Heroes after Lenin:
Millennial Anxiety and Cultural Revival in a Post-Soviet Age
Jonah Steinberg
Abstract
The Nasir-i-Khusraw Millennium Celebration, a conference surrounding the
11th Century missionary-saint who brought Isma’ilism to the Pamir mountains, was held in Tajikistan’s Gorno-Badakhshan in 2003. In this essay, I consider what the conference illuminates about identity and epistemology on the periphery of the former Soviet realm. Nasir-i-Khusraw becomes a focus for the assertion of identity in the wake of a war in which Gorno-Badakhshan was on the losing side, for making sense of capitalism, and for navigating change. The gathering highlights struggles over the meaning of history, demonstrates the use of the past in the present, and reveals much about the reformulation of
Soviet forms in this self-consciously “post-Soviet” moment. Far from recapitulating Soviet Nationalities Policy, I argue that the conference, like similar hero-focused gatherings across the former USSR, points to the ways that the raw materials of Soviet philosophies of self and history are remolded to suit current circumstances.
A Missionary’s Millennium
1 In September of 2003 the town of Khorog, capital of Tajikistan’s Gorno-
Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast, played host to a conference celebrating the thousandth birthday of Nasir-i-Khusraw, the missionary who brought Isma’ili
Islam to the region. The gathering, ‘Nasir Khusraw: Yesterday, Today,
Tomorrow,’ billed itself ‘The Conference Devoted to Nasir Khusraw
Millennium Celebration’ and was the culmination of a longer summer of millennial events and celebrations organized by the Aga Khan Foundationi and the provincial government to commemorate the missionary-hero. The conference’s collective presentations constructed a narrative of Nasir-i-
Khusraw as an emblematic figure of great regional significance, and cast him, and the ideas he developed, as relevant to local life in an intentionally modern, self-consciously post-Soviet moment (explicitly formulated as such). He was presented at the event variously as a pioneer of rationalism and science, a profoundly important figure of Islamic history, an ethical guide, an emblem of renewed identity in the wake of a catastrophic civil war, a groundbreaking figure whose philosophy might serve as a blueprint for the navigation of the formations of capitalism and democracy only recently established in the area, and an embodiment of new models and narratives of history.
As I will describe in further detail below, Gorno-Badakhshan, as part of an
Islamic-Democratic alliance, was on the losing side of the civil war that followed shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Tajikistan’s subsequent independence; in addition to the devastation the region faced, it was also punished by the victors, the former elites of the Communist party,
2 who called for it to be cut off from the rest of the country, and began a campaign of exclusion and even, in their words, ethnic cleansing. This resulted in alienation, isolation, and famine; the situation changed only when the global institutions of Isma’ili Islam, a sect to which most residents of Gorno-
Badakhshan belong, began to supply the region from Kyrgyzstan and incorporate its people into the transnational structure of the institutions of the
Aga Khan, the Isma’ili religious and worldly leader. In Khorog, the town in which the conference was held, these Isma’ili transnational institutions are thus far more visible than the Government of Tajikistan (see also, on these historical elements, Roy 2000, Bliss 2006, Heathershaw 2009).
In this inquiry I will try to situate the conference’s narratives about Nasir-i-
Khusraw in the context of the multiplicity of voices defined by the social landscape just described. I am interested in particular in Nasir-i-Khusraw’s place in emergent struggles: over identity, over meaning, and over systems of knowledge. I argue that discussions at this conference over Nasir-i-Khusraw illuminate, in particular, an anxious conversation about theories and philosophies of history, a search for new epistemological models which revolves around the question of what place should be accorded now to Marxist dialectics and Leninist models of person and time (see also Amsler 2007). In order to make sense of these questions about history, I explore the Bakhtinian chronotopes in which Nasir's narration is located. The concept of the chronotope sheds light on the way the conference participants are endeavoring to negotiate the role of the past in the present, and to position themselves in
3 relation to past and future. Nasir-i-Khusraw, I will suggest, stands at the meeting point of ‘Soviet’ and ‘post-Soviet’; his revival invokes the ghosts and specters of multiple pasts. But I see Nasir as significant in making sense of the complexities of the persistence of one spectral past in particular: that of Soviet
Nationalities Policy (see Haugen 2004). I propose that the conference echoes but does not replicate the structures and rituals of ‘national’ culture erected by the Soviets. I suggest, furthermore, that it is not only in this place at this time that these echoes and traces are visible, but in other places in the lands of the former USSR where pre-Soviet heroes are placed in frames recalling (but not repeating) Soviet policy to create self-designated post-Soviet figureheads (see also Beyer 2006, Adams 2010). At the core of the paper, then, is the attempt to draw the ethnographic detail of this conference and its historical antecedents into a consideration of the navigation and contestation of the meaning of history at a time of upheaval and crisis.
The ordinal and temporal sequentialization of Soviet/Post makes little sense here as an organizing principle. The relevance of the conference and the missionary-hero lies in the profoundly complex politics of culture it reveals;
Nasir stands at the meeting point of multiple and polyvalent forces, and his revival reveals the process by which identities are asserted or determined or denied in the ruins of the Soviet Union. I endeavor here to illuminate the intricate calculus of identity and meaning—emerging both from the material debris of civil war and the epistemological confusion over the role of history in
4 the wake of Communism—in whose context Nasir-i-Khusraw in his current incarnation is rendered meaningful.
In Nasir-i-Khusraw’s revival the ghosts of Soviet Nationalities Policy and the
Lenin cult alike can be discerned; the forms and structures of the not-so-distant
Soviet past haunted the conference. As they sat in the auditorium at Khorog
State University, as they walked by a faded but untouched mural announcing
‘70 Years of Lenin!’, as they watched the unveiling of a new Nasir-i-Khusraw park featuring the work in bronze of an Armenian sculptor, the participants surely felt these spectral traces. In the context of prescribed ‘national form and socialist content,’ Soviet nationalism, writes Yuri Slezkine (1995), increasingly, over time, ‘did not seem to have any content other than the cult of form’ (451, emphasis added). Yurchak (2003) similarly suggests that in the
Soviet domain ‘the acts of copying the precise forms of ideological representations became more meaningfully constitutive of everyday life than the adherence to the literal (‘semantic’) meanings inscribed in those representations’ (481). The reproduction of form itself clearly had a momentum which has not yet ceased. Thus the assertion that elements of
Soviet national form are visible in the Nasir-i-Khusraw conference is neither surprising nor incidental; these traces represent the deep and continuing entrenchment in local culture of a mode for the public expression of a nationalized culture.
