From revival to mutation: the religious personnel of Islam in Tajikistan, from de-Stalinization to independence (1955–91)

Abstract

‘Thou hast done well: This is God Who hath brought thee here!’

Īšān Tīmūr Hwāja (born 1948) to the author, summer village of Sang-i Milla-yi Bālā, district of Šahr-i Naw, Tajikistan, 10 August 2009

On the basis of a reconstruction of the careers of a variety of religious personnel of Islam in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, from de-Stalinization to independence, this article aims to shed light on some neglected features of Islam in Soviet Central Asia. Questioning the present-day hagiographic process, and confronting the data of oral history with those of pre-modern Muslim hagiography and biographies of religious scholars, this article assesses the specific Islamic revival that has been taking place in Central Asia in the aftermath of the reopening of the Gulag in 1955–56. It also deals with the lasting Kulturkampf, engineered by the Soviet authorities, between the Fergana-born Uzbek-speaking accredited staff of the Muslim Spiritual Board on the one hand, and the Persian-speaking leaders of prominent Sufi lineages with Bukhara and Samarqand pedigrees on the other. The role of mass population transfers in this phenomenon is evoked through their impact on the disruption of the Sufi masters' sacred ‘territories’ (Persian: qalamraw), and the increasing role of the latter as community builders. Acting as alternative figures to pre-modern khans, the Soviet saints of Islam, who have become the objects of a rich hagiographic process, are also introduced as the bearers and transmitters of pre-modern court culture that vanished from Central Asia in the early 1920s. Special consideration is given to the mutual relationship and competition between the scholars (‘ulama) of the Spiritual Board and the gnostics (‘urafa) of the Sufi paths, as well as to the former's contribution to a revival of Turkic Islamic culture – notably through the comment of Chaghatay didactical literature within active, though underground, literary circles.

Keywords:

• Islam
• Sufism
• Central Asia
• Tajikistan
• religious personnel
• religious sociology
• biography
• hagiography

Notes

So far, the bulk of the material collected remains unprocessed. The present article comes after only two biographical notes in Russian, extracted from a corpus in the making of biographies: Dudoignon (2010a, 2010b). As to the author's contributions on the revival of traditional intellectual sociability in Soviet Persian-speaking Central Asia, see below, n. 55.

On the development of ṭabaqāt literature in the pre-modern world of Islam, see notably Smith (2005) and Toelle and Zakaria (2005, pp. 131–135).

The tazākir (sing. tazkira) are biographical dictionaries or anthologies of saints usually belonging to a specific geographical locale; the malfūẓāt comprise the oral discourses of Sufi saints recorded in written texts. For an overview of the figure of the saint in Persian (and Turkic) hagiographic literature of pre-modern Central Asia, cf. DeWeese (2002) and Paul (2002).

For comparative studies in modern and pre-modern biographical tradition, see for instance Mervin (1998, 2003) and my comments on these works in Dudoignon (2004a, pp. 1105–1107).

On this category and on its almost continuous quantitative significance within the Tajik SSR, see for instance Ro'i (2000, pp. 289–90); see more recently Tasar (2010, pp. 109–122).

The resources of state archive collections of the former USSR for the history of Islam in Soviet Central Asia have been exposed and exploited in the last 20 years by several outstanding historical works: Ro'i (2000, in particular pp. 2–9), with considerations of the various types of inaccuracies in Soviet archive sources; Keller (2001), and my review of this book in the reader's breviary, the bibliographic journal Central Eurasian Reader (henceforth CER) 1, 2008, pp. 272–273; see also Tasar (2010, pp. 16–19).

As for instance in the mid-1950s, before the violent reaction of 1958–59: Central State Archive of Tajikistan (henceforth CSAT), F.516, O.1, D.100-101 ― with telling data on the intensification of the closures of non-registered mosques in 1949–50 (31 closures), and in 1958–61 (243 closures, confirming retrospectively the relatively significant amount of identified non-registered mosques active in the 1950s).

For implementation of the religious policy of the USSR towards Islam, see Ro'i (2000, pp. 589-606) and Tasar (2010, pp. 205–214).

The author borrows this term from Hamid (2007).

