500 words

1

The Religious Environment: Worldview, Ritual, and Communal Status

Islam and Conversion

The process of conversion to Islam remains on the whole poorly studied in either its social and historical, or affective and personal/psychologi- cal, aspects. Despite the relatively recent and signal contributions of Nehemiah Levtzion I and Richard Bulliet 2 who have advanced inno- va tive classificatory, methodological, and analytical strategies in the framework of comparative and more localized approaches toward Islamization, the complex of problems associated with conversion to Islam still has not drawn sufficient attention from specialists on all "fronts" of Islamization to allow a synthetic treatment of conversion to Islam from either a theoretical or historical perspective. 3 If old notions of forced conversion and the choice of "Islam or the sword" have been abandoned, at least in scholarly literature, little serious analytical work

I. See above all the volume Conversion to Islam, ed. Nehemia Levtzion (New YorklLondon: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979), and Levtzion's contributions therein, "Toward a Com- parative Study of Islamization" (pp. 1-23) and "Patterns of Islamization in West Africa" (pp. 207-216), as well as his bibliography (pp. 247-265), in which Central and Inner Asia are pre- dictably poorly represented; cf. also his "Conversion under Muslim Domination: A Comparative Study," in Religious Change and Cultural Domination, ed. D. N. Lorenzen (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1981), pp. 19-38.

2. See his seminal work, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), and more recently his "Process and Status in Conversion and Continuity," introducing Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), pp. 1-12, and his "Conversion Stories in Early Islam" in the same volume (pp. 123-133).

3. For important theoretical considerations on conversion to Islam in historical surveys see, for example, Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, vol. 2 (The Expansion of Islam in the

18 Islamization and Native Religion

has been done as a means of replacing older models and assumptions of how Islam was adopted and appropriated in specific contexts; nor, in general, have primary sources been tapped or reevaluated with an eye to the particular issue of Islamization.

In the case of Inner Asia we are remarkably ill-served with regard to studies of conversion to Islam; specialists on Islam in sub-Saharan Africa and on South Asian Islam4 for instance, have recognized the importance of conversion as a historical and religious issue in their respective regions, and their studies are often models for approaches to Islamization in Central and Inner Asia. But to date the study of conversion to Islam in the Inner Asian world has hardly begun, either from a historical or his- toricist perspective, or from the perspective of Islam's religious and social interaction with indigenous traditions.

The primitive state of studies of Islamization in Inner Asia is suggested already by the meager bibliographical talley; the small quantity alone is revealing, not to mention quality. To this day the only extended narrative account of Islam's spread in the Inner Asian world is found in the quite dated work of T. W. Arnold 5 and there remains no comprehensive survey

Middle Periods) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), esp. pp. 532-574 (with a distinc- tive slighting of Inner Asian Islam, however), and Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 242-252 (as well as his more extensive treatment of Inner Asia, with attention to conversion issues, pp. 413-436). See also the study of John Wansbrough, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), and the insightful remarks of R. Stephen Humphreys, Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (revised ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 273-283.

4. For Islamization in Africa see Levtzion's bibliography noted above. On Islamization in South Asia, see especially Bruce B. Lawrence, "Early Indo-Muslim Saints and Conversion," in Islam in Asia, vol. I, South Asia, ed. Yohanan Friedmann (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1984), pp. 109-145, and his "Islam in India: The Function of Institutional Sufism in the Islamization of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Kashmir," in Islam in Local Contexts, ed. Richard C. Martin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982; Contributions to Asian Studies, vol. 17), pp. 27-43; cf. also Carl W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), esp. pp. 155-168; Richard M. Eaton, "Approaches to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India," in Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies, ed. Richard C. Martin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), pp. 106-123, and his "Sufi Folk Literature and the Expansion of Indian Islam," History of Religions, 14/2 (November 1974), pp. 117-127; P. Hardy, "Modern European and Muslim Explanations of Conversion to Islam in South Asia: A Preliminary Survey of the Literature," in Conversion to Islam, ed. Levtzion (1979), pp. 68-99; Zawwar Hussain Zaidi, "Conversion to Islam in South Asia: Problems in Analysis," American Tournai of Islamic Social Sciences, 6/1 (1989), pp. 93-117; and, closer to our region, Georg Buddrus, "Spiegelungen der Islamisierung Kafiristans in der miindlichen Oberlieferung," in Ethnologie und Geschichte: Festschrift {iir Karl Tettmar, ed. Peter Snoy (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1983), pp. 73-88.

5. T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam: A History of the Propagation of the Muslim Faith

The Religious Environment 19

of the history of Islamization in Inner Asia. 6 For the Islamization of Central Asia proper, general histories of pre-Mongol Central Asia note the "fact" of Islamization, but to date most treatments skirt the real issues involved in understanding it/ similarly, the historical, documentary, and numismatic evidence on the important Islamizing dynasty of the Qarakhanids has drawn considerable attention, but its history remains obscure, as does

(Aligarh, 1896; repr. Lahore: Shirkat-i-Qualam, 1956); chapters 7 and 8 (pp. Z06-Z53) treat Islam's spread in Central Asia and "among the Mongols and Tatars." Thoroughly obsolete on nearly all counts, Arnold's work is still the only extended discussion of Islamization in Inner Asia as a religious phenomenon; its date is indicative of the deplorable inattention to this issue in twentieth century scholarship.

6. In lieu of such a study, brief overviews are available in general historical surveys, such as Lapidus's work cited above, and in a few other works: cf. Clifford Edmund Bosworth, "Islamic frontiers in Africa and Asia: (B) Central Asia," in The Legacy of Islam, ed. Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth (Znd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 116-130; Alexandre Bennigsen and Fanny E. Bryan, "Islam in the Caucasus and the Middle Volga," and "Islam in Central Asia," Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 7, pp. 357-377 ; Valeria Fiorani Piacentini, Turchizzazione ed islamizzazione dell'Asia Centrale (VI-XVI secolo d. Cr.) (Milan: Societii Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1974), which gives primarily a political and ethnic history of Central Asia rather than a study of Islamization as such; and M. F. KoprUlU, L'Influence du chamanisme turco-mongole sur les ordres mystiques musulmans (Istanbul, 1929). Additional studies of aspects of Islamization in particular periods or regions are cited below; here may be noted my preliminary analysis of a conversion narrative from Central Asia, "Yasavian Legends on the Islamization of Turkistan," in Aspects of Altaic Civilization II (= PIAC XXX), ed. Denis Sinor (Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1990), pp. 1-19, which briefly treats some of the conceptual issues treated also in the present study.

7. For reliable historical surveys, see Bartol'd, Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, tr. V. and T. Minorsky, ed. C. E. Bosworth (4th ed., London: Luzac & Co., 1977), but see also the important work ofWilferd Madelung, "The spread of Maturidism and the Turks," in Actas do IV Congresso des Estudos Arabes et Islamicos, Coimbra-Lisboa (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), pp. 109-68; reprinted in the author's Religious Schools and Sects in Medieval Islam (London: Variorum Reprints, 1985), No. II. Madelung's study, with its prosopographical approach to the problem of early Islam in Central Asia and among the Turks, draws attention to important issues too often clouded by assumptions derived from studies of Islam among the Turks of Anatolia, uncritically transferred to Central Asia. The overemphasis on a supposed ShI(ite and "hetero- dox" role in Central Asian Islam, dealt with for the pre-Mongol Islamization of the Turks by Madelung, is the focus of an excellent, reasoned discussion by R. D. McChesney for the Timuricl era (and after) in his Waqf in Central Asia: Four Hundred Years in the History of a Muslim Shrine, 1480-1889 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 33-36. See also Yuri Bregel, "The Role of Central Asia in the History of the Muslim East," Afghanistan Council Occasional Paper #20 (February 1980); R. N. Frye, "Comparative Observations on Conversion to Islam in Iran and Central Asia," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 4 (1984), pp. 81-88; C. E. Bosworth, "Barbarian Incursions: The Coming of the Turks into the Islamic World," in Islamic Civilisation 950-1150, ed. D. S. Richards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 1-16; Bernard Lewis, "The Mongols, the Turks and the Muslim Polity," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 18 (1968), pp. 49-68; M. A. Usmanov, "Rasprostranenie isla- ma i ego roJ' v istorii Srednei Azii," in Iz istorii obshchestvenno-filosofskoi mysli i vol'nodumiia v Srednei Azii, ed. M. M. Khairullaev (Tashkent: Fan, 1991), pp. 10-26.

20 Islamization and Native Religion

the course of its Islamization. s Still less is known of the actual condition of Islam among the Bulghars, a question taken up at least briefly below. Beyond these examples from the "classical" age of Islamic expansion, moreover, the situation is worse still. The process of Islamization in East Turkistan remains poorly studied and poorly known,9 while even the establishment of Islam in the three western successor states of the much- studied Mongol empire has drawn scant attention; the "re-Islamization" of Central Asia in the late Mongol and early Timurid era remains essen- tially unstudied, and the spread of Islam into southern Siberia has been left virtually untouched as wel1. 1o

Soviet scholarship has added to this picture its own range of misin- terpretations, and not only from the standpoint of rigid Soviet ideology; "nationalist" scholarship in each of the <;entral Asian republics has con- tributed its own slant to the history of Islam in Inner Asia, and indeed at

8. For the Qarakhanids in particular, see Peter B. Golden, "The Karakhanids and Early Islam," in The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. Denis Sinor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 343-370; cf. Robert Dankoff's introduction to his translation of the Qutadghu Bilig, Wisdom of Royal Glory (Kutadgu Bilig), a Turko·Islamic Mirror for Princes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Robert Dankoff, "Three Turkic Verse Cycles Relating to Inner Asian Warfare," HUS, 3-4/1 (1979-80), pp. 151-165; Marcel Erdal, "Early Turkish Names for the Muslim God, and the Title Celebi," Asian and African Studies (Jerusalem), 16 (1982, = PIAC XXIV), pp. 407-416; M. [sic] Barthold, "The Bughra Khan Mentioned in the Qudatqu Bilik," BSOS, 3 (1923), pp. 151-158; and several studies of docu- mentary material that provides important linguistic and onomastic evidence to analyze for the course of Islamization: Marcel Erdal, "The Turkish Yarkand Documents," BSOAS, 47 (1984), pp. 260-301; Monika Gronke, "The Arabic Yarkand Documents," BSOAS, 49 (1986), pp. 454-507; Sinasi Tekin, "A Qarabanid Document of A.D. 1I21 (A.H. 515) from Yarkand," HUS, 3-4 (1979-80), pp. 868-883; plus older studies of CI. Huart, "Trois actes notaries de Yarkend," lA, 1914,4, pp. 607-627, and Mohamed Khadr and Claude Cahen, "Deux actes de waqf d'un Qarabanide d'Asie Centrale," lA, 255 (1967), pp. 305-334 (and see the remarks by C. E. Bosworth, lA, 256 (1968), pp. 449-453). See also the historical studies of Omeljan Pritsak, "Die Karachaniden," Oer Islam, 31 (1953-54), pp. 17-68; "Karachanidische Streitfragen, 1-4," Oriens, 3 (1950), pp. 209-228; "Von den Karluk zu den Karachaniden," ZOMG, 101 (1951), pp. 270-300.

9. For the distinctive, though still obscure, patterns of Islamization and cultural interaction in East Turkistan, from Qarakhanid times down to the post-Mongol era, cf. Haneda Akira, "Introduction (ch. I, Problems of the Turkicization; ch. 2, Problems of the Islamization)," Acta Asiatica, 34 (1978) [Special Issue: Historical Studies on Central Asia in Japan], pp. 1-21; Mano Eiji, "Mogholistan," and Oda Juten, "Uighuristan," in the same volume, pp. 46-60 and pp. 22-45, respectively; William Samolin, East Turkistan to the Twelfth Century: A Brief Political Survey (The Hague: Mouton, 1964); and N. N. Pantusov, "Gorod Almalyk i Mazar Tugluk- Timur-khana" and "Legenda 0 Tugluk-Timur-khane," in Kaufmanskii sbomik, izdannyi v pami- at' 25 let, istekshikh so dnia smerti pokoritelia i ustroitelia Turkestanskogo kraia, general-ad'iu- tanta K. P. fon-Kaufmana (Moscow, 1910), pp. 161-202.

10. The Mongol era is discussed more fully below; for the general issue of "re-Islamization" in the Mongol era, the "onomastic" approach suggested by Bulliet's work has been taken up

The Religious Environment 21

least two generations of the educated and modernized Central Asian elite have ignored or dismissed or underestimated the Islamic component of their "national" culture in an effort to highlight the specifically "Turkic" or, for example, Q'irgh'iz, component of the civilization of which they are the current bearers.11 It is thus uncertain whether our explorations in the centrality of Islam and conversion to communal self-consciousness in pre-modern times may still "speak" to the contemporary "heirs" of the Golden Horde. But in any case, we find in narratives such as those ex- amined in this study an opportunity to approach these issues from the indigenous perspective, and from one established prior to the Soviet-era Communist and/or nationalist transformation of (or constraints upon) the communal lenses through which Islamization is viewed.

In any case, most treatments of conversion to Islam, both in general and in Inner Asia in particular, have been concerned with "how it happened" and with imagining the conditions for and implications of extensive Islamization, as historical questions. Far fewer are studies that approach the question of Islamization from perspectives similar to that adopted for

briefly for the Chaghatay ulus in John E. Woods, "The Timurid Dynasty," Papers on Inner Asia, No. 14 (Bloomington, 1990), pp. 9-12. For the spread of Islam in Siberia in the post-Mongol era, cf. Abdlilkadir inan, "Sibirya'da islamiyetin in Necati Lugal Annaganz (Ankara: TUrk Tarih Kurumu Baslmevi, 1968), pp. 331-338; and the interesting legendary material dis- cussed by N. F. Katanov, "0 religioznykh voinakh uchenikov sheikha Bagauddina protiv inorodtsev Zapadnoi Sibiri," Ezhegodnik Tobol'skogo Gubemskogo Muzeia, 14 (1904), pp. 3-28, and "Predaniia tobol'skikh tatar 0 pribytii v 1572 g. mukhammedanskikh propovednikov v g. Isker," in the same Ezhegodnik, 7 (1897), pp. 51-61.

II. This process began much earlier in some cases, with the fascination for things Russian and European and "modern" found among westernized intellectuals in pre-Soviet Central Asia under Russian rule. For an extreme example of a Europeanized Qazaq opponent of Islam, see the short tract by the celebrated ethnographer Chokan Chingisovich Valikhanov (d. 1865) enti- tled "0 musul 'manstve v stepi" (published in his Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, I [Alma- Ata: Izd-vo AN KazSSR, 1961], pp. 524-529); Valikhanov's hostility toward Islam (and its "fanaticism") is accompanied by an insistence (or perhaps wish) that Islam was never strong among the steppe nomads, but he is at least open in his hope that Russian education will pre- vent the emergence of a Shamil (the leader of anti-Russian Muslim resistance in the North Caucasus down to 1859) among the Qazaqs, and he speaks admiringly of the American ex- ample, where, he says, the Indian wars had virtually ended "since the government of the United States began to civilize the Iroquois, Creeks, Choctaws, and other redskins." For contemporary reflections of similar attitudes, but with the nationalist and anti-Russian element highlighted and adopted by a western observer, cf. Guy Imart, "The Islamic Impact on Traditional Kirghiz Ethnicity," Nationalities Papers, 14/1-2 (Spring-Fall 1986), pp. 65-88; by contrast, for an appreciation of traditional Islamic adaptations, d. Edward Lazzerini, "The Revival of Islamic Culture in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Or, Why a Prosopography of the Tatar Ulema?" in Passe turco·tatar, present sovietique: (.;tudes orrertes a Alexandre Bennigsen, ed. Ch. Lemercier- Quelquejay, C. Veinstein, and S. E. Wimbush (Louvain/Paris: Editions Peeters/Editions de I'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, 1986), pp 367-372.