5 The problem of the presence of the Soviet in the post-Soviet has of course been well-addressed in the literature on ‘postsocialism.’ But the shape of the past’s iterations in the present is not at all fixed; it is dynamically emergent, fluid. Bruce Grant, in his ethnography of Sakhalin Island, In the Soviet House of Culture, asks: ‘After nearly seventy years of Soviet administration, what constitutes tradition’ (1995: 142)? As Gal (2007) points out, while ‘discourse events are linked to each other by similarity, the echo can create the earlier event itself’ (3). Nasir’s narration in time and space, his ‘chronotopes,’ reveal complicated intersections of multiple pasts, some of them consciously revived and others merely intimated. In the post-Soviet context, in the so-called
‘vacuum of power,’ multiple actors and forces enter the social field; thus the context is itself a unique one with characteristics that need to be understood in their own right. In Gorno-Badakhshan, Nasir-i-Khusraw is as much about the national and transnational politics of the present as it is about the forceful resonance of the komsomol and the kolkhoz.
Neoliberal Anxieties
But the (re)inscription of Nasir-i-Khusraw, 1000 years after his arrival and more than a decade after Communism, represents something else besides: a local attempt to navigate the arrival of capitalism and to engage meaningfully with the concept of neoliberalism (see also Liu 2003 and 2005). In the form and content of the Nasir-i-Khusraw ‘millennial conference’ we see the anxieties associated with rapid social change and the introduction of the world
6 market, or what is perceived to be the world market. The theme itself, as the reader will see, is explicitly and repeatedly invoked by the presenters and organizers. The conference organizer, Sarfaroz Niyozov,ii for example, narrated Nasir-i-Khusraw as a symbol embedded in the social and political context of the moment itself. He framed Nasir in the contemporary situation, in the relationship of people to states and historical events. He suggested that despite the thousand years that separate the audience and Nasir-i-Khusraw,
‘one sees that the fundamental issues of human experience are the same,’ again making the past relevant to the present and linking the global to the local. He related the hardships of the Autonomous Region of Badakhshan, part of the losing alliance of the Tajik Civil War, to those of Khusraw, who himself faced many hardships in the country. Despite those hardships, according to Niyozov, he was still (even now) ‘sitting in Yumgan like a king.’
Early in his talk, Niyozov explained of Nasir: ‘He was not the child of a mother and a father but of a nation.’ Soon thereafter, he began to address a post-Soviet alternative to Communism—’neoliberalism.’ He posed the question of how the idea of Nasir-i-Khusraw, despite the thousand years between his life and the present, can help local people to shape the forces of a now defined by a neoliberal economy so that they do not become a victim of such forces. He emphasized the relevance of such a figure in efforts to make sense of the present, and pointed to Nasir’s potential for self-repositioning among a people crushed by civil war. Consider his words:
7 For here even in this hall, the collapse of the Soviet Union might be
seen as a tragedy. There is a move that happened from one totalitarian
discourse to multiple discourses. Of what had happened to Soviet
politics, from univocality to multivocality or polyvocality. All of us
know that socialism, unfortunately, did not prove to be the solution.
We know that there are problems even within it. We know that
democracy is also problematic; we have questions about democracy.
We know about the problems of modernization, of development. The
many things that have not been expected and happened have resulted in
almost equally negative results. And we are beginning to know that the
so-called free-market economy that we are all talking about is not a
neutral phenomenon. And we have to be aware that there are values
that are going with…humanism and relativism. Not to get upset about
it, but we have to understand the implications…People who live in
communities like ours, where the values are lacking in authority,
community, locality, kinship, cooperation…But when one looks at the
time of Nasir Khusraw and compares it to today, one sees that feelings
about judgment, hope, opportunity, equity, identity, dignity, and liberty
are still the same. Nasir Khusraw complains about them, and we have
also complained about them.
The entailment, at least at the moment of the conference, is meant to be: in such a conundrum, what does Nasir-i-Khusraw (as a symbol and an idea) offer us now? Niyozov, in his presentation, pointed out Khusraw’s universal appeal,
8 calling him ‘Muslim and an asset of humanity in general.’ Niyozov’s comments were clearly directed in part at the governmental representatives in attendance. It is such moments that begin to hint at the role of the Nasir hero in articulating a critique both of the totalitarian state and of what is perceived to be neoliberalism. The chronotopic role of Nasir is thus given life in the context of the introduction of neoliberalism, in particular: in such change in the present, what guidance from the past? How can the time-frame of a saint rooted in the old ways be calibrated so that it fits the predicaments of the unfolding world?
And what exactly is Nasir’s role in the attempt to make sense of change and in developing a position on what appears to be capitalism in a place where capitalism itself rather recently stood for evil? How can we interpret this text?
Perhaps, we might venture, the focus on Nasir represents some kind of compromise, some kind of intermediate model tempered by ideologies of culture, reason and belief. Ni çi, ni ça: neither the free market, nor the Soviet past, but an alternate imagining of the future. A new statue in place of the old, pointing in a new direction; in it, perhaps, some family resemblance, but nonetheless bearing a distinctive countenance.
On Ghosts and Outposts of History
Something more, however—and more difficult to capture—is occurring here beyond the intersection and negotiation of forces and interests alone. The
9 Nasir-i-Khusraw Millennial Conference, as I have asserted and as I will show, is a site at which theories of time, knowledge, and personhood are actively negotiated and produced. At stake, then, is the primacy, or at least the currency, of multiple competing ways of thinking and representing history (see also Amsler 2007). The conference thus embodies something more than just the navigation and experience of Soviet and post-Soviet history itself described above, but also the navigation and experience of the idea of history, of the frameworks for making sense of it in a place where such frameworks have been central to understandings of self and society.