For this reason among others, the key criterion for the selection of the figureheads who have been dealt with in the framework of this research has been either: (1) the existence on them of an oral or even sometimes, as we shall see, nascent, written hagiographic tradition; or (2) their personal role as an element and vector of this tradition in the case of pupils and disciples of prominent ^culamā and šayh s.

On Dahbīd and the Dahbīdiyya, see the section on competence or genealogy and n. 61.

See the short presentation of the Ḥanafī School in the Persian world by Schwartz (2002).

On the international political resonance of this event, and its significance for the relations between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East and Central Asia, see Dudoignon (2011a).

See Dudoignon (2004b, pp. 220, 226–234); the reference work as to the development of comparable hagiographies in pre-modern times remains DeWeese (2000).

My most complete biographical data on Īšān Quṭb al-Dīn's nascent posthumous personal tradition among Higher and Lower Mačāhī populations (with reference to his spiritual teaching and ‘miracles [karāmāt]’) came from my conversation with local Imam Mīr Rāziq Ṣādiqzāda (Sodiqov), village of Šamtīč (or Šamtūč), district of ^cAynī, 6 August 2006.

To date, the reflection on the possible historical use of hagiographical literature has been significantly more developed by specialists of pre-modern periods than by historians of the twentieth century. (As for European studies, see in particular Goulet [2005, pp. 9–27]). On the issues and methods of the utilization of conversion narratives and, more generally, of hagiographical texts for the history of Islam in Central Asia, see DeWeese (1994, pp. 10–16, 160–79; 2006).

One of the first works opening up this major taboo of Tajikistani collective memory, and confirming its role as a major founding drama of the country's contemporary national history, has been the pioneering monograph by Sh. Kurbanova (1993, esp. pp. 51–79). See also the historical works by R. Abdulhaev (especially [2009, pp. 207–236]).

See, for instance, the telling case of Īšān Sayyid Imām al-Dīn ‘Ġāzī’ (1929–92), whose father had come from Qandahar in Afghanistan and settled down in the steppe of Ġāzī-Malik, south of Ḥiṣār. Oral testimonies at our disposal about him often focus on his radical stance against the Soviet regime from 1979 onwards (Īšān Sayyid Imām al-Dīn authored odes to Ayatollah Khomeini), and on his personal rivalry with historical lineages of the Naqšbandiyya originating from the Qarategin Valley. His laqab of Ġāzī (fighter for Islam in infidel territory) postulates his rejection of the USSR as a whole. The Persian term qalamraw often appears in narratives on his deeds, especially when conversation turns to his conflicts with his arch-rival in the Ḥiṣār Valley, Naqšbandī šayh Dāmullā Šarīf Ḥiṣārī (1893–1990), who is often identified by supporters of Īšān Sayyid Imām al-Dīn as a servile collaborator with the Soviet authorities. (On Dāmullā Šarīf and his political role in the Ḥiṣār Valley, see the section on the transmission of Persianate learning). My data on these aspects of Īšān Sayyid Imām al-Dīn's biography come from an interview with Īšān Sayyid Imām al-Dīn's youngest son from a second marriage, Sayyid Maẓhar al-Dīn Ġāzī, in Dushanbe, 27 October 2005; and from a second, longer interview with Īšān Sayyid Asrār al-Dīn, Īšān Sayyid Imām al-Dīn's elder son from a first marriage, and Halīfa Muḥammad-Rajab b. Bābā-Kalān, a murīd and miracle-teller (karāmat-gū) of Īšān Sayyid Imām al-Dīn's, in Qarāġāč, a destitute village well off the trunk road from Dushanbe to Qurghan-Teppa, in the family and community's necropolis near Qāq-Sang in the same area, 16 July 2007.

First developments on this aspect are to be found in Dudoignon (1994, esp. pp. 93–96); discussed in detail by Rubin (1998, pp. 143–152). See also Dudoignon (1998 pp. 73–78; 2000).

Cf. Courtois et al. (1998); Merl (2002). The release that started in 1954 owes one of its peculiarities to the fact that the political prisoners could return after their time was over; under Stalin they normally were sentenced additionally. After Khrushchev's speech, no further releases would take place, just rehabilitations (pers.comm. with Stephan Merl, 12–13 July 2010).

