Mohira Suyarkulova Phd Thesis

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Mohira Suyarkulova Phd Thesis BECOMING SOVEREIGN IN POST-SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA: 'DISCURSIVE ENCOUNTERS' BETWEEN TAJIKISTAN AND UZBEKISTAN Mohira Suyarkulova A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of St Andrews 2011 Full metadata for this item is available in St Andrews Research Repository at: http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3159 This item is protected by original copyright Becoming Sovereign in post-Soviet Central Asia ‘Discursive encounters’ between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan Mohira Suyarkulova This dissertation is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews March 2011 Candidate’s declaration I, Mohira Suyarkulova, hereby certify that this thesis, which is approximately 76,214 words in length, has been written by me, that it is the record of work carried out by me and that it has not been submitted in any previous application for a higher degree. I was admitted as a research student in February 2007 and as a candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in May 2008; the higher study for which this is a record was carried out in the University of St Andrews between 2007 and 2011. I received assistance in the writing of this thesis in respect of language, grammar, spelling and syntax, which was provided by Simon Taylor. Date …….......................................... Signature of candidate ………....................................................... Supervisor’s declaration I hereby certify that the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of the Resolution and Regulations appropriate for the degree of Doctor of Philosopy in the University of St Andrews and that the candidate is qualified to submit this thesis in application for that degree. Date …….............................................................Signature of supervisor ………......................................... Permission for Electronic Publication In submitting this thesis to the University of St Andrews I understand that I am giving permission for it to be made available for use in accordance with the regulations of the University Library for the time being in force, subject to any copyright vested in the work not being affected thereby. I also understand that the title and the abstract will be published, and that a copy of the work may be made and supplied to any bona fide library or research worker, that my thesis will be electronically accessible for personal or research use unless exempt by award of an embargo as requested below, and that the library has the right to migrate my thesis into new electronic forms as required to ensure continued access to the thesis. I have obtained any third-party copyright permissions that may be required in order to allow such access and migration, or have requested the appropriate embargo below. The following is an agreed request by candidate and supervisor regarding the electronic publication of this thesis: Access to all of printed copy but embargo of all of electronic publication of thesis for a period of five years on the following ground: publication would preclude future publication. Date ……........... Signature of candidate …….................. Signature of supervisor …...................... Acknowledgements Writing this doctoral thesis was an important learning process, a period of personal and professional growth, but most of all is was a very humbling experience. As a scholar of International Relations of Central Asia, I owe an intellectual debt to innumerable thinkers. Here, however, I would like to thank people in my life without whom this project would not be realised. A lot of people and institutions contributed to the process of thinking about, drafting and finalising this thesis. Parts of it were kindly read and commented on by Avery Archer, Jeanne Feaux de la Croix, Sandra Pagodda, Aisalkyn Botoeva. As a result the drafts were substantially improved. Some parts of this thesis were presented at various conferences and greatly benefited from the comments and criticisms from the audiences and discussants, to whom I am very grateful. The faculty of the International and Comparative Politics Department of the American University of Central Asia had a truly formative influence for me as a scholar. Bill Hansen will always be an inspiration. Victoria Lavrova, who left us too early, was a role model and a fashion icon. Emil Juraev, Burul Osmonalieva and Askat Dukenbaev were stimulating and generous teachers and mentors. To them and the scholarship from the Open Society Institute I owe the best education one can get in Central Asia. Special thanks are due to Temirlan Moldogziev, my undergraduate dissertation supervisor, and his lovely wife Olga for their incredible hospitality during my visit to Bloomington, Indiana, where I was presenting a paper at the conference. Credit is due to Madeleine Reeves, Nick Megoran and John Heathershaw, whose scholarship set a standard to which I aspired to in this thesis. The School of International Relations of the University of St Andrews has provided a stimulating intellectual environment for me over the past five years. I owe a great debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Dr Sally Cummings, who gave me ‘tough love’, but nonetheless believed in me and challenged me to be a