Beyond resistance and nationalism: local history and the case of Afaq Khoja

Thum, Rian

Abstract

Kashgar's seventeenth-century ruler-saint, Afaq Khoja, is remarkable for the amount of historical writing he has inspired, both outside and within Chinese Turkestan. His reputation among Uyghur historians is one of the few aspects of local Uyghur historical knowledge production that has attracted the attention of foreign scholars. In this essay the author uses the now-familiar example of Afaq Khoja's reputation to show that much of what is distinctive about local Uyghur approaches to history has been so little understood as to be missed even in this often-discussed case. This article describes how the local historical appropriation of Afaq's reputation, particularly the recording of narratives about Afaq in writing, began as a typical product of the Naqshbandi maqāmāt tradition, was reshaped into Kashgarian local history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then reshaped again as an ethno-national history beginning in the 1930s, culminating in the publication of the popular historical novel, Apaq Khoja, and its subsequent burning by officials of the People's Republic of China. While the reputation of Afaq in the present certainly reflects the current political context, it also bears significant marks of these earlier traditions through which it has passed. Thus this article argues for an understanding of ‘local history’ as a form of knowledge production that embraces a host of historical approaches, including transnational devotional literature, popular local oasis history and nationalist historical fiction. The author also suggests that these transformations of local history have reflected shifting senses of what is ‘local’ over the last 300 years. The argument is advanced through philological investigation of the manuscript sources, ethnographic fieldwork and literary analysis of the recent novel Apaq Khoja.

Citation

Thum, R. (2012). Beyond resistance and nationalism: local history and the case of Afaq Khoja. Central Asian Survey, 31(3), 293-310. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2012.722366

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Oct 2, 2012
• Publication Date: 2012-09
• Deposit Date: Nov 19, 2019
• Journal: Central Asian Survey
• Print ISSN: 0263-4937
• Electronic ISSN: 1465-3354
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 31
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 293-310
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2012.722366
• Keywords: Earth-Surface Processes; Geography, Planning and Development; Development
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2656806
• Publisher URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02634937.2012.722366