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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Soviet Scholarship on Islamic studies exists in almost hermetic isolation from its Western counterpart for both linguistic and methodological reasons. Soviet scholarship is concerned with a different set of questions that emerge from Soviet Marxism, rarely tackling the conceptual questions formulated in the West. Nevertheless, Soviet scholarship is very strong on descriptive detail which could, if properly utilized, enrich Western debate. Unfortunately, few Western Islamicists (except those involved in Central Asian history) know Russian, and therefore a wealth of factual information unearthed by Soviet scholars remains virtually unknown in the West and plays no part in the scholarly discourse here.
1 See, for instance, Bonine, Michael E., “Urban Studies in the Middle East,” MESA Bulletin 10 (1976) 1–37.Google Scholar This review article contains a comprehensive bibliography of work in Western languages, but does not list Russian titles. Of course, the bibliography is now dated, but the situation concerning the use of Russian-language materials remains unchanged.
2 See, e.g., Belenitskii, A. M., Bentovich, I. B., and Bol’shakov, O. G., Srednevekovyi gorod Srednei Azii (The medieval city of Central Asia) (Nauka, Leningrad 1973)Google Scholar, which contains a substantial bibliography of Russian-language works on the period. Bol’shakov is also the author of Srednevekovyi gorod blizhnego vostoka Vll-seredina XIII v.: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie otnosheniiȃ (The medieval city of the Near East in the seventh to the thirteenth centuries: Socioeconomic relations) (Nauka, Moscow 1984), an account of the economic history of the cities of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in the medieval period resting on a masterful synthesis of Western scholarship with Marxist methodology.
3 Mukminova, R. G., Ocherki po istorii remesla v Samarkande i Bukhare v XVI veke (Essays on the history of crafts in Samarkand and Bukhara in the sixteenth century) (Fan, Tashkent 1976)Google Scholar; id., Sotsial’naiȃ differentsiatsiiȃ naseieniiȃ gorodov Uzbekistana XV-XVI vv. (Social differentiation in the population of the cities of Uzbekistan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) (Fan, Tashkent 1985); N. N. Tumanovich, Gerat v XVI-XVIII vekakh (Herat in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries) (Nauka, Moscow 1989).
4 Azadaev, F., Tashkent vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka: ocherki sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi i poliiicheskoi istorii (Tashkent in the second half of the nineteenth century: Sketches of socioeconomic and political history) (Izd. AN UzSSR, Tashkent 1959).Google Scholar
5 For a brief survey of Sukhareva’s work, see her obituary in Sovetskaiȃ etnografiiȃ, 1983, no. 6, pp. 158–162; see also Lunin, B. V., Biobibliograficheskie ocherki o deiaieliakh obshchesivennykh nauk Uzbekistana, 2 vols. (Fan, Tashkent 1976–77) vol. 2, pp. 157–160.Google Scholar Both these notices include selected bibliographies of her work.
6 The khanate of Bukhara never came under direct Russian rule. The protectorate imposed in 1873 allowed the khanate a great deal of internal autonomy, which ensured that external influences were kept to a minimum until 1920 when the Red Army took Bukhara and the People’s Republic of Bukhara was established.
7 Sukhareva, O. A., Bukhara: XIX-nachalo XX v. (Pozdnefeodal’nyi gorod i ego naselenie) (Bukhara in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: A late-feudal city and its population) (Nauka, Moscow 1966) 328 pages.Google Scholar
8 Pozdnefeodal’nyi gorod. Bukhara kontsa XIX-nachala XX v. Remeslennaiȃ promyshlennost’ (The late-feudal city. Bukhara at the turn of the twentieth century: Artisanal industry) (Izd. AN UzSSR, Tashkent 1962), 194 pages and photographs. This book was published as volume two of a three-volume work, but the other two books were published independently.