better scholar. Huge thanks to her for her patience, invaluable advice and making it possible for me to undertake and complete this project. This work could not have been completed if it was not for the income from my work as an Uzbek language instructor at the University of St Andrews, which I have had for the duration of my doctoral studies. Huge thanks are due to the Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies (Glasgow) who have thus financed my PhD life. I would like to thank my PhD-colleagues and friends in St Andrews and elsewhere with whom I had the pleasure to discuss, argue, drink, dance, go for walks, have Sunday brunches and go strawberry picking. I thank Inga Jacobs, Gladys Mokhawa, Walter Lotze, Taryn Sheppard, Faye Donnely, Paola Raunio, Stefanie Kappler, Janka Skrzypek, Alison Careless, Maaike Warnaar, Teemu Naarajärvi, Merja Polvinen, John Morrison, Agnieszka Szemiel, Jan Grill and Ryan Parks for their encouragement, support, kindness, and always being there. Thanks to Aida Bekturova for staying in touch throughout these years. Thanks to Albena Kuiumdjieva for helping me through the darkest hour before the dawn. Thanks to Katharina Buck for her wisdom, wit and Cheburashka. Finally, and most importantly, I am forever indebted to my family. I thank my relatives in Tajikistan for assistance in getting the entry visa, hosting me during the fieldwork, being my informants and suppliers of literature. Thanks to my aunt Nigina and her son Yusuf for being my travel companions. I thank my brother Muhsin and his wife Anna for taking care of my mother over the extended periods of my absence from home. Special thanks go to my mother, who has supported my educational endeavours, remained my rock, and always brought me back to earth by her no-nonsense approach to life. It is to her that this work is dedicated. Abstract In 1991 republics of Soviet Central Asia were reluctantly ‘launched’ into independence. The central puzzle of this dissertation is: “How has sovereign statehood been ‘constructed’ in the post-independence period in the absence of history of anti-colonial struggle?” This is an analysis of state sovereignty as a practice that is performative and interactive through the examination of ‘discursive encounters’ between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Such analysis traces temporal and spatial dimensions of dialogical sovereign identity construction. In post-Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan sovereignties have been performed in a dialogue, through dynamic interactions with one another. The work of asserting state sovereignty is performed by various actors who claim to impersonate the state and speak on its behalf. Multiple narratives of the self are articulated in relation to the relevant “interlocutor”, whose reactions and counter-articulations are “fed back” into the narrative of the self. The right to existence of these states as agents of international relations is justified through such ‘discursive encounters’ that simulate sovereignty. I propose the Möbius strip as a conceptual model for understanding the process of sovereignty-assertion. Competing historiographies present two irreconcilable narratives: history of an ethnic group and history of the territory of the current state. These are consistent with the nature of nationalisms in each state. While Tajik nationalists long for ‘historical Tajikistan’, Uzbek nationalism is inherently conservative and defensive of territorial sovereignty. The controversy surrounding the Roghun HPP is an example of the daily construction and maintenance a state. Competing principles of water sharing contributed to an ongoing crisis in Tajik-Uzbek relations. Sovereignty is simulated within the periods and zones of ‘exception’ via a Möbian mechanism of dialogical meaning-making, whereby each side strives to exploit the inherent ambiguity of signifiers in order to advance their own narrative of the self and other. Table of contents Chapter I. Introduction................................................................................................ 1 Thesis topic and rationale ........................................................................................................1
Recommended publications
  • The Leningrad Connection: Oriental Projects of Source Editions
    UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Settling the past: Soviet oriental projects in Leningrad and Alma-Ata Bustanov, A.K. Publication date 2013 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Bustanov, A. K. (2013). Settling the past: Soviet oriental projects in Leningrad and Alma-Ata. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:28 Sep 2021 Chapter I: The Leningrad Connection: Oriental Projects of Source Editions 1.1 Classical Oriental Studies and Soviet Politics With the establishment of the Asiatic Museum in St. Petersburg (1818) a new center of Russian Oriental Studies emerged which became famous for its rich manuscript collection and for its historical and philological studies of written sources. Even after the transfer of the academic Institute of Oriental Studies from Leningrad to Moscow (1950), the center of manuscript studies remained in its former place as the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies, which continued to be regarded by foreign and native observers as a school of classical, non-political, philological Oriental Studies.
