Mir Alisher Navoi, 1441 - 1501
Born in Herat (now northwest Afghanistan). He served as a powerful official under the Timurid Sultan Husain Bayqara, and as such was responsible for supervising much of the architectural and cultural development in the kingdom. He was a Sunni Muslim who regarded Türki (also called Chaghatay) as his first language. He is best known for his poetry, which elevated Türki to the level of a true a literary language and laid the foundation for future development. He wrote the first history of the Türki language, as well as a treatise arguing that Türki was superior to Persian—this was a new sentiment at the time. Navoi’s life is a good case study for how difficult it is to fit pre-modern Central Asian identities into the modern template of nation and ethnicity. According to one contemporary, Navoi was a descendant of the Uyghur Kaghanate, from whom the Mongols had adopted their alphabet. Given that the Uyghur Kaghanate was destroyed in 840, six hundred years before Navoi’s own birth, was Navoi a Uyghur? Navoi died just a few years before Shaybani’s Uzbek horde invaded Herat. However, because he wrote widely-admired poetry in Türki, a language that would be shaped into modern Uzbek in the 1920s, more than 500 years after Navoi’s death, was Navoi an Uzbek and “the father of the Uzbek language”? The Soviet Union, and today’s Republic of Uzbekistan, say so. Yet, according to Stalin’s definition of nation, one could argue equally plausibly that we should call Navoi an Afghan, since he lived his entire life in what is today Afghanistan. Given that Navoi was as fluent in Persian as he was in Türki, and lived within the Iranian political and cultural sphere of influence, was he Iranian?
Uzbekistan gets a history
Education was one of the Soviets’ highest priorities and one of their proudest achievements. By the 1960s a solid majority of Soviet children—Russians, Armenians, Kyrgyz, Yakuts, Latvians, Chechens, Koreans, and over 100 other groups—were literate at an elementary or higher level. Given that most people had been illiterate in 1917 and that the Soviets had dedicated themselves to teaching children how to read and write in their native languages, this was astonishing. For the Soviet state, a vernacular literature was an essential building block for creating national identity. As Russians could not imagine their nation without the poetry of Alexander Pushkin, so Uzbeks would learn that their nation was unimaginable without the poetry of Alisher Navoi. The creation of histories for the new Soviet nations was a logical next step. In modern nation-states, schools teach national history in order to instill a sense of identity, cultural continuity through time, and loyalty to the state. In the case under consideration here, that of Uzbekistan, textbook writers had to create from scratch a narrative of the Uzbeks as a unified nation. The narrative they finally came up with, in the 1960s, was highly successful, but not necessarily in ways that the Soviet state had hoped.
Soviet Communist ideology dictated the outlines of Uzbek history even before historians started serious work. Stalin’s definition of a nation stated that Uzbeks, identifiable by their common language and economic lifeways, had always lived on the territory currently called the Uzbek SSR. Marxist-Leninist laws of historical development assumed that Europe was the historical model that the rest of the world would follow, and stated that class conflict had always been the major driving force in Uzbek history. Stalinist historiography added a defensive Russian nationalist narrative: Uzbek history would follow the same pattern as Russian history, which featured brave patriots fighting against evil foreign invaders. The result was a story in which Uzbeks had lived in Central Asia for millennia. The best Uzbeks were from the lower classes, but the nation had produced high cultural works as well. Uzbek and Russian histories joined in the thirteenth century, when Russians and Central Asians both suffered under the “Mongol-Tatar” yoke. While Russian children learned about Alexander Nevskii, the iconic Russian hero of the Mongol period, Uzbek children learned about Mahmud Torobi, a Bukharan hero who led the “workers” in a noble but failed uprising against the Mongols.
This Uzbek national history provided people with a deep sense of connection, importance and identity through time. Soviet Uzbeks were united by patriotism, intellectual achievement and bravery, in contrast to the tribal and regional rivalries, fighting prowess, and Muslim piety that older Central Asian histories emphasized. However, this history was broken into distinct periods according to the unsuccessful resistance of Uzbek heroes against foreign invaders. Almost all the heroes the textbooks praised earned their glory through martyrdom, not victory. Often the heroes were working-class men who lost their battles due to the treachery of the ruling class. These martyrs provided a proud and ancient genealogical line for the whole Uzbek people, but they did not threaten Russian dominance. In this story, Uzbeks could end foreign or class oppression only with Russian help. Every valiant death was another step toward union with the Russian working class in the international fight for communism. Soviet Uzbek history glossed over the uncomfortable facts of rival Uzbek lineages, varying dialects and lifeways, and above all that Uzbeks were themselves “foreign invaders”—Turko- Mongols who conquered Transoxiana in the name of reclaiming Shaybani’s Mongol patrimony. They were moderately successful in burying the real historical complexity, but Uzbek national identity did not develop as Moscow intended. One reason was that Soviet scholars also preserved and studied historical manuscripts, so the state-approved narrative never entirely erased older traditions. A second, and more important, reason was that Uzbek school children were never just passive objects of Soviet indoctrination. While the narrative of the Uzbek nation’s continuous existence from ancient times was attractive, the accompanying idea that Uzbeks were dependent on the Soviet state for their existence made little impact. Post-Soviet Uzbek historians now emphasize the ancient continuity of the Uzbek nation in terms largely unchanged from the 1960s, but they have turned the meaning of the Soviet historical narrative on its head. Instead of a tale of national heroes struggling toward communism, children study a tale of struggle toward national independence, exactly the opposite of what the Soviets had wanted. Uzbeks absorbed a markedly Russian-Soviet sense of nationhood, but have turned it to their own purposes [Keller, 2007].