Nasir is conjured through the vehicle of his work into contemporary social life; the past is thus given some life in the present. Even the introduction to the conference program stressed the chronotopic project itself, claiming that ‘Nasir
Khusraw is not just a figure of the past or ‘yesterday,’ but of the present and the future.’iii Papers from the conference emphasized this immediacy—many sought to construct Nasir as an essential element of local Isma’ili pasts who is nonetheless relevant to the present. Among the papers were the following:
‘Nasir Khusraw: The Light that Enlightens the Lives of the Peoples of
Pamir’ (Nadezhda Yemelianova, Institute for Oriental Studies, Russia)
The Significance of the Tradition of Nasir Khusraw and the
Reinvigoration of its Intellectual Aspect in Northern Pakistan (Shahnaz
Salim-Hunzai, Khonai Hikmat, Pakistan)
10
The Influence of Nasir Khusraw’s Religio-Didactical Teachings on the
Formation of the Identity of the Ismailis of the Pamiro-Indukush
Ethno-Cultural Region (Boghshoh Lashkarbekov, Institute of
Linguistics, Russia)
Nasir Khusraw and Iranian Ismailis (Said Jalal Badakhshani, The
Institute of Isma’ili Studies, United Kingdom)
Some focused on Nasir’s potential as a moral compass, a blueprint for contemporary behavior:
Nasir Khusraw: A Man of Faith and Principles (Mirbaiz Khan, ITREB
Canada)
Father’s Advice as a Stock of Gold: Didactic and Ethical Advice of
Nasir Khusraw (Aliqul Dewonaqulov, Institute of Oriental Studies,
Tajikistan)
Ethical Values from Nasir Khusraw’s Perspective (Fida Ali Ithar
Hunzai, ITREB, Pakistan)
11 Others focused on some aspect of the universality of Nasir-i-Khusraw by appealing to his connection to Europe or to basic truths held to be rooted in modern academic disciplines:
Nasir Khusraw from Pythagoras to Shakespeare: Seeking Order in
Universe (Shafiq Virani, Harvard University, USA)
Comparing Humanistic Ideas of Nasir Khusraw and Francesca Petrarka
(Elbon Hojibekov, Khorog Institute of Humanities, Tajikistan)
Nasir Khusraw on the Dialogue of Wisdoms and Ideas and Dialogue of
Civilizations at Present (Mamadsho Ilolov, Ministry of Labour and
Social Protection, Tajikistan)
Rationalist Tendencies in Nasir Khusraw’s Thought (Nozir Arabzoda,
Tajik-Slavonic University, Tajikistan)
Nasir Khusraw and Literary Criticism of the 20th Century (Alice
Hunsberger Asia Society, USA)
Justice and Civil Scoiety from Nasir Khusraw’s Perspective (Yusufbek
Shodmonbekov, Khorog State University, Tajikistan)
12 Nasir Khusraw’s Contribution to the Plantology and Anthropology
(Yusuf Nuraliev, Iranian International Academy of Science, Tajikistan)
And still others mobilized Nasir-i-Khusraw as a figure central in modern projects of state-building and intercommunal dialogue:
Nasir Khusraw the Flag Bearer of the Protection and Development of
Mother Tongue (Dodikhudo Karamshoev, Institute of Languages,
Tajikistan)
Nasir Khusraw’s Role in the Development of the Intra-Islamic
Dialogue: Historical and Anthropological Approach (Lola
Dodikhudoeva, Institute of Oriental Studies, Tajikistan)
Themes of Motherland and Patriotism from Nasir Khusraw’s
Perspective (Shirin Bunyod, Badakhshan Sector of Tajikistan Writers’
Union, Tajkistan)
The program also includes a breakout session on ‘the encounter of this tradition with the forces of modernity, post-modernity, and globalization.’ The attempt here to construct Nasir-i-Khusraw as modern reveals something of the attempt at revival, at breathing life into Nasir-i-Khusraw as a guide—in part for contemporary Pamiri life, but in part for a transnational Isma’ili assemblage for which the Pamir is a critical symbol.
13
As the dialectical understandings of structure, event, and purpose regnant in the Soviet polity are destabilized by alternative and sometimes alien ways of explaining the past and future, as people on the edge of former Soviet ‘empire’ wrestle with a new place for the grand teleological narrative of Marxist-
Hegelian time and history (see Khalid 2007a and 2007b, Amsler 2007), moments like this represent a locus for the emergence of new metahistoric frameworks. The spaces—or frames—in which continuity is understood to be possible (putatively) shift, in this case, from a narrative centered around production, proletarian solidarity, and revolution, to a new narrative of Islam, reason, and heuristic interpretation, from ideologies of progress, modernity, and the future to (patently modern) narratives of tradition and the past. And it is not only the conceptual epicenter of locally-current metahistorical frameworks that is transformed here, but also their geographic axis—from
Europe, or at least European Russia, to Asia, or at least Central Asia. Mirroring understandings of the emergent role of the region in the networks of transnational Isma’ili Islam, a periphery is newly presented both as the actual historical center of something, and as a new potential center of something.
Nonetheless, the shift is less than complete. It is certainly not the case that a new and fully-formed theory of history simply replaces an old one here, within the walls of this hall at Khorog State University (itself once the site of the
Dompolit, the Soviet House of Political Education). Ghosts of those earlier models of history, of discursive orders once unassailable, of official state
14 epistemologies only recently available for questioning, are present here too— in the new, records and footprints of the old persist. The trope of the ghost captures well those remainders and traces that circumscribe and delimit this and other related ideological spaces. Ghosts rupture stability and closure; they frighten, haunt, unsettle, disrupt comfort and order. The sense that any theory of self, society, and history is likely to be weak and unstable generates an anomic uncertainty over the solidity and validity of the new explanatory frameworks by which sense might be made of change and the world. New forms and paradigms are proposed, contested, tried on for size, sometimes accepted, sometimes rejected. The Nasir-i-Khusraw Millennial Conference in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Province reveals both the persistence of the past and the ambivalence and anxiety over that persistence, both the desire for the new and the interdigitation of the new with the old. The ghosts and spirits of dialectic narratives and narrators of history perdure even as they are mobilized into new dialogic relations.
Revival in the Pamir:
War, Repression and Nasir’s Narration
The Nasir-i-Khusraw Millennial Conference was fraught with tensions and anxieties rooted in tenuous and precarious negotiations of culture. This can be understood only in light of the recent and violent history of the region. It is this history which I believe most fundamentally explains the deployment by various allied parties of Nasir-i-Khusraw as a new symbol, an emblematic hero
15 for an outcast region whose control is the subject of new forms of contestation.
Gal (1991) points to the role of discourse on Bartók in articulating local ideas about Hungary's place in Europe in late Socialism; I argue that Nasir, in part as with Bartók for Hungary in Europe, helps Badakhshanis articulate ideas about their place in Tajikistan, in the world, and in the former Soviet sphere.
Upon the collapse of the Soviet polity, the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous
Oblast, situated in the Pamir Mountains of southeastern Tajikistan, found itself on the outside of the emergent politics of a (barely) independent republic. The old Soviet elite, consisting of apparatchniks and other party officials primarily from the Kulob region in Northern Tajikistan, moved quickly to seize power and suppress potential and real opponents. Prominent among such opponents was the rapidly-developing Islamic-Democratic Alliance of which the political actors of the Pamir mountains were a constituent. When the ex-Communist factions won the vicious civil war that ensued, they made every effort to exclude and disenfranchise people from the rebel regions, which they cut off from the rest of the country. It was the transnational institutions of Isma’ili
Islam, a religious formation with which Pamiri societies were traditionally affiliated, that ultimately provided aid for the Pamiris in the face of immanent famine.
