6 Between Karbala and the Tragedy in Bukhara, 1910: Collective Memory and Identity Among Bukhara’s Shiites

Local memory plays an important and quite meaningful role in the way various groups identify and present themselves. Memory representations may draw boundaries between social, ethnic, and national groups. Collective memory, for its part, is not static, but rather fairly dynamic in nature, and is influenced by the social, political, and economic changes taking place in society. In post-Soviet societies, local memory can perform various roles: it can be built into a common national narrative, it can dissolve and be forgotten, or it can even be construed as a counter-memory.

In this article, I intend to consider similar patterns of local collective memory in an attempt to understand what role is played, and what place is occupied, by such narratives in the social lives of small social groups. The object of my research will be a small community of Imamite Shias, Central Asian Iranians, currently living in the city of Bukhara and its suburbs. An ethnic and religious minority in current-day Uzbekistan, the Bukharan Iranians are distinguished by their adherence to Twelver Shiism (in contrast to the Hanafi Sunni majority in the region), some minor differences in religious rites relating to the cycle of life compared to the most widespread practices in the Bukharan cultural realm, and patterns of collective memory which carry representations of collective trauma.

Providing one such framing of trauma were the events leading to the clash between Shias and Sunnis in January 1910 in the capital of the Bukharan Emirate, resulting in casualties on both sides. In conversations during my fieldwork in Bukhara (two times), I discovered that memory about these events plays an important role in self-identification for individuals of the older generation. More religious people apply a more persistent religious framework around their representation of the 1910 events, which adds to and can even mitigate the traumatic experience of the past.

Based on my field notes, I would like to look more closely at this case to understand what role representations of the past play and what place they occupy in the identity of Bukhara’s Shiite community; examine how and why the religious aspect is included in these representations; and determine whether there is a difference in representations of the past among members of different generations. A separate theme is the impact of historical policies by those in power and their influence on local memory. This process can result in either suppression of local memory or the search for suitable niches where it can be inserted into larger narratives of memory about the past of one small community.

Methodological Framework

First, I will define the concept of collective memory, by which I mean understandings of past events that members of a group (social or “ethnic”) share, and which can serve as one marker of identity.

As the most interesting methodological prism, and the one through which it is best to look in my case, I chose the following. When considering the phenomenon of communicative memory, we must refer to the work of Aleida Assmann, who emphasizes one vital factor: that personal memories exist not only in one’s societal surroundings, but also inside a particular time horizon. These time horizons are replaced every forty years, or, with more profound censorship, can be observed every eighty to one hundred years. Taking shape through communicative acts, this type of memory is strictly limited in time.^[1] In Iwona Irwin-Zarecka’s work on the dynamics of collective memory through the impact of the surrounding society, the chapters concerning “communities of memory,” in which the author writes about how individual people who have undergone a similar traumatic experience (the Holocaust, the GULAG) can be brought together through memory, are especially interesting and appropriate for my work.^[2]

Timur Dadabaev addresses the phenomenon of collective memory in Central Asia, using the example of Uzbekistan’s Soviet past. Here, one can see traumatic experiences of the past (Stalinist repressions), hybrid identities (the “Soviet man”), and religiosity and Soviet “modernization” as they are reflected in memory, as well as the transformation of communal life through the institution of the mahalla.^[3] Work by Laura Adams and a short article by Svetlana Gorshenina should be mentioned as critical examinations of cultural policies in combination with the policy of memory in post-Soviet Uzbekistan and the “selective” attitude of the republic’s new leadership to its past.^[4] Here, the authors raise the question of the fundamental rejigging of the space of historical memory as it refers to Soviet images and symbols and their replacement with recently created images of the national canon.

Research Methodology and Study Participants 

This study is based on the classical social anthropology approach of qualitative interviews conducted with participants, and on digital ethnography methods to collect material. One interesting source is the book published by one member of the Shia community, dedicated to the tragic events of 1910, which serves as a family history offering examples of various historical narratives widely shared among participants in the period the book was written (the 2010s).^[5]The participants in my study were representatives of the city’s Shiite community, fifteen individuals of various ages (from thirty-five to eighty years old), as well as residents of Bukhara (eleven people) representing various groups within the city. I should note that for representatives of the older generation, this topic is taboo, and can be painful. Participants therefore often avoided the topic or mentioned it in an offhand way.

