Next to us were some rather Asian-looking men who were speaking a language I thought I could understand, but not completely.While we sat there beside the Central Asians, I noted that they said words similar to Turkish, but with a slightly different pronunciation. I really was not trying to eavesdrop, but I could not help but overhear them speaking. The language being spoken seemed to me to be very similar to Turkish.
Later I did a little research and realized that there are some basic Central Asian terms:
Bai: Rich man
Beg: Chief
Dopa: Little round embroidered skull cap
Jinn: Evil spirit
Khoja: Title for religious leader
Mazar: Islamic holy tomb
Madrasah: Islamic theological seminary
Mektep: School
Sahib: During the 1920s and 1930s, title for a European
Sheikh: Caretaker of a holy tomb
Yurt: A circular domed tent made of felt
After sitting there for about half an hour, finally I worked up enough courage to ask the people where they were from. They said they were Kazakhs.
Later I came across an excellent book by Dr. Bruce Privratsky, “Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory.” I learned from Privratsky that the Kazakhs are a Muslim people in Central Asia among whom religious belief and behavior are mediated by a vibrant memory of their nomadic ancestors.
You can often hear the term Turkestan used in reference to the area extending from the Caspian Sea in the west to the Chinese frontier in the east and across the Aral Mountains in the north to the borders of Iran and Afghanistan in the south. A similar sound, but different spelling and meaning, Turkistan is Persian for “land of the Turks.” Eastern, or Chinese, Turkistan refers to the western provinces of China, now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and Southern, or Afghan, Turkistan refers to a small area of northern Afghanistan.
In part because of the Persian influence in the region dating back centuries and the Arab conquests in the eighth century, by first the Umayyads and then the Abbasid Caliphate, inhabitants of Turkestan share many common words. Although most of the population speaks one or more of the Turkic languages, the majority of the Turkish people don’t dwell there.
Turkistan also has another meaning. Privratsky’s book is all about the pilgrimage town of that name. The town, Turkistan, is where Tamerlane in the 14th century built an impressive shrine for Ahmet Yasawi, who is the founder of an important Sufi community. After the Arab conquests, Zoroastrianism was suppressed, and Islam, which today remains the chief religion of Turkistan, became prominent.
The author, Privratsky, was an instructor at Yasawi University when he lived in the town of Turkistan from 1992 to 1998. During his seven years of residency, he studied the Kazakh language and observed the culture.
Privratsky’s book provides painstaking linguistic precision for language lovers. His book is a fascinating work in that he helps the reader understand certain detail about the language -- vocabulary, etymology, semantic nuance and local usage. Privratsky seeks to enable the reader to understand Islam and its changing contours of ethnicity and religion. He points out that the tomb of Ahmet Yasawi makes Turkistan a “place with saints” (auliyeli jer), and the monument itself is called a mazar (cemetery), a beyit, qabir or qabirstan (grave) and a kesene (tomb, shrine).
Though the tomb is no longer used for Friday prayer, the local people call the Yasawi Shrine the meshit (mosque); they distinguish it from an actual mosque by terming the latter a juma meshiti (Friday mosque) or jamagat meshiti (congregational mosque), adds Privratsky. Just as Lenin’s Mausoleum in Red Square is of high significance, so is the Yaswai Shrine for the Kazakhs.
Privratsky affirms that all these terms are loan words from Persian and Arabic. He also paints a picture of how these unusually sacred places connect to the Kazakh identity by forming a landscape. The Kazakh religious beliefs form a background for life lived out in relation to these sacred places.
Through the discussion in the book we also learn the key points of Kazakh religion. Privratsky points out that Kazakhs think of their ancestors as Muslims. For some nations, language and customs are significant, but for Kazakhs “land” and “blood” symbolically comprise the most meaningful ethnic boundaries for Kazakhs in Turkistan.
Remembering the ancestors is a main plank of daily religion. Thursday meals dedicated to various spirits can take precedence over more normal expressions of Islam. Kazakhs seem to be practitioners of ancestral worship to some degree, and ancestor spirits return home on a regular schedule, usually believed to appear on Thursdays. The author infers that it is an ancestral cult. In other wards, for Kazakhs, “The Thursday domestic rite and the culinary practices of the Muslim tradition are definitive markers of their musilmanshiliq, the Muslim life.”
Under Soviet oppression, mosques were a target of Soviet attacks on pubic expressions of religion; interestingly the Soviets did not fully grasp the relation between ancestors and Sufi saints, which explains the local focus on cemeteries and shrines rather than on mosques.
Privratsky attributes the fact that Kazakh religion survived under the Soviets to this misconception and to the fact that a people who were traditionally nomadic and had an oral culture were able to retain their religious values by expressing them in ritual forms. He assesses the nature and impact of “collective memory theory” -- the way a group has a shared understanding of how things used to be in the past -- in the religious life of the Kazakhs as they were freed from the yoke of Communism and gained their independence.
This is an excellent study of the historical setting, description and analysis of religious life in the town of Turkistan, but at 90 pounds, it does not fit the average person’s budget!
“Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory,” by Bruce Privratsky, published by Curzon, 90 pounds in hardback. ISBN: 978-070071297-7
