The Turkistanis of Mecca: community histories of periphery and center

ABSTRACT

This article presents a case study of one family’s exile from the Tarim Basin, where the relatives they left behind are now known as ‘Uyghurs,’ to the Mecca region, where the exiles regard themselves as ‘Turkistanis.’ This case is then examined in the context of other exilic families’ oral histories and narrative strategies to show an ongoing process of Turkistani identity formation and history production that seeks to accommodate personal and community histories of varied vintages and origins. Localized histories of early exiles mix with nationalist histories brought by later arrivals; family documents rub elbows with a hagiographical novel; and Turkistanis who see their community as unitary confront more recent ideas that some families are ‘Uyghurs’ and some are ‘Uzbeks.’ Together these form an eclectic whole that addresses the unusual position of a people who have been exiled from a place that much of the world views as a periphery to one that they themselves view as center.

KEYWORDS:

• Exile
• pilgrimage
• Turkistani
• nationalism
• identity
• historiography

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

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Notes

1. Personal names of interviewees are pseudonyms. Uyghur forms (e.g. Patimä) are used for individuals born in Central Asia, while Arabic forms are used for those born in Saudi Arabia (e.g. Fātima).

2. Interviewees were selected by snowball sampling, beginning from the personal network of author Huda Kashgary.

3. Balci, “Central Asian Refugees”; and Bayram Balci, “Uzbek and Uighur Communities.”

4. Rajagopalan, Diasporic Mediations, xiv.

5. Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies,” 84.

6. Other important examples of diasporic peoples undergoing exile to a place they widely regarded as a center include Jews who fled to Palestine from Nazi Germany in the 1930s and Chinese Indonesians who fled persecution and migrated to various parts of China in the wake of Indonesian independence.

7. See Yamani, Cradle of Islam.

8. Thum, The Sacred Routes; Bovingdon, “Contested Histories”; and Ildikó Bellér-Hann, “Setting an Example.”

9. This is a stock phrase found, with minor variations, in much Chinese writing about the Tarim Basin, see, for example, “Zuohao Xinjiang lishi wenhua jiao yu.”

10. The research was for this article was conducted jointly by Rian Thum and Huda Abdul Ghafour Amin Kashgary, both of whom participated in all of the cited interviews. The writing was undertaken by Thum.

11. Documents #1, #2, #4, and #8, Jiddah Turkistani family collection.

12. Document #7, Jiddah Turkistani family collection.

13. Document #3, Jiddah Turkistani family collection.

14. Măshhădi, Atush, 104.

15. Ibid., 107.

16. Musta’idd Khan, Maasir i ’Alamgiri, 63; Churās, Khronika; and Thum, “Moghul Relations with the Mughals.”

17. Ishaev, “Mekka, sviashchennyi gorod Musul’man,” I was led to this source by the citation in Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj, 79.

18. Andījānī, Dirāsah taḥlīliyah liniẓārat awqāf bilād māwarā’ al-nahr, 60.

19. Abduljan, “Hüsӑyniyӑ mӑktipi dӑvridiki nӑshriyatchiliq, mӑtbӑ’ӑtchilik vӑ hösnkhӑtchilik”; and Brophy, Uyghur Nation.

20. Ihtiyari Muhpir, “Heremdiki mexhur Uyghurlar”; and Turkistānī, Al-i’lām li-ba’ḍ rijālāt Turkistān.

21. Balci, “La communauté Ouzbèke d’Arabie Saoudite.”

22. He described the first wave of exiles as the fallout from the collapse of the Eastern Turkistan Republic, the second the result of the Communist takeover, and the third the 1958 “Afghan Uyghur” expulsion.

23. Andījānī, Dirāsah taḥlīliyah liniẓārat awqāf bilād māwarā’ al-nahr.

24. Arabic plural nuẓẓār.

25. Samin, Of Sand or Soil. We met only one Turkistani family that professed to keeping a genealogy.

26. Balci, “Central Asian Refugees.”

27. Kane, Russian Hajj, 81.

28. See Kane, Russian Hajj.

29. See, for example, Abū al-Fidāʼ, Géographie d’Aboulféda, 505.

30. “Mashhūr ādamlar wa ulūgh ḥādithlar.”

31. It is beyond the scope of this article to address the important notion of muhajirun, a word for exile that gestures to the prophet Muhammad’s exile from Mecca. Turkistanis have often used this term to place themselves in a much larger group of Islamic sanctified exiles that come from all over the world. See Balci, “La communauté Ouzbèke d’Arabie Saoudite.”

32. Thus, for example, one waqf is named after a man called ʿAbd al-Rahīm al-Bukhārī al-Khūtānī, see Andījānī, Dirāsah taḥlīliyah liniẓārat awqāf bilād māwarā’ al-nahr, 61.

33. Thum, Sacred Routes, passim.

34. See note 21 above.

35. Turkistānī, Ūlūgh Turkistān fājiʿasi.

36. Ăzizi. Sutuq Bughrakhan.

37. Bughrā, Sharqī Turkistān tārīkhi.

38. al-Bukhārī al-Andījānī. ʿŪlamā’ Mā Warāʿ al-Nahr al-muhājirīn lil-ḥaramayn, 79; and Turkistānī, Al-i’lām li-ba’ḍ rijālāt Turkistān.

39. Shajarat al-ansāb.

40. Can, Spiritual Subjects; Green, “The Hajj as Its Own Undoing,” 198.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Humanities Center; Muhammad Alagil Professorship, National University of Singapore; University of Nottingham [Nottingham Research Fellowship].

Notes on contributors

Rian Thum

Rian Thum is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham His research interests include the histories of Muslims in China, Uyghurs, and money.

Huda Abdul Ghafour Amin Kashgary

Huda Abdul Ghafour Amin Kashgary is an independent scholar who earned her PhD from al-Azhar University. She is a member of the Turkistani community in Jiddah. Her research interests include economic history and Arabian connections to the Silk Road.