    [Show full text]
  • Attitudes Towards Linguistic Diversity in the Hebrew Bible
    Many Peoples of Obscure Speech and Difficult Language: Attitudes towards Linguistic Diversity in the Hebrew Bible The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Power, Cian Joseph. 2015. Many Peoples of Obscure Speech and Difficult Language: Attitudes towards Linguistic Diversity in the Hebrew Bible. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:23845462 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA MANY PEOPLES OF OBSCURE SPEECH AND DIFFICULT LANGUAGE: ATTITUDES TOWARDS LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN THE HEBREW BIBLE A dissertation presented by Cian Joseph Power to The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2015 © 2015 Cian Joseph Power All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Peter Machinist Cian Joseph Power MANY PEOPLES OF OBSCURE SPEECH AND DIFFICULT LANGUAGE: ATTITUDES TOWARDS LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY IN THE HEBREW BIBLE Abstract The subject of this dissertation is the awareness of linguistic diversity in the Hebrew Bible—that is, the recognition evident in certain biblical texts that the world’s languages differ from one another. Given the frequent role of language in conceptions of identity, the biblical authors’ reflections on language are important to examine.
    [Show full text]
  • Soviet Central Asia and the Preservation of History
    humanities Article Soviet Central Asia and the Preservation of History Craig Benjamin Frederik J Meijer Honors College, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401, USA; [email protected] Received: 23 May 2018; Accepted: 9 July 2018; Published: 20 July 2018 Abstract: Central Asia has one of the deepest and richest histories of any region on the planet. First settled some 6500 years ago by oasis-based farming communities, the deserts, steppe and mountains of Central Asia were subsequently home to many pastoral nomadic confederations, and also to large scale complex societies such as the Oxus Civilization and the Parthian and Kushan Empires. Central Asia also functioned as the major hub for trans-Eurasian trade and exchange networks during three distinct Silk Roads eras. Throughout much of the second millennium of the Common Era, then under the control of a succession of Turkic and Persian Islamic dynasties, already impressive trading cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand were further adorned with superb madrassas and mosques. Many of these suffered destruction at the hands of the Mongols in the 13th century, but Timur and his Timurid successors rebuilt the cities and added numerous impressive buildings during the late-14th and early-15th centuries. Further superb buildings were added to these cities by the Shaybanids during the 16th century, yet thereafter neglect by subsequent rulers, and the drying up of Silk Roads trade, meant that, by the mid-18th century when expansive Tsarist Russia began to incorporate these regions into its empire, many of the great pre- and post-Islamic buildings of Central Asia had fallen into ruin.
