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

The Nation’s Grand Narrative
Independent Uzbekistan rapidly constructed a grand historical narrative that insists on the nation’s ancient history and its continuity under any political structure. Historical commemorations seems endless: 660 years since the birth of Tamerlane (1996); 2,500 years since the foundation of Bukhara and Khiva (1997); and 2,500 years since the foundation of Tashkent (2009). Any political or scholarly work must comment on the unique ancient lineage of the country. As mentioned in the UNESCO history of Uzbekistan, “Uzbekistan is a country of ancient and original history, whose peoples have contributed much to world history. The territory of Uzbekistan is one of the sources of development of the original man.”³⁶ Uzbekistan’s historical metanarrative can be schematically divided into three main strands.
Indigeneity: The Older the Better
The first one is to secure the indigeneity of Uzbeks as far back in history as possible, in order to deny Iran and Tajikistan the legitimacy of the Indo-European legacy, to refute the Western and Russian perceptions of Turkic peoples as nomads who moved from Eastern Siberia and Mongolia to Central Asia and the Mediterranean Basin, and to monopolize the prestigious Scythian heritage. As discussed in the previous chapter by Peter Finke, the notion of the Uzbek as a sedentary Turkic-speaker requires finding a balance between the legacy of the Iranian oases-dwellers and that of the pastoralists in the steppe.³⁷ These two cultural realms compete for symbolic preeminence, both in time (who can claim indigeneity?) and associated values (which culture is “superior”?). The sedentarity issue also forces scholars to address the mismatch between the ethnonym of Uzbeks, which emerged with the Shaybanid dynasty in the sixteenth century,³⁸ and the earlier presence of a Turkic population in Transoxiana, coming from the steppe, the Dasht-i Qipchaq.
This struggle for autochthonism was not born with independence, but has its roots in the Soviet period. In the 1930s and 1940s, Soviet history crafted the notion of ethnogenesis (etnogenez), defined as the emergence of a specific ethnic group over centuries and its association with a specific territory.³⁹ In Tashkent in 1941, the historian and Orientalist Aleksandr Yakubovski (1886–1953) published a brochure entitled “The Question of the Ethnogenesis of the Uzbek People.” The pamphlet traces the Uzbek ethnogenesis not to the sixteenth century and the Shaybanid dynasty, but to the tenth century, with the arrival of Turkic peoples and their settlement under the Kara-Khanid dynasty.⁴⁰ The claim for a particularly ancient Uzbek ethnogenesis continued with the main figure of Soviet Uzbek ethnology, Karim Shaniyazov (1924–2000), a disciple of Yulian Bromley, head of the ethnology section of the Institute of History of the Uzbek SSR as early as 1967.
Since independence, Shaniyazov, the only ethnologist to be a member of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, remains the main academic figure bearing the ethnogenesis discourse and the quest for nativeness.⁴¹ In 1998, he stated that “everyone has the right to know the ethnogenesis and ethnic history of his people”⁴² and that it is natural that these issues have attracted renewed interest after independence. Although he continues to cite Soviet scholars, Shaniyazov sought to embed in the contemporary rhetoric a rejection of the Soviet legacy and an affirmation of the sole right of Uzbeks to write their own origin narrative. He criticized scholars “from the center” (i.e. Moscow)⁴³ who would have preserved the imperial Russian approach and would not have been able to develop a scholarly discourse on the ethnos valid for all peoples of the Soviet Union. Despite this denial, Shaniyazov never challenged the Soviet notion of ethnogenesis.
