Uyghur Nation

Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier

David Brophy

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674970465
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

The meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in the nineteenth century had dramatic consequences for Central Asia's Muslim communities. Along this frontier, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and the revolutions that engulfed Russia and China in the early twentieth century. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the modern Uyghur nation.As exiles and émigrés, traders and seasonal laborers, a diverse diaspora of Muslims from China's northwest province of Xinjiang spread to Russian territory, where they became enmeshed in political and intellectual currents among Russia's Muslims. From the many national and transnational discourses of identity that circulated in this mixed community, the rhetoric of Uyghur nationhood emerged as a rallying point in the tumult of the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. Working both with and against Soviet policy, a shifting alliance of constituencies invoked the idea of a Uyghur nation to secure a place for itself in Soviet Central Asia and to spread the revolution to Xinjiang. Although its existence was contested in the fractious politics of the 1920s, in the 1930s the Uyghur nation achieved official recognition in the Soviet Union and China.Grounded in a wealth of little-known archives from across Eurasia, Uyghur Nation offers a bottom-up perspective on nation-building in the Soviet Union and China and provides crucial background to the ongoing contest for the history and identity of Xinjiang.

CHAPTER ONE

People and Place in Chinese Turkistan

Twentieth-century invocations of the Uyghurs constructed a narrative of perennial nationhood—of nationhood lost and found. This discourse of Uyghur nationhood tapped into a rich historical and philological legacy, harking back to a golden age of Uyghur civilization and by extension pointing to the decline that had since reduced the community to a fractured and colonized condition. It was, no doubt, an ambitious act of redefinition. Yet those who pioneered this discourse must have felt sufficiently confident that its historical claims were justified, and that a vision of common Uyghur origins corresponded in some way to an existing reality. For this reason it is necessary to begin this study with a review not only of the history of the first Uyghurs but of the various communal narratives that existed among the Muslims of Chinese Turkistan at the start of the twentieth century. These registers of identification were created both from above and from below, in the interaction of rulers and ruled, and of the Muslims of Chinese Turkistan with the outside world. The rhetoric of Uyghur nationhood drew heavily on Xinjiang’s local Islamic traditions, though it resituated these symbols in a new narrative of Turkic civilization. To account for this transformation, we must also move beyond Xinjiang and look at the revision of Turkic history that that late-nineteenth-century Orientalist and Turkological scholarship carried out.

The ability of states to relocate and reclassify their subjects, the cultural shifts that follow in the wake of religious conversion, and the prestige of scholarly traditions have all contributed to defining the peoples and places that we meet in historical sources on Chinese Turkistan. With a steppe zone running through its north (Jungharia), and a society of settled oasis dwellers in its south (the Tarim Basin), the region now known as Xinjiang has always been a meeting point of nomadic and sedentary communities. The rise and fall of states in the steppe has left its mark on the region’s history on many occasions, but three key moments stand out in this respect: the dissolution of the original Uyghur state in Mongolia and the flight of the Uyghurs south; the incorporation of the region into Chinggis Khan’s world empire; and the hegemony of the Junghar Mongols in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The sediment of administrative schemes and communal narratives left by these regimes shaped the eastern half of Central Asia in the form that it took on the eve of the Qing conquest in the 1750s.

From the Steppe to the Sown: The Uyghurs and Uyghuristan

A nomadic people called the Uyghurs enter the historical record in the sixth century, as one of a number of groups occupying the middle ground between the Tang dynasty and the empire of the Turks, with whom they had much in common linguistically and culturally. When the Turk empire collapsed in the eighth century, the Uyghurs filled the void, establishing their rule in what is now Mongolia. Chinese chronicles describe the Uyghur empire as composed of an elite of “inner” tribes surrounded by a series of affiliated “outer” tribes. The confederation held for almost a century, until the Uyghurs were driven from the steppe by an invasion from the north. Fleeing south, some threw themselves on the mercy of the Tang emperors. Others settled in the no-man’s-land between China and Central Asia, in the oases of Ganzhou, Hami, and Turfan. These Uyghur principalities adopted Buddhism from their Iranian and Chinese neighbors, and patronized the flowering of a new Turkic Buddhist civilization. Uyghuristan—the land of the Uyghurs—was the name that Muslim geographers gave to this region.¹

