribing mystical verse to Persian literary masters.420 If it was merely the hofiz’s words being recited it would not be true mystical speech. But that is not to say that it is “authentic” authorship that is relevant. It matters very little whether the line of verse is “correctly” attributed to a long-dead Sufi poet. Rather, the importance of
(mis)attribution is in the authority it lends to the speech context in which it is embedded.
That is, quoting a particular poetical gloss derives its rhetorical power from purported authoritative authorship. It is of little consequence within the performance frame whether a specific attribution is spurious. There is a contrast here between Persian historiographical practices in which authors would cite multiple conflicting accounts of
420 A parallel example could be the case of the rhetoric of the Persian epic, the Shahnameh. See Dick Davis, “The Problem of Ferdowsî’s Sources,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 116, no. 1 (1996): 49–50. Van den Berg also rightly emphasizes the authority-lending power of poetic attribution. She writes that such misattribution allows for ease of transmission because of its new “value.” van den Berg, Minstrel Poetry from the Pamir Mountains: a Study on the Songs and Poems of the Ismailis of Tajik Badakhshan, 109. 229 the same event directly as they were related and conclude with a statement to the effect of
“God knows best what happened,” letting the reader sort out the “truth.” Instead, here the hofiz engages in an adaptive process during performance, sometimes morphing the text to his ritual ends, and concludes with an authorization of his adaptations in the form of a mystical signature of a past Sufi master, in effect giving that person’s authorization for the hofiz’s poetical license.
Further, even when a particular derivation can be legitimated, the degree of correspondence between the specific text and its canonistic written counterpart is similarly irrelevant for its semantic or contextual resonance to be communicated. In the case of the verse van den Berg collected, the verses’ authority, then, does not derive from their unique and singular resonance with Ismaili theology or practice in the Pamir
Mountains. Rather, the poems become authoritative because they are marked as traditional. Because they resemble canon and their fragments are evidenced in the tomes of medieval verse, they are able to cross boundaries normal discourse cannot.
Some of the power of halqai zikr performance is rendered possible by the discursive support provided by spurious attribution, interpolations, and poetic variation.
Such practices traditionalize Sufi’s performance repertoire. By traditionalization, I refer to the active ongoing process of rendering new poetical projects authoritative by creating new products through textual bricolage.421 Items of newer provenance like Jununī’s
ǧazals or orally-derived items not found in the textual editions of poets like Rumi or
Hofiz are equated with “authentic” compositions of Persian literary masters.
421 Here, my focus is on a concept of tradition rooted, “not in time, but in social life.” Hymes, “Folklore’s Nature and the Sun’s Myth,” 353. 230
This kind of traditionalization has even greater resonance among Sufi groups as it continually reinforces emic notions of how power and knowledge function in the order through the idiom of master-disciple. The master-disciple relationship, the simultaneous emic and etic root paradigm for explaining models of Sufi practice across the Islamic world, thus is continually perpetuated in performance. Traditionalization of poetry then serves the purpose of perpetuating a kind of mythic master-disciple relationship.
Performance creates a direct silsila, or Sufi lineage, relationship between Rumi, Hofiz, and others and the adepts gathered for the halqa. So as a poet’s verses are recited, or verses recited are apocryphally attributed to him, in practice Rumi or Jununī becomes the brotherhood's teaching pir. The only one truly authorized to “speak” in zikr is the pir, the one entrusted with transmitting mystical pedagogy and comportment to his adepts.
Spurious attribution or Jununī’s level inclusion alongside the taxallus Shamsi Tabrizī allows them to “speak” directly in the ritual event just as would the present pir. The taxallus performance makes their poetry a direct quote, even where the specific half lines have been modified towards performance ends as described above.
In order for poetry performance within zikr to retain and wield such power, poetry necessarily must be (mis)attributed to an authentic, grand sacred past. Just as some of the symbolic resonance of textual tokens may be attributed to the symbolism of the Qurʿanic text, there is also a normative Islamic resonance with the kinds of attributive practices of
Tajik Sufism. In order for a hadith to be “read” as authentic and authoritative, it must possess an attested, sound (sahih) isnod (chain of transmission). Taxallus attribution in
Tajik Sufism is a kind of isnod of poetic authority, legitimating the “soundness” of the
231 poetic product. In this regard, misattribution or the conflation of centuries of sacred history and the equalization of poets of both classical and more recent provenance is not just the result of carelessness, ignorance, or an insufficient command of the literary poetic idiom. Instead, relatively new poems in order to be “read” as mystical speech must be traditionalized.422 Traditionalization is the process whereby new verse becomes canon and by which the authority of the fictive and “real” pir is reinforced. In some ways, I conceive of zikr texts as what Susan Stewart calls a “distressed genre.”423 Within bodies of poetical texts used in halqa ritual, as she argues, there is a “Gap between past and present as a structure of desire, a structure in which authority seeks legitimation by recontextualizing its object and thereby recontextualizing itself.”424 It is this transformative potential that I argue is operationalized as Sufi verse is performed.
However, it is not just the attributive process, be it spurious or otherwise, that lends legitimacy and weight to the performance project. The particular vehicle for such traditionalization lends further credence to its legitimation. The performance register itself contributes towards message production. In the next section, I explore the specific resonance of poetical discourse as a vehicle of message production and transmission and the means whereby the specific performance modes of poetry performance enables certain kinds of meanings to be (re)produced.
422 Traditionalization in this way “minimizes” the “intertextual gaps” between prior discourse, i.e. the Persian canon, and the performance text(s). This minimization of the intertextual gaps between bodies of discourse via traditionalization, “is a potent means of infusing the discourse with authority.” Bauman, A World of Others’ Words: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality, 157. 423 Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 67. 424 Ibid., 74. 232
Authoritative Performance: Persian Poetry and the Hegemony of Proverbial Speech
Features of the poetic performance register, i.e. the specific generic conventions of poetic ritual speech and its incumbent specialized performance vocabulary, also lend support to the hofiz’s discursive project. Classical Persian poetry is a specific, way of speaking in the Hymesian sense,425 a specific mode of discursive engagement predicated on a recurrent corpus of “speech styles” operational among Tajik Sufis. These styles, namely the stylized chanting of classical Persian poetry or new poetical creations which adhere to the selfsame generic conventions, evince formulized manners of message reception in the audience. The specific “responsibility” of the performer,426 the hofiz, for the display of communicative competence in the classical Persian speech register and the discursive support such responsibility provides for emic conceptions of how spiritual power is transmitted within the halqa contributes to how meaning is created among the halqa’s participants. In this section, my emphasis is the specific power of poetical speech, specifically the almost hegemonic pull of poetical ways of speaking among
Tajiks and the proverbial resonance of poetry performance that lend further credence to zikr performance.