The specters of this war—its suffering, its dead, its persistence in the present— provided their own hauntings in moments of the conference, some of them embedded in fleeting discursive moments and hidden from public view; here
16 are revealed the dynamics of the relationship between the Pamiris and the post-
Soviet Tajik state. One morning, for example, the entire conference audience was stuck sitting for hours while they waited for government representatives, who were having lunch elsewhere in town, to come. This behavior, after an hour or so, began to garner resentment in the audience, who expressed in hushed murmurs that they were being snubbed. The whole event was suspended while the audience and the presenters waited for the representatives to arrive. Safdarbek Janmamadov,iv an Isma’ili from the remote Roshorv valley educated at Cambridge and in Scandinavia, articulated great displeasure to me, comparing the politics of this moment to other situations of oppression and tyranny around the world. Later, he said that it represented the ‘worst form of slavery in Tajikistan,’ the process by which he says Badakhshanis are expected to be at the government’s beck and call, at their behest; he pointed out that Pamiris are objects of condescension. He explained it as a result of the post-civil war ‘compromise,’ as a result of which Pamiris were subordinated to the government’s wishes. Sitting in the dining hall later with the conference attendees and the VIP’s, Janmamadov pointed to the Pamiri dancers and said that he can’t look at this in the same way after studying the principles of Said’s
Orientalism.
The reinvention of the missionary-hero in the Nasir-i-Khusraw millennial conference, then, emerges as an assertion of identity and historical status in the face of alienation and massacre. Within that assertion, the trope of place is of particular significance: along with many others, Niyozov, in his speech,
17 emphasized that Nasir-i-Khusraw wrote most of his books in this place. This emphasis, in my view, helped to frame the conference as a celebration of this
Pamiri locality, with all of its historical specificity. The conference thus serves as a space in which Pamiri Isma’ili subjects are able to begin to write for themselves—and then edit—new definitions and images of self in the post-
Soviet context. Thus it is not just chronotopic time-frames and models of history which are being hashed out here; it is also models and understandings of the meaning and value of place in those reworked blueprints of time and in the emergent politics of identity.
The categories of identity to which Nasir-i-Khusraw is supposed to be attached—Pamiri, Badakhshani, Isma’ili—are themselves contingent. The
‘Pamir’ and ‘Badakhshan’ as regions—along with the idea that each described a particular and unitary identity—were both themselves creations of Imperial
Russia adopted and adapted by the Soviets. Hirsch (2005) notes a particular dispute in the 1930s about the question of whether or not to subsume the
Pamiri societies the Soviet-sponsored ethnographic brigade in the region called
‘Shugnans, Vakhans, and Ishkashims’ into the ‘Tajik’ category. She points out that the ‘brigade noted that each had its own language and culture, lived in its own ‘compact territorial region,’ and had a diaspora in Afghanistan’ (288). In
1937 they were first each deemed worthy of status not as natsiya (or ‘nations’) but as narodnosti (‘people’ or ‘folk’), but then, in a break from that decision, reincorporated into the ‘Tajik’ classification (289; see also Haugen 2004,
Megoran 2010). Within 25 years the ‘Pamiris,’ with all of their prepackaged
18 official cultural traits, were listed in ethnological encyclopedias like Narody
Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana (The People of Central Asia and Kazakhshtan)
(Tolstova et al.: 1963).
These histories of categorized nationalities and national categorizations could not be suppressed at the conference, at whose beginning the Chairman of the
Gorno-Badakhshan provincial government, introduced by members of the transnational Institute for Isma’ili Studies, began discussing ‘Tajik’ heritage and pride, markedly never mentioning Pamiri, Badakhshani, or Isma’ili. He discussed at length Nasir’s relation to Firdausi, Rudaki, Omar Khayyam, and other Persian-language literary figures. This has the effect of framing Nasir-i-
Khusraw as the property of the legitimate ‘Tajik’ literary and cultural heritage approved by the Soviets. As mentioned below, ‘Tajik’ itself as an institutionalized national ethnicity is essentially a Soviet invention. ‘Pamir’ and ‘Pamiri,’ however, themselves as ethnonyms also Soviet inventions, become in this context, largely because of the civil war, a charged and contested and politicized site and sign. The use of ‘Tajik’ here thus has complicated and strategic ramifications. Sarfaroz Niyozov, the conference organizer, then spoke and thanked the Government, the University (whose director also spoke later), the Aga Khan Development Network, and, significantly (given the presence of many government representatives),
President Imomali Rahmonov. These acknowledgements point, again, to a desire (or an anxiety) to show complicity and cooperation with the state, especially given a subject matter which is potentially subversive.
19
‘Isma’ili’ as a religious label was itself not in wide circulation until a British
High Court case of 1866 decreed that the Aga Khan was the legally-sanctioned supreme leader of all members of a community by such a name, and that all regional components of the community would be unified under the new rubric
(see Shodhan 1991). Thus all the frameworks by which the communities in question are conceived (and for whom Nasir-i-Khusraw has become a rallying point) are themselves in their current forms in part imaginings formed in the colonial encounter. Nonetheless, if they were generated by empire, they were also spurned within the hierarchies and classificatory schemes around which it operated.
Moreover, ‘Isma’ili’ and ‘Pamiri’ are the schematic idioms around which post-
Soviet exclusion—and the perceived need for a figure like Nasir—has revolved. Nasir is a hero attached to these categories. And, in response, the
Pamir region has been the focus of an all-out effort at incorporation by contemporary global Isma’ili structures—incorporation into transnational participation by virtue of the arrival of Isma’ili institutions on the local stage.
Attached to this incorporation is a process of socialization to the norms and ideals of the diasporic Khoja elite—dispersed first around the Indian Ocean rim to Africa, and then more recently to Europe and North America. The relationship of the largely-affluent Khojas to (poor) local—and particularly
Himalayan—Isma’ili societies is complicated and, like the conference, fraught with tension. As can be expected, ritual practice varies widely, and it is the
20 Khoja version that is officially sanctioned. The imposition of Khoja forms on non-Khoja ‘Isma’ili’ populations generates friction and resistance, and the
Khoja arrival is simultaneously welcomed and perceived as a new hegemony.
The Nasir-i-Khusraw effort thus represents not only a serious statement in the light of post-Soviet Central Asia, but also figures into the transnational politics of Isma’ili identity.
