Central Asia Meets the Middle East

David Menashri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135241575
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The emergence of Muslim republics has been part of a larger transformation experienced by the Middle East in the 1990s. The main purpose of this volume is to examine the impact of the transformation on the Middle East, especially Turkey and Iran.

Part One

Past Legacy and Current Politics

Central Asia’s Place in the Middle East

Some Historical Considerations

Robert D. McChesney

GEOGRAPHIC SETTING AND GEOPOLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS

SINCE GEOGRAPHY is destiny as far as Central Asia is concerned, some acquaintance with its geographical features, not to mention a brief definition of the term ‘Central Asia’, should help the better understanding of the pattern of human settlement and the region’s political history. The term ‘Central Asia’ is used here to designate the area defined by certain permanent features of the landscape – the Caspian Sea to the west, the Tien Shan Mountains to the east and north-east and the Hindu Kush Mountains to the south. The Kazakh Steppe (or the Qipchaq Steppe – Dasht-e Qipchaq – as it is known in history) forms the northern borderland. A wide corridor between the great deserts of Iran to the south-west and the deserts of Turkmenistan links the region with the Middle East. Today this land area comprises five former Soviet republics – the recently independent countries of Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan (or Kyrgyzia), Uzbekistan and Tajikistan – and the northern region of the formerly unified country of Afghanistan. What has made the region ‘central’ in history has been its location at the intersection of the overland lines of communication linking China with the Mediterranean and India.

A common thread running through the history of the region and what made it vulnerable to conquests by alien forces (the Arabs in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, the Mongols in the early thirteenth and the Russians in the nineteenth) was its highly developed regionalism, a condition heavily influenced, if not determined, by the way in which resources were distributed across the land. Seventy-five per cent of the land area is desert and the rest is concentrated in scattered oases connected by rivers.

The region has two major river systems, the Amu (Oxus to the Greeks, Jayhun to the Arabs) and the Syr (Jaxartes, Sayhun), both of which until very recently emptied into the Aral Sea, the former from the south, the latter from the north-east. Today these rivers provide 90 per cent of the surface water available to the region that was formerly part of the Soviet Union.⁹⁷ Like the delta of the Nile River, the Amu delta has supported civilizations for millennia. Unlike the Nile, though, where broad flood plains in northern Sudan and Egypt have made agriculture possible along most of its length by natural and artificial flooding of the basin, the topography of the Amu and Syr Basins has confined exploitation of the rivers’ waters only to limited areas. On the other hand, since the main source of water for the two great Central Asian rivers is meltwater from permanent glaciers, it is reasonable to assume that aside from the annual variations in precipitation or the variations created by much longer-term cyclic changes as global temperatures rise or fall, the amounts of water these two rivers have provided has remained constant and that the main variable in the level of sustainable population has to do with changing soil conditions and agricultural technology.

Besides the two large rivers, there are several smaller river systems, one of which, the Zarafshan (also known in the past as the Soghd or Kuhak River), supports the two most important (in economic, political and cultural terms) oases of Central Asia, Bukhara and Samarqand. Another is the Kashka Darya which waters Qarshi (Nasaf, Nakhsh Ab) and its environs. These smaller rivers carry the remaining ten per cent of the surface water available in the former Soviet Central Asia and form extremely important micro-regions.

South and west of the Amu the micro-regions and the rivers that support them are: Qunduz and the Qunduz River, Balkh (today the Mazar-e Sharif region of northern Afghanistan), whose ancient and elaborate irrigation network is fed by the Balkh Ab; Sarakhs/Tejend/Bala Murgh Ab (from north of south) watered by the Murgh Ab; and Herat fed by the Hari Rud which beyond Herat turns north-west and continues on to supply the Marv oasis. The Hari and the Murgh run parallel courses some 80 to 240 kilometres apart, the former to the south and west of the latter. The Balkh Ab, the Murgh Ab and the Hari Rud, like the Zarafshan and Kashka Darya, do not empty into larger bodies of water. Virtually all of their waters are, and have been, used in elaborate and complex irrigation systems. Any surplus or flood water simply disappears in the sands downstream of the oases.

Radiating west and south-west from the so-called Pamir Knot, where the Tien Shan and Pamirs meet the Himalayas, is a group of mountain ridges between two of which the Zarafshan flows westward. South of the Zarafshan, the Wakhsh River, the Surkh Ab, and the Kafirnihan River also water regions of what is today Tajikistan before emptying into the Amu. However, the steep terrain along their courses has long precluded the kind of extensive agriculture possible in the Bukhara, Samarqand, Herat and Balkh oases. In all of Central Asia there is only one extensive agricultural plain, the Fergana valley – 425 kilometres long and at its widest point 125 kilometres, surrounded by mountains with a narrow opening to the west and difficult mountain passes to the east and north.

