Download PDF | Devin DeWeese - Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde_ Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition-Penn State Press (1994).
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Acknowledgments
My work on this book in a sense dates back to the final weeks of 1983, when I first examined the lone accessible manuscript of btemish BajjT's work in Tashkent and read and transcribed the conversion narrative; I returned to the narrative only in late 1987, for a conference paper, and since then a series of revisions, frequently interrupted by other projects, has produced the present study. As my thinking about this narrative and its implications developed, a number of friends and colleagues, too numerous to mention, helped and contributed to the final product, whether by reading earlier drafts, by answering specific inquiries, or by suggesting new directions to consider, in the course of wide-ranging discussions whose connection with the present work became evident only much later. My appreciation of how much I have profited from their insights removes any pretense that this study might be regarded as the product of my efforts exclusively.
I am especially indebted to Yuri Bregel, not only for his longstanding guidance and support, but for his interest in this particular project and his helpfulness in reading through several preliminary versions; many thanks are due also Larry Clark, who also read parts of several drafts and offered much-needed encouragement and guidance. Through conversations or correspondence, several colleagues have enriched my work on this study in important and substantive ways, whether in specific difficulties or in sharpening my research and analysis; my thanks go to Oleg Akimushkin, Gustav Bayerle, Peter Golden, Jo-Ann Gross, Gyorgy Kara, Robert McChesney, Jiirgen Paul, Nazif Shahrani, Denis Sinor, Maria Subtelny, Timur Beisembiev, and VIi Schamiloglu. Among my students, I am particularly grateful to Allen Frank, David Tyson, and Bill Wood, who aided me enormously in bibliographical matters and also raised or reinforced important elements of the arguments developed here.
Needless to add, I alone am responsible for all errors and omissions in the book, and for the views and arguments sustained in it. I am also greatly indebted to the friends and colleagues who have helped me so unstintingly during my research trips abroad to Central Asia and India. Special thanks are due my colleagues who made my work at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent so fruitful during my two visits, in particular Dr. Buri Akhmedov, Dr. Dilorom lusupova, Dr. Muzaffar Khairullaev, Dr. Qivamutdin Munirov, Dr. Asom Urunbaev, Dr. Orif Usmon, and the late Dr. Elena Poliakova; the Institute also kindly provided me with a microfilm of Otemish l:!ajjI's work, which greatly facilitated my research. I am also grateful to Dr. Botirbek Hasanov for his aid during my work at the Institute of Manuscripts in Tashkent, and to Dr. Bakhtiyar Nazarov for his considerable help in arranging my second trip to Central Asia.
My work in India, to some extent less relevant to the present study, nevertheless contributed in important ways: special thanks go to Mr. N. B. Inamdar at Osmania University in Hyderabad; Dr. A. R. Bidar and Mr. Atiqur Rahman at the Khuda Bakhsh library in Patna; Mr. Akbar Ali Khan Arshizadah of the Raza Library in Rampur; and Dr. Awsaf Ali of the Indian Institute of Islamic Studies in New Delhi. My initial trip to Tashkent in 1983-84 was made possible by a grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board; a second trip in 1991 was funded by grants from IREX and the American Philosophical Society. For materials uncovered in Indian collections I am grateful to the IndoAmerican Fellowship Program of the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, which funded my work in India during the summer of 1988.
Fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Humanities facilitated completion of this work as well as the preparation of further studies devoted to other conversion narratives not explored in depth here. Finally, I wish to thank the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Orientabteilung, which provided a microfilm of the manuscript that turned out to include the important account of Nurullah KhorezmI. As this book was well into production, I received in April 1993 a copy of the publication, announced in 1990 (see Chapter 2, note 185), of the Tashkent manuscript of btemish l:IajjI's work, prepared by the late V. P. Iudin (Utemish-khadzhi: Chingiz-name. Faksimile, perevod, transkriptsiia, tekstologicheskie primechaniia, issledovanie V. P. Iudina; Podgotovila k izdaniiu Iu. G. Baranova; Kommentarii i ukazateli M. Kh. Abuseitovoi [Alma-Ata: Gylym, 1992]). The work contains Iudin's Russian translation and transcription (into the Cyrillic script as adapted for the modern Qazaq literary language in Soviet times) of the entire text, facsimiles of the manuscript, textological notes, and indexes prepared by M. Kh. Abuseitova; it includes also a reprint of Iudin's article, "Ordy: belaia, siniaia, seraia, zolotaia ... " (cited in Chapter 2), as well as three previously unpublished studies by Iudin based on btemish HajjI's work, a brief introduction by Iudin's wife, Iu. G. Baranova, and a foreword by the editor-in-chief, B. A. Akhmedov.