To the contrary of many literary assemblies of the 1920s–30s: on the latter, see for instance Dudoignon (2002, pp. 149–153) on the religious dimension of the literary assemblies at novel writer ^cAbd-Allah Qādirī's place in Tashkent in the decade preceding the highest wave of the Red Terror, and on the Islamic rituals performed in this framework.

See notably the assessment by Keller (2001, pp. 247–250).

Periodization sketched notably by Halbach (2004).

See the testimony by the local historian of modern Islam, Abdulhai Mahmadaminov (2004, pp. 113–133), with interesting, detailed comparative analysis of the textbooks from these varied periods of time ― cf. also my review of this book in CER 1, 2008, pp. 402–403.

Cf. Babadjanov (2000), Babadjanov and Kamilov (2001, pp. 200–206).

On early-modern developments of Central Asian debates on jihad and its renouncement, see the pioneering work on Xinjiang under Qing domination by Hamada (2001); for tawakkul more generally see Lewisohn (2000).

As for early-twentieth-century quibbles against the ṭarīqāt and īšāns, see notably Zarcone (1997), Hamada (1999), and Dudoignon (2010c). On the continuation of these discussions during the Soviet period and the role played in them by the reformist ^culamā of the SADUM, see notably Muminov (2005) and Tasar (2010, pp. 185–201). On the prestige of the ^culamā of the SADUM in the early Soviet period, see Arapov (2006) ― and my review of this article in CER 1 (2008), pp. 384–385.

Dudoignon (1994, pp. 93–96, 2011b).

For instance, on the key role of new converts, see the productive sociological remarks by Roy (2008, pp. 28–36), with a case study from Tajikistani Pamir (pp. 102–103). About the gradual appearance of new protagonists of Islamic education in Tajikistan since the early 1990s (however with relatively little interest in significant institutions developed during the last decades of the Soviet period in often remote rural areas of the country), see notably Epkenhans (2009, pp. 321–340); Abramson (2010, pp. 36–43). For a subtle pioneering study of the cultural and psychological impact of exposure of Central Asian students in religion to new contexts, see Bissenova (2005, pp. 253–263).

Cf. above n. 7.

On these specific developments of hajj narratives during the Soviet period, see notably Dudoignon (2007).

See for instance CSAT F. 1516, O. 1, Ed. Khr. 54, D. 7 (‘Materialy o prebyvanii dukhovnykh inostrannykh delegatsii i inturistov [Materials on the Sojourn of Foreign Spiritual Delegations and Inturists, May 17 – November 27, 1956]’), ff. 27, 46: Qāżī ^cAbd al-Rašīd comes second in the list (third in the list of the welcoming delegation at the airport) after the then Qāżī of the Tajik SSR, Dāmullā ^cAbd al-Sattār Rafīqzāda (Sattar Rafikov); CSAT, F. 1516, O. 1, Ed. Khr. 66, D. 6 (same title, 23 May – 8 August 1957), f. 22: Qāżī ^cAbd al-Rašīd is third on the list of the delegation led by Qāżī ^cAbd al-Majīd Yūsufzāda (in charge from 1957 to 1961) in the welcome of a group of Pakistani clerics led by the chairman of the Jam^ciyyat al-^cUlamā^c-i Islām religious political party. During the same period of time, at least until the drastic reduction of the hajj and local pilgrimages (ziyārāt) by the Khrushchev administration for 1959, Qāżī ^cAbd al-Rašīd often appears as the leader of numerically small groups of pilgrims to Mecca: for example, CSAT F. 1516, O. 1, Ed. Khr. 54, D. 5 (‘Materialy o palomnichestve v Mekku [Materials on the Pilgrimage to Mecca, 29 April – 3 June 1956]’), ff. 5: that year, the former Qāżī leads a group of six people, all men of approximately the same age, to the Hejaz ― including four Muslim clerics, three imām-haṭībs and the šayh of the already important mazār of Zayn al-^cĀbidīn in Jill-i Qul (Dzhilikul'), south-west of the Tajik SSR; CSAT, F. 1516, O. 1, Ed. Khr. 65, D. 4 (same title, January 8 – May 28, 1957), ff. 7–14 (the six other members of the group of pilgrims are all Muslim clerics attached to registered institutions). As for 1958, Qāżī ^cAbd al-Rašīd is number two or three in delegations led by younger clerics: see for instance CSAT, F. 1516, O. 1, Ed. Khr. 72, D. 5 [two files] (same title, January 3 – June 2, 1958), ff. 12–3; F. 1516, O. 1, Ed. Khr. 79, D. 8 (same title, March 7 – May 27, 1959), ff. 16, 18, 20–21, and others.