In his famous 1974 book, For an Ethnic History of the Uzbek People, Shaniyazov interprets ethnic reality as something stable over time that can be objectively described and explained, and he suggests that ethnology demonstrates the specificity that makes each people unique. He focused on Kipchaks, who, along with the Karluks and Oghuz, are traditionally apprehended as ethnic ancestors of the Uzbeks. The value of the Kipchaks lies in the fact that they are mentioned in Arabic sources from the eighth and ninth centuries. By cross-referencing data sources and ancient philological, etymological, and geographical information, Shaniyazov thus positions the Kipchaks as part of what he called the “indigenous people” (korennoy narod) of South Siberia.⁴⁴ He argued that although medieval sources indicated the arrival of the western Kipchaks on the present-day territory of Uzbekistan only in the fifteenth century, they neglected to mention the existence of eastern Kipchaks, who were present since the tenth century. For him, the “main features of the ethnic Uzbek nationality” thus go back to the tenth century.⁴⁵
Uzbekistan’s independence only reinforced Shaniyazov’s account and its institutional status. Even before 1991, he incorporated the idea—developed discreetly in the 1970s and now regarded as a fundamental principle in Uzbekistan—of a first substrate of Turkic people throughout the Central Asian area dating from the second millennium BCE, before the arrival of Indo-Europeans in the area. In a monograph, The Kang State and People,⁴⁶ published in 1990 in Uzbek, Shaniyazov denied the conventional discourse of the Turkic khaganate marking the arrival of Turkic peoples in the region. According to him, the Uzbeks were born from the merger of two different roots, the historically attested waves of Turkic peoples and those already indigenous to the Central Asian territory. Central Asian populations mentioned in ancient sources, like the Scythians, are therefore retrospectively equated with the Turks; this original national “root” could not be Persian-speaking and must already have been Turkic. Shaniyazov put particular emphasis on the Kang dynasty, which arrived in the region from southern Siberia and Dhzungaria in the fourth millennium BCE and founded a state in the second and first millennia BCE.
Shaniyazov’s arguments imply an ethnic stability that nothing could disrupt. The two founding elements of the ethnos remain language and territory. According to him, nomadic peoples would not be able to advance beyond the tribal stage unless they settled in place. This statement serves as a means to indirectly disparage the neighboring Kazakhs, Karakalpaks, and Turkmens by emphasizing the specifically sedentary nature of the Uzbek realm. Thus, the territorial continuity between Karluks, Kara-Khanids, and Uzbeks would reveal the early nature of Uzbek ethnogenesis compared to peoples such as the Oghuz, who had not ceased changing territory, giving rise to the Seljuks, the Ottomans, and then the Turkmens. This desire to anchor in history the existence of a sedentary Turkicness virtually ignores the presence of Persian-speaking populations, only briefly mentioned and stripped of their indigenous status.⁴⁷ Shaniyazov also tried to justify why the Uzbek nation failed to impose its ethnonym but would have already existed without it: ethnic consciousness would have preceded not only the state but the ethnonym as well.
Shaniyazov completed his sketch of national history in The Processes of Formation of the Uzbek Nation,⁴⁸ a book published posthumously in 2001 and regarded by the local scholarly community as a classic reference work. In an introduction dedicated to President Karimov, the late author stresses the need to return to national roots in order to build the future of the new state; by not fairly assessing the significance of the past, one would take the risk of debasing Uzbek culture and underestimating its age.⁴⁹ The book includes an outline of the historical discourse that Shaniyazov developed throughout his career and seeks to put forward a final summary of the discussion of the history of the nation. According to him, one of the peculiarities of the Uzbek ethnogenesis is its immutability.⁵⁰ The Uzbek nation’s ancient roots would date from the second millennium BCE; the Scythians would be proto-Turkic populations and not Iranian ones, and the prestigious status of being their heirs would thus go to the Uzbeks and not to the Tajiks; and the nation’s “consciousness” would have been maintained over centuries, even if the Uzbek ethnonym arrived late on the stage of history.
The struggle to capture the prestigious ancestry of the Scythians accelerated in the 2000s, with virulent online competition between Uzbek and Tajik scholars, as well as experts on other Turkic-speaking nations. Tajikistan has been reclaiming its Indo-European legacy under the label of Aryan and even proclaimed 2006 the “Year of Aryan Civilization.”⁵¹ As noted by Victor Shnirelman, Sakae and Massagetae are presented as Uzbek ancestors in history textbooks.⁵² In Uzbek publications and Internet discussions, Uzbek scholars such as Academician Ahmadali Askarov, an archeologist by training, criticized Tajik historiography and insisted on the Aryan legacy of Uzbekistan, stating that the famous Andronov culture was already Turkified. As declared boldly by Shamsiddin Kamoliddin, one of the leading figures of the Uzbek Institute of History, “Proto-Turks were the first inhabitants of this region and constituted a part of its ancient pre-Indo-European population.”⁵³