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Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions
Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition
This book is the first substantial study of Islamization in any part of Inner Asia from any perspective and the first to emphasize conversion narratives as important sources for understanding the dynamics of Islamization. Challenging the prevailing notions of the nature of Islam in Inner Asia, it explores how conversion to Islam was woven together with indigenous Inner Asian religious values and thereby incorporated as a central and defining element in popular discourse about communal origins and identity. The book traces the many echoes of a single conversion narrative through six centuries, the previously unknown recounting of the dramatic "contest" in which the khan Ozbek adopted Islam at the behest of a Sufi saint named Baba Tukles.
DeWeese provides the English-language translation of this and another text as well as translations and analyses of a wide range of passages from historical sources and epic and folkloric materials. Not only does this study deepen our understanding of the peoples of Central Asia, involved in so much turmoil today, but it also provides a model for other scholars to emulate in looking at the process of Islamization and communal religious conversion in general as it occurred elsewhere in the world."
DeWeese provides the English-language translation of this and another text as well as translations and analyses of a wide range of passages from historical sources and epic and folkloric materials. Not only does this study deepen our understanding of the peoples of Central Asia, involved in so much turmoil today, but it also provides a model for other scholars to emulate in looking at the process of Islamization and communal religious conversion in general as it occurred elsewhere in the world."
638 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 31, 2013
There's no way to avoid it: this book is dense and complex and, if you are reading it at the end of a full workday as I was, it takes time to get through. It comes with the full academic panoply of source study and footnotes and linguistic analysis. I have a doctorate in Russian history, and it still took me months to finish it.
Don't let that deter you. This is one of the best books I have ever read on Eurasian culture. It looks at a series of myths that begins with the Tatars' conversion to Islam and explores how these myths develop into epic tales of a heroic community ancestor. In the process, the author makes several important points.
First, he argues that religious stories have little to tell us about historical events (that is, their importance does not lie in some supposed historical core) but a lot to tell us about what a given community values. Second, he explores the blending of the new religion—in this case, Islam, but he also shows the same mechanism at work in the Uighurs' adoption of Manicheanism—with traditional definitions of community and stresses that the adoption of Islam was a community decision aided by Islam's own emphasis on community. He details three stages of incorporation for the new religion and traces how the Islamizing myth became encrusted with elements from traditional Inner Asian legends (the World Tree, the World Mountain, Water, and the feminine ancestor guardians in the person of swan maidens, air spirits, and protective animals). Third, he points out that modern scholars' belief that Inner Asian peoples saw empire as the ideal political state, attained only sporadically but always the goal, is backwards: in fact, these myths reveal the assertion of community in an attempt to weld fundamentally disparate and independent tribes into a larger whole. Islam, as a world religion, is one larger community of this type. The intermittent and often short-lived steppe empires are another.
The insights from this book—in particular, the importance of female ancestors—were crucial in developing my second novel, The Golden Lynx. The political arguments play an even greater role in the first of my four sequels to that book, The Winged Horse (not yet published). And I can see that I will continue to rely on it throughout the series. So even though it's undoubtedly not for everyone, anyone who has an interest in cultural difference and assimilation, the societies of Central and Eastern Asia and the steppe, and the innovative use of historical sources should seek it out.
Don't let that deter you. This is one of the best books I have ever read on Eurasian culture. It looks at a series of myths that begins with the Tatars' conversion to Islam and explores how these myths develop into epic tales of a heroic community ancestor. In the process, the author makes several important points.
First, he argues that religious stories have little to tell us about historical events (that is, their importance does not lie in some supposed historical core) but a lot to tell us about what a given community values. Second, he explores the blending of the new religion—in this case, Islam, but he also shows the same mechanism at work in the Uighurs' adoption of Manicheanism—with traditional definitions of community and stresses that the adoption of Islam was a community decision aided by Islam's own emphasis on community. He details three stages of incorporation for the new religion and traces how the Islamizing myth became encrusted with elements from traditional Inner Asian legends (the World Tree, the World Mountain, Water, and the feminine ancestor guardians in the person of swan maidens, air spirits, and protective animals). Third, he points out that modern scholars' belief that Inner Asian peoples saw empire as the ideal political state, attained only sporadically but always the goal, is backwards: in fact, these myths reveal the assertion of community in an attempt to weld fundamentally disparate and independent tribes into a larger whole. Islam, as a world religion, is one larger community of this type. The intermittent and often short-lived steppe empires are another.
