Thread by @kamilkazani

Unrests in Nukus, Karakalpakstan. Karakalpakstan used to be an autonomous republic in Uzbekistan. In 1990s they proclaimed sovereignity with the right of secession. Now Uzbekistan decided to abolish it autonomy, escalating the conflict.

It's time to talk about Central Asia🧵

First thing to understand about Central Asia is that modern borders have no correlation at all with borders of historic regions. For example the historic region of Khorasan that played a key (or the key?) role in Medieval Islamic history is now divided between a number of states

Modern nation states very much exaggerate their primordiality. In case of Uzbekistan we understand this. In case of Iran we don't. And yet, in my view Islamic authors didn't talk about Iran nearly as much as about Khorasan. The former was an abstraction, the latter - a reality

Second thing to understand about Central Asia that it used to lie on commercial crossroads. Much or even may be most of the trade between East and West Eurasia went by land caravans through Central Asia. The region used to be rich and have geographic comparative advantages

Commercial transactions brought cultural contacts. Just one example. The Qing rulers of China presented themselves differently in their Chinese and Manchu correspondence. In Chinese letters Qianlong showed himself as a "normal" Confucian ruler. In Manchu letters Hongli didn't

That might not be an exaggeration to say that the Manchu served as a secret language of power in the Qing empire until very lately. Only in Manchu which their Chinese subjects couldn't understand, Qing rulers could express their thoughts relatively freely

Manchu script looked nothing like characters. It was an adaptation of Mongol script for the Manchu language commissioned by Nurhaci Khan in late 16th c. Mongol script in its own turn was an adaptation of the Old Uyghur Script for the Mongol language commissioned by Genghis Khan

Old Uyghur script itself ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, through the cultural and religious contacts of the Silk Road. So the Manchu writing system whose knowledge is necessary for understanding the politics of the Qing Empire evolved from a writing system of Levant

Modern discourse is still Eurocentric. When discussing the Silk Road cultural exchange, we focus on Marco Polo, and ignore his contemporary Rabban Sawma, a Beijing Nestorian who travelled to Europe. How did Medieval Paris look for a native of Khanbaliq?

depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts…

Out of all branches of Christianity, it was Nestorianism, that was the most successful along the Silk Road. Btw: this map is incomplete, it did important conquests in Northern Steppe as well. To my best knowledge, Nestorianism really declined in China only after the Ming ascent

Manichaeism was another faith successful in the Silk Road context. In the early Middle Ages Muslim authors often presumed that China is mostly Manichaean. Manichaeans were overrepresented among the commercial class that Muslim merchants interacted with

13th c Mani shrine, Fujian

Until the late Middle Ages, Central Asia was a vibrant commercial and cultural crossroad, an oasis of cultural, intellectual and scientific life. Then it gradually declined. Why? First of all, the Portuguese found a maritime way to Asia. Dutch, English and French followed soon

Initially the Portuguese maritime shipping was not *that* cheaper than the land shipping through the Silk Road or a combined maritime-land route through the Indian Ocean. So they used violence to monopolise the trade, forcing the Indian Ocean rulers to call for the Ottoman help

But with the time going, maritime freight rates were rapidly decreasing. Very soon neither the old Silk Road nor the new land routes opened by the Russian Empire couldn't really compete with the maritime route. That is a major reason Russians couldn't properly exploit Alaska btw

Another major factor of the decline was the rise of the Safavi empire and the subsequent escalation of the Sunni vs Shia conflict that happened in the 16th c. That's a very complicated story that I honestly don't understand. Still, I'll summarise my POW

In the late Middle Ages, the Islamic heartland was divided between a few empires of sword. They quarrelled with each other, but pretty much all governing elites were:

1. Sunni
2. Turkic or Turkified (e.g. late Mamluks were Circassian, but spoke Cuman and then Anatolian)

Reality may be more complicated though. Even now the line between the Sunni and the Shia may be really blurry. Back then it was even more so. Many Sufi orders, including those that constituted the core of the Ottoman Empire didn't seem to be the orthodox Sunni at all

What is now Iran was largely governed by the Aq Qoyunlu Turcoman and Sunni polity. They quarrelled with the Ottomans, and tried to establish the anti-Ottoman alliance with Venice and the Golden Horde. Still, Sunni

It seems that the Safavids were initially a Sufi and Sunni order, residing in what is now Azerbaijan. But at some point they turned to the Twelver Shiism. In the late 15th Safavid Sheiks rallied the Turcoman tribes and led them to war against their Sunni overlords

Around 1500 Ismail of the Safavid led the Qizilbashi Turcoman tribes to the conquest first of Greater Azerbaijan and then of entire Iran. Iran used to be predominantly Sunni back then. But Ismail forcibly converted it to Shiism (which his own family had only recently adopted)

He immediately got into a war with two Sunni states: the Ottomans to the West and Uzbeks (& also Turkmen tribes, etc) to the East. That was predictable. Sunni Aq Qoyunlu rulers before him fought with the Ottomans, too. But now the war escalated into the existential conflict

Two arch-rivals, the Ottoman Sultan Selim and the Safavid Shah Ismail both pursued nearly genocidal policies. But these cleansings were not ethnic, they were religious. Shia Turcomans were massacred in the Ottoman Empire, Sunni (often Persians) in the Safavid Empire

Painting the Ottoman-Safavid fight as the Turko-Iranian war is madness. Out of two states it was the Ottoman Empire that was more Persianate. Selim wrote poems in Persian, while Ismail - on Azeri. It would be more accurate to paint the Early Safavid Empire as Azeri than Persian

What is important is that

1. The Safavid Empire was locked between the Sunni enemies in the Ottoman Empire and in Central Asia
2. The war quickly spiralled into the existential conflict with both sides soon refusing to view each other as Muslims

At some point at the late 16th c. the Ottomans started the mass enslavement of the Safavid subjects during their expeditions to Iran. Safavids retaliated. Very soon the wars of Safavids both with their Western and Eastern neighbours involved the mass enslavement

That explains why Persians comprised the largest demographic group among early modern Central Asian slaves. By 1600 nobody viewed the Shia Safavid subjects as their fellow Muslims anymore. Turkmens would just laugh in the face of the captives if they tried to use this argument

Now let's at this map again. On the one hand, position of the Safavid Empire looks kinda bad. It is trapped between two existential enemies on the West on to the East. On the other hand, position of the Central Asia may look even worse. It lost its direct contact with Levant

Hypothesis

The Safavid rise circa 1500 largely stopped the Turkic migration from the Inner Asia to the West. Due to the Safavid rise, the Ottoman Empire wouldn't have such an unrestricted supply of new settlers from Turkestan as before. So the Ottoman Empire would have few Turks

Being itself a product of the Turkic migration from the Inner Asia westward, the Ottoman Empire was cut off from the inflow of new Oghuz Turks even before it reached its apogee of power. This may be reason why it had so few Turks and lost its Inner Asian character so quickly

What I find interesting is that this confessionalization of Islamdom happened nearly simultaneously with the confessionalization of Christendom. Shia-Sufi and the Catholic-Protestant split happened almost exactly at the same time. The end of thread