This geography of Central Asia, a geography of irrigated, agriculturally self-sufficient micro-regions nestled up against mountains, no doubt had a bearing on the decentralized, regional political structures that have marked the history of the region. The population has typically crowded around the centres of these oases, in the towns and their immediate agricultural suburbs. Commerce, with the institutions, both legal and customary, which allowed it to flourish was important to the well-being of these Central Asian oases. It allowed for specialization in agricultural commodities (particularly dried fruits and nuts), in manufacturing (textiles in particular) and in animal husbandry (horse-breeding enjoyed a special place). But agriculture and its ability to sustain the oasal population while freeing some of its members to engage in commerce was of fundamental importance.

The region and its several parts have been known by many names over the ages, some derived from political, some from ethnic and national sources. There has never been a single name that encompassed the entire region by which either its inhabitants or outsiders knew it, as far as we know. The name with perhaps the widest applicability in ancient times was Bactria, but that generally referred to the lands south of, or along the Oxus. Soghd (Sughd) was another name with broad applicability though centred more on the land and urban centres (Samarqand and Bukhara in particular) along the Zarafshan River. The name Soghd survived long after Bactria disappeared. The area of the Amu River delta long bore the same name, Chorasmia in ancient and Khwarazm in more recent times. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the name Khiva replaced Khwarazm.

In the early Islamic period, much of Central Asia came to be known by a name which the Arabs applied to it and which would survive until fairly recent times. The rubric, ‘Ma wara’ al-nahr’ – ‘what lies beyond the river’ – is translated into English as Transoxania, combining the Arabic ‘ma wara” (‘what lies beyond’, or ‘across’, that is, ‘trans’) with one of the classical names for the river (Oxus). The Muslim Arab armies found the river a dividing line beyond which it proved difficult to establish their authority at first and so gave it the name. This was not because the river itself posed any kind of a serious barrier but because of other factors. W. Barthold notes that the first Arab forces were principally interested only in raiding. He also finds evidence that while the Arabs were masters of desert and steppe warfare, the rugged mountain terrain presented them with real problems of mobility and tactics.⁹⁸ In addition, the highly regionalized political formations of Central Asia in which there was no administrative-bureaucratic centre at which to direct military strategy had its effect on the more or less centralized Arab armies. Raids against the numerous oasal centres beyond and within the Oxus basin – Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, Kash, Khuttalan – were invariably militarily successful but did not lead to political control. Then, when the Arab caliphate turned inward and fought its own civil war in the mid-680s, the political will to continue the expansion in the east was lost for an entire generation.⁹⁹ So although Arab armies first arrived on the left bank of the Oxus, probably no later than 652, it was not until a half century later, that a determined and ultimately successful effort was made to establish permanent political control over Transoxania.

CONNECTIONS WITH THE MIDDLE EAST

Central Asia’s historical connections with the Middle East have been recorded, in a more or less uninterrupted fashion, from the listing of the provinces of the Achaemenid Empire in the Behistun inscription (c. 520 BC)¹⁰⁰ down to the present day. (For the suppression and revival of Islam in Central Asia since the Russian revolution, see the essay by Farhad Kazemi and Zohreh Ajdari below.) The recent 70-year period (1917–90) in which there has been something of a rupture in the relationship was exceptional. But even in that period, the region’s historic cultural links with the Middle East were publicly promoted, even if commercial, intellectual and cultural ties were restricted.

The latter-day interruption of relations is, of course, one of the consequences of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the imposition of its ideology and structure on much of Central Asia. But it is also clear that the subsequent polarization of international politics and the effect this had on the way in which both the Middle East and Central Asia came to be studied in the twentieth century further contributed to a perceived disjunction in the histories of the two regions. The emergence of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States of America as binary opposites, irrevocably, it seemed, separate and antagonistic, created a field in the US-dominated West called Soviet studies which assumed jurisdiction over all areas under direct Soviet administration. In the case of Central Asia this meant taking the study of the region out of the hands of Western orientalists, Iranologists, Turcologists, Islamicists and leaving it to Soviet specialists who came to the study of the languages and culture of the region from a very different kind of training. In the Soviet Union, the same kind of division occurred. The regions which were under Soviet control fell under the purview of specialists in Soviet history and institutes of history of the Academy of Sciences, while adjacent regions (Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia) were assigned to different departments in the universities and to the institutes of oriental studies of the Academy of Sciences, creating divisions as strange as those created in the West by the field of Soviet studies. The net effect was, to some degree at least, to weaken or attenuate the understanding of the historical linkages between Central Asia and the Middle East, something pre-Soviet era scholars – even in the era of Russian–British superpower rivalry – never seem to have lost sight of.