The local discussion about capitalism that emerges in the conference is not entirely about a conversation with and reaction to Communism. Part of the
Isma’ili institutional project, led by the Khoja elite, is about inculcating indigenous Isma’ili societies to norms of modernity and zeal for participating in capitalism. Through the institutional entrenchment, Himalayan adherents are taught that they are Isma’ili, and that part of their participation in a transnational Isma’ili sphere of circulation is learning proper market behavior.
So Nasir also figures into a negotiation of the Pamiri stance towards not just a global market, but a global Isma’ili-mediated market. The Nasir-i-Khusraw conference thus occupies a special position of compromise in that negotiation.
As Sarfaroz Niyozov, the conference organizer mentioned above, said to the audience on the opening day: Nasir-i-Khusraw could ‘serve as a bridge between faith and intellect…between philosophy and theology…and shari’a and haqiqa, between Muslims and non-Muslims, between religion and secularism.’ Surely, then, also as a bridge between capitalism and other imaginings of the moral(ized) economy? In this statement we see one of the
21 many proposals for a new theory of history in which older elements—Soviet and pre-Soviet alike—still have a place.
The transnational character of the conference was itself an object of discussion. As Sarfaroz Niyozov explained in his keynote address:
The most important thing about these contexts [Qubadiyan,
Badakhshan, and Tajikistan] is that Nasir Khusraw created a tradition
across these regions (of course, these are themselves Soviet units), and
followers across these regions, which is not only Tajikistan, but also
Afghanistan, the Northern Areas of Pakistan, in Iran, and also in
Western China. This is something that distinguishes
him from many scholars.
On the eve of the conference, Hafiz Karmali, an Isma’ili of Khoja origin who had grown up in Africa, who had lived in Canada, and who now resided in
Paris, put on a stage interpretation of Nasir-i-Khusraw’s life. Karmali, who was loosely affiliated with IIS, showed in his self-consciously postmodern multimedia play (with TV screens showing various angles of the stage) the journey of Nasir from Khorasan to the Fatimid Court in Cairo, and his eventual journey to and conversion of Badakhshan. Another central feature of the conference was the showing of a film coordinated by Sharofat
Mamdambarova, a prominent Badakhshani intellectual (and directed by Safar
Khakdodov), on the legacy of Nasir-i-Khusraw in the religious practice of the
22 people of the Pamirs (see Manetta 2011). Despite the unifying project underlying the film’s production, it ultimately evinced discord and underlined the friction characterizing the interaction between local people and Isma’ili institutions. ITREC, the primary Isma’ili regional religious authority in Gorno-
Badakhshan, wanted to regulate the film as, according to them, it did not represent the standardized Isma’ili practice they endeavor to establish. Rather it showed localized and indigenous forms of Isma’ilism, with a great deal of valley-to-valley variation and a great deal of deviation from the form prescribed by ITREC.
Parallels can be found elsewhere. As a ‘focal point for various tensions in the current moment’ (Quijada, n.d.: 2), the discourses surrounding the preserved body of the great monk Etigelov in post-Soviet Buryatia produce an emergent semiotic politics not unlike that surrounding the legacy of Nasir-i-Khusraw in post-Soviet Badakhshan—in two environments themselves not entirely dissimilar. In particular, it is the analogous location of figures like Etigelov and Nasir at the nexus of global and local formations and encounters, and furthermore at the interstices between state socialism and religion, that render them relevant for discussion within the same framework.
Etigelov is a subject of popular fascination precisely because he is
polyvalent. For the Traditional Buddhist Sangkha of Russia, Etigelov
returned to his people at an opportune moment to sanctify the lineage
of the Pandido Khombo Lama and thereby strengthen the institutional
23 position of the Traditional Sangkha as a uniquely Russian Buddhist
organization. At the same time, people respond to this Buddhist figure
as a place spirit (khoziain mesto) who is able to link the local to a
global Tibetan Buddhist community (Quijada, n.d.: 13).
Nasir, like Etigelov, embodies an ambivalent sign for an ambivalent moment—importantly, a sign that raises the question about the role of the past in the present. As an event, the conference illuminates the contingent emergence of community at a time of unsettling change and great anxiety.
Perhaps most revealing and remarkable here, then, is the struggle that emerges—struggle over the figure of Nasir-i-Khusraw, and struggle over other things, including philosophies of history and legitimacy of identities, making use of Nasir. The contestation over Nasir as sign, the almost territorial struggle to lay claim to his legacy and his life, the oppositional nature of the attempts to characterize him—all these point to the rifts and fault zones that come at a moment of great epistemological crisis.
The mobilization of Nasir-as-trope is of great import here, as various factions and actors narrate the hero-saint as an idealized representative of their perspective in a zone only recently recovered from war, in a zone of continued and routinized violence. Nasir-i-Khusraw’s Millennial Conference is fundamentally characterized by heteroglot struggle, a ‘spectral dispersion,’ in
Bakhtin’s (1981) words, in which the half-possessed, captured word, ‘always
24 half someone else’s is infused, invested, and ‘populated with the speaker’s intentions.’ Gal (1991) shows very effectively the complicated ways that narratives surrounding historical figures may be mobilized for emergent political exigencies and objectives. In her analysis of Bartók’s funeral, she emphasizes how public discourse on a mythologized figure ‘in a single set of events, in its specific historical moment…constitutes a part of broader political processes’ (441). Nasir-i-Khusraw the historical person (along with his historical texts) becomes, like Bartók, a very flexible signifier indeed, available as a vessel to be filled with assertions of identity and proposals for new narrations and constructions of history.
In these fragmentary moments and glimpses, then, multiple and complex tensions begin to emerge. We see here, first, a delicate negotiation of local and global, a tentative exploration of the potential contribution of Pamiri Isma’ilis to a transnational, institutionally-mediated Isma’ilism. In this fraught relationship, locality is also deployed by global Isma’ili institutions as a symbol for something authentic or genuine, or at least exotic and pleasing. A second tension that emerges in discourses surrounding the conference is between Pamiris, now identifying under the trope of ‘Isma’ili,’ and the state. In this context the conference embodies a claim or assertion to a valid identity, one which is backed up by others who are very actively emphasizing the value of that identity (and its investment in the idea of Nasir-i-Khusraw). A third tension emerges in the critique of social change, and more specifically the critique of neoliberalism, in which a figure neither explicitly ‘Soviet’ nor
25 ‘modern’ is deployed. This critique sheds light on the sticky position of Pamiri
Isma’ilis in the middle of multiple political actors all involved in introducing new ideologies and modes of organization; it belies something of local attempts to make sense of the rapid (and largely exogenous) change occurring in the region. While it is the Soviet past to which ‘neoliberalism’ is most immediately contrastable, the Soviet modus vivendi is not available or publicly-expressible as an acceptable alternative at this time, and it is a more distant past which is mobilized—by both Pamiris and others—in articulating a new Pamiri identity in the face of multiple axes of change. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the social dynamics revealed by the conference reveal the negotiation of Isma’ili identity itself both on the regional level and in the face of the introduction of new standards of Isma’ilism by global institutions.