Setrag Manoukian argues that in Iran, “Poetry is the form in which Iranians experience themselves as subjects endowed with the power to act and live in the world.”427 In contrast to other forms of discourse, like history, poetry necessitates acts of interpretation and the inherent multivalent, implicit nature of the poetical medium opens
425 Dell Hymes, “Ways of Speaking,” in Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking, ed. Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 433–451. 426 Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 11. 427 Manoukian, City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History and Poetry, 205. 233 up the possibility for novel re-imaginations of the past and new configurations of the present. Yet, paradoxically, Manoukian observes that poetical discourse is the dominant medium of speech and message transmission in the Persian-speaking world, and by extension, poetry is thus, “the dominant form of knowledge.”428 This kind of cultural hegemony of the poetical speech act is similarly at work in Tajik Sufi ritual. Webb
Keane argues, “If the normative is the language of political hegemony, then ritual should be hegemony’s most powerful instrument, its authoritativeness bearing some relation to the distribution of political authority within a society.”429 Putting Manoukian’s concept of the power inherent in poetical ways of speaking in Iran in dialogue with Keane’s observation about the conservatism and hegemonic pull of ritual language, one can begin to piece together some of the multifaceted resonance of poetry as a medium of authoritative speech.
I would submit that one of the chief reasons for the hegemonic pull of poetical performance registers is in the ways poetry within performance frames or approximates proverbial speech. The historical literary interrelationship of Persian proverbs and mystical poetry has been explored in depth elsewhere.430 On the one hand, Persian poets have made great use of proverb and aphoristic constructions in the poetry. For example, in the case of the Masnavī, Mills has written that, “The language of the Masnavī is so
428 Poetry is so highly revered among Persian-speakers, even those far removed temporally and geographically from Persian proper. Cf. Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Classical Poetry as Cultural Capital in the Proverbs of Jews from Iran: Transformations of Inter-textuality” (Paper presented at The Form of Value in Globalized Traditions conference, The Ohio State University, March 6, 2009). 429 Keane, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society, 6. 430 See especially Korosh Hadissi, “A Socio-Historical Approach to Poetic Origins of Persian Proverbs,” Iranian Studies 43, no. 5 (2010): 599–605.; Paul E. Losensky, “Fanā and Taxes: A Brief Literary History of a Persian Proverb,” Edebiyât 7 (1996): 1–20. 234 densely aphoristic that in many passages it is hard to decide what should not count as a proverb or proverbial usage.”431 To paremiologists, the difficulty in some ways is determining whether the proverb in current circulation originated with the poet in question or whether the poet made use of a proverb already in circulation at the time of his writing.
Here, I take proverbial speech to be contextually-dependent “quoting behavior”432 which uses talk with a historical antecedent to speak pedagogically into the present performance context.433 I am not so concerned with how mystical poetry performance within zikr correlates with the formal features of internationally dispersed standard proverb generic conventions,434 e.g. related to short length, single theme, etc., rather my point is that such poetry marshals the collective wisdom of mystical ages past in support of the hofiz’s performative project.
One potential objection to the foregoing discussion could be the issue of singular authorship.435 By definition, proverbs are authorized collectively, anonymously, or attributed to, “the talk of the elders of bygone times.”436 In contrast, Persian ǧazals purportedly are singularly authored and are “signed” by their authors in the last bayt of the poem. Yet, as has already been discussed, more often than not within performance such authorship, more a factor of poetic intercalation, can be ascribed to holistic mystical
431 Mills, “Folk Tradition in the Masnavī and the Masnavī in Folk Tradition,” 136. 432 J. Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 27. 433 Briggs, Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art, 104. 434 Ben-Amos, “Analytical Categories and Ethnic Genres.” 435 For example, Galit Hasan-Rokem, “Proverb,” in Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments: A Communications-centered Handbook, ed. Richard Bauman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 130. 436 Briggs, Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art, 4. 235 tradition rather than to a singular originator of the poem. It is with its attendant
“traditional referentiality” that poetry, even when (mis)attributed to a long-dead Sufi master, retains at its core a proverb-like means of message transmission.
Even more, in quotation the author of a specific poem, especially when the poem is šeʿri xalqi, (folk poetry), is glossed as simply “the poet.” For example, in one hagiographic text, the writers describe the eight stations along the mystical path. After a few sentences relating some specifics about the step, they offer two half lines or two full lines of poetry, often without specific attribution. Instead, they write, “šoir farmuda”437
(The poet has said.) Thus, authorship is sometimes even explicitly attributable to anonymous tradition rather than individual artists. And even when there is a singular poet to whom a verse is credited, still the performer often adapts the poem to his performance context using the rhetorical devices of classical verse and the resulting intercalation is multi-authored and possibly even better attributable to tradition at large.
In addition, poetry as a discursive medium is inherently multivalent, immanently re-iterable, able to traverse multiple speech contexts, and readily insertable in varied situational contexts. In Tajikistan in particular, classical Persian poetry is even farther removed from the colloquial speech register with its sometimes archaic vocabulary, formulaic structure, and courtly dialect features. Such poetry evinces a “complex but open-ended semantic structure.”438 In some traditions, proverbs are offered at the outset of performance as succinct nuggets of wisdom to be elaborated and explicitly semantically unpacked either in overt explanatory discourse or through other means such
437 Darvozī and Badalipur, Zindaginomai Hazrati Ešoni Abdurahmonjon ibni Ešoni Porsoxoja, 29. 438 Losensky, “Fanā and Taxes: A Brief Literary History of a Persian Proverb,” 3. 236 as narrative. In contrast, within Sufi groups in Tajikistan, poetry is quoted at the conclusion of discourse, as an encapsulating summary and succinct “proof” of the performer’s point. These lines of verse are offered as a gloss on the narrator’s topical focus. The performer constructs a temporal assemblage between his own speech and the collective wisdom of mystical tradition at large voiced through the final poetry text. This link firmly established, the proof is complete and irrefutable. No further elaboration is needed.
