Please join us for the 7th Annual Edward A. Allworth Memorial Lecture given by Devin DeWeese, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. Moderated by Aziza Shanazarova.

Consideration of the origins and development of a notion of Uzbek communal identity—and eventually, ‘national’ identity—have tended to focus on the Tsarist era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and specifically on the small circles of Jadidist intellectuals who would emerge—mostly with tragic outcomes—as the first generation political and cultural leaders of Soviet Uzbekistan. The widespread public acceptance, in the first half of the 20th century, of ‘Uzbek’ as a communal label, however, suggests deeper roots that have less often been noted, much less traced historically. This lecture will explore two little-known works that offer glimpses into an emerging quasi-historical consciousness in 18th- and 19th-century Central Asia in which constructions of ‘Uzbek’ communal identity play important roles, against the backdrop of a distinct regional focus that favored the rooting of communal, ethnic, and religious consciousness in particular territorial contexts. One of the works belongs to the broader genre of the legendary biographies of Timur, focusing on the 14th century, while the other traces Chinggisid history down to the successors of Muḥammad Shibani Khan in the 16th century, with special attention to the royal ties of a particular Uzbek tribe; both works were written in Chaghatay Turkic, though somewhat comparable Persian works can be noted in each case. Together these two ‘historical’ works suggest the contours of an emerging sense of Uzbek identity, outside elite circles, that above all framed communal belonging in Muslim terms.

Devin DeWeese is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (1994) and (with Ashirbek Muminov) of Islamization and Sacred Lineages in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, Vol. I: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th-19th Centuries (2013). His numerous articles on the religious history of Islamic Central Asia and Iran focus chiefly on problems of Islamization, on the social and political roles of Sufi communities, on Sufi literature and hagiography in Persian and Chaghatay Turkic, and on critical assessments of scholarship on Islam in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.