At its height, Uyghur control extended as far west as Kucha and Lake Issiq Köl. Chinese sources attest that Uyghurs migrated as far as the Pamir region, as did former members of the Uyghur confederation such as the Qarluq. It was from this tribal mix that the Qarakhanid dynasty emerged in the tenth century, a polity of equal significance to Uyghuristan in the twentieth-century construction of a Muslim Uyghur history. The Qarakhanids were the first Turkic-speaking nomads to maintain both a royal Turkic tradition and to adopt Islam. From twin capitals in Kashgar and Balasaghun (now in Kirghizstan), the Qarakhanids raided along the edges of the Taklamakan Desert, carrying out the first wave of Islamization of the Tarim Basin. By the early eleventh century they had succeeded in overthrowing the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, but further inroads into Uyghuristan were checked by the arrival of the Western Liao dynasty, and following them, Chinggis Khan’s Mongols. Wars with the Buddhists of Khotan and Uyghuristan resulted in a series of localized saintly traditions in the Tarim Basin, linked to the graves of holy warriors and martyred imams. The cult of the Qarakhanid monarch Satuq Bughra Khan (fl. 930–950), whose tomb lies on the outskirts of Artush, only grew in popularity as the centuries passed.

The trappings of sedentary civilization proved to be a mixed blessing for the inhabitants of Uyghuristan. In the early thirteenth century, the Mongols were so impressed by Uyghur literacy that they employed Uyghur scribes throughout their chancelleries and armies, scattering them to the ends of the Eurasian continent. The best-known of these Uyghurs ended up in China as scholar-officials of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), one of several successor states to Chinggis Khan’s vast empire. When the Yuan fell, a few of these elite families returned to Uyghuristan, while others migrated to Korea.² Some who served the Mongols ended up in south China, where they eventually adopted Islam and blended into the emerging community of Chinese-speaking Muslims (Hui).³ Others marched west with the armies of Chinggis Khan’s first son Jochi to the Russian steppe, returning to Turkistan centuries later as part of the tribal confederacy known as the Uzbeks.⁴ Still others found service in Mongol successor states elsewhere: in Ilkhanid Iran, or with the Seljük rulers of Anatolia. In the middle of the fourteenth century, in the turbulent aftermath of Mongol rule in the Muslim world, one such family rose to prominence as one of Anatolia’s independent princely dynasties—the Sons of Eretna (Eretna oğulları).⁵

It is hard to gauge the extent to which these widely dispersed Uyghurs felt themselves part of a single ethnic group or members of a diaspora. During the Yuan dynasty, elite Uyghurs in China maintained social ties to Uyghuristan and continued to give their children Uyghur names while adapting to Chinese literati society. It makes sense to suppose that such “diasporic” qualities of the community weakened as Uyghuristan itself lost its distinct political and religious identity. During the break-up of the Mongol empire, Uyghuristan was situated between the Yuan dynasty and the eastern half of the ulus of Chaghatay, Chinggis Khan’s second son. When the Ming dynasty sent its emissaries to Amir Timur’s court in Samarkand, there were already many Muslims living among the Buddhist Uyghurs of Hami and Turfan. According to the envoy Chen Cheng (1365–1457), the Buddhists and Muslims spoke a common Turkic language but were distinguished from one another by religious and cultural markers. For example, Uyghur men grew their hair long, while the Muslims shaved their heads; Uyghur women donned black veils, while Muslim women dressed in white.⁶

The Ming court took these distinctions into account as it extended its network of military garrisons into Uyghuristan in the early fifteenth century. In 1406 the Ming emperor enfeoffed a Buddhist aristocrat of Chaghatayid origins as the Loyal and Submissive King (Zhongshun wang), who presided over three military governors in Hami—one each for the Muslims, the Uyghurs, and the Ha-la-hui (most likely a Mongol group).⁷ Although cultural boundaries between the three groups were gradually eroding, these institutional boundaries preserved the Uyghurs as a distinct community, at least from the viewpoint of Chinese sources.

In the early sixteenth century, as Ming authority in Central Asia declined, Uyghuristan fell under the sway of the Muslim Chaghatayids. In the course of this conflict, Muslim raids and Ming reprisals sent a number of Uyghurs fleeing east into the Gansu corridor, where they settled around the frontier towns of Suzhou and Ganzhou. Following in the footsteps of the Chaghatayid holy warriors, Sufi missionaries traveled to Uyghuristan, seeking converts among its remaining infidels. The last reference to non-Muslim Uyghurs in an Islamic source comes from the hagiography of a Sufi saint of the late sixteenth century, the Naqshbandi Sufi Ishaq Vali of Samarkand. Here it is told how one of the saint’s disciples led a trading mission from Yarkand to Suzhou, where he lodged with a local qadi (Islamic judge), Khoja Abdusattar, whose daughter was gravely ill. Through his disciple’s entreaties, Ishaq Vali manifested himself from many miles away in Yarkand and miraculously cured the qadi’s daughter. “At that time,” we read, “close to three thousand Uyghur infidels had gathered around Khoja [Abdusattar]. They all became Muslims, and secretly they became devotees of His Holiness [Ishaq Vali].”⁸