The rhetorical intent of these lines of Jununī’s verse was to appeal proverbially to the wisdom of a past mystical master as a final proof, validating the thrust of the now complete narration. Conversely, in zikr, if the specific ways of speaking hegemonically operating within Tajik Sufi halqai zikr ritual are proverbial discourse, oftentimes enigmatic in referential content and esoteric in pragmatic potential, then it begs the question as to how devotees read poetry within performance. That is, if there exists a kind of semantic gap between the intent of the hofiz and the other devotees in attendance at the halqa ritual, then how do adepts “understand” the hofiz’s purported message? In the next section, I discuss some of the potential ways ritual is received especially when the referential content of the verses is beyond the comprehension of the receivers of the text.
“Understanding” Ritual
The multivalence of poetic and proverbial speech in general, coupled with the esotericism and enigmatic quality of mystical verse in particular, complicates any simple
237 discussion of how devotees “understand” ritual. Meaning is coterminous with the experience engendered in ritual. As Glenn Hinson argues, “Speakers draw belief, knowledge, and experience into a single referential field.”439 There are at least three competing levels of esotericism at work within the brotherhood. The first is an emic, mystical discourse of the botin and zohir, that is the hidden/inner and outward/apparent.
The second level is an ongoing explicit dialogue of siru asror, mystery and secrets, particularly directed towards how my interlocutors viewed my ethnographic enterprise.
And finally, there are competing potential discrepancies between the overt ritual message and the oftentimes distinct ways that devotees receive that message within halqai zikr ritual.
The first level, the competing dialectic between the hidden reality of mystical experience and its outward apparent dimension, is perpetually the stuff of Sufi conversation. There is a divine realm which remains hidden to the uninitiated, a sphere to which one’s intellect has no recourse. It is this sphere of interaction which is beyond the awareness of those outside of the halqa. A related discourse of mystery and secrets
(siru asror) also accompanies much of the talk within the pir’s xonaqoh. This discourse permeated almost all of my interaction with Sufis in and around Dushanbe. In this regards, devotees frame the pir as being able to distinguish one’s true niyat, intention, if one is merely seeking the revelation of “secrets,” i.e. the wisdom of the Sufis, as a curiosity seeker, with the intention to spoil, or perhaps with the intention accessing these secrets without the proper mediation through and relationship with the pir. The pir’s
439 Hinson, Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel, 9. 238 judgment of the seeker’s intention determines how the seeker is received within the halqa.
One devotee framed this as, “Hazrati pir maqami didani dil dara.” (His excellency the pir has [attained] the stage of seeing the heart.)440 The pir thus has the ability to distinguish the inner workings of one’s heart and determine one’s motive in seeking out the pir and the halqa. The pir subsequently, “Tamošo mekunad dar dil.
Duroǧ gufta namešavad.” (Looks around in the heart. Lies can’t be uttered.) The pir will travel, “safar,” within one’s inner being, and as such nothing can be hidden because lies cannot hide the reality of one’s spiritual intentions. As the pir examines one’s heart, there are physical indications of his inner travels. A person may shake or sob uncontrollably. If the pir determines that the potential devotee has sinned, or ignored the pir’s earlier instructions and dictates, the pir may also silently cry, mourning because of his disciple’s ǧaflat (forgetfulness). All of this is part of the pir’s hidoyat, his guidance.
On another occasion, a hofiz was telling his pir, in my presence, about the asror that he had been sharing with me, particularly the botin dimensions of zikr performance.
The pir quickly offered a segue into a discussion of botin and zohir. The qalb (the heart), he said, can hear, see, touch, and feel. In short, the qalb has the sensory ability of all of the zohir sense organs. In contrast, the eyes cannot hear and the ears cannot see. When the secrets of the heart will be revealed (Asrori qalbī kušoda šavad), then the solik, the devotee, will be able to understand all mysteries. Throughout this conversation, the pir
440 One of the stages along the mystical path. Similar to traditional Naqšbandī understandings of the maqam-e mushāhada. See Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh, 132. 239 had refused to communicate directly with me. The complete conversation was mediated through the hofiz. The direct implication of his discussion was that it is the qalb that allows for understanding, not the senses with which I was attempting to grasp the hofiz’s purported secrets. So, even if I had “heard” or “seen” the secrets of the tariqat, I would not understand them with intellectual inquiry alone.
To a certain extent, these dismissals of my pursuit of ethnographic knowledge and the obfuscation that often followed under the rubric of “secrets” worked as a kind of emic
“disclaimer of performance,”441 denying the speaker’s performative responsibility for the discourse that followed his admonitions. Once the difference between what is apparent and what is unseen is introduced and the discourse of “siru asror” is invoked, then all of what the speaker states is merely “beaqlī,” foolishness, because as has been stated, in regard to the mysteries of the unseen, “Aql toǧri namigirad.” (The mind cannot grasp it correctly.) These admissions deny the speaker’s performative competence and shift such responsibility elsewhere. Indeed, as one adept noted, “To xudo naxaya, sir kušoda nameša.” (Until God wills it, the secret will not be revealed.) One pir poetically added that there are so many siru asror that they would fill numerous books. If only I submitted to his guidance, I would have to write two “books,” i.e. two dissertations, one devoted to topics that the mind can grasp and another to those that it cannot.
In some ways, the ethnographic enterprise itself invites a more overt discussion of the dynamics between insider and outsider discourse in the tariqat and the competing epistemological constructions they engender. Ethnographic methodology and the
441 Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, 21–22. 240 production of scholarly knowledge buck the norms of adab within the halqa. Specific ideas regarding to whom a question can be directed and its appropriate time and place, what topics are considered proper for public discussion, and the sequence of one’s familiarity with the “secrets” of the order all are discordant with standard modes of ethnographic inquiry. That is not to say that Tajik Sufi groups do not possess emic metacommunicative routines.442 On the contrary, the nature of the mystical enterprise is such that explicit group teaching events and the opportunity for adepts to seek specific guidance and clarification of teaching texts are constituent of learning modes within the halqa. However, most basically, one is not permitted to broach discussion with the pir until one has formally submitted to his guidance and embarked on the completion of the vazifa he assigns,443 hence the mediated conversation between the pir and me. During my time in the xonaqoh, I did not observe another occasion when an outsider approached the pir, so I cannot speak to whether the pir used the same mediated conversation strategy with others outside of the tariqat.