9 Kvarial’naiȃ obshchina pozdnefeodal’nogo goroda Bukhary (The neighborhood community of the late-feudal city of Bukhara) (Nauka, Moscow 1976), 365 pages (henceforth KOB).
10 Bukhara was relatively well endowed with local historical literature. Sukhareva cites three Persian-language sources: (1) Muhammad Ja’far Narshakhi, Ta’rikh-i Bukhara, a tenth-century Arabic urban topography that has survived only in a twelfth-century Persian abridgment; see the critical edition of the text by Charles Schefer, Description topographique et historique de Boukhara par Mohammed Nershakhi (Paris 1892); English translation by Richard Frye, The History of Bukhara (Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge, Mass. 1954); Russian translation by N. Lykoshin, Istoriiȃ Bukhary (Tashkent 1897); (2) a fifteenth-century guide to the sites of Bukhara generally known as Kitab-i Mullazadah and most easily available as Mu’in al-Fuqara’ Ahmad ibn Mahmud, Ta’rikh-i Mullazadah dar zikr-i mazarat-i Bukhara, ed. Ahmad Gulchin-i Ma’ani (Ibn Sina, Tehran 1960); Sukhareva used an earlier lithographed edition: Ahmad b. Mahmud Mu’in al-Fuqara’, Marghubah-yi pasandidah-yi za’irin, musammi ba-Mullazadah (New Bukhara 1904); (3) an anonymous work in the same genre, titled Tuhfat ul-Za’irin (litho., New Bukhara, n.d.).
11 For a survey of the travel accounts in Russian, see Bukhara, pp. 3–14. Sukhareva also uses the following Western sources in Russian translation: Jenkinson, Anthony, Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia, ed. Delmar Morgan, E. and Coote, C. H., 2 vols. (Hakluyt Society, London 1886)Google Scholar; Izzut-Oollah, Meer, Travels in Central Asia in the Years 1812–13, trans. Capt.Henderson, P. D. (Foreign Department, Calcutta 1872)Google Scholar; Burns, Alexander, Travels into Bokhara, together with a Narrative of a Voyage on the Indus, 3 vols. (John Murray, London 1834Google Scholar; reprinted Oxford University Press, Karachi 1973); Vámbéry, Arminius, Travels in Central Asia, Being the Account of a Journey from Teheran across the Turkoman Desert on the Eastern Shore of the Caspian to Khiva, Bokhara, and Samarcand, performed in the Year 1863 (John Murray, London 1864).Google Scholar
12 The Bukharan map is reproduced in O. A. Sukhareva, “Ocherki po istorii sredneaziatskikh gorodov” (Essays on the history of Central Asian cities), in Istoriiȃ i kul’tura Srednei Azii (drevnost’ i srednie veka) (The History and culture of the peoples of Central Asia: Antiquity and the Middle Ages) (Nauka, Moscow 1976).
13 Collections of published documents include: Kaziiskie dokumenty XVI v. (Qazi Documents from the sixteenth Century) (Moscow 1937); Iz arkhiva sheikhov Dzhuibari (From the archives of the Juybari Shaikhs) (Moscow 1938); Dokumenty k istorii agrarnykh otnoshenii XVI-XIX vv. (Documents on the history of agrarian relations in the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries) (Tashkent 1954); and others.
14 Sukhareva, O. A., K istorii gorodov Bukharskogo khanstva (istoriko-etnograficheskie ocherki) (Toward a history of the cities of the Bukharan Khanate: Historico-ethnographic sketches) (Izd. AN UzSSR, Tashkent 1958)Google Scholar, appendix 2. This map has been used as the basis for the map in Geise, Ernst, “Transformation of Islamic Cities in Soviet Middle Asia into Socialist Cities,” in French, R. A. and Ian Hamilton, F. E., eds., The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy (John Wiley, Chichester 1975) 148–149Google Scholar, which also contains the only description of pre-revolutionary Bukhara in English.