Iudin devoted no special attention to the conversion narrative that is our central focus here; his understanding of the text is for the most part in accord with my own interpretation, with two substantive exceptions: (1) he treats the term I have taken as representing the word "qoruq" differently, but unfortunately gives no explanation for his reading; and (2) he offers a somewhat different understanding of the drinking ceremony described in the narrative, one that is entirely plausible and perhaps preferable to my own. However, Iudin's textological notes, as published, are far from complete, dealing for the most part only with textual emendations rather than lexica-semantic questions, and it appears that the materials he left at his death may likewise offer few clues as to his understanding of particular terms; Baranova's introduction mentions a lexicon prepared for the text by Iudin, apparently with attention to syntax and usage, but this remains unpublished, and in any case it is usually only from his translation that we may judge how he interpreted a given term. In all fairness, however, Iudin has dealt with the entire text, and not merely the small part of it discussed here.
I have sought, for the present work, to incorporate Iudin's interpretation of these two problematic issues, and of other textual points he raises, in my notes to the text and full translation of the conversion narrative (Appendixes 1 and 2), but with few exceptions I have not added further notes in Chapter 2 regarding his analysis of the work as a whole or his use of the work as a historical source; of special interest in this regard is his discussion of the tradition of "steppe oral historiography" (pp. 57-75), which includes a discussion of several names that figure in btemish HajjI's account of bzbek Khan's rise to power. Iudin worked, of course, as have most researchers, without access to the Istanbul manuscript of btemish HajjI's work; unfortunately he was also unable to consult two published works useful in analyzing the text (CAbd al-Ghaffar Qi"ri"mi's history, based in part on btemish I:Iajji's work, and the study of Mustafa Kafah, who was able to consult the Istanbul manuscript), and both the philological analysis included in the published work, and the historical commentary as well, are far from exhaustive and in general are disappointing. This new publication is thus by no means the final word on btemish I:Iajji's work. Nevertheless, Iudin's efforts, and those of his colleagues who prepared his work for publication, promise to make btemish I:Iajji's work widely accessible to scholars for the first time and, as such, mark a significant step forward in the study and appreciation of this remarkable source.
Introduction
In 1253, the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck encountered Muslims where he may well not have expected, and certainly did not wish, to find any. Rubruck was acquainted with the Islamic world, having spent considerable time in the Middle East in the course of the French king Louis IX's crusade in Egypt and Palestine; but in 1253 he was traveling, at Louis' behest, through the lands of the Mongol khan Batu in what was to become known as the Golden Horde, on his way to the court of the Mongol Great Khan, Mongke. It is possible that even before his deparhue, the friar had heard reports of "Saracens" in Batu's realms from earlier travelers, but much of the world through which he journeyed was virtually unknown to his contemporaries. In any case, in his report to King Louis, completed most likely in 1255, Rubruck noted the presence of Islam and Muslims in the lands of the Golden Horde, including three noteworthy comments that at once evince his dismay at finding his own faith's chief rival there, and at the same time nicely encapsulate for us sentiments that have dominated popular and scholarly attitudes toward Islam in the Inner Asian world down to our times. Of Berke, Batu's brother, whose accession to the throne in 1257 was to mark the first official "establishment" of Islam in a Mongol state, Rubruck wrote, "he makes himself out to be a Saracen";1 and like Rubruck, a host of Western travelers, observers, and scholars, doubting the "seriousness" of Muslims in this "exotic" world, have made an assumption of "light" or "nominal" Islamization a cardinal feature of most approaches to Islam in Inner Asia. Of the Bulghars of the Volga, whose Inner Asian state had adopted Islam already in the tenth century but was a victim of the Mongol advance in 1237, Rubruck complained that they "are the very worst kind of Saracens, clinging more firmly to the law of Mohammed than any others'? and like Rubruck a similar host of Western observers, when the error of dismissing Islam there as merely superficial became clear, has resorted to dismissing the "quality" of Islam in Inner Asia, falling back on the all-toofamiliar Western motif of fanatical Islam. And regarding the same Bulghars, whose land was held to be not far from the fabled "Land of Darkness" and lay, as Rubruck noted, another five days' journey north of Batu's encampment, the friar gave voice to an underlying bewilderment that unfortunately has not been much improved upon in more recent treatments of the spread of Islam in Inner Asia: "I wonder," he wrote, "what devil carried the law of Machomet there."3 Much could be written, and ought to be, about the misconceptions and inappropriate assumptions about Islam among Inner Asian peoples, both in history and at present. In a sense a persistent fear and hostility toward Islam that color both scholarly and popular attitudes in the West, combined with general unfamiliarity with the Inner Asian world, have rendered Islam in Inner Asia the focus of Western hopes (that Inner Asian peoples are not very Muslim) and fears (that they are as fanatical as all Muslims, after all), both resting on the same general bewilderment about the origins, history, and significance of Islam in Inner Asia, as reflected in Friar William's comments.4 Our aim here, however, is not to discuss the ways in which specialists on Inner Asia, or on Islam, have continued to show their essential surprise and bewilderment upon finding Muslims in Inner Asia, through their contradictory dismissals of Islam there as either ungenuine or uncivilized; suffice it to say that such characterizations still dominate even contemporary press accounts of present-day Muslim peoples of the former Soviet Union. Rather, I would like to consider "what devils" brought Islam to Inner Asia, by paying attention to accounts of Islam's introduction and spread among Inner Asian peoples as far removed from the sympathies evident in Rubruck's remark (and most scholarly accounts today as well) as possible: accounts created and transmitted and adjusted among the Muslim peoples of Inner Asia themselves-that is, among communities for whom those who brought Islam are not devils, but saints. More precisely, the present work is a study of one conversion narrative and its many echoes, in the context of the religious issues it was evidently designed to address, and above all in the context of one central character in the conversion drama and the ways this character resonated for subsequent generations. Elements of the narrative in question must have developed already during or soon after the reign of the Mongol ruler whose conversion it recounted, Ozbek Khan of the Golden Horde (r. 1313-1341). It is not until the middle of the sixteenth century, however, that we find a welldeveloped version of the narrative set down in a written form that survives to this day, in a rare and little-studied work from Central Asia known as the Tarzkh-i Di1st Sultan, written by a certain Otemish HajjI; and it is this version-the earliest to which we can have access-that we must adopt as our basis both for envisioning the religious import of the narrative in the two centuries between the "events" it recounts and its reduction to written form, and for evaluating later developments of the tale or its elements in written and oral venues. That this conversion narrative survived, with much of the content reflected in our earliest written form intact, at least down to the early twentieth century is confirmed by scanty, but convincing, evidence, thus attesting to the continuing power of the story as a whole. More important, perhaps, the central character in the conversion narrative-an enigmatic figure called Baba Tukles-was the object of a truly remarkable range of narrative elaboration, popular devotion, genealogical appropriation, and saintly and shamanic invocation, among the peoples of the western half of the Inner Asian world. In particular, the account in question casts new light on the origins of this "Baba Tukles," whose name is well known from semi-historical and epic narratives produced among the peoples of the Golden Horde. Those narratives suggest, and the new account confirms, that Baba Tiikles was known first as a bearer of Islam who brought the new religion to the Golden Horde, but that his "Islamizing" role was assimilated in popular memory with the roles of royal ancestor and mythic progenitor. This assimilation itself, and in particular the direction of assimilation, argues for a much closer link between Islamization and "ethnic" identity than has previously been acknowledged for Inner Asian peoples; the account in question helps to reveal the essential equivalence of conversion narratives and legends of origin, both recounting the essentially sacred act of "founding" a community and defining it in fundamentally religious terms. For what emerges in considering the various stages of Baba Tiikles' development from "Islamizer" to "nation former" to "mythic ancestor" is a clear pattern linking Islam with indigenous Inner Asian values-most important, with Inner Asian conceptions and formulations whereby the origin and legitimacy of human communities are sacralized. The strange and powerful figure of Baba Tiikles was hailed as the bringer of Islam to the fourteenth-century Golden Horde; he was recalled as an Islamizing ruler among the twentieth-century Noghays of the North Caucasus; he was credited with "creating," in effect, a number of Inner Asian peoples ranging from the Uzbeks to the Qalm"iqs; he was claimed as an ancestor by a startling array of "Inner Asian" nobility ranging from the sixteenth-century rulers of the Noghay horde, to Sufi shaykhs in seventeenth-century Bukhara, to Russian aristocrats in twentieth-century America; he was turned into a mythic ancestor and patron spirit in an oral epic cherished among perhaps more Turkic-speaking peoples than any other, including Noghays, Tatars, Bashkirs, Qaraqalpaqs, Qazaqs, and