Beyond the discourses of botin/zohir and siru asror, the third level of esotericism in the halqa is directly enacted within the ritual performance frame. As has already been alluded to in this chapter, the referential content of mystical poetry performance is often explicitly enigmatic and oftentimes adepts lack the requisite literary and religious vocabulary to parse its particulars. Yet, as Glenn Hinson has noted, “Religious experience… grants a special kind of knowing,” that has no need for objective
442 Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask: a Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 443 Cf. Flueckiger, “The ‘Deep Secret’ and Dangers of Karamat: Miraculous Acts, Revelation, and Secrecy in a South Indian Sufi Tradition.,” 161. 241 verification.444 Discussing the gap between those who “understand” and those who don’t,
Sufi says:
Mefahma, naǧz, bistaš panzda ta mefahma, bisti digaš hamin namefahma, hamin ba xudo, megun, ki un asta-asta merad-diya. Asta-asta, asta-asta, asta-asta. in tariqati haminxelin merad-diya. Hamin buromada-buromada, buromada jamʿ mešad, jamʿ mešad, jamʿ mešad, bad vaqti vayda meoya asta-asta. Bad yak vaqt mehfama, ki hamin dar borai čī guftagī, čī maʿnī dorad.
Hamin hozir dar Tojikiston hamin mardu odamo yoro šudagī, solikoi yoš, manamin yak xel čizoi šohidoi.
sinnu solda šast-haftod raftagī,
nišon tiī, namefahma, ina soddatar karda navistagī mega: Biyo, ey dindor gar firdavs mexohī, ibodat kun. Anamin čī maʿnī dorad? Biyo, ey din, maʿneš mefah… BG: Ha… Gar firdavs, yaʿne agar da heč mexohī… Ibodat kun, xay soda karda navistagī. BG: Ho, ho, ho Yake az bihištdor yaktaš nomaš firdavs ast. BG: Ho… Behtarin… Ho… Nomaš Firdavs ast. Mexohī duroyī? Duroyī? Ibodat kun.
They understand well, twenty or fifteen of them understand, twenty don’t understand. In this way, they say, that they are going along, Slowly, slowly, slowly.
444 Hinson, Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel, 10. 242
This path445goes along like this. Like this, it comes, comes, comes, gathers together, gathers together, gathers together. Then, at its time, it comes slowly. Then, one time he understands, that it is like this. About what’s being said. What meaning it has.
Like this, now in Tajikistan these here men and people are wounded, the devotees are young, I’ve witnessed things like this.
[Those] Sixty, seventy years gone in age
You show them, they don’t understand, here it’s written more simply, it says: Come, Oh believer, if you want paradise, worship. What meaning does this have? “Come, Oh believ…” you understand the meaning? BG: Yes. “If paradise,” that is to say if you want in nothing. “Worship,” that’s written simply. BG: Yes, yes, yes. One of the names of [seven] heavens is called paradise. BG: Good. The best BG: Good. Its name is paradise. Do you want to enter? To enter? Then worship.
Sufi’s description of how knowledge accrues over time is indicative of the predicament already described. Many adepts, as many as half of those in attendance according to Sufi, do not “understand” the ritual texts. Learning the parameters of mystical speech, “understanding” what it means, and being able to function appropriately within halqa is an iterative process. Much of the emotion seen in ritual is not authentic,
445 I have translated “tariqat” here as “the path.” More specifically, he is referring to the Sufi path and the brotherhood in particular. 243 according to one šayx. The audience is just reacting from their “röhi aivanī,” (animal spirit), not from their qalb. Through a redundancy of discursive routine, the result of the weekly repetition of zikr formulae, the steady accrual of the norms of mystical comportment, and the repeated exposure to ritual texts, they are able to attain true
“understanding.”
In some ways ritual texts are what Joan Radner and Susan Lanser call “coded” speech.446 Radner and Lanser’s work specifically deals with coding strategies used by women to communicate in arenas of subordination. That is, strategies which enable women to communicate to other women, but whose messages are undetectable to male power. Radner and Lanser are particularly concerned with communication that must be protected and could potentially be dangerous if expressed openly. Their conception is useful to think how ritual speech is expressed within the halqa. While in the halqa coding may not serve as a kind of “weapon of the weak” or as merely a “public transcript” hiding the true nature of communication,447 and though during the Soviet period the obvious benefits of enigmatic language are readily apparent, ritual language is still (at the least) biform. The audience composition is complex, as some members of the audience are competent to decode the inherent esotericism of the poetical texts and others have yet to be initiated into that knowledge and thus are still liminal in their relation to group power centers. Radner and Lanser’s conception of coding is limited to the way
446 Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser, “Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures,” in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan N. Radner (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 1–29. 447 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 244 subordinate actors approach centers of power, but it can just as easily be applied to the ways that those in power use coding to maintain their power.
Poetry with its inherent multivalence is particularly suited to “coding” strategies.
Some potential multiplex messages of the poems may be explicitly apparent even to those unable to decode their particulars.448 Some in attendance may readily “read” poetical texts in an explicit (zohir) light, while in contrast, others may possess the requisite skill to decode the more mundane’s true (botin) mystical import.
Darsi Tariqat
In light of the attendees varying degrees of ritual cognizance during halqai zikr and the multiplex messages transmitted, the question remains what exactly is modeled to adepts in attendance beyond the particularities of the ritual text or the traditional inherent referentiality of oral verse. I would submit that one of the chief components of mystical pedagogy, the “message” of ritual and what devotees are enjoined to master is a mystical disposition, a way of inhabiting the world through a Sufi interpretative frame. Much contemporary anthropological scholarship concerning Islamic life has focused on Muslim models of ethical subject cultivation.449 These studies have shifted the frame of scholarly reference to think through the ways Muslims actively fashion their own moral selves and are creating new moral subject positions.
448 Radner and Lanser, “Strategies of Coding in Women’s Cultures,” 5. 449 Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. ; Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics.; Silverstein, Islam and Modernity in Turkey. 245
Sufi adepts in Tajikistan are similarly engaged in projects geared towards reclaiming a “correct” way of being in the world predicated on the inculcation of Sufi models of comportment and meditation, simultaneously cultivated by collective and personal ritual exercise. However, Sufism in Tajikistan is also experiential. To further illustrate this point, I discuss one additional site in which Sufi practice is experienced and in which mystical dispositions are further modeled, regular group teaching events called
“lessons of the path” or “darsi tariqat.”
