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Tadzhikistan's Modern-day Dante
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19187 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
4,861 Words |
| Author
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Marat Akchurin
Marat Akchurin is a Soviet writer and publisher. His
forthcoming book, Lost Empire: A Tartar's Tour through Soviet
Ethnic Republics, will be published in January 1992
(HarperCollins). In the Soviet Union, Akchurin supervised the
editing of more than fifty volumes of Asian ethnic literature. |
ZEMNYE I NEBESNYE
STRANSTIVIIA POETA
(The poet's wanderings through
the earth and the heavens)
Timur Zulfikarov
Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1990 446 pp.
LYIUBOV', MUDROST', SMERT' DERVISHA
(Love, wisdom, and death of a dervish)
Timur Zulfikarov
Dushanbe: Adib, 1990 526 pp.
Do the inhabitants of a country whose territory is 93 percent mountainous consider themselves mountaineers? "No," you can safely say, if the country is Tadzhikistan, the southernmost republic of the Soviet Union.
The majority of its population call themselves Tadzhiks. Estimates of their number vary from three to five million. Soviet statistics confidently state that they number three million; however, this information, like any other Soviet demographic data, is very approximate. In Tadzhikistan's case this imprecision has clear-cut historical causes, which are connected with the incompetent (or insidious?) demarcation policy of the Bolsheviks during the 1920s. As a result, Russia's former Central Asian colonies, once transformed into puppet republics, received administrative boundaries that did not correspond to the ethnic ones. The inhabitants of Soviet Central Asia have suffered the horrendous consequences of the cartographers' mistakes, especially now, under Gorbachev, as the number of victims of inter-ethnic conflict has begun to be counted in the thousands.
Readers should remember that concepts such as nation and nationality have a European origin. They were much more relative, even quite recently, especially when applied to the Muslim East. Until a few years after the October coup of 1917, there had never been a separate Tadzhikistan, a separate Uzbekistan, nor even a separate Turkmenia. The fact that many Tadzhiks lived in the neighboring Uzbek Republic and were counted as Uzbeks began to be seen as a problem only during the Soviet era. Previous emirates in this region also were multinational, bilingual, or even trilingual, but the ethnic affiliation virtually never played a major role. The identity of the local populace was based on religious beliefs and occupation. For twelve centuries the predominant religion was the Sunni sect of
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