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

Reclaiming the Classic Transoxiana Heritage
A second direction for Uzbekistan’s metanarrative is to take over the more classical heritage of sedentary Transoxiana (Ma wara an-nahr in the Islamic tradition) and to demonstrate the Uzbek nation’s preeminence among Central Asian peoples.⁵⁴ Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan professed itself the direct heir of Central Asia’s “Golden Age” (oltin asr) between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, and appropriated all the philosophers, scientists, writers, and Islamic thinkers who lived on the territory of present-day Uzbekistan. All are celebrated with eponymous metro stations in Tashkent, and their images appear on banknotes.⁵⁵
The iconic embodiment of this Golden Age is Tamerlane (Amir Timur, 1336–1405), who ruled over the region from 1370 to 1405. His image replaced the Lenin statue on Tashkent’s main square as early as 1992, and Karimov directly identified with him. This choice is quite paradoxical: Tamerlane was Mongol in origin (but not from Ghenghis-Khanid blood) and struggled to be recognized as a legitimate leader in parts of the Islamic world. Nonetheless, he offered useful symbols for the Karimov regime: He was born in the heart of Transoxiana, in Shakhrisabz near Samarkand, and therefore “belongs,” territorially speaking, to Uzbekistan. He ruled over a large part of Eurasia and Asia, as far as India (the founder of the Mughal Empire, Babur, was a Chaghatay Turk nobleman hailing from Andijon), a sign of Uzbekistan’s grandiose view of the influence of the country (the Timurid museum in Tashkent displays a scale model of the Taj Mahal as part of the Uzbek cultural heritage). He represents the political authority of the khan and paternalistic ruler Karimov aspired to be (all other contenders to such a status are literary figures). Finally, he acted as a patron of the arts; the artistic and architectural achievements realized under his rule and that of his heirs stoke Uzbekistan’s aspiration to be at the forefront of world culture.
The Soviet regime had an ambivalent view of Tamerlane, depending on the period and the scholars commenting. Some denounced him as representative of the Golden Horde’s culture, embodied by Asian cruelty and repression. Others celebrated his military achievements and centralized power, rehabilitated the era’s architectural legacy, and highlighted the role of his grandson Ulugh Bek (1394–1449), the founder of modern astronomy. In the 1970s and 1980s, Tamerlane as an individual was not integrated into the official pantheon, but the Timurid dynasty was seen as a period of high cultural achievements. Post-Soviet Uzbekistan had relatively little to add to confirm his personal status as father of the Uzbek state.⁵⁶
Other figures were added to the nation’s pantheon,⁵⁷ especially the fifteenth-century literary icon, Alisher Navoiy (1441–1501), also known as Nizām-al-Din ʿAlisher Herawī. Navoiy is the greatest poet and prose-writer in classical Chaghatay, the Turkic language that served as a lingua franca in Central Asia, with a strong infusion of Arabic and Persian words. The basis of Navoiy’s legitimacy is different from that of Tamerlane: it is not territorial, as he was born in Herat, today’s Afghanistan, but due to the authority of Chaghatay, a precursor of the modern Uzbek language (a combination of Karakhanid and Khorezmian). Here, too, the independent Uzbek state did not craft this new hero from scratch; Navoiy was already celebrated in the 1920s by Soviet authors as “announcing” the Uzbek language and culture.
If Tamerlane, Ulug-Bek, and Alisher Navoiy comprise the first tier of national heroes, another group ranks just below them. It includes scientists such as al-Fergani (800/805–870), one of the most famous astronomers of his time; al-Khorezmi (d. 850), a mathematician, astronomer, and geographer during the Abbasid Caliphate; al-Beruni (973–1048), a scholar and polymath from Khwarezm; and Ibn Sina [Avicenna] (980–1037), an Islamic neo-Platonic philosopher, famous for his works on medicine. To this scientific lineage should be added two key figures in Islamic culture who epitomize the influence of Bukhara at that time: Imam al-Bukhari (801–870), who authored the hadith collection known as Sahih al-Bukhari, regarded by Sunni Muslims as one of the most authentic hadith collections; and Bahaudin Naqshband (1318–1389), the founder of the main Sufi Order, the Naqshbandiyya, and a revered mystical poet. His restored shrine was celebrated by Karimov with great pomp in 1993 as a symbol of the nation’s reconnection with its Islamic past, and the main street in Bukhara, formerly named for Lenin, was named after him.⁵⁸
There are some glaring omissions in this Uzbek pantheon. For example, what of the Shaybanid dynasty and its founder Muhammad Shaybani (1451–1510), who occupies a relatively minor position in today’s metanarrative? Indeed, the Shaybanids arrived too late in the nation’s history to be considered “founding fathers,” and they have been shut out of the competition for antiquity that drives Uzbek historiography. Moreover, they are too explicitly linked to the Golden Horde, competed with the Timurids, and are known for their schism with those who would become the Kazakhs: all these elements made them unsuitable to the nativist claim of the Uzbek grand narrative. The later periods of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, too, are largely whitewashed: they show Uzbek khanates and a Bukhara Emirate no more at the center of continental empires and the cultural vanguard of the Persian-Turkic world, but as backward provinces, progressively marginalized from new trade routes and becoming the peripheries of new empires.
Uzbekistan’s symbolic takeover of the whole classic Transoxiana-Turkestani Golden Age has not avoided creating tensions with neighboring republics, obviously with Tajikistan—scholars from both republics have been fighting over the Scythian/Aryan legacy—but also with the other Turkic republics, whose leaders want their legitimate share of the same cultural Turkestani tree, forcing Kyrgyz and Kazakh historiography to sometimes define themselves against Uzbekness as Central Asia’s main benchmark.