Many Tajik Sufis participate as a halqa beyond individual consultations with the pir, sohbat, and group ritual exercise like halqai zikr described above. Members of the halqa gather together weekly after morning prayers in the pir’s home to hear the pir teach on mystical texts, like the Maktuboti Imom Rabbonī,450 Rumi’s Masnavī, or even portions from Bedil’s devon.451 The texts provide the focus of the event. After members of the brotherhood have gathered and each has received an individual blessing from the pir, the more senior members of the brotherhood sit around the pir. The pir says a bismilloh and begins reading the day’s text. The specific group that I routinely visited had been going through the Maktuboti Imam Rabbonī for the past few months, and by the time of my attendance had reached letter number sixty four.
450 The Maktuboti Imom Rabbonī are the collected letters of Šayx Aḥmad Sirhindī (1564-1624), a 16th century Naqšbandī pir and the founder of the mujaddidī line of the Naqšbandi lineage. Yohanan. Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi: An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). Sirhindī has been an important figure in the history of Sufism in Central Asia and his writings concerning the “renewal” of Naqšbandī thought in the Indian subcontinent have been widely circulated and studied among Sufi groups. 451 Dudoignon, “From Revival to Mutation: The Religious Personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de- Stalinization to Independence (1955-91).” 246
The pir read from a worn lithographed copy of Sirhindi’s work. A few others in attendance also read along from tattered copies of the work. The pir read each letter word for word, stopping occasionally to define unfamiliar terminology or even to quote a bayt of poetry intertextually related to the same theme. Specialized mystical terms such as “zot” (essence), “odami itloq” (the man set free from his nafs), and “fanoi odam”
(annihilation of the murid’s self, as opposed to annihilation in the divine or the Prophet
Muhammad) were succinctly defined, and he continued reading on. He concluded with the benedictory phrase, “May you understand it in the coming week.” Then, he opened the floor for questions. Most times, only a few murids responded, asking basic questions like the meaning of “alhamdulilloh,” (praise/thanks to God), the distinction between
Qodirī and Naqšbandī zikr formulae, or whether a certain kind of fish was halol. Most often, in this way the questions diverged sharply from the text of the letter.
Darsi tariqat, though ostensibly about the explication of arcane and extremely valued mystical texts, teaches adepts much more than the particulars of Sufi theosophy.
Instead, those in attendance gain mastery of a mystical vocabulary and interpretative frame and learn how to imitate models of comportment towards the pir and those farther along the mystical path. In short, what is transmitted is a mystical disposition, in which to a certain extent the meanings of the individual lines of Sirhindi’s letters are irrelevant.
These dispositions are encountered experientially, and as such speech events like darsi tariqat may be more readily interpretable as ritual, with an attendant formulism, sacral symbolism, and performance tradition. Appropriately, Arthur Buehler calls these kinds
247 of teaching orientations the “ritualization of religious knowledge.”452 Mystical pedagogy is about more than the kinds of subject formation so eloquently chronicled in the anthropological literature. These dispositions are to be phenomenologically enacted.
In subsequent conversations after dars, adepts stress the “terms” learned during their time with the pir, in contrast to themes or points of spiritual or profane application.
They quote back the pir’s short Tajik-colloquial explications of Sirhindi’s terminology, yet more often than not ignore the text of the letter. When describing the event, they similarly stress the rules governing who sits where, when one can approach the šayx, and the particular vazifa enjoined on them at their personal conferences with the pir. The textual core of dars is seemingly interchangeable and irrelevant to communicating the norms of practice that are to be experienced. Yet again, as with the discussion above of zikr, different members of the group with varying degrees of mystical initiation, Persian and Arabic literacy, and backgrounds in Islamic sciences no doubt engage with the content differently than others. Also, the text is not irrelevant to the extent that it can be dispensed with entirely. The pir goes through Sirhindi’s letters chronologically in the manner of traditional Muslim pedagogy. The goal is to “master” each text before moving on to the next, so that over the period of several years one has gained enough competence to potentially teach the text.
Conclusion: Tradition, Canonization, and Revivalism
452 Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh, 27. 248
Both the performance of traditionalized poetry in halqai zikr and didactic speech events like darsi tariqat implicate the kinds of discursive projects of newly textualized
Tajik Sufism as outlined in the previous chapter. Traditionalization processes, along with the redundancy of discursive routine that they create, are similarly constitutive of new textual canonization and further lend authority and legitimacy towards the nascent religious project of contemporary Tajik Sufi groups. Thus, they continually create new relationships between the sacred past and secular Tajik present. In performance, they draw symbolic linear connections between the poetry of the classical Persian masters, much later Tajik poets, and contemporary hofiz. They further posit stability and “correct” genealogy irrespective of historical disjuncture.
Traditionalization is thus a vital component of contemporary Tajik Islam.453 The present, again, needs real sacred historical legitimation, as discussed in the previous chapter. But here it is not the publication of national poetry into the tabula rasa post-
Soviet religious marketplace; rather it is the hegemonic power of poetical discourse that renders these new historical imaginations thinkable and possible. Poetry performance in its multiplex traditionalization further creates space for new spiritual agency beyond the textual worlds and control of teaching hierarchies extant during the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods.
453 The active dimensions of Islamic tradition and the traditionalizing processes at work within Tajik Islam have been well-attested in anthropological literature on Tajik life. For example, Manja Stephan has observed the traditionalizing processes in relation to conceptions of Islamic space in Dushanbe city. Das Bedürfnis nach Ausgewogenheit Moralerziehung, Islam und Muslimsein in Tadschikistan zwischen Säkularisierung und religiöser Rückbesinnung (Würzburg: Ergon-Verl., 2010), 56–80. And, Colette Harris’ work on youth culture in Tajikistan considers the ways that Tajik Muslims conceptualize and actively create Tajik “tradition.” Muslim Youth: Tensions and Transitions in Tajikistan (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2006), 37–62. 249
In contrast to some of the discussion about reading dispositions among Sufi adepts in Tajikistan found in the previous chapter, the practices of halqai zikr and darsi tariqat necessitate guidance by a competent spiritual guide, a pir. It is in this way that the master-disciple relationship reaffirms the esoteric quality of mystical knowledge, the group’s “siru asror,” even when these same mysteries are ostensibly now available in print, as evidenced in the previous chapter.