My status as a researcher and outsider also played a role. Not many people were inclined to share their personal family histories. Yet conversations with various residents of the city older than 40 indicated that the memory of the Sunni-Shia clash of one hundred years ago does, to a certain extent, have its place in the city’s memory. Conversations with participants took place in a Shiite mosque, or else during other religious gatherings at congregants’ homes. These informal, somewhat spontaneous conditions helped me to collect field data, because I often noticed that during many face-to-face interviews, when we had agreed to a specific time and topic for conversation, many participants deviated from the topic of my questions, or there was palpable tension in their answers. I observed that participants occasionally spent a long time searching for an answer or censored their responses. My participation in the religious rites alongside study participants also assisted me in collecting material; we went to the mosque together, performed prayers together, and were present together at funerals and wedding ceremonies.

Historical Context

Central Asian Iranians, variously called ironi, fors, and shiya (meaning “Shiite”), are one of the ethnic groups residing in the territory of present-day Uzbekistan. Most are descendants of various immigrant groups (both voluntarily and forcefully displaced) from the territory of present-day Iran. In some cases, their ancestors came from northern Afghanistan during the period from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century.

The classification of Central Asian Iranians as a separate group has to do with historical events of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Primarily, this means the conflict between the Safavid and Shaybanid states that began in the sixteenth century and which, aside from being a military conflict, also took on the trappings of a “war for the faith.” Shah Ismail’s declaration of Shiism as the Iranian state religion in the sixteenth century resulted in a break in relations with the Central Asian region. That break manifested itself in the form of fatwas issued by Central Asian clerics at the end of the sixteenth century, expelling followers of Shiism from the Muslim fold, and declaring them subject to enslavement. Shaybanids policies reflected this, as did the later policies of the Ashtrakhanids and Mangyts regarding the forced resettlement of people from Khorasan to Bukhara from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.^[6]

Soviet ethnographer Olga Sukhareva writes that people resettled from Merv in the eighteenth century, called “Marvi,” formed the backbone of the modern-day Iranian community in Bukhara.^[7] Just as in Khiva, Bukhara had large numbers of Persians in involuntary servitude: people who were bought and sold at specialized markets and put to work in various economic spheres, from domestic labor to agriculture. Immigrants from Iran were not the only ones who served as a source to replenish the involuntary labor forces. The same happened with residents of North Afghanistan—Sunnis who had been seized while fleeing the region and were renamed “Shiites” and passed off as Persian heretics.

After the conquest of Central Asia in the late nineteenth century, the Russian Empire signed treaties with the Khivan khanate and the Bukharan emirate in 1873, which included provisions to abolish slavery in those territories.^[8] After slavery was abolished, some former slaves returned to Persia, while others remained in Central Asia.

It would be a mistake to insist that Persians were of low social status in the Central Asian states; they were present in all social strata of nineteenth-century Bukharan society, from peasants to tradesmen to merchants to sarbaz in the Bukharan emir’s army (where, in most cases, they held roles in the command), and they also served as bureaucrats at various levels.^[9] They were attractive bureaucrats to the rulers of the Mangyt dynasty in Bukhara, who sought to break the influence of Uzbek clans over the emirate’s internal affairs and appointed Persians with no kinship ties to the Bukharan elite of the time to many important positions.^[10] This was often interpreted as Iranian dominance, which angered many in feudal circles within the emirate.

A majority of the Persian population were temporary migrants who were merchants and seasonal laborers from various regions of Persia. In Bukhara, the Iranian population previously settled in the western part of the city (the Juibar or Hiyobon neighborhoods), and there were also smaller groups in the Tup-khona and Dust-Churogosi neighborhoods (the central part of the city). Furthermore, there was an Iranian population residing in the settlements of Kum-Rabat, Afshar-mahalla, and others.^[11] Another city where immigrants from the Iranian highlands concentrated was Samarqand. The Iranian population took shape by the methods described above, and in the nineteenth century, Iranian migrants were one of the fastest-growing groups due to active migration.

