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Central Asian Survey

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The journey of maps and images on the

Silk Road
a
Jean-Charles Ducène
a
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Published online: 28 May 2010.

To cite this article: Jean-Charles Ducène (2010) The journey of maps and images on the Silk Road,
Central Asian Survey, 29:1, 137-139, DOI: 10.1080/02634931003765639

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 Central Asian Survey
Vol. 29, No. 1, March 2010, 131 –142

Book reviews

Turkestan struggle abroad (from Jadidism to independence), by A. Ahat Andican, Haarlem,

SOTA, 2007, 776 pp., E65.00 (hardback), ISBN 90-807403-6-5

The pan-Turkic ideal and its political manifestations had a regular, if generally secondary, role in
twentieth-century Central Asian political history.1 In many instances it was on the ‘wrong side’
as evident in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Second World War, for example. As such, texts
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on the region have regularly contained reference to pan-Turkism, including notable discussions
by Naumkin, Olcott and Whitlock in larger works. However, these have, understandably, dealt
with the issue in passing, introducing them as simply one supporting actor in a much larger play.
Andican alters the perspective by placing the Turkestani ideal centre stage. He has sought to
produce a definitive, comprehensive, English-language book that is solely devoted to the
pan-Turkic ideals and movements. As he acknowledges, the book is a labour of love, based
on more than twenty years of research.
The book is structured as a straightforward, traditional political history. In 667 pages,
Andican details the evolution and success or otherwise of the Turkestani ideal over more than
a hundred years. His ‘narration of the struggle abroad for the liberation of Turkestan’ begins
with the Jadidists and their interaction with the radical and revolutionary groups of late
Tsarist Russia as well as the reformist thinking in late Ottoman Turkey. It then examines the
activities of the Basmachi, and the Bukharan Amir Amanullah, both ultimately operating out
of Afghanistan in their protracted resistance to Soviet control of Central Asia. The Turkestani
groups’ exile activities in 1920 –30s Western Europe and Turkey, as well as their less well-
known presence in Afghanistan and Iran during the same time, are then described. This discus-
sion of the inter-war period is perhaps the most interesting and groundbreaking part of the
material, at least to this reader. The complicated and controversial relationship between Nazi
Germany and the émigrés, and subsequent creation of the Turkestan Legion and its fate
during and immediately after the Second World War, are discussed in detail. The book then
deals with the Cold War era, including events in Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey and ultimately
the collapse of the Soviet Union. It concludes with a slightly incongruous chapter entitled
‘Warfare in Afghan Turkestan’. This includes reference to the internecine violence in 1990s
Afghanistan and the attack on the World Trade Center and its implications for Afghanistan.
Although dealing with an ideology and organizations whose primary focus was Tsarist/
Soviet Central Asia, the book centres on these groups’ intellectual and physical manifestations
outside of the region. This makes sense given the intellectual and physical linkages to the
Ottoman Empire and Turkey, the fact that these organizations were forced to operate in exile
and, as the author demonstrates, had to interact and adapt to global and regional ideologies,
events and political actors.
A real strength of the book is Andican’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject and his
extensive use of primary source material. Throughout the text are reproductions of manifestos,
pamphlets and photographs, many of which are from the author’s private collection. An
appendix also contains colour representation of the flags of Turkestani movements. The
inclusion of this material is a real asset and brings the text alive.
However there are a number of underlying flaws with this work. These centre on questions of
objectivity and impartiality, and the analytical quality and depth of the work. The book feels
ill-balanced both in terms of focus and analytical judgement. Careful, even substantive