According to the family's legend, his second wife, Dawlat Bī, fell in love with him when she listened to the tape of one of these sermons. Besides the vox populi, my main source on Dāmullā Qāsim-Jān's life and deeds remains a long interview ― interrupted by a short raid from the Tajik secret services, probably alerted of the arrival of a suspect visitor by a neighbour ― with his son Mullā Muḥammad-Jān, in the Qarā Mīr Šakar Mosque of Dushanbe, 25 October 2005.

The main biographical data on Qāżī ^cAbd al-Rašīd comes from diverse autobiographical documents attached to his applications to or reports from the hajj, in the decades after his time as the Qāżī of the Tajik SSR: for example, SCART, F. 1516, O. 1, Ed. Khr. 65, D. 4, esp. ff. 7–14 (‘characterization [kharakterizatsiia]’ by the Council for Religious Affairs near the Council of Ministers of the Tajik SSR, as well as elements of biography and autobiography attached to a group application to the hajj in May 1957), as well as from conversations with some of his former pupils, like the famous Dāmullā ^cUbayd-Allah b. Mullā Sayyid ^cAbd al-Raḥmān (alias Dāmullā Dādar-Jān) (b. 1920), interviewed by the author in the ‘Turkmaniston’ Kolkhoz, district of Qurghan-Teppa, during the freezing night of 5 October 2005.

And the nomination, that same year, of Ḥājjī Akbar Tūrajānzāda (b. 1954), the son of a most prominent Tajik Naqšbandī īšān from the Rāmit (Romit) Valley, east of Dushanbe, as the Qāżī of the Tajik SSR.

For example, Usmankhodzhaev (2007, pp. 63–65).

On him and his role in the revival of the Ḥanafī tradition in Soviet Central Asia after the Second World War, see notably the historical presentation by Babadjanov (2001, pp. 200–206).

Until the last decade of his life, his teaching did not attract more than a handful of listeners, according to the oral testimonies of his pupils and disciples, notably Mahdūm Burhān al-Dīn Ḥasanābādī (b. 1938), who remained in Mawlawī Hindūstānī's entourage from the mid-1960s to the master's death in 1989. (This material comes notably from my interview with Mahdūm Burhān al-Dīn in Ḥasanābād, near Dushanbe, on 4 August 2004).

On the use of this polemic denomination by people of Mawlawī Hindūstānī's circle to 1979, see Babadjanov (2001, pp. 204–205).

Le Goff (1996, pp. 509–512), with considerations on the taste for the exemplum literary genre ― anecdotes inserted in sermons ― for facts that took place ‘in our time’ (nostris temporibus); Vauchez (2009, pp. 218–228, 241–247).

For elements of comparative study on the chronological variation of the typology of miracles, with adjustments specific to periods of inter-confessional confrontation and repression of religious practice (for instance, in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989), see notably the synthetic essay by Bouflet (2008, pp. 253–256).

In the Islamic tradition, the term karāma (plur. karāmāt), which is absent from the Qur'an and is a possible phonetic derivative of Greek χα´ρισμα, assumes the sense of ‘charisma’, the favour bestowed by God completely freely and in superabundance. ‘More precisely, it comes to denote the “marvels” wrought by the “friends of God”, awliyā^c (sing. walī), which God grants to them to bring about. The marvels most usually consist of miraculous happenings in the corporeal world, or else of predictions of the future, or else of interpretation of the secrets of hearts, etc.’ (Gardet 1997, p. 615).

