'Let go of the madrasa and the khaneqah'

One of the highlights of the annual conference of the Association of Central Eurasian Students (ACES) at Indiana University, which was held at the beginning of this month, is the booksale. Consisting mainly of donations from publishers and cast-offs from faculty-members' personal libraries, it can be a hit or miss affair. However, this year (as with last), it was beefed-up by the remnants of the personal library of the late, great Denis Sinor, who died at the beginning of last year. In his will, he left most of his books (15,000+ volumes, I believe) to two institutions in his native Hungary. What was left was first picked over by us at the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, and then put out at the booksale.

Consequently, I was able to pick up a few interesting items. Of most immediate interest is a Soviet-era study on medieval Central Asian Turkic poetry (Э. Р. Рустамов, Узбекская поезия в первой половиние XV veka. Taшкент: 1963). Anachronistic usages of 'Uzbek' aside, it's a hugely useful survey of the Turkic poets of Central Asia who effectively constitute 'Alī Shīr Navā'ī's immediate predecessors, one of whom - اتایی - is the subject of a paper I'm writing this semester on the Yasavī sufi presence in Khurasan.

Only one copy of his divan is known to exist, and is held at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg. A descendant of one of the successors of احمد یسوی, his poetry reflects some sufi themes and ideas (although I want avoid as far as possible simply labelling him as a 'sufi' poet). One couplet quoted by Рустамов caught my eye:

قویغیل اتایی مدرسه و خانقاه
معنیدا قولی صادق و صوفیدا حال یوق

As usual, I'm struggling with a translation that is both literal and lyrical. This is my best attempt to date:

Ata'i: let go of the madrasa and the khaneqah;
Spirituality is an expression of devotion and a Sufi has no means.

The first line is fairly self-explanatory; it's trying to clarify how اتایی elaborates upon that statement in the second line that causes me to stumble. My best guest is that formal study in the مدرسه is not necessary because an 'expression of devotion' (I'm guessing that for metrical purposes قولی صادق is an inversion of the Possessive construction in Turkic) is all that is required to achieve spirituality, and that because a 'Sufi has no means' i.e. has foresworn worldly goods, then a خانقاه is also not necessary.

Regarding this last part, if that is indeed what اتایی is saying, then this would strike one as peculiar because if there is one thing we associate with sufis in this period, it is affiliation with the institution of the خانقاه. It may be an elaboration of a 'rejectionist' stance (similar to the one described by Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends: Dervish groups in the Islamic later middle period, 1200-1550. Сalt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994.), and thus we may consider the poetic voice in this case representative not of sufis, but of dervishes. Just a thought.

Color me amazed ...

Among projects I keep in the slow-lane is an attempted translation of a pair of verse histories that belong to the clutch of Persian and Turkic works collectively referred to as the Kokand Chronicles. Produced in the 19th century, these works offer various perspectives on the history of the Ming dynasty, the Khanate of Kokand, and the Ferghana valley after 1720. Timur K. Beisembiev is at the forefront of current scholarship on these works, and has produced much that is useful (including the now indispensable Annotated Indices to the Kokand Chronicles) but a lot of work remains to be done. (This is the story, alas, for much of Central Asian history between the Mongol and Russian conquests.)

The works in question are the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب and the شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ مطریب and exist in two copies at the Beruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent. The copy I am working from is Ms. 696/I-II, and is described in volume five (publ. 1960) of the institute's catalogue of manuscripts (q.v. nos 3532 and 3534, p. 49). Both works are concerned with the reign of Muḥammad 'Alī Khan (r. 1237/1822-1258/1842). Nothing is known of the authors.

A pair of stiches caught my eye in شهنامهٔ دیوانهٔ عندالیب (fol. 5b l.15-fol.6a l.1):

خان نی اوروغیدین ایرمیش اول ایر
حم آتی انینگ ایرور علی شیر

که رنگی اوجوب گحی قیزاردی
که سرغاریبان گحی کوکاردی

My best translation thus far of this quite literally colorful pair of stiches goes something like this:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called 'Alī Shīr,

Who turned pale and sometimes red;
Who turned yellow and sometimes blue.'

The translation is a bit literal, and maybe the depth of meaning can be more accurately rendered in a metaphorical sense:

'There was a man from the khan's kinfolk,
Also called was 'Alī Shīr.

Sometimes he blanched and sometimes he blushed;
Sometimes he yellowed and sometimes he turned blue in the face.'

I'm still working on it; suggestions welcome.

Write on!