To conceptualize ‘Central Asia’ and the ‘Middle East’ as distinctive regions is to allow this past 70 years to set the parameters of our understanding today. Regions often tend to be identified in political rather than cultural or economic terms and in that regard it is not only natural but logical to distinguish the regions. However, it should be understood that the political divisions that existed in the past in the form of fluidly defined dynastic entities and, more recently, in terms of national entities, rarely if ever correspond with the historic cultural and economic divisions, despite the unremitting efforts of historians, occasionally motivated by imperial and national chauvinism, to assert the correspondence.

In some respects the region called Central Asia has had a ‘western’ orientation, at least during the course of recorded history. Two series of events, two sets of conquests, symbolize the westward direction of the cultural gaze of the peoples of Central Asia. The first of these was the conquests of the region by Alexander in the fourth century BC. The cultural baggage of the Greeks was unloaded in Central Asia and served for a millennium or more to inform the civilizations of the region. Some thousand years after Alexander introduced Hellenism, the Arab armies brought the ideology of Islam whose power to shape and direct cultural expressions remains undiminished nearly a millennium and a half later.

Both these episodes – the Alexandrine and the Arab intrusions and occupations – helped focus and direct the region’s search for meaning in westward direction. An even more sharply defined moment, the defeat of a Chinese army in 751 along the Talas River in what is now Kazakhstan – at a spot 425 kilometres due west of Almati and 300 kilometres north-east of Tashkent – probably insured that China would not be the part of the world toward which Central Asia would look for meaning and inspiration.¹⁰¹

In sum, Central Asia’s ties to the Middle East – and, in fact, its sense of belonging in a larger cultural world – were formed long before the Arabs brought Islam to the region. Instead the ready acceptance of Islam came as part of a long tradition of receiving guidance and standards in cultural practice from the West. Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Manicheanism and Christianity had all made major impacts on the region. The impact and influence of Buddhism, outside the narrow trade corridors south of the Amu, is a far more controversial issue and at this point the weight of the argument seems to be more on the side of those who downplay its influence in Central Asia.

HISTORICAL–ECONOMIC RESOURCES

From the extensive writing about Central Asia in the period after the Arab conquests in the early eighth century, certain themes emerge. First and most dominant are the conceptualizations of Central Asia as a region of economic importance, principally as an entrepôt on the route from China to the Mediterranean (the Silk Road) and secondarily as a source of commercial expertise. The documents from Mt. Mugh and recent research on Paykand¹⁰² confirm the legendary reputation of the Soghdians as businessmen and long-distance traders and as suppliers of luxury goods to the great Islamic cosmopolis, Baghdad. Second, the region has been highly regarded as a producer and exporter of food. Between the eighth and the tenth centuries, it was also considered a major source of Turkish slaves.

The tenth-century Arab geographer, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Muqaddasi (var. al-Maqdisi),who visited Khorasan in 984, left a detailed list of exports of the region at that time (principally, textiles, arms and armour, foods, leathergoods, metalware, livestock and slaves, as well as goods imported from elsewhere)which is worth repeating for what it tells us of at least one medieval view of the importance of the region. It is presented here as given in Barthold’s Turkestan:

As regards merchandise, the following was exported: from Tirmidh: soap and asafoetida;

Bukhara: soft fabrics, prayer carpets, woven fabrics for covering the floors of inns, copper lamps, Tabari tissues, horse girths (which are woven in places of detention), Ushmuni fabrics,¹⁰³ grease, sheepskins, [and] oil for anointing the head;

Karminiya: napkins;

D...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Is There a ‘New Middle East5?
• Part One Past Legacy and Current Politics
• Central Asia’s Place in the Middle East
• Ethnicity, Identity and Politics
• Part Two Iran and the Return of Islam
• Iran and Central Asia
• Iran and Transcaucasia in the Post-Soviet Era
• Part Three Turkey and the Role of Pan-Turkism
• Turkey’s Ostpolitik
• Turkey and Transcaucasia
• The Eastern Question Revived
• Part Four Economic and Strategic Implications
• The Disintegration of the Soviet Union
• The Impact of Central Asia on the ‘New Middle East’
• Epilogue
• Index