    [Show full text]
  • 2 Trade and the Economy(Second Half Of
    ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Introduction 2 TRADE AND THE ECONOMY(SECOND HALF OF NINETEENTH CENTURY TO EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY)* C. Poujol and V. Fourniau Contents Introduction ....................................... 51 The agrarian question .................................. 56 Infrastructure ...................................... 61 Manufacturing and trade ................................ 68 Transforming societies ................................. 73 Conclusion ....................................... 76 Introduction Russian colonization in Central Asia may have been the last phase of an expansion of the Russian state that had begun centuries earlier. However, in terms of area, it represented the largest extent of non-Russian lands to fall under Russian control, and in a rather short period: between 1820 (the year of major political and administrative decisions aimed at the Little and Middle Kazakh Hordes, or Zhuzs) and 1885 (the year of the capture of Merv). The conquest of Central Asia also brought into the Russian empire the largest non-Russian population in an equally short time. The population of Central Asia (Steppe and Turkistan regions, including the territories that were to have protectorate status forced on them) was 9–10 million in the mid-nineteenth century. * See Map 1. 51 ISBN 92-3-103985-7 Introduction Although the motivations of the Russian empire in conquering these vast territories were essentially strategic and political, they quickly assumed a major economic dimension. They combined all the functions attributed by colonial powers
    [Show full text]
  • The University of Chicago Old Elites Under Communism: Soviet Rule in Leninobod a Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Di
    THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO OLD ELITES UNDER COMMUNISM: SOVIET RULE IN LENINOBOD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY FLORA J. ROBERTS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2016 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures .................................................................................................................... iii List of Tables ...................................................................................................................... v Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ vi A Note on Transliteration .................................................................................................. ix Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One. Noble Allies of the Revolution: Classroom to Battleground (1916-1922) . 43 Chapter Two. Class Warfare: the Old Boi Network Challenged (1925-1930) ............... 105 Chapter Three. The Culture of Cotton Farms (1930s-1960s) ......................................... 170 Chapter Four. Purging the Elite: Politics and Lineage (1933-38) .................................. 224 Chapter Five. City on Paper: Writing Tajik in Stalinobod (1930-38) ............................ 282 Chapter Six. Islam and the Asilzodagon: Wartime and Postwar Leninobod .................. 352 Chapter Seven. The
    [Show full text]
  • The Devils' Dance
    THE DEVILS’ DANCE TRANSLATED BY THE DEVILS’ DANCE HAMID ISMAILOV DONALD RAYFIELD TILTED AXIS PRESS POEMS TRANSLATED BY JOHN FARNDON The Devils’ Dance جينلر بازمي The jinn (often spelled djinn) are demonic creatures (the word means ‘hidden from the senses’), imagined by the Arabs to exist long before the emergence of Islam, as a supernatural pre-human race which still interferes with, and sometimes destroys human lives, although magicians and fortunate adventurers, such as Aladdin, may be able to control them. Together with angels and humans, the jinn are the sapient creatures of the world. The jinn entered Iranian mythology (they may even stem from Old Iranian jaini, wicked female demons, or Aramaic ginaye, who were degraded pagan gods). In any case, the jinn enthralled Uzbek imagination. In the 1930s, Stalin’s secret police, inveigling, torturing and then executing Uzbekistan’s writers and scholars, seemed to their victims to be the latest incarnation of the jinn. The word bazm, however, has different origins: an old Iranian word, found in pre-Islamic Manichaean texts, and even in what little we know of the language of the Parthians, it originally meant ‘a meal’. Then it expanded to ‘festivities’, and now, in Iran, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, it implies a riotous party with food, drink, song, poetry and, above all, dance, as unfettered and enjoyable as Islam permits. I buried inside me the spark of love, Deep in the canyons of my brain. Yet the spark burned fiercely on And inflicted endless pain. When I heard ‘Be happy’ in calls to prayer It struck me as an evil lure.
    [Show full text]
  • Bukharan and Russian Monarchies in the Inter-Revolutionary Period
    The Last Days of the Emir: Bukharan and Russian Monarchies in the Inter-Revolutionary Period By Casey E. Smith A Study Presented to the Faculty of Wheaton College In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for Graduation with Departmental Honors In Russian Studies Norton, Massachusetts May 10, 2020 2 Introduction Russia and Bukhara in the Early Twentieth Century In Western European travelogues of journeys to the Emirate of Bukhara, one of the more frequently mentioned landmarks of the city of Bukhara is the one hundred fifty foot tall Kalyan minaret in its center, from which the last Emirs of the Manghit Dynasty hurled prisoners to their death. After the decree of Bukhara as a protectorate of the Russian Empire in 1873, the despotism of the last emirs was widely evaluated by the literature of Western travel authors, Russian bureaucrats, and Bukharan reformists alike. Meanwhile, in 1906 Nicholas II read his statements to the First State Duma, decreeing that he would still maintain his autocratic power despite the attempts at democracy the Duma embodied. Ironically, the parliament —established after strikes and peasant uprisings— sat in the glittering halls of Russia’s grand Tauride palace. While Emir Mohammed Alim Khan witnessed the destruction of the Emirate at the hands of both Russian imperialists and reformers within the Emirate, Nicholas II faced a similar threat of complete delegitimization of his power. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Russian Empire consisted of most of its modern day territory as well as modern-day Finland, and the Central Asian lands as far as Afghanistan and modern-day Iran.