22 Islamization and Native Religion

the present study:12 our theme is not "how it happened," but "how it was understood to have happened" among the peoples most directly affected. In the end, of course, our objectives do not depart so much from those that have informed most earlier studies of conversion to Islam, insofar as we hope finally to add what may be learned from listening to "how the story was told" to our understanding of conversion as a historical phenome- non; first, however, we must pay attention to the story rather than the "history," as this latter term tends to be used by specialists today.

To this end it may be worthwhile to consider some more theoretical aspects of Islam that inform religious practice and religious narrative and are important for the issue of conversion. This is hardly the place for a sur- vey of "ideal" Islamic notions of conversion or of the proper relations between Muslims and the unconverted; neither can we take up the theo- retical or historical referents of the terminology of dacwah (the "summons" to adopt Islam) or tawbah ("repentance," "metanoia," and hence "conver- sion" in the personal sense of turning from evil to good). Rather, we will note several points of special relevance for conversion narratives and for conversion in Inner Asia, informed by other narratives not presented here.

First, the "terminology" of Islamization in Inner Asian conversion narra- tives is relatively limited. The term tawbah is virtually never used, while dacwah (with its Turkic equivalent in the verb ilnde-, "to summon"), a term that has come to mean active missionary-style proselytization in the modern world, plays primarily a formal and structural role in the conversion narra- tives. That is, the narratives record the "call" to adopt Islam issued by the fig- ure who brings Islam, but the call itself is rarely the focus of discursive elabo- ration, while the "bearer" of Islam is not first and foremost a dacI; the summons is issued more as a narrative device to set up the decisive conver- sion contest or struggle than as a significant addition to the story's content.

Similarly, in many conversion narratives the motivating factor that brings a "bearer" of Islam to an infidel land or community is not dacwah in the sense of "missionary propaganda" (although the summons is still issued, formulaically), but a desire to "open" territories to Islam; here the sig- nificant term is the Arabic fataba, with its connotations ranging from

12. Among these may be noted two studies in the volume edited by Levtzion referred to above, namely Russell Jones's "Ten Conversion Myths from Indonesia" (pp. 129-158) and, less directly (though in line with our concern for understanding the interplay of indigenous and Islamic religious concerns), Humphrey J. Fisher's "Dreams and Conversion in Black Africa" (pp. 217-235); cf. also David Owusu-Ansah, "Islamization Reconsidered: An Examination of Asante Responses to Muslim Influence in the Nineteenth Century," Asian and African Studies (Jerusalem), 21 (1987), pp. 145-163.

The Religious Environment 23

"conquest" to "revelation." The term is mirrored in Turkic contexts by the lise of the verb ac-, "to open," as in the phrase "islam aca keldiler," "they came to 'spread' Islam."

More commonly, the terms used to refer to conversion to Islam reflect the meaning of "islam" itself: a person or community will simply be said to have "submitted" (aslama), or to have "become Muslim" (in Persian or Turkic accounts), or to have "been ennobled with the accep- tance of Islam" (using a derivative of sharufa), or, finally, to "have entered the faith of Islam." In the narrative of Otemish HajjI, for instance, the motivation of the bearers of Islam is both to "summon" Ozbek Khan to Islam, and, more pointedly, to make him a Muslim. What must be noted here in connection with this terminology is what is implied in all these cases: it is not a change of heart, as might be conveyed by the use of tawbah or its derivatives, or of mind, as in the "intellectual" process implied by dacwah or its derivatives, but a change of status. This change in status is evident even in the use of the Arabic aslama, insofar as it conveys an act of will and implies the well-known distinction between "faith" ("fman) and "submission" to the divine will (islam), thereby sig- naling a change of an individual's status before God; it is still clearer in the terminology, which involves "becoming" something different or "acquiring" a status that is deemed ennobling.

Most telling are the frequent instances in which conversion is spoken of as an "entering" into the religion (dIn) of Islam, using both the Arabic- based terminology with derivatives of dakhala, and Turkic kir-; this "entering" is clearly understood as referring to the central socioreligious concept of Islam, the ummah, "community." This leads us to our second point regarding the Islamic understanding of conversion to Islam, namely, the inherent links between religious identity and communal identity. The Islamic ummah defines itself, and other communities, on religious grounds, and hence the adherents of other adyan constitute distinct so- cial groupings or communities (as is further evident from the social and re- ligious meanings of millah, for instance). Conversely, this often means that distinctive communal groups are expected to be marked by a particular religious orientation; to change one's religion is to change one's com- munal identity, and vice versa.

In this understanding of "conversion" are two important implications for our subject of Islamization in Inner Asia. First, Islamic ideals of com- munity in effect sanction the intimate bonds between religious and communal identity that in turn make "communal" conversion not only

24 Islamization and Native Religion

acceptable, but in some cases normative. Second, in its emphasis upon the religious basis of communal identity, and conversely the communal basis of religious identity, the Islamic tradition is paralleled quite closely, and with important consequences, by attitudes toward community and religious life prevalent in Inner Asian tradition, as we will discuss shortly.

In the Islamic context, the normative character of such communal conversion should not be overstated, of course, but it is present nonethe- less. If the Qur)an idealizes "prophets without honor" in their own com- munities and individuals (e.g. Ibrahim) who break with family, even, in devotion to God's will, both the social and theoretical development of the Islamic ummah reinforce the equation of religious and communal identities in such a way as to widen the expectation that people will come to Islam not as individuals, but as communities. This is especially pronounced in dealing with peoples well beyond the borders of the Dar aI-Islam at a given time: if Muslim religious and political policy toward non-Islamic communities within Muslim-ruled territory aimed at frag- mentation of communal bonds through "piecemeal" conversion to Islam, hopes and expectations with regard to peoples beyond the frontiers of Islam tended to envision their conversion en masse and as communities.

There is also a specifically Islamic paradigm for such "communal con- version" in the "conversion-to-community" of the first century of Islam's spread, whereby adoption of the "religion" of Islam amounted to joining the "community" not of Muslims, but of Arabs, specifically in acquiring "client" status in affiliation with a particular Arab tribe. While both the understanding of Islam implied by such a practice, and the practice itself, seem to have disappeared quite early (in part, no doubt, to resentment among the growing block of "converts" toward their subordinate status in the community), the paradigm remained as an understanding of conver- sion with important latent potential.

Indeed, in Inner Asia itself (and in Inner Asian conversion narratives) we often find a complementary divergence between paradigms of con- version stressing Islamization of territory, on the one hand, and Islam- ization of communities, on the other. In the first case we find that the vocabulary of "opening" the land to Islam is employed, while the termi- nology conveying a change of status predominates in the latter. The "ter- ritorial" model, of course, as evident in the division of the world into Dar ai-Islam and Dar al-Harb, is more familiar to students of the Islamic world, but is at once less "sociologically" sophisticated, and less practi- cally relevant in the Inner Asian context; and for this reason the "com-

The Religious Environment 25

munal" model is worth emphasizing here. It is particularly noteworthy that a variety of "mechanisms" emerged in

popular and learned Islamic religious thought to explain and articulate such "communal" conversion among distant or simply alien peoples, the Turks of Inner Asia among them; most of these mechanisms would appear to be outgrowths of Islamic discourse itself, but were quickly appropriated by the Islamizing community concerned as part and parcel of their Islamization. Links with Islamized genealogies provided one obvious mechanism, as in the case of the discovery of "Turk b. Yafith"; another was the "seeding" of particular holy people through the world (as in the discovery of cA.dites in distant places, or in stories of the Prophet's com- panions appearing in various localities), while more mystically oriented strategies include stories placing particularly prominent converts among the Prophet's interlocutors during his miCraj, or the theory of "UvaysI" Sufis (who could provide not only conversion, but mystical initiation, for noteworthy converts). Occasionally, indigenous models of sanctification are adapted with a thin veneer of Islamization, as in stories of a "convert" supernaturally conceived or of an infant who refuses his infidel mother's breast; but still more often the "mechanism" used to explain communal conversion is the one with which we are most directly concerned here: legendary and hagiographical conversion narratives evoking both Islamic paradigms and indigenous religious themes.

A final and fundamental feature of the Islamic understanding of conver- sion is suggested already by both the communal paradigm of conversion, and by the change of status (rather than change of heart) signaled by "con- version." It is also one of the most difficult to appreciate for those rooted in Christian conceptions of religious conversion, or in modernist iconoclasm and anti-ritualism, which insist upon the "heart" as more important than "the law," emphasize "content" over "form," and consider "religion" first and foremost as a matter of "personal belief"; they would be more com- fortable if "conversion" in Islam were indeed spoken of in terms of tawbah and understood primarily as a "change of heart." This feature springs from the distinctly Islamic approach to the formal and external, an approach already clear in the divinely and prophetically sanctioned designation of Muhammad's religion as islam: to overstate the case, we may suggest that the Islamic tradition regards even purely formal and "external" adoption of Islamic practices and patterns as religiously meaningful, since those pat- terns, even in their formal aspects, are conveyors of divine grace, barakah.

That is, as much as a true change of the inner man is demanded by

26 Islamization and Native Religion

Islam, a purely formal, and even minimal, change of the external man is not to be dismissed as easily in the Islamic experience as it often is in the Christian tradition, or for that matter among irreligious critics of religious "hypocrisy"; inherent in the Islamic outlook is the conviction that the for- mal and external manifestations of Muslim religious obligations, as ordained by God and exemplified by the Prophet, may themselves transmit the divine grace which alone can "turn" the soul toward God and lead to a "change of heart." In effect, it is laudable if a person truly "repents" of evil and unbelief and in this spirit performs his obligatory prayers. But even if he does not repent, his community should see to it that he performs those prayers nevertheless, for if he does so, the divine grace inherent in those external forms may eventually succeed in its transformative work; and as he prostrates his body in prayer, his heart and mind may follow.

What this understanding of religiosity may mean or imply in other contexts need not detain us here; what it means in the case of conver- sion, however, is that from an Islamic perspective there is no such thing as the purely formal or nominal or external adoption of Islam that is so often noted with disdain by students of Inner Asia. Even a conversion-of an individual or of a community-that is "imperfect" from the standpoint of either full ritual attentiveness or inner spirituality is nevertheless a first step toward deeper religiosity, and in any case should not be dismissed or belittled inasmuch as it is, in however rudimentary a form, a token of God's grace and solicitude toward his creature. To come full circle to our emphasis upon communal status, what that "imperfect" conversion sig- nals, above all, is indeed God's greatest gift from the Islamic perspective: the conferral of membership in a salvific community.

Such an approach is already sanctioned within Islamic tradition, with specific Inner Asian relevance, as noted in an important article by Wilferd Madelung with regard to a statement attributed to Abu I:Ianlfah. Asked about "the status of a Muslim in the territory of polytheism who affirms Islam as a whole but does not know or affirm the Koran or any of the re- ligious duties of Islam,"13 Abu I:Ianlfah affirmed that such a person could still be counted as a "believer"; and, as Madelung observed, the dominant theological school in Central Asia at the time of the conversion of the Turks no doubt intentionally "misread" part of this passage, turning "in the territory of polytheism" (fi arcj ash-shirk) into "in the territory of the Turks" (fl arcj at-turk). The response of Abu I:Ianifah was thus "appropri- ated" in Central Asian tradition, and through a slight orthographic

13. Madelung, "The Spread of MaturTdism," pp. 122-123.

The Religious Environment 27

change an express statement of his leniency in matters of doctrine and ritual was assigned to the specific context of deciding what made a Central Asian Turk a member of the Muslim community.

We will return to these issues shortly. For now, it is hoped that this brief consideration of the value of "external" Islamization as understood within the Islamic tradition may already suggest alternatives to the tired chorus of views on the "nominally" Muslim peoples of Inner Asia that effectively dismisses the importance and effectiveness of Islamization. To appreciate these alternatives from the Inner Asian perspective, as well as from an Islamic one, however, we must turn to a consideration of the re- ligious traditions of the Inner Asian world.

Indigenous Religion in Traditional Inner Asia

The traditional indigenous religion of Inner Asian peoples prior to their entry into Islamic or Christian or Buddhist cultural and religious "spheres of influence" (as well as many traditions retained after their entry into these originally foreign traditions) belongs to a realm of religious life, common and even normative throughout the world and throughout history, for which scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has still failed to devise a suitable and "comfortable" terminology. Labels ranging from "primitive religion" and "animism" to "natural" or "archaic" or "tribal" religion have been proposed or suggested or simply used, but in the end found wanting; each conveys a set of assumptions or impli- cations objectionable in some way, whether as excessively pejorative or as historically romanticizing, and none has been widely accepted as more "scientific" or illuminating or useful, in any particular way, than older la- bels such as "paganism."

In part this lack of suitable labels stems from the nature of the tradi- tions themselves; they are, in the final analysis, not something separable from the course of life itself, from the human experience as a whole, as organized and classified by the communities in which these traditions prevail, and as such in most cases are not marked by special terminology native to these communities. We are thus ordinarily unable to find a "native" designation among peoples marked by such traditions, either for "religion" in general or for "our religion" in particular, unless and until it is recognized as distinctive by being opposed to some "religion" from out-

28 Islamization and Native Religion

side. This absence of indigenous terminology is, however, hardly a sign that conceptions and practices immediately recognizable as "religious" are unimportant or poorly developed among such peoples; on the con- trary, it is most often a sign that these "religious" conceptions and prac- tices are so intimately linked with all aspects of life-that is, with all aspects of what being human is considered by those peoples to mean- that life is inconceivable without them, leaving no rationale for a separate taxonomy devoted to "religion" as such.

For our purposes we will not belabor the terminological difficulties presented by these "primitive" or "archaic" traditions, nor seek by using a particular set of terms to suggest any special suitability beyond mere con- venience. Rather, we will speak of "indigenous" or "native" Inner Asian religious traditions, only as a convenient way of referring to the "systems" of belief and practices evident among Inner Asian peoples before those peoples' contacts with and/or adoption of the religions of peoples beyond the Inner Asian world. In settling upon this rather prosaic and colorless (and misleadingly all-encompassing!) terminology we should not lose sight of the rich diversity and conceptual depth of the mythic and re- ligious world created by Inner Asian peoples; nor at the same time should we forget the real and often decisive distinctions of "ethnic" and linguis- tic affiliation, geographical distribution, and 'economic and environ- mental adaptation that characterize the diverse communities lumped together in the phrase "Inner Asian peoples."

Moreover, by speaking of "native" or "indigenous" traditions among these communities, we should not understand these traditions as somehow hermetically sealed from "outside" religious influence down to the time when we first find descriptions or other reflections of their religious life in our sources; the heritage of contacts between the inhabitants of the Inner Asian world and the civilizations of China, Iran, the Near East, and Eu- rope long predates our earliest historical records for Inner Asian peoples, and it would be foolish to suggest a rigid body of hallowed traditions tena- ciously held by "Inner Asian peoples" from their earliest appearance in our sources down to the time of their adoption of a particular "outside" mis- sionary religion. What we find instead is a dynamic and fluid "tradition-in- development" among Inner Asian peoples, shaped by "indigenous" re- sponses to economic, social, political, and spiritual life, but also by interaction with "outsiders" -and such interaction unquestionably involved early and regular exposure to such "world religions" as Buddhism and Zoro- astrianism, and later Christianity, Manicheism, Judaism, and Islam. What

The Religious Environment 29

we are concerned with is not to argue what was "indigenous" and what re- flects "outside" influence or "borrowing" in Inner Asian tradition in some historically absolutist fashion, but to explore a pattern of indigenous re- ligious concepts, values, and practices that appear to have shaped not only the "native" tradition as distinct from imported faiths, but the response to, and modes of assimilation of, those imported faiths as well.

