Blood Orange - Cupid Deluxe (2013)

In July 2014 I returned to my then home in Atlanta after eight months overseas. I spent six of those months in Tashkent, researching my dissertation in archives and libraries, thumbing through crumbling manuscripts and tattered books in search of ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī. I was trying to pull together fragments of his legacy and influence upon later writers in an attempt to illustrate (or was it demonstrate?) his ineluctable influence on Central Asian culture.

After several years of graduate school, I though I was prepared. I knew the languages. I navigated daily life in Uzbek, but when I went back in time, I read Chaghatay Turkic (the precursor of both modern Uzbek and Uyghur). I had sat through hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of lectures, seminars, and workshops on the highways and byways of Islamic Central Asian history. I knew the names of long-forgotten classical texts and their equally neglected authors.

But for much of my time in Tashkent, I was a lonely, scared mess of a man. A creature of habit, I restricted myself to a handful of restaurants, teahouses, and canteens. I only frequented two bars. One was a German-style beerhall on the other side of the railway tracks that skirted the south of the city. If you followed the tracks eastwards, you reached Almaty in Kazakhstan. Westwards, and you came to Samarqand and then Bukhara.

The beerhall was popular with foreign workers and their local colleagues, usually employees of the few remaining multinationals who hadn't been driven out by the government's paranoia and incessant harassment. My other watering hole of choice was a Georgian restaurant in a old-style central neighbourhood. Most of the old city of Tashkent was levelled in the earthquake of the 1966, but this neighbourhood still consisted of the single-level houses arranged around a central courtyard that are the stock feature of older Central Asian oasis cities.

I kept myself to myself. There were few foreign researchers and scholars about. The government discouraged anyone from doing research on anything other than the safest and potentially least embarrassing or critical topics. I had no problems there. Navāʾī is the national poet of Uzbekistan.

I suffered through a brutal winter compounded by infrastructural problems: exploding boilers, failing heating, powercuts, uncleared roads ... Some nights I curled up in bed in thermal underwear, pyjamas, a cardigan, woolly hat, and scarf. Only a reliable and steady wifi network, a small library of DVD boxsets, and endless streams of Grateful Dead(!) live recordings kept me moderately sane.

An article by Nick Paumgarten on the fanatical taping habits and obsessive cataloguing practices of Deadheads had proved bizarrely inspirational, as I believed I saw similarities between the manifold differences of manuscript copies of the same work by Navāʾī and the bazillion variations of Grateful Dead concerts. Several recordings might exist of the same show, depending on whether they were recorded by the sound engineer working through the soundboard, or some geezer int he audience holding a microphone above his head. Here was my theoretical framework.

At the end of April 2014 I returned to the United Kingdom, to see family, conduct more research, and take a long overdue holiday with my wife. I did the first and third of these, but the second was cut short when my father was taken suddenly and unexpectedly ill in late May. He died three weeks later, his long-faulty immune system finally unable to beat off a common viral infection.

After burying him and helping my mother wrap up the strands of his life (the paperwork! the files! the bank accounts!) I returned home. I felt I had to simply get on with life. I had to write a paper for a conference in Montreal at the beginning of August. I had to return to Bloomington to teach in the Fall. I had to begin preparing my job application materials.

But amid all this, I forgot that I had to save my marriage. One of my promises for the year had been that I wanted to discover new music. As a teenager, I avariciously read the music papers and 'zines. In this moment, I thought that reactivating that passion would bring fresh stimulus to my life. I half-remembered a review of an artist who went under the moniker Blood Orange. More particularly, I fixated on their most recent release, Cupid Deluxe. Sasha Frere-Jones described it as "one of those albums that spawned a single radio hit and then fell out of print."

As my marriage then crumbled and dissolved and we separated, Cupid Deluxe became what I recently described to a friend as "my divorce album." I listened to the whole thing (and still do) the way people used to listen to albums: in one sitting. At home. On the bus. In airports. In the car. I proselytized (and continue to proselytize) for it. Frere-Jones's description seemed perfectly apt. No-one had heard of it.

One track came to encapsulate that time and is still the song that I play for friends and potential converts. "High Street" combines the vocals of Dev Hynes (the driving force of Blood Orange) with the flow of Skepta. Although Hynes should be best be described as a citizen of the world (parents from Guyana and Sierra Leone, raised in London, lives in Brooklyn) this particular song is a resolutely London song.

