Writing Travel in Central Asian History

4 The Steppe Roads of Central Asia and the Persian Captivity Narrative of Mirza Mahmud Taqi Ashtiyani

113 4 The Steppe Roads of Central Asia and the Persian Captivity Narrative of Mirza Mahmud Taqi Ashtiyani Abbas Amanat and Arash Khazeni In the widely read nineteenth-century Oriental novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1826), James Morier imagines in descriptive detail the turbulence of a Turkmen raid on Iran’s Central Asian frontier: At length, what we so much apprehended actually came to pass. We heard some shots fired, and then our ears were struck by wild and barbarous shoutings. The whole of us stopped in dismay, and like a flock of birds when they see a hawk at a distance, huddled ourselves together into one compact. But when we in reality perceived a body of Turcomans coming down upon us, the scene instantly changed. Some ran away; others, losing all their energies, yielded to intense fear, and began to exclaim, “Oh, Allah! Oh, Imams! Oh Mohamed the prophet! we are gone! we are dying! we are dead!” . . . A shower of arrows, which the enemy discharged as they came on, achieved their conquest, and we soon became their prey. The invaders soon fell to work upon the baggage, which was now spread all over the plain. . . . The Turcomans having completed their plunder, made a distribution of the prisoners. We were blindfolded and placed, each of us, behind a horseman, and after having traveled for a whole day in this manner, we found ourselves on roads only known to the Turcomans. Passing though wild and unfrequented tracts of mountainous country, we at length discovered a large plain, which was so extensive that it seemed the limits of the world, and was covered with the black tents and numerous flocks and herds of our enemies.1 Morier’s fictional account of the Turkmen slave raids (alaman) was not so far-fetched. During the nineteenth-century, the Qara Qum (Black Sands) Desert was infamous 114 | Abbas Amanat and Arash Khazeni as a transit route for the Central Asian slave trade. Raiding the eastern Iranian borderlands during the Qajar period (1785–1925) and taking Shi‘i Persians as captives, Sunni Turkmen pastoral nomads of the steppes held slaves for ransom in their yurts or sold them in the markets of the Central Asian oases of Khiva and Bukhara. Turkmen slave raids disrupted caravan trade on the roads, and created a space of danger and uncertainty on the eastern borderlands of Iran, leading the Qajar dynasty to strive to assert its imperial authority through often futile military expeditions into Central Asia throughout the nineteenth century.2 These nineteenth-century expeditions produced a number of travel books (safarnama ) that surveyed the steppes and depicted.3 Nineteenth-century Persianate travel and borderland narratives on Central Asia were part of an effort to describe distant places and peoples on the eastern edges of Qajar Iran. Drawing on the conventions of the Persian travel book (safarnama) and prompted to a certain extent by the growing body of printed Western geographical and ethnographic literature, Qajar frontier histories and travel narratives mapped Central Asia as a natural environment and left ethnographic accounts of encounters with Central Asian peoples. As ethnographic texts of difference , narratives on the Central Asian borderlands were prone to employ cultural preconceptions in their representations of distant peoples and places encountered on the road. In Qajar travel narratives on Central Asia, the Turkmen are cast as rapacious raiders and wicked tribes (tawayif-i ashrar) from the steppes of the Oxus.4 The pastoral nomadic Turkmen were notoriously feared by the settled townsmen and villagers for their surprise forays (chapu) and violent slave-raiding expeditions (alaman ), which had carried away thousands of Persians from the eastern provinces of Astarabad and Khurasan as captives (asir, bandah, bardah). Numerous Persianate travel books on Central Asia from the nineteenth century detail cross-cultural, inter-Asian encounters in the steppe borderlands of Central Asia.5 This body of travel writing includes captivity narratives that offer rich material for the study of the Central Asian slave trade and encounters between the settled agrarian world of Iran and the pastoral steppes of the Oxus. Nineteenth-century narratives of captives from Iran trace the paths and encounters of journeys across steppe roads, recounting cross-cultural contacts and exchanges.6 At the same time, captivity narratives are records of the troubles of central state along distant borderlands. Nineteenthcentury travel accounts and captivity narratives from Iran to Central Asia trace the paths and encounters of journeys across steppe roads. Among these Persian captivity narratives...