By the "indigenous Inner Asian tradition," then, we mean only the adap- tations of home-grown and "imported" religious concepts and patterns that had been assimilated and appropriated as its own by a particular community at a particular time, regardless of its "origin" as a cultural historian might in- sist upon; and it is indeed a central theme of our discussion that Islam itself eventually became part of that "indigenous" tradition just as earlier "for- eign" elements had. Our aim here, then, is to highlight the features of con- ceptualization (rather than "belief") and practice that may be considered central and fundamental to the Inner Asian peoples who encountered Islam, at the time of that initial encounter, and to trace the echoes of those features in the ongoing interaction between the Inner Asian worldview and the religious ideals and communal expectations of the Islamic tradition.

Problems in Interpreting Inner Asian Religion In identifying these central features, we are hampered by a number of purely practical considerations surrounding the scholarly study of Inner Asian religion. The most obvious is the relative scarcity of indigenous sources prior to the recordings of oral tradition undertaken by ethnogra- phers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; for earlier periods we must rely, in most cases, upon accounts of Inner Asian religious practices left by travelers, historians, geographers, or missionaries, from the outly- ing civilizations of China, Iran and the Near East, and Europe, with their inevitable mixture of hostility and misunderstanding and, in some cases, idealization. As for the indigenous sources themselves, they do exist, and many have been studied, but arguably the richest repository of indige- nous Inner Asian religious lore- the enormous body of oral tradition, especially epic narrative-has only recently begun to attract analysis, and moreover appears to have suffered significant abuse in recent times in the name of various modern ideologies.

Similarly, we are obliged not only to view Inner Asian religious life through the eyes of outsiders, but also to look through the prism of

30 Islamization and Native Religion

adopted foreign traditions; and these, precisely because of their adop- tion and assimilation and nativization, are often more obscuring of ear- lier ways than the obviously distorted outside accounts. This means, among other things, that we must look to more recent ethnographic descriptions of religious life among peoples less subject to Islamic, or Buddhist or Christian, influence, since we rarely have comparable des- criptions for the peoples who adopted Islam or Buddhism or Christianity prior to their conversion. In other words, we are compelled to rely upon nineteenth and twentieth century accounts of religious life among rela- tively un-Islamized peoples such as the Tuvans or Altays, for example, since we have few accounts (and none comparable to ethnographic descriptions) of religious life among the still un-Islamized "Uzbeks" of the fourteenth century (leaving aside the obvious questions of ethnic identity and continuity). We are obliged to assume some similarity between the religious concepts and practices of these peoples, and as justified as such an assumption may be in most cases, we must not lose sight of its essentially conjectural nature.

Moreover, the traditional religious beliefs and practices and values of Inner Asian peoples have not enjoyed the same level or quality of scholarly attention as has been devoted to other "aboriginal" peoples, whether those of North America, pre-Christian Europe, or 'sub-Saharan Mrica. This is due in no small measure to the historical fact of the incorporation of most of Inner Asia into the Soviet state, where for the better part of a century the academic study of religion was markedly stunted by official dogma and aca- demic predilections shaped by the state. While Soviet scholars produced usable and in many cases quite admirable ethnographic studies including extensive data on religious life, Soviet ideology precluded the development of a serious interpretative framework for understanding religious life as such. Even in the more "purely" academic works-not to mention the fre- quent cooperation of academics in producing tracts belonging to the genre of antireligious literature-the essential hostility and contempt for religious "belief" and practice, as well as an uncritical adoption of a priori categories and ideologically sanctioned evolutionary historical patterns offered by Soviet Marxist orthodoxy, are often evident, both in outright dismissals and categorizations of elements of religious life as "survivals," "superstitions," and signs of backwardness and primitiveness to be abandoned by progressive thinkers, and more insidiously in the analytical frameworks imposed upon the data.

Finally, it must be remembered that the most recently nativized-how

The Religious Environment 31

deeply or successfully remains to be seen-foreign "faith" for many Inner Asian peoples is precisely that Marxist-Leninist ideology, which has shaped not only the way the Soviet academic establishment has presented Inner Asian religion, but the way native but Soviet-trained Inner Asian scholars and the Soviet-educated Inner Asian public view their heritage. It is unfortunately the case that scholarship among many of the newly independent, or at least newly self-assertive, peoples of the former Soviet Union is often not the best source for an "indigenous" understanding of pre-modern Inner Asian religious life; all too often native Inner Asian scholars brought up in the Soviet system have adopted the same Soviet- style approaches noted above, or more recently have traded Soviet ideo- logical constraints for scholarship in the service of "national pride." In either case the link between native elites and native tradition has been significantly weakened. This in itself is not so remarkable if understood as simply the current stage of the reworking of communal identities among Inner Asian peoples, but we must remember that at each stage of such reworkings in the past, something of the original flavor and intent of indigenous traditions was lost in the rush to find in them a basis for a native response to new political or social challenges; we must expect something to be lost at this stage as well.

We thus cannot point to any adequate attempt at a synthesis of "re- ligion in Inner Asia," either for Inner Asian peoples as a whole (presum- ing that such a grouping would be meaningful), or for individual Inner Asian peoples or subgroups (whether historically defined or viewed, as has been the unfortunate practice in most Soviet literature, from the perspec- tive of modern ethnic or national groupings). The scholarly edifice of the study of traditional, indigenous Inner Asian religion remains to be built, and the same holds true for the various parts of the Inner Asian whole (with the exception of the substantial scholarship on Tibetan religion). This means that the "structure" that might serve as the backdrop for understanding religious change and conversion in Inner Asia is not availa- ble, and unfortunately we cannot presume to construct it here, either for "Inner Asia" as a whole l4 or for the Mongol and Turkic worlds of direct rele-

14. Among surveys of some aspects of religious life in Inner Asia may be cited the works of the prolific Jean-Paul Roux, of which we may note his recent summary (with extensive bibliography of his earlier publications), La religion des Turcs et des Mongols (Paris: Payot, 1984); Faune et (lore sacrees dans les societes altarques (Paris: Librairie d'Amerique et d'Orient Adrien- Maisonneuve, 1966); and La mort chez les peuples altarques anciens et medievaux d'apres les doc- ume1lts ecrits (Paris: Librairie d'Amerique et d'Orient Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1963); Uno Harva [ne Holmberg], Die religiosen Vorstellungen der altaischen Volker (Helsinki: Werner Soderstrom

32 Islamization and Native Religion

vance for US. 15 In the absence of such a survey we may sketch here a number of issues central to the indigenous pre-Islamic religious world- view, and, at the risk of overgeneralization, note those features, in "syn- thetic" and interpretative fashion, may help us to understand the issue at hand: Islamization in the Jochid ulus.

Inner Asian Religion: "Shamanism" and Beyond If we examine the essential features of the ways in which the nature of man and the cosmos is commonly conceptualized among Inner Asian peoples, as evident in both indigenous sources (above all, oral tradition of

Osakeyhtio, 1938; Folklore Fellows Communications, vol. 125), which provides a detailed sur- vey of concepts of the structure and origin of the world, souls and death, hunting rites, shaman- ism, etc., remains an essential work, of which an "abbreviated" English version is available: Uno Holmberg, The Mythology of all Races, vol. 4, Finno-Ugric, Siberian (New York: Cooper Square, 1964 [originally published 1927]). Perhaps the most comprehensive survey of religious beliefs and practices among Inner Asian peoples appears in Wilhelm Schmidt's magnum opus, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (Miinster: Aschendorff; 1926-1955), of which vols. 9-12 cover the indigenous religious traditions of Inner Asia; Schmidt's work is marred by an interpretative framework based on his assumption of "original monotheism," and despite the wealth of data collected must be used as cautiously as much Soviet scholarship.

15. A concise and readable introduction to Mongol religion is provided by Walther Heissig, The Religions of Mongolia, tr. Geoffrey Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980). On religion among Turkic peoples see, in addition to the works of Roux and Schmidt mentioned above, Annemarie von Gabain, "Inhalt und magische Bedeutung der alttiirkischen Inschriften," Anthropos, 48 (1953), pp. 537-556; the excellent philological discussion of Alessio Bombaci,'" Qutluy bolzun!' A Contribution to the History of the Concept of 'Fortune' among the Turks," UAf, 36 (1964), pp. 284-291, and 38 (1966), pp. 13-43; Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, "Qut: Ein Grundbegriff in der zentralasiatischen Religionsbegegnung," in Humanitas Religiosa: Festschrift fur Har- aids Biezais (Stockholm, 1979), pp. 252-260; and Robert Dankoff, "Kashgari on the Beliefs and Superstitions of the Turks," TAOS, 95 (1975), pp. 68-80. Of Soviet surveys, we may cite (with the caveats in place regarding Soviet religious studies in general) two of N. A. Alekseev's works, Rannie formy religii tiurkoiazychnykh narodov Sibiri (Novosibirsk: Nauka, Sibirskoe otdelenie, 1980), and Shamanizm tiurkoiazychnykh narodov Sibiri (Novosibirsk, 1984), the latter with a full German translation, Schamanismus der Turken Sibiriens: Versuch einer vergleichenden arealen Untersuchung, tr. Reinhold Schletzer (Hamburg: Reinhold Schletzer, 1987), and a par- tial English translation, "Shamanism among the Turkic peoples of Siberia," SAA, 2811 (Summer 1989), pp. 56-107; promising recent exceptions to the primitive Soviet treatment of religion include the collective series produced by E. L. L'vova, I. V. Oktiabr'skaia, A. M. Sagalaev, and M. S. Usmanova, entitled Traditsionnoe mirovozzrenie tiurkov Iuzhnoi Sibiri; the three volumes (bearing the subtitles Prostranstvo i vremia; veshchnyi mir [Novosibirsk: Nauka, Sibirskoe otdele- nie, 1988], Chelovek; obshchestvo [1989], and Znak i ritual [1990]) provide an excellent themat- ic survey of elements of religious conceptions among the Turkic peoples of southern Siberia, based on ethnographic material. Of similar quality, with a wider ethnographic scope, is the insightful work of E. S. Novik, Obriad i fol'k/or v sibirskom shamanizme: opyt sopostavleniia

The Religious Environment 33

epic and shamanic narratives) and in "solicited" descriptions of native con- ceptual systems recorded by ethnographers, we note immediately that the Inner Asian religious worldview is marked by an elaborate and quite com- plex spiritual morphology of human beings, with systems of multiple souls representing the rich spiritual and psychic capabilities of human life,16 as well as an equally richly developed cosmological structure for the world and its spiritual underpinnings; the elaborate cosmologies customarily involve an axial center that at once separates, and provides for passage between, the tripartite cosmos of underworld, earth, and heaven, multiple layers in the heavens and underworld, and a host of spirits enlivening natural objects and formations and inhabiting the entire mythic universe. 17

These systems, however, are reflected in "practical" religious life almost exclusively in connection with the individual spiritual experiences and communally oriented ecstatic and ritual functions of the chief re- ligious specialist of the Inner Asian world, the shaman. IS Now in much of the scholarship dealing with Inner Asian religion, and indeed in most incidental surveys of Inner Asian religion by nonspecialists, the role of the shaman has been emphasized to such an extent that it has become commonplace to refer to the religious life of Inner Asian peoples prior to their adoption of, say, Buddhism or Islam (and even after their "conver- sion" as well) as "shamanism," as if the term could designate something akin to the other religious "-isms" that entered Inner Asia. Without raising here the conceptual issues involved in "defining" what is called shaman- ism, and without raising the historical problems involved in equating the

struktur (Moscow: Nauka, GRVL, 1984), of which a partial English translation appeared in SM, 28/2 (Fall 1989), pp. 20-84, entitled "Ritual and Folklore in Siberian Shamanism: Experiment in a Comparison of Structures."

16. On conceptions of the soul see, for example, in addition to general works noted above, Ivar Paulson, Die primitiven Seelenvorstellungen der nordeurasischen Viilker: Eine religionsethno. graphische und religionsphanomenologische Untersuchung (Stockholm: Ethnographical Mu- seum of Sweden, 1958); S. M. Shirokogoroff, The Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935); and Ivan A. Lopatin, The Cult of the Dead among the Natives of the Amur Basin ('s-Gravenhage: Mouton & Co., 1960).

17. In addition to the general treatments noted above, see A. F. Anisimov, "Cosmological Concepts of the Peoples of the North," in Studies in Siberian Shamanism, ed. Henry N. Michael (Toronto: Arctic Institute of North America, 1963), pp. 157-229; cf. the Russian original, Kosmologicheskie predstavleniia narodov Severa (MoscowlLeningrad: Izd-vo AN SSSR, 1959).

18. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), is the standard introduction to the subject; often factu- ally unreliable for Inner Asian shamanism, it remains the signal reference point from which other studies (by supporters or, now more commonly, critics, of Eliade's approach) begin. For Inner Asian shamanism in particular, the literature is now quite extensive; for summaries and/or use-

34 Islamization and Native Religion

modern "ethnographic shaman" with the religious specialists noted among historical Inner Asian peoples, we must object to this tendency on other grounds, above all on the grounds that the emphasis upon the spiritual career of the shaman often obscures the more normative domestic and communal focuses of Inner Asian religious life. These domestic and com- munal focuses are vital, as we will consider shortly, for understanding the appeal of Islam (or rather the way in which Islam was appropriated with a communal focus) in the Inner Asian setting; they are often lost sight of, however, due to the frequent overemphasis upon the role of the shaman.

That role is, to be sure, of profound interest, both because the shaman is the central religious specialist charged with the deepest knowledge in the community of both "practical" and "theoretical" religion, and be- cause the shaman fulfils vital social functions beyond his ecstatic exper- tise;19 moreover, as we shall see, the "heroic" shaman's ecstatic journey provides an important model for our understanding of several aspects of

ful bibliographical guides, see the work of Alekseev, Shamanizm tiurkoiazychnykh narodov Sibiri; Vilmos Voigt, "Shamanism in Siberia (A Sketch and a Bibliography)," Acta Etlzno· graphica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 26 (1977), pp. 385-395; Mihaly Hoppal, "Shamanism: An Archaic and/or Recent System of Beliefs," UAJ [Bloomington), 57 (1985), pp. 121-140; T. M. Mikhailov, Buriatskii shamanizm: istoriia, struktura i sotsial'nye funktsii (Novosibirsk: Nauka, Sibirskoe Otdelenie, 1987). See also Abdiilk"dir inan, Tarihte ve bugiin pa- manizm: materyaller ve araptlrmalar (3rd ed., Ankara: Tiirk Tarih Kurumu Baslmevi, 1986). Among the most useful and detailed ethnographic studies of shamanism among Inner Asian peoples are the works of Vilmos Dioszegi, including his "Pre-Islamic shamanism of the Baraba Turks and some ethnogenetic conclusions," in Shamanism in Siberia, ed. V. Dioszegi and M. Hoppal (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1978), pp. 83-167, and "The Problem of the Ethnic Homogeneity of Tofa (Karagas) Shamanism," in Popular Beliefs and Folklore Tradition in Siberia, ed. V. Dioszegi (Bloomington, Indiana/The Hague: Indiana UniversitylMouton, 1968), pp. 239-329. One of the first analyses of the religious meaning conveyed by various components of the shaman's costume (a subject emphasized by Eliade, Dioszegi, and indeed most students of shamanism) remains standard: Uno Harva [ne Holmberg), "The Shaman Costume and Its Significance," Annales Universitatis Fennicae Aboensis, ser. B, I (2) (1923), pp. 1-36. For a more recent examination of the social functions and "ritual" methods of the shaman based on Siberian material, see Anna-Leena Siikala, The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1978; Folklore Fellows Communications, v. 220). Accounts of shamanic practices among the Turks and Mongols down to the fourteenth century have been collected by John Andrew Boyle, "Turkish and Mongol Shamanism in the Middle Ages," Folklore, 83 (1972), pp. 177-93; see also Jean-Paul Roux, "Le nom du chaman dans les textes turco-mongols," Anthropos, 53 (1958), pp. 133-142, and his "Le chaman gengiskhanide," Anthrop()s, 54 (1959), pp. 401-432.