ISSN 0263-4937 print/ISSN 1465-3354 online

http://www.informaworld.com
 132 Book reviews

editing could have partially remedied these problems. It would have also improved the work’s
crispness, removing superfluous material such as a substantive section on the Russian Revolu-
tion, for example, which adds little to Andican’s argument or the reader’s education.
However this would not have solved the crux of the problem, which is the author’s inability
to distance himself from his subject. Consequently, the book is as much a polemic as an impartial
history, and the author’s sympathies are rarely very far below the surface.
What analysis there is tends to be cursory. The book’s chronological approach means it is
rich in dates, personality and events. However the quality and quantity of its critical assessment
is more limited. The book does raise a number of interesting, difficult, and even provocative
questions about the Turkestani movements’ goals, methods and alliances, most obviously on
the decision to cooperate with the Nazi regime. One does not feel, however, that Andican
answers these entirely satisfactorily or with enough evidence at times to defend controversial
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conclusions. In addition the text is relatively uncritical of the motives, actions and goals of
Turkestani activists whilst highly critical of actors who do not share their ambitions. There is
little discussion of what the Turkestani agenda really is, how relevant it was or how it
evolved during the period of study. The text’s inclusion of diverse figures such as the Jadidists
and General Dostum as fellow Turkestani actors suggests there is little to link them other than a
supposed acceptance of a shared Turkic ethnicity and (sporadic) opposition to Russian/Soviet
authority.
A leitmotif in the book is the portrayal of Turkestani activists as political pawns in much
larger and more ruthless power struggles, whether the Second World War or the Cold War.
To a limited extent, his analysis is correct. Pan-Turkicism was a marginal movement with
few resources. It was therefore unable to compete effectively in the arena of ideals with
Communism, Nazism or even liberal Western values such as the nation-state and democracy.
However Andican seems overly keen to blame external factors for pan-Turkicism’s failures
rather than reflect on the intellectual and organizational weaknesses or political miscalculations
of the Turkestani ideal and its advocates. These issues are perhaps most pronounced in his
discussion of the Nazi – Turkestani relationship during the 1930s and the Second World War.
Andican seeks to justify this as a relationship of unequal partners. He rightly shows the stark
Hobson’s choice for Soviet Central Asians in the German prisoner of war camps; die in the
camps’ appalling conditions, or volunteer to fight alongside a regime that opposed the alleged
Soviet oppressor. However he seeks to argue that there was no other alternative and the
values of his protagonists were untainted by such collaboration. The ‘Central Asians as
pawns’ thesis also undermines another of his (and his protagonists’) arguments – the axiomatic
role of agency and self-determination in this, as in any, ‘liberation’ movement.
The author’s objectivity is also brought into question by his strong views on the USSR. For
Andican, the ‘Soviet Union . . . was the vista of the gravest tragedy in history’ [italics added by
the reviewer] and ‘the most tyrannical ideology the world had ever experienced.’ (p. 17). One
cannot deny the suffering the USSR inflicted on its own peoples of all ethnicities, but even
within the period of study it faced some stiff competition for this accolade, including the
actions of another totalitarian regime, which elements of the Turkestani movement fought
alongside.
The issue of impartiality is perhaps most acute in the final chapter on Afghanistan. Andican
does not shy away from his own political engagement with General Dostum. (Andican was
Turkish Minister of State for the Turkish Republics and Turkish Communities during the
1990s.) However the issue of conflict of interest and distance between author and subject are
not addressed. One wonders if another, less involved author would refer to General Dostum,
whose militias were investigated by the UN after being accused of suffocating hundreds of
Taleban prisoners to death by locking them inside containers, as a ‘perfect soldier’ (p. 656).
 Book reviews 133

The author’s clear passion, and even political and personal engagement with his subject
affect the book’s impact. Consequently it needs to be read with care. It should be regarded as
a primary rather than secondary source – more political memoir than objective analysis.
Although highly opinionated, it is nonetheless a richly detailed and well-illustrated account of
an important but under-studied phenomenon.

Note
1. The views, findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in this review are those of the author
alone and do not necessarily represent the official position of the OSCE and/or its participating states.

Stuart Horsman
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Policy Support Service, Organisation for Cooperation and Security in Europe, Vienna
Email: Stuart.Horsman@osce.org
# 2010, Stuart Horsman
DOI: 10.1080/02634931003765589

Conflict transformation in Central Asia: irrigation disputes in the Ferghana Valley, by

Christine Bichsel, Abingdon, Routledge, 2009, 169 pp., no price, ISBN 0-415-46725-X
(hardback)

The extent and significance of violence and conflict potential in the contemporary Ferghana
Valley borderlands has become one of the most intense subjects of debate in the study of
Central Asia over the last decade. Christine Bichsel’s new book provides a richly detailed
and analytically sophisticated supplement to this work that is attentive to the social construction
of conflict historically, materially and symbolically.
Bichsel’s primary focus is the international mission to resolve these ostensible conflicts. She
takes as her foil the identification of ‘dangerous divisions’ over resources and along ethnic lines.
This finding has served as the premise of a number of significant policy studies and multi-million
dollar aid programmes, as well as prompting a critique, in the pages of this journal, of the ‘dis-
course of danger’ that has been engendered by these studies and interventions. From 2003 – 2007
she researched three similar conflict transformation projects in the Ferghana Valley borderlands
all addressing conflicts over irrigation. Her first case is the villages of Pülyon, Khalmion and
Alga along the Kyrgyzstan– Uzbekistan frontier near the foothills of the Alai mountains. The
second is Kush’iar, Sogment and Charbak on the southwestern edge of the Uzbekistani Sokh
enclave. The final case is of Aksai and Tojikon in the borderlands of the Tajikistani Vorukh
enclave. Both of these enclaves are within Kyrgzstan.
Bichsel argues that the peace-building framework adopted by the three aid agencies she
studies leads them to a broadly common approach that misdiagnoses conflicts as driven by
ethnic difference and scarcity of resources. This misdiagnosis, she argues, means that their
aid has unintended effects, even supporting processes of authoritarian state-building which
generate the real grievances behind the conflicts.
The author’s approach is that of the ethnography of aid, a body of thought emerging from
dissatisfaction with the analytical gazes found in development studies. Developmentalism
seeks development through universal models of progress whilst, conversely, post-development-
alism finds in these models the very antonym of their intent – the disempowerment and
increased dependency of the Global South. By contrast ethnographers of aid explore aid as
 134 Book reviews