Soyuz as Antecedent?
Locating the Conference in the Political Economy of Soviet Nationality
I have expressed a concern with the degree to which the reintroduction of
Nasir-i-Khusraw carries the traces of Soviet policies on culture and the official histories they produced; as I have claimed, the resonance of Soviet formations was never absent from this conference. At the same time, I have argued, these formations should not be seen as unproblematically determinative of Nasir’s heroization or simply reiterative of the past.
26 Rather than simple imitation or repetition, Sue Gal, in a recent address, proposes a more complicated understanding of reiteration and resonance of forms across time and space. Not simply reproduction, but purposeful and self- conscious attempts at reproduction, invocations of the past with an instrumental political objective in mind for the present. ‘What we perceive as
‘movement,’’ she writes, ‘is more precisely a repetition or imitation of forms that are framed, reflexively and in retrospect, as being ‘the same thing, again’ or as instantiations of an ideal, a genre’ (2007: 2). Speakers, she explains, are involved in a project of ‘‘lassoing’ their own performances to previous events
(or ideal types) thus displaying what they deem to be similarity’ (3). What emerges as important here is not necessarily the real, material, or historical connection between two forms (Soviet and post-Soviet hero-figures, say), but the value with which that linkage is endowed:
Where do these ideologies of similarity and connection come from?
Many originate in discourses that describe people-types and make
judgments about them through discussion of their speech and their
other semiotic practices. These descriptions are not innocent. They are
themselves part of the cultural projects of the narrators. The
stories/theories link the arenas of action of those who narrate with the
arenas of action of those about whom the stories of origin, essence, or
moral worth are told. There can be serious consequences for both
arenas; what happens in one affects the other. The speech- (or semiotic-
) register is like a clasp or hinge between the worlds of those who
27 create the indexicalities and those who are its objects. The semiotic
practices described serve different interests and functions in the two
arenas, yet they are often seen as the same cultural object (Gal 2007:
3).
Certainly this captures something of what is happening at the Nasir-i-Khusraw conference, both in the process by which a historical figure is refashioned for the present, and in the continuity and reformulation of forms, practices and structures bridging the real and perceived post/Soviet divide.
Soviet Nationalities Policy, informed by a state-sponsored ‘ethnography’ (and
‘ethnology’), dictated that each primordial ‘nationality’ (natsiya) and autochthonous ‘folk’ (narod) should have its own benign and packaged culture with a set of non-threatening, institutionalized practices, rituals, garments, festivals, and heroes. It is an example, albeit in a radically different historical context, of the type of subject-producing ethnographic power described by
Dirks (2001) in Castes of Mind. Slezkine (1995) reveals that ‘all officially- recognized Soviet nationalities were supposed to have their own nationally defined ‘Great Traditions’ that needed to be protected, perfected, and, if need be, invented by specially trained professionals in professionally designated institutions’ (447). Beginning in the 1930s, special institutional nodes for the creation of these official national cultures proliferated, and by the end of that decade the essentialized traits and characteristics of each nationality were well- entrenched.
28
Heroes and other figureheads attached to specific nationalities were rarely religious; if they held some spiritual value they were, at least explicitly, denuded of it. A second hero complex in circulation was not culturally specific but rather pan-Soviet—the cult of Lenin and the other forefathers of
Communism. The Lenin statue, pointing in the direction of Hegelian progress
(or, as a popular joke suggested, in the direction of the public toilets), stood in
Khorog, the capital of Gorno-Badakhshan, just as it stood in Dushanbe—and beyond. Consider the persistence of Lenin in Buryatia: ‘Even for the many who never made it to Moscow, Lenin is still present in Ulan-Ude. The largest head of Lenin in the world still graces the town square, and the bus to Ivolga passes a small full-body statue of him on the road to the datsan’ (Quijada, n.d.:
27). Such forms—universal Lenins and Soviet-sanctioned national particulars alike—aimed to supplant the type of culture which could be potentially destabilizing but also to assuage and to accommodate such that every cultural unit would have symbols to which it would be attached.
Francine Hirsch (2005) underscores how crucially central the epistemic regimes produced through ‘ethnographic knowledge’ and its corollary
‘technologies of rule’ (mapping, listing, categorizing, surveying) were to the formation of idealized national cultures in the USSR. Through the implementation of such technologies and the entrenchment of such knowledges, ‘Soviet citizens learned that they were supposed to define themselves as members of an official nationality’ (Hirsch 2005: 146). This is
29 what Bruce Grant identifies in another Soviet borderland, Sakhalin Island, as the primacy of ‘the sense of culture as an object’ (1995: 16).v The Bolshevik ethnographers of The Commission for the Study of the Tribal Composition of the Population of Russia ‘would produce all-union censuses assist government commissions charged with delimiting the USSR’s internal borders, lead expeditions to study ‘the human being as a productive force, and create ethnographic exhibits and civic education courses about ‘The Peoples of the
USSR’’ (Hirsch 2005: 7). These ethnographers held their own chronotopic ideas that surely inflect the chronotopes of the post-Soviet heroes in contemporary currency: they ‘subscribed to a teleological vision of ‘spatialized time’’ (7).
Those applying ethnographic knowledge to the formation of ‘official cultures’ in the Soviet realm saw the transition from ‘tribe’ to ‘nation’ as the immediate and necessary next step in the evolution of culture (before, of course, the transition to International Communists): ‘Ethnographers, along with local elites, then worked with the Soviet government to create national territories and official national languages and cultures for these groups’ (Hirsch 2005: 8).
By accumulating ‘knowledge that shaped how the regime saw its lands and peoples, and by helping the regime generate official categories and lists, these
[ethnographic] experts and local elites participated in the formation of the
Soviet Union’ (Hirsch 2005: 11). Verdery (1991) notes that in Socialist
Romania, ‘scholars and party officials participated jointly in the business of
30 creating, strengthening, and utilizing cultural symbols that have ideological force’ (246).
