Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tukles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition.

• Author: Karamustafa, Ahmet T.

Devin DeWeese's Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde is a tour de force of erudition and meticulous interpretation on a previously much neglected topic - Islamization of Inner Asian peoples - on the basis of an often laconic, widely scattered, and difficult historical record. In his quest to study the encounter of indigenous Inner Asian religious traditions with Islam, the author treats the reader to a dizzying procession of painstakingly constructed scholarly surveys and analyses on a bewildering variety of issues in Inner Asian history, ranging from Mongol court ceremonial to Khazar conversion to Judaism, from Turkic philology to Bukharan Naqshbandi genealogy. The resulting monograph is as exhilarating as it is expansive.

The work is organized around a single, short narrative that recounts the conversion of Ozbek Khan of the Golden Horde (r. 1313-41) to Islam at the behest of a delegation of Muslim saints led by the enigmatic figure Baba Tukles. Starting with the earliest extant written account of this narrative preserved in the Tarikh-i Dust Sultan of Otemish Hajji, written in Khorezm in the 1550s, DeWeese moves in two separate directions. On the one hand, he carefully traces all the echoes of the narrative in written and oral records of six hundred years of Islamic Inner Asian history from the fourteenth century to the present, in a kaleidoscopic journey that introduces the reader to a bewildering array of Inner Asian peoples and events, all somehow connected with the conversion narrative (including Russian aristocrats in twentieth-century America!). While this feat alone is sufficient to establish his credentials as a major sleuth of Inner Asian history, the author simultaneously reconstructs, in great detail, the indigenous Inner Asian religious context, both in its general contours and in certain pivotal aspects, for the interpretation of the conversion narrative in question.

The book is formally divided into seven chapters. In the first chapter, DeWeese critically surveys, and presents his own views on the topics of Islam and conversion, indigenous religion in traditional Inner Asia, and Islamization in Inner Asia. The following chapter is devoted to the reconstruction of the historical setting for the conversion narrative centered around Ozbek Khan, where a thorough account is given of the Islamization of Western Inner Asia under the Golden Horde on the basis of all available evidence, including, as the last item...