#CentralAsia #history #AhmedRashid

1 Conquerors, Khans and Communists

As it had been so many times before, the fate of Central Asia was to be decided. The khans, or chiefs, of the great tribes - the Kazakh ordas, the Mongol hordes, the Uzbek Shaybanis and the Tajik clans - were gathering to discuss their fate on a cold winter's evening. They arrived wrapped up in great fur coats and fur hats with earflaps that stretched across their faces hiding them from view. Flurries of snow swept across the earth as the chiefs, with their advisers and bodyguards in tow, greeted each other with the customary Muslim warmth.
An honour guard, its members shivering in the cold, went through an elaborate military drill to welcome each delegation. Their hands were close to freezing as they grasped their weapons and brought them level to present arms to the guests. In one corner of the arrival ground a band of musicians played the national anthems of the tribes and traditional tunes. In between the arrival of the delegations, the musicians clapped their hands to keep warm and rubbed their lips to prevent them chapping. In another corner young girls, dressed in elaborate and colourful costumes, waited to present frozen flowers to the guests.
Tonight the khans would feast together, sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by carpets and silk pillows, and discuss the critical situation informally, gauging what the others felt and what positions they were likely to take in public.Tomorrow there would be a grand tribal assembly, the ulus or majlis or jirga - there are many names for it - where they would all present their views.The leaders that gathered that night were the heirs of the conquerors of the world, men such as Genghis Khan, Babar and Tamerlane. Their ancestors were also some of the greatest scientists, poets, philosophers and mystics that the steppe has ever produced.The majority of these leaders had never seen the sea: they lived in a landlocked region among the highest mountain ranges in the world, the harshest deserts and the most lush oases ever tilled by man.Yet that night there was a strange tension in the air, a disquiet and nervousness that old-timers had never seen before. Some of the leaders looked fearful, which was hardly normal for the warriors of the Central Asian steppe.
The setting for the meeting was Ashkhabad, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. The chiefs were the old communist party bosses and now presidents of the republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. The date was 12 December 1991.The reason for the meeting was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
These heirs of Genghis Khan's warrior nomads and Stalin's communist party machine had suddenly been orphaned; everything they had known for the past seventy-four years was disappearing before their eyes. Four days earlier at a dacha near Brest, 3,000 kilometres away, presidents Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Stanislav Shuskevich of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) had signed a treaty formally disbanding the Soviet Union and creating a new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). In getting rid of the 1917 Revolution and the legacy of Lenin, these Slavic leaders had not bothered to inform or consult with their fellow republican presidents in Central Asia.
Whereas once the Muslims of Central Asia had decided the fate of Russia, now the Slavs were taking their own decisions and seemed prepared to dump Central Asia in the process. That day, shivering on the airport tarmac in Ashkhabad as I watched each delegation arrive, the band strike up and the honour guard salute, I witnessed people's palpable fury at the Slavs and, in particular, the anti-Russian feeling. There was talk of racial discrimination, of ethnic o and the Cross, were again coming to life. Once again history was repeating itself.
The next day at Ashkhabad the five presidents of the Central Asian republics sat down together at a press conference and declared, more or less, that they had eaten humble pie. On a long, elevated platform, presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Rakhmon Nabiev of Tajikistan, Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan, Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and Saparmurad Niyazov of Turkmenistan said that they were willing to join the CIS, but on the basis of equality. They demanded that they too be made founder members of the CIS. There was not a word of anger against Russia or Yeltsin - in public the leaders swallowed their resentment. Russia was still too powerful to annoy. A week later, on 21 December in Alma Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, the new CIS was formed with eleven out of the fifteen former Soviet republics becoming members. The three Baltic republics were gone for good and Georgia stood aloof. The Soviet state had ceased to exist.
The life blood of the Soviet state had been ebbing away ever since the August coup attempt in Moscow. That had been carried out by Communist hardliners to prevent President Gorbachev signing a new Union treaty that would have still retained some of the close links between the republics.The irony was that the failed coup ensured that public opinion in Russia and Ukraine, the two most powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, demanded that they leave the Soviet Union altogether. It was as though a mother was preparing to see her children drown. 'Why should we bailout these strife-torn regions of Central Asia, who share nothing with us - least of all our religion. We would be much better off on our own, for then Russia could become a great power again,' said an aide to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, one of the principal economic advisers to President Yeltsin. If this was the mood in Moscow in the offices of the highest in the land, the mood in the streets was even more militandy in favour of Russian independence.
Decades of indoctrination, about the principals of the Soviet State and its internationalist duties had been thrown out of the window. Central Asia in particular was no longer considered part of the great and glorious Soviet motherland, but instead was seen as culturally, racially and in religious terms totally separate from Russia.The socialist premiss of equality, and specifically that the poorer regions of the Soviet state should be developed to become equal to Russia, was now nothing but a naive and expensive policy that was draining the Russian exchequer. The new Soviet man whom communism was supposed to create was now suddenly reduced to defending ethnic frontiers.
The leaders meeting in Ashkhabad knew well the present mood amongst the Slavs, which was being pandered to by leaders such as Yeltsin and Kravchuk, and they were furious. Since the August coup attempt, the Central Asian leaders had backed Gorbachev in his demand for a strong centre. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan was in the forefront of those arguing for a strong centre in order to keep the military, the nuclear arsenal, the currency and the economy under a single control. He was firmly backed by other Central Asian leaders - except for the president of Kyrgyzstan, Askar Akaev, who six months earlier had supported the idea of a loose commonwealth structure instead of the Soviet state.
Delegation members spoke in private about how Yeltsin had abused and humiliated them by secretly going ahead with the Minsk treaty. The leaders spoke bravely of how they would form a new Central Asian common market. 'All the Central Asian states must get together to form a new confederation or our economic development will be stalled,' said President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. 'A Central Asian community is the need of the hour,' echoed the Kyrgyz president, Askar Akaev. Yet everyone knew that for the time being these were merely words. Their faces showed their real fears. Since 1917 Central Asia, the land of the greatest trading routes in history, had become little more than an economic colony for Moscow, producing cotton, metals and other raw materials for the Soviet economic powerhouse. When that powerhouse was seen to be built on sand, Central Asia had nowhere else to turn. By thousands of threads, from electricity grids to oil pipelines to telephone lines, the Central Asian republics were tied into Russia. Moscow was an economic and financial spider's web from which no leader on that day could ever see himself disentangled.
That night in Ashkhabad there were no celebrations. 'We are not celebrating, we are mourning, ' said a Turkoman Foreign Ministry official. 'The future is extremely bleak. The West will help Russia and other Slav republics to survive, but who will help us? ' asked a member of the Uzbek delegation. Here was the final and tragic irony. The break-up of the Soviet Union had given Central Asia that very independence that their forefathers had struggled for, but they were hesitating to eat from it. Economically dependent on Moscow and politically desirous of a strong centre that would guarantee a peacekeeping role for the CIS army, the five states were now faced with rebuilding their economies, forging independent foreign policies and ensuring some degree of foreign aid. The communist bureaucracies that these leaders had risen from had only known subservience and dependency on Moscow for the party line. Now there was no line and no party. All lines had been cut.
Moreover they were all faced in varying degrees with radical Islam, assertive ethnic nationalism and inter-ethnic rivalries, and now had to create their own security forces to maintain law and order. Kazakhstan had suddenly become an independent nuclear power - for the only reason that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) were based on its soil. When Islamic fundamentalists in Iran and Pakistan hailed Kazakhstan as the first independent Muslim state to have nuclear weapons, that only added to Nazarbayev's nervousness. Anti-Russian feeling amongst the local populations had to be contained so that it would not create a new bloody battleground and a further excuse for Moscow to abandon Central Asia. There was a large and powerful Russian minority in every republic, the largest being in Kazakhstan where it formed nearly half the population.These Russians faced their own crisis: whether to brave the coming ethnic storms in Central Asia or to migrate back to Russia, a move that could trigger off large-scale economic disruption in the republics because it was the Russians who were the technical brains and manpower behind the economy. All these problems, for which the former communist bureaucracies were ill prepared, came as shops emptied fast and food shortages grew.
If the end of tsarist Russia was a turning point for Central Asia in the first part ofthe twentieth century, because it introduced the region to the modern era and a new ideological and economic system, then the end of the Soviet Union has been an equally traumatic turning point, for it created five new independent states in the heart of Muslim Asia. Whereas the transformation of Central Asia after October 1917 was carried out with an unprecedented degree of bloodletting, which decimated the population, the transformation in December 1991 took place without a single dead body in the streets. It was a remarkable way to achieve independence, even though just a few months later Tajikistan was to be in the grip of a brutal civil war.

