The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi

The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi
Author: Musa Sayrami
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231558236

The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi is an epic and tragic history from the region of Xinjiang in northwest China, the homeland of the Muslim-majority Uyghur people. Written in the early twentieth century, it chronicles a mass rebellion by the Muslims of Xinjiang against the China-based Qing empire from its beginnings in 1864 to the Qing reconquest of 1877 and its aftermath. Its author, Musa Sayrami, was an eyewitness to and participant in the rebellion, and he later became a servant to the state that arose from it: an emirate led by the Central Asian military commander Yaʿqub Beg. Sayrami documents the optimism of the rebellion’s early days, when local Muslims rose up to demand justice, as well as the tragedies that resulted from its leaders’ hubris. Yaʿqub Beg’s state offered hope for Islamic rule, but he turned out to be a flawed ruler, and the Qing reconquered the region. The narrative alternates dramatic scenes of battles and intrigue with colorful legends and reflections on the nature of politics. Sayrami wrote not only to record events being lost from memory three decades after the uprising but also to account for why the Islamic rebellion had failed. He draws on traditional Islamic scholarship to analyze the relationship between Qing and Islamic power, developing an incisive argument about politics and empire. Presenting a distinctly Uyghur perspective on China, Eurasia, and the world, the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi is at once an invaluable lens on a period of flux and a cornerstone of Uyghur writing.

The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History

The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History
Author: Rian Thum
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2014-10-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 067496702X

For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr—the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet—have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with the past. Uyghur historical practice emerged from the circulation of books and people during the Qing Dynasty, when crowds of pilgrims listened to history readings at the tombs of Islamic saints. Over time, amid long journeys and moving rituals, at oasis markets and desert shrines, ordinary readers adapted community-authored manuscripts to their own needs. In the process they created a window into a forgotten Islam, shaped by the veneration of local saints. Partly insulated from the rest of the Islamic world, the Uyghurs constructed a local history that is at once unique and assimilates elements of Semitic, Iranic, Turkic, and Indic traditions—the cultural imports of Silk Road travelers. Through both ethnographic and historical analysis, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History offers a new understanding of Uyghur historical practices, detailing the remarkable means by which this people reckons with its past and confronts its nationalist aspirations in the present day.

Land of Strangers

Land of Strangers
Author: Eric Schluessel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2020-10-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 023155222X

At the close of the nineteenth century, near the end of the Qing empire, Confucian revivalists from central China gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan. There they undertook a program to transform Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians, seeking to bind this population and their homeland to the Chinese cultural and political realm. Instead of assimilation, divisions between communities only deepened, resulting in a profound estrangement that continues to this day. In Land of Strangers, Eric Schluessel explores this encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the oasis of Turpan. He follows the stories of families divided by war, women desperate to survive, children unsure where they belong, and many others to reveal the human consequences of a bloody conflict and the more insidious violence of reconstruction. Schluessel traces the emergence of new struggles around essential questions of identity, showing how religious and linguistic differences converged into ethnic labels. Reading across local archives and manuscript accounts in the Chinese and Chaghatay languages, he recasts the attempted transformation of Xinjiang as a distinctly Chinese form of colonialism. At a time when understanding the roots of the modern relationship between Uyghurs and China has taken on new urgency, Land of Strangers illuminates a crucial moment of social and cultural change in this dark period of Xinjiang’s past.

The Life of Alimqul

The Life of Alimqul
Author: Timur Beisembiev
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2013-12-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136820043

This work studies a narrative devoted to the history of the Kokand Khanate, a state that played a great role in Central Asian history in the 18th and 19th centuries, controlling territory equal to continental western Europe, until it was conquered by the Russian Empire in 1876. This unique manuscript, discovered by the editor in Tashkent, is a biography of Alimqul Amir-i Lashkar, Commander-in- Chief of the Kokand army and de facto ruler of the Kokand state in 1863-1865, who died in battle at the age of thirty three. Shortly after his death, Tashkent was captured by Russian troops. The author of this biography was an intimate friend of Alimqul and was actively involved in politics. Includes rare reproduction of Chagatay Turkic text.

The Empire And the Khanate

The Empire And the Khanate
Author: L. J. Newby
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004145508

Drawing on Qing archival sources, from the Qianlong era to the mid-19th century, this study charts the changes in Qing policy that characterized the empire's relations with the Central Asian khanate of Khoqand, and shows how these developments impacted on the northwestern frontier of Xinjiang.

Central Asian Intellectuals on Islam

Central Asian Intellectuals on Islam
Author: Sophie Roche
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-10-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3112402812

The refereed series ZMO-Studien publishes monographs and edited volumes which mirror the interdisciplinary research programme and approach of the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient.

Epigraphy and Islamic Culture

Epigraphy and Islamic Culture
Author: Mohammad Yusuf Siddiq
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317587456

Architectural inscriptions are a fascinating aspect of Islamic cultural heritage because of their rich and diverse historical contents and artistic merits. These inscriptions help us understand the advent of Islam and its gradual diffusion in Bengal, which eventually resulted in a Muslim majority region, making the Bengali Muslims the second largest linguistic group in the Islamic world. This book is an interpretive study of the Arabic and Persian epigraphic texts of Bengal in the wider context of a rich epigraphic tradition in the Islamic world. While focusing on previously untapped sources, it takes a fresh look into the Islamic inscriptions of Bengal and examines the inner dynamics of the social, intellectual and religious transformations of this eastern region of South Asia. It explores many new inscriptions including Persian epigraphs that appeared immediately after the Muslim conquest of Bengal indicating an early introduction of Persian language in the region through a cultural interaction with Khurasan and Central Asia. In addition to deciphering and editing the epigraphic texts, the information derived from them has been analyzed to construct the political, administrative, social, religious and cultural scenario of the period. The first survey of the Muslim inscriptions in India ever to be attempted on this scale, the book reveals the significance of epigraphy as a source for Islamic history and culture. As such, it will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian Studies, Asian History and Islamic Studies.

Uyghur Nation

Uyghur Nation
Author: David Brophy
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674970462

The meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in the nineteenth century had dramatic consequences for Central Asia’s Muslim communities. Along this frontier, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and the revolutions that engulfed Russia and China in the early twentieth century. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the modern Uyghur nation. As exiles and émigrés, traders and seasonal laborers, a diverse diaspora of Muslims from China’s northwest province of Xinjiang spread to Russian territory, where they became enmeshed in political and intellectual currents among Russia’s Muslims. From the many national and transnational discourses of identity that circulated in this mixed community, the rhetoric of Uyghur nationhood emerged as a rallying point in the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. Working both with and against Soviet policy, a shifting alliance of constituencies invoked the idea of a Uyghur nation to secure a place for itself in Soviet Central Asia and to spread the revolution to Xinjiang. Although its existence was contested in the fractious politics of the 1920s, in the 1930s the Uyghur nation achieved official recognition in the Soviet Union and China. Grounded in a wealth of little-known archives from across Eurasia, Uyghur Nation offers a bottom-up perspective on nation-building in the Soviet Union and China and provides crucial background to the ongoing contest for the history and identity of Xinjiang.