    [Show full text]
  • When Is a Country Multinational? Problems with Statistical and Subjective Approaches
    Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2011 When is a country multinational? Problems with statistical and subjective approaches Stojanovic, N Abstract: Many authors have argued that we should make a clear conceptual distinction between monona- tional and multinational states. Yet the number of empirical examples they refer to is rather limited. France or Germany are usually seen as mononational, whereas Belgium, Canada, Spain and the UK are considered multinational. How should we classify other cases? Here we can distinguish between (at least) two approaches in the literature: statistical (i.e., whether significant national minorities live within a larger state and, especially, whether they claim self-government) and subjective (i.e., when citizens feel allegiance to sub-state national identities). Neither of them, however, helps us to resolve the problem. Is Italy multinational (because it contains a German-speaking minority)? Is Germany really mononational (in spite of the official recognition of the Danes and the Sorbs in some Länder)? On the otherhand, is Switzerland the “most multinational country” (Kymlicka)? Let us assume that there is no definite answer to this dilemma and that it is all a matter of degree. There are probably few (if any) clearly mononational states and few (if any) clearly multinational states. Should we abandon this distinction in favour of other concepts like “plurinationalism” (Keating), “nations-within-nations” (Miller), “post- national state” (Abizadeh, Habermas), or “post-sovereign state” (MacCormick)? The article discusses these issues and, in conclusion, addresses the problem of stability and shared identity “plural” societies.
    [Show full text]
  • Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet's Social Philosophy
    CHAPTER 3 Rethinking the French Liberal Moment: Some Thoughts on the Heterogeneous Origins of Lefort and Gauchet’s Social Philosophy Noah Rosenblum ecent scholarship has taken an interest in the renaissance of French liberal thought in the second half of the twentieth century. This R“French liberal revival” has swept up scholars and commentators alike, and is often thought to include the important French philosophers Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet. But, as work in intellectual history has shown,1 the term sits uneasily on at least these two. On close examination, we see that some of their mature thought is only ambiguously committed to liberal goals and rests on complex philosophical premises that are incompatible with some traditional liberal arguments. Tracing aspects of their social thought back to its roots reveals how deeply opposed to liberalism some of their premises were and helps us see how they carried illiberal ideas forward into new contexts. This forces us to take a new perspective on at least this piece of the twentieth century’s French liberal moment, revising accepted stories of its origins and meaning. Recognizing the heterogeneous sources of their argument leads us to appreciate Lefort and Gauchet’s creative work of reconstruction and resist the urge to canalize their powerful social philosophy. Conceptualizing the “French Liberal Revival” In a purely analytic sense, we can understand the idea of a “French liberal revival” in two different ways. The phrase describes, first, a new or renewed interest in traditional liberal themes by thinkers writing in French. We can S. W. Sawyer et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Socialisme Ou Barbarie: a French Revolutionary Group (1949-65)
    Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary Group (1949-65) Marcel van der Lindenl In memory of Cornelius Castoriadis, 11 March 1922 - 26 December 1997 The political and theoretical views developed by the radical group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 onward, have only recently received some attention outside the French speaking world.2 For a long period things were little different in France where the group and its similarly named periodical also received scant attention. This only changed after the students' and workers' rebellion in May- June 1968. The remnants of the journal, which had been unsaleable up to then - it had stopped appearing three years earlier - suddenly became a hot-selling item. Many of the 'heretical' ideas published in it seemed to be confirmed by the unexpected revolt. In 1977 the daily Le Monde wrote on the intellectual efforts of Socialisme ou Barbarie: "This work - aIthough unknown to the public at large -has nevertheless had a powerful influence on those who played a role in May 1968." In the writings of the group one finds "most of the ideas which are being debated nowadays (from workers' control through to the critique of modern technology, of Bolshevism or of mar^)."^ In Socialisme ou Barbarie an attempt was made to consider the bureaucra- tization of social movements. The central questions were: is it an iron law that movements opposing the existing order either fall apart or change into rigid hierarchies? How can militants organize themselves without being absorbed or rigidified into a bureaucratic apparatus? Socialisme ou Barbarie first posed these questions because the group asked itself why things had gone wrong in the traditional labour movement.