"Driving down Ilford Lane, going home ... "

British hip-hop or r&b does best when it stick to home turf, lyrically and melodically. Although I'd fallen out of love with London many years before (I left, friendless, in a white removal-van) "High Street" reminded me of the dirty glamour of daily London. Pushchairs. Sidewalks. Stolen phones. Traffic lights. The roar. Hynes and Skepta erect a moving monument to the daily grind from prosaic foundations. As crappy though I felt my life had become, I remembered that homes are not built in the stars, but start in the gutters.

No More I Love Yous - The Lover Speaks (1986)/Annie Lennox (1995)

"I used to have demons in my room at night ..."

For much of my teen years and well into my twenties, I used to have night terrors. In the in-between state of awake and asleep, spiders used to drop onto my bed. Or build webs over my head. Dark shadows half-concealed themselves behind my bedroom door. Other times I would wake up, paralyzed. I could feel someone holding me. On other occasions, I could sense someone watching me. Don't move. If I don't move, they won't see me.

The cure, it turned out, was simple. I kept the freebie sleep-masks from long-haul flights and used those as amulets to protect me from my nightmares. More prosaically, it meant that when I opened my eyes, my mind was not overstimulated by the night. All I saw was pitch-black. comfortable, pitch-black. Instead, my dreams became the battleground for my anxieties, and hopes, and fears, and despair. As they ought to be. That's what dreams are for. There are no nightmares, just alarming fragments of fact and fantasy melded into terrifying magical reality.

For several years from 1997 or 98, I saw a lot of crappy wannabe bands playing third or fourth on the bill on a Tuesday night at the Rat's Ass in Camden, or the Bumfuck and Firkin in Stoke Newington, or the Stoned Gnome in Islington. I was there because I had a lot of arty friends who were in bands trying to get noticed. Some of them were old and wise enough to admit that that they just wanted to perform their songs in public for a few, kind, non-judgmental friends and that it got them out of the house on an otherwise depressing, grey, wintery, London evening.

There are no other kinds of evenings in London.

Others really were trying to make a career of it. They had websites. They played festivals. They recorded demo tapes. Jazz Summers was in the venue one time, I remember. (look him up, kids.) But in them end they gave up their internship at a record company, stopped pulling pints in pubs because the hours were convenient, and did what their parents' wanted them to do. Get a regular job. Get married. Have kids. Let the waistline expand.

These days hipsters pulling pints in brewpubs is quite the thing, I hear. Funny how things change.

But one time I went to see my older, wiser friend Patrick and his equally old and wise friend Mike perform their songs in front of a few friends. They played rootsy acoustic stuff: things they'd written, with a tasteful cover version on the side. Naturally, they were deep down on the bill. Headlining was some guy I'd never heard of.

David Freeman. Turns out he wrote a song in the 80s that barely scraped the charts and clearly didn't receive much radio-play. But his band, a duet called The Lover Speaks, toured as an opening act for the Eurythmics. Clearly Annie Lennox remembered who they were, because ten years later she did them a massive favor and recorded one of their songs on Medusa, her album of covers.

No More I Love Yous was fucking massive in 1995. Inescapably fucking massive. It. Was. Fucking. Every. Where. On the radio. On the telly. In cars, buses, trains, airplanes. It was one of those epochal records that no matter how many times you hear, it stays fresh and provocative. The kind of record that makes you want to stop driving and listen to the whole thing on the hard-shoulder, because you ask yourself "What. Is. This?"

The video captuared my attention, as I guess it did everyone else, because of the performance by Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo ("Les Trocks"), a campy group of American ballet enthusiasts who combined drag and brave athleticism. Think Judith Butler meets the Bolshoi with a twist of Klaus Nomi.

Lennox is an honest performer. Her unforgiving rawness have won her a fanatical following of men, women, straight, gay, bi, questioning, normal, stark raving mad, boring, quite interesting ... who feel that the only role she is interesting in performing is herself. "Why," from he earlier solo debut, Diva, remains a painful and powerful testament to the ways relationships get fucked up. And how much it hurts. I worry for Annie Lennox whenever I hear her perform it, and I feel sorry for the audience members for whom it has become the perfect encapsulation of whatever pain it is they are experiencing.