The insights from this book—in particular, the importance of female ancestors—were crucial in developing my second novel, The Golden Lynx. The political arguments play an even greater role in the first of my four sequels to that book, The Winged Horse (not yet published). And I can see that I will continue to rely on it throughout the series. So even though it's undoubtedly not for everyone, anyone who has an interest in cultural difference and assimilation, the societies of Central and Eastern Asia and the steppe, and the innovative use of historical sources should seek it out.
December 15, 2016
Extremely dense in both good and bad ways. A necessary work to have and read by steppe history fans like myself.
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July 21, 2024Tarikh-i Dost Sultan by Qtemish Hajji 1550s
December 19, 2016
v interesting implementations of methodologies great work
February 1, 2016
Full disclosure: I study at Indiana University and have taken classes with Professor DeWeese. To me, this book is one of the best ways to experiences his enormous erudition if you are unable to hear him speak in person. That said, it is somewhat misleadingly named, since this volume is at once more focused, and infinitely more expansive in its scholarship than you might expect. More focused, in that his major concern is a single eccentric figure--Baba Tükles, a hairy Sufi missionary who survives a trial by fire in the court of Özbek Khan--and his continued re-use in geneological, historical, epic, and folkloric materials in western and central Eurasia.
At the same time, the publishers could easily have re-titled the work "Conversion and Native Religion in Central Eurasia" without argument from the readers. DeWeese considers not only the religious conversion of the Golden Horde--the northwesternmost part, or ulus of the Mongol empire, but nearly every well known instance of conversion in Inner and Central Asian history--including the Manichaeism of the Uyghurs, the Judaism of the Khazars, the Islamization of the Bulghars, and more. Even more impressively, DeWeese supports this wide-ranging and insightful survey with reference to all the major European scholarship on Central Asia, whether in Russian, German and French, as well as to primary source materials and secondary works in Persian and many Turkic languages.
Like other reviewers have mentioned, this makes the text quite a challenging read. However, I would say that his writing style is usually not only readable, but also engaging, and that most of the footnotes are optional for a non-academic reader.
My only disappointment is in his neglect not of folklore, but of established academic tools for the systematic study of folklore. I think this work's comparison of narrative motifs and motif complexes would have benefited from references to Stith Thomson's famous Motif Index, and the ATU Tale-Type Index. This is not only because he argues that certain motifs (particularly when they occur together) are characteristic of Inner Asian religion without acknowledging that many also occur well outside this geographical area, but also because he himself has done an enormous amount of classificatory work. He provides, for example, a table comparing narrative elements of various versions of the Idige epic--most of which have numbers in the Motif Index. But since he does not use these numbers, much of the comparative value of his findings (for himself and other scholars) is foregone.
This, however, does not detract from the contributions of the work. As a thorough and exquisitely well-researched treatment on Islamization in central Eurasia, the book really has no equal.
At the same time, the publishers could easily have re-titled the work "Conversion and Native Religion in Central Eurasia" without argument from the readers. DeWeese considers not only the religious conversion of the Golden Horde--the northwesternmost part, or ulus of the Mongol empire, but nearly every well known instance of conversion in Inner and Central Asian history--including the Manichaeism of the Uyghurs, the Judaism of the Khazars, the Islamization of the Bulghars, and more. Even more impressively, DeWeese supports this wide-ranging and insightful survey with reference to all the major European scholarship on Central Asia, whether in Russian, German and French, as well as to primary source materials and secondary works in Persian and many Turkic languages.
Like other reviewers have mentioned, this makes the text quite a challenging read. However, I would say that his writing style is usually not only readable, but also engaging, and that most of the footnotes are optional for a non-academic reader.
My only disappointment is in his neglect not of folklore, but of established academic tools for the systematic study of folklore. I think this work's comparison of narrative motifs and motif complexes would have benefited from references to Stith Thomson's famous Motif Index, and the ATU Tale-Type Index. This is not only because he argues that certain motifs (particularly when they occur together) are characteristic of Inner Asian religion without acknowledging that many also occur well outside this geographical area, but also because he himself has done an enormous amount of classificatory work. He provides, for example, a table comparing narrative elements of various versions of the Idige epic--most of which have numbers in the Motif Index. But since he does not use these numbers, much of the comparative value of his findings (for himself and other scholars) is foregone.
This, however, does not detract from the contributions of the work. As a thorough and exquisitely well-researched treatment on Islamization in central Eurasia, the book really has no equal.
January 10, 2012
A little hard to get through to be honest. But valuable, and pretty much on its own. The intersections of old steppe religion (my interest, and he unearths things I haven't found elsewhere) with Islam.
January 9, 2009
Deweese sets the standard for the study of Islamization.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews