For the last forty years or so, the Turkish scholar İsenbike Togan has been one of the leading international experts on the history of Central and Inner Asia and the Turkic world. Having trained initially as a Sinologist, she took her doctorate at Harvard in 1973 and has since published widely on Mongolian and Timurid history, Sufism, gender relations, and political dynamics in the Ottoman Empire. She has published widely also in a second sense: while all too many scholars nowadays spend their careers fretting about the politics of journal rankings and impact factors, Togan's work is as likely to appear in publications coming out of Beijing, Samarqand or Ufa as it is under the banner of a major European or American university press. In her voracious academic interests and her engagement with intellectual life across the globe, İsenbike Togan has left her mark on generations of colleagues and students: and the superb collection of papers assembled in the present volume bears eloquent testimony to her legacy.
The contributions to the volume are as wide-ranging as Togan's own career. The first section, devoted to the theme of ‘Sinology and Sino-Mongolistics’, kicks off with Robert E. Hegel's discussion of ‘The Emergence of Genres in Early Chinese Novels’. Challenging the idea that the early novel was a mass-audience literary form, Hegel shows just how dense were the webs of allusion which educated Ming-era readers were expected to recognise: sufficiently dense, indeed, that Festschrift readers who are unfamiliar with the subject may struggle with the sheer weight of detail on display. The paper is a rich one, and richly suggestive in its consideration of how, in the Ming-era literary environment, ‘genre’ might be a matter more of intertextual reference than of structure and form. Yuan-Chu Ruby Lam's ‘Remarks on Nai-Xian's Touring Antiquities in North China’ is a slighter piece, but similarly impressive, taking as its subject the text of a lost Yuan-era travelogue as remembered in those surviving prefaces to the work which – adopting a practice not unknown even today – the author Nai-Xian solicited from his various literary cronies. George Lane, meanwhile, turns his attention to ‘The Dali Stele’. Dating from 1304, this Chinese-language inscription in Dali, Yunnan province, describes Qubilai Khan's peaceful capture of the city in 1252, and is a useful source for how the Mongol conquest of Song China was memorialised by posterity. Unfortunately, Lane's paper is poorly written (the opening sentence is almost incomprehensible) and shaggy in focus; to suggest that “[t]he significance of the Dali Stele is that it showed a new direction and attitude in the policies of the Mongols towards the indigenous people and a deeper awareness of alternative methods of pacification and the fostering of loyalty” is furthermore to burden the inscription with a precarious interpretative weight, exacerbated by Lane's assumption that a fourteenth-century commemorative text can be taken as an unvarnished reflection of thirteenth-century political practice. Morris Rossabi's contribution to the volume, by contrast, offers a different perspective on events. In ‘Notes on Khubilai Khan: Religious Toleration or Political Expediency?’, Rossabi cogently challenges the assumption that Toluid rulers adopted a commonly peaceable policy towards their subjects, noting that over the course of the 1280s Qubilai's policies towards Daoists, Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims alike became significantly more hostile than before; to generalise about Toluid benevolence, he shows, is greatly to oversimplify the matter.
There then follow three papers on ‘Sufism in Central Asia’. In ‘The ‘Competitors’ of Isḥāq Khwāja in Eastern Turkistan: Hagiographies, Shrines, and Sufi Affiliations in the Late Sixteenth Century’, Devin DeWeese dismantles the idea, as found in recent works of French, Japanese and Korean scholarship, that the prominent Naqshbandī shaykh Isḥāq b. Makhdūm-i A‘ẓam encountered upon his arrival in Altishahr entrenched corporate opposition from such rival entities as the ‘Uwaysī spiritual brotherhood. With his masterful command of the sources, DeWeese shows just how insubstantial is the evidence for any such corporate rivalry, as in fact – here echoing some of his earlier work – for the existence of any such thing as an ‘Uwaysī order. The characteristic density of reference on display is such that many readers will find the paper hard going – indeed, the very resilience of the idea that there existed a corporate ‘Uwaysiyyah perhaps speaks in part of people's failure to grasp the import of DeWeese's earlier writings – but, in his refusal to collude in making the sources say what they do not, DeWeese sets an example of intellectual scrupulousness which many would do well to emulate.