19. See in particular on the social roles of the shaman the work of Siikala cited above, and the interesting article of I. R. Kortt, "The Shaman as Social Representative in the World Beyond," in Shamanism in Eurasia, ed. M. Hoppal (Cottingen: Edition Herodot, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 289-306.

The Religious Environment 35

the conversion narrative of central concern here. But it is usually the individual elements of the shaman's life that receive attention, whether his initial "sickness" and alienation from his community or his initiation and ecstatic performances; and the shaman, in turn, despite his impor- tant social roles, is often cast as a kind of spiritual "loner," set apart from his community and serving it almost grudgingly. In any case it is often overlooked that the shaman's specialist services are called upon primarily in times of individual crisis or communal imbalance, leaving the vast realm of everyday religious life, of sacralized norms of living in a human community, outside the purview of "shamanism"; with minimal exagger- ation it is safe to say that the ordinary, workaday religious life of everyone but the shaman is all too often ignored or neglected, as if it were less interesting-or less central in the Inner Asian religious tradition-because it is less dramatic than the shaman's spiritual tour de force.

Inner Asian religious life is much richer and more diverse than the label "shamanism" suggests. However extensive a role the shaman may play in explaining elements of this domestic cult, or in officiating at communal versions of ancestral rites, or in "mobilizing" a community to observe cer- tain norms, the fact remains that the ancestral and communal focuses of Inner Asian religion were customarily more directly linked with the daily lives of most people-affecting their conceptions of individual and com- munal "health" and soundness, affecting their life-supporting economic activities, from hunting to animal husbandry to agriculture, which ances- tral spirits were believed to protect, and affecting their individual status as members of a family and their conceptions of belonging to a particu- lar tribe or "nation" -than were the ecstatic performances or personal re- ligious journeys of the shamans.

For the ordinary individual who is not a shaman, neither the wealth of souls nor the elaborate cosmological structures are experienced directly (aside from exceptional cases of visionary experience); he of course knows of them, for they fill and inform the entire spectrum of the shaman's deal- ings with both the individual and with the entire community, and as such the shamanic cosmology and "soul-culture" shape even the ordinary indi- vidual's religious expectations. But as a rule the ordinary person does not come face to face with them except through the shaman's mediation, nor does he manipulate them or interact with them ritually.

Both the macrocosmic and microcosmic worlds of the Inner Asian spir- itual universe, then, are well developed conceptually, but the religious "practice" associated with them-the "handling" of human souls and the

36 Islamization and Native Religion

"navigation" of the vast spiritual worlds as a guide or seeker of souls-is reserved for religious specialists. Little of the elaborate cosmology evident in shamanic narratives or even epic tales is ritually significant for most people at most times: we find virtually no examples in Inner Asia, for instance, of publicly reenacted creation myths of a type well known from ancient Chinese, Indian, or Mesopotamian religion, wherein the creation of those macrocosmic structures is ritually repeated to celebrate, and en- sure the preservation of, cosmic order and, thereby, human life. Nor do we find significant evidence of an abstract or speculative inquiry into the nature of the multiple human souls that might have both reflected and en- couraged aspects of "practical" religion at an individual level ranging from asceticism to alchemy, as evidenced in Indian or Chinese thought-systems.

If we seek instead the sphere of religious activity that directly and regu- larly affects and involves the ordinary individual in Inner Asian societies, what we do find is an emphasis not upon the origin of the cosmos as such, but upon the origin of the human being, and, more important, of man as a social creature. Inner Asian traditions clearly belong to the nor- mative class of "aboriginal" religions in which life and health are the chief values, with ritual action focused on "life-sustaining" activities; these naturally involve "crisis intervention" on the part of religious spe- cialists, the shamans, at times of sickness and death. But the distinctive Inner Asian focus on what makes life possible is communal and ancestral. That is, with its central religious focus, broadly speaking, directed toward the maintenance of human life, Inner Asian tradition outside the occa- sionally "individualistic" spiritual career of the shaman knows only one setting within which such life is deemed religiously meaningful and thus conceivable and even possible: community.

This focus on the maintenance of human life in a communal setting infuses virtually all religious activity in traditional Inner Asia, including but not limited to the individual and social healing performances of the shaman, from life-cycle rites and the concern for healing, to the system of taboos and ethical norms, and from household offerings to ancestral spirits at the hearth to other domestic rites linked with enhancing economic suc- cess in animal husbandry, agriculture, hunting, or craft production. The same focus infuses the very sense of community and social belonging: to be accepted into a community is the equivalent of birth, often ritually celebrated as such, while to be deprived of one's community is to die, and the same principle is evidenced in the frequent occurrence in Inner Asia, as elsewhere, of communal ethnonyms denoting simply "people," "human

The Religious Environment 37

beings." In both cases such conceptions have not only to do with the living community, but with the souls of deceased members in the afterlife, and, with notions of the "cycling" of souls within the bounds of a given community (i.e., through common beliefs that a newbom child is inhabi- ted by the soul of a deceased ancestor), with the future of the community, those yet unborn, as well.

One of the central features of indigenous Inner Asian religious life may thus be found in its steady and persistent focus on the centrality of com- munity as the setting for human life, and naturally for religious life as well. Here we find a key to Inner Asian religion deeper and more re- vealing than is suggested by calling that religion "shamanism." And in any event, the unifying concern that ties the domestic ancestral cult with the activity of the "specialist" shaman is the essential recognition that "religious" life consists-like economic life and political life-of ways of understanding and manipulating the world in order to maintain the cen- tral sacred value of (communal) life and (communal) well-being.

A natural and vital focus of such religious life, designed to maintain and promote life and well-being, falls naturally upon the Ancestors, who are the key to the community's health and well-being as protectors not only of the family's stock and lineage, but of its economic foundations as well. The ancestor spirits are customarily assimilated to the spirits of the earth and soil in agricultural communities, are regarded as protective pa- trons of the herds' fertility in pastoral nomadic communities, and are the recipients of offerings and appeals for thevsuccess of a hunt, alongside the master spirits of nature and of the intended victim, among hunting com- munities; they are likewise assimilated to the patron spirits of craft pro- duction, and playa vital role as the tutelary spirits of shamans. More important, the ancestral spirits, as the "numinous" embodiment of the social structures of family and community, are a central focus of the most common and most sacred religious practice among Inner Asian peoples; for the vast majority of individuals and communities, religious life lies pri- marily not in recourse to a shaman or "worship" of some deity, but in the periodic offerings to the ancestral spirits in their various forms, intended to preserve the health and continuity of the family and community.

Herein we find already an important clue to the centrality of communal self-identity for religious practice (and religious conversion!), and vice versa. The most sacred and fundamental religious rites are those focused on spirits regarded as the ancestors of the family and community. Conse- quently, the ways in which the family and community are defined, through

38 Islamization and Native Religion

contemporary relationships and mutual obligations as well as through as- sertions of genealogical ties, have direct and profound cuI tic significance, and hence a profound religious component; conversely, that religious component, both in its "affective" and ritual aspects, provides many of the symbolic structures employed in the process of asserting the definition of a given community. Communal identity shapes the form and content of the central rites and "sentiments" that belong to the sphere of "re- ligion," rites and sentiments that "conversion" directly affects; and at the same time, the religious worldview, thus infused with specific communal content, in turn provides the discursive paradigms, and their ritual "reifi- cation," whereby the legitimacy and sacrality of familial and communal groupings are asserted.

Accordingly, it is the origin of, and ritual celebration of, the familial and communal group that is the religious focus of Inner Asian domestic cults, and the origin of the communal group, immediately assimilable to the origin of humankind, is one of the central elements of Inner Asian religious life in which both "myth" and "ritual" elements were of on- going vitality and importance. 2o

Before considering these domestic myths and rites more carefully, however, we may note here, in connection with the reflection of social organization in the Inner Asian religious yet another common feature of the prevailing scholarly approaches to Inner Asian religion that, alongside the fixation on the shaman, has tended to skew our under- standing of the foundations of that worldview. This is the attention, at times inordinate, devoted to the sacral foundations of, or religious legiti- mation of, political rule at the broadest levels of social organization in Inner Asia. One of the most prolific writers on Inner Asian religion, Jean- Paul Roux, has gone so far as to speak of an "imperial cult" in Inner Asian history, as an apparent constant that is called up at times of political unifi- cation and is expressly opposed to the shamanic religion (which Roux

20. The mythic focus on the origin of human community does not seem to have produced in Inner Asia an abstraction explaining the origin of the cosmos as such in human and/or social terms; we find no Inner Asian equivalent to the Vedic Purusha-hymn, in which the world is formed through the ritual dismemberment of the Cosmic Man, nor do we find either the ritual development reflected in such an abstraction, or the speculative and mystical thought such an abstraction might fuel. Rather, in Inner Asia the origin of the local community is more often equated with the origin of the world, or at least of the world that matters-the social world- with little attention to the formation of the elements of the cosmos; whatever "mythic abstract- ing" may have occurred (and examples may be found in some Inner Asian myths), the important point is that these never were taken as the basis for ritual practice, which remained focused on the origin of human community, at the family, clan-tribal, and state level.

The Religious Environment 39

casts as nonimperial). A full evaluation of this view, and others that assume a structural bifurcation between "imperial" and "domestic" religion in Inner Asia, lies beyond the scope of this study; but it must be noted here that the present exploration of Islamization, and especially of the "nativi- zation" of Islam, suggests quite different approaches to the relationship be- tween what may be more properly regarded not as two competing "levels" of religious thought and ritual, but as "imperial" and "domestic" styles of evoking essentially the same system of religious values and practices.

These issues will be taken up later in connection with the legitimizing functions of narratives relating communal origin and/or conversion, but for now we must reemphasize the central importance of domestic rites in the ordinary, "everyday" religious life of most people at most times. 21 In general the "ancestor-cult" among Inner Asian peoples, and the closely linked and pervasive offerings to familial and household spirits, have not received the attention they deserve, but it is difficult to escape the con- clusion that this domestic religious practice is the focus of meaningful and ongoing religious life for the majority of people. It is precisely the meaningfulness of the religious complex at this most basic level of social organization in Inner Asia that on the one hand impels indigenous "imperial" state-formers to appeal to it, and on the other hand makes the nativization of a "foreign" religion within the familiar structures of that same complex such a potentially potent weapon both for "imperial" reformers and for groups and individuals hostile to the status quo and in need of an affective basis to unite people in anti-imperial structures. It is in this light that we may understand the use of the central conversion narrative under consideration here both by Chingisid representatives of imperial prerogatives and by their opponents.

The Domestic Rites and Their Universalizing Role: An Inner Asian Mythic Complex It is precisely in the domestic cult that we find the only recognizable ritual evocation of cosmological principles in Inner Asia, through the mythic as- similation of the focus of domestic rites with the central structures of the cos-

21. Even Raux, who has so strongly emphasized the role of the shaman and of what he sees as an "imperial tradition" in Inner Asian religion, seems to grudgingly acknowledge the centrality of the household ancestral offerings, writing, "II n'est pas exclu, meme, que pour Ie bas peuple .. celte religion intime soit la religion essentielle" (La mort, p. l3!).

40 Islamization and Native Religion

mos; this in turn helps us to appreciate why appeals to sacred communal origins as articulated within the framework of a mythic complex embody- ing those cosmological principles have such powerful resonance not only with khans and ruling dynasties at the imperial level, but with the ordinary tribal population as well. To understand this more clearly, we must explore the domestic ritual and the mythic complex associated with it more closely.

The system of domestic rites is typically focused within individual house- holds, in the offerings made to ancestral spirits most often conceived of as dwelling at or near the hearth, and within communities, in the often sea- sonal (fall and spring) communal rites involving offerings to protective clan spirits;22 the latter in particular are, as noted, often clearly "economic" in focus, involving appeals to the protective and engendering capacities of the ancestors to fructify herds, to help make hunts successful, or to make crop- lands fertile and productive, with household rites likewise involving ap- peals for successful hunts as well as for blessings on various types of craft production, but more often linked to more direct human and familial con- cerns of health, protection of children and aid in childbearing, and fertility.

The household rites are usually quite simple in form, involving offer- ings of food and drink to the ancestral spirits, both by smearing fat or grease on the mouth of wooden or felt figures ("idols") representing the ancestors or household spirits, and through offerings of meat or fat directly in the hearth fire as burnt offerings, accompanied by libations of kumiss (fermented mare's milk) or other drinks (either sprinkling the liquid into the fire, or casting it into the air). Even when the figurines are used, how- ever, the connection with the hearth is maintained by keeping the "idols" either wrapped up or enclosed in a small chest near the hearth. 23

Such offerings are noted first in the thirteenth century among travelers to the Mongols, including Rubruck and Marco Polo, but appear also in descriptions of religious customs among many Inner Asian peoples from travelers and ethnographers down to the present century; they are among the chief constants in daily life that not only affirm the temporal continu-

22. See Harva, Die religiiisen Vorstellungen der altaischen Viilker, pp. 570-577 on seasonal offerings to clan protectors.

23. Cf. Harva, Die religiiisen Vorstellungen, pp. 230-238; Roux, La mort, pp. 1\7-131. See also the excellent account of rites among the Tuvans in Erika Taube, "Die Wider- spiegelung religiiiser Vorstellungen im Alltagsbrauchtum der Tuwiner der Westmongolei," in Traditions religieuses et para.religieuses des peuples altarques (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972; = PIAC XIII), pp. 1\9-138, esp. pp. 128-131 on libations and burnt offerings to ancestral figurines kept near the hearth. For illustrations of such wooden and felt images, cf. S. V. Ivanov, Skul'ptura altaitsev, khakasov i Sibirskikh tatar, XVlII-pervaia chetvert' XX v. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1979).

The Religious Environment 41

ity and "solidarity" of individual households and families and communi- ties, but provide the foundations upon which sentiments of inclusion in communal structures of larger scale must be built. Although accounts of such images predominate among peoples not yet "converted" to Islam or Buddhism or Christianity, a steady series of Western travel accounts af- firms their ongoing significance in the domestic rites of Inner Asian peo- ples even after their adoption of other religions; in particular, ancestral offerings focused upon the hearth and involving the use of such jarringly un-Islamic "idols" are repeatedly mentioned by outside observers as a continuing presence in the homes of nomadic Muslim peoples of Inner Asia (i.e., in places rarely, if ever, mentioned in indigenous sources) in the post-Mongol period,24 suggesting not so much the inferior quality of the Islam adopted there as the enormous strength of the specifically an- cestral rites that survived, often with "Islamized" form, from the old pre- Islamic ways. It is precisely this ancestral complex (including related funeral customs) that inevitably persisted most strongly after the adoption of Islam, seamlessly integrated, in both ritual practice and in conceptuali- zation, into the sacralized daily lives of peoples now considered (by them- selves and others) as Muslims; this survival in turn provides the rationale for the prominence attached to "Islamized" ancestral spirits not only in domestic rites, but in the mythic articulation of sacred origins that is most relevant for our focus in the present study.