indeterminate social processes where hegemonic discourses shape local contexts but are also
themselves adapted and even resisted in these contexts. The book explores three subjects of
inquiry and in each case builds on a nascent literature in Central Asian Studies. Firstly it
surveys irrigation practices and disputes in her three case studies, both historically and
contextually. Secondly, Bichsel analyses the international discourse of peace-building as it is
adopted and applied in the Ferghana Valley context by the three agencies. Finally, she considers
what she calls the ‘optics’ of the aid agency approach where conflicts are seen as problems in
need of solutions rather than social processes of transformation.
Bichsel makes a significant empirical contribution to all three of these areas in large part due to
her inter-disciplinary gaze. Firstly, her discussion of the physical and historical geography of her
three cases from a broadly social constructivist perspective allows her to explore the role that
landscape and resources play without resorting to any deterministic rendering of scarcity
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causing conflict. This is shown vividly in her discussion of the Kyrgyz saying ‘better be the
head of the water than the head of the people’ (pp. 49–54). The material is also very well presented
with original maps of the three local areas studied. Secondly, her attention to social and political
geography leads her to explore how both territorial and spatial formations are shifting in response
to post-Soviet state-building (in the ‘creeping migration’ of tree-planting villages and reciprocal
new village settlements promoted by regional and central governments, pp. 114–119) and
international intervention (in the creation of international, inter-ethnic water usage associations
and the rehabilitation of canals, pp. 121–122). Finally her political anthropology allows her to
see how politics cannot be removed from these conflicts despite the aid agencies’ best efforts to
achieve cooperation between parties free from political interference. The community-based
organizations (CBOs) she surveys were thus merely reactive to local political authorities, be
they official, unofficial or both. For example, in the Kyshtut municipality of Batken region,
these authorities included the (now deceased) local parliamentarian, businessman and criminal
Baiaman Erkinbaev (pp. 90–94). As a consequence, ‘CBOs in general had very little substance
to trace, almost no texture to grasp and were often of vague and elusive nature’ (p. 83).
The outstanding issue of Conflict transformation is how in the newly independent states of
Central Asia international development proceeds amidst state formation and vice versa. Perhaps
partly because of the empirical richness and inter-disciplinarity of her study Bichsel minimizes
her reference to theory although it clearly stands in the background of her work. For example,
she clearly prefers Ferguson’s conceptualization of development as anti-politics to Scott’s
capturing of this in terms of authoritarian high-modernism (p. 12) yet as the book doesn’t
explore this debate in any depth it is difficult to fully grasp the justification for this conceptual
choice. It also leaves the more sophisticated parts of the analysis more difficult to follow.
For example, excellent empirical works show that the popular adoption of ethnic difference
as the basis for conflict stems, at least partly, from governmental ‘re-traditionalization’ as well as
aid agencies’ misdiagnosis of conflict and practices of working through and between ethnic
groups. Whilst aid agencies see conflict as arising from the lack of ‘civilization’ in the Ferghana
Valley (p. 102), in many ways what we have is the very opposite. Bichsel demonstrates that con-
flict is historically and socially constructed since at least the border delimitations of 1924 – 27
(pp. 106 – 112). Thus, recent exercises in delimitation and subsequent militarization of the
border, particularly by the government of Uzbekistan, must be seen in light of a wider
process of nation-building beginning during the Soviet era. However, one feels that Bichsel
could say more here. Particularly in the case of Uzbekistan, nation-building could equally be
read as the kind of disciplining and grid-making modernization which Scott describes. Given
the emphasis which Bichsel places on the role of Soviet and post-Soviet states in fomenting
and addressing conflict, it is not clear why Scott’s high-modernism and Ferguson’s anti-politics
cannot be combined to illuminate how state formation and international development interact.
 Book reviews 135

Bichsel is somewhat hopeful that aid agencies might learn based on some evidence of dis-
cursive change (p. 127), in particular the recent and long overdue realization that the primary
conflict dynamic in the Ferghana Valley is between citizens and states (p. 123). However,
whilst there is no doubt that the aid industry in Central Asia attracts some extraordinary local
and foreign talents, it also generates its own political economy and discursive environment
which trap it in quite misleading heuristic frameworks and make it deaf to less instrumentalist
readings of conflict be they international or local. As Bichsel masterfully shows, aksakals
(elders) and ashar (collective labour) serve as mere decorative dressing – trompe l’œil
(p. 82) – for international aid in the Ferghana Valley. They are of instrumental purpose for
project-conducting and the representation of ‘indigeneity’ but they are not considered in
terms of the kind of authority and substantive legitimacy they may or may not have (p. 70).
This damning critique of the international aid industry for its detachment from the local
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context and simulation of ‘bottom-up’ peace-building (p. 78, 83) implies that whatever
change takes place in development thinking it will be technical, procedural and thus quite super-
ficial. As Bichsel herself notes, ‘it is equally important to bear in mind that such change does not
efface the constructed need to continue reforming the subjects of peace-building’ (p. 127).

John Heathershaw
University of Exeter
Email: J.D.Heathershaw@exeter.ac.uk
# 2010, John Heathershaw
DOI: 10.1080/02634931003765605

The ghosts of freedom: a history of the Caucasus, by Charles King, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 2008, 291 pp., £16.99 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-19-517775-6, £10.99 (paperback) ISBN
978-0-19-539239-5

Those who have narrated the history of the Caucasus have generally followed one of two paths.
The first is to submerge in the deep gorges and look up to the mountains from that angle, often
telling the story of a region from the perspective of ethnic groups inhabiting one river valley or
another. A second way is to take the bird’s-eye view, hovering way above the zeniths of the
mountain chain, and telling the story of the region from above or outside. Charles King has
followed the second approach, penning a book on the Caucasus looking at its northern
regions as well as the south (known by the Soviets as the Transcaucasus). While most contem-
porary writing on the Caucasus has taken an interest in the region’s post-Soviet history, focusing
mainly on its ethno-territorial conflicts and the hydrocarbon potential, King goes centuries back
and starts from the Russian push towards the warm seas. With its scope and style it is a unique
endeavour, comparable to the more detailed and voluminous work of Eric Hoesli A la conquête
du Caucase, published in French by Syrte in 2006.
The choice of looking at the Caucasus from the outside creates a narrative that follows the
footsteps of the Russian geographers, officers, poets and the noblemen who discovered and colo-
nized the Caucasus under the banners of the Tsars. This is because from a Western perspective,
the ‘discovery’ of the Caucasus happened through the Russian advances into this borderland
between Europe and Asia, and to a lesser degree by the occasional European traveller. King’s
narrative presents the Caucasus chain as a land of savage beauty and freedom for the children
of Decembrists escaping the oppression of St Petersburg. Soon, the infatuation with the wild
Caucasus will turn into a violent confrontation, where the most capable Russian military officers
 136 Book reviews

march as if in a parade starting from Tiflis (today’s Tbilisi) towards the aouls of Daghestan or
Chechnya: Ermolov, Paskevich, Vorontsov and Bariatinskii.
Recent chronicles of the nineteenth-century struggle between the Russian armies and
the highlanders have generally focused on the epic resistance of the Caucasian tribesmen best
embodied in the rebellion led by Imam Shamil. King, however, gives enough space to
explore the commonly overlooked aspects of this history: the slave trade. According to estimates
some 150,000 to 200,000 people ‘mainly ethnic Slavs, may have been abducted in the first half
of the seventeenth century alone’ (p. 53) mostly by Caucasian tribesmen, to be sold on slave
markets in Constantinople, or in other major Ottoman cities. Russia, the second European
state that outlawed slavery, faced a serious challenge as it had to react to liberate at least
influential hostages either by paying ransoms or organizing armed expeditions. The book
describes well – not only graphically – the clash between the armies of the Tsars and the
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murids, but also the confrontation of two civilizations. The march of the Russian armies
through the mountains was not a simple parade, as expeditions often turned into catastrophic
defeats. Furthermore, once conquered, villages often had to be repeatedly reconquered. This
raised the intensity of the confrontation, as well as the human savagery, leading to the
destruction of whole villages and forests. Entire tribes were massacred or deported to the
Ottoman lands. For example, from a total of 505,000 Adigey inhabitants of the northwest
Caucasus, some 300,000 – 400,000 would be forced to leave their ancestral lands at the end of
the Caucasian Wars in 1864.
King shows how the Caucasus was imagined, described and sung by poet travellers and cele-
brated geographers. It was pivotal for the Russian intelligentsia of the nineteenth century:
Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, but also lesser known geographers who tried to document its
fauna and flora, the mountain valleys, villages and ethnic groups. Travellers to the Caucasus fre-
quently changed their professions and identities in situ: soldiers became poets, and geographers
sent by the Russian academy returned as convinced strategists. Tsarist officers held prisoner by
Shamil’s murids converted and settled in the highlands.
In chapter four, King turns his attention to the aftermath of the First World War. This wit-
nessed the collapse of the Russian Empire and the emergence of the ephemeral republics of
Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia in the South Caucasus. The attempt to create a Transcaucasus
Confederation would soon fall apart under foreign pressure and internal competition. Soon, the
Bolshevik armies regrouped, crushing the independent republics: Azerbaijan, then Armenia in
1920, and finally Georgia fell to the advancing Red Army in 1921.
One of the virtues of this book is its capacity to move swiftly from describing the broad
sweep of history to attention to detail that give a different light to the developing history. For
example, we see how Western audiences imagined the Caucasian, through the experience of
Zoberdie Luti exposed in American cities as ‘Circassian beauty’ with her dark unkempt hair
and light skin, selling the exotic orient to the markets of mass consumption. Unfortunately, at
times the details take much more attention than the significant historical moments that shook
and shaped the Caucasus. For example, the author describes in nine and a half pages the conquest
of the Caucasian mountain summits by European alpinists, mainly Englishmen aided by Swiss
guides, who discover the region by the mid-nineteenth century (pp. 123 – 133). On the other
hand, the Armenian Genocide, a singular event with global importance, which has changed
the ethnic map of the Caucasus and reduced the lands inhabited by Armenians to one tenth of
historic Armenia, is described in a mere three and a half pages (pp. 156 – 159). The Soviet
period is hastily narrated, with less attention to detail than that of the nineteenth century, or
the coming of Mensheviks to power in Georgia.
This book accessibly and clearly narrates of a complex history. It is an excellent introduction,
written as if to seduce the newcomer by painting colourful mountains, vibrant portraits of bigger
 Book reviews 137

