The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History.

AuthorKim, Kwangmin
PositionBook review

The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. By Rian Thum. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 323. $39.95.

The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History examines the formation of a dominant genre of local history writing--the vernacular tazkirah--and the central role it played in the rise of regional identity of Altishahr ("Six Cities") or eastern Turkestan since the 1700s. Challenging the widely accepted scholarly opinion that Altishahr lacked a coherent regional identity prior to the arrival of modern nationalism and print culture at the turn of the twentieth century, Thum convincingly shows that the area emerged as a coherent region in the mind of the oasis residents along the trade routes since the 1700s, thanks to the circulation of texts and knowledge about Sufi saints who died in the region as well as to the popular practice of local pilgrimage to their shrines. This book also examines the tenacious legacy of regional identity formation predicated on sacred personages in the forms and contents of the nationalist discourse about "Uyghur" identity that emerged under the rule of Nationalist and Communist governments in the twentieth century.

The first chapter traces the emergence of the vernacular tazkirah as the dominant form of history writing in Altishahr. During the watershed moment of the late seventeenth century, locally authored vernacular historical texts replaced Persian historical texts authored outside Altishahr as the mainstay of history writing available to the local readership. In contrast to previous Persian texts, the vernacular tazkirah focused on the past of Altishahr. They mainly centered on stories of saints and heroes who were born in a foreign land, came to the region to proselytize Islam, and died in Altishahr. In combination with the adopted Persian-language histories that covered the rest of the world, the local tazkirah provided a compelling, comprehensive view of the past for Altishahr residents.

The second chapter examines the mechanism of community authorship of the tazkirah, and how the process of manuscript production--the dominant technology of book production from the 1700 to the 1930s--allowed various local people, literate and illiterate, to participate in the production of the texts. The shaykhs reciting the text in local shrines were able to modify the text to suit the needs of saint worship. Anonymous copyists, who were often the consumers of the text, modified it in the process of copying...

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