    [Show full text]
  • Afghan Women and the Taliban
    Afghan Women and the Taliban: An Exploratory Assessment Seran de Leede ICCT Policy Brief April 2014 Recent years have seen an increase in visible and sometimes even prominent roles for women in terrorist organisations. Both academics and organisations involved in counter-terrorism have paid increasing attention on the role of women not only as supporters of, but also as opponents to political violence. This Policy Brief examines the position of women in Afghanistan vis-à-vis the Taliban. Leiden University researcher Seran de Leede explores if Afghan women have been involved in the armed struggle of the Taliban as either active or passive supporters. She also considers the resilience women have shown towards political violence in Afghanistan and the possible role women can play in countering violent extremism in the country. Ultimately, this Policy Brief aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of women in (countering) political violence in Afghanistan. About the Author Seran de Leede is a researcher at Leiden University’s Centre for Terrorism and Counterterrorism in The Hague, where she supported ICCT Research Fellow Prof. Dr. Beatrice de Graaf in her research activities. She completed her Master’s degree in modern history at the University of Leiden in February 2012. De Leede specialises in modern right-wing extremism in Germany, with a special interest in the position of women in terrorist organisations. About ICCT - The Hague The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) is an independent knowledge centre that focuses on information creation, collation and dissemination pertaining to the preventative and international legal aspects of counter-terrorism.
    [Show full text]
  • Piece to Work Into Introduction
    THE JADIDS IN BUKHARA: THE JUXTAPOSITION OF THE REFORMS OF AINI AND FITRAT CANDACE MIXON INSTITUTE OF ISLAMIC STUDIES MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL MAY, 2011 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Masters of Arts – Thesis ©Candace Mixon 2011 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT/ RÉSUMÉ……………………………….……...……..……………...… ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………….……………………..……………….……… iv INTRODUCTION…...…………...…………...…………………………………..……..1 CHAPTER ONE: BACKGROUND OF ‘ABDALRAUF FITRAT…………………..23 CHAPTER 2: BACKGROUND OF SADRIDDIN AINI…………………………….47 CHAPTER THREE: FITRAT AND AINI IN COMPARISON…………………….70 CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………….…….....….83 WORKS CONSULTED………………………………………………..………..……...88 ABSTRACT This thesis places two important Muslim intellectual leaders of reform in Bukhara in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a historical and religious context. Jadidism in Central Asia, an Islamic reform movement during this period, is still an understudied topic both in the context of Islamic reform movements and the wider study of Islamic history. The concentration of this project is on efforts towards social reforms in Bukhara by focusing on two major actors in the Jadid movement, ‘Abdalrauf Fitrat and Sadriddin Aini. Through an analytical review of original works written by ‘Abdalrauf Fitrat and Sadriddin Aini, as well as the information provided by secondary sources supporting the historical circumstances and later perceptions of these two intellectuals’ influences, this thesis will provide a useful contribution to the growing body of western literature in the field of Central Asian Islam. By using a comparative approach, the thesis examines instances of agreement and disagreement between the two reformers using a variety of sources. Many reports concerning the Jadids at this time have either lumped many reformers together as a singular body or championed the type of reforms proposed by one figure over those or another.
    [Show full text]