The heroization of Lenin himself was of course part of this process. As Hirsch observes, ‘Folk songs and tales about Lenin, like Turkmen rugs embroidered with Stalin’s image and folk dances about collectivization, were illustrations of the dictum ‘nationalist in form, socialist in content’’ (2005: 270).vi Local iterations of Soviet culture were represented in ethnographic tracts as spontaneous indigenous expressions of revolutionary experience (i.e. the North
Ossetian ‘Dance of the Collective Farm Brigade Leader’). One can detect in the conference’s construction of Nasir-i-Khusraw elements of such ethnographicizations and indigenizations of Soviet culture, but the way in which Nasir is fêted is also distinctively more than that, and certainly reveals features of something beyond both ‘Soviet’ and ‘post-Soviet.’
Slezkine (1995) describes in his essay on Soviet Nationality a moment which reveals critical parallels for the Nasir-i-Khusraw conference: the 1934
Congress of Soviet Writers, at which scholars advanced proposals for figures to be seen as emblematic of their nationalities. Both the form and the content of this gathering are revealing. The content of the conference suggested that
‘all soviet peoples possessed, or would shortly acquire, their own classics, their own founding fathers and their own folkloric riches’ (446). The Ukrainian representative promoted the virtues of Taras Shevchenko; the Armenian speaker boasted of the literary quality of his people’s national epic, insisting on
31 recognition that its formal qualities earn it a place in the canon of world literature; the Azeri representative spoke about his nation’s affiliation with
Nizami, and of the literary stature of Mirza Fath Ali Akhundov, able to match the great writers of Russia; the Tajiks aligned themselves with the great medieval Persian poets Rudaki, Jami, and Khayyam,vii placing those figures squarely within the Soviet Tajik national paradigm; the Georgians, Turkmen, and others made similar assertions (446). Throughout, two themes: that the emblematic figureheads of the peoples of the Soviet borderlands, far from parochial, could compete with the great figures of European Russia; and that their ancient and medieval traditions revealed continuity and were part of their contemporary existence as Soviet Nations (see also Megoran 2010).
Slezkine’s historical review shows that the 1000-year anniversary, even, emerges as a recognizable form in Soviet celebration and public reflection, In the late 1930s, events across the USSR celebrated ‘the 1000th anniversary of
Firdousi, claimed by the Tajiks as one of the founders of their (and not
Persian) literature; the 500th anniversary of Mir Ali Shir Nawaiy (Alisher
Navoy), appropriated by the Uzbeks as the great classic of their (and not
Chaghatay) culture’ (1995: 448). Such historical observations force a consideration of conferences themselves, more generally in the post-Soviet sphere, as reproduced forms and as sites for the reproduction of form (see also
Adams 2010 on the ‘spectacular state’ in Uzbekistan). Yurchak (2003) shows that the patterned reproduction of Soviet form ‘took place not only at the level of ideological texts, but also in other discourses of ideology: visual (posters,
32 films, monuments, architecture), ritualistic (meetings, reports, celebrations) and in centralized ‘formal structures’ of everyday practice’ (481). Thus the very fact of the configuration and distillation of the discourse surrounding
Nasir-i-Khusraw into the structure of a conference is critical.
The shape of the event itself, then, morphologically bears the imprint and resonance of earlier modalities and forms. However, we should again be cautious about assuming that this conference, just because it echoes Soviet experiences, embodies merely an unwitting replication of structures. As
Yurchak observes, the replication of form (which, as we see here, must surely spill beyond the temporal boundary between the days of the Soviet Soyuz and the days after), stood in a profoundly complex relationship to the production of meaning. And knowing how to recapture the earlier iterations of a practice was a strategic move in which actors could carve out a space for self-positioning and -fashioning. Yurchak suggests that
The two types of work—’pure formality’ and ‘work with meaning’—
were in a mutually constitutive relationship: fulfilling some ‘formality’
was a necessary prerequisite for being able to perform ‘work with
meaning.’ To put this differently, performing the unavoidable and
ritualized ‘formality’ helped to outline the ideological space (what
Andrei calls ‘shell’) within which other, ‘meaningful’ forms of
ideological work and socialist life could proceed (2003: 498).
33 This exemplifies well the utility of the trope of the ‘ghost’ of Soviet form and content in the Nasir-i-Khusraw conference and moments like it. Past forms are certainly present, embodied in traces of various types, but they open up spaces in which new meanings can be generated and older ones (re)considered. The spectral past is instantiated in part through expertise in how to mobilize it in the present, and in deploying its proper (re)incarnation in the present.
Given these historical antecedents, echoes, and continuities, it is not at all surprising that the Nasir-i-Khusraw conference certainly represents something of a token of a type, and is in form neither entirely new nor confined to the
Pamir alone. Parallels can be identified in similar settings across the former
Soviet Union (see Adams 2010). It is clear that the conference, and the new interest in Nasir-i-Khusraw in general, can be seen as reflections of a particular type of cultural revivalism. Thus, Cossacks gathered en masse in
Novocherkassk a few years ago to celebrate in a multi-day festival the 250th birthday of their hero Matvei Platov. They came from the immediate region and from a transnational Cossack diaspora (including North America and
Europe). In Daghestan, in the Caucasus, Avars and other groups gathered in
1997 to celebrate the 200th birthday of the Naqshbandi ‘Imam Shamil’ who fiercely resisted Tsarist Russian invasion. There was a conference in
Makhachkala, in Daghestan, entitled ‘North Caucasian Peoples' War of
Liberation under Leadership of Shamil: Its International Importance.’ Held in the People’s Assembly Chamber of the old Supreme Soviet building in
Makhachkala, and attended by international scholars like Karl Marx’s
34 granddaughter Frederique Longue-Marx (again, theory acts back upon history), the conference was also referred to as an ‘International Scientific
Conference Dedicated to the 200th Anniversary of imam Shamil’ (Henze
1997).viii Such moments across post/Socialist time and space certainly represent a shared process on some level, but what is the nature of that process and what is the nature of its sharedness? In each, a hero’s chronotope is activated in an effort to navigate and renegotiate local orientations to cultural formations rooted in Soviet, pre-Soviet, and newly emergent historical structures.