than-life characters, describing the food, the wine and the traditions in the often-troubled history
of the Caucasus.

Vicken Cheterian
CIMERA, Geneva
Email: vicken.cheterian@cimera.org
# 2010, Vicken Cheterian
DOI: 10.1080/02634931003765613

The journey of maps and images on the Silk Road, by Philippe Forêt and Andreas Kaplony
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(eds), Leiden, Brill, 2008, xxxi + 243 pp. including 70 illustrations, E 49.00/US$79.00 (hard-
back), ISBN 978-90-04-17165-7

This book, edited by Philippe Forêt and Andreas Kaplony, draws together ten papers presented at
a conference held at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
May 2004. The purpose of these studies is not to explore the history of cartography. Rather, it is
to chart the circulation of visual information (maps and images) along the Silk Road in the
widest sense of the term, between China and Europe. After the foreword by Lorenz Hurni,
we have a Preface by Valerie Hansen ‘What is a map?’ and the Introduction by Philippe
Forêt and Andreas Kaplony, in which we learn that the topic of the book is ‘to explore the
Silk Road’s uniquely long communication network and investigate the diffusion of concepts
and objects related to visual knowledge’. This transmission is considered ‘both between neigh-
boring civilisations and between generations within the same culture’ (pp. 1 – 2). The book is
divided into four parts ‘The Buddhist road’, ‘The Mongol road’, ‘Within the Islamic world’
and ‘The Mediterranean road’.
The first part begins with a paper by Nicolas Zufferey, ‘Traces of the Silk Road in Han-
Dynasty iconography: questions and hypotheses’. After an introduction about the written
sources – where Zufferey remarks that the concept of Silk Road did not exist in that time in
China – he discusses many archaeological Buddhist records. He shows the difficulty of their
interpretation and concludes that we do not know how the Silk Road transmitted visual knowl-
edge during the Han period.
Next, Natasha Heller deals with ‘Visualizing pilgrimage and mapping experience: Mount
Wutai on the Silk Road’. She analyses a representation of Mount Wutai – one of the four
sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism – located in Magao Cave 21, in Dunhuang. She
focuses her attention on the geographical, religious and above all social meanings of the rep-
resentation of the pilgrims and their relationships.
Finally, Dorothy C. Wrong in ‘The mapping of sacred space: images of Buddhist cosmogra-
phies in medieval China’ talks about the painting of cosmologies in Chinese Buddhism. She dis-
cusses both the single-world and the multiple-world systems of Buddhist cosmologies. She deals
with the wheel of life, the vertical axis of the world, the sacred localities in the heavens and how
Chinese imagery intermingled with that of Indian. In the multiple-world cosmologies, she
studies the depictions of the Impure World and the Pure Land. In the former, the Chinese
artists make use of their traditional artistic conventions and in the latter, they apply their
native perspective adapted to the Buddhist imagery. She completes her study with the Lotus
Repository World, the transcendent world described in one of Mahâyâna texts.
Jonathan M. Bloom begins the second part with a paper entitled ‘Lost in translation: gridded
plans and maps along the Silk Road’. He explores the reasons for the presence of plans and maps
 138 Book reviews

