The Andijan Uprising of 1898 and Its Leader Dukchi Ishan Described by Contemporary Poets by Aftandil S. Erkinov (review)

In May 1898 a Muslim spiritual leader called Muhammad 'Ali Sabyr, better-known as the "Dukchi Ishan," ¹ led approximately 2,000 of his followers in an attack on the Russian garrison of Andijan at the eastern end of the Ferghana Valley. Twenty-two soldiers were killed and twenty injured, but the uprising was easily suppressed, the Ishan executed, and his followers exiled to Siberia. The village of Mingtepe where he had lived and gathered a large following was razed to the ground and replaced with a Russkoe selo inhabited by settlers. This apparently minor incident has sparked more debate than any other from the fifty years of Russian rule in Turkestan before 1917. In part this was because, before the 1916 Revolt, violent resistance to Russian rule in Central Asia was so rare. The Andijan Uprising was called upon to bear a huge weight of interpretation, beginning with those of tsarist officials, who generally attributed it to a mixture of innate Islamic "fanaticism" and the manipulations of sinister foreign agents from Afghanistan and the Ottoman Empire, and on whose understanding of Central Asian religion and society it had an impact out of all proportion to the threat that it posed to Russian rule. Early Soviet historians ignored its religious aspects and recast it as a popular and revolutionary movement, though by the 1950s attitudes were more circumspect, and it was often viewed as reactionary. In post-Soviet Uzbekistan it has been reinvented as "national" resistance to Russian colonial rule. Perhaps because many interpretations are so politicized, scholars remain divided as to whether the motives for the uprising were primarily religious or economic and social, and whether the Dukchi Ishan was more concerned with resisting the colonial regime, or with reforming the moral corruption in Muslim society, which he felt it had fostered. ² The views of his followers, and the wider reaction to the uprising among Muslims in Russian Central Asia remain still less well understood.

This book makes a significant contribution to the last of these points in particular, but it also provides an excellent introduction to the complex historiographical controversies that surround the interpretation of the Andijan Uprising. It is the product of collaboration between the two most distinguished historians working in Uzbekistan today. Aftandil Erkinov's meticulous edition of the Turki texts of a cycle of twenty poems composed in response to the Andijan Uprising is preceded by a twenty-five-page "foreword" from Bakhtiyar Babajanov which is really an article in itself, a summary in English of his numerous publications in other languages on the Andijan Uprising in recent years. ³ Erkinov has also published on the poems in Russian, while he had made a few of the texts available online through Halle's Zerrspiegel project, so some of this material is not entirely new. ⁴ Nevertheless, this edition is more than the sum of its parts, and by making these texts available to a wider audience, including English-speaking undergraduates, Erkinov has rendered a great service to scholarship.

Babajanov's foreword touches on four principal themes: the first is the dire state of historical scholarship in both contemporary Central Asia and in the West. In the former, he argues, this is because historians are subjected to strong political pressures to conform to a "nation-building" agenda, while much writing simultaneously (and unconsciously) continues to reproduce Soviet tropes and stereotypes. In the latter case it is because of what Devin DeWeese has called the "legacy of Sovietology." ⁵ While I would not disagree in toto with either of these judgments, I think that Babajanov is unduly pessimistic here: some excellent historical work is now being done in Central Asia, principally in Kazakhstan, though...