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CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION
A common thread running through this study has been the relationship of the
Central Asian Islamic past to the contemporary Tajik present, and how orientations towards the sacred past were shaped in Sufi approaches to textualities and within ritualized speech events. The centrality of history and the past to contemporary devotional projects among Tajik Sufis is difficult to overemphasize. As Saba Mahmood has noted, “The past is the very ground through which the subjectivity and the self- understanding of a tradition’s adherents are constituted.”454 And by extension, Islamic tradition is a discursive mode of engagement with sacred texts, exemplary personalities, and histories, and their articulation in contemporary belief and practice.
As I argued in chapters 1 and 2, for some commentators this tradition is no more than the retrograde looking gaze of too many Central Asian Muslims.455 For others, tradition is the complete opposite of secular modernity.456 Depending on the scholars’ own hermeneutical framework, the relationship between these two temporal poles is often
454 Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, 115. 455 Poliakov and Olcott, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia. 456 Haghayeghi, Islam and Politics in Central Asia.; Naumkin, Radical Islam in Central Asia: Between Pen and Rifle.; Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. 251 deemphasized as Central Asian Islamic practice is often either interpreted as simply tradition, a vestige, and syncretic at that, or on the other hand is construed to be the result of imported, modernist ideologies of more recent origin. By extension, critical discussion of Islamic practice in the region often devolves into securitization with the
“traditional” standing in for a certain social innocuousness and perhaps even irrelevance.
Tradition and the past are rarely engaged as discursive constructs themselves.
In contrast to these metanarratives of Islamic tradition in Tajikistan, Sufi adepts offer numerous countervailing discourses providing insider critique of these paradigms.
As I argued in chapter 2, instead of celebrating triumphalist revivalism, Sufis are nostalgically looking back to a supposed golden age of Central Asian Sufism, now only a distant shadow, with many Sufis now arguing that there are no pirs remaining in
Tajikistan. Also, rather than engaging the political sphere in the mold of Sufi figures of old, many now insist on the a-politicism of the mystical quest as they attempt to substitute ethical and experiential pursuits for the secular endeavors of politics.
Such orientations to the Sufi sacred past carry over into textual and ritual environments. Just since the end of the Tajik Civil War (1997), one nineteenth-century village mullo, Sayid Nasimxon (Mavlavī Jununī), has become one of the most popular religious poets in Tajikistan, and among Sufi groups his renown has become even greater.
In chapter 3, I discuss these rapid processes of his saintly canonization, hagiographic valorization, and the social processes of decontextualization, traditionalization, and recontextualization that make these new historical imaginations possible. The mutually- reinforcing support of publishing manuscripts, narrative legitimation, and their
252 reinforcement across related and unrelated domains including oral and written hagiography, sermon performance, and television have created new dispositions of religious “reading” among Tajik Sufis.
In chapter 4, the discussion moves to consider how these dispositions of religious
“reading” carry over, are enacted, and are shaped within the ritualized speech events of
Tajik Sufi halqa. Ritual is the place in which Sufi conceptions of the past are introduced and commented upon. Halqai zikr as a site of remembrance invites adepts to encounter the divine by means of reflection on a sacred history. Within ritual, even more explicit linear connections are drawn between the spiritual milieu of the hofiz’s traditionalized lyrics and that of the masters of historical Tajik Sufism, figures of the stature of Rumi,
Hofiz, and Bedil. Discourse, both of older and of more recent provenance, is leveled by its iteration inside this coherent interpretative frame. It is precisely the performance of
Jununī’s poetry alongside that of the masters of Persian Central Asian Sufism that legitimates his new historical legacy. Tradition becomes a communicative resource enabling novel configurations of the religious present using building blocks from historical Persian Central Asian Sufism.
An issue with which I have contended throughout the study is the conceptualization of what I term “nascent religious discourse” vis-à-vis paradigms of revivalism. That is, I have attempted to delineate the connections among the processes of traditionalization and canonization associated with new poetical texts, the creative adaptation of older texts, and the ways that Tajik Sufis linearly imagine their relationship to the Tajik sacred past. In chapter 2, I critique outsider heuristics related to religious
253 revivalism using Sufi conceptions of their Islamic present and suggest that revivalism should be dispensed with entirely as a frame for exploring post-Soviet Tajik Sufi life. I am not altogether leery of etic analyses of Sufi life in Tajikistan, however analytical terms should be deployed in close relationship to emic ones. Where they do not properly index the experiential worlds of their referents they lose their analytical value. In chapter
3, issues related to the temporality of contemporary Sufi life and the creation of nascent religious discourse, both in textual artifacts and in the texts’ related narrative support, again come to the fore. The analytical focus becomes the (re)creation of Tajik Sufism and the ways that new religious projects are legitimated by sacred tradition.
This all is not say that I completely reject calling the contemporary proliferation of Islamic practice in Tajikistan a “revival.” Rather, my point is that forms of practice may have been publicly revived, but that should not imply that they hold the same experiential meanings for their practitioners or that they serve similar social purposes as they did before the October Revolution. Revival in this way is not simply a return. For example, in the case of halqai zikr, even when form is somewhat consistent with pre-
Soviet practice, many of the texts performed within ritual are decidedly new.
In chapter 4, the argument continues by considering the ways that performed Sufi tradition is an intercalation of canonistic classical mystical verse, newer Tajik Sufi poetry, and the hofiz’s artistry. At the center of this intercalation is an embodied temporality and textuality, in which Sufi masters of old “speak” directly into the performance event. Items from classical Persian poetical tradition are performed alongside newer Sufi poetry and novel poetical creations, and this leveling of discourse
254 within the performance frame further legitimates contemporary Sufi devotion by inextricably linking it to the Sufi sacred past. These temporal assemblages legitimated by the traditionalization of newer texts and imbued with the generic power of Persian poetic, aphoristic speech open up the possibility for the creation of new poetical tradition and lend authorization to nascent devotional projects.
