Renegotiating Identities and Cultural Legacies Chapter Twelve Be(com)ing Uzbek

Historical Background
There is relatively little dispute on the origin of the ethnonym “Uzbek.” Scholars seem reasonably convinced that the name derives from Uzbek Khan (or rather Özbek Khan), a descendant of the Mongol emperor Chenggis Khan, who lived from 1282 to 1342 and was instrumental in the final Islamization in the realm of the Golden Horde. When and why the different groups settling in this territory adopted this as a generic term is not entirely clear, but the switch in religion may have been an important factor. A first period of political dominance that was labelled as being Uzbek was the rule of Abul-Khayr during the mid-fifteenth century. It was, however, short-lived and soon led to the secession of those tribal units that would later form the nucleus of the Kazakhs.⁹ At the turn of the sixteenth century a new confederation of Uzbeks emerged under the leadership of Muhammad Shaybaniy. He conquered the territories of contemporary Uzbekistan and expelled the last Timurid rulers, including Babur, who would centuries later became historical idols of the new state.¹⁰
The period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century was characterized by several polities that in the literature are labeled as Uzbek Khanates or Emirates. Soon after the Shaybanid conquest, internal divisions led to the formation of three political entities with the centers being Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand. Until the early nineteenth century, all of these polities were ruled by descendants of different lines of Chenggisids before they were toppled by other tribal leaders. A few decades later, the Tsarist expansion reached the oases to impose a colonial system upon the local population. By the year 1868 all of the territories had been brought under control and were henceforth governed by a type of indirect rule. In the case of Bukhara and Khiva, formal independence continued until 1924.¹¹
During these centuries the ethnic and linguistic configuration in the oases changed fundamentally. While there had been earlier Turkic invaders before the Shaybanids, the majority of the population had in all likelihood remained Iranian-speaking. During the early period most of the newcomers also settled in the steppe and desert belts but gradually started to settle in the oases.¹² This would contribute to the Turkification of the local population, although the changes in the ethnic composition differed for each of the oases, as will be explored in the following section. With their settlement, however, the descendants of the Uzbek tribes also changed language, adopting the Turkic dialects of those groups, such as the Qarakhanids, who had begun settling in the oases during the pre-Mongol period. Today, the vast majority of Uzbeks speak so-called Qarluq dialects, in contrast to the Qipchaq dialects inherited from the northern steppes. This is significant, because the latter dialects are closer to the contemporary languages of Kazakh and Kyrgyz.
The Uzbeks of today can thus be characterized as the product of a complex mixture of populations and languages over the course of the last 1,500 years, since the very first Turkic nomads reached the oases of Transoxania. In its contemporary form the language also reflects this process, as it is heavily influenced by Iranian vocabulary and grammar.¹³ This put the settled Turkic speakers, who did not call themselves Uzbeks at that time, into an intermediate position between the old established sedentary population, which had started to be called Tajik by that time, and the various nomadic or semi-nomadic groups outside of the oases, most of whom spoke Qipchaq and in some cases Oghuz variants of Turkic.¹⁴
With the establishment of Soviet rule in the 1920s, things changed profoundly. The new socialist ideals contained, somewhat paradoxically, a strong move toward strengthening ethnic distinctions. The “affirmative action empire”¹⁵ envisioned, at least temporarily, an outline that gave great credit to separate units defined on the basis of their differences as well as socioeconomic development. In the framework of the politics of national delimitation, two parallel processes took place. One was the fixation of ethnic units, such as the Uzbeks, and the assignment of each and every individual to one of them. The second was the creation of socialist republics, five in the case of Central Asia, and subordinate entities of lower status. The corresponding ethnic entities, among them Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajiks, Turkmen, and Uzbeks, were awarded the highest level of evolutionary progress, nation, within the Soviet hierarchy.¹⁶
Of these, Uzbekistan occupied the central and most densely populated part of the territory. Several authors have pointed to the fact that the Soviets favored the republic over others, such as by incorporating large tracks of land where the majority of people actually spoke Tajik.¹⁷ Others have elaborated on the mismatch mentioned above, namely that most of those who became “Uzbeks” at that time would not have thought of themselves as such before. On the contrary, in many regions the label had until then been reserved for the still seminomadic populations at the outskirts of the oases. But the Soviet engineers had decided to create the Uzbek nation as a manifestation of age-old sedentary civilizations, reaching back to the pre-Turkic period.¹⁸ While there had been disputes along the borders in all directions, the new concept was readily accepted, and today most people regard the label “Uzbek” as self-explanatory. As we will see later, those groups that could qualify as the real descendants of the original group, the so-called Qipchaq-Uzbeks, are seen as a peculiar variation of the general pattern.
Independence caught the elites in Uzbekistan by surprise, as they did with most of the other former Soviet republics. The sudden collapse of the USSR forced them not only to initiate economic reforms and to create a sovereign political system, but also to search for commonalities that would bind the people living in this state together or at least separate them from others. The process of nation-building in Uzbekistan has been observed with particular attention, not only because of it being the most populous of the new states, but also due to the perceived anomalies, such as the central role of the Timurid heritage (in contrast to the largely neglected Shaybanids). There is a striking degree of continuity with the Soviet past in terms of understanding Uzbekness as an ethnic concept that draws on an ancient sedentary culture, a moderate importance of Islam, and a strong attachment to the territory of the state as well as its component localities.¹⁹
This understanding of Uzbekness and its titular state has led to minority policies characterized by assimilation rather than discrimination. I will elaborate on this by describing the ethnic configuration in four different sites within the country. These case studies do not claim to be representative of the whole, but rather they point to the fundamental, and constitutive, locality of the very concept. Uzbeks of different provenance have by definition to be different according to the respective setting they come from or live in. The territorial concept of ethnicity and nationhood, however, also implies little attention to those Uzbeks outside of the borders, as will be described in more detail later.