Settled compactly in southwestern Samarqand, in the Pandjob district, as well as in villages around the city itself, Samarqandi Iranians are the biggest group (most likely, more than half) of all Central Asian Iranians living in Uzbekistan. One reason, aside from the socio-economic conditions in the region, was the fact that a certain portion of Bukharan Persians moved to Samarqand and its environs after the events of 1910. Currently, there are small communities of Iranians in the Jizzakh, Qashqadaryo and Surxondaryo provinces. While classified and defined as Iranians, they do not constitute a single, entire ethnic group, and currently a strong tendency toward local identity (Bukharan or Samarqandi Iranians) has been evident.

One powerful influence on this was the migrants’ origins in different regions of Persia: the Marvi (originally from Merv), the Sabzevari (Sabzevar), the Mashhadi (Mashhad), or the Persiyon (the label for Iranian Azerbaijanis). They had a past of cultural and social differences, and represented different ethnic groups which previously lived in Persia and northern Afghanistan (Persians, Turks, and others). Furthermore, a certain percentage were Persian subjects, classified differently at the bureaucratic and everyday level by both government officials and the Iranian population who had previously settled in that region. For instance, according to 1910 data, approximately 300 Persian subjects and around 16,000 Iranians, who were subjects of the Russian Empire, lived in Samarqand.^[12]

Currently, there are also observable linguistic differences: while the Bukharan Iranians speak Tajik, the Samarqandi Iranians use Uzbek in everyday life. This is another indication that migrants from Persia originally came from different regions: Khorasan, Iranian Azerbaijan, and others. One important point is that there is no broad, low-level communication between the various groups (Samarqandis, Bukharans, Jizzakhis); each group exists on its own. The common denominator for them all is their adherence to Twelver Shiism, and certain differences, in terms of rites commemorating the cycle of life, with regard to the surrounding Uzbek or Tajik population.

There is no precise statistical data on the number of Iranians residing in present-day Uzbekistan. Firstly, as of this writing, no census of the population has yet been completed in independent Uzbekistan. Second, some Central Asian Iranians are recorded in official registers as Tajiks or Uzbeks. According to various counts from the Soviet period, the number of Iranians was 9,830 in 1926, 20,026 in 1979, and 24,770 in 1989.^[13] However, these figures in no way reflect the actual size of the Iranian population. Their numbers can be roughly estimated at between 50,000 and 90,000. By similar estimates, there are approximately 10,000 to 15,000 Iranians living in Bukhara and the surrounding area, although those numbers cannot be verified and are based only on the assumptions of my informants.

Current Times

Research by Soviet ethnographers who studied the population of Bukhara in the second half of the twentieth century indicates that the city’s Iranian population maintained its identity in terms of religious creed (Shiite equals Iranian). According to this data, one marker of identity was group mourning of events during the days of Muharram.^[14] In contrast, however, I have also had discussions with Iranian Sunnis whose identity is based on family memory and the migration of an ancestor from Iran. Both in Soviet times and in the present period, Bukharan Iranians live in various regions of Bukhara, mixed with their Bukharan Sunni neighbors. Currently, the city’s “Trikotazhka” (unofficial name) district (formerly Juibar) is considered the Iranian section of the city; the Iranians living there no longer constitute an overwhelming majority, but the centers of contemporary Shiite life in the city are located there. These are, first and foremost, the Shiite mosques, Haji Mir Ali, and Hussainiya.^[15] It was built in early 1905, closed in 1935, and reopened in 1989. The whole complex is centered around two connected courtyards, the first containing the mosque and administrative building, restored in the early 2000s, and the second containing the Hussainiya. This is used for daily prayers for men, and during Muharram, is the place for women’s religious gatherings.