Sometimes, connoisseurship in horse breeding could serve as a profession, as in the case of Naqšbandī šayh of the Ġāzī Malik Steppe area, south of Dushanbe, Īšān Imām al-Dīn Ġāzī. For more on him, see n. 18 above; this information comes from my interview with his youngest son Īšān Maẓhar al-Dīn (Dushanbe, 27 October 2005).

For a still rare integrated study of this emigration phenomenon, see Abdullaev (2009, pp. 149–266).

On the Dahbīdiyya, see the section on competence and genealogy.

Material coming from my interview with Ḥājjī Ismā^cīl Pīr-Muḥammad-Zāda, Dushanbe, 26 August 2009. For an example of a retrospective written testimony on Sang-i Kulūla's charisma in the south of the Tajik SSR, and on the massive attendance of his funeral ― obsequies of prominent šayh s constituting a key and still understudied event of Islamic religious life in Central Asia during the whole Soviet period ― see notably Mahmadaminov (2004, pp. 402–403).

On him, see Dudoignon (2009, 2010b).

Notably during my interview with Mīrzā ^cAbd-Allah Kalānzāda at his place in Khujand on 27 August 2004.

Interestingly, this double profile of a scholar and a healer also fuels occasionally, though more rarely, the charisma of the mosque's religious personnel, whether registered or not, thanks notably to the latter's double qualification as scholars of Islam and as learned herbalists. In the city of Ġarm, for instance, the main market town of the Qarategin Valley after the mass deportation from the more populated Ḥāyiṭ district in the 1930s–50s, the Imam of the city's Great Mosque, Ḥājjī Mullā Barāṭ Šarīfzāda ‘Raštī’ (c. 1935–2004), who is credited with the role of conciliator during the civil war of 1992–97, used to rival in terms of popular prestige members of the lineage of local Naqšbandī šayh Īšān Mullā ^cAbd al-Rafī^c, better known under his laqab of Īšān Malīḥ (c. 1873–1959), and the latter's son Īšān Pārsā Hwāja (1927–2005). These data come out of the author's examination of the graves in the cemetery of Askalān, and of his interviews about these two figureheads of contemporary history of Islam in the central part of the Qarategin Valley with Ḥājjī Qurbān Šarīfzāda, Mullā Barāṭ's son and successor (in Ġarm, 27 October 2005) and with Īšān Muqtadā b. Īšān Pārsā Hwāja b. Īšān Malīḥ (in Askalān, later in the afternoon of the same day).

Personal conference on adab by Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, Paris: Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, 21 October 2007.

One of many verses in explicit praise of adab by Īšān Sayyid ^cAbd al-Raḥmān-Jān says: ‘Adab tājīst az nūr-i ilāhī / Ba sar nihaš har jā ki hwāhī (Adab is like a Crown of Divine Light / Put It on Your Head Anywhere You Wish),’ quoted in Darvozī and Badalipur (2003, p. 48). One could not be more explicit.

Kasaba, the Persian term of Arabic origin used in Central Asia by female healers, deprived of a sacred genealogy and religious background, for designating their activity of magical healing. The difficulty of the access to Muslim learned female milieus has resulted in the spectacular overrepresentation of secular-background practitioners of women's religious, magical and gnostic celebrations in the research literature and current anthropological practice on Islam as it is agreed in feminine gender, in Soviet and present-day Central Asia. A rare exception remains a monograph that has so far remained quasi without posterity by Krämer (2002, pp. 109–118, on the issues of books and initiation).

For a rare but renowned case of a female religious protagonist with a decisive role in the transmission of religion and adab, see for instance in the Qarategin Valley, the role played by Īšān Bībī Ḥurr al-Nisā (d. 1963) ― married with a mudarris, Mullā Muḥammad-Nabī Hwāja, of aristocratic ascent but deprived of the status of a muršid ― in the education of her son Īšān ^cAzīz Hwāja; for more on the son, see n. 47). During my most recent expedition to Tajikistan, information on Dāmullā Šihāb al-Dīn (1882–1965), a Sufi šayh and healer of the lower Qarategin Valley, could be collected with data on the activity of his wife Bībī Hāliṣa b. Ḥājjī Muḥī al-Dīn (c. 1926–2002); the information came from an interview with their son Īšān Sa^cīd Hān (b. 1947) and his sister Bībī Sabagul (b. 1951), in the sanctuary, in the cemetery, and in the mosque of the village of Mazār, in the rural district of Fayżābād, 16 July 2009.