But her rendition of No More I Love Yous is merely ok. If you want to feel the full affect, visit the original by the Lover Speaks. When I heard David Freeman and his partner perform it, you knew right away who wrote it. Like hearing Carole King singing (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. Sure, Arethra has the pipes, but Carole has the pain.

Both the name The Lover Speaks and the lyrics of No More I Love Yous are inspired by Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. In it, Barthes endeavoured, in the manner of his greater and later project of avoiding "writerly" texts, to create a work based on fragments that reflected the quicksilver nature of this thing we call Love. Moreover, it was a discourse that reflected the rapturous highs and the wretched lows of Love.

"Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.”

It is the most painful feeling to wake up one morning and realize that you no longer love someone or that they no longer love you. In doing so, you lose a little piece of language. It is a form of censorship, the destruction of language. But the emotion lingers. In order to create anew, we must first destroy. When I have met other people who undergone similar experiences - by which I mean the same, but different - the loss of a loved one who still lives is as painful as losing a loved one who dies.

In this digital age, marriages and relationships don't die. They remain embedded in the digital ether. The reminders are constant. Facebook. Instagram. Flickr. Twitter. These fragments are the basis for the archaeology of past loves. Maybe in the future a Neo-Barthes will create a work based on these digital fragments. The demons of the internet. The only way to avoid them is to switch off and sleep in digital darkness, where one can dream.

Research Methods (3)

A week or so ago I attended a workshop organized by the recently-established Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis at IUB. The workshop was on Omeka, a digital publishing platform tailored for librarians, archivists and humanists who want to curate collections and research materials online. I attended because I'm becoming more and more interested in possible ways of being to present aspects of my research online, ways that require more sophisticated storage and hosting options than are available through (admittedly, pretty good) blog platforms like Blogspot or Wordpress.

Omeka is becoming increasingly popular with humanists whose research incorporates strongly visual components: manuscripts, photographs, paintings, illustrations &c. The attractions for someone like me, who is interested in the rich world of  medieval and early-modern Central Asian manuscript traditions, are obvious; moreover, it brings me into synch with developments in online curation that are currently impacting upon my own research: thanks to digitization initiatives such as Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan, Islamic Heritage Project at Harvard University, and Walters Arts Museum Islamic Manuscripts, I've been able to acquire research materials that once would have required sensitive negotiation and not insubstantial travel costs and copying fees to acquire.

In fact, I learned about the latter goldmine as a direct result of the Omeka workshop: the Walters Art Museum has made publicly available the metadata of its Islamic manuscripts, and the workshop convenors used it as an example of how spreadsheets can be imported (with the aid of a plug-in) into your Omeka site and used to generate new metadata fields.

Not previously aware of the Walters Art Museum (ignorant me!), or its precious collection of Islamic manuscripts, I was delighted to find that it has a fine Safavid copy of نوائی's خمسه, attributed to the 16th cent. As I begin to construct my my research agenda and schedule for the dissertation, the easy availability of such a fine work - unthought of 10-15 years ago - drives home to me the transformational nature of the digital humanities and its benefits to the researcher.

Nawa'i Editions (2)

In one of my earliest posts I noted the lack of both critical text editions and translation of the works of نوائی. Therefore, I was very excited when I was in Tashkent back in August to pick up a copy of a recently-published Arabic-script edition of the نسایم المحبَه, his biographical dictionary of Sufi saints, based largely on three of the earliest known manuscripts: 1) Topkapi MS. Rivan 808; 2) St. Petersburg IVAN MS. 97a; and 3) Sulaymaniyya MS. Fath 4056.

These three MSS. are all copied in a small hand, with 27 lines on each page, so the editors have consulted a pair of later MSS. copied in a larger hand. Incidentally, The editors appear not to be aware of another MS. which arguably belongs to the older family, namely MS. Tk. 1069 III Coll., Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata. This MS. of 116 fols, which I've been able to examine on microfilm, is copied in a small hand, with 27 lines on each page. Many parts of the text are obscured by water damage, but with a little patience and the power of Adobe Acrobat, it's mostly possible to read.

The publishing of (on the face of it) a reasonably reliable text edition will, I hope, make this important source of Central Asian hagiography available to a much wider audience. As I've found out to my delight on numerous occasions, it has a lot of valuable material not found in other sources. For example, according to a friend of mine working on Isma'ilis in Central Asia, it contains one of the earliest references to the traveller and poet ناصر خسرو in a specifically hagiographical context i.e. as a religious personality (p.371)

Most importantly, though, it contains one of the earliest outlines of the group of Turkish shaykhs (ترک مشایخی) 'from the time of احمد یسوی' i.e. the Yasaviyya. While earlier sources had alluded to the co-called 'Turkish shaykhs,' and یسوی was an important figure in the cosmology of Central Asian Sufism, it is only in this work of نوائی that we see the first a full-developed outline of the Yasavaiyya generations, based on initiatory and hereditary linkages.

Q&A session

It was a busy summer: a couple of pre-dissertation research trips, one to the UK and one to Uzbekistan; a French readings class; work at the research institute; class preparation for the Fall; and  reading for Quals. It was probably *too* busy, but I achieved a couple of major goals, namely finally fulfilling my coursework requirements, and then taking - and passing - my Qualifying exams, which means - paperwork aside - I am essentially ABD (all but dissertation).

This semester I'll be working with our professor of Persian literature on a study of نوائی's Persian divan, and specifically his responses (جواب) to the غزلs of, inter alia, جامی، خسرو دهلوی and حافظ. The responses usually fall within the categories of مخمس or تتبع, and I'm hoping that a deeper understanding of the mechanics and aesthetics of the جواب will help me understand نوائی's place within  late-Classical Persian poetry and how it seeped into his Turkic work.

This in turn is part of my broader mission to investigate نوائی as a literary and intellectual phenomenon. Among North American and European historians of the Timurid period, the study of نوائی has tended largely to focus on his activities as a politician and patron of the arts, and his literary importance has become axiomatic, without actually being the subject of wide-ranging and deep scholarly investigation. It is, of course, a different story in Central Asia, where - because of his prominence as a culture hero - literary critics have long engaged with his works (though there too there are interpretive issues, largely deriving from the still strong influence of Marxist ideology, coupled with post-independence nationalist ideologies).

'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.

Research Methods (1)

In one of the December issues of the London Review of Books last year, the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recalled her experiences as one of the lucky few foreign researchers allowed into the Soviet archives in the 1960s ('A Spy in the Archives').

It's a wonderful account of the dualities and binaries that seem to have underlain her encounters. On the one hand, there was official suspicion, both from British and Soviet bureaucrats charged with overseeing her visit; at the same time, her host family and acquaintances were seemingly quick to dispense with the formalities and provide her with the proverbial 'home from home.'

Based not on my own experiences, but from what I've heard and read about the experiences of researchers in the current post-Soviet space, it seems that some things haven't changed. For example, it is de rigeur in the acknowledgements section of any monograph written by a European or American scholar on, say, Central Asia (and when this thought first popped into my head, I was able to check immediately agains several such volumes in my bookshelves), to note the wonderful hospitality of librarians and archivists, usually in the form of endless cups of tea and local delicacies (dumplings, bread, pastries, kebabs etc.).

All well and good, you might think ... but I wonder if such a habit is a hangover from Soviet days. Fitzpatrick writes:

We weren’t allowed to go to the snackbar or cafeteria because that would have meant wandering unsupervised around the building; instead, kind-hearted supervisors (dezhurnye, always women) made tea for us and allowed us to eat sandwiches at our desks, dropping crumbs on the state secrets.

Diversions (3)

The New York Times Sunday Book review recently elicited responses from six writer/critics to the question, 'Why criticism matters.' One of the writers canvassed was Elif Batuman, an American writer from a Turkish family, whose wonderful book on the the study of Russian literature and the ups and downs of graduate student life, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010), was one of the best books I read last year ... ::rewind:: one of the best books I read last year not written by 'Ali Shir Nawa'i.

As her response unfolds, you realise she is championing not the positive review, but the negative review. She writes:

Negative criticism is particularly exciting, not only because of schadenfreude, but because once limitations are identified, we glimpse how to transcend them. Learning the shortcomings of today’s neuronovel, we catch sight of the psychological novel of the future: a novel expressive of the problems we have now, including the encroachment of cognitive science into the concept of the self. When this novel appears, it will be because some people wrote neuronovels and books like “Proust Was a Neuroscientist” and others identified the ways in which these works captivated us but failed to describe human existence.