This same neighborhood is home to the auliyo (“holy place”), where soil is buried which, according to study participants, was brought over 200 years ago from the graves of the Shiite imams Muhammad al-Baqir and Ja’far al-Sadyq, near Medina, now in Saudi Arabia. The “holy place” itself was restored in the early 1990s and is run by the Shiite community. The overseers are Seyid Huseyn and his son Murtazo, who act as rouzekhans during the month of Muharram.^[16] I should note that the auliyo is not visited exclusively by Shiites; Sunnis who live nearby come there, too. The same can be seen at the Haji Mir Ali Shia mosque, during the mourning days in Muharram, which many appreciate as a neighborly act. Near this auliyo, in the same neighborhood, there is a cemetery containing burial plots for the city’s Shiite community.

Outside of Bukhara, Iranians also live in the neighboring villages Afshar-mahalla and Tor-tor mahalla; in the latter, a two-story Hussainiya from the early twentieth century has been preserved, which is no longer active. Finally, outside the city of Kagan (ten kilometers from Bukhara) is the village of Zirobod, where study participants tell me that Iranians currently comprise a little over half the population, and which has its own small Shiite mosque. There are three Shiite mosques currently active in Uzbekistan, including, for example, in Samarqand’s Pandjob neighborhood, and one more is being built outside of town. In Uzbekistan, Shiite mosques, like Sunni mosques, fall under the jurisdiction of the country’s Spiritual Administration. This is exercised through supervision of the mosques’ inner workings, through recommendations for and approvals of the Friday sermons, through control of financial resources, and more.

According to ethnographer Fania Liushkevich, the Zirobod Iranians differ in several ways from the Bukharan Iranians.^[17] Their dialect of Tajik has more parallels to the Khorasan dialect of Farsi, indicating that some of their ancestors were natives of the northeastern part of Iran. There are also differences in rites for the cycle of life. My informants told me that in Soviet times, the Zirobodis distinguished themselves from the Bukharans with their greater degree of religiosity, expressed in requirements to hold religious gatherings at home during Muharram, which was the result of a greater freedom from oversight by government agencies which prevented religious events from being held in Bukhara itself.

The religious history of Bukharan Shiites has in many respects repeated the trajectory of post-Soviet Islam in Uzbekistan. Following the Soviet period, when contacts with fellow believers outside the country were cut off, religiosity had been reduced to merely mundane, everyday religious rituals. We can state with confidence that during the Soviet period, the Shiism of the Bukharan Iranians became local in nature, and transformed into a “tradition” handed down from “fathers and grandfathers,” which was expressed in everyday religiosity (performing prayers, holding various events connected with the Shiite religious calendar). Many participants, especially older ones, knew little about the present state of Twelver Shiism, its internal dynamics, political movements, or religious authority figures (the marja al-taqlid).^[18] In many respects, their religious life is on Uzbekistan’s Islamic margins; influencing this is the fact that the Shiite mosques, as mentioned above, as well as other spheres of religious life (pilgrimages to Mecca), and until recently travel to Iraq and Iran, have been subject to approval by special agencies overseeing the religious sector in the republic.

Turning to look at the tradition of commemorating the death of Imam Husayn with a ten-day mourning period in the lunar month of Muharram, so important for Imamite Shi’as, in Bukhara, this commemoration is quite simple in comparison to Iran or other regions of the Shiite world. People assemble near evening at the Haji Mir Ali mosque. After the evening prayers, they listen to a sermon by the imam of the mosque, and then the maddah performs mourning odes and pangyrics (marsiya and nouha [noha]), followed by a ritual meal which concludes the ceremony.

Several aspects which are characteristic of Iran and other regions where Shiism is widespread—mass processions (dasta), theatrical performances (ta’zieh ),and rituals on Ashura including the slicing of the skin on one’s head (tatbir)—are completely absent in Bukhara and considered foreign by the local Shiites.