In all of these discussions, the issue at play relates again to concepts of bodies of tradition and their movement through social space and time. Sufi tradition is not merely a
“temporal ideology”457 or some kind of mythic, self-conscious “imagined” product.458
Sufis are actively (re)imagining their religious past and reviving certain practices, but as I hope I have demonstrated, the texts and ritual uses of these texts are decidedly new. Sufi practices are not a return to Sufism as observed prior to the Soviet period or merely the adaptation of Soviet Sufism to post-Soviet exigencies. Rather, these are decidedly new projects, not “revivals,” nonetheless all with the dialectic of the present and the past at their core. Sufis in Tajikistan are actively engaging with their sacred past, irrespective of
“authentic” chains of spiritual transmission, traditionalizing new liturgical texts, and creating new religious tradition all using constituent elements from their sacred past.
Both religious history and textualities have been revived, but in novel ways. Similarly, traditionalizing processes at work within the Tajik tariqat create ever new, non-revivalist
“tradition.” In this regard, it makes little sense to think of Sufism in Tajikistan in the
457 Dorothy Noyes, “Tradition: Three Traditions,” Journal of Folklore Research 46, no. 3 (2009): 239–245. 458 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–14. 255 frame of an Islamic revival. In contrast, Tajik Sufi hofiz are creating religious tradition anew.
In addition, even those aspects of contemporary practice with an “authentic” relationship to the Sufi past have not necessarily retained their meanings throughout the
Soviet period. The functions and meanings of past practice did not and could not exist as an immutable item of cultural heritage as there is no “immutable heritage of the past.”459
That is, even though models of halqai zikr may have predated the dissolution of the
Soviet Union and present practice, their meanings have not remained as constant.
Meaning is always negotiated in social life. Indeed, it is precisely in present ritual zikr performance that experience (and tradition) becomes intelligible to the adepts gathered.460
By extension, notions of revivalism, specifically when attuned to religious practice in
Central Asia, may take for granted the distinction between form and function.461 While many forms may have remained relatively constant since the pre-Soviet era, meaning is always negotiated in the present. Notions of Islamic revivalism in Central Asia concurrently make a misleading assumption that form defines function or that religious meaning exists in disembodied a-temporal form. Instead, any discussion of religious life in Central Asia must move away from disembodied form and instead unpack its meanings as negotiated in social life, as the notion of Islamic revivalism in Central Asia minimalizes Central Asians’ cultural creativity and deemphasizes participants’ own agency.
459 “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious,” The Journal of American Folklore 97, no. 385 (July 1, 1984): 288. 460 Rasanayagam, Islam in post-Soviet Uzbekistan: The Morality of Experience, 245. 461 Saroyan and Walker, Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union, 30–31. 256
As I hope I have shown, Sufi tradition in contemporary Tajikistan is ever evolving, making use of the Persian past in the service of contemporary devotion. New texts, once traditionalized, are incorporated along with the old. The present is not an uncritical return to the pre-Soviet past, nor is it purely a continuation of Sufism as practiced during the Soviet period. Rather, all of these streams are constantly being negotiated within ritual, group teaching contexts, and embodied in the creation and valorization of new bodies of texts.
Revisiting the place I began this study with a discussion of state interference into the Tajik religious sphere, another result of Sufi traditionalization processes and the performance of tradition relates to Sufis’ adoption and critique of hegemonic state discourse. Sufi practitioners’ creative engagement with the Persian sacred past often works to mitigate state discourses of Islamic revivalism. Localized religious, poetical tradition works to open up emic heuristic space for critiquing the dominant strategies of the state aimed at combating terrorism and extremism. Just as Sufi counter-discourses offer competing visions of political potentiality and triumphalist revivalism, they similarly critique the power of hegemonic state metanarratives concerning religious practice in Central Asia. As the Tajik state increasingly views any religious practice outside of its direct control to be a threat to its power with an accompanying potential to act as a breeding ground for extremist ideology aimed at state overthrow, Sufis tacitly assert a countervailing ideology of the past which critiques outsider discourses of their historical legacy and contemporary relevancy.
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Sufi uses of tradition connect their present a-politicism to localized, Tajik sacred history, exemplified in their use of figures like Mavlavī Jununī. Their lionization of Tajik spiritual exemplars through publication, narrative, and ritual performance implicitly subverts state accusations of their use and propagation of foreign, imported religious ideology. Such discourse resists state attempts to define the parameters of acceptable practice, and as such is a threat to state control of ideology. Similarly, rather than evincing hostile “extremism” directed towards Rahmon’s government, they make use of the same symbolic idioms of Central Asian Islamic heritage in which the president trades.
Thus, when the hofiz discussed in chapter 4 encounters a ǧazal originally composed for a state propaganda display, he uncritically adapts it for mystical performance within the halqa. Similarly, other adepts welcome Rahmon’s use of their religious heritage in his speeches and simultaneously refocus it towards their own ethical and experiential projects.
To end where I began in chapter 1, I trust that my situated, fragmentary, and contingent interpretations of Sufi belief in post-Soviet Tajikistan have been consistent with Tajik Sufi understandings of their religious subjectivities, and that my inscription of their beliefs has not imposed a false “ontological colonialism”462on their self- understandings of their devotional projects. In that vein, I will allow Sufi to have the final word. The last time we were together near the end of my fieldwork, he said:
Tamomi olimoe, ki tahlili ǧazaloi šayx Hofiza, ǧazaloi hazrati Bedila, Jununīya, hamin tamomi jumhuriya, hameša navišta šudand.
462 Hinson, Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel, 331. 258
Gap mezanand, gap mezanand, ganda mekunand, injaš in xel bud, unjaš in xel bud. Čeni fahmiši vay guš mekunī. Mebiyon, mebiyon, dar yak či mahkam.
Qalb. Čī xel vazifa metyad, čī xel tariqatī mešad, čī xel ba haq merasad, hameša namedonand. Hameša durust namebiyod, Baroi on xabarum, ki: Heč kas az peši xud čize našud, Heč ohan xanjari teze našud. Heč Mavlono našud mulloi Rum, To muridi šamsi Tabrezī našud.
To murid našud, to dasti pir nagirift, to talqin nakard, to vaya ba haq narasond, vay našud Mavlono.
All of the scholars who analyze Šayx Hofiz’s ǧazals, the ǧazals of his excellency Bedil, Jununī, and so on, in the whole world, always [things] are being written [by them]. They talk, they talk, they lead astray, [they say], “Here it was like this. There it was like this.” So if you listen to their interpretations, they go on and on, [but] one thing is closed [to them].