15 Wirth, Eugen, “Die orientalische Stadt: Ein Uberblick aufgrund jüngerer Forschungen zur materiallen Kultur,” Saeculum 26 (1975) 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16 Lapidus, Ira, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1967) 91.Google Scholar
17 The one exception is a study of a contemporary Moroccan town; see Eickelman, Dale F., “Is There an Islamic City? The Making of a Quarter in a Moroccan Town,” IJMES 5 (1974) 274–294.Google Scholar
18 The terms used in the sources for the residential quarter include ku, mahallah, and guzar. By the late nineteenth century, guzar was the only term in use. Ku had fallen out of favor, while mahallah was applied only to isolated, self-contained neighborhoods such as the three Jewish quarters. See Sukhareva, “O terminologii sviȃzannoi s istoricheskoi topografiei gorodov Srednei Azii” (On the terminology related to the historical topography of the cities of Central Asia), Narody Azii i Afriki 1965, no. 6, pp. 101–104.
19 This correspondence of the residential quarter with the mosque seems unique to Bukhara. In Tashkent, it was common for a quarter to have more than one mosque; see N. G. Mallitskii, “Tashkentskie makhallia i mauza” (The mahallahs and mama’s of Tashkent), in ‘Iqd al-Jiman: V.V. Bartol’du tashkentskie druz’iȃ, ucheniki i pochitateli (Barthold’s festschrift) (Tashkent 1927).
20 Such control was important if the guzar were to serve as a semi-private space to be shared by all its inhabitants. Eickelman (op. cit.) has pointed to the existence of multiple bonds and a resulting sense of shared honor (the notion of qaraba) among the inhabitants of a residential quarter in a Moroccan town. These bonds require the construction of a semi-private space which could serve as an extension of the private household space and allow freer circulation of women in the quarter. Janet Abu-Lughod (“The Islamic City—Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance,” IJMES 19 [1987] 155–176) has pointed to this phenomenon as an important characteristic of the Islamic city. Muslim society in Bukhara before the revolution exhibited the same traits that have been studied in other Muslim countries.
21 O. A. Sukhareva, “Traditsionnoe sopernichestvo mezhdu chastiami gorodov v Uzbekistane (konets XIX-nachalo XX v.)” (The traditional rivalry between parts of cities in Uzbekistan at the turn of the twentieth century), Kratkie soobshcheniiȃ Instituta etnografo AN SSSR, no. 30 (1958) 121–129. Sukhareva (KOB, pp. 52–56) also mentions youth gangs (called ‘aluftah) of the sort described in the literature by Claude Cahen et al. for earlier periods of Islamic history. (See the classic account by Claude Cahen, “Mouvements populaires et autonomisme urbain dans l’Asie musulman du moyen-âge,” Arabica 5 [1958] 225–250; 6 [1959], 25–56, 233–265). The gangs in Bukhara were in existence at the beginning of the twentieth century but are very difficult to pin down for lack of documentation.
22 The amir’s chancellery kept a record of all the guzars in the city. Although the actual daflar has not been found in the archives of the chancellery (now held in Tashkent), two other semi-official lists of the guzars of Bukhara are known to exist. One of these lists is reproduced in KOB, pp. 59–60. Eickelman (op. cit.) found that residential quarters in Morocco are purely mental constructs, used by residents as a way of organizing social space. Noe has made the same observation about Lahore (Noe, Samuel V., “In Search of ‘the’ Traditional Islamic City: An Analytical Proposal with Lahore as a Case-Example,” Ekistics, no. 280 [1980] 69-75).Google Scholar In Bukhara, the residential quarter seems to have had a more concrete existence. The mere fact that lists of guzars existed indicates that the guzar in Bukhara was more than a purely mental construct.
23 Paul Goble has recently made a similar point; see his “Central Asian Studies on Non-Soviet Islam: A Bibliographical Guide,” The Middle East Journal 43 (1989) 649–654.