Another marker of religious identity I would name would be the practice of pilgrimage to the atabat, the tombs of the Shiite imams in Iraq, revered by Shiites, and to the mausoleum of the eighth Shiite imam, Imam Reza, in the Iranian city of Mashhad. These pilgrimages, after a degree of liberalization with respect to religion under the new president Shavkat Mirziyoyev, have now begun to be taken by Bukharan Shiites with no particular difficulties or limitations of the kind that arose during Islom Karimov’s term in office. Pilgrimage practices, which entitle pilgrims to the status of Karbalai or Mashhadi, create new forms of hierarchy by means of the personal symbolic capital resulting from such trips. Through these pilgrimage practices, members of the local community are integrated into a trans-local Shiite space.

It seems necessary to mention the recognized religious leaders of Bukhara’s Shiite community in the early Soviet and late Soviet periods. First was Seyid Haji Mir Ali (1867–1925), born in a community of Turkic-speaking Iranians in Sochaki-Poyon, near Samarqand. At age 15, he moved to Bukhara to study in the local madrasa, and afterwards moved to Najaf in Iraq. He then completed the haj and returned to Bukhara, where he was recognized as a religious authority, a mujtahid. Politically repressed in 1925, he was exiled to Arkhangelsk, and died there.^[19] He was an active participant in the events of 1910.

The second was Ibrogim Muhammad Kosimi (or Kosymov), better known as Kosim Persiyon (1911–1997). A native of Mashhad in Iran, and an Azerbaijani, he moved from Sarahs (Turkmenistan), where he finished his studies, to Bukhara in 1947. He worked as an accountant during the Soviet period, and wrote religious poetry in Turkic and Farsi. Starting in the 1950s, he was the head of Bukhara’s Shia community,^[20] and taught various students to recite from the Qur’an and perform mourning odes and elegies (the marsiya and nouha). His authority and status are recognized not only among Bukharan Shiites, but also among religious people of the older generation among the local Sunnis.

These two religious figures, in my view, give Bukhara the local status of being another center, currently second only to Samarqand in terms of having an active Iranian population. Samarqand may be the place that becomes the center for local Shiism in Uzbekistan because it has more extensive contact with the Iranians, both through official structures and unofficially (through networks of believers), and because of the availability of direct flights to Mashhad in Iran.

At the level of everyday religious life, some religious families of seyids currently maintain their symbolic and social capital, as reflected in their constant participation both at religious gatherings and at life-cycle rituals (weddings, births, funerals). But there are also cases when seyids of the older Shia generation are invited to be honored guests at Sunni events (as reciters of the Qur’an). At the same time, however, study participants told me that the seyids’ status is much lower now than in the Soviet period, when many of them enjoyed unimpeachable authority. One reason for this is that their families previously held a certain monopoly on religious knowledge, while in the post-Soviet period, the appearance of accessible religious sources and literature undermined that monopoly.

It would be an error to believe that Bukharan Shiites are a separate group, existing only in their own social sphere. Something like that was true in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when, according to historical sources, many Iranians lived in their own closed-off neighborhoods and formed trade groups along religious lines. Many citizens of Soviet Uzbekistan passed through the same Soviet-era institutions (schools, the army, party organizations, and the experience of Soviet everyday life), and Bukharan Shiites were no exception. While many scholars have written about a new hybrid identity, the appearance of the “Soviet Muslim” category, when it comes to Bukharan Iranians, we can introduce the category of “Soviet Shia Muslim.” This found expression is a kind of duality: Shiite at home, and Soviet citizen in society. The Soviet experience relating to Islam in Central Asia operated identically for the Shiite community of Bukhara.

The post-Soviet period in Uzbekistan, with its transformation of Soviet society, affected the Bukharan Iranians as much as other groups in the city. Today, Iranians are part of Bukhara’s social space, included in various types of local networks (business, migration). One example is the activation of trans-border “Bukharan” networks in a period of labor migration to Russia, Turkey, and South Korea. At the same time, as in indication of what portion of Iranians follow fairly secular lifestyles, members of that community control part of the alcohol production business in the city.