Uzbeks; he was revered as a saint nearly as widely, with shrines created for him from Astrakhan to Bashkiria to southern Kazakhstan; and as late as the 1980s, he was invoked as a tutelary ancestral spirit by Qazaq shamans, as one of the leading Muslim saints incorporated into Inner Asian shamanic performance. The conversion narrative focused on Baba Tiikles' activity reflects oral accounts produced from the fourteenth century to the twentieth and popular among the Muslim peoples of Central and Inner Asia-that is, among peoples who in creating and transmitting such narratives appear to have been consciously or unconsciously asserting the centrality of Islam in their own conceptions of communal origin, identity, and solidarity. Perhaps more important, the extant forms of these popular tales, dependant finally upon the conversion narrative that is the center- piece of the present study, were clearly significant markers of both popular and learned attitudes. They formed a store of common "historical" knowledge tapped by popular bards, tribal and village elders, and court historians; they were not only "preserved" as inherited tradition, but were "kept alive" in a real sense by being altered and updated to reflect changing communal concerns and aspirations. In this way, the conversion narrative that provides the basis for the present study, like other conversion narratives from Inner Asia whose analysis must await a later setting, offers invaluable insights into the dynamics of Inner Asian peoples' encounters with Islam, and, what is perhaps more significant, adds to the sources at our disposal for understanding those encounters a hitherto ignored or undervalued dimension: the voices of Inner Asian peoples themselves. Such an effort to listen to indigenous voices not only gives us insight into "what devils" brought Islam to Inner Asia and into why and how those bearers of Islam became saints revered among Inner Asian peoples; it also serves, ultimately, to undermine those larger misconceptions about Islam in Inner Asia.
The conversion narrative explored here represents one of the three broad areal spheres of Islamic culture in Inner Asia (Central Asia proper, the Volga-Ural region, and East Turkistan); its impact, however, was even more widespread, through its echoes in popular tales circulated for centuries throughout western Inner Asia, from the Crimea to Siberia and from Kazan to Khorezm.
Aims, Assumptions, and Approaches
The motivation for examining this narrative and its echoes stems in part from the misconceptions alluded to above regarding the character of Islam in this Inner Asian world. In particular, I would highlight two issues underlying our explorations in this study: First, the lack of any substantial and serious study of Islamization in Inner Asia, combined with the relative neglect of the problem of conversion in Islamic studies in general, has produced in those scholarly books and articles that cannot avoid at least touching upon the impact of Islam in Inner Asia a litany of uncritically accepted pronouncements on Ishimization, with a standard theme: Islam "sat lightly" upon the Inner Asian nomad, whose "conversion" was in name only and failed to have any serious impact on his daily life or consciousness. Such a view, that Islamization in effect did not matter, is not only clearly flawed by a remarkable misunderstanding both of the nature of Islam and of the indigenous religious conceptions that preceded Islamization, but is at the same time patently uninformed by any of the conceptual tools developed over the last century for the humanities and social sciences by the field of Religionswissenschaft. A more balanced consideration of the issue allows us to counter both the prevailing view and the prevailing "approach" by suggesting that Islamization did matter, and in a fundamental way that was both transformative and at the same time characteristically attuned to pre-Islamic traditions. With this basic assumption we may examine the conversion tale and its echoes as examples of fundamentally religious discourse that illustrate the reinforcement and recasting of deeply held values through the encounter with Islam and evince a native understanding of sacred communal origins as well as a conscious, "assertive" evocation of communal solidarity. Second, the interplay of religious and national/ethnic identities among the traditionally Muslim peoples of the former Soviet Union-the heirs of the "Islamized" peoples of Inner Asia-has long been discussed by students of contemporary Soviet and Central Asian affairs, and has taken on even more compelling interest in the era of glasnost', resurgent nationalism, and now independence, as these peoples reassert their right to define their own historical identities. This same issue, however, has never been seriously examined in its historical context, as the outgrowth of traditional conceptions among the peoples of Central Asia regarding how, when, where, and by whose influence they became Muslims and thereby took on a new communal identity; rather, "explanations" of the varying degrees of "Islamic consciousness" embedded in national feeling have rarely looked further than nineteenth-century descriptions, and, more important, have never "listened" to indigenous accounts of intertwining religious and