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  • Confusing Black and White: Naqshbandi Sufi Affiliations and the Transition to Qing Rule in the Tarim Basin*
  • David Brophy (bio)

The role of Sufi brotherhoods as a force either of resistance or of accommodation has aroused interest in a variety of imperial contexts, and the case of Qing Inner Asia is no exception. Even those with only a passing acquaintance with the history of the region will probably have heard of the “khojas,” and may be familiar with the schism between the “Black Mountain” and “White Mountain” factions in the Tarim Basin, in the south of what is now Xinjiang. These khojas were members of the Naqshbandiyya, a Sufi brotherhood (ṭarīqat) that spread from Transoxiana throughout Asia and the Middle East in the post-Mongol period. Descended along two different lines from a sixteenth-century saint of Samarqand, Makhdum-i A‘ẓam, these khojas can hence be referred to collectively as Makhdumzada, “the sons of Makhdum.” “Black Mountain” is a term commonly applied to the family of Isḥaq Vali (d. 1599), also known in the literature as the “Isḥaqiyya.” The “White Mountain” khojas descend from Afaq Khoja (d. 1694), and hence also take the name “Afaqiyya.” A longstanding rivalry between these two camps has been thought greatly to outweigh any rupture that took place within either of them. Indeed, this rivalry has acquired the status of a grand narrative of Eastern Turkestan’s history, stretching from the middle of the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth. [End Page 29]

Assuming the significance of this rivalry, scholars have expended a considerable amount of ink describing its historical origins, and seeking to describe what difference, if any, actually distinguished the “Black Mountain” and “White Mountain” communities—be it in terms of succession practice, orientation toward worldly politics, or social composition.1 Yet despite this interest in the khojas and their role in Xinjiang, much of the local textual record capable of shedding light on these questions has been neglected. Only a few of the available Persian and Chaghatay source texts have come into wide circulation in précis translation, and scholars rarely venture back to a close reading of the originals, let alone engage with less well-known works. To some extent this is due to a problem of accessibility: the body of texts I draw on here remains entirely in manuscript form and is divided up among libraries around the world. Yet it is also a question of genre. Most of this writing consists of hagiography—a genre of which historians have tended to be wary. To be sure, there are limitations on the value of hagiographies as historical sources. Unlike in Western Turkestan, in Xinjiang there was no concurrent tradition of “official” Islamic historiography that might act as a check on these works. Yet my methodology here will not place excessive demands on this corpus. At this stage of research, simply identifying the authorship and factional affiliations of texts, and gaining some sense of a text’s standpoint toward key political events, and adjudication of the role of key individuals, is enough to improve significantly our understanding of this period and the role of Sufi affiliations within it. Laying this groundwork will, I hope, allow us to venture into more difficult questions of interpretation, and bring this body of writing into more productive dialogue with perspectives provided by the archive and official historiography of the Qing.

My reading of this hagiographic corpus has led me to question much of the received wisdom in this field, in several respects. The first is the most basic one of identification and classification. To state my most important finding, the “Black Mountain” and “White Mountain” designations, which have come to be treated as interchangeable with “Isḥaqiyya” and [End Page 30] “Afaqiyya” respectively, were not synonyms for these terms. They instead describe a schism within the Afaqiyya that emerged in the wake of Afaq Khoja’s death. Much of what was previously thought of as belonging to the “White Mountain” will therefore have to be reclassified as “Black Mountain.” Making this corrective leads us to a view of the “Afaqiyya” as a considerably more diverse phenomenon than has been realized, and...

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