Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Islamic scholars of Bukhara during the long nineteenth century. Islamic scholars were among the most influential individuals in their society, and that power rested on their mastery of diverse forms of knowledge rather than birthright. Instead of imagining those varied competencies and practices as embodied by separate professions, this book conceptualizes them as distinct practices and disciplines mastered by a single milieu. Instead of imagining stratified castes of “ulama” as against “sufis” as against “poets,” there is a unified social group of multitalented polymaths selectively performing sharia, asceticism, and poetry as circumstances dictated. These polymaths of Islam were the custodians of the only form of institutionalized high culture on offer in Central Asia. Their authoritative command over many different forms of knowledge — from medicine to law to epistolography and beyond — allowed them to accumulate substantial power and to establish enduring family dynasties. The Turkic military elite relied on these scholars to administer the state, but the ulama possessed an independent source of authority rooted in learning, which created tension between these two elite groups with profound ramifications for the region's history.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter explains that for all of their eclecticism, and for all their seeming paradoxes, the polymaths of Islam were united by a common madrasa education, mastery of a canon of texts, and shared regional networks. Their curriculum went far beyond the grammar and logic emphasized in the madrasa. Even mastering substantive Islamic law from medieval Arabic texts was necessary, but not sufficient, to distinguish a high Persianate intellectual from his many, many competitors. Most of the ulama — especially those who rose to the top — studied a plethora of collateral disciplines: poetry, mysticism, astronomy, calligraphy, medicine, trade, and more. Secondary scholarship often pairs these forms of knowledge with discrete communities, differentiating scholars, poets, sufis, and physicians into distinct social groups, with the sufi-ulama dichotomy especially pronounced. However, these were not separate groups with separate corporate identities. Rather, they were discrete social roles performed by a single social group. Their integrated knowledge base allowed them to mix and match social functions with impunity.

Epilogue

Throughout this book, I frequently underscored continuity with the long run of Islamic history even into the early twentieth century, illustrating the ways the ulama perpetuated a Perso-Islamic legacy stretching back over a thousand years. Of course, a great deal had changed as well, much more than the ulama would have liked to admit....

Bukhara Center

This chapter assesses the human impact of Bukhara's efflorescence. To what extent did Bukhara's cosmological centrality manifest in actual networks of human exchange? How far did Bukhara's allure extend, and from what points of origin were people willing to travel there for education in its colossal madrasa establishment? The story of centering the cosmopolis for a regional constituency and of deploying the corresponding social currency within that context is one that could equally be told about any number of other Persianate nodes: Lahore, Isfahan, Istanbul, and beyond. Bukhara was not unique in this regard. However, this pivot between cosmopolitan high culture and social power dynamics at the subregional level remains terra incognita. Texts were resonant across vast swathes of territory, but the mechanics of the world undergirding them are left to the imagination in much of the extant scholarship. Yet these ideas were not merely floating in the ether, and the paths taken by the ulama of Bukhara can perhaps shed light on the social world producing, and produced by, cosmopolitan transculturation. Ultimately, the chapter traces the geographical trajectories of the Islamic scholars at the heart of this study, revealing a regional cultural–religious network that revolved around Bukhara the Noble, the Abode of Knowledge.

Centering Bukhara

This chapter traces the history of the ascent of Bukhara by focusing both on investments in physical religious infrastructure and on textual mythologization, whereby Bukhara was discursively centered within the larger Perso-Islamic cosmopolis. These mutually reinforcing efforts had roots in the deep past, reemerged in the sixteenth century, and reached a crescendo in the nineteenth century. The early modern chapter of this story, particularly urban construction of religious infrastructure under the Shibanid and Ashtarkhanid dynasties, has received scholarly attention. The nineteenth century, however, is better known for colonial defeat and stagnation. The chapter argues that the Manghit era marked the city's cultural apex, inheriting all of the prestige and infrastructure from previous eras, and building on them substantially. By tying the universal and abstract to the immediate and concrete, Bukhara's mythologization project exemplifies an understudied process with parallels throughout the preindustrial world.

