Volume 88, Issue 2

The Russian conquest of Central Asia marked the beginning of record-keeping for Qazaq arbitrators ( bīs ) and customary law ( ’ādat ). It remains obscure how bīs complied with the colonial regulations obliging them to record their court proceedings. I approach this issue first by questioning the utility of extra-judicial sources crafted in Russian at the instigation of colonial bureaucrats; hence, I argue that the comparison alone of ’ādat -related judicial records written in Turki (Chaghatay) with šarī’a court certificates allows situating the legal terminology applied by Qazaq arbitrators within the discursive tradition of Islamic law. By way of illustrating my approach, I offer a close reading of a report of a murder case adjudicated according to Qazaq customary law in the vicinity of Khiva in 1895. My commentary on the summary of the trial sheds light on the interplay of customary and Islamic law in the region. In addition, it challenges earlier interpretations of the use of the exculpatory oath among the Qazaqs.

The present paper conceptualises two distinct ways in which scholars may try to make sense of a document or set of documents, and considers why so few attempts are made to marry these two approaches. By subjecting the collected contents of an early 20 th -century documentary scroll from Nasaf first to an ‘evocative’ reading and then to an ‘antiphonal’ one, I consider what we may glean from considering each reading in the light of the other.

Groups based on the notion of a shared sacralized descent enjoyed considerable influence in religious, social or political affairs in Central Asia by grace of their actual or imagined ancestry. They were credited by titles like īšān, sayyid, hwāğa and tūra . The flexibility of multiple genealogy accounts provided ample space for negotiations of conceptions concerning identity, descent, and sacredness as well as for their affirmation or disapproval. The 19 th century saw an increase in newly emerging, self-styled religious dignitaries, but the strategies these people adopted to achieve their goals and the responses of their environment remain largely understudied, the more so if their attempts remained unsuccessful. This article explores the vain endeavour of two īšāns , father and son, to establish themselves in the religious market in the Ferghana Valley, and discusses the “making of new religious figureheads” during the tsarist and early Soviet period. Based on letters and documents from the īšāns‘ private holdings, the essay shows their efforts to present themselves as progeny of the Prophet Ayyūb – patron saint of the silk processing craftsmen – from whom they tried to levy donations, but met repeated refusal.

Historians of the Khanate of Khiva have long disagreed about the legal and fiscal status of certain categories of land ownership known as atā’ī mulk and yārlīqlī mulk . In the present article, I try to offer a new reading of these categories. In so doing, I challenge the influential arguments of Russian scholars such as O. Škapskij, V. Giršfel’d, A. Galkin , whose conceptualisations of yārlīqlī mulk reflect a number of interpretative errors and confusions between various different legal and fiscal practices. By analysing in detail the edicts of khans’ yārlīqs and tax registries, I attempt to demonstrate that the lands identified by Russian authors as yārlīqlī mulk enjoyed complete fiscal immunity, and that they were commonly referred to in vernacular usage as mulk-i hālis (or mulk-i hālisī ).

Drawing on a collection of Islamicate and Russian-language documentary materials presently held in Tashkent, I explore how the administration of Tashkent’s Kūkeldāš Madrasa oversaw and regulated the leasing-out of the madrasa’s waqf -endowed trade and artisanal establishments. By tracing shifts in the administration of leasing arrangements we may begin to illustrate a number of other, larger shifts in socio-economic practice over the course of the madrasa ’s long existence, reflecting the consequences first of the rise of the Khoqand Khanate and secondly of the Russian conquest and the establishment of the Turkestan Governorship-General. By attending to patterns of lease arrangements over the history of a single waqf establishment, we may begin to discern shifting patterns of practice which are all too often obscured when viewed against a wider canvas.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an exceptional document preserved at the Louvre Museum under the mark MAO 2098. The manuscript is a calligraphic genealogical scroll relating to the Ḫwāğas, members of a Sufi Naqšbandi lineage of East Turkestan which was extremely powerful during the 17 th and the 18 th centuries. Striving to join the dots literally as well as figuratively, I propose to read the šağara in several different ways. Most obviously, the text provides some limited new information on members of the Āfāqi branch of the Ḫwāğa family. At the same time, we can read the text as a communicative device serving to advance two intertwined social practices: family strategies and the construction of power. Produced within a forum of competition with other aristocratic households, prestigious Sufi lineages in particular, the scroll serves to highlight both the Šarīfian origin of the family and the hereditary succession of its spiritual leaders. At the same time, the manuscript’s remarkable aesthetic qualities served to impress upon those who saw in it the numinous force of the Ḫwāğas’ supernatural authority.