DeWeese Devin. Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde

University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1994. — 650 p. — ISBN 0-271-01072-X.Devin DeWeese (born 1956) is a professor of Islamic and Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana.
As he notes: “‘nationalist’ scholarship in each of the Central Asian republics has contributed its own slant to the history of Islam in Inner Asia, and indeed at 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”.
This book is the first substantial study of Islamization in any part of Inner Asia from any perspective and the first to emphasize conversion narratives as important sources for understanding the dynamics of Islamization. Challenging the prevailing notions of the nature of Islam in Inner Asia, it explores how conversion to Islam was woven together with indigenous Inner Asian religious values and thereby incorporated as a central and defining element in popular discourse about communal origins and identity. The book traces the many echoes of a single conversion narrative through six centuries, the previously unknown recounting of the dramatic &"contest&" in which the khan Özbek adopted Islam at the behest of a Sufi saint named Baba Tükles.
DeWeese provides the English-language translation of this and another text as well as translations and analyses of a wide range of passages from historical sources and epic and folkloric materials. Not only does this study deepen our understanding of the peoples of Central Asia, involved in so much turmoil today, but it also provides a model for other scholars to emulate in looking at the process of Islamization and communal religious conversion in general as it occurred elsewhere in the world.
A careful reading of this closely argued and densely packed book can provide insights into the premodern meaning
of the ethnic/national groups known as Kazakh, Karakalpak, Noghay, or Uzbek and, in particular, into the role of Islam in their ethnogenesis.List of Tables.
Acknowledgments.
Abbreviations.
Introduction.
The Religious Environment: Worldview, Ritual, and Communal Status.
The Historical Setting: Baba Ttikles and the Conversion of Ozbek Khan.
Conversion Narrative and Religious Meaning, I: The Setting Story, History, and Religious
Conversion Narrative and Religious Meaning, II: The Drama Baba Ttikles and Shamanic Narrative.
Baba Ttikles in History and Genealogy.
Baba Ttikles in Epic Tradition and Folklore.
Baba Ttikles and the Uses of Sacred Origins.
Appendix 1 Otemish l:IajjI's Account of the Conversion ofOzbek Khan: Text.
Appendix 2 Otemish l:IajjI's Account: Translation and Commentary.
Appendix 3 An Eighteenth-Century Khorezmian Account of the Conversion of Ozbek Khan: Text.
Bibliography.
Index.Текстовый слой (OCR)