The central role of the hearth in such offerings, both as the seat of the fire, honored in its own right and as a conveyor of sustenance to the ancestors, and as the ritual and "orientational" center of the household, is evidenced even earlier in Inner Asia; it was Herodotus, after all, who af-

24. Cf. Roux, La religion des Turcs et des Mongols, pp. 231-234. Giles Fletcher, describing the Tatars of the Crimea in the latter sixteenth century, writes: "Herein they differ from the Turkish religion, for that they have certeine idole puppets, made of silke or like stuffe, of the fashion of a man, which they fasten to the doore of their walking houses, to be as Janusses or keepers of their house. And these idols are made not by all, but by certeine religious women, which they have among them for that and like uses" (Edward A. Bond, ed., Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, comprising The Treatise "Of the Russe Common Wealth," by Dr. Giles Fletcher; and The Travels of Sir Jerome Horsey [London: Hakluyt Society, Series I, No. 20, 1856], p. 90; cf. Giles Fletcher, Of the Rus Commonwealth, ed. Albert J. Schmidt [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press / Folger Shakespeare Library, 1966], p. 96). Captain John Smith (better known for his adventures in Virginia) describes similar felt "puppets," and their feeding, among the Crimean Tatars, though he cribs from Rubruck (cf. The Complete Works of Captain John Smith (1580-1631), ed. Philip L. Barbour (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press/ Williamsburg, Virginia: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1986), vol. 3, pp. 192-193. For the lISe of such "idols" among the Islamized Baraba Tatars of southern Siberia, cf. Dioszegi, "Pre-Islamic Shamanism of the Baraba Turks," pp. 88-95, 152-153.

42 Islamization and Native Religion

firmed that no oath was more sacred among the Scythians than one sworn by the royal hearth fire. This in itself suggests the close links between the hearth and the seat of sacred human identities, but the explicit "seating" of communal life and identity in the hearth is especially well evidenced among peoples of Inner Asia. The Altay and Teleut, for instance, regard the hearth fire as the preserver of the life of each family and clan, and refer to the "stone hearth (ochoq) dug out by the mother;" the hearth fire is not to be taken outside the home, except in the ritually controlled con- text of family ceremonies (e.g., when brothers establish new homes), and the extinguishing of the hearth fire is typically regarded as the symbolic equivalent of a clan's extinction. 2) From Herodotus through accounts of the medieval Turks and Mongols to modern ethnographic descriptions, we find the recurrent observation that Inner Asian peoples regard fire as among the most sacred things, and in most instances this is to be under- stood not as referring to "fire" in the abstract, but to the particular hearth fire in each household;Z6 and the ritual use of the domestic hearth is, as noted, one of the central familial and communal religious practices of the "old" religion to survive among Islamic Inner Asian communities. 27

The sacrality of the hearth and hearth fire in the domestic cult is of particular importance, for the hearth and its symbolic significance convey religious meaning both in ritual and in spatial or "orientational" contexts, in both cases linked to the Ancestors. In the first regard, the hearth is clearly the locus of ancestral spirits (and of the figures that represent them and "receive" offerings to them), as noted; but the spatial orientation of the hearth as the "center" of the household also links it to a larger cosmo- logical symbolism that both solidifies the hearth's familial, ancestral links

25. Cf. N. P. Dyrenkova, "Kul't ognia u altaitsev i teleut," Sbomik Muzeia antropologii i etno- grafii, t. 6 (Leningrad, 1927), pp. 63-78 [esp. pp. 63, 66-67, 74-77].

26. Cf. Taube, "Wiederspiegelung," pp. 122-123; Dyrenkova, "Kul't ognia," p. 63; L'vova et aI., Traditsionnoe mirovozzrenie (1988), pp. 136-147; and in general on the sacredness offire, cf. Jean-Paul Roux, "Fonctions chamaniques et valeurs du feu chez les peuples altalques," RHR, 189 (1976), pp. 67-101, and N. Poppe, "Zum Feuerkultus bei den Mongolen," Asia Major, 2 (1925), pp. 130-145.

27. We have, for example, a revealing description for a people who will be of importance for us, the Noghays, in the observations of a nineteenth century observer who notes the importance of the hearth in the daily life of the people. Asserting that Islam had weakened the "cult of fire" and thereby deprived the hearth of spiritual significance, the writer nevertheless notes one "sur- vival" of "the cult of fire linked with the cult of ancestors": he describes a festival in which all family members eat a meal around the hearth while remembering deceased relatives, believing that the spirits of the dead return to the homes of their living relatives and join in the revelries at the hearth (G. Maliavkin, "Karanogaitsy," Terskii sbomik, vyp. 3, kn. 2 (1893), pp. 133-173 [pp. 150-151, noteD.

The Religious Environment 43

and ties it to a larger system of beliefs and conceptions vital to an appreci- ation of communal identity in Inner Asia. It is through the hearth as a gateway to the world of the Ancestors, both ritually (in the domestic offer- ings) and conceptually (in the symbolic equivalences known through cosmological assumptions and shamanic report), that we find the keys to the "universalization" of domestic ritual experience in the mythic assimi- lation between the center of the dwelling and the center of the world.

This assimilation, which lies at the heart of the evocative power of the legends of origin and conversion narratives we will be considering, in effect equates the individual domestic hearth at the center of the house- hold with the center of the universe (that is, of the religiously and humanly significant world), a sacred center marked by a number of recurrent and virtually universal images evoked also in cosmogonic myth, heroic epic, sha- manic narrative, and straightforward, ethnographically solicited "descrip- tions" of the spiritual cosmos that Inner Asian peoples inhabit.

The images most often associated with the sacred cosmic center, and thus assimilated domestically to the hearth, are the axial and chthonic sym- bols of a Mountain, a Tree, a Stream or Lake or Pool, a "Goddess" (i.e., a feminine spirit), and a Cavern (or hollow or other subterranean enclosure): the Mountain and Tree are immediately implied in the microcosmic, domestic context by the axis linking the hearth with the smoke-hole of the dwelling; the Goddess is mythically reduplicated in the ancestral female spirits (the "grandmothers") who dwell by the hearth in each family's household (and she herself implies the nourishing "water of life" that fills the Stream or Lake at the macrocosmic level, for she offers the sustaining liquid to the First Man born there either from the pool itself or from her own breasts); and the Cavern finds its mythic equivalent in the hearth itself, since both are passageways to the chthonic world of the Ancestors (the hearth being "dug" into or "hollowed out" of the earth, and at the same time being the seat of the ancestral spirits who in macrocosmic con- ception are believed to dwell in the underworld).

These images are usually found together, occasionally associated with other mythic motifs and at times, perhaps, with one or another image missing from the set (though no doubt mythically implied by the others' presence); their recurrent reflection in legends of origin from throughout the Inner Asian world is an important indication that these images together amount to a potent mythic complex intimately connected with sacred origins at both the universal and particular level, and hence repeatedly evoked in the religious, economic, social, and political circumstances in

44 Islamization and Native Religion

which such sacred origins take on special significance. At the universal level, this mythic complex is marked above all by the

World Mountain and World Tree, familiar axial images usually combined with a Cave that serves as the First Man's birthplace; this universal and communal center is inhabited by a feminine spirit who, regardless of the form she takes in the varied evocations of this myth, is none other than the mother of humanity, and she serves variously to give birth to the First Man and/or to nourish him with the water of the sacred Lake or Stream that completes the basic mythic complex. Reflected in an enormous range of Inner Asian traditions, this mythic complex of Mountaintrree/ Cave/Water/Goddess is one of the primary religious conceptions central to traditional Inner Asian life, belief, and ritual. It is a standard feature of shamanic narratives, and is frequently depicted on the shaman's drum and costume; linking the heavens and the underworld, the Mountain and Tree form the orientational centers for the shaman's ecstatic journeys in either direction, and shamanic narratives thus repeatedly affirm their axial nature. Among the Altai-kizhi, for instance, shamanic descriptions tell of a mountain in the center of the earth, with the Milk Sea at its peak and the "holy golden poplar" (bay terek) rising from its top as well, at the "navel of earth and heaven."28

But this mythic conceptualization does not by-any means belong to a purely "shamanic cosmology." Rather, it appears consistently in popular songs and epic tales among Inner Asian peoples; it appears in Inner Asian "iconography," as well, and, is clearly reflected in the domestic religion that occupies most people at most times, i.e., when the shaman is not needed.

In popular songs praising the World Tree collected among the Turks of Minusinsk in south-central Siberia, for instance, nearly all elements of the mythic complex are evoked: "Piercing the twelve heavens / On the summit of a mountain / A birch in the misty depths of air. / Golden are the birch's leaves, / Golden its bark, / In the ground at its foot a basin / Full of the water of life, / In the basin a golden ladle ... "29 Similarly, the complex appears in hero-tales that clearly combine in one figure the traits proper to both shaman and First Man. In the Altay epic tale of Maday Qara, for instance, the hero dwells in the Altay mountains in a stone yurt where seventy rivers flow together and the "eternal poplar with a hundred boughs," the Bay Terek, stands reaching up to heaven. When his people

28. Cf. Alekseev, Schamanismus, p. 98. 29. Tr. Holmberg / Harva, Mythology, p. 350, citing Anton Schiefner, Heldensagen der

minusinskischen Tataren (SPb., 1859), p. 62.

The Religious Environment 45

are nearing destruction, he leaves his son, the future hunter-hero Koguday Margan, atop a high black mountain beneath a birch tree, whose juice will sustain the boy; through his protective abandonment-a familiar theme in legends of origin - he hopes to ensure the child's survival, and indeed, as the hero's people is defeated and enclosed in an iron prison, the boy is found and cared for by an old woman, "the mistress of the Altay," under whose tutelage he grows up to eventually free his people. 30

The structuring of this mythic world is remarkably similar throughout Inner Asia, and one of its most frequently invoked, and ritually signifi- cant, elements is the sacred Tree. 31 Its symbolism may well be in evidence already in the archaic motifs of the so-called animal-style art of Scytho- Siberian civilization in Inner Asia,32 and as the "Tree of Life" it is an essential feature of most Inner Asian worldviews. This Tree, on the cos- mic Mountain, is typically the dwelling place, and often the birthplace, of the First Man, and the tree itself is frequently identified with, or sim- ply houses, the "goddess" who nourishes him. The tree's spirit is custom- arily feminine, appearing as a woman to the First Man-himself born from the tree-and nourishing him from her breasts; and this intimation of the tree-spirit's close association with a clan's life and continuity is quite normative. Among the Evenki (Tungus) of northeastern Inner Asia, for instance, the female clan spirit is believed to reside among the roots

30. See Ugo Marazzi, tr., Maday Qara: An Altay Epic Poem (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1986), pp. 30-32,46,58 ff., and the synopsis, pp. 9-10.

31. See, on the Tree of Life, Roux, Faune et flore sacTI!es, pp. 357-380, and his La religion des Turcs et des Mongols, pp. 148-154, and, more generally, E. A. S. Butterworth, The Tree at the Navel of the Earth (Berlin: De Cruyter, 1970). On the Terek or Bay Terek ("mighty poplar") as the sacred clan tree, see also the material collected in the valuable work of R. C. Akhmet'ianov, Obshchaia leksika dukhovnoi kul'tury narodov srednego Povolzh'ia (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), pp. 94-96; on echoes of the notion of the world tree in the Volga-Ural region, cf. C. M. Davletshin, "0 kosmogonicheskikh vozzreniiakh Volzhskikh bulgar domongol'skogo perioda," in Iz istorii tatarskoi obshchestvennoi mysli (Kazan, 1979), pp. 44-55 [pp. 50-54]. Of some interest for the contemporary resonance of such images may be noted the evocations of such elements in mod- ern Central Asian literature, as in the case of the Uzbek writer Mamadali Mahmudov's Dimas qayalar (1981), in which a sacred tree at the edge of a high cliff figures repeatedly in the story; the tree is the object of pilgrimages, and the hero appeals to it before battle, addresses it as his "mother," and is restored to health in a cavern at its base (cf. William Fierman, "Cultural Nationalism in Soviet Uzbekistan: A Case Study of The Immortal Cliffs, Soviet Union / Union sovietique, lUI [1985], pp. 1-41 [pp. 9-10]).

32. On the tree symbolism of the stylized cervine antlers so prominent in the animal-style art, see Esther Jacobson, "The Stag with Bird-Headed Antler Tines: A Study in Image Trans- formation and Meaning," Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 56 (1984), pp. 113-180; essentially the same view is advanced, apparently independently (but less well de- veloped) in Anatoly I. Martynov, The Ancient Art of Northern Asia, tr. Demitri B. Shimkin and Edith M. Shimkin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp 99-111.

46 Islamization and Native Religion

of a sacred clan tree that is symbolically identified with the World Tree. 33 The connection between this cosmological conception and individual

life and domestic rites is well illustrated in conceptions of the Turkic peoples of the Altai: the Milk Sea is found in the third heaven, where Paradise is located, atop a high mountain in the midst of a great forest containing the Tree of Life; from the base of the Tree of Life flows the same substance as that which fills the Milk Sea, and this same Milk Sea is the source of the life-force placed by the birth spirit (yayuchi") into each child as it comes into the world. 34 This life-force is qut, a term with a wide range of numinous connotations among the Turkic peoples of Inner Asia, from this humble use to refer to the "embryonal force" that enlivens children, to its use in designating the "fortune" that ensures a house- hold's health and physical well-being when it falls through the smoke- hole (i.e., above the hearth) in the tent, and finally to more exalted uses signaling the power and prosperity that divine favor grants to a monarch; in each case, however, the term's association with the sacred power that underlies the security of a family's or community's health, economic foun- dations, and reproductive continuity is evident at each level of its use, and in each case should remind us of its conceptual association with the mythic complex under consideration.

The mythic complex and the cosmic structure it signifies are thus well represented in ethnographic accounts and epic literature for a wide range of Inner Asian peoples; most important for our purposes, the complex provides the mythic framework for many Inner Asian legends of origin and for a number of Inner Asian "nativizations" of conversion narratives, as discussed below, although the appearance of this mythic complex in such tales has not always been recognized as such. But what makes the features of this mythic complex so compelling as elements in hero tales and shamanic narratives, and as a basis for legends of origin, is their sym- bolic assimilation of the universal and particular focuses of Inner Asian religious conceptions and practices.

As suggested, this assimilation works in both ancestral and cosmologi- cal directions. First, the hearth is closely associated with the feminine ancestral spirits who are the preservers and transmitters of the veritable "substance" of the family and clan, both as the "dwelling-place" of these

33. Cf. A. F. Anisimov, "Cosmological Concepts," p. 176. 34. Cf. Harva, Die religiosen Vorste/lungen, pp. 85-89, 170; on this use of qut see Bombaci,

"Qutlu'Y bolzun!" p. 32.