DeWeese's paper is nicely complemented by a piece by Jürgen Paul on ‘The Khwājagān at Herat during Shārukh's Reign’. In this paper, Paul considers that process over the course of the early fifteenth century whereby Khwājagānī Sufis shifted from the sort of ‘quietism’ associated with ‘Abd al-Khāliq Ghijduwānī and Bahā’ al-Dīn Naqshband to the political engagement displayed by Khwājah Aḥrār. This is an important shift, but one – as Paul observes – which has all too often been overlooked in synoptic histories of the Naqshbandiyyah. Reviewing the political activities of Sufi figures who were active in the generations between Naqshband and Aḥrār, Paul notes the particular importance of ‘Alā’ al-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār and his descendants as transformative figures who played a lead in situating the Khwājagān on the political stage. Finally in this section of the volume, Vernon James Schubel contributes a paper on ‘Sufism in Central Asia: Remnants, Remembrance and Reconstruction’. Schubel here considers the phenomenon of Sufism as both a set of social practices and a subject of historical discourse in contemporary Uzbekistan – or, rather, in almost contemporary Uzbekistan, the bulk of his fieldwork and literary references coming from the mid-1990s. By its nature, the piece is now somewhat dated, though it remains of value for its survey of Uzbek-language publications on Sufism from ca. 1994–1996.
The next section of the volume is devoted to ‘Politics and its Varieties’. In ‘Legitimization of Rule in the Twentieth/Twenty-First Century: The Case of ‘Abdurashīd Dostum’, Ingeborg Baldauf explores the rhetorical moves with which the Uzbek Afghan warlord has managed, over a long career, to secure for himself the support of the population of Mazar-i Sharif and the surrounding region. Drawing on İsenbike Togan's own work on strategies of legitimisation in the history of the Turks, Baldauf untangles from Dostum's public image various tropes – the ‘military self-made man’, the embodiment of ‘God's blessing for the people’, the agent of ‘development’ and ‘transformation’ – which, she suggests, are similar to those cultivated in an earlier age by the likes of Tīmūr. In premising Dostum's retention of power so squarely on the use of political rhetoric, Baldauf opts to disregard other, cruder factors: discussions about legitimatisation tend, as a rule, to have little to say about the use of airless shipping containers. But the paper is original, and it gleams with observations from over a decade's worth of fieldwork in the region – fieldwork largely enabled (as Baldauf notes, in an acknowledgment of the possible partiality of her material) “by the direct or indirect support of General Dostum himself”.
The remaining three papers in this section contain less in the way of primary research, and are instead more generally ruminative in tone. In ‘Characterizing Ottoman Polity: “Turko-Persia” and the Ottomans’, Metin Kunt challenges Robert Canfield's widely-accepted view that there existed a general division of labour in the Islamicate empires between a Turkish military and a non-Turkish administrative class: in the post-1600 Ottoman Empire, he observes, these ethnic roles were in fact reversed. Beatrice Forbes Manz suggests in ‘Reflections on Nomads, Agriculture and Urban Life’ that the agricultural and urban destruction wrought in the Middle East by Seljuq and Mongol armies was not so much an inter-civilisational reflection of these armies’ nomadic origin as a consequence of social dynamics within the forces in question. And in ‘Sultan Meḥmed the Conqueror: The Conquest and the Centralization of Power in the Ottoman Empire’, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak argues that the conquest of Istanbul was less an end in itself than one in a series of moves towards a set of wider political and religious ambitions, these largely modelled, he suggests, on the career of Alexander the Great.