Such an interpretation can be applied not just to literary criticism, but to any form of criticism where the aim is to help an author revise and improve their writing. Unfortunately, the truly negative book-review is rarely seen in the scholarly journals: in the last couple of years I've seen one particularly dreadful book-length survey of central Eurasian history receive some unfeasibly (and unwarranted) polite reviews.

Glossing Nawa'i (2)

As noted in an earlier post, for the student whose first language is English, the absence of dictionaries and lexicons defining and explaining Chaghatay Turki words and phrases is frustrating.

Another useful aide I've (re)discovered is Cagataische Sprachstudien: grammatikalischer Umriss und Chrestomathie, enthaltend zwoelf Original-Auszuege mit Uebersetzung, nebst Woerterbh dieser ost-tuerkischen Sprache und verwandten Dialekten (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1867; repr. Amsterdam, Philo Press, 1975), by Arminius Vambery, the 19th-Century, Hungarian scholar/explorer/public nuisance who acquired a vast range of materials during his peregrinations in Central Asia.

As the title reveals, it is essentially a chrestomathy, featuring transcribed passages from various Chaghatay Turki texts accompanied by German translations, with a glossary at the back. It also comes with a helpful overview of basic Chaghatay grammar, which at least has the benefit of utilizing Arabic script, rather than the transliterated Latin script examples featured in works on Chaghatay grammar by inter alia Bodrogligeti and Eckmann.

Diversions (2)

'What role for theory in historiography?' is a question historians constantly ruminate on. When I was at school in the UK, there were generally reckoned to to be four "schools" of historiography through which historians interpreted British history, namely Whig/Liberal, Marxist, Revisionist, Post-Revisionist.

For the uninitiated Whig/Liberal (as I understand it ...) meant the teleological interpretation of the passage of British history which viewed all events in the socio-political sphere after the Norman Conquest (1066) as constituting a progressive march towards multi-party democracy, the rule of law, and individual liberties.

It was initially interpreted as a slow reaction/revolution against the so-called "Norman Yoke", the imposition of which had traduced Anglo-Saxon monarchical traditions and the concept of Common Law. Consequently, the Magna Carta was viewed as the first step in the restitution of private property and the reigning in of extra-judicial Royal powers; the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the establishment of the Republic and later Commonwealth affirmed the right of Parliament to raise taxes and levies independently of the monarch; the Bill of Rights of 1689 defined basic rights for Englishmen; and the Reform Act of 1832 revolutionized parliamentary representation, empowered the newly-industrialized areas at the expense of the landowning classes, and swept away the old system of "rotten boroughs." Or something like that ... you catch my drift.

For many, many years, this was *the* widely accepted narrative for the teaching and understand of British history, and was associated with the platforms of the Whig and Liberal parties, until it was skewered by Herbert Butterfield in his tidy polemic, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). By which time, political and intellectual trends had begun to challenge traditional notions of historiography.

Marxist historians, as befitting their background in the socio-economic theories of their hirsute and whiskery fountainhead, viewed many of the events in British history - and here I use "British" as opposed to simply "English" - as products of struggle between the classes following revolutions in modes of production. R. H. Tawney wasn't explicitly a Marxist (he was by all accounts a Christian socialist), but he was inspired by Max Weber - who most definitely was a Marxist - and his works such as The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) and 'The Rise of the Gentry, 1558-1640', Economic History Review, vol. 11, no. 1 (1941) opened up new avenues for like-minded historians to explore major events in British history through the prism of economics. Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone explored similar themes

This segues into Revisionist historiography, which some people take to mean "Contrarian" or "Counterfactual", but is a shade more complex than that. At its best, it adopted the theories and methodologies pioneered by the Marxist historians, took side-swipes at the sacred cows of the Whig/Liberals, but - as the name suggests - looked for new interpretations of accepted narratives.

The classic example was the reinterpretation of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. As it was largely taught to me, the Treaty was too harsh in its punitive measures against Germany, and played nursemaid to the economic and social conditions that resulted in the rise of Nazism. Such views were widespread early on, not least in John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

However, more recent revisionist interpetations have argued that the Treaty was in fact highly lenient - see Corelli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (2002). In a similar vein, revisionist historians argued that the policy of Appeasement and Munich Agreement were far from the acts of political cowardice and weakness portrayed by Churchill and others, but rather policies of expediency and acts minor political genius.