The Religious Environment 47

spirits and as the point of intimate ritual contact with them; these femi- nine spirits, represented in the wooden or felt figures and offered food and drink in this form, are more often than not assigned the telling ap- pellation of "the grandmothers" (i.e., the emegender 15 ). Second, the hearth, as center of the dwelling, is spatially associated with the axis join- ing the upper world through the smoke-hole of the yurt, for instance, with the chthonic world of the Ancestors reached spiritually through the hearth itself (which is conceived as an opening into the earth, whether it is actually a pit or enclosed oven in form, or is merely marked by three stones, etc.); as such the hearth is "orientationally" equivalent to the cen- ter of the earth where the Axis of the world, conceived as the World Moun- tain and/or World Tree, meets the earth and joins the three realms of Heaven, Earth, and Underworld, and it is ritually equivalent as well. And both conceptions are joined in the mythic assimilation of the "grand- mother" spirits to the feminine spirit who dwells at the base of the World Tree and nourishes shamans and heroes either with her own breasts or with the Water of Life. 16

The hearth is thus the symbolic equivalent of the center of the earth, ritually reiterated in each household; and the feminine spirits who inhabit the domestic hearth correspond to the feminine figure, appearing alter- nately in the form of a beautiful maiden, a maternal nourisher, and a grandmotherly protector, as well as in other forms (including animal con- sorts and guides), who inhabits the base of the World Tree at the site where a spring wells up or a stream flows. Through this mythic identifica- tion of the microcosmic individual hearth with the macrocosmic center of the world, the system of universal sacred symbols is localized in each Inner Asian dwelling, and the individual ritual center is universalized, allowing the individual family group to participate in a symbolic cosmos

35. Cf. Harva, Die religiosen Vorstellungen, pp. 173-174; see also E. Lot-Falck, "A propos d'Atiigan, Deesse mongo Ie de la terre," RHR, 149 (1956), pp. 157-196 (pp. 186-190 on "the grandmothers"]. On the Turkic feminine spirit Umay and her conceptual development, cf. L. P. Potapov, "Umai - bozhesivo drevnikh tiurkov v svete etnograficheskikh dannykh," in Tiurk- ologicheskii sbornik 1972 (Moscow: Nauka, GRVL, 1973), pp. 265-286, and Denis Sinor, '''Umay,' a Mongol Spirit Honored by the TUrks," in Proceedings of the International Conference Oil China Border Area Studies (Taipei: National Chengchi University, 1984), pp. 1771-1781.

36. The Water of Life, of which heroes and shamans partake, is mythically associated with the body of water situated at the base of the world tree on the world mountain; it is no doubt this water that is symbolized, for example, in stone carvings of medieval Turkic warriors holding ClipS at their chests, and the mythic bestowal of the water of life to the hero/ancestor beneath the World Tree most likely found pictorial expression in the famous Scythian goldwork and the Pazyryk felt hangings.

48 Islamization and Native Religion

whose essential structures are known not only throughout a particular community, but throughout the entire Inner Asian world.

Our point here is not to further explore the rich symbolism of this mythic complex or to analyze its origins from any particular perspective; rather, the importance of this mythic complex-which will be taken up later in specific connection with legends of origin-lies in its being the meeting-place of household domestic rites preserved at the local level throughout Inner Asia even after conversion to other religions, and a wide- spread cosmogonic myth common among Inner Asian peoples through at least two and a half millennia. In the elements of this mythic complex that recur among so many communities over such a long time we find reflected one of the simplest and most powerful religious values of Inner Asian peoples, namely, the assumption that significant (i.e., ritually relevant) cos- mogony consists of the origin of human beings, and not of human beings in the abstract or as individuals but as familial and communal groupings. In effect, the creation of the world and its structures may be recounted, but it no longer has ritual significance-only human origins are reflected in the domestic cult.

Yet what the domestic cult celebrates in its "universalized" aspect is not merely the origin of Humanity in the abstract or in the whole; rather, it is only when the framework for human origins, provided by this mythic com- plex of Mountain/TreelCave/WateriFeminine Spirit, is given particular social content that it becomes ritually significant in the domestic and com- munal context. At its basic level this social content is obviously the family and clan, and some religious meaning is potentially quite sustainable at this level; for social and political meaning, however, the social content infused into the traditional mythic context must be located somewhere between the individual family and the abstraction of all humanity.

In effect the very ubiquity of this mythic complex suggests that simply recounting the birth of the Hero or First Man at the World Tree on the World Mountain by the World Stream, and his nourishment and guid- ance to personhood by the feminine spirit there, might become as ritually irrelevant as the story of the earth's creation; the same motifs may recur in such recountings, but they become a cosmogonic, or rather ethnogonic, myth only when infused with particular names and identities that bear social and communal significance. And this consideration in turn tells us that a cosmogony that is both relevant and religiously meaningful must recount a particular collectivity's origins within the structural framework, which is to say within the social expectations, indicated by the recurrent

The Religious Environment 49

motifs of the familiar mythic complex. Those motifs offer the structural means of universalizing and sanctifying the collectivity's origins, of linking it with the normative and holy structure of the cosmos, and thus of asserting its legitimacy and sacrality. When those universalizing motifs are linked with the "personnel" - i.e., "ancestral" names- "believed" or asserted to link an assemblage of households and communities (which already signal their acceptance of those universal motifs in their domestic ritual practice) into a larger confederative or imperial structure, the stage is set for a politi- cally significant ritual affirmation, alongside the politically significant nar- rative affirmation of what amounts to a communal charter.

The present study will be less concerned with the ritual affirmation of social cohesion than with the social and political implications of the "char- ter," as evidenced in our central conversion narrative and its permutations; this issue will be considered later, after looking at the recurrence, in the conversion narrative and the tales rooted in it, of the mythic framework on which legends of origin are repeatedly hung. Here it is appropriate, how- ever, to note briefly the political implications of this mythic assimilation of the universal and domestic, for in the ancestral focus of the latter as well as in the "creational" focus of the former lies an enormously potent symbolic basis for the conceptualization of communal integrity and identity, and for the legitimation of political inclusion and organization. That mythic com- plex links the universal and domestic, and so naturally we find it evoked in legends of origin seeking to mobilize people for whom the domestic rites are sacred and valid, into accepting the social, political, and ultimately sacral validity of a larger-scale collectivity.

When ancestral spirits are honored and fed in a particular household, the members of the household express their membership in a community that includes not only the household and its deceased and unborn mem- bers, but other descendants of those ancestral spirits as well, as far afield as may be actually or assertively "remembered," all in a ritual setting immedi- ately and universally recognized as the local reflection of sacred cosmic structures. When an entire community (e.g., a tribal encampment or a village) celebrates a memorial feast for the departed "communal" ancestors (i.e., those not specifically commemorated), it likewise asserts its commu- nal identity and solidarity in a way that sacralizes the community's origins and ancestry in the context of that same cosmology. At this level we find clearly evoked communally based myths of the First Man/Ancestor with the assemblage of mythic elements associated with such figures in Inner Asia; that is, we do not expect to find the universalization of particular

50 Islamization and Native Religion

household ancestors into First Man, but we do find communal ancestors so universalized, and at levels ranging from individual clans or villages up to tribal confederations and groupings as inchoate (retroactively, at least) as, for example, the "Oghuz." At this level, already, we must no doubt appreciate the "assertive" character of such universalizations of communal ancestors, since the social grouping "imagined" by them is already not "natural" and inevitable; rather, it is held together in part by the affective appeals, communally endorsed and rehearsed, to a common ancestral fig- ure who is surrounded with the mythic accoutrements appropriate to First Man and Founder of "a people." The conscious discursive act-which we witness above all in oral tradition-of attaching those mythic accoutre- ments to an ancestral figure accepted by or asserted for a community is itself a political statement on the ultimate legitimacy of that community, essentially marking an assertion that the community's origins are equiva- lent to the origins of the universe, or at least of the universe's significant and relevant component, that of human beings.

It is thus not surprising to find stock features of legends of origin present in what amount to "confederative charters," giving us confederative leg- ends of origin in which a common ancestor is "discovered" or "asserted" and sacralized as founding a legitimate community in a number of ways that most commonly involve (1) the universalization of the ancestor as First Man (for the community in question at least) through surrounding him with the mythic symbols appropriate to First Man, and/or (2) the legiti- mizing power of a "new religion" that the ancestor is regarded as intro- ducing through conversion.

We will discuss the potential political functions of such confederative legends of origin at the conclusion of our study, but here we may note that the power of "rehearsing" the communal "charter" clearly rests upon the religious and magical/ritual functions of narrative recitation, and indeed of speech itself, in Inner Asian tradition; the impact of religious modes of lan- guage beyond specifically religious contexts has been noted, especially in the case of shamanic narratives,37 but has wider implications for social and political organization in Inner Asia, as we will see.

37. On the relationships between religious language (in shamanic narrative or in ritual and magical contexts) and heroic epic and folklore, cf. Arthur Hatto, "Shamanism and Epic Poetry in Northern Asia," in his Essays on Medieval Gemtan and Other Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 117-138; Novik, Obriad i fol'klor; D. K. Zelenin, "Religiozno- magicheskaia funktsiia fol'klornykh skazok," in Sergeiu FedoTOvichu Ol'denburgu k piatidesi- atiletiiu nauchno-obshchestvennoi deiatel'nosti 1882-1932: Sbomik statei (Leningrad: Izd-vo AN SSSR, 1934), pp. 215-240; E. Taube, "South Siberian and Central Asian Hero Tales and Shamanistic Rituals," in Shamanism in Eurasia, ed. Hoppal, vol. 2, pp. 344-352; and P. A.

The Religious Environment 51

Islamization in Inner Asia

In view of these considerations on Islam and conversion and on the nature of indigenous Inner Asian religious conceptions, how are we to understand the encounter of these two traditions? This, or at least some pieces of the puzzle, is essentially what we will hope to learn from exploring the conver- sion narrative and its echoes in the following pages; but a few further general considerations on the integration and assimilation that occur in the meeting of Inner Asian and Islamic worldviews may now be in order, as a means of underscoring the assumptions adopted here regarding what "Islamization" may mean.

We must acknowledge first off that the process signified by the unfortu- nately inelegant term "Islamization" is in reality a dual process that neces- sarily works in two different directions: on the one hand the introduction of Islamic patterns into Inner Asia involves the "imposition" of Islamic norms in a new setting, an alien environment; on the other hand, the nativization of Islamic patterns involves their incorporation and assimilation into indigenous modes of thought and action. That this process of integration and assimilation-which after all would be expected naturally on the basis of other local adaptations of Islam-requires comment at all in the case of Islam in Inner Asia is indicative of the imposing array of primarily modern voices that, for quite diverse motives, have ignored or rejected outright this normal and ordinary integration, often seeking in the process to fragment or destroy the integrity of traditional religious life among Inner Asian peoples who considered themselves Muslims.

The diversity of such voices is as remarkable as the extent to which they have virtually silenced other views. They range from Tsarist Russian missionaries and educators eager to weaken Islam but often willing to make a Christian accommodation with, for instance, the cherished ances- tral veneration, to largely westernized (in this case Russianized) intellectu- als from among particular Inner Asian peoples who viewed their communi- ties' inherited mythic and ritual patterns with embarrassment or only thinly veiled contempt. They range from homegrown Muslim purists who with reasonable legitimacy, from the internal logic of Islamic discourse (which, after all, was implicitly and potentially endorsed by their communities by virtue of their adoption, even if "only nominal," of Islam), sought to rid

Troiakov, "Promyslovaia i magicheskaia funktsiia skazyvaniia skazok u khakasov," sF: 1969, No. 2, pp. 24-34, with an English translation, "Economic and Magical Functions of Taletelling among the Khakasy," SM, 14/1-2 (Summer-Fall 1975), pp. 146-167.

52 Islamization and Native Religion

their communities of non-Qur)anic practices, classed as either remnants of paganism or as bidcah, and to move closer to an ideal defined in strictly Islamic terms, to modern nationalists seeking to evoke pre- or non-Islamic elements of "national culture" as a means of asserting yet another vision of communal identity along lines of modern (and essentially European) notions of the nation. They range from moderately westernized and modernized Muslim "reformers" eager to root out "backward" and "irra- tional" or "unscientific" elements of both strictly Islamic, and pre- or non- Islamic, origin, more or less equally hostile to backward elements of both origins but simply inclined, analytically, to distinguish the two, to Soviet academics, both Russian and "native," who by training and by institutional orientation learned to analyze religious life and practice into bits and frag- ments whose "origins" could be assigned to various Marxist-Iy conceived eras of history or pre-history (since by demonstrating such "origins" they supported the central governmental and academic goal, whether un- spoken or openly avowed in a particular context, of showing the essential irrationality and incoherence of "religion"). In all cases the approach is essentially modern and western and "scientific," and often proudly com- mitted to ignoring or belittling the voices of the simple, "primitive," "uneducated," "ignorant," and "backward" peoples of Inner Asia; in the end these approaches are more or less equally divorc'ed from the realities of ordinary life and religion, as it touched most communities, in the tra- ditional Inner Asian world.

By and large this array of voices intent upon minimizing the historical role of Islam in Inner Asia have successfully reinforced the standard assumptions of "light" Islamization in this region. In some measure these assumptions stem from the general lack of serious analysis of Islam in Inner Asia, and from ideological motivations suggested earlier; more in- sidiously, they stem from two more basic, and in some ways contradictory, assumptions, both of which I believe are seriously off the mark, though ingrained in much traditional scholarship on Islam. First is an assumption that Islam in local settings relatively isolated from the urban intellectual centers of "Islamic civilization" is essentially ignorant, substandard, and uninformed by the richness of intellectual life and social relations thought to be limited to urban settings; in part this assumption rests on an under- standable, though still pernicious, tendency in academic settings to ad- mire what is most compatible with one's own outlook and experience, namely "intellectual" and "cultural" life in urban environments. Second, there is an assumption, touched upon above, which is more difficult to

The Religious Environment 53

dismiss: that Islam is not Islam-or, more generally, that religion is not religion-if it is "only external" or "merely nominal." This assumption stems from a similar academic emphasis upon intellectual systems whose internalization is supposed to be the mark of "genuine" adherence to a religion, and from a neglect of the patterns of daily living that are the focus of most traditional religion.

The first issue has been targeted in recent decades through the social sciences, as anthropologists, especially, have shown the richness and, more important, the meaningfulness of Islam outside the urban environ- ment (or outside the intellectual elite even in cities). Recently, for instance, assumptions of the "ignorant" or "primitive" nature of Islam in Afghanistan have been targeted, with arguments that the knowledge of Islam that reaches rural villages and nomad camps is not defective or significantly different in qualitative terms from the "high" Islamic tradition; to the con- trary, extensive "textual" bases may be found for the literary and oral transmission of the material needed to develop knowledge of Islamic-style discourse, including handbooks, verse summaries of the essentials of the faith, hagiographies, poetic dIvans and prayer collections, and heroic and romantic tales enunciating Islamic themes, but including as well the indi- viduals able to communicate those literary sources to an even wider audi- ence.,8 In this context the role of epic narratives with "Islamized" heroes may be added as well, as will be discussed further below.

At the same time, however, we may widen our consideration of what the local and "popular" understanding of Islam amounts to. If on the basis of textual sources widely known among supposedly ignorant and unlettered Muslims we can stress the solidity of Islamic values and the role of such texts as internalizers of these values, we are coming close once again to the assumption that if the beliefs and practices of local rural "unlettered" Muslims were to be regarded as "mere forms and ex- ternals," they would be somehow less important behaviorally, culturally, and socially. That is, it is undoubtedly important to show the relative sophistication of local knowledge of Islamic ideals and practices, but we should not lose sight of the depth of the transformation already effected outside those textual bases if a community has adopted forms- even if only forms-from Islamic models, within a traditional religious environment (1) which is already well-supplied with formal behavioral and ritual expec-

38. Cf. M. Nazif Shahrani, "Local Knowledge of Islam and Social Discourse in Afghanistan and Turkistan in the Modern Period," in Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert L. Canfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 161-188.