The heart. Which vazifa one gives, how one becomes [one] of the tariqat, how one reaches God, they never understand. [That person] never sees it correctly. Because of this I know that: No one becomes anything by himself [alone], No piece of iron will become a dagger. No Mavlono463 will become the mullo of Rome, Until he becomes the disciple of Shamsi Tabriz.
Until one becomes a disciple, until one takes the hand of the pir, Until one has been taught the litanies and articles of faith, until [a pir] makes the person reach God, he won’t become Mavlono.
463 “Mavlono,” “our master” in Arabic, is an honorific given to religious leaders, e.g. judges, heads of religious orders, etc. The most famous holder of the title is Jalāluʿdīn Rūmī to whom this poem is attributed. 259
GLOSSARY
Adab – proper comportment, rules of the behavior within a Sufi xonaqoh
Ahli tasavvuf – lit. people of Sufism/mysticism, Sufis, mystics
Avliyo – friends of God, Sufi saints
Basmačion – partisan fighters who opposed the new Soviet regime in Central Asia
Bayat – a formal pledge of submission given by a disciple to a Sufi pir, followed by undertaking the ritual requirements of the halqa and performing correct adab
Bayt – a couplet of Persian poetry consisting of two half lines or misraʿ of verse
Botin – inside, interior, esoteric, knowledge hidden from the uninitiated, the opposite of zohir
Daʿvat – lit. invitation, Islamic missionary activity
Devon – book of poetry, complete (poetical) works
Doǧ – spot, mark, stain, among Tajik Sufis used to describe how a pir’s ritual grace imprints on his disciple’s heart
Ešon - honorific for religious figures in Central Asia, often used as a synonym for sayid, males descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. However, in practice the term is applied to members of sayid families, Sufi lineages, and other assorted religious dignitaries.
Fayz – grace, blessing, specifically the ritual grace which emanates from the pir by means of his tavajjöh during halqai zikr
Fiqh – Islamic jurisprudence 260
Ǧazal – a lyric poem, the most common genre of Persian mystical poetry normally consisting of between seven and fourteen distiches all with a common end rhyme and often broadly concerning mystical or profane love.
Ǧazalxanī – the singing of ǧazals
Halqa – circle, term used for each individual group of Sufis and for the general ritual and teaching events in which these same disciples gather
Halqai zikr – a circle of remembrance, the ritualized recitation of the names of God within a Sufi halqa
Hofiz – singer or chanter of ǧazals during halqai zikr
Hol – mystical state, ritual mood
Hu – lit. he, one of the names of God
Imom – official who administers a mosque in Tajikistan, person who leads prayers in a mosque
Imomi xatib – official who performs the sermon in a mosque
Irfon – mystical knowledge
ʿIšq – love, specifically divine love or love for ones pir
Isnod – chain of hadith transmission
Jazb – attraction, enrapture, the ecstasy and emotive exuberance achieved in halqa zikr
Latoʿif – subtle centers, in Naqšbandī thought the places in the corporeal body which are activated during ritual performance
Maddoh – praise poetry, panegyric
Madrasa – school for religious studies
Mahfil – meeting, assembly, Sufi gathering
Masnavī – genre of Persian epic poetry characterized by an internal rhyme in each two half lines as opposed to the mono-rhyme of lyric forms
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Mavlavī – honorific given to Islamic scholars
Misraʿ - one half line of Persian poetry
Muroqiba – contemplation, meditation, one of the ritual exercises of Sufism
Murid – disciple of a pir
Namoz – the five daily prayers of Islam
Nastaʿliq – Persian style of writing
Pir – spiritual master of Sufi adepts, leader of a halqa
Qalamrav – the dominion or jurisdiction of a Sufi pir
Qiblagoh – the direction of prayer, also the home of a saint or pir
Qozii kalon – the head of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, the head Islamic official in Tajikistan
Radif – the end rhyme of a Persian ǧazal normally consisting of a single word or phrase
Sabki hindī – the style of Safavid-Mughal Persian poetry, normally typified by its odd syntax and dense metaphor
Samo – Sufi ceremonies that use music to elicit ritual ecstasy
Sayid – male descendent of the Prophet Muhammad
Širk – polytheism, attribution, the sin of attributing undue powers or qualities to another figure that are reserved for God alone
Silsila – chain of Sufi initiation and descent
Siru asror – mysteries and secrets of the Sufi tariqat
Solik(on) – disciple(s), follower(s), devotee(s)
Sovxoz – Soviet state farm
Šajaranoma – genealogical table, document authorizing ones status as a sayid
Šayx – Sufi master, pir 262
Šeʿri xalqi – folk poetry
Tafsir – commentary on the Qurʿan
Tariqat – way/path, Sufi order, transnational teaching hierarchy
Tasavvuf – Sufism, mysticism
Tavajjöh – attention, concentration, a pir’s power to direct his fayz on an adept engaged in ritual
Tavakkal/Tavakkul – complete trust and reliance on God, forsaking all, stage on the Sufi path
Taxallus – a penname, found at some point in the last bayt of a ǧazal, most often phrased as self-praise or rather as simple identification of the poet, e.g. Rumi’s penname in his Devoni Šams as indicated in the title is Šamsi Tabriz or the sun of Tabriz and Sayid Nasimxon’s is Jununī or the mad
Tazkira – an anthology of poets, Sufi saints, etc.
Ṭumār – the story text of traditional Persian storytellers
Ulamo – Islamic scholars
Uwaysī – a Sufi initiated into a tariqat by a non-living pir
Vajd – ecstasy, state achieved in halqai zikr
Vazifa – duty, mystical task given by a pir to a disciple
Viloyat – saintly power and authority possessed by a pir
Xalifa – successor, the assistant/deputy of a Sufi pir
Xati iršad (iršadnoma) – document from ones pir authorizing one to teach independently
Xonaqoh – Sufi lodge or convent, home of a pir
Xutba – Friday sermon given at a mosque by an imomi xatib
Zikri jahrī – the vocal remembrance/recollection of the names of God
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Zikri xufī – the silent remembrance/recollection of the names of God
Ziyorat – shrine pilgrimage, visiting and paying respect to Sufi pirs
Zohir – apparent, outside, exoteric, knowledge available to all, the opposite of botin
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