See Rakhimov (1990, pp. 37–56), and my short review of this very important monograph in Abstracta Iranica, 14 (1991), p. 133.

For a first assessment of this phenomenon, through the case of a leading circle of the city of Kūlāb in the very south of the Tajik SSR, see Dudoignon and Zevaco (2009, 2010).

See notably, on the basis of southern Kazakhstani materials, Muminov (1996, 1998) and Privratsky (2004).

See, notably, among the hagiographical literature produced on both of them recently by common hagiographers: Badalipur (2000), Darvozī and Badalipur (2003); see also Dudoignon 2010a with details on the elements of genealogy provided in these two publications. Information on the life and work of Īšān Sayyid ^cAbd al-Raḥmān-Jān also comes from my interviews with several of his disciples ― most notably with Mahdūm Sulṭān Šīngilīčī, in Ḥasanābād near Dushanbe on 29 July 2004 ― as well as with several of his sons and continuators ― among whom were: Īšān ^cAbd al-Wājid (b. 1962, the keeper of his father's grave), interviewed in Īšān Sayyid ^cAbd al-Raḥmān-Jān's former cell, in the village of Qal^ca-yi Naw, district of Fayżābād in the lower Qarategin Valley, 26 October 2005; Īšān ^cAbd al-Batīr (b. 1962, the current Imam of the Šāh Manṣūr Mosque of Dushanbe), interviewed in this mosque on 21 October 2005; Īšān ^cAbd al-Ḥāšir (b. 1953), interviewed in the family's house in Dushanbe, where part of his father's personal manuscripts are preserved, 22 November 2005.

See for instance Nūrī's own publications, and his obituaries published in the press of the party and newspapers sympathetic to it during the weeks following his death: Anonymous, ‘Aknun obro kī sof mekunad?’ (Who henceforth will be purifying water?)', Millat 48 (3 August 2006), 1; The Council of the IRPT, ‘Ustod Saiid Abdullo Nurī az olam darguzasht (Ustād Sayyid ^cAbd-Allah Nūrī Has Passed away)’, Millat 49 (10 August 2006), 1; Saidahmad Qalandar, ‘Olimi diloshno, khushkhulqu khushguftor raft (A shrewd, equable and eloquent scholar has gone)’, Sipehr 32 (2006). 2; Sabznigor (pseud.), ‘Dardo, ki asiri nangu nomem hanūz . . . (Those sorrows still captive of honour . . .), ’ Najot 388 (31 August 2006), 1 & 3, among others.

Interview with his elder brother Ḥājjī ^cAṭā-Allah Nūrī, ‘Turkmaniston’ (former ‘Pravda’) Kolkhoz, district of Qurghan-Teppa, 15 August 2009.

See notably the short historical syntheses by Algar (1993), Papas (2005, pp. 35–38).

According to his assessments, developed during several interviews with Ḥājjī Pūlād Hān in Qizil-Qal^ca, notably on 4 August 2004 and 10 October 2005. For the first social-science assessment of the role of hwāja lines in Soviet Central Asia, see Abashin (2001). This author postulates that, due to their specific habitus, the hwājas were the most adaptable as well as the most competent representatives of traditional elites confronted with modernity.

Ba^cd-i šaš sāl čūn guzašt āmad darīnjā Rūsiyān / Ba yarāq u aslaḥa wa ham ṭayyāra dar safar / Jang šud paydā miyān-i Rūs u ham mujāhidīn / Mujāhid bigurīht, maqtūl šud halq bīšumār / Būd sāl yakhazār u sīṣad u ham čihil u hašt. (After six years had passed came here the Russians / With arms and weapons and also with planes in the move / War took place between Russians and Mujāhids / The Mujāhids fled and a lot of people were killed / This was the year one thousand and three hundred and forty eight.)