54 Islamization and Native Religion

tations addressing the same spheres of life as the "new" Islamic rites (since these rites were not entering a vacuum), and (2) in which individuals and groups do not ordinarily do something new and without precedent among the Ancestors without a specific reason and without an accompanying "assertive" assimilation of the new to past precedent. The strength and depth of the change is all the more remarkable if we note that in adopt- ing new behavioral and ritual forms, the community is acknowledging those new forms as more efficacious-and implicitly more meaningful religiously-than inherited traditional norms.

Here we must again avoid the "idealist" insistence that "meaning" be always or primarily in "intellectual" terms; to turn prevailing attitudes upside down, we may argue that if Islam offered a nomad or peasant only intellectual and discursively articulated religious "meaning," we might well question the depth of Islamization. But when Islamic norms of behavior, Islamic patterns of social discourse, and even external Islamic ritual forms offer the nomad or peasant greater "meaning" than indige- nous ways in the practical economic and social spheres that are the focus of traditional religious life-as is assumable on the basis of their adop- tion-we should recognize the profound and intimate sphere they have touched. Even in the case of "old" ways not entirely displaced by Islamic ones-the usual situation, after all, with some ritual'patterns retained and others more consciously adapted to Islamic patterns 39 -we should keep in mind the extent of what has been "let in" through "nominal" Islamization, recalling that these old pre-Islamic ways have survived alongside the deep and intimate aspects of life affected by Islamization (self-designation on personal and communal levels, ritual performance, in many cases concep- tions of purity linked with the performance of ablution and methods of slaughtering animals, etc.). For what has been "let in" is the potential for more-than-nominal Islamization, with the introduction of new discursive reference points and new values and figures to evoke in social dialectic.

39. It should be stressed that finding such clear examples of pre-Islamic thought and practice in the lives of Muslims-a favorite analytical approach in the Soviet ethnography of perezhitki- should not mislead us into expecting that such "survivals" would be regarded by the people who cherish them as anything other than normative religious practices in a community whose self- understanding as "Muslim" immediately "Islamizes" those "survivals." In other words, if we look at the religious behavior of people who consider themselves Muslim, instead of only at an abstraction of "Islam," we are compelled to acknowledge that the ancestral focus of pre-Islamic Inner Asian religious traditions has not simply "survived," but has found reaffirmation, integra- tion, and assimilation, among Muslims following Islamization; and in that reaffirmation, which implicitly and quite simply removes any onus of "un-Islamic" links, lies much of the strength of Islamization's hold on Inner Asian communities,

The Religious Environment 55

Understood in this way, Islamization is perhaps less "dramatic," and its immediate impact on traditional ways of life less pronounced, than up- holders of a strictly Islamic ideal would like; it is also less of a "histori- cal watershed," insofar as taking on Islamic identity was "simply" another stage in the "reshuffling" of communal and confederative identities and designations with which Inner Asian history abounds. But for precisely this reason the centrality of Islamization in communal self-designation is underscored.

It may be objected that in focusing on the adoption of the name or status of "Muslim," or of a name linked to or defined in terms of Islami- zation, we are in effect acquiescing in the purely "nominal" and superficial character of Islam among Inner Asian peoples; in this objection we find the "affective" counterpart of the argument that the nomads, and Inner Asian peoples in general, adopted Islam only "formally," taking only some external signs and ritual forms.

This objection is, I would argue, fundamentally misdirected, from two perspectives. First, from the indigenous Inner Asian perspective, to downplay or underestimate the depth and importance of adopting the self-designation "Muslim," or of an awareness of bearing a communal self- designation rooted in or explained by Islamization, is to seriously mis- understand the signal importance of the name and the spoken word in tra- ditional Inner Asian society. The name and its utterance have a sacred character; utterance has power, and the correspondence of a thing's name and its essence or reality is assumed, not in some abstract or metaphysical sense as argued in Chinese or Indian philosophy, but in terms of a virtu- ally physical and magical link between the name and the named. To call oneself "Muslim" or by a name whose mention evokes recollection of an Islamizer, or of an entire "sacred history" or genealogy linked to Islam- ization, is no trivial matter. To adopt a name is to change one's reality, and in this sense there is hardly a deeper "conversion" than a nominal one; in any case such a nominal conversion, reflecting a change of status, is par- ticularly well-suited for expression through the discursive patterns of con- version narratives modeled upon legends of communal origin.

Similarly, ritual forms or spoken ritual formulas (as well as central ele- ments of language itself, especially those vital to social decorum and eti- quette) are not to be trifled with: old ones are not lightly given up with- out a corresponding conscious change, and, in later generations, recurrent affirmations of the "choice" made by the community and the pain it entailed (as indicative of its seriousness). In particular, the "ritual" formu-

56 Islamization and Native Religion

las involved in "genealogical" constructions of identity, through the acknowledgment of ancestors, are central to the entire scope of religious life in Inner Asia; the acknowledgment of, for example, a Muslim saint as one's individual or communal ancestor marks a singularly vital assimila- tion of Inner Asian and Islamic values: the centrality of the Ancestor in Inner Asian tradition ensures that he is not "renamed" lightly, while his Islamic character (even when evoked in popular lore quite succinctly, through simple external symbols indicative of Muslim status) conveys the religious and indeed communal status of his "descendants."

Second, from the Islamic perspective, the "name" and "form," are also similarly linked with sacred power; they are understood to be rooted in reality, and so are not to be taken lightly. With the name, in particu- lar, we find a clear and profound conception of the correspondence of the name, at the fundamental level of utterance and the word's oral "shape," with reality, tied to the notion of the sacred origin of names in the speech of It is in this light, for instance, that we should under- stand the famous "Islamization" of the ethnonym "Turk" through Arabic semantic analysis of its "root," whereby it is properly situated, potentially and implicitly, in the Qur'an.

Beyond this, the Islamic assumptions regarding the sacred power of the external to affect the internal, of the form to shap'e the spirit, and of re- ligious ritual and "ritualized" and sacralized social interaction to serve as a channel for divine grace, all shape an Islamic approach to "conversion" wherein adoption of the name and basic ritual forms are the crucial first step. From a deeper Islamic perspective as well, then, "nominal" and "external" conversion is not regarded as inherently superficial or without meaning. Rather, such "conversion" amounts to, as implied in the typical Muslim term for the spread of Islam, an opening: Islamic rule (and identity) is established, and the observance of external forms is facilitated, thus "opening the way" for the Islamization of hearts.

Finally, the adoption of the name and form, moreover, amounts to an implicit and potential communal endorsement of "Islam" as an ideal, thereby opening the way, through new, Islamically defined latent possibi- lities, to new sets of transformative forces that are both "Islamic" and "na- tive" at the same time. Islamization not only brings the reaffirmation and integration of certain "assimilable" native traditions; it also brings the

40, See the discussion of orality in Islamic religious conceptions in William A. Graham. Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1987). pp. 96-115.

The Religious Environment 57

potential for more socially and politically transformative action, for even the "purely nominal" adoption of Islam allows into the community, potentially, the entire "cast of characters" of Islamically defined religious and political figures, who would renew or reform or purify or strengthen or defend "Islam" as they imagine it. What is important here is not simply that we find such figures and movements, but that it is the "origi- nal" adoption of Islam, however "nominal" or superficial it may have been, that makes these figures "native" rather than alien forces-more to the point, that the original Islamization is often at least tacitly evoked by these figures to justify their program. At the same time, that "original" Islamization may hand indigenous "reformers" a potentially powerful tool to use, in combination with native mythic patterns, in challenging an ex- isting social and political order.

We must also consider here, finally, another objection to the depth or quality of Islamic "conversion" in Inner Asia, for these are doubted not only on the grounds of conversion's nominal or superficial character, but on the grounds of "impure" or "nonreligious" motives as well. We often read, that is, that such and such a community or ruler "converted" to Islam only for the somehow implicitly base motive of seeking thereby diplomatic or economic or political benefits; such portrayals amount to a dismissal of the "quality" of the underlying "sentiment" upon which the "conversion," inappropriately regarded as a "change of heart," is based, since in this way of thinking "religion" ought to be primarily a matter of belief rather than of practice or status.

If we adopt such a view, however, we are clearly letting modernist and Christian-based and idealist sensibilities intrude too far into our consider- ation of Islamization and its conditions and implications. From the Mus- lim perspective, again, there is nothing inherently base in conversion to Islam for economic or even political benefit; such conversion offers the same potential for effecting an "opening" of hearts as does the "purely nominal" conversion, and from the early days of Islam the promise of par- ticipating in the material benefits enjoyed by and ensured by the Muslim community by joining it was recognized as a legitimate and in no way dis- reputable inducement to the change of status involved in "conversion" to Islam. If the change of status led to a change of heart, so much the better; but Islam promises blessings of various kinds in this life, above all the blessings, tangible and intangible, derived from normal participation in a human community sacralized by divine forms. We should not belittle the open and avowed Islamically defined acceptance of "conversion" for less

58 Islamization and Native Religion

than "spiritual" motives, since the material or social benefits brought by conversion form part of the "material" wedge that may provide the "open- ing" needed to effect changes in the spirit as well as in the form. These considerations must be kept in mind as we consider the important ways in which Islam, and narratives of Islamization, were "used" politically in Inner Asia; we have become accustomed to dismissing the political "use" of religion as inevitably cynical and deceptive (and ultimately injurious to religion itself), but the political use of religion is much of what Islam is about in social terms.

In attempting to understand Islam in Inner Asia from an Islamic per- spective, then, we would do well to recall the famous h.adzth affirming that Islam was not meant to be a burden on humanity; rather, Islam is, from an Islamic perspective, an avenue for divine grace, and encompasses a wide spectrum of behaviors and attitudes, some set as ideals, some enjoined, and some merely accepted or tolerated. Islam entails for indi- viduals and communities alike an aspiration to the best and highest in spiritual, moral, social, and ritual life; an enjoining of a set of formal and minimal obligations (of faith, ritual, and morality) expected of all serious Muslims; and an acceptance of even quite substandard "performance" of those obligations so long as the divine grace of membership in a sacra- lized (and salvific) community is not blatantly rejected through an act of apostasy. As would be expected, Islam in Inner Asia offers examples of individual and communal religious life at all three of these levels; but all too often the vitality of Islam in Inner Asia is judged solely on the basis of the first two, missing the profound significance-again, from the Islamic perspective itself-of the retention of a self-identity signaling member- ship in that salvific community.

But even if the quality of some person's or some community's conver- sion to, or knowledge of, Islam in the Dasht-i Q·ipchaq, for instance, would not satisfy a jurist at al-Azhar-and why, after all, would we adopt him as a standard by which to judge the Islam of Inner Asia? - it seems reasonable to pay more attention to what the change (in status, in name, in pattems of social and religious ritual) amounts to from the perspective of the person or community that underwent the change.

If we keep this standard in mind, we must first recall that in traditional Inner Asian religion, one of the chief, if not the preeminent, purposes of the sphere of activity that we would label "religious" is precisely to promote "life": that is, to protect health and the survival of the com- munity, to ensure material well-being and prosperity, to fructify herds and

The Religious Environment 59

fields, to render "manufactured" craft objects effective and productive, etc. Alongside these economic aims are the political purposes of sanction- ing rule and organizational principles in order to ensure the community's life and prosperity in relation to other peoples, that is, through warfare, diplomacy, and trade. In all cases one does not-in Inner Asian religious tradition, as in "normative" Islam-employ "religious" concepts or prac- tices to escape or downplay these fundamentally human aims, but to ne- gotiate them.

So to find that a particular individual or ruler or community has de- cided that the value system and complex of rites which the society in question has long recognized as efficacious for upholding life-trusting in it and investing it with individually affirmed credence, socially enforced expectations, and ritually (and ecstatically) evoked numinous power- is after all no more useful or effective than "the way of the Muslims," or is even less powerful, is to admit a transformation of enormous import, pre- cisely because of its "banality." To acknowledge that elements of one's communal tradition are less efficacious in securing the things that "re- ligious life" is intended to secure in traditional society is perhaps some- what staid and undramatic from our customary perspective, because in this case what Islam is sought for, or adopted for, is the same thing sought from the "old" tradition. However, it is just because of this banality, because of the enormous psychological and social shift signaled by seek- ing the same ends but through what had been an "alien" system of world- view and rites, that the shift is all the more remarkable and noteworthy {rom the indigenous perspective.

The Example of Almambet In order to illustrate the type of reevaluation we are suggesting regarding Islam in Inner Asia, we may consider briefly the lessons of a conversion narrative of a type quite different from those primarily "literary" accounts with which we will be concerned in the balance of this study. The account in question comes, by contrast, from Inner Asian oral tradition, from the Q'jrgh"iz epic cycle of Manas,41 and provides an excellent illus-

41. See now the new edition and English translation of the major accessible mid-nineteenth- century recording of the epic, by Arthur T. Hatto, The Manas of Wilhelm Radloff (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), based upon Radloy's publication, Proben der Volkslitteratur der nordlichen tiirkischen Stiimme (Russian title: Obraztsy narodnoi literatury severnykh tiurkskikh

60 Islamization and Native Religion

tration of the narrative displacement so prominent in the originally oral tale preserved by Otemish ijajjI. In this massive Q"irgh"iz epic corpus the theme of the Muslim struggle with the infidel Qalmaqs may well repre- sent simply the latest "cultural overlay" on more archaic structures of heroic and shamanic struggles and journeys; but in one substantial sec- tion the theme of conversion to Islam is especially well developed, and is clearly highlighted as in tension with ancestral and communal identities. The section in question 42 recounts the early career of Almambet, a hero who becomes Manas's most trusted friend and ally, though born a Qalmaq; the account also clearly signals the tension between Chingisid khan and "commoner," with the latter "justified" by Islam, for Almambet is a khan's son but rejects his patrimony for the sake of Islam.

The account of Almambet begins by posing an essential and primeval distinction between the infidels (kapi'r) and Muslims (busurman), a dis- tinction assumed, in a natural "universalization" of communal experi- ence, to be as basic as the elemental dichotomies of creation: "When land became land, and water water, there were the infidels, Sons of six Fathers, and the Muslims, Sons of Three." This distinction can be over- come, however, through "heroic" choice, and this is perhaps the central message of the story. Among the infidels was born Almambet, the son of the Oyrat [i.e., infidel Qalmaq] khan; but Almambet's destiny was evi- dent already before his birth, for in the epic account he is said to have been conceived through the intercession of the "saints" (aliya; i.e., awliya) and the Muslim God (azriit AIda). That Almambet's Muslim des- tiny was evident even before his birth is further emphasized in one vari- ant, in which Almambet is born already circumcised, while in a theme

plemen) (SPb., 1866-1907) [hereafter "Radlov, Proben"], ch. 5, "Narechie dikokamennykh kirgi- zov" (SPb., 1885), with the Manas cycle on pp. 1-368; cf. Hatto's "Kirghiz, Mid-Nineteenth Century," in Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry, vol. I, The Traditions, ed. A. T. Hatto (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1980), pp. 300-327. For an extensive sur- vey of the variants of the Manas cycle and its episodes, see A. S. Mirbadaleva, N. V. Kidaish- Pokrovskaia, and S. M. Musaev, "Obzor zapisei variantov eposa 'Manas,'" in Manas: Kirgizskii geroicheskii epos, kn. I (Moscow: GRVL, 1984), pp. 443-491. As Hatto has stressed (as an anti- dote to the modern Soviet Qi'rghi'z "nationalist" appropriation of Manas), the heroes of Manas are called Noghays, suggesting the borrowing of epic narratives and personages from Qazaq tradition (see his Manas, introduction, pp. xiv-xvi, with further pertinent comments on twentieth-century "intellectualizations" of the epic, and his The Memorial Feast for Kokotoy- Khan (Kokotoydiin As!): A Kirghiz Epic Poem [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], pp. 90-91, 272); the various themes found in the Manas epic are thus potentially more closely relevant to a discussion of "the Noghay epic" than is suggested by labeling it strictly "Qi'rghi'z."

