Polymaths of Islam

Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia

James Pickett

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781501750250
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

Polymaths of Islam analyzes the social and intellectual power of religious leaders who created a shared culture that integrated Central Asia, Iran, and India from the mid-eighteenth century through the early twentieth.

James Pickett demonstrates that Islamic scholars were simultaneously mystics and administrators, judges and occultists, physicians and poets. This integrated understanding of the world of Islamic scholarship unlocks a different way of thinking about transregional exchange networks. Pickett reveals a Persian-language cultural sphere that transcended state boundaries and integrated a spectacularly vibrant Eurasia that is invisible from published sources alone.

Through a high cultural complex that he terms the "Persian cosmopolis" or "Persianate sphere," Pickett argues that an intersection of diverse disciplines shaped geographical trajectories across and between political states. In Polymaths of Islam he paints a comprehensive, colorful, and often contradictory portrait of mosque and state in the age of empire.

Chapter 1

Defamiliarizing the Familiar

Conceptualizing Religion and Culture in Turko-Persia

Understanding the Islamic scholars of Bukhara requires that we set aside assumptions about culture and religion and build some new scaffolding to cover the void. Nation, ethnicity, identity—these are all concepts that have been thoroughly theorized for the modern period, but when superimposed on earlier centuries they are unhelpful at best and actively misleading at worst. Religion has received more evenhanded conceptual attention, but anachronism is present in that literature as well. This chapter integrates different conceptual tools for understanding social and cultural dynamics in the premodern world to render the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa.

The invention of tradition is a well-established concept, as is the notion that many national identities are of recent provenance.¹ Much of what we might consider timeless or “traditional” was only recently objectified as such within the last century or two. Similarly, numerous studies have established the historical contingency of “secular” culture as separable and distinct from religion. Persian poetry understood as a “cultural” foil to “religious” Arabic texts is burdened by a dichotomy that would not have been appreciated by the original authors. But where does that leave us before the innovation of the modern categories that shape our thinking? If Persian culture was not the same as Iranian national culture, then what was it? If we are to decenter Islam from the Arabian Peninsula, then why did Arabic texts remain core to any educated person’s repertoire—even into the early twentieth century? And what of the “Turko” part of the term Turko-Persia featuring in the title of this chapter?²

The questions of how Persian high culture relates to Islam, or what it meant to write in Turkic, are exactly the issues that make this book more than a narrow consideration of elite that happened to live in what we now consider Central Asia. Islamic scholars of Bukhara were in different ways representative of a broader constituency of literati whose members were to be also found in western China, Iran, India, and even North Africa. However, because reconceptualizations of culture and religion in the preindustrial era are still in their infancy and often scattered across disparate literatures, this chapter builds on them, combines them, and in some cases critiques or repurposes them.³

Chasing the Cosmopolis

To understand how culture and power and religion interacted in long nineteenth-century Central Asia, it is critical to first appreciate that premodern culture and society were organized by dynamics fundamentally distinct from those of the present-day world.⁴ Even though the vast majority of the world’s population was uneducated, and despite treacherous expanses separating urban centers, many of the cultures enacted by elite strata were astonishingly uniform.⁵ These continua of transregional acculturation constituted the environment within which Islamic scholars imagined their world, just as they created it. This world was the cosmopolis.

This cultural dynamic persisted—and even flourished—against the backdrop of the industrializing Russian Empire from the 1860s on. Colonial empire brought with it profound changes to cultural and religious organization in Central Asia, reshaping understandings of ethnicity and orthodoxy, and sowing the seeds that would eventually displace the cosmopolis. Yet the endurance of those older forms—too often waved away as unchanging “tradition”—has remained a blind spot in the literature.⁶ Positing the cosmopolis as a quintessentially premodern cultural complex places the inexorable transition to colonial modernity in its proper context and complicates its hegemony.

Insights from the literature that theorizes cosmopolitan high culture in the preindustrial world allow us to move beyond anachronistically imposing modern categories into arenas in which they had no salience.⁷ This scholarship is scattered and has predominantly been applied to other regions, so it is essential to recapitulate its most important facets and synthesize them in relation to high culture and religion in Eurasia specifically. This is doubly important since the few previous efforts to apply conceptual literature on cosmopolitan high culture to the Persianate world have been misleading in several key respects, particularly with regard to religion.