Sirhindī's teaching did bring about a deep mutation of the Naqšbandiyya ― henceforth named Mujaddidiyya, that is, ‘renovated’ ― in the Indian subcontinent and then beyond, especially in Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus and the Ottoman world. His ‘Epistles’ (Maktūbāt) provided the Naqšbandiyya with a complete didactical text. Besides his early insistence on the strict application of the Muslim law and on the maintenance of non-Muslims in an inferior legal status, Sirhindī has remained in history for his codification of the dikr ceremony on the basis of yoga principles. He is also noted for his refutation of the idea of ‘ontological unity’ (waḥdat-i wujūd) with God during ecstasy (ḥāl), and his development of more prudent notion of ‘unity of experience’ (waḥdat-i šuhūd: cf. the recent synthetic introduction by Gaborieau [2007, pp. 134–135]). Deeply conditioned by the demographic and political realities of Islam in the subcontinent, and focusing on the permanent restoration of the master–disciple link (rābiṭa), Sirhindī's thought has been exerting a particularly strong attraction in Central Asia, especially under Russian and Soviet dominance since the second half of the nineteenth century.

According to oral sources pertaining to either the pupils of Mawlawī Hindūstānī or to those of Qāżī ^cAbd al-Rašīd, for instance, among the latter: Dāmullā Dādar-Jān, a prominent ^cālim of southern Tajikistan since the 1960s (n. 34), who mentions 40 to 50 students in Qāżī ^cAbd al-Rašīd's ḥujra of the Šāh Manṣūr Mosque in Stalinabad/Dushanbe in the last 20 years of his life and activity (in an interview in the ‘Turkmaniston Kolkhoz’ of the Qurghan-Teppa area, 5 October 2005) against the 20 pupils mentioned by Mawlawī Hindūstānī's former students and still only in the very last years of the latter's activity.

Darvozī and Badalipur (2003, pp. 65–68).

These considerations are based mainly on the author's respective interviews with Mahdūm Sulṭān Šīngilīčī and Dāmullā Burhān al-Dīn, in Ḥasanābād on 4 August 2004.

On the presence of this figurehead in archive documentation, see Tasar (2010, pp. 219–221); yet most of the elements provided in the present study about Dāmullā Qāżī ^cAbd al-Sattār Rafīqzāda come from the author's interviews with Dāmullā ^cAbd al-Sattār's youngest son, Muḥammad-Amīn Sattārzāda (Sattorov) in his father's house in Qurghan-Teppa, Sunday, 16 August 2009; and with Ḥājjī Murād-Jān Tābitzāda (Sobitov) (b. 1943), the Imam of the Dūstī (‘Friendship’) Mosque built in 1965–66 in the Karl-Marx Street of Qurghan-Teppa (in Ḥājjī Murād-Jān's place in Qurghan-Teppa, 17 August 2009)

VHS videotapes from a private collection, district of Ḥiṣār. According to other oral testimonies, assemblies (maḥāfil) of this kind were organized regularly in the early 1980s by Qāżī Mīrzā ^cAbd-Allah Kalānzāda (in charge from 1961 to 1988) in all the regions of the Tajik SSR, according to my interview with Dāmullā Dādar-Jān, ‘Turkmaniston’ Kolkhoz, 5 October 2005.

In fact, like many of his colleagues of the SADUM, Qāżī Dāmullā ^cAbd al-Sattār Rafīqzāda was of rural origin: he was born in the village of Qayqiyābād, district of Ūč-Qurġān, region of Namangan.

Conversation by the author with Muḥammad-Amīn Sattārzāda in the presence of other members of the family, Qurghan-Teppa, Sunday, 16 August 2009.

This state of things has been confirmed by several witnesses from the Uzbek-speaking religious staff of the Qurghan-Teppa district, notably in my interview with the already mentioned Ḥājjī Murād-Jān ābitzāda, at his place in Qurghan-Teppa, 17 August 2009.

Sometimes even with the calligraphy, as in the case of Īšān Sayyid ^cAbd al-Raḥmān-Jān, the copyist of several masterpieces of Persian classical poetry, notably of a full Matnawī of Mawlānā Jalāl al-Dīn ‘Rūmī,’ a text that he taught and commented on during half a century in his ḥujra of Fayżābād.

During his interview with the author at Sang-i Milla-yi Bālā, 10 August 2009.

See notably Darvozī and Badalipur (2003, pp. 27, 39).