One of the things that inevitably slows down my blog-posting is the fiddly and persnickety process of correctly transliterating non-Latin scripts. Hence, if you look at some of my past posts, you'll see I've transliterated titles of books and whatnot originally published in, say, Russian or Uzbek, into Latin.

I've now decided this not a helpful process ... both intellectually dishonest and - what with developments in OCR and the non-Latin script search capabilities of Google - no longer necessary on my part to transliterate or transcribe Cyrillic or Arabic-script titles and sources into Latin. As more and more libraries (mine own, IU, for example) are calibrating search functions for non-Latin scripts, it actually means we now no longer have to worry quite so much about how we transliterate the given title of a Russian or Persian work, since interested parties can now simply type the relevant text in the orginal scripts and let nature - I mean, teh interwebs - work it's magic.

Ongoing Research (1)

I've accumulated a short list of "to do" projects over the summer, which I need to somehow fit in around my Uyghur language programme; these include:

1) MESA conference presentation;
2) CESS conference presentation;
3) Revise and submit paper for publication.

Of these, the first two are green-lighted; the third is more of a shot in the dark, but since I'm working on my advisor's recommendation - and since I like to think that he wouldn't deliberately send me on a fool's errand - it shouldn't be a complete waste of time and, in any case, it might well end up in my dissertation.

For MESA, I'll be presenting a paper on a Naqshbandi shaykh in Herat in the second-half of the fifteenth century, and for CESS I'll be discussing the influnce of Nava'i's work on early nineteenth century poets in Central Asia. The paper I'll be attempting to get published is a discussion of Nawa'i's memoir of Jami, Khamsat al-mutahayyirin.

A busy summer in store, then.

Research Methods (2)

Hmmm. That didn't take long. Still, since no-one actually *blogs* anymore, I don't suppose anyone noticed. Life has been busy, but I've become involved in a Wiki project based out of Harvard, established by my friend Eric (the man behind Who was Du Tong?, which aims to provide an online chrestomathy for Chaghatay Turki (and variants of).

Called nothing more grand than TurkicWiki, it's still in its early (Beta) stages, but we've already started posting texts online and slowly glossing them. For obvious reasons, we're initially focusing on printed texts in the public domain, which restricts our options somewhat, but we do have a sizeable chunk of the Baburnama posted, as well as a link to Ilminski's edition at Google Books.

Nava'i Scholarship (2)

It is Spring Break Break. Let joy be unconfined. Wandering around campus and downtown today I am reminded just how wonderful Bloomington can be when a) the weather is mild, and b) most of the students have left. Lest I be accused of misanthropy or academic snobbery on account of the latter point, I should point out that I happen to think Bloomington fairly lovely - if not outright wonderful - most of the year. It's just that, like a good wine (wah-wah-wah) sometimes you need a little time and space to breathe in order to truly appreciate the, err, and here the metaphor dies .. pfft.

That said, I've been able to return to some projects that have had to go on the back burner while I've been focused on the Conference, work, and regular studying. One of these projects involves gathering older i.e. 19th century scholarship on Nava'i. I've mentioned (I think ...) Monsieur Belin before, who published a two-part survey of Nava'i and his works in the early 1860s.

In the same venue - Journal asiatique - he published his translation of Mahbub al-qulub, Nava'i's treatise on ethics and society. A little earlier, the Russian orientalist Mikhail Nikitskiy, under the aegis of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, also published a survey of the works of Nava'i, as well as descriptions of Mir 'Ali Shir from period sources (Davlatshah Samarqandi, Khondamir, Sam Mirza et al).

These materials I've either been able to download off teh interwebs, or scan to .pdf from the wonderful microfilm and facsimile collection of Central Asian scholarship held at the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies - where I happen to work. Most convenient.

Uzbek Scholarship (1)

I've reached that point in my preliminary research where I've exhausted most of the published English-language source material, and I'm moving into the realms of Uzbek and Russian publications, more particularly, academic journals.

The initial phase has been to tootle around the stacks of IU Wells Library, plucking volumes, issues or parts of journals from the shelves, flicking through the tables of content, and recording details of relevant articles.

This - children - is bibliographic research the old-fashioned way. The three journals I've most been concerned with in this phase - Sharq Yulduzi [Star of the East), O'zbek tili va adabiyoti (Uzbek Language and Literature) and O'zbekiston tarixi (History of Uzbekistan) - are not readily available electronically (yet...).

However, even with the incomplete sets in the Wells Library, I've identified several dozen likely looking articles which may be of some use, all to do with Nava'i, in some way or other.