Eventually, the Post-Revisionists appeared on the scene, positing themselves somewhere in between all three of the above mentioned groups, generally eschewing political or methodological biases, and preferring instead measured conclusions based on judicious interpretation of the source material ... and shouldn't that be the preferred methodology of all historians?

Finally, I reach the point of this post. I am a product of my education, and as a would-be historian my formative teenage years were spent in fields (17th Century Britain and Europe) very different to the ones I now frolic in (15th Century Central Asia). Moreover, my current region and period of focus has been largely untouched by the major theoretical and methodological developments in Asian history of the past 30 years of so, to wit Post-Colonialism, 'Orientalism', Subaltern Studies, 'the Cambridge School', and Micro-history, to name the most prominent. On top of that, Central Asian studies in America and Europe has benefited immensely from the opening up of libraries, archives and sites of historical interest in the Post-Soviet space which were previously inaccessible.

In the past few years, historians of Central Asia - and not least those who focus on the periods of Tsarist (1865-1917) and early Soviet (1917-41) rule - have begun to discuss the study of the region in terms commonly used in, say, the study of British-ruled India or French colonial Algeria. Debates about the applicability of Post-colonial theory to the study of Central Asian history, or the usefulness of Saidian (i.e. inspired by Edward Said, Orientalism) memes e.g. Tsarist geographical expeditions as tools of imperial rule, have appeared in the journals.

Such debates are impassioned and inspiring but, like the trends outlined above, they can lead to ossification, stagnation and a certain kind of groupthink in the halls of acadme. Historians grounded in the study of Russia, Russians, and the Russian language (for example ...), need to learn to engage with Central Asia for Central Asia's sake. Theories explaing the rise and consolidation of, say, the Manghits in Bukhara should be grounded in close analysis and interpretation of the sources for that period and place.

Similarly, an understanding of early Russian attempts to impose Imperial systems of taxation and law in the Steppe or Ferghana valley need to based on a solid understanding of pre-Imperial norms (if such things even existed). Foucault - much beloved Foucault - remarked words to the effect that the solution to the problem of global and hegemonic discourses was to found in the "Local".

Nawa'i Scholarship (1)

Part of the process of researching Nawa'i includes, of course, engaging with previous scholarship. It is an onerous task: major monographs and articles have appeared in Russian, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian, German, French, Tajik ... and so on. Curiously, little is available in English - it's a similar situation that alluded to in an earlier post, when I was bemoaning the paucity of English-language translations of Mir 'Ali Shir.

I've recently been loaned by my advisor a volume written by the Soviet orientalist E. E. Bertel's, simply titled Navoi: opit tvorcheskoy biografii [Navoi: An experiment in creative biography] (Moscow/Leningrad: Academy of Sciences, 1948). Bertel's was one of the leading Russian orientalists of the 20th century, despite the obvious political and philosophical constraints placed upon him by the Soviet system, which often required scholars to bend their conclusions to match the prevailing ideological trends.

Bertel's has made an attempt here at a scholarly biography, but with (on the face of it) a populist slant. However, I should refrain from making judgment until I've actually, well, read it.

Bertel's also wrote a similar work on Jami, and it's the relationship between Jami and Nawa'i that is the focus of the latest phase of my research. I'm also holding onto a volume edited by the late Uzbek scholar Asom Urunbaev, entitled Pis'ma-avtografi Abdarrahmana Djami iz "Al'boma Navoi" [Signed letters of Abdurrahman Jami from the "Navoi Album"] (Tashkent: Fan, 1982).

It consists of (Russian) translations from the Persian of letters written by Jami, taken from the so-called Nava'i Album' of collected letters (Ms. of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, no. 2178). Some of these letters were quoted from in Nawa'i's composition Khamsat al-Mutahayyirin, his memoir of his friendship with Jami.