ethnic identities. It is the critical value of such indigenous accounts of conversion that must be stressed here, for I would argue that our only access to the meaning of conversion for those peoples lies in such narrative responses. "Conversion" is inevitably a process of such considerable psychological and social complexity that even a thorough reconstruction of the historical setting and events that occurred, and even a precise description of "what happened" could not convey the signifi.cance of the conversion understood and felt, religiously, by the adherents of the new faith and their communal heirs. The "conversion" happened, and had historical antecedents and consequences, but in and of itself was at the same time beyond the ken of historical reconstructions, and yet important and central enough for those who felt themselves intimately connected with it that it had to be talked about and recounted and related; in those recountings we find clues to what was regarded as important and socially meaningful in the conversion. Beyond the general aims and assumptions regarding what may be learned from listening to these native voices, the specific hypotheses of the present study, based in part upon the preliminary analysis of a number of other conversion narratives in addition to the one that serves as the point of departure here, are as follows: 1. Conversion narratives are themselves central elements in the process of Islamization, as the community articulates its Islamicness and either stresses its break with the past or finds common ground with pre-Islamic traditions or values.
2. Conversion narratives are assimilable, in structure, content, and function, with the "legends of origin" reasonably well known among Inner Asian peoples telling of the creation of the world and/or of the "first man": in structure because they follow similar narrative patterns as employed in legends of origin; in content because they frequently employ specific symbols and narrative elements strikingly similar to those found in legends of origin; and in function because, like legends of origin, they appear to have been asserted and "rehearsed" as a means of declaring the sacral integrity of a particular collectivity on the basis of identity in origin. 3. For this reason we often find development of these narratives in two apparently opposite directions: the "Islamization" of indigenous mythic creation narratives, and the assimilation of figures and events associated with Islamization to sacred figures and events in pre-Islamic traditions (as we will see, it is the later epic reworkings of elements in the "original" conversion narrative that most closely parallel communal legends of origin, but echoes of the themes evoked in such legends may be found also in our earliest version of the conversion narrative itself). 4. The conversion narratives' capacity to provide a vision of communal integrity prompts us in turn to ask for what further specific ends these articulations of Muslim status were used beyond the essential assertion of sacred values and communal self-conception. In this instance we find at least two of particular interest: they are used (a) to support claims of political legitimacy through religious charisma, and (b) to lend prestige and authority to religiously defined subcommunities that could claim credit for the conversion recounted in a given narrative (certain conversion narratives clearly originated among Sufi groups who came to be regarded as the principal forces in Islamization). 5. As the equivalent of "legends of origin" articulating a community's understanding of its identity, conversion narratives express the centrality of conversion to Islam in the formation of a particular tribal, ethnic, or "national" community. 6. Narratives of Islamization, as well as conversion narratives recounting the establishment of other religions, are further illustrative of the patterns of interaction between other "world religions" and indigenous Inner Asian traditions, and among those world religions in the Inner Asian setting. Our purpose in the present work is thus to analyze the varied complex of religious meaning conveyed by the narratives about Baba Tiikles, as well as the further uses of elements from that complex, from the perspective of Islam and from that of pre-Islamic religious values, with special attention to the frequent assimilation of the two. Our interest in the narrative and its echoes is as a source not for history per se, but for religious values in general, and more to the point, religious ways of comprehending and imagining the significance of conversion and its meaning for communal identity. We will necessarily discuss sources that properly belong to the realms of history, literature, and folklore, but our approach is not limited to one or all of these specific disciplines; rather, our aim is to focus on the religious meaning conveyed in or illustrated by the sources, in order to understand how Islamization was understood and articulated in terms of both native and "Islamizing" conceptions of what is sacred in human life and community. In particular, this study will intentionally fall short of an exhaustive history of Islam and Islamization in Inner Asia; our concern here is not "what happened," but "what people say happened," in particular, the people who consider