with graticules, or squaring, in Central Asia during Timurid times. The author enumerates the
rare existing plans or drawings. He shows that it is certain that the gridded paper was used in
ornamental techniques at the end of the Middle Ages. A single paragraph on graduated maps
is not particularly informative and ignores the problem of projection. He concludes that the
appearance of gridded architectural plans in Timurid Iran and Central Asia was the result of
contact with China. For a fuller understanding of this, the reader must still rely on Sezgin’s
work (Sezgin 2005, pp. 95– 121, 323– 329).
Johannes Thomann follows this with ‘Square horoscope diagrams in Middle Eastern
astrology and Chinese cosmological diagrams’ and asks ‘Were these designs transmitted
through the Silk Road?’ The author remarks that ‘the more frequent medieval horoscope dia-
grams in Greek, Arabic and Latin Codices (. . .) show (. . .) a quadratic frame divided into
nine squares (. . .). This layout was common in Chinese hemerology’ (p. 97). After reviewing
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the history of the astrological diagrams, Johannes Thomann finally concludes that this pattern
‘most probably came from East Asia’ (p. 114). But the author himself admits that a large
number of Central Asian documents remain to be edited.
Dickran Kouymjian takes us to Armenia with his paper, ‘The intrusion of East Asian imagery
in thirteenth-century Armenia: political and cultural exchange along the Silk Road.’ The author
focuses his attention to a number of oriental motifs that slipped into Armenia during the pax
mongolica. He analyses in particular two examples of visual exchange between Cilician
Armenia and the Mongols found in illuminated Armenian manuscripts. First, he studies series
of animals found in a lectionary commissioned in 1286 by Prince Het’um. Then, he brings to
light some stylistic resemblances in iconography between three Alexander Romances: one
from a manuscript now in the Mekhitarist monastery in Venice, the second from a Byzantine
manuscript also in Venice and a manuscript of the Shâhnâmah, kept in Paris.
At the beginning of the third part, Andreas Kaplony compares ‘al-Kāshgharı̄’s map to his
text’ and deals with ‘the visual language’ and ‘the transmission of Arabic-Islamic maps’
(p. 137). In this very interesting study, based on the occurrence of names on the map and in
the text, the author shows in particular the intervention of the copyist in the drawing of the
map. In the appendix, he also gives a list of geographical names not only from al-Kāshgharı̄’s
map but also from the text of his Compendium of the languages of the Turks. According to the
author, the copyist wanted to stress the position of the main Turkish world in the Islamic lands
and to localize the tribes at that time. In his introduction (p. 140) Kaplony quickly deals with
the mathematical tools (we add the term) that the Arabic-Islamic geographers used, viz.
astrolabes, celestial globes and large metal precision maps. In fact, it is the development of
spherical trigonometry applied to astronomy and in particular to the problem of the qibla,
that provoked the search for provoke greater precision in the plotting of the geographical
coordinates.
Following this, Yossef Rapoport tackles the image of the East in the Book of curiosities (‘The
Book of curiosities: A medieval Islamic view of the East’), a treatise acquired by the Bodleian
Library in 2002. The author considers maps of the Oxus, of Lake Issiq Kul, the Indus-Ganges
map and the maritime route to China. About a map of the Oxus, the author writes: ‘The con-
ception of river maps, rather than regional maps, may be derived from the work of al-Khwār-
azmı̄’ (p. 157). This hypothesis would appear to be at odds with Jafri’s reconstruction of the
map (Jafri 1985, p. 103). The most important information concerns the schematic picture on
Lake Issiq Kul, derived from the account of Tamı̄m ibn Bahr’s journey, and the overland
itinerary from India to China along the Ganges.
Finally, in the fourth section of the book, Paul Kunitzsch deals in a short paper with the
‘Celestial maps and illustrations in Arabic-Islamic astronomy’. Sonja Brentjes gives a very inter-
esting contribution entitled ‘Revisiting Catalan portolan charts: do they contain elements of
 Book reviews 139

Asian provenance?’ Through her study of Angelino Dulcert’s portolan chart and the Catalan
Atlas of 1375 she shows the influence of Arabic cartography on the representation of physical
space and the influence of Asiatic or Arabic iconography on the picturing of the animals or
the rulers. In both cases, more reproductions would have helped illustrate and substantiate her
argument.
This important collection brings together a number of studies of both the history of the ico-
nography and the history of ideas, using the Silk Road as an axis. However, as is often the case
with edited collections, there are significant disparities between contributions. Some reopen
older problems, others pose unanswered questions, while some are genuinely authoritative
and make real advances in our understanding. Nonetheless, together they demonstrate that the
Silk Road was important for the transmission of images, whether scientific, religious or artistic.
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References
Razia Jafri, S., 1985. Al-Khwarazmi’s map of the world based on the Kitab surat al-ard. Dushanbe: Donish
Publishers.
Sezgin, F., 2005. Mathematical geography and cartography in Islam and their continuation in the
Occident. vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the
Johann Wolfgang Goethe University.

Jean-Charles Ducène
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Email: jean-charles.ducene@ulb.ac.be
# 2010, Jean-Charles Ducène
DOI: 10.1080/02634931003765639

‘Studies on Central Asia’, a special issue of Oriente Moderno, LXXXVII (1), 2007, edited by
Bahodir Pasilov and Roberto Tottoli, Rome, Istituto per l’Oriente, 2008, 236 pp, no price given,
ISBN 9-770030-547004