Bukharan Iranians’ identity hinges primarily on the religious component; within this category, “Shiite” means “Persian,” and vice versa. In their official documents, many Iranians are registered as “Uzbeks” or “Tajiks.” Many participants call themselves fors (Persian), considering the ethnic definition of ironi to be incorrect.

The Events of 1910

In this section, I will now turn to the events of 1910 drawing on G. Tsviling’s work, which was written in Russian for use by imperial officials. The author sheds light on the chronology of events in detail.^[21]

On January 9, 1910, near the Samarqand Gates in Old Bukhara (the center of the city, as it had been a hundred years previously), the Persians began a public mourning event on the anniversary of the death of Husayn, the day called Ashura (pronounced locally as “ashuri”). Accompanying the public processions (dasta), which can be seen in the present day in areas where Shiism is widespread, there were often performative acts such as self-flagellation with chains (zinjir zani), the “slicing off” of heads with swords (gama zani or tatbir) and beating oneself on the chest (sine zani).

As Ol’ga Sukhareva writes, such displays of mourning by Shiites were familiar to local, Bukharan Sunnis who attended the Shiite events that took place exclusively in neighborhoods where Iranians lived.^[22] But on January 9, the Shiite procession began in the center of the city, possibly with the permission of the prime minister (kushbegi) of the emirate, Astankul, who was ethnically Persian. The procession of the excited crowd of Shiites through the center of the city was met with a rowdy response from the assembled crowd, including many pupils (mulla bacha) from Bukhara’s Sunni madrasas, who mocked the Persians as they expressed their grief. Wanting to teach the mocking audience a lesson, some participants of the Shiite procession attacked the mulla bacha in the crowd, and in the ensuing scuffle, one of them was killed, and several were wounded.

After the incident, a delegation of Sunni mullahs was sent to Astankul, asking him to respond to the incident and punish the guilty, and to accept the body of the murdered student for burial. They had no success, and in fact, the mullahs were arrested. That triggered more upheaval in the city, where many people who were dissatisfied with Persian dominance in the emirate’s official ranks interpreted Astankul’s actions as a way to protect his fellow believers. After the arrest of the mullahs, a large crowd of the city’s angry Sunnis gathered at the public square at the Registan, demanding that the prisoners be released, and the instigators be punished. The kushbegi attempted to disperse the crowd, ordering soldiers to open fire.

Tsvilling writes that all these central events took place on January 10. The Sunnis emboldened by anti-Shiite sermons at the mosques and rumors of an attack by Shiites that had allegedly taken place either on the Sunni mosque of Juibar (located next to the neighborhood where the Persians lived) or on the Sunni mosque in Hiyobon (where there was a mixed Sunni-Shiite population). Meanwhile, the Shiite population was also primed for conflict, thanks to quickly circulating rumors about the planned assassination of the Bukharan Shiite leader, Seyid Haji Mir Ali. Residents of the Shia neighborhoods and Persians from the adjacent villages both came to the cleric’s defense.

The Sunnis who penetrated into the Hiyobon quarter that day were met by Shiite resistance. Many were shot from the rooftops in the neighborhood’s narrow streets. In Tsvilling’s opinion, this marked the start of the active phase of the conflict, when seeing that the Emir’s soldiers were not interfering to impose order, the crowd turned to vigilante justice, storming stores and workshops belonging to Iranians and killing any Persians they came across, who answered in kind. While the Persians were fairly well-armed in their own neighborhoods, thanks (Tsvilling says) to secret assistance from the kushbegi, and were relatively safe, the brunt of the violence was born by Shiites living in mixed neighborhoods with Sunnis.