themselves intimately connected in some way with the "reality," as they asserted it, of the conversion in question, and who repeatedly rehearsed and adapted the account of the conversion. We will not restrict or even concentrate our focus on any "historical facts" contained in the conversion narrative or in its later echoes; indeed,. it is central to our working assumption that we would miss the point entirely were we to approach the narratives exclusively as "historical" sources to be mined for historical details. We will naturally attempt to discuss the historical settings in which the various stages, or styles, of the narrative transformations developed; but our focus is on the religious meaning revealed by the relationships between successive narrative developments, not the relationship between "historical reality" and the narrative tradition in part inspired by it. 5 The argument advanced here with regard to the specific conversion narrative of immediate concern is quite simple; but inasmuch as presenting it depends upon discussing the conversion account itself (which, since it has not been studied before, requires full philological analysis) and upon introducing a wide array of material from relatively poorly known historical and epic traditions of Inner Asia, it may be useful to summarize it here as follows. The figure (Baba Tiikles) to whom is ascribed, in an early narrative, the pivotal role in converting Ozbek Khan to Islam became also a pivotal figure in the genealogical "myth" that lent political legitimacy and religious sanction to the Noghay horde, one of the major tribal confederations that emerged from the disintegration of the Golden Horde; as such this figure's role was preserved in the historical tradition of the Golden Horde's successor states and, what is for us more significant, in the epic and folkloric tradition preserved among the peoples of the former Jochid ulus. In that epic tradition, reflecting both formulaic transmission and creative innovation among generations of bards in western Inner Asia, are found clear signs of the implicit equivalence, among the bards as well as their audiences, of the roles of "Islamizer" and "ancestor," each serving as the "founder" of a given community. And this equivalence serves to provide important, though hitherto unappreciated, insights into the subtle but unmistakable process whereby Islam was able to "fit into" and reinforce (rather than oppose) the basic Inner Asian religious values associated with community and with the centrality of human life in the communal context. Such insights, finally, suggest in turn not only a potentially fruitful perspective to adopt in attempting to understand the historical process of Islamization in Inner Asia; they suggest also the need for a reevaluation of the role of Islam, and of religious values and identifications in general, in providing unity and definition to particular Inner Asian communities even today. Specifically, the identification of the "Islamizer" who becomes "Ancestor" is based upon the sixteenth-century account mentioned above, which offers us a clear picture of the earliest stage of the narrative traditions surrounding Baba Tiikles, as well as confirmation of the initial focus of these traditions upon Islamization. We can in fact distinguish three stages, or rather styles, in the narratives about Baba Tiikles produced from the fifteenth century to the twentieth: first, the story of his miraculous role in converting Ozbek Khan to Islam, as preserved in Otemish HajjI's account but echoed in popular tales recorded as late as the 1920s; second, literary accounts in the Tatar historiographical tradition from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which attempt to "historicize" Baba Tiikles but retain his "Islamizing" role while stressing his ancestry of Edigii, regarded as the "founder" of the Noghay confederation; and third, oral tradition in the epic accollnts of the hero Idige (a figure inspired by the historical Edigii), which recollnt Baba Tiikles' ancestry of the hero and often reflect his association with Islamization, but in many cases also surround Baba Tiikles with mythic themes drawn from indigenous, pre-Islamic Inner Asian religious traditions. Herein we find the importance of Islamization, and of narratives recounting it, in the reshuffling of communal identities that has characterized much of Inner Asian history, in which political and social currents that appear as mass migrations and extinctions often mask a change in allegiances accompanied by the creation of a "national mythology" to· explain and justify the newly formed group. Precisely such a reshuffling is the stuff of contemporary headlines as the peoples of the former Soviet Union reevaluate their identities, and understanding Islamization is critical for understanding that process: however much the impact and role of Islamization may have been attenuated during the past seventy-odd years, as a distinctly un-Islamic "confederative myth" was imposed upon the Muslim peoples of western Inner Asia, both the "substance" of Islamization's effects in Inner Asia, and the patterns of its evocation in national mythologybuilding are likely to continue to be instructive as we observe the emergence of new nations, and as these nations continue the process of defining themselves.