The cosmopolis has been most extensively theorized by Sheldon Pollock, who elegantly defines it as the study “of how and why people may have been induced to adopt languages or life ways or modes of political belonging that affiliated them with the distant rather than the near, the unfamiliar rather than the customary.”⁸ This model provides conceptual vocabulary for understanding earlier cultural dynamics on their terms. It provides tools for explaining why elite in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan interacted with the Mahabharata (a Sanskrit epic), why Irish monks well outside the territories of the former Roman Empire were known for their enviable Latin, why Vietnamese Buddhist monks living in Hanoi authored new works in classical Chinese, and—relevant for our purposes—why Islamic scholars of Bukhara parsed many of the same Persian texts as their colleagues in Sarajevo. This model helps us to distance ourselves from modern categories of ethnicity and explain why the Persian cosmopolis was no more the patrimony of Tajiks or Iranians than Latin was the exclusive birthright of Italians. And it clarifies why Persian borrowed so much from the Arabic language and its literary forms but Arabic took so little from Persian—just as Tamil derived concepts from the Sanskrit cosmopolis but not vice versa.⁹

The cosmopolis paradigm has much to offer, but it also comes with cumbersome baggage. On the one hand, Pollock’s concept of the premodern cosmopolis is superficially connected to much more extensive literature on modern cosmopolitanism; on the other hand, it is disconnected from scholarship using different terminology to describe cultural and social phenomena that are conceptually related.¹⁰ The literature on cosmopolitanism conflates studies of cosmopolitanism as a philosophical position (à la Kant, counterposed to currents of Romantic nationalism) with examinations of deracinated communities of elite actors moving between discrete empires and states.¹¹ This first literature does not inform my research despite the connection implied by the shared etymology, and despite the overlap asserted in parts of the secondary literature.

Meanwhile, seemingly unrelated scholarship substantially enhances our understanding of the cosmopolis. The idea of elite, transregional high culture may initially bring to mind recreation and pleasure, but the cosmopolis was hardly divorced from power. The genesis of a given cosmopolis was often intimately bound up in the projection of imperial authority, and imperial networks lingered on even after the collapse of the empire itself.¹² Empires facilitated exchange between vast territories, spreading exactly the sorts of high cultural forms encapsulated by the Persian cosmopolis.¹³ Bolstered by imperial power, those cultures were embraced beyond the reach of the state and persisted after the state disintegrated.¹⁴ Thus the (post)imperial “commonwealth” as an analytical framework overlaps considerably with the idea of the cosmopolis, and both are arguably different ways of engaging the same phenomenon.¹⁵

The cosmopolis is often conceived of as a world literary high culture, and the ulama of Bukhara, who are at the heart of this nonliterary book, lived in an exceedingly literary world.¹⁶ It should not be forgotten that literature is often produced by scholars trained in institutions—institutions established through the investment of resources, resources extracted through coercive force.¹⁷ Thus we must expand our horizons to include the interaction between literary texts (arguably all texts in the Persianate case) and the social forces that produced them.¹⁸

Contesting the Persianate, Reconciling the Islamic

How does this conceptual groundwork help make sense of the cultural soup that filled territories across Eurasia and beyond? I take the idea of the Persian cosmopolis (with the adjective “Persianate” describing the same phenomenon) to refer to a canon of literature and the outcome of interactions with that canon.¹⁹ Although this canon was not reducible to the Shah-nama (the Persian epic of kings), the cosmopolitan space overlapped closely with areas that embraced that text and other core entries in the canon (e.g., Sa’di’s Gulistan).²⁰ The ulama of Bukhara lived and breathed the much the same Persian literature as their peers in India, Iran, and in the Ottoman Empire—a textual canon a thousand years in the making.²¹

Those same intellectuals read Arabic texts as well, and explaining the relationship of Persianate language and culture to Arabic has plagued applications of the cosmopolis framework to the Persian case. Most scholars have dealt with this challenge by eliminating Islam from the equation, characterizing the Persian cosmopolis as a “secular” overlay on top of the Islamic world but without any particular connection to religion.²² Leaving aside the fact that understanding the Persian cosmopolis as essentially “secular” begs the basic question of why its reach never extended much further than the Islamic world,²³ it also fails to appreciate Talal Asad’s historicization of the emergence of the secular as a category separate from religion.²⁴

Ferdowsi and Ibn Balkhi: Secular Iranian Proto-Nationalists? A Zoroastrian Third Column?

How should we understand Ferdowsi’s masterpiece, the Shah-nama, in relation to Islam and the Arabic cosmopolis? This is a critical question since the Arab literary theorist Ali ibn al-Athir (d. 1233)...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Technical Note
• Introduction: Islamic Scholars and the Central Asian Backdrop
• 1. Defamiliarizing the Familiar: Conceptualizing Religion and Culture in Turko-Persia
• 2. Centering Bukhara: The Reconstruction and Mythologization of an Abode of Knowledge
• 3. Bukhara Center: Islamic Scholars as a Network of Human Exchange
• 4. Patricians of Bukhara: Turkic Nobility, Persianate Pedagogy, and Islamic Society
• 5. High Persianate Intellectuals: The Many, Many Guises of the Ulama
• 6. Between Sharia and the Beloved: Culture and Contradiction in Persianate Sunnism
• 7. Opportunity from Upheaval: Scholarly Dynasties between Nadir Shah and the Bolshevik Revolution
• 8. The Sovereign and the Sage: The Precarious, Paradoxical Relationship between the Ulama and Temporal Power
• Conclusion: United in Eclecticism
• Epilogue: Efflorescence before the Eclipse
• Bibliography
• Index