This special issue of the venerable Italian journal Oriente Moderno is of particular interest as it
showcases the work of scholars working in Central Asia itself: some from Kazakhstan, but most
from Uzbekistan. For many of them this will be the first time their work has been translated and
published in a Western language, and we must thank the editors of the journal for attempting to
bring it to a wider audience.
The quality of the fourteen articles varies considerably, from meticulous scholarship to
nationalist polemic. Topics covered include Architecture, Music and Islam, past and present.
Unfortunately there is no space here to consider all the individual contributions.
Two essays deal with architecture. B. Aminov’s piece on ‘La symbolique musulmane’ is a
sophisticated discussion of the symbolic meanings of the various geometric, calligraphic and
natural forms to be found in the decoration of mosques, madrasas and tombs of the Timurid
period in Samarkand and Shahrisabz. B.A. Baitanayev and Yu. A. Yolgin give us a rather
pedestrian survey of Islamic architecture in Southern Kazakhstan.
Aftandil Erkinov provides two characteristically profound and extensively researched
articles, both on musical forms. The first concerns Munajat songs: secret, personal prayers to
God, of which there are numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscript copies in
the Biruni Oriental Institute of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences, some of which are here
 140 Book reviews

reproduced in facsimile. Erkinov demonstrates how, although such prayers are mentioned in the
Qur’an, in Central Asia they are almost always written in Turki or Persian rather than Arabic,
and that they seem to have earlier, pre-Islamic roots in Shamanism and other local forms of reli-
gious belief. The second article, co-authored with Dilnavaz Yusupova, is based on ethnographic
fieldwork in Penjikent as well as archival research, and seeks to establish whether the ‘Yar-Yar’
song heard at Tajik and Uzbek weddings (the Olan) has a secondary use in traditional medicine
and healing. The authors provide fascinating evidence that this is indeed the case; although the
article is marred by the fact that ‘traditional medicine’ has been translated as ‘quackery’ through-
out, giving it a pejorative meaning that the authors cannot possibly have intended.
Bahodir Pasilov and A. Ashirov look at ‘The revival of Sufi traditions in modern Central
Asia’. This begins with a lengthy review of existing writing on the subject, and the authors
criticize the Bennigsen school which considered Sufism to be primarily a political, anti-Soviet
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phenomenon, whilst also remarking that much published ethnographic research (they mention
particularly that of the Russian scholar Sergei Abashin) is based on fieldwork conducted in
the late 1980s, before the contemporary ‘revival’ of Central Asian Sufism (as they see it) was
properly underway. They then provide a series of rather disconnected observations on current
practice amongst the Naqshbandiyya and Yasaviyya Tariqas in the Ferghana Valley and
Southern Kazakhstan, paying particular attention to the use of the Jahri Zikr (spoken prayer);
no clear conclusions emerge from their discussion.
Shodmon Vahidov’s essay on ‘View of Muslim authors on the Russian conquest of Turki-
stan’ draws on his 1998 doctoral thesis on the historiography of the Kokand Khanate. He con-
siders at some length the writings of three Khoqandi historians. Mullah Khalbek ibn Muhammad
Musa Andijani celebrated the career and heroic death of ‘Alimqul, the commander who led
Kokand’s forces against the Russians, and condemned the corruption and decline he saw in
Kokand after the Russian conquest. Muhammad Yunus bin Muhammad Amin Taib, one of
many Khoqandi officials who later served Amir Yaqub Bek in Kashgar, wrote that violent resist-
ance to the Russians was useless. Unlike Andijani, he was prepared to characterize the colonial
regime as Dar al-Islam, and condemned the uprising against Russian rule by the Dukchi Ishan in
1898. Finally Ishaq Khan Tura ibn Junaidullah Khwaja Ibrat wrote at length about the beneficial
technical innovations that Russian rule had brought to Central Asia, and the need to learn from
Western science and technology. The texts Vahidov refers to are much less well known than the
much-scrutinized writings of the Jadids, but on this evidence would repay close attention.
The largest single group of articles deals with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century
history. Saidakbar Agzamkhodjaev in ‘The formation and socio-political activity of the
society Shuroi Ulamo’, describes the activities of this organization of supposedly conservative
clergy during the revolutionary years in Turkestan. It is hard to disagree with Agzamkhodjaev’s
characterization of the Tashkent Soviet as ‘chauvinist’: Muslims were indeed barred from
becoming members, on the grounds that there was no Muslim proletariat. His description of
the Kokand autonomy as formed by ‘national-patriotic forces’ is rather more questionable, as
is the notion that the principal aim of both ‘Progressists’ and ‘Qadimists’ (Agzamkhojaev
assumes this distinction unquestioningly)1 was ‘the elimination of the colonial oppression’.
The subsequent aligning of this group with the Bolsheviks would seem to suggest otherwise,
whilst for many Islamic reformers the Russian Empire, whilst far from an ideal ruler, was
nevertheless seen as having brought Muslims closer to modernity.
D.A. Alimova contributes an essay entitled ‘Turkestan Djadidism and Islamic reformism in
Egypt: points of contact’. There is indeed concrete evidence of contact between the Turkestan
Jadids and Egyptian reformers such as Muhammad ‘Abduh (the text misleadingly gives the
impression that ‘Abduh’s mentor, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, was also Egyptian). To
give the best-known example, Mahmud Khoja Behbudi, whom Alimova cites extensively
 Book reviews 141