The Sovereign and the Sage

This chapter assesses the ulama's relationship with state power. By the long nineteenth century, the ulama stood as a pillar of the state, limited though that state was. Islamic scholars systematically deployed their diverse Persianate skill set and leveraged Islamic knowledge on behalf of the Turkic nobility. Nevertheless, the ulama still envisioned the state as an Islamic state, and they carefully guarded their moral prerogative to speak for the religion both groups agreed had a total monopoly on politics and social life. Although in certain instances evidence exists of this most important of prerogatives — the authority to legitimately speak for religion — shifting in favor of the Turkic military elite, the ulama cultivated a spirit of moral independence and superiority to the state.

Between Sharia and the Beloved

This chapter examines the puzzling implications inherent in the amalgamation of so many social roles and knowledge forms into the figure of the high Persianate intellectual. Its title alludes to two sorts of tension: paradoxes of hindsight that were not necessarily perceived as such within the society in question; and apparent logical contradictions of Perso-Islamic culture emerging from the primary sources themselves, products of their own time and understood as problematic by the historical actors in question. The chapter first addresses the former category: widespread belief in the everyday supernatural was for the most part compatible with scripturalist Islam, even though that imagery would seem to cut across the modern categories of “orthodoxy” and “folklore.” It demonstrates that there was no contradiction between these practices, to the extent that retrospective categorizations of orthodox mullahs, on the one hand, and ecstatic sufis and poets, on the other, ought to be jettisoned altogether. These were all social roles performed by the polymaths of Islam. The chapter then looks at tensions within Islamic society during the long nineteenth century.

High Persianate Intellectuals

This chapter discusses the high Persianate intellectuals in Islamic history. The ulama were not the only patricians of Bukhara, but they were the only elite cadre whose claim to authority rested on the mastery of Perso-Islamic knowledge. Indeed, the Islamic scholars stood at the apex of a historical synthesis integrating a wide range of Perso-Islamic knowledge forms into a single whole. Just as Islamic and pre-Islamic Persian forms were inexorably intertwined in the city's mythologization, so too were the disciplines and social roles of the ulama. By the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of graduates were emerging from Bukhara's madrasas and it was not enough to simply have mastered Arabic grammar and theology: scholars distinguished themselves through their “extracurricular” and “postgraduate” scholastic pursuits. Never before had scholars had so much in common across such an eclectic range of competencies, nor would they again, following the rise of reformist Islam and the Soviet transformation.

Patricians of Bukhara

This chapter identifies who created, recreated, and maintained the Persian cosmopolis. Islamic scholars were not the only patricians of Bukhara, and they cannot be understood outside of the larger ecosystem. They shared their elite status with merchants, competed for spiritual and cultural leadership with street preachers, and were reliant on a Turkic military elite for their wellbeing. No formal barriers existed between these categories, and non-scholarly patricians frequently invested their resources to educate themselves and become ulama. Even though there were many ways to wield influence in Bukhara (as in all societies), only the scholarly elite and the Turkic nobility were explicitly valorized as such, albeit by fundamentally distinct justifications. Merchants and preachers might also be considered patricians, but they lacked a formal place in the cosmopolis and were rhetorically subordinated to the twin pillars of the patriciate: Turkic nobility and the ulama.

Opportunity from Upheaval

This chapter focuses on different crises during the long nineteenth century that catalyzed new “dynasties” of scholars, allowing them to entrench their descendants in the state and nonstate institutions that provided resources and authority in their world. It looks at two families of scholars, both of whom came into prominence as a result of the political upheaval coinciding with the Manghit dynasty's rise to power. These two households provided services to the Turkic nobility that helped their patrons to justify their rule and extend it over new territories. In return, Manghit nobles provided the scholarly families with the resources necessary to perpetuate their legacy for over a century and a half. The chapter then considers the new geopolitical realities precipitated by the Russian subjugation of Bukhara in 1868 and how they led to the empowerment of a new crop of family dynasties alongside or in place of the old ones — albeit for a briefer duration, with the Bolshevik Revolution just around the corner.