Today Central Asia comprises five independent republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. From its beginning in 1917, the Soviet state never included Kazakhstan in Muslim Central Asia, preferring to give it a non-Asian identity by linking it closely to Russia and Siberia.Today, however, the Kazakhs themselves and the world at large believe they are very much part of the region. Central Asia covers an area of 3,994,300 square kilometres which includes some of the most sparsely populated regions in the world. Its population of only 51 million people includes more than 100 different ethnic groups, from Germans and Austrians to Tibetans and Koreans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks. Uzbekistan has a population of 20.5 million, and Uzbeks form substantial minorities in all other
four republics. There were some 10.6 million Russians living in Central Asia in 1992, but there has been a large-scale exodus of Russians from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan because of fears of ethnic violence and Islamic fundamentalism.
Tashkent and Ashkhabad, the capitals of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, have long urban histories but the other three capital cities, Dushanbe in Tajikistan, Alma Ata in Kazakhstan and Beshkek in Kyrgyzstan, were created by the Bolsheviks to give a sense of ethnic identity to those nationalities. Uzbekistan contains all the most famous historical cities of Central Asia: Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand. They were the seats of nomadic empires and settled kingdoms in the past, as well as being centres in the development of Islam throughout the region. For centuries the hundreds of madrasahs, or Islamic colleges in Bukhara and Samarkand attracted students from as far away as Morocco and Indonesia. Bukhara is seen by many Muslims as a place of pilgrimage and the most important city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Central Asia was also the birthplace of Sufism, the mystical trend in Islam which spread rapidly to Africa and Asia.
Central Asia lies at the heart ofthe Eurasian continent. Completely landlocked, it borders Iran and Aghanistan to the south, China to the east and Russia to the north and west.The main Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges in the south and theTien Shan mountains in the east. There are no fixed boundaries in the north: where the Kazakh steppe merges into the Siberian steppe in a flat landscape that is punctured with numerous lakes. Although thousands of rivers start in the mountains, only two rivers travel for any length and finally reach the landlocked Aral Sea.The Amudarya, the Oxus river of ancient mythology, originates in the Hindu Kush range, runs along the southern-border of Central Asia skirting Afghanistan and Iran, and reaches the Aral Sea after a journey of 2,500 kilometres. The Syrdarya or Jaxartes river originates in the Tien Shan (where it is first called the Naryn river), passes through the Ferghana valley and journeys north of the Kyzlkum desert to reach the Aral Sea after travelling 2,200 kilometres. Thousands of smaller rivers flow down from the mountains but their waters disappear into the sands of the great deserts.
The lands between these two rivers, which today comprises Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, have produced the main developments of Central Asian history and culture. Both these broad rivers formed formidable frontiers for the ancient world. The Amudarya divided the Persian empire and its culture from the Turkic nomadic empires of the Central Asian steppe.The same river later formed the frontier for the Tsar and the communists, separating Central Asia from first the British empire in India and then the Muslim world to the south. Meanwhile the Syrdarya formed the only northern barrier for the Persian, Greek, Arab and then Turkic kingdoms in Central Asia, protecting them from nomadic invasions from Mongolia and the Gobi desert.
All the mountain ranges of Central Asia and Afghanistan converge at the Pamirs, known as the Roof of the World, mountains which until only recently were considered to form one of the most inaccessible ranges because of its height, its snows and its freezing temperatures. In the eighteenth century the Pamirs were called the Third Pole, after the North and South poles, because they were so unknown. The Tien Shan and Kun Lun ranges run north and east from the Pamirs.
It was only in the 1850s that Russian explorers first set foot on the Tien Shan, locally called the Mountains of the Spirits because of the voices that seemed to emanate from their glaciers. Marco Polo was the first Western traveller to traverse the Tien Shan range. 'Even by daylight men hear the voices of the Spirits and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments. Travellers make a point of staying close together,' he wrote. The Kun Lun were known in ancient Chinese mythology as the Celestial Peaks.
In the centre of the region lie two of the largest deserts in the world. In the south, covering much of present-day Turkmenistan, is the Karakum or 'desert of black sands', which covers 350,000 square kilometres of some of the most arid terrain on earth, where rain is so rare that rainstorms are events recounted decades later by the local nomads.To its north in present-day Uzbekistan is the Kyzlkum or 'red sands' desert, which covers another 300,000 square kilometres and is one and a half times the size of Britain. Despite the scarcity of water, both these deserts have distinctive fauna and flora, as well as being home for some of the toughest nomadic tribes in the world, in particular the Turkomen.
As fearsome as the mountains and deserts are, so the valleys are lush, fertile and capable of producing an abundance and huge variety of crops. In 1900 the total irrigated land in Central Asia was an estimated 46,000 square kilometres of which 12,500 square kilometres lay in the oases of Bukhara, 9,000 square kilometres in the Ferghana valley and 300 square kilometres in and around Khiva. Ancient irrigation was carried out by digging wells and using the wheel system to raise water, as well as the kareez method, and by taking water from the rivers. Agriculture in Central Asia has always been carried out around oasis settlements where water was readily available. Each oasis was a selfcontained economic unit and autonomous except for the barter trade with surrounding nomads and the caravans that passed through them. Oases were frequently devastated or ransacked by the nomadic armies sweeping through, but it took them only one or two agricultural cycles to revive. It was only in the eighteenth century that the pauperized local rulers of Central Asia began to squeeze farmers for taxes and tributes.
At the heart of Central Asia is the Ferghana valley, once a cohesive economic unit but divided in the 1930s by Stalin between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. The valley is 300 kilometres long and 170 kilometres wide and its history, the power of its princes and mullahs and its ability to mount sustained resistance against all outsiders, has made it the political and Islamic nerve centre of Central Asia. With a population of 7 million people, the narrow valley is the most densely populated region in Central Asia. The Soviet regime changed this natural geography of oasis settlements by irrigating vast areas of the steppe for cotton and grain cultivation. The project was initially highly successful, but the lack of planning and foresight later created massive problems which the Soviet regime refused to acknowledge and which are only coming to the surface today. Acute water shortages, pollution, the drying-up of lakes and seas, desertification and environmental catastrophes brought on by nuclear waste are only some of the problems that these newly independent republics now face. This tragedy is compounded by the fact that the nomads have always lived at one with their environment. The nomad's respect for the environment is unmatched anywhere in the world. Thus the callousness with which the Soviet system treated the land has been particularly galling to the nomadic population.
Much of the world's ancient history originated in Central Asia for it was the birthplace of the great warrior tribes that conquered Russia, Europe, India and China. Later we look in greater detail at the history of the individual races of Central Asia, even though it is difficult to split the ancient history of a region that, until Stalin, considered itself as one geographical and even historical entity.
For example, in the history of which modern day republic does one include the story of Alexander the Great or of Genghis Khan, two conquerors who affected the whole region, or the story of the Saminid kings who laid the foundations for the lasting influence of the Persian language and culture in Central Asia? Later we attempt to discuss these figures according to the regions where they had the most influence.
However, a brief outline of Central Asian history is necessary if one is to understand the cut and thrust of its present-day politics.
To the classical world of the Greeks and the Romans, Central Asia was known as Transoxiana, or the region beyond the Oxus river. The Oxus was only one of many ancient names given to the Amudarya river.
To the Arabs Central Asia was known as 'the land between two rivers' - the Syrdarya and the Amudarya.
To the English Elizabethans it was known as Tartary.
It was the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller and writer Ibn Battuta,who coined the word Turkestan, meaning 'the land inhabited by Turks'.
The nineteenth-century British writer Rudyard Kipling called Central Asia the 'Back of Beyond'. The Chinese built the Great Wall of China precisely to keep out the tribes from Mongolia and Central Asia.
European writers wrote about Central Asia without having the slightest idea what it was really like and often even where it was.
The Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe in his verse drama 'Tamburlaine the Great' describes Central Asia and the exploits of Tamerlane in some detail, much of it wrong. Nevertheless, Marlowe's poetry helped to build the image of awesome power and megalomania that Central Asian leaders came to represent. As 'Tamburlaine' says in a more modest moment:

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about;
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Poets such as John Milton and the Romantics John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley helped build up the mystique of Central Asia in European eyes.
Writers such as G.A. Henty and Kipling described it in their adventure novels as a barbaric, unpredictable region - even though neither had ever been there.
For the European outsider, Central Asia was a land where the imagination could run riot and take whatever liberty it liked, so few Westerners ever travelled there.
In one way or another Central Asia has always gripped the imagination of outsiders, whether they be Muslim or Christian, European or Asian. For the West it has epitomized the mystery of the Orient and the wide open spaces of the steppe punctuated by bazaars, ruthless tyrants and nomadic armies.
In the nineteenth century Central Asia was permanently etched in the minds of British schoolboys because the Great Game played between the Russian and the British empires led to numerous adventure stories about the region.
For Muslims Central Asia has epitomized the distant and inaccessible, but still the second holiest region after Saudi Arabia - steeped in Islam and mysticism, and the originator of so many Muslim races.
For the Russians it has been a reminder of one of the most painful parts of their history, as they lived for centuries under Mongol rulers and their successors, the Tartars. Russian mothers still use the threat 'the Tartars are coming' to frighten little children into bed or into doing their homework. Russian prejudices remain deeply ingrained. Ethnic riots in Central Asian cities are still described by Russian commentators as 'riots between rampaging mobs' or 'crazed Islamic fundamentalists'. In 1990, after ethnic riots between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz, no less a person than the Soviet interior minister Vadim Bakatin described them as 'a reflection of primitive and medieval nationalism'.The same kind of nationalism being espoused in the Baltic republics or Ukraine at the time was never described in such a way.
Central Asia has always been different. At the heart of the history of Central Asia is not the story of princes and their courts, but the story of the nomad and his horse. In recent years Soviet archaeological research has pushed back the date when man first began herding animals in Asia to around 4000 BC. It is now thought that the horse was first domesticated in the Ukraine and that the cult of the horse spread rapidly eastward.
During the Neolithic Age, between 4,000 and 2,000 BC, Central Asia saw the development of mixed farming in which tribes hunted, herded and grew some crops. Based around the Caspian Sea these tribes developed pottery and stone tools as they steadily moved eastward into Central Asia.
Recent excavations at Altyn Tepe, near present-day Ashkhabad, revealed Neolithic settlements whose peoples traded with Persia and Mesopotamia in the Middle East. Later, pure pastoralism developed as tribes wandered further afield from their oasis settlements looking for pasture for their ever-larger herds of animals.
From around 1700 BC a distinct nomadic culture emerged. The evidence of unearthed burial mounds points to the importance given to horses and camels, which were killed and buried alongside their owners.
Later, between 1700 and 1000 BC, mounted nomadism became common, with the training of horses for war and their harnessing to chariots once the spoked wheel had been invented. When the Hittites conquered Anatolia in 1286 BC, mounted warriors and chariots were used for the first time as part of the established battle order.
The Saka tribes settled around the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea were the first mounted nomads to found a dynasty in the region.
At its height around 800 BC, this dynasty ruled an area including that of modern-day Iran, western Turkey and Central Asia. Squeezed by growing Persian power, the Sakas later retreated into the Pamirs and the Tien Shan mountains, in the region today known as Kyrgyzstan.They remained here until 200 BC, when they were finally conquered by the Persians.
From 700 to 300 BC the Scythian tribes, who were settled north of the Syrdarya, swept southward conquering Central Asia and then India and Syria. The Scythians became the main antagonists of the Persian kings and later Alexander the Great, but today there is little evidence of what became of them; they must have been assimilated into the great ethnic melting pot of Central and South Asia.
The early Persian kings were the first to demarcate Central Asia, now inhabited by the offshoots of the Saka tribes. They divided the region between the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers (darya means 'river' in Persian) and stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pamir mountains into three distinct regions. From west to east these were Chorasmia, Bactria and Sogdiana.The latter included modern-day Tajikistan, eastern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan, while Bactria included much of present-day Uzbekistan.The Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC was to rule Central Asia for the next two hundred years, until the arrival of the Greeks.
It was in Bactria that Zoroaster, who was born in modern Azerbaijan, first appeared with a new reIigion of fire worship. Zoroastrianism spread rapidly through Bactria Ind Sogdiana and was later adopted by the Persians.
The single aberration in this history of invasions from the east and south was the arrival from Europe of the Greeks under Alexander the Great. After defeating the Persians, Alexander conquered Bactria and Sogdiana between 329 and 327 BC. Alexander left an indelible mark on Central Asia, founding cities, promoting Hellenic culture and creating far greater uniformity within the region than it had ever known before. One of his successors, General Selucucos, founded the Selucid dynasty which ruled Bactria and large parts of Sogdiana.
In 239 BC another Greco-Bactrian kingdom was established which ruled from the Afghan city of Balkh. The Bactrians were to be finally overthrown by nomadic invaders from the east in around 140 BC.
Meanwhile the western region of Central Asia in present-day Turkmenistan continued to be ruled by the Parthian dynasty which was based on the Saka tribes. In 224 BC they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. With the southern belt of Central Asia firmly under the control of the Persians, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century BC by successive waves of more Sakas, who continued south to Aghanistan and India. After these invasions, Buddhism also arrived and much closer contact was established between Central Asia and China to the east and India to the south.
In the eastern region of Central Asia in what is now Kyrgyzstan, "'the Sarmatian nomads with their Siberian animal culture moved south from Siberia and dominated the region from around 500 BC onwards. The first raids into Central Asia by Chinese princes took place around 100 BC and for a time they captured the Ferghana valley and imposed an annual tribute of 1,000 stallions on their victims.The Chinese were convinced that the famous horses of the Ferghana sweated blood. These horses were not only highly prized in the Chinese army, but also served as models for all horse sculpture across China.
In time both the Sarmatians and the Chinese were pressed from the rast by the Huns, the forefathers of the Mongols, who came out of the Gobi desert to occupy Kasghar in Xinjiang around 200 BC, crossed Central Asia and reached the Volga river in Russia by AD 400. Their empire - the first nomadic Mongol empire - stretched from Korea to the Ural mountains in Russia. The descriptions of the Huns fit the modern Kazakhs, who retain the same stocky physique and still have the largest mean head size of any people in the world. The Hepthalities, orWhite Huns, went on to conquer eastern Europe and parts of India, and in the fifth century Huns settled on the Danube rallied around their chief Attila and marched on Rome.
As the Huns moved westward, the vacuum in the east was filled by the Turkic tribes, who began what was to be a series of invasions westward spread over several centuries. The Turkic tribes originally inhabited the Alatau mountains in eastern Central Asia, from around 1000 BC onwards.
The word Tur or Turkic was given by the Chinese to signify all those nomadic tribes who occupied the region from Mongolia to the Black Sea and who posed a threat to the Chinese empire. Raids by the early Turkic tribes forced the Chinese to build the Great Wall of China. Around AD 200 these tribes turned around from attacking the Chinese in the east to attacking the oasis towns in Central Asia to the west. Some Turkic tribes settled in the Ferghana valley. By AD 500 these Turkic nomads were to defeat both the Persian Sassanids and the remainder of the Huns in the western part of Central Asia. Meanwhile eastern Central Asia was in the hands of the Uighur Turkic tribes, who set up a nomadic empire that straddled the border between present-day former Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang.
Soon after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, Central Asia was invaded by the Arabs of the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus. Crossing Persia, the Arabs first defeated Zubil, the Turkic king of Kabul, and then, crossing the Oxus for the first time, defeated the Sassanids at Merv in AD 651.The Arabs began the process of converting Central Asia to Islam, and some 50,000 Arab families arrived to settle in Merv.
The second wave of Arab conquests began in 705 when Bukhara and Samarkand were conquered. By 713 the Arabs ruled over the Ferghana valley and had ventured as far east as Kasghar.
The Zoroastrian fire temples in Samarkand and Bukhara were destroyed as the conquered people converted to Islam. The Arabs ruled Central Asia from the kingdom of Khorasan, which covered what is today western Afghanistan, northern Iran and Turkmenistan.
The Arab capital was at Merv, near the present-day Turkoman city of Mary. Merv, called the Queen of the World, developed as a major centre of Islamic learning under the Arabs and later the Seljuk Turks, until it was destroyed by the Mongols.
The Arab conquests saw a flowering of Islamic thought, philosophy and mysticism which was to turn Bukhara into a city second only to Mecca for its religiosity and learning. Al Bokhari (809-69), the philosopher and commentator on the Koran, wrote the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, which is still revered as one of the most important works in Islam. As the Arabs drove northwards, the Chinese were expanding into eastern Central Asia, and in 751, at Talas, the Muslim Arabs and the Chinese at last met in batle.The decisive victory of the Arabs ensured that the Chinese would encroach no further into Central Asia than Xinjiang.
By AD 900 several independent Muslim kingdoms had sprung up In Central Asia. The most important of these dynasties were the Persian Samanids who ruled from 874 to 999 and made their capital at Bukhara, from where they acted as patrons to one of the greatest periods of Islamic art, culture and science that Central Asia was ever to see.The Samanids were descended from Saman, a Zoroastrian from Dalkh in Afghanistan, whose son Ismail captured Khorasan and later the whole of Persia.
With a well-organized army and bureaucracy, the Samanids built up extensive trading links with Europe and China, thus regulating the Silk Route. During Samanid rule Central Asia became a recognized entity, considered to be not at the edges of the world but It the very centre of the known world, and which armies, merchants and peoples travelling from west to east had to traverse. With physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians such as AI Biruni and poets such as Firdausi, the Samanid court left an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture that was not to be eroded in Central Asia until the advent of communism.
The defeat of the Samanids by AIptgin, a Turkic officer of slave origins who formerly belonged to the Samanid army, saw the end of Persian political domination in Central Asia and the advent of Turkic domination. At Ghazni in Aghanistan the Turkic tribes created the Ghaznavid dynasty, which was to rule over a region that included parts of Central Asia and India. Its strongest ruler, Mahmood of Ghazni, undertook seventeen campaigns into India between 1001 and 1024 and conquered much of Central Asia. A series of invasions from the north by fresh Turkic tribes brought the Seljuk Turks to centre stage. The Seljuks first settled near Bukhara before they moved south.They captured Merv and then defeated the Ghaznavids in 1041, establishing an empire that spread as far as Turkey. By 1055 the Seljuk chief,Tughril Beg, stood outside the gates of Baghdad.
For over 200 years the Seljuks ruled from the Pamirs to Iraq, thus uniting for the first time under Turkic hegemony Central Asia with Persia and the Arab world. At the height of Seljuk rule, King Malikshah (1072"-92) ruled from Kasghar to Jerusalem and protected the booming trade along the Silk Route between Syria, Central Asia and China. The Seljuks were challenged and finally defeated by the Mongols under Genghis Khan.The Seljuk execution of Genghis Khan's envoy in 1218 and the murder of 450 Muslim merchants who had traded with the Mongols led Genghis Khan to attack their domains in Central Asia. Seljuk high-handedness is thus often blamed for the Mongol onslaught over Asia and Europe that was to follow. When the Seljuks and other Turkic tribes had moved westward they left behind in the Gobi desert their kinsmen, the Mongols, who gradually came to inhabit the region south of Lake Baikal.
Genghis Khan, born in 1155, succeeded in uniting the local tribes and in 1206 he was elected the Great Khan at a tribal meeting which adopted the name Mongol for a new tribal confederacy.
Later called the Golden Horde, this confederacy included all the tribes that today make up the major ethnic groups in Central Asia.
The exception are the Tajiks who derive their ancestry directly from the ancient Sogdians.The ancient Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Turkomen were the warriors, whilst the Uighurs formed the bulk of Genghis bureaucracy because under Chinese influence they had developed a written script and a code of laws, which Genghis Khan was to adapt to Mongol needs.
Nobody in Central Asia or Europe could imagine what was about to appear over the horizon. The Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing 30,000 people and burning the city to the ground in the process. In Bukhara, Genghis Khan declared, 'You ask who I am, who speaks this to you. Know, then, that I am the scourge of God, if you had not sinned God would not have sent me hither to punish you.'
In the next twelve months the whole of Central Asia fell to the Mongols. In 1223 an army of Tartar tribes led by Mongol generals defeated far superior Russian forces at the battle of Kalka and then pushed on through Russia in the dead of winter, finally reaching Hungary. The conquest of Russia was not to be avenged by the Russian princes for another three hundred years, until Ivan the Terrible captured the Tartar capital of Kazan in 1552. The Tartars were the heirs of the Mongols. It is ironic that, despite untold massacres carried out by the Mongols and the destruction of entire cities, Genghis Khan was a strong protector of trade and the Silk Route between Europe and China across Central Asia. During his lifetime, under a 'pax mongolica' merchants could travel from Korea to the Crimea in absolute security, not least because entire populations had been decimated along the way. The cost of this peace is now estimated to be about 5 million people who were killed by the Mongols. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided Central Asia into two - the khanate ofTransoxiana in the west and Turkestan in the east.
The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to be perhaps the most important and lasting cultural influence in the region.
Taimur, or Tamerlane as he is known in the West, was born in 1336 and did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old. Born south of Samarkand amongst the Barlas Turks, Tamerlane captured most of Turkestan by 1380 and then moved south to Persia and India, west to Russia, and eastward to China. In 1393 he captured Baghdad. Two years later he took Moscow. As he conquered he moved the cream of the vanquished regions' intelligentsia and craftsmen to Samarkand, where he began to build the grandest capital city of ancient Asia. Tamerlane established the Timurid dynasty, and his grandson Ulugh Beg continued his artistic and intellectual traditions, turning Samarkand and Bukhara into the seat of all learning in the decorative arts, architecture, poetry, philosophy, painting and astronomy.
After two thousand years the military machine perfected by the nomads of Central Asia appeared to be finally running its course. Except for slight variations, their weapons had not changed for centuries. The short and powerful bow with which a rider could shoot off dozens of arrows accurately from the saddle, the dagger and small shield remained the same. From around AD 600 the short sword for close-quarters fighting was replaced by a steel sabre. Only in the seventeenth century did the introduction of firearms change the weaponry and tactics of nomadic warfare. The nomads' standard dress of pantaloons, wide at the waist and fitted into knee-high leather boots with a high heel, together with a long shirt, barely changed except for differences of style amongst the various ethnic groups.
A similar dress was adopted by Muslims in India during the Mogul empire. Elaborate saddles and harnesses for the horses made of leather, fur and a felt underlay had become standard by the thirteenth century. With the Huns ruling in central and western Europe, the Goths in Spain and Italy, and the Avars in Hungary, it appeared for a time that the whole world was in the grip of Central Asian nomads. They influenced Eropean military tactics and weapons, and European attitudes to the use of cavalry. Amir Khusrun, a Muslim writer living in India in 1389, gave historians a vivid description of the Mongol army on the move, which was similar to many of the nomadic warrior armies of Central Asia:

There were more than a thousand Tartar infidels and warriors of other tribes, riding on camels, great commanders in battle, all with steel-like bodies clothed in cotton; with faces like fire, with caps of sheep-skin, with their heads shorn. Their eyes were so narrow and piercing that they might have bored a hole in a brazen vessel. Their stink was more horrible than their colour. Their faces were set on their bodies as if they had no necks. Their cheeks resembled soft leather bottles, full of wrinkles and knots.Their noses extended from cheek to cheek, their mouths from cheek bone to cheek bone.Their moustaches were of extravagant length.They had scanty heards around their chins. The King marvelled at their beastly countenances and said that God had created them out of hell-fire.

The Timurid dynasty was to be replaced by a new tribal grouping, the Shaybani Uzbeks. The Uzbeks were of mixed Turkish and Mongol blood and part of the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan, but they had remained nomads, untouched by the civilizing influences of urban life. Under their dynamic chief Mohammed Shaybani, who was born in 1451, the Uzbeks united other tribes and then defeated the Timurid heir Babar at the decisive battle of Serpul, near Samarkand.
This battle was to change the course of Indian history, for Babar went on to conquer Afghanistan and India and to found the Mogul dynasty in Delhi. In a brief decade, from 1500 to 1510, the Uzbeks defeated the Turkomen and the Persians, thus extending their empire to much of Central Asia and northern Persia.
But Persian power was again on the rise with the coming to power of the Safavids, who ruled from 1501 to 1722 and who changed the state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam - a step that considerably reduced Persia's influence in Central Asia. Persia's main challenge was to contain Ottoman power in Turkey and Uzbek power in the north - the Uzbek chief Mohammed Shaybani was killed in 1510 in battle against the Safavids. In any case the Uzbeks soon broke up into smaller principalities, and the frequent wars of succession amongst them led to the evolution of three khanates, based on the cities of Khiva in the west, Bukhara in the centre and Kokand in the east. With the discovery of the sea route to India, the importance of the Silk Route had declined and, semi-forgotten, Central Asia slipped into a limbo.
Russia had made its opening move eastward as early as 1552 when Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan from the Tartars and massacred the entire population. Ivan built Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square to commemorate the victory and topped its domes with onion shapes to symbolize the severed heads of the turbaned Tartars.
The battle and its grim memento was to be etched into Russia's collective memory for ever. As one writer has noted, the only time after 1552 that Russian forces ever retreated in the face of Muslim power was four centuries later in Afghanistan.
Ivan the Terrible swept on in 1556, taking Astrakhan, the strategically important city where the Volga empties into the Caspian Sea. Military expeditions were then mounted beyond the Ural mountains and into Siberia.Within a century, by 1650, the Russians had reached the Pacific, subduing the Siberian khanate along the way. Over the next two centuries the Muslim tribes in Central Asia were rolled back by a Slav crusade.
Peter the Great seized Dagestan, along the Caspian Sea, in 1723, which began a long and bloody war by Russia to conquer the Caucasus, which was to last until 1859 because of the spirited resistance put up by Caucasian guerrilla leaders such as Mullah Shamyl (1797-1871).
By the time Russia could claim that it had complete control of the Caucasus, it had also moved steadily southeastward into present-day Kazakhstan, building forts and roads and making treaties with local chiefs.
By 1750 the Russians had built forts over some 2,500 kilometers from Gurev, on the northern tip of the Caspian Sea, north to Orenburg and then east as far as the Alatau mountains and the town of Ust-Kamenogorsk (see map). Meanwhile the Russians had also expanded southward from the Siberian steppe as far as Lake Balkash. The Kazakhs were the first to be subdued, through a series of treaties with their chiefs between 1731 and 1740, but the three main Kazakh ordas or hordes still provided formidable resistance to Russian settlers.
As with Siberia, the pressure to conquer Central Asia was a mixture of imperial policy, ambition to rule the entire continent east of Moscow, and unrelenting economic pressure from merchants, bankers and Industrialists.The expansion into Siberia was fuelled by the hunger for land, furs or 'soft gold' and the sudden requirement by the Tsar for penal colonies.
In Central Asia, Russian expansion was fuelled by the military-bureaucratic apparatus which suddenly found itself, at the end of the war in the Caucasus, without an enemy to fight. Senior officers of the 200,000-strong Army of the Caucasus lobbied at the Tsar's court for permission to advance eastward.
At the same time, under Tsar Alexander the Second (1855-81), a similar aim was given to foreign policy by Foreign Minister Prince A. Gorchakov. In his first memorandum to the Tsar he wrote that Russia should turn away from Europe and expand its national interest in Asia, even at the price of confronting the British empire.
Merchants had been trading with Central Asia since the time of Peter the Great, and they had already discovered the merits of Central Asian cotton when the American Civil War (1861-65) suddenly cut off American cotton supplies. Merchants demanded that Moscow advance into Central Asia to secure cotton supplies.They increased the yield by importing Russian farmers and more scientific methods of cultivation. The abolition of serfdom in Russia had created a huge potential free peasant class, who wanted land, while Russian industriaIists were anxious to sell their goods to Central Asia. Once the economic and military imperatives had been determined, the court and the intellectual elite produced the necessary moral justification so common to other empire-building states in the colonial era.
Mikhail Pogodin (1800-75), a history professor at Moscow University, became popular for preaching the superiority of the Russian race and its civilizing mission in Asia. Other historians and writers joined him, helpIng to build an intellectual consensus for an aggressive, expansionist IlOlicy on Russia's borders.
The Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845 in St. Petersburg and largely manned by retired military officers, used its expeditions to Central Asia to advocate seizing the region. Pyotr Semyonov (1827-1914), vice president of the society and himself an explorer of the Tien Shan range, argued for an expansionist policy on the basis of Russia's need for military security. He was later given the title 'Tyan-Shansky' by the Tsar in recognition of his work in opening up Central Asia.
The Russian Orthodox Church demanded that Russia end the slave trade in Khiva and bring Christianity to a barbaric people. For a time in Moscow everyone believed that it was Russia's manifest destiny to move into Asia and expand the empire.
None other than the great Russian novelist and humanist Feodor Dostoevsky was to write in 1881:

...the Russian is not only a European, but also an Asiatic. Not only that; in our coming destiny, perhaps it is precisely Asia that represents our main way out. In Europe we were hangers-on, whereas to Asia we shall go as masters. In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans. Our civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirit and drive us thither.

The first expedition to the east had been a disastrous attempt by Peter the Great to conquer Khiva, in 1717, in which an entire Russian army was decimated. Another military expedition, sent out in 1839, also failed, but from then on the Russians followed a more cautious policy.They advanced east along the Syrdarya river building forts and subduing local tribes, and also moved west from the Tien Shan mountains which they had reached from Siberia. The two prongs of this move converged on Chimkent, which was captured in 1864;
Kyzl Orda, the main seat of Kazakh resistance, had fallen in 1853 and Vierny, now Alma Ata, was founded a year later. The Land between the Two Rivers was now encircled from three sides and the Russians moved in to conquer the rich agricultural heartland of Central Asia that comprises modern Uzbekistan.
Military campaigns were mounted to capture Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868: Bukhara became a Russian protectorate. Meanwhile campaigns against the Turkomen in the south resulted in the capture of Khiva in 1873.
Finally Kokand, in the east, fell in 1876.
Russia's advance into Central Asia had been watched with great trepidation by another great colonial power, Britain, which scrambled to try to capture Afghanistan in a bid to hold back what it feared would be a Russian advance on British India.
Thus began the Great Game between Russia and England which was played out over the vast landscapes of Afghanistan, Persia, Xinjiang and Central Asia. Sensing the coming tensions, Russia quickly legitimized its presence in Central Asia.The conqueror of Central Asia and its governor-general from 1867 to 1881, General K.Von Kaufman, signed a peace treaty with the khan of Khiva abolishing slavery and making Khiva a vassal state. A similar treaty was signed with the emir of Bukhara. Britain tried to trump it in neighbouring Xinjiang by signing a friendship treaty with the emir of Kashgar to ensure that the Russians did not try and move further east into Chinese Turkestan.
Russia also legitimized the borders of Central Asia with its new neighbours. In 1860 a Sino-Russian treaty established the border with Xinjiang. This was to divide permanently the ethnic groups that spanned that border: the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uighurs and others.
Russia neutralized the Persians by signing a peace treaty with Teheran in 1881, after the Russian army had defeated the Turkomen. In 1887 Russia began a long series of demarcations of the Afghan border with the British, to ensure that Afghanistan remained a buffer zone between the two Imperial powers.
The rivalry between the two had intensified after Moscow began laying tracks for the first railway lines in Central Asia, which in twenty years were to traverse the whole region.
The strategic 1,400-kilometre railway line from the Caspian Sea to Samarkand was completed in 1888 after its creators had overcome the enormous problems of building a track in waterless deserts.When the railway line reached Merv and then Kushk on the Afghan border, Russia was only 112 kilometres from Herat in western Afghanistan, which created near-panic in London and Delhi. Russian hawks insisted that a track be laid to Herat while British hawks managed to persuade their government to take the British railway line up the Khyber and Bolan passes in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan to the border with Afghanistan. British military historian Major-General Henry Rawlinson saw Russia advancing towards India 'like an army investing a fortress', and when news leaked that the Russian general M. D. Skobelegv had put forward a plan to the Tsar to Invade India through Afghanistan with just 15,000 men, there was consternation in the British Parliament and in the press.
The pressure from the British in India ensured that Moscow quickly Integrated Central Asia into the Russian empire. Within a few years Central Asia had become a cotton-growing colony for the textile mill owners in Moscow and a virgin market for manufacturers of Russian consumer goods.
It was a vast dumping ground for unwanted Russian firm labour, former serfs and political dissidents as well as a playground for adventure-seeking soldiers, priests, explorers and mountain climbers.
Unlike the British or French colonists, the Russian empire-builders had no seas to cross and no natural barriers to block their absorption of Central Asia. There was no organized state power In the region to hinder their advance and no foreign competition to Interfere with their economic exploitation of the region.
Russia had the vast steppes of Central Asia all to itself. By merely controlling the great navigable rivers and key mountain passes and by building railways, Russian access and political control were assured. Geography had given Russia a vast new hinterland that had incalculable natural resources and unparalleled strategic military depth.
Many Russians and a significant school of thought in England led by Sir Halford Mackinder, the founding father of geopolitics, viewed Central Asia in much the same way as the Mongol hordes did: that Central Asia was the centre of the world. 'It is the greatest natural fortress in the world defended by polar ice caps, deserts, arid tableland and mountain ranges. It was the largest landmass in the world and whoever controlled it exercised enormous power because they were not dependent on sea power.
It was the centre of political gravity because it enclosed more frontiers than any other region in the world - those of India, China, Europe and the Middle East. Although overstated, these were appealing notions for Russian and English strategists, who pushed for their respective expansionist policies in Central Asia. This debate about the 'heartland' was only vindicated during World War Two, when Central Asia gave enormous depth and space to Russia's defence and allowed the country to recover industrially from the fury of the German blitzkrieg.
However, like all usurping powers Russia faced unrelenting resistance from the people. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads periodically rose in revolt against the new Russian farm owners who were seizing their grazing grounds. Revolts were crushed by the army and thousands of nomads were killed; many fled to China to escape persecution.
The Turkomen continued a hit-and-run guerrilla war in the desert that continued unabated until the 1930s.
The Tajiks and the Uzbeks under various political guises - first Pan-Turkism and then Pan-Islamism - resisted the Tsar's policies just as fiercely.
The history of this resistance, which is described in much greater detail later in our discource, was studiously ignored by first tsarist and then Bolshevik historians. The collective memory of this resistance is now playing a major role in shaping the future of the newly independent republics. The brutal repression and exploitation by Russia, which in arable areas led to the cultivation of cotton replacing all major food crops, plunged Central Asia into a grave economic crisis.
When on 25 June 1916 the Tsar ordered the mass mobilization of Central Asian manpower between the ages of nineteen and forty-three to carry out labour duties in the rear of the Russian army that was locked in battle with Germany, this simple edict was all that was need for a generalized revolt. Within a few months Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads were waging an all-out guerrilla war against the Russian army. But without coherent leadership and common goals, and with vast distances to be covered to maintain communications, the revolts were suppressed - with great bloodshed, the slaughter of entire villages and the hanging and forced deportation of thousands of rebels north to Siberia.
Nevertheless the political divide between Russia and Central Asia had grown enormously in the process and a new local leadership of intellectuals, tribal chiefs and merchants formed new parties and military organizations across the region. Prevalent amongst them was the desire for independence, not just from tsarism but from Russia itself.
Russian colonialism had led to an intellectual revival amongst Muslims, especially in the cities of present-day Uzbekistan.
Fierce debates erupted between those who believed in a purely Islamic revival in Central Asia and those who believed in an independent united Turkestan under a Pan-Turkic nationalist leadership.
Others, particularly Tartar intellectuals, were sympathetic to a socialist revolution, which they hoped would not only do away with Russian oppression but also rid their own societies of feudal and tribal elites.
At the heart of these debates was the reformist Jadid movement, begun in 1883 by the Crimean Tartar Ismail Gasprinsky and later led by Uzbek and Tartar intellectuals. The Jadids believed that only by modernizing Islam, spreading education and allowing greater freedom to women could Central Asian Muslims combat growing Russian influence and shape their own future.
When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917 there was considerable hope in Central Asia that Lenin's promises of self-determination meant that Russia would now grant either full independence to Central Asia or at least much greater autonomy. In Lenin's first appeal to the 'Muslims of Russia and the East' on 5 December 1917, he linked the Bolshevik programme, particularly the right of selfdetermination, to the revolt in Central Asia against tsarism. But the Bolsheviks' real attention was directed to Europe, where they believed the incipient insurrection in Berlin would quickly engulf Europe in revolution. Only in late 1918 did Stalin write the first articles in Pravda focusing attention on the revolutionary potential of Central Asia, which could help consolidate the Bolsheviks. A Commissariat of Nationality Affairs, or 'Narkomnats', headed by Stalin had been created in November 1917, but it had failed to address Muslim nationalist feeling in Central Asia. Only after the hopes of revolution in Europe had diminished did Moscow create the All-Russian Congress of Muslim Communist Organizations in the winter of 1918-19 to direct the developing civil war in Turkestan.
Tashkent, a city with a population of 200,000 Muslims and some 50,000 Russian settlers, was the centre of Turkestan's political life. Russian workers and soldiers overthrew the Provisional Government on 31 October 1917 (Julian calendar) and established the first soviet in Central Asia, but local Muslims were not invited to join it. They held a separate Muslim Congress which demanded autonomy for Central Asia but was ignored by the Tashkent Soviet. Muslim leaders then held an important congress in Kokand in December 1917 and announced the formation of the Provisional Autonomous Government of Turkestan, which would seek independence from Russia. Thus within a few months two centres of power had emerged, the wholly Russian and communist centre in Tashkent, and the Muslim and clearly nationalist Turkic centre at Kokand. Ethnic and religious differences had already divided Central Asia. In February 1918 Kokand was attacked by troops of the Tashkent Soviet, who slaughtered the city's inhabitants. The direct result of this brutal assault on the aspirations of Central Asian Muslims was the creation of the Basmachi Muslim rebel movement.
The Basmachis were local guerrilla groups led by mullahs, tribal chiefs and landlords who resisted Soviet rule across the whole of Central Asia and sustained their unequal struggle until the 1930s. By 1919 there were some forty Basmachi groups with some 20,000 fighters strung across the steppe from Ashkhabad to Ferghana and Dushanbe. Lenin's appeals to local Russian communists to be more sensitive to Muslim demands, such as his June 1920 appeal 'On Our Tasks in Turkestan', were ignored. As well as joining the Basmachis, Turkic nomads also joined the White armies in great numbers. By ignoring Muslim demands, the Bolsheviks gave the White armies, now fighting the Reds across much of Central Asia, a major recruiting base.
But the White generals, helped for a time by a dozen foreign countries who wanted to see Bolshevism destroyed, failed to capitalize on this support because their slogan, 'Russia one and indivisible', alienated the Central Asian Muslims and their dream of independence. By 1920 the Civil War was largely won - because tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers crossed lines and joined the Red Army after being appalled by White Russian attitudes and atrocities.These Muslim troops believed that the new communist era promised greater freedom and development for Central Asia. It was a hope that was to be dashed within months of Lenin's death and Stalin's rise to power.