The Plan of This Study
With these goals and assumptions in mind we will consider the central conversion narrative and its resonance in its own time, and the later reworkings of its central character, within the following general plan. First, in an introductory essay, we will consider the general questions of what Islamization means or might mean and, on the assumption that Islam as a religious system is generally better known than the indigenous religious traditions of Inner Asian peoples, we will consider in broad outline the common, shared features of those traditions particularly relevant to the issue of Islamization, in order to set the stage for the religious "counterpoints" that follow through the rest of our discussion. Next, we will focus more closely on the particular time and place that form the setting for our central conversion narrative, namely, the Mongol successor state of the Golden Horde in the early fourteenth century, noting the range of issues of relevance to the historical process of Islamization in this polity but considering in particular the available "historical" accounts on the "event" that is the subject of our conversion narrative, the "winning" of the ruler Ozbek Khan to Islam. We will then discuss the "new" source that provides our conversion narrative, and present the narrative itself; an edition of the original Chaghatay Turkic text and a full translation of the narrative are provided in Appendixes 1 and 2, since considerable philological discussion, not all of which is directly relevant to the religious issues at hand, is unavoidable in dealing with this source. Following this discussion of the central conversion narrative, we will begin the task of trying to understand and evaluate how this narrative spoke to and conveyed religious meaning to its audience. The popularity and longevity of at least some elements in the narrative-most important, of the central figure ascribed the pivotal role in "converting" Ozbek Khansuggest that the narrative was religiously and socially meaningful in at least certain communities for more than six centuries. Indeed, the rest of the book is devoted to outlining the forms the narrative and its "spinoffs" took, and to making an attempt-necessarily imperfect and tentative in view of the nature of our sources-to discover why this tale and its central character retained such a strong and persistent hold on the religious imagination of Inner Asian peoples from the fourteenth century to the twentieth, from the Crimea to the Altay, and from the Volga basin to Bukhara. More precisely, we will first consider the wide range of religious counterpoints in the primary conversion narrative itself, suggesting the ways in which specific elements (and even individual words of particular resonance) in the narrative's content and structure may have "packaged" religious messages for an indigenous audience in the context of Islam, or in the context of real or imagined features of pre-Islamic religion, or in the context of both. This discussion will be accompanied by a more general treatment of a central feature, both structural and semantic, evident both in the narrative as a whole and in many of its distinctive components: the theme of "displacement" and its variations. Here we will draw upon comparative material from other Inner Asian conversion narratives that may parallel and illuminate this theme, and suggest some conclusions regarding the use of "oppositional" and "assimilative" displacement in such narratives. Next, we will trace the central figure in our conversion narrative, known as "Baba Ttikles," and his narrative transformations, first in a variety of "historical" sources and genealogical traditions, and then in a wide range of oral epic and folkloric traditions. In effect, in our preceding discussion of the religious messages implicit in the original conversion narrative, we will have examined how the figure of Baba Tlikles came to be surrounded with an intense sacred and mythic aura; in the subsequent discussions of Baba Tiikles' appearance in historical/genealogical and epic tradition, we will explore what was made of this sacred aura in subsequent generations of his story's Inner Asian "audience." This audience appears to have lost interest in many of the tensions and counterpoints that infused that original narrative, which gave Baba Tiikles his sacred status, with religious meaning, but nevertheless seems to have clung to the figure of Baba Tiikles as the repository of an impressive variety of sacral functions vital to communal integrity and solidarity. In particular, we will explore the ways in which the figure of Baba Tiikles confirms our hypothesis that Inner Asian Islamic conversion narratives are structurally and functionally equivalent to communal legends of origin, highlighting both his role in the legitimation of the Noghay horde and his transformation into a mythic ancestor who is at the same time both Culture Hero and First Man. This will lead us to consider again the implications of the wide variety of religious meaning attached to Baba Tiikles for the broader issues of Islamization, and the role of Islam, in the Inner Asian world. And finally, we will discuss some conclusions suggested by the case of Baba Tiikles with regard to what such conversion narratives may tell us about Inner Asian "responses" to Islam in the important areas of political legitimacy and communal self-conception.
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