Using my contacts at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, whose website I have been managing for the past year. There are many Ismailis in Tajikistan - mostly in the Badakhshan area in the Pamirs. The Tajik Ismailis represent one of the largest minorities of Tajiks anywhere. However have still not quite managed to sort out a guest family to stay with (but it is amazing what you can do in two weeks).
Also planning to visit my contact Paul who works for Sworde Teppa charity in Kurgan Tepe in the south of the country. I will be able to help out with the English teaching there in return for a few Tajik lessons. It will be great to get to know the students as well.
And so, why am I going? Why Tajikistan? I am researching the Samanid period from the 9th and 10th centuries CE in Central Asia - specifically Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The Samanids were one of the first Persian speaking dynasties to wield power after the Arab invasion of Transoxiana and Khorasan in the 7th century. Central Asia has been described as the centre of the mandala, then it was a heterogenous place whose inhabitants followed Zoroastrianism (or their own version of it, very different from the Zoroastrianism in Iran proper), Buddhism in the East, and Nestorian Christianity and Mannichaeism being minority religions.
Today the area, once almost forgotten by the West, difficult to access, is making geopolitical headlines again. It is a place between the Islamic, ex-Soviet and Chinese worlds where tea is green and drunk in bowls, when vodka is not being drunk. I am interested in identity and material culture and how the latter portrays the former and has the potential to change the mindsets of the user.
This is true whether during the medieval times or today. Today the Tajiks, along with other nations in Central Asia are trying to formulate their identity having been left in the vacuum brought about by the collapse of the Soviet empire.
Central Asia is fascinating to me, with names to conjure with: Bukhara and Samarqand.
The almond-groves of Samarkand,
Bokhara, where red lilies blow,
And Oxus, by whose yellow sand
The grave white-turbaned merchants go:
Ave Imperatrix by Oscar Wilde
Unfortunately (for the Tajiks) that these cities, even though they have or used to have a majority speaking Tajik population have been within Uzbek borders since the Soviet invasion in the 1920s. Bukhara is especially interesting to me as the capital of the Samanid empire and the location of the most spectacular buildings, I would argue in Central Asia; the Samanid Mausoleum, or dynastic tomb. How they used this building to project their dynastic power, and how the present population of Bukharans view it, is one of my research questions.
Title for the PhD thesis is Samanid material culture and identity formation in post-Soviet Tajikistan.
So on this blog you will find musings (academic and otherwise) and travel stories from Central Asia and the wider Islamic world.