42. Hatto, Manas, pp. 14-27; Radlov's edition, pp. 6-61; cf. Manas: kirgizskii geroicheskii epos, kn. 2 (Moscow: GRVL, 1988), pp 188ff. (text), 511ff. (tL).

The Religious Environment 61

quite common in the context of Islamization-well known from the leg- end of Oghuz Khan and applied also to the Jochid khan Berke-another variant has Almambetsuckled by a Dungan (Chinese Muslim) woman upon his birth, whereupon he refuses to return to his infidel mother. 43

In view of the intimate association, which both nature and tradition strengthen, between the complex of womb, birth, and childhood-nurtur- ing on the one hand, and the spiritual and physical continuity of the fam- ily and community on the other, such a displacement is of no small con- sequence - that is, we see (1) the displacement of the ancestral spirits who oversee the conception, birth, and protection of the child by Muslim saints and Allah; (2) the implicit displacement of traditional "infidel" rites performed for newborn children by the "rite" of miraculous prenatal cir- cumcision;44 and (3) the displacement of the birth mother from the infi- del community by a Muslim mother. In each case, we should not expect exposition of the meaning: the evocation of these powerful images and their juxtaposition with their Muslim replacements makes the point quite clearly for an audience familiar with current traditions and familiar enough with notions of what traditions preceded the current ones to

43. Hatto, Manas, p. 408, note to I, 2, lines 99ff. The close parallel in narrative structure between this part of Manas and the story of Berke's Muslim upbringing and subsequent conver- sion (see the following chapter) should probably not be taken as establishing the story of Berke as a prototype for Muslim conversions, which the Manas bards mimicked; rather, the parallels probably point to "narrative imperatives," suggesting, as we would expect, that the indigenous accounts of Berke's conversion reflect developed oral narratives featuring such a sequence of Muslim inclination through miraculous Islamic intervention at birth (the Muslim mother's milk) and then the "choice" of conversion in adulthood, just like Almambet.

44. The treatment of circumcision here invites comparison with that in the tale of Er Toshtiik, often included as part of the Manas cycle (discussed more fully below), in an early episode in which the shaman-hero comes upon the dwelling of a hideous woman, Bek Toro, while search- ing for his father's lost herds (a theme recalled in Herodotus's telling of a Scythian legend of ori- gin, as discussed below). The woman promises to aid the hero in his search if he will spend the night; he eats and drinks and falls asleep, waking at midnight to find the hut resplendent with light, and the woman beautiful and alluring. But as he begins to caress her hair and undo her blouse, Bek Toro stops him, revealing that she knows his identity and origin, and that indeed it was she whose prayers ensured his birth; she is thus his spiritual mother, but what she tells him to allay his amorous intentions suddenly takes on a distinctly Islamic cast: "Do not touch me, Toshtiik! You are still impure of body, you have not yet been circumcised, you remain unlaw- ful." She laments that she would have taken him for her own, "but this lower world is full of blemishes," and so she resolves to "reclaim" him on the Day of Judgment; eventually she makes a deal with the intended bride of Er Toshtiik whereby the bride will have him in this world, but Bek Toro in the next (cf. Pertev Boratav and Louis Bazin, ed. and tr., Aventures merveilleuses sous terre et ailleuTS de Er-Toshtiik Ie geant des steppes [Paris: Gallimard/Unesco, 1965], pp. 38-40; see also Nora K. Chadwick and Victor Zhirmunsky, Oral Epics of Central Asia [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969], pp. 101-102).

62 Islamization and Native Religion

understand that "what we do now" and "who we are now" were deter- mined by just such a sacred displacement.

Despite the early signs of his Muslim destiny, it is still the mature Almambet who must be "converted" and make the fateful choice that pits him against his family and community.45 The agent of his conversion is the Muslim Kokcho, who befriends Almambet and awakens his desire to become a Muslim; it is to Kokcho that Almambet declares his wish to cast off the signs of his Qalmaq heritage, and it is in his presence that Almambet opens the Qurcan and reads (naturally, without instruction or assistance) and announces, "I will become a Muslim!" (men busunnan bolom). But following this lone allusion to Almambet's conversion as his individual act, the communal focus comes plainly back into view: he at once announces his intention to make his people Muslims, and to break with them if they do not heed him, and his words clearly reflect the notion that his people, as a community, should enter "the Muslim tribe" (busunnan qomi", i.e., the qawm of Muslims).

Almambet then journeys back to his people, and at every step we find a challenge to Qalmaq tradition: he enters his father's house and greets him, in the Q"irgh"iz version of the Muslim greeting, "Asalau malikim, atam," but receives no answer; he stands "at the head of the hearth," the sacred center of the yurt (By), where the fire-pit dugin the earth to join the underworld with this world meets the celestial world, beneath the opening in the yurt through which good fortune is portrayed as descend- ing, and there challenges his father and his people to become Muslims. In the refrain, the elements of the conversion he demands from them are made clear: let us, says Almambet, learn the Qurcanic words "Kul- kuldabat kualdat;"46 let us "seek a place between Mecca and Paradise;" let us become Muslims; and, in a tellingly sophisticated encapsulation of

45. In the hero's Muslim birth followed by decisive contest-induced conversion we see a par- allel to a common structure in other conversion narratives, wherein an initial inclination is fol- lowed by a conversion provoked by some threat or crisis and effected through a dramatic "con- test"; the initial inclination, in turn, may be presented "theologically" by evoking the primeval fitrah of humankind, "miraculously" through intercession for the hero in the womb or at birth, or "historically" through the hero's affiliation with a previously Muslim people (the latter strate- gy is common in accounts of the Turks and Mongols cast as "historical" traditions, with their lat- ter-day descendants depicted as having fallen away from a primeval Islam adopted by legendary ancestors, e.g. Oghuz Khan; it is not at work in the case of Almambet inasmuch as the Muslim/ Kafir distinction is itself primeval, disallowing both a primeval conversion and the fitrah, and highlighting the choice entailed in changing religious communities).

46. Hatto, Manas, p. 411, note to 1,2, line 217, identifies this as the words of silrah 112 affirming monotheism, qui huwa'lliihu a/:llld{un}.

The Religious Environment 63

what Islam had to offer his people, let us "seek" or "learn" "the goodness of this world with That World."47 Almambet tells his people to discuss the issue in council (kengash), thus appealing for a communal decision, and promises to return in the morning to learn the choice.

Almambet's father, however, not only refuses to adopt Islam, but effec- tively disowns his son, wondering how Almambet could speak such words and ordering his people to keep his son from his sight and to kill him when he returned in the morning; he refers to Almambet as his "spent arrow" and his "hard excreted turd," expressions that may be said to "amount to a formula of unclanning or disinheritance."48 Almambet man- ages to reach his father the next morning and again repeats his summons, urging his people, "Rather than be khans of the Infidel, let us be Mus- lim slaves";49 here, the frequently encountered opposition between khan (implicitly Chingisid) and "commoner" is clearly invoked and linked to the legitimacy accorded to the latter by conversion to Islam. His father, however, flatly refuses to become a Muslim, and departs. Almambet next goes to his mother, reporting his father's rejection and appealing to her not to abandon her child, but the mother sides with the father, and Almambet resolves, in effect, to renounce his patrimony, his family, and his community; recalling his unheeded appeal to his people, he de- clares again his individual choice to prefer being a "Muslim slave" over being an infidel khan.

As he prepares to do battle with his infidel kinsmen, then, Almambet first invokes the aid of the Muslim hero Koshoy, whose success he ascribes to the protection of his ancestor-spirits (arbak) and angels (berishtii). Koshoy's Muslim status is affirmed as Almambet praises his turban, calls him "my Khoja," and compares his voice to the prayer-summons (azan), and the new convert asks that his ancestral spirits and angels support him as well. 50 It is thus made clear, in another instance of displacement, that Almambet has cut himself off from the protective ancestral spirits of his own people and must seek protection from Muslim spirits.

He next appeals to his Muslim friend Kokcho, or rather to the protec- tive spirits who support Kokcho; in a foreshadowing of Almambet's disap- pointment with Kokcho-as a result of which he will leave him and take lip with Manas-we are told that Kokcho's "angels" (berishtii) could not

47. a diino miniin bu diino ;akSzlzk sump ketali, a diino miniin bu diino ;akSzlzk ;ayzn bildlik. 48. Hatto, Manas, pp. 411-412, note to I, 2, lines 247ff. 49. Kapirdin kanz bolgonco, busumwn kulu bololu, p. 22, I, 2, lines 293-294. 50. Hatto, Manas, pp. 24-25; cf. pp. 413-414, notes to I, 2, lines 394ff.

64 Islamization and Native Religion

help Almambet, but Manas' ancestral spirits (arbak; i.e., arvab) did come to his aid without even being invoked (and without Almambet ever hav- ing met Manas), clearly demonstrating their solicitude for the new Muslim convert. 51 Thus supported, Almambet slays myriad Oyrat infi- dels and then departs. His falling-out with K6kch6 still in the future, Almambet in effect seals his conversion to Islam and his new membership in the Muslim community as he again meets his friend and the instigator of his conversion: he has returned to his true community, for his greeting, asalau malzkim, left unrequited by his own father and his own people, is returned by his friend K6kch6.

Incidentally, the story of Almambet is also instructive with regard to the role of the narrative itself: in recounting the hero's adoption of Islam and his struggles in defending it against the challenge from his own family, the bard and audience effectively relive the dramatic tension vividly enough to appreciate the fact that "we" are not forced to face it again; the reason "we" need not face the disruption of family, way of life, etc., is that we are now part of a Muslim community (and must take care not to fall away from Islam), thanks to the early heroes whose difficult choice we need only reaffirm.

A final element in the "Islamization" of Almambet and his physical and "familial" integration into the Muslim community occurs after his disenchantment with K6kch6 (who remained only his "friend") and his coming to Manas (who becomes his "brother"). To be sure, the figure of Manas may appear less explicitly Muslim than K6kch6, in large part because he is more richly developed than K6kch6, and because of the latter's specific role in Almambet's conversion. But a prominent, if not paramount, theme of the epic is the nobility and superiority of Almambet, a convert to Islam, contrasted with the venality and outright betrayal exhibited by characters born Muslim, and this superiority is highlighted most effectively in Almambet's valor in defense of Manas. 52

51. Hatto (Manas, p. 415, note to I, 2, lines 426ff.) sees in this "an effort to bridge the contra- dictions between new and old in the outlook of the superficially Islamized Kirghiz;" see below on this supposed superficiality.

52. Cf. Hatto, Manas, p. 227; the contrast is most clear in the case of Koz-kaman, whose life is the reverse of Almambet's: he was a "Noghay," born a Muslim, but was abducted as a child by the Qalmaqs, and although he himself retained some signs of his origin, his offspring are the worst of infidels, who submit to circumcision as a formal sign of accepting Islam (pp. 262-263) but whose "Qalmaqized" nature is revealed in their treacherous poisoning of Manas. See also Hatto's "Mongols in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Kirghiz Epic,"' in Gedanke und Wirkung: Festschrift ZUnI 90. Geburtstag von Nikolaus Poppe, ed. Walther Heissig and Klaus Sagaster (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1989), pp. 139-145, where in connection with this episode he

The Religious Environment 65

In any event, Manas's Muslim status is never in doubt in the epico Although Manas's army includes both Muslims and infidels, the dia- logues among Manas and his companions are repeatedly punctuated with Muslim greetings, and together Manas and Almambet lead holy wars against the infidel Qalmaqs, Russians, and Chinese; Manas likewise is restored to health, after being poisoned, through the intercession of "Kan Kojo" of Mecca, and he himself travels to Mecca to revive his Forty Com- panionso 53 The bond between the two heroes is likewise portrayed in a telling mix of Islamic and pre-Islamic elements: when Almambet is first spotted on the way to Manas's camp, Manas is drawn to him as he ob- serves him from a distance, noting that although his form resembles that of an infidel, the "golden traits" of his countenance "resemble a Muslim's;"54 and later, when they have become the closest of companions, Manas praises Almambet's conversion to Islam, when "Rather than be a Kalmak khan, you said 'I shall become a Muslim slave!'" as the event that brought them together. 55

The most dramatic element in forging their bond, however, comes when Almambet, alienated from his own mother through his conversion to Islam and his effort to extend that conversion to his people, in effect takes Manas' mother as his own: as, miraculously, the withered breasts of Manas's mother again flow with milk, Manas and Almambet each suck one breast, thereby becoming brothers and affirming Almambet's inclu- sion in a new family and communityo56

The archaic mythic and "shamanic" themes of the Manas epic are often cited as evidence of the "superficial" Islamization of the Q"irghlz, and it is possible to find quite little of a certain type of Islam even in the account of Almambet's conversion, if that is what one is looking for. Nevertheless, although it is true that "Islam" as a doctrinal structure or developed literary tradition or urban-style cultural system was noticeably less prevalent among the nomadic QOirghlz than, say, among sedentary communities of Mawarannahr, to call QiOrghlz Islam superficial is to ignore the historical elevotion of the QOirghOiz, from the Farghana valley to East Turkistan, to Sufi shaykhs; it ignores the incorporation of Muslim

observes: "What the Kirghiz valued was not race, but a way of life. Their own stock could deteri- orate under Kalmak influences: an Oirot [sic] prince converted to Islam could be the Khan's trusted bosom friend!" (p. 140)0

53. Hatto, Manas, pp. 298-301; cf. p. 228. 54. Hatto, Manas, pp. 62-65. 55. Hatto, Manas, pp. 272-273. 56. Hatto, Manas, pp. 70-71; cf. p. 49.

66 Islamization and Native Religion

patterns in life-cycle rites among the Q"irgh"iz; it ignores the Islamic-style sacralization of Q"irgh"iz territory through the proliferation of saints' shrines; it ignores the Islamization of Q"irgh"iz genealogies; it ignores Q"irgh"iz communal identification with the Islamic world; and it ignores the assimilative acts evident in the epic accounts themselves. Whether the Islamic features in the Manas cycle reflect the adoption of Qazaq and Noghay epic heroes with already established Islamic elements, or the addition of Islamic elements after the adoption, we find a remark- able inclusion that belies "superficiality."

The argument that Q"irgh"iz Islam was superficial ignores also the depth of the Islamic element adduced in the epic: it is hardly conceiva- ble that the focus on the familial and communal break in the story of Almambet was considered meaningless or trivial by the epic's audience. To be sure, the "reformist" Muslims who sought to strengthen their style of Islam among the Q"irgh"iz would have found Q"irgh"iz Islam superficial; but we should not judge the level or depth of Islamization solely or even primarily from the standpoint of a particular group's ideals of Islamic doctrine or practice-to do so concedes the validity of that group's vision of Islam, which mayor may not be suitable in a given instance, but beyond this it involves us in a fruitless academic pursuit for an abstracted and ideal Islam instead of a more appropriate ex"amination of Islam as self-defined Muslims live it. Rather, the depth of Islam and of the change that Islam entailed should be judged on the basis of their relationship with values and self-conceptions native to the Q"irgh"iz, not in relation to the values of some "normative" Islamic standard from an entirely differ- ent environment.

The story of Almambet, then, offers insight into the indigenous ap- propriation of Islam and the often decisive impact of this appropriation. Despite its "heroic" rather than "historical" character, it also includes a number of more specific parallels to the conversion narrative with which we are most directly concerned. To appreciate these, however, we must consider that narrative in its historical context and in the religious meaning-at times shared with the tale of Almambet-that it conveyed to its audience.