The Historic Nawa'i (1)

part of my research ... well, *part* of it now - probably most of it in the near future - involves examining how successive generations of poets engaged with and responded to Nawa'i's literary legacy. Quite simply, it means reading reams of late medieaval Turkic poetry (Central Asian or Ottoman) and identifying occasions on which poets either responded directly to Nawa'i - usually through the medium of often through the poetic form known as mukhammas, a five-line poem usually written in response to another - or by alluding to him in their poetry.

An example of the latter can be found in the poetry of the noted Khorezmian historian Shīr Muhammad Mīrāb bin ‘Awaḍ Biy Mīrāb al-Khīwaqī (1192/1778-1244/1829), or simply (and more commonly) Mu’nis. Nawa'i's works are known to have been on the curriculum (such as it was) in Central Asian madrassas by the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Examples of Nawa'i's works copied by Munis himself today survive in Central Asian collections.

References

V. A. Abdullaev, O’zbek Adabiyoti Tarixi II: XVII asrdan XIX asrning ikkinchi yarimgacha [History of Uzbek Literature, II: From the 17th Century to the Second Half of the 19th Century], (Tashkent: O’qituvchi, 1967).

Q. Munirov, Munis, Ogahiy va Bayonining Tarikhiy Asarlari [The works of history by Munis, Agahi and Bayani], (Tashkent: Uzbekistan SSR Academy of Sciences, 1960).

Gerhard Schoeler and Munibar Rahman, ‘Musammaṭ’, EI², VII (1993), pp. 660-2.

Diversions (1)

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not reading/studying Mir 'Ali Sir all the time - just most of it ... but that's by the by. By way of distraction, and in order to hone my reading and translating skills vis à vis Chaghatay Turkic, I've been working through some materials available online at Harvard University's Islamic Heritage Project.

One is Janāb-i Ba-davlatnī hikāyātlārī ('Tales of the Blessed Lord'), an account of Ya'qub Beg's rule, written by Aḥmad Qulī Andījānī in 1322 AH/AD 1904-05. As manuscripts go, it's fairly easy to read and comprehend; indeed, as literary stylings go, it's pretty banal. Moreover it was one of the works consulted by Hodong Kim for his - as we like to say in these parts - 'seminal' study of Ya'qub Beg and related revolts against Qing rule in Xinjiang during the 1860s and 1870s, Holy War in China: The Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford University Press, 2004).

Available through the same avenue of research is a collection of 13 Central Asian documents from the 16th-19th centuries, in Persian or Chaghatay. Most of them appear to originate from Samarqand, Kashgar or Yarkend ... and, because the world is arranged this way, they are the subject of a study by - Hodong Kim, published as a chapter in a collection of conference proceedings, entitled Studies on Xinjiang Historical Sources in 17-20th Centuries, edited by James Millward, Shinmen Yasushi and Sugawara Jun, under the auspices of the Toyo Bunko. Hodong Kim's chapter ('Eastern Turki Royal Decrees of the 17th century in the Jarring Collection') compares the Harvard copies with those held, as the chapter title indicates, in the collection of the noted Swedish orientalist, Gunnar Jarring.

Nawa'i MSS (3)

Earlier posts alluded to a) the lack of English translations of Nawa'i's works, and b) the production of scholarly editions in (mostly) Uzbekistan and Turkey. However, as libraries and archives get stuck into the arduous process of digitizing their collections, it is to be hoped that the manuscript copies themselves will become accessible online - preferably without having to pay for the privilege, but we can but hope.

One good example is the University of Michigan, which has made available for download (courtesy of the excellent Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan project)an early 19th-century copy of the Khamsa-i Nawa'i. Composed during 888-890 AH/AD 1483-85, this is a quintet of mathnawīs modeled on Persian works by Niẓāmī, Amīr Khusraw and Jāmī; Nawa'i's was the first in the genre to be written in Chaghatay Turkic. The five parts are:

I.) Ḥayrat al-Abrār
II.) Farhād va Shīrīn
III.) Laylī va Majnūn
IV.) Sab‘a-yi Sayyār
V.) Saddi Iskandarī

This particular copy comes from the Abdulhamid Collection at UM, so-called because it belonged to the Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909). The name of the copyist and the date of copying is given at the end of the text: Sahib Shaykh Khatib, 1245 AH (AD 1829/30).

I haven't had much of an opportunity yet to examine the ms., but on the face of it, it is a very good copy, made in a clear and tidy hand, with relatively few blemishes or major lacunae.