#History #China #PersianEmpire #TurkicEmpire #MongolEmpire #RussianEmpire #SilkRoute #Eurasia #Transoxiana #FerganaValley #Uzbekistan #Tajikistan #Turkmenistan #Kazakhstan #Kyrgyzstan #Islam #MilitantIslamism #Jihad #CentralAsia #URSS #SovietUnion

from: Jihad : the rise of militant Islam in Central Asia
by: Ahmed Rashid

2 Conquerors and Saints: The Past as Present

The ethnic, political, and religious factions now vying for control in Central Asia have a history almost as old as the Central Asian civilizations themselves. Since around 500 B.C., when Darius I added the region known as Transoxiana (present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) to the Persian Empire, to the 1920s, when Stalin forcefully divided the region into the five socialist republics that correspond to the current independent republics, Central Asia has been a center for war and empire, art and culture, religion and commerce.
Much of the reason for Central Asia's rich history is geographical: its huge landmass lies at the heart of the Eurasian continent. In ancient times it was considered the center of the world, linking China with Europe by means of the famous Silk Route. In reality this consisted of several routes, forged to allow merchants to carry goods by camel caravan across the two continents. But the travelers transported more than silk or spices; they also spread new technologies—such as papermaking, gunpowder, and silk weaving— new ideas, and new religions. The religion of the ancient Greeks, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity, Hinduism, Manichaeanism, and most of the major ideas of Islam have at one time or another found a home in Central Asia. It is the prevalence of the various ideas on Islam, in particular, and how they have been received by the various rulers of the Central Asian landmass, that are essential to an understanding of the conflicts that threaten the region today.

The Importance of Geography

Central Asia's greatest strength in the past— and its greatest problem today— is that it is landlocked, bordering Iran and Afghanistan to the south, China to the east, and Russia to the north and west. The vast Central Asian steppe is bounded by the Caspian Sea in the west, the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountain ranges in the south, and the Tian Shan Mountains in the -est along the border with China. There are no clear geographical boundaries in the. north, where the Kazakh steppe merges into Siberia.
Central Asia was once known as "the land between the two rivers'' for the two major rivers, the Amu Darya (Oxus) and the Syr Darya (Jaxartes), that bounded much of its territory before emptying into the Aral Sea. These two rivers have created formidable geographical, cultural, and political boundaries that separated Central Asia from the rest of the world even as the Silk Route connected it.
The Amu Darya, for example, divided the nomadic Turkic and Mongol empires in Central Asia from the Persian Empire to the south, and helped act as a buffer— along with an independent Afghanistan— between the British Empire in India and tsarist Russia. Recently it has marked the border between Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Central Asia.
The Syr Darya has protected Central Asian kingdoms from periodic invasions from Mongolia, Siberia, and the Gobi Desert. Rivers are not the only natural boundaries.
Central Asia lies at the crossroads of the world's highest mountain ranges: the Pamir Mountains, which cover 93 percent of today's Tajikistan; the Tian Shan Mountains, stretching to the east and north of the Pamirs; the Himalayas to the southeast; and the Hindu Kush to the south.
The legendary traveler Marco Polo crossed the Pamirs in 1273 on his way to China, dubbing the range the Roof of the World. "Ascending mountain after mountain, you at length arrive at a point, where you might suppose the surrounding summits to be the highest lands in the world. ... So great is the height of the mountains, that no birds are to be seen near their summits. Here there live a tribe of savage, ill disposed and idolatrous people, who subsist upon the animals they can destroy and clothe themselves with the skins," wrote Polo in his memoirs.
In the center of this vast, magnificent landscape of mountains and steppe are two of the largest deserts in the world.
In the south, covering much of Turkmenistan, is the Kara-Kum (black sands) Desert: more than 135,000 square miles where rain falls approximately once a decade.
To the north, in Uzbekistan, lies the Kyzyl Kum (red sands) Desert.
But between these bleak wastes lush, well-irrigated valleys provide oases around which settlements and cities have grown, each oasis a self-contained economic community whose citizens traded with the local nomads and caravans that passed through. The harsh, sparsely populated landscape made Central Asia ripe for conquest but difficult to rule: empires rose and fell periodically throughout its history.
The geographical face of Central Asia remained largely untouched until the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the region became part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. The Russians and later the Soviets changed the landscape, building massive irrigation networks flowing from huge reservoirs to support cotton agriculture between the Amu and Syr Darya rivers. Although in the process they created irretrievable environmental damage and pollution that have eventually resulted in acute water shortages, the drying up of lakes and rivers, and further desertification, the water routes were for many years essential sources of agriculture and food. Today those irrigation networks lie broken, hostage to the political battles that divide the region.
Central Asia currently comprises five independent republics: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, whose fiercely disputed boundaries were drawn by Stalin as part of his divide-and-rule campaign. Its landmass of 1,542,200 square miles hosts a population of just 52 million people, representing more than one hundred ethnic groups, from the predominant Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Tajiks to Germans, Koreans, and Tibetans. The largest ethnic group is the Uzbeks, who make up 72 percent of Uzbekistan's 22 million people as well as substantial minorities in all the other Central Asian republics. Before the breakup of the Soyiet Union, there were also some 10 million Russians, comprising one-fifth of the population, many the result of forced relocation by Stalin, as another means of weakening the power of the region's ethnic groups. A large number of these Russians have migrated to Russia since 1991.
But the heart of Central Asia has always been the Fergana Valley. Just two hundred miles long and seventy miles across at its widest point, the fertile valley has for centuries been the home for the largest concentration of people. Today it has 10 million inhabitants, 20 percent of the total population of Central Asia.
The emperor Babur, who conquered Afghanistan and founded the Mogul Empire in India in the fifteenth century, was born in the Fergana Valley, describing it in his memoirs as the closest place to Paradise on earth. From his splendid palaces in Delhi, Babur would recall the 140 varieties of grapes and watermelons produced in Fergana. Valley horses were prized as cavalry mounts by nomadic tribes and empire builders as far away as China.
More than crops and livestock flourished in the Fergana Valley. Fergana has also traditionally been the center of Central Asia's political and cultural Islam, producing saints, scholars, mystics, and warriors whose knowledge and learning spread across the Muslim world.
The bordering city of Osh, today the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan, was a seat of Islamic learning in the tenth century. Legend has it that the large mountain in the center of the town was blessed by King Solomon; it still bears the name Takht-i-Sulaiman (Seat of Solomon) and was long a site of Muslim pilgrimage. To the west lie the ancient Muslim capitals of Bukhara and Samarkand. The 360 mosques and 113 madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) of medieval Bukhara produced scholars who spread their faith throughout Russia, China, South Asia, and the Middle East. In the words of a medieval proverb: "The sun does not shine on Bukhara, it is Bukhara that shines on the sun." Even after Bukhara became a Russian protectorate in 1868 there were still 100 madrassahs in Bukhara, with some 10,000 students.