On January 11, the pogroms continued, and seeing no way to stop them, the Russian political leadership in Bukhara, who represented the political and economic interests of the Russian Empire in the emirate, decided to bring in troops to defend Russian subjects and Russian institutions. On January 12, authorities in St. Petersburg ordered the general in charge of the Turkestani Army, Major General Heinrich Liliental, to Bukhara. After his arrival, he met with the Sunni mullahs and convinced them to ask their fellow believers to end the violence. This approach proved successful, and a truce was reached. January 14 was declared a city-wide day of mourning. On January 15, in the presence of General Liliental, delegates from the Sunni side (their names and other information have not been recorded anywhere) and the Shiite side (represented by Seyid Haji Mir Ali) met at the Registan Square near the Ark and shook hands to signal an end to the conflict. According to Tsvilling, the total number of dead was around 500, but that figure could not be verified, given that the bodies of the dead on both sides were dumped in canals or quickly removed for burial. The author himself mentions a possible figure of 1000 killed.

Several historians offer a different version of what happened.^[23] First, many saw the events of January 1910 as a response to the dominance of Persians in the official ranks of the Bukharan emirate, and as an attempt to remove Astankul, the Persian prime minister who was hated in many circles. They say the conflict had been planned well in advance, with the involvement of an outside party (Ottoman Turkey), which had sent agents into the emirate’s territory with the goal of weakening the influence of the Russian Empire. In this version, the kushbegi Astankul was seen as an agent of Russian interests, as were the Bukharan Persians, who supported the Russian authorities.

I will not get into the details of the historical puzzle here, leaving that topic to be sorted out by historians and scholars of the region. Instead, I will focus on contemporary representations and collective memory of the events.

Memory and Identity

The January 1910 events had the most significant impact on the self-identity and self-representation of Bukhara’s Iranians, and this can be sensed to a certain extent even today. Sukhareva provides an interesting quotation concerning the identity of Bukharan Iranians in the Soviet period:

It was after this (the January 1910 events) that the ethnic group comprised of various elements, formerly bearing the name “ironi” or “marvi,” rejected those names and started to call itself “fars” (fors). This halted the process of their ethnic integration with native Bukharans, which had been evident for the past century; after a hundred and fifty years of life in Bukhara, the fars had merged with them almost completely in terms of language and culture, so that the main difference between them had become their adherence to different strains of Islam.^[24]

To this, we should add that the traumatic experience of the past and its representations became the “border,” to a certain extent, between the Iranians of Bukhara and other communities within the city. Fania Liushkevich offers the following, in support of the thesis of the traumatic experience of the past and its influence on identity:

The name “fors” entered wider use mainly in Bukhara after the clash with Shiites provoked by Sunni religious leaders in 1910, as a consequence of which the direct use of the term “ironi shiite” became undesirable, and sometimes impossible. The term “fors,” therefore, was used only for part of the group, and existed alongside the general name “ironi,” used mainly as an official title in documents and in conversations with outsiders.^[25]

In the same place, we read:

As field data indicate, within a single family, members of different generations define themselves differently. The names “ironi” and “fors” are preserved in official documents only among members of the older generation. Middle-aged and especially younger people, for whom, naturally, religious belonging no longer has such significance, in Bukhara, for example, officially call themselves Tajiks or Uzbeks.^[26]

This has been confirmed by several older informants I interviewed during my visits to Bukhara in 2018 and 2022:

My father was registered as fors, but I registered us as Tajiks. That was during Soviet times . . . why? He didn’t want us to have problems due to our nationality . . . but still, we knew that even if we were registered as Uzbeks or Tajiks, at home we’d behave like Persian Shiites.^[27]

The reason for such caution was that the Bukharan Sunnis who participated in the 1910 events, or their relatives, mostly still lived in Bukhara. The wariness also might have stemmed from retribution by the relatives of those who were killed, which also caused various attempts by participants to de-emphasize their “Iranianness.” As Participant A recalls:

My father often told me: Don’t tell anyone, not even at school with your friends, that we do ashuri at home. Behave like a Tajik or Uzbek outside the house and try not to tell anyone you’re an Iranian. My father worried about us, even in Soviet times. He’d heard the same instructions from his own father, our grandfather, who saw the 1910 events happen.^[28]

As can be seen from this participant’s story, even in the Soviet period, identity markers important for Bukharan Iranians had taken shape, which included both mourning traditions for Muharram and family memories about the past tragedy. Another participant, a 75-year-old man, told me about