Conversion to Islam resituated the Uyghurs on the eastern fringe of a Turkic-speaking Muslim world whose political center was the Chaghatayid court of Yarkand to the south but drew on cultural models from the Timurid courts of Samarkand and Bukhara. The new faith brought with it a new Turkic literary language known as Chaghatay and a new canon of Sufi poetry and hagiography. In this process local Uyghur dialects were assimilated to a Tarim Basin standard, and the Sogdian-Uyghur script gave way to Arabic. By the late sixteenth century, Ming court translators who had studied the vertical Uyghur script in order to handle correspondence with Turfan and Hami found their training to be obsolete. Since “tributary” missions from these parts were now carrying letters in Arabic script, they were assigned to the Muslim Bureau, which had previously dealt with states and peoples from farther west.⁹ The linguistic handbooks that these translation bureaus published give some indication of the transformation that was taking place. In a vocabulary list that was used in the Muslim Bureau, the Chinese name for Turfan and its peoples—Gaochang—was glossed simply as Turki, the name by which the language of the sedentary oasis-dwelling communities of Turkistan was now known.¹⁰

The Turko-Mongol Legacy

As a political entity, Uyghuristan faded from view as the Chaghatayids subsumed it into a realm that they called Moghulistan, reflecting the ruling elite’s own sense of Moghul (i.e. Mongol) identity. During the early history of the Chaghatayid ulus, while it was centered to the north of the Tianshan, Moghulistan referred to these mountains and to Jungharia. This was the steppe zone that the traditionalist Moghuls preferred, in contrast to their Timurid cousins, who were now ruling from the cities of Transoxiana. Those among the Moghuls who migrated south to the Tarim Basin initially felt that they had left Moghulistan behind. In the early sixteenth century, however, when the Chaghatayids established a new court in Yarkand, it engendered a sense of Moghulistan as encompassing the Tarim Basin.¹¹ Although the nomadic Moghuls soon blended into the local Muslim community and lost their distinct corporate identity, the concept of Moghulistan survived, particularly in the local literary imagination.¹²

The Chaghatayids directed a second wave of Islamization in the Tarim Basin, both by military means and by patronizing the activities of Sufi shaykhs (known by the title khoja). Some of these khojas belonged to local saintly families, but many were affiliated with brotherhoods originating to the west, most notably the Naqshbandiyya from Bukhara. As Devin DeWeese has argued, conversion narratives provided important grounds for communal identity in Central Asia.¹³ Islamic rulers and prominent shaykhs had an interest in reconciling the Tarim Basin’s two royal traditions—the Qarakhanid and the Chaghatayid—and presenting themselves as heirs to an unbroken legacy of Islamic sovereignty. In this process the activities of a sixteenth-century Sufi shaykh named Khoja Muhammad Sharif occupied an important position. By touring the Tarim Basin and miraculously “rediscovering” the shrines of such legendary Qarakhanid Islamizers as Satuq Bughra Khan, Muhammad Sharif linked his Chaghatayid patrons at the Yarkand court to earlier royal traditions.¹⁴ Intermarriage, as well as corrupted genealogies, also facilitated the merging of sources of authority, allowing the tripartite ruling class of khan, amir (or beg), and shaykh to present themselves as an interconnected unity. By the eighteenth century, Xinjiang’s Naqshbandiyya khojas could claim illustrious Chaghatayid or Qarakhanid genealogy, with some assuming the title of “khan khoja.”

Conversion played an important role in assimilating the Uyghurs to surrounding communities, but it did not erase all memory of them. Irrespective of its infidel associations, Uyghur culture retained a certain prestige in parts of the Islamic world, particularly where Turkic ruling elites confronted Iranian claims to cultural superiority. In the Timurid center of Samarkand, for example, the Uyghur script enjoyed something of a revival in the fifteenth century. Although linguists today distinguish the Buddhist Uyghur written language from the Chaghatay that succeeded it, not all saw this as such a sharp break. The fifteenth-century author Qidirkhan Yarkandi, for example, praised in the introduction to his divan the Chaghatay poets Lutfi and Sakkaki, who were, as he put it, “fluent in the Uyghur parlance and eloquent in the Turki tongue.”¹⁵ Cultural reference points such as these helped to preserve a geographic notion of Uyghuristan in the wake of its political downfall. Writing in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Balkh historian Mahmud b. Vali adopted the term “Uyghuristan” for the entire khanate of the Yarkand Chaghatayids.¹⁶ A century an...