History of Conquest

The history of Central Asia is a tale of conquest, of Mongol "hordes" and Arab holy warriors who swept across its steppes and crossed its mountains and, for a time, enfolded it within the largest empires in the world. Alexander, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan: at one time each of these conquerors added the territories of Central Asia to his vast empire, founding dynasties that survived for centuries— until the next invader arrived.
Early Central Asian history is dominated by the rivalry between the Persians to the south and the Turkic tribes to the north, who vied for control of the rich oasis cities. The Persian Empire under Darius I added Transoxiana to its territory around 500 B.C. but the Persians were ousted for a time by Turkic nomadic invasions from Siberia and Mongolia. These tribes had originally (beginning in about 1000 B.C.) inhabited the Alatau Mountains in eastern Central Asia. (The Chinese began using the word Tur or Turkic to identify all the nomadic tribes who posed a threat to their empire— the ancient origins of the word Turkistan [home of the Turks], used even today to identify Central Asia.) The resurgent Persians next fell victim to Alexander the Great, who conquered Bactria and Sogdiana (ancient Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan) between 329 and 327 B.C., founding the modern-day city of Khujand. Alexander consolidated his control by urging his men to marry local women; he himself married a Sogdian princess, Roxana. Alexander's Greco-Sogdian heirs created the Bactrian Empire, which governed a large part of Central Asia and Afghanistan between 300 and 140 B.C. The western region of Central Asia (presentday Turkmenistan) was ruled by the Parthians, a tribal dynasty based on the Saka tribes, whose empire lasted until A.D. 226, when they were defeated by the Persian Sassanids. Meanwhile, the north of Central Asia was invaded in the last century B.C. by successive waves of Sakas, who in time were driven out by another tribal group of nomads from the Gobi Desert: the Hsiung-nu, the forefathers of the Mongols. The Hsiung-nu had spread west after defeating the Uighurs, another tribal confederation who at that time ruled present-day Xinjiang Province and western China. Continuing their westward march across Central Asia, the Huns, as they were now called, reached the Volga River by a.d. 400. Their empire— the first nomadic Mongol empire— now stretched from Korea to the Volga.
In the fifth century the Huns invaded Europe under their chief Attila and marched on Rome. As the Huns moved westwards the vacuum in eastern Central Asia was once again filled by invading Turkic tribes, who continued their incursions for several centuries. These nomadic invasions from Mongolia and western China have left behind few traces of their empires or culture, and little is known about the political system they erected to rule their vast landmass. Invariably, they would arrive to conquer and then move on eastwards whilst other tribes arrived to take their place.
One nomadic empire did leave some impressive traces: the Kushan Empire, which dates from the first and second centuries A.D. and also included northern India, Iran, and present-day Xinjiang Province in China. In the second century the great Kushan king Kanishka became a patron of the Mahayana school of Buddhism, which was the first to humanize the figure of Buddha. (Previously Buddha had been depicted only by symbols, such as the prayer wheel.) Massive and beautiful stylized Kushan Buddha statues have been unearthed in archaeological digs in the twentieth century in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. It is also noteworthy that in keeping with the religious tolerance that has always characterized Central Asia, the Kushans allowed Zoroastrianism and Hinduism to flourish alongside Buddhism.
For the first several centuries A.D., then, various groups contended over Central Asia: Huns, Sassanians, Turks, and Chinese, who invaded the Fergana Valley. But the next important series of incursions began around 650, when the Arabs came, bringing with them the new faith of Islam. During the next hundred years they sent invading forces into Transoxiana, capturing Bukhara and Samarkand. In 751 an Arab army defeated a Chinese army at Talas, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, decisively ending Chinese ambitions and establishing Islam in Central Asia, although the Arabs themselves did not remain to found substantial kingdoms in the region.
Independent Muslim kingdoms sprang up in the oasis cities. The most significant of these was the empire of the Persian Samanids (874-999), who made their capital at Bukhara. With a well-organized bureaucracy and army the Samanids regulated and expanded the Silk Route, spreading the Persian language and making Bukhara a trade, transport, and cultural center of the Islamic world. Physicians such as Ibn Sina, mathematicians like Al Biruni, and poets such as Firdausi ensured that the Samanid court would leave an indelible mark on the development of the Persian language and culture, an importance that would not be eroded in Central Asia for centuries.
The Samanid Empire came to an end with the arrival of a new wave of Turkic tribes. The Ghaznavids (based in Ghazni, Afghanistan) took over Khurasand, the Qarakhanids captured Bukhara, and later the Seljuks arrived to defeat them and conquer Central Asia and Turkey.
By 1055 the Seljuk chief Turhril was standing outside the gates of Baghdad. For the next two hundred years the Seljuks ruled the area from the Pamir Mountains and the borders of China to Iraq, uniting Central Asia with the Persian and Arab worlds for the first time under Turkic hegemony.
The Mongol hordes (ordas) were the next to sweep through the region. In 1218 the Seljuks had executed an envoy of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan and murdered 450 merchants who had been trading with the Mongols. The infuriated Mongols set out to conquer the Seljuks, and historians have subsequently blamed Seljuk high-handedness for the Mongol onslaught that followed. Under Genghis Khan the Mongols captured Bukhara in 1220, killing thirty thousand people. Standing before a pile of heads in Bukhara, Genghis Khan declared, "You ask who I am, who speaks this to you. Know, then, that I am the scourge of God. If you had not sinned God would not have sent me hither to punish you." The Mongols continued eastwards, adding Russia and parts of Eastern Europe to their empire. Then, having conquered this vast area, they settled down to exploit it. They developed the Silk Route, which had broken down during the incessant invasions, building resthouses along the way and instituting a postal service. Under the Mongols it was possible for caravans to travel in safety from Istanbul to present-day Beijing. For the first time since the conquests of Alexander the Great, Europe was linked with Asia. After the death of Genghis Khan, Central Asia was ruled by his son Chagatai, whose descendants divided the region into two khanates: Transoxiana in the west and Turkistan in the east.
The last great explosion out of Central Asia was to leave the most significant cultural influence in the region. Timur (Tamerlane), who did not begin his conquests until he was forty years old, created the first indigenous empire in Central Asia. Timur was a Barlas Turk who had been born near Samarkand, and he made the city his capital in 1369. After he had conquered Central Asia, he added India, Persia, Arabia, and parts of Russia to his empire. Samarkand was already one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of 150,000, and under Timur it became one of the architectural marvels of the world as well, for Timur brought in artisans and architects from all the conquered regions. By now, after almost four hundred years of Turkic rule, the region had become established as the center for Turkic influence in Central Asia and of resistance to Persian cultural and political domination. Timur even replaced Persian with the Jagatai dialect of Turkish as the court language. The Shaybani Uzbeks, who traced their genealogy back to Uzbek Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, created the last of the great nomadic empires in Central Asia. In 1500 they defeated the Timurids (descendants of Timur) and set up their capital in Bukhara. Under Shaybani rule Turkic (Uzbek) language and literature flourished. The great Uzbek poet Mir Alisher Navai (1441-1501) created the first Turkic script, which replaced Persian.
After the sixteenth century, weakened by the decline of the Silk Route as sea routes opened linking Europe to Africa and India, the Shaybani Empire began to erode. Large empires and strong rulers were no longer needed to ensure the safety of the Silk Route, whilst the dramatic loss of income from the traffic in trade meant that rulers were no longer capable of keeping large standing armies and expanding their kingdoms. In addition, the conservative ulema (Islamic scholars, who had enormous influence over daily life) banned innovations in education and science, further marginalizing Central Asia. The Shaybani Empire gradually degenerated into a collection of small, squabbling, city-based fiefdoms. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these emerged as three separate but weak khanates— Khiva, Kokand, and Bukhara — in which the khans (rulers) later established dynasties: the Kungrad in Khiva, the Mangyt in Bukhara, and the Ming in Kokand. The impoverished khans survived by the slave trade and the imposition of exorbitant taxes on the population.
It was inevitable that the tsars, seeking to expand their Russian empire, should eventually look to Central Asia. By 1650 the Russians had annexed Siberia and reached the Pacific Ocean. In the next two centuries Russia moved to conquer the Caucasus and Central Asia. Peter the Great invaded the Kazakh steppe in 1715 and began building Russian forts, the first at Omsk in 1716. By 1750 all the Kazakh khans, who saw the Russians as their best security against the marauding Uzbeks, had signed treaties with Moscow. The Russian expansion was fueled by the empire's vast military bureaucratic apparatus, which had subdued the Caucasus and was now without a role even as the tsars eyed the potential resources of Central Asia: minerals and cotton. When the American Civil War (1861-65) cut off vital cotton supplies to Russian factories, the urge to conquer Central Asia was irresistible. At the same time Russia was watching with apprehension the steady expansion of the British Empire in India from Bengal towards Afghanistan. This was the era of the Great Game —the vast power struggle between Russia and Great Britain for control of Asia that used Central Asia and Afghanistan as pawns in their efforts to outmaneuver each other, building influence. At the end of the nineteenth century, Afghanistan was established as buffer between the two empires of Russia and Britain.
In the brief period between and 1876, Russian armies captured Tashkent and much of modern-day Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan, although the border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan remained open, and tribal leaders and bandits frequently took refuge in one another's territories— a tradition that is being revived today amongst the Islamic extremists of Central Asia and the Taliban. The Russians established the province of Turkestan, whose capital was Tashkent and which was ruled by a governor general appointed by Moscow. They left the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva as autonomous political units, dependent on Russia. Whilst the settled regions were easily conquered, the nomadic tribes continued to resist for several decades, and periodic revolts broke out in the Fergana Valley. In 1885 Russian troops crushed a revolt in the valley towns of Osh, Margilan, and Andijan led by a Sun Dervish, Khan Tura. The most serious threat to Russian rule arose in May 1898, when twenty-two Russian soldiers were killed in Andijan by Islamic rebels. The revolt spread to other towns before Russian troops arrived and brutally quashed the rebellion.
As a way of controlling the region, the Russians began resettling Central Asia with ethnic Russians and Cossacks and turning the rest of the land over to cotton production; in 1891 alone more than a million Russian and Cossack farmers were settled on Kazakh lands adjoining Siberia. The Russians developed large cotton plantations by means of vast irrigation projects. New industries manned by Russian workers were also introduced, and Central Asia was linked with Russia through a railway network that for the first time brought the Russian Empire up to the borders of Afghanistan, Iran, China, and British India. Tsarist rule ended in a holocaust of suffering for the peoples of Central Asia. In 1916, with the region facing a massive famine, a revolt broke out after Moscow tried to draft Central Asians to fight for the tsarist army in World War I. The government also increased taxes and forcefully appropriated wheat from the region. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz nomads, who saw no reason why they should fight in Europe for the tsar, were the first to rebel, and the revolt soon spread across Central Asia. But as with previous rebellions, tsarist troops brutally suppressed it, killing tens of thousands of people in the process. In the Tian Shan Mountains a Cossack army carried out reprisals against the Kyrgyz, slaughtering flocks, burning down villages, and forcing huge numbers of Kyrgyz to flee across the border into Chinese Turkestan. Even today the Kyrgyz identify the 1916-17 repression as the worst period in their history, in which as much as a quarter of the Kyrgyz population was slaughtered or forced to flee.
But when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917, Central Asia had no desire to become part of the new Soviet Union. Central Asians resisted Sovietization more fiercely than most other regions, with the Muslim Basmachis ("bandits"), as the Bolsheviks termed them, leading the struggle. By 1929, however, when the Basmachis were finally defeated, the map of Central Asia had been forcibly redrawn into five soviet republics, and the centuries of wars for control of the region seemed to have come to an end. That too was to change.