here, visited Egypt in 1899 and may have met ‘Abduh,2 whilst Agzamkhojaev in the preceding
piece (p. 2) mentions Behbudi’s citations of ‘Abduh in two articles which he wrote for his
Samarkand newspaper Aina in 1914. Alimova does not refer to any of this, instead drawing
weak parallels between Behbudi’s writings and those of ‘Abduh and al-Afghani without men-
tioning any of the real connections between them. The thorny question of how Behbudi’s
idea of a cosmopolitan, multi-lingual Turkestani identity can be reconciled with ‘national
sovereignty’ as it eventually emerged in Central Asia is not addressed.
K.K. Radjabov’s article on the ‘Struggle for independence in Turkestan and Muslim clergy’
(pp. 177 – 188) is heavily distorted by an insistence that the Kokand autonomy, the Jadids and
the Basmachi revolt should all be seen as part of a single ‘national’ movement against
Russian colonial oppression. Whilst some corrective to the Soviet narrative which characterized
the former groups as ‘bourgeois oppressors’ and the latter as ‘feudal, fanatical reactionaries’ is
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undoubtedly needed, this is far too simplistic. The extent to which even the Jadids envisaged an
independent ‘Turkestani’ state entirely free of Russian control is highly debatable; to attribute
such motives to the Ferghana Basmachi – who don’t seem to have had any defined political
goals – or to the likes of Ibrahim Bek – who whilst acting in the name of the Emir of
Bukhara seems to have been largely concerned with establishing a personal fiefdom in the
Surkhan-Darya region – is misleading. Radjabov’s final conclusion that ‘the armed movement
in the Turkestan kray against the Soviet regime had arisen as the struggle of peoples in the
region, which had historical roots and traditions into the century-old emancipating war of the
Turkestanis for independence and freedom of their native land [sic]’ is an anachronism. The
idea of a single Turkestani (as opposed to Islamic, Bukharan, Kokandian or tribal) identity
had only tentatively been put forward in reformist writings at the turn of the century, and it
would rapidly be dissolved by Soviet nation-building policies in the 1920s.3 It was not a signifi-
cant factor in motivating mass anti-Soviet resistance, and to cite an unrepresentative group of
Turkestani exiles on this point without making clear the date and context in which they were
writing is disingenuous.
Valery Germanov’s article on the ‘Shiite – Sunnite conflict of 1910 in the Bukhara Khanate’
provides a vivid description of the violence which followed Emir ‘Abd al-Ahad’s decision to
allow the Iranis of Bukhara openly to celebrate the mourning festival of Ashura. Over a
period of four days government seems to have broken down almost completely in the city of
Bukhara and surrounding areas, with horrific massacres taking place on both sides before the
Russian authorities finally intervened. Germanov attaches too much credence to Russian
reports of the gratitude with which the ‘peacemaker’ General Lilienthal, was received by the
population, although he does acknowledge that the Russians did nothing to tackle the root
causes of the riots. His account is marred by the repeated use of terms such as ‘fanatical’ and
‘feudal reactionaries’. Whilst I would cautiously accept his conclusion that the violence went
beyond religion and expressed a wider discontent with the administration of the Emirate, the
‘geopolitical interests’ he refers to played a very minor role.
The translation of more Central Asian scholarship is welcome, and some of the articles in this
special issue (such as Rinat Shigabdinov’s piece on ‘Islamic Socialism in Turkestan’) make
genuine advances in our understanding of the region’s history. However, overall this collection
is rather disappointing. This is partly because it has been so poorly edited. Whilst the one article
in French is of reasonable quality, the English translations appear to have been done mechani-
cally and are at times incomprehensible: I challenge any reader to come up with a plausible
explanation of what ‘the particles of certificates meeting in the Arabian geographical literature’
(p. 35) or ‘minarets are built here with the help of another plastic language’ (p. 50) were
originally supposed to mean. In combination with a pedantic fussiness over diacritics and at
least three different systems of transliteration from the Arabic script the effect is unfortunate.
 142 Book reviews

Beyond this, many of the contributions reveal the weaknesses of a particular tradition of Central
Asian historical scholarship that combines new officially imposed ideologies of nationalism with
the continued recycling of many Soviet-era tropes.

Notes
1. On this point see Dudoignon (1997, pp. 207 –222)
2. See Khalid (1997, pp. 135– 138.).
3. See Khalid (2004, pp. 80–81.).

References
Dudoignon, S., ed., 1997. Qu’est-ce que la «Qadimiya»? Éléments de sociologie du traditionalisme musul-
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man en Islam de Russie et en Transoxiane (de la fin du XVIIIe siècle au début du XXe). L’Islam de
Russie. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose.
Khalid, A., 1997. The politics of Muslim cultural reform. Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Khalid, A., 2004. Nations into history: the origins of national historiography in Central Asia. In: S.A.
Dudoignon, ed. Devout societies vs. impious states? Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 127–145.

Alexander Morrison
University of Liverpool
Email: A.S.Morrison@liverpool.ac.uk
# 2010, Alexander Morrison
DOI: 10.1080/02634931003765662