As represented in the conference papers, Nasir’s value is legitimized in part by virtue of his embodiment of narratives of empirical truth whose resonance and weight is rooted in enlightenment discourses of rationalism, humanism, and indeed ‘science.’ As echoed in the idea of a ‘scientific conference’ on Imam
Shamil, an effort at legitimization by recourse to science or other modalities representing undeniable truth is one element connecting these disparate projects at the construction of heroes, saints, and other cultural figureheads in a post-Soviet moment. In Justine Buck Quijada’s (n.d.) analysis of the
‘incorruptible body’ of the Buryat Buddhist monk Etigelov, ‘science’ is again mobilized to legitimize the validity of belief and the stature of a cultural emblem:
Etigelov is able to inspire faith precisely because his miraculous
condition is confirmed by science, which during the Soviet era, was
35 intended to supersede faith. In his scientifically proven imperishable
body, Etigelov reconciles this tension, placing science in the service of
faith. In conversations with people throughout the city, the scientific
proof of his imperishable condition was indeed what aroused either
fascination, or in many cases, fear. (17)
This manner of justifying cultural (or perhaps national) signs by virtue of some empirically provable status certainly captures something perhaps distinctly
Soviet. The diversification of the objects of its application—in other words, its investment in new targets and signifiers—then might capture something distinctly and translocally post-Soviet. And the blurry boundary between what is different in the two posited modalities, post- and Soviet, shows the weaknesses of presupposing the ontological status of such a distinction.
Yurchak (2003) further critiques the integrity of arguments which posit a fundamental dichotomy between the Soviet and a contrastive other, pointing to the intercalation of ideological formations rather than simple polarity (484). To complicate such a view, he suggests that analysts of the (post-)Soviet would do well ‘to replace the conception of knowledge implied in the binary models as objective, static, bounded, and divided into spheres, with a conception of knowledge that is always-already partial, situated, and actively produced’
(485).
In a number of settings post-Soviet heroes, saints, and figureheads are part of state-sponsored attempts at (re)authoring culture and generating patriotic
36 sentiment in the wake of Soviet empire. Marat (2007) writes of hero-formation in Central Asia that
national ideologies constantly refer to specific historical figures.
Personalities are reincarnated everywhere - throughout Central Asian
state institutions…Abylaikhan in Kazakhstan, Manas in Kyrgyzstan,
Amir Temur in Uzbekistan, Samani in Tajikistan, and, finally,
Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan – all represent masculinities within
national ideologies reinforced by the Central Asian political elites. The
spirit of a national defender is brought as an indispensable source of
national ideologies. (Marat 2007: 2)
What is occurring in the Nasir-i-Khusraw conference is, however, something more complex than can be encapsulated under the framework of nationalist projects. Rooted as it is in the precarious politics of a society marginalized both within Tajikistan and within transnational Isma’ilism, it represents something else altogether.
Post-Soviet polities, claims Hirsch (2005) ‘have taken what was most useful from their Soviet-produced histories to create new historical narratives that celebrate their victorious struggles for national independence. Others have looked to the era before 1917 for ‘usable pasts’’ (325). In the street names of
Azerbaijan, write Landau and Kellner-Heinkele, ‘Soviet heroes were replaced by Azeri poets, artists, musicians, and freedom fighters’ (2001: 68). But in a
37 moment like the Nasir-i-Khusraw millennial conference we see that the configuration of the post-Soviet in relation to the Soviet is vastly more complicated than ‘taking what was most useful,’ ‘replacing,’ or identifying
‘usable pasts,’ and requires a nuanced ethnographic consideration of the contradictory and charged emotions surrounding the units now considering themselves ‘nations’ and ‘peoples’ in the former Soviet realm. What is revealed here, however, is the persistence of a structure in which the post-
Soviet nation, and in particular the post-Soviet national periphery, can continue to exist as a formation, and that constituents within it can continue to share something: in the words of Jean Comaroff (1985), a ‘shared structural predicament,’ representing, potentially, a markedly new form of postcoloniality (see Khalid 2007a and 2007b).
Within the walls of the lecture hall at Khorog State University, inside the buildings of the Dompolit, the old Soviet House of Political Education, the
Nasir-i-Khusraw Millennial Conference allowed a distinctly new type of argument over the primacy of theories and models of history to unfold. New dialogics in a world where dialectics were everyday belief. And yet, even the certainty with which those theories were proposed and negotiated was itself disrupted by ghosts and traces of texts and authors only recently-replaced.
Those spectral forms, enjoined to remain quiet, in fact did not say much out loud at the conference, and yet their voices could still be discerned. If something links together post-Soviet borderlands in this ‘shared structural predicament,’ it is surely the common experience of navigating which roles
38 will be played by the almost-forgotten ghosts and which by the newly- remembered heroes, and determining how they might co-exist, even if uneasily.
39
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i The Aga Khan Foundation is led by Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, the hereditary spiritual leader or imam of the Isma’ili Muslims. Nominally nonsectarian, it nonetheless tends to serve areas of the world where Isma’ilis
45 live, providing subjects with a broad array of services from roads to schools, village councils to microcredit. Its interaction with Isma’ili Muslim societies around the planet is intimate and extensive. For a detailed account, see
Steinberg’s (2011) Isma’ili Modern. ii At the time, Niyozov was an important member of the Institute for Isma’ili
Studies (IIS). The Nasir-i-Khusraw Millennial Conference, which I attended from August 31st to September 3rd, 2003, while I was in residence in the town, was planned primarily by IIS (London), and the Isma’ili Tariqah Religious
Education Committee (Dushanbe and Khorog) to celebrate the thousandth birthday of Nasir-i-Khusraw. These subsidiaries of IIS work to regulate and standardize Isma’ili practice on local and regional levels. Most countries with significant Isma’ili populations have an Isma’ili Tariqah Board. Most centralized decisions about Isma’ili policy come out of the Secretariat in
Chantilly, France, out of the Institute for Isma’ili Studies, or out of the Aga
Khan Development Network, in Geneva. They are, however, usually deputized through regional and local bodies. iii I thank Jennifer Dickinson, an anthropologist of post-Soviet Ukraine, for the observation that such formulations resonate strongly with elements of the iconography of Lenin, like Mayakovsky’s famous assertion that ‘Lenin lived;
Lenin lives; Lenin will live (on)’ iv Individual names have been changed except where the actions of the person in question were publicly visible.
46 v It is common among post-Soviet subjects in Central Asia to express the belief that everyone should have a culture with certain institutional trappings; hence, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, the degree to which the peripatetic Luli (or Mughat or Jugi) were represented by a city resident as being the victims of oppression and marginalization was captured by the statement: ‘They don’t even have their own cultural center!’ vi See also Tumarkin (1983) on the historical details of the ‘Lenin cult.’ vii Some of which, notably, were also aligned at the conference with Nasir-i-
Khusraw. viii Gal (1991) also shows very effectively that such forms straddle the post/Soviet boundary, describing how, at his funeral in still-socialist 1980s
Hungary, ‘allegory, decontextualization, and myth were used to reinforce and recreate the image of Bartók as a national hero’ (440),
47