Islam in Central Asia

The people of Central Asia are predominantly Sunni Muslims of the Hannafi sect. Shia Muslims make up a small minority in some of the great trading cities, like Bukhara and Samarkand, as well as in Tajikistan, where the Ismaeli sect, whose spiritual leader is the Aga Khan, can be found in the Gorno-Badakhshan region of the Pamir Mountains. (The Ismaelis also occupy adjacent areas south of the Pamirs in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.) Since 1991 Central Asia has also seen a meteoric rise of militant Islamic sects, each with its own brand of orthodoxy and sharia (Islamic law), and this phenomenon has obscured one of the most important aspects of traditional Central Asian Islam— its tolerance. Characterized by major advances in philosophy, ethics, legal codes, and scientific research under largely liberal political rulers, and spread through a vast region by Arabs, Mongols, and Turks, the Islam of Central Asia took many forms. Early Central Asian Muslims coexisted in relative peace not only with one another but also with the Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Nestorian Christians who had established pockets of civilization in the region.
Perhaps the most important Islamic movement to arise in Central Asia was Sufism: a form of Islamic mysticism that preached direct communion with God and tolerance towards all other forms of worship. Sufism originated in Central Asia and Persia soon after the Arab invasions. The name derives from the rough woolen cloaks worn by the early Sufi brothers (sufi means "wool" in Arabic), who inherited some of the symbols of pre-Islamic nomadic mystics. The Sufis encouraged popular participation in Islam through their opposition to authority, intellectualism, and the mullahs (clergy).
Sufis urged all Muslims to experience God directly, without the intervention of priests or scholars— an important factor in the spread of Islam amongst Central Asia's sparse, nomadic population. The Sufi orders, or tariqas ("the way"), are best defined as "brotherhood[s] of Sufis who have a common pedigree of spiritual masters, ... in which elders initiate disciples and grant them formal permission to continue a common school of thought and practice."
Sufis invoke God through the zikr, vocal (or sometimes silent) prayers, Dervishes—another Sufi sect— perfected into an art form. Many of the tariqas evolved into secret societies with their own codes of behavior and prayer. The tariqas played a major role in reviving Islam in the thirteenth century after the Mongol destruction, and they continued to sustain Islamic faith and practice centuries later in the Soviet era, when Islam was driven underground by the authorities.
The most important tariqas are Naqshbandiyya, Qadiriyya, Yasawiyya, and Kubrawiyya.
The Qadiriyya, probably the oldest extant order, was founded by Abd al-Qadir. A minor tariqa in Baghdad in the twelfth century, the Qadiriyya moved to Central Asia, becoming particularly strong during the thirteenth century, and then spread to Afghanistan and India. Central Asian Qadiris were centered mainly in the cities of Transoxiana.
Kubra, the founder of Kubrawiyya, was martyred in the Mongol massacres in Central Asia in 1221. The Kubrawiyya order took strong hold in Khorezm (present-day Uzbekistan).
The Yasawiyya order was founded by the poet and mystic Ahmed Yasawi, who died in 1166 and is buried in southern Kazakhstan. Their main influence was in the Fergana Valley and amongst the southern Turkic tribes.
Muhammad ibn Baha ad-Din Naqshband (1317-89), the founder of the Naqshbandiyya tariqa, is still the most revered mystic and saint in Central Asia and Afghanistan. Even today his tomb outside Bukhara is the most important place of pilgrimage in Central Asia.
Unlike other Sufi sects the Naqshbandis, though mystics, believe in active missionary work and political activism; many led revolts against the tsar and the Communists. The leader of the 1898 revolt in Andijan was a Naqshbandi.
The Sufi orders spread their message to China via the Fergana Valley and to India and the Arab world through Afghanistan. Sufi spiritual leaders, especially the Naqshbandis, vied with the traditional ulema, who tended to be fiercely opposed to them, for influence amongst local rulers. And influence they had: the rulers of the Turkic dynasties would seek validation for their rule from the leading Sufi saints. The relationship of ruler and mystic, in the words of Islamic scholar Bruce Lawrence, tended to be "fraught with tension," for Sufi mystics saw themselves as eternal rulers, more powerful than the most autocratic temporal ruler.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the leading Naqshbandi families (leadership in the sect was frequently passed down from father to son) served as political advisers and spiritual guides to many of the khans who governed the increasingly fragmented Central Asia. Some of these Sufi families became rulers themselves. Many became rich and corrupt in the process, one of the reasons for the Jadid reforms in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century Naqshbandi political activism played a major role in influencing militant Islamic movements in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and most recently the Fergana Valley.
But beyond the oasis towns and valleys, the spread of Islam on the Central Asian steppe was slow and sporadic. Islam did not come to the Kazakh steppe until the seventeenth century, and even then the predominant Sufism incorporated ancient shamanistic traditions of the nomadic culture, such as the veneration of animals and nature. Although Zoroastrianism, the religion of the Persian kings, was discouraged by the Islamic invaders, elements continued to thrive on the steppe, taking on an Islamic coloring, as well as in Iran and India.
Thus, early on in the history of Islam two branches of the religion emerged in Central Asia: the traditional, conservative, scholarly Islam of the settled areas and the oasis cultures that was dominated by local rulers and the ulema, and the much looser, less restrictive Islam of the nomads that still favored Sufism and pre-Islamic traditions.
As historian Fernand Braudel noted, "Islam is essentially an urban religion. So Islam consists of a few densely populated regions, separated by vast stretches of empty space."
Even today the nomadic Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkmen tribes are far less Islamicized— and much less susceptible to Islamic radicalism— than their ethnic counterparts in the settled oasis areas.
The Arabs who brought Islam Central were soon displaced by Persian and Turkic tribes, each of whom adopted Islam. Of the two, for many centuries Persian was the dominant influence, lasting until the Safavid dynasty came to power in Persia around 1500. The Safavids changed Persia's state religion from Sunni to Shia Islam— step that considerably reduced Persian influence in Central Asia. In addition, Persia became preoccupied with combating the challenge of the Ottoman power in Turkey on its western borders, and Persian leaders therefore paid less attention to Central Asia.
Nevertheless, the earlier Persian empires had left an enormous legacy in Central Asia in the arts, language, poetry, and sciences. Not until the Shaybani Uzbeks, who aggressively made their empire more Turkic, did Persian control and influence in Central Asia wane. The only vestiges of Persian ethnicity remaining in Central Asia today are the Tajiks, who speak Persian and are proud of their Persian culture and heritage. But the tension between Persian and Turkic culture continues, both in the competition for influence in Central Asia between Iran and Turkey and in the ongoing disputes between Tajikistan and Turkic Uzbekistan over Tajiks in Uzbekistan and Uzbeks in Tajikistan, and over borders. Many Tajiks assert that the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, which Stalin handed over to Uzbekistan, should rightfully belong to Tajikistan. For they are Tajik cultural and historical centers.
Central Asian Islam became less dynamic under the tsars, not because Central Asia's new Russian masters tried to interfere with the Islamic clergy, law, or practices but because they wooed them with modern advances: industry, education, technology. The Russians also supported the ultra-conservative ulema, whilst at the same time settling millions of ethnic Russians in the region to try and make good Russians out of Central Asians.
But the new colonial masters were only partly successful. The introduction of Western ideas and sciences paved the way for a modernist reinterpretation of Islam by the Jadids, a reform sect of Tartars whose inspiration was Ismail Bay Gasprinski (1851-1914), founder of the influential Tartar-language newspaper Tercuman in 1883. Based on Usul-i-jadid (new educational principles), Jadidism was one of the many intellectual Islamic reform movements that swept the colonized Muslim world in the late nineteenth century. All sought in varying degrees to reconcile the problems associated with exposure to Western modernism with Muslim religion and culture, particularly for Muslims who lived in colonies ruled by non-Muslims. These movements, in India, Egypt, Turkey, and Afghanistan, were primarily anticolonial and pan-Islamic, but they also advocated religious reform, modern education, and an understanding of the sciences.
Jadid teachers and scholars in Tashkent and the Fergana Valley founded new schools with modern curricula: math, the sciences, theater, poetry, and Russian and Turkic literature, as well as traditional Islamic subjects. They staged plays and operas and published a number of newspapers that helped revive the Turkic languages and develop a modern Turkic culture. The literature they generated analyzed local history, culture, and politics in a modern way for the first time. This embrace of modernism brought the Jadids into conflict not just with the Russians but also with the ulema, whom they considered reactionary and obscurantist. For their part the Russians had encouraged the ulema to continue their practice of a conservative interpretation of the sharia as a way of countering anti-Russian Islamic and nationalist movements.
For all their success the Jadids remained an intellectual rather than a mass movement, divided over ideology and politics. When the 1917 revolution came, some Jadids backed the Bolsheviks because they sought to throw over the tsarist empire and saw in the Communist ideology a chance of greater freedom, the adoption of modern ideas, and education whilst others resisted them because of their lack of respect for Islam. The Jadids who joined the Communist Party after 1917 played a critical role in helping build indigenous Communist parties in Central Asia, but it did them little good. The Soviets termed the Jadids bourgeois reformers and banned their literature. When Stalin came to power he began a steady purge of Jadids; the last Jadids were eliminated in the massacres of 1937. During the brief cultural flowering after independence in 1991, Uzbek intellectuals attempted to republish and popularize Jadid writings, but they were quickly suppressed. Uzbek President Islam Karimov discourages all attempts to renew interest in Jadidism, although the movement has immense relevance in today's discussion of the way Islam, nationalism, and democracy can coexist in Central Asia.