Of these latter three papers, Kunt's is by some measure the most attractive: lucid and clear in its argumentation, it also speaks with palpable affection of the volume's dedicatee. Such affection is manifest also in Elif Ekin Akşit's ‘To Learn From Women’, the first of two papers inspired by Togan's work on gender history: in offering an overview of late nineteenth-century women's reading groups, Akşit writes, she has in her mind “an imaginary picture of İsenbike Togan”. In ‘Writing Women: Women's Poetry and Literary Networks in Nineteenth-Century Central Asia’, meanwhile, Nurten Kılıç-Schubel examines the life of the poetess Dilshād, one of a number of female authors who rose to prominence during the final decades of the Khoqand khanate. As Kılıç-Schubel notes, Dilshād's career has hitherto not enjoyed the academic attention it deserves; by exploring autobiographical data contained in the Tārīkh-i Muhājirān, Kılıç-Schubel goes some way towards redressing this balance. In foregrounding the narrative details of Dilshād's career, however, Kılıç-Schubel rather neglects the poems themselves: given the promise of the paper's title, one would like to know a little more about how Dilshād's work relates in style and genre to other instances of nineteenth-century women's verse.
The question of genre provides a common focus to the five papers gathered in the final section of the volume, ‘Texts and their Contexts’. In ‘On the Impact of the Early Building Traditions in Medieval Anatolia’, Ömür Bakırer places two twelfth-century tomb towers – one in Kayseri, the other in Erzincan – within a wider Islamicate architectural tradition; while the paper might have benefited from illustrations, there is a fine plasticity to Bakırer's writing which nicely evokes the visual motifs under discussion. Similarly excellent is the contribution by İlker Evrim Binbaş. In ‘Structure and Function of the Genealogical Tree in Islamic Historiography (1200–1500)’, Binbaş situates the development of genealogical trees within a larger literary history, showing how, in their organisational taxonomies and visual schemata, such trees from the Īlkhānid and Tīmūrid eras were shaped, no less than works of prose, by accreted convention and intertextual play. Noting, furthermore, how genealogical trees were a product of those environments where rulers most heavily premised their claims to authority on descent, he suggests that in the dynamics of the genre's popularity we glimpse the correlative dynamics of Islamicate strategies of justification: the medium of the genealogical tree, as it were, was at least part of the message.
With ‘Companions to a King Errant: Bābur and his Lieutenants to the Conquest of Kabul’, Cornell Fleischer contributes a slim piece, though – as a conference paper first presented some two decades earlier when he and İsenbike Togan were colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis – one which again attests to a touching fondness for the dedicatee. Judith Pfeiffer's paper, meanwhile, is a terrific piece of work. In ‘Faces Like Shields Covered with Leather:’ Keturah's Sons in the Post-Mongol Islamicate Eschatalogical Traditions’, Pfeiffer explores a curious incident from the time of Hülegü's assault on Baghdad in 1258. As recounted by the early fourteenth-century chronicler Waṣṣāf, a deputation from the Shi‘is of Ḥilla presented themselves before Hülegü, offering their submission and suggesting that the impending fall of Baghdad was the realisation of an ancient prophecy that power would one day transfer to the sons of Qanṭūra/Keturah, wife of the prophet Abraham. Pfeiffer considers the ambivalence of this implied ascription of identity, situating the Mongols as it does alongside the Muslims within a shared line of Abrahamid descent but, in tracing their ancestry from Keturah – a figure whose descendants feature prominently in Islamicate apocalyptic literature –, casting upon them less flattering associations at the same time. What Hülegü perhaps took as a gesture of inclusive embrace, Pfeiffer suggests, may have had a different meaning for Muslim contemporaries, and for Waṣṣāf's readers in turn. Finally, Karl Reichl brings the volume to a close with a piece on ‘The Karakalpak Epic of Edige’. Examining the treatment of certain episodes in the epic as found in the half-dozen or so Qaraqalpaq-language versions circulating in print, Reichl considers some of the textual correspondences and contrasts which come to light. The paper is rather drily quantitative – x number of correspondences, y number of deviations – but, in highlighting some of the differences to be observed between individual modern transcriptions, Reichl beautifully shows how oral epic continues to adapt and morph even today as part of a shared living heritage.
Taken as a whole, the volume is a highly impressive one. Occasional inconsistencies in transliteration and style suggest a somewhat light editorial footstep, but this is hardly a serious complaint: in gathering together this marvellously rich and diverse collection of papers, the two editors have performed an invaluable service, and have amply succeeded in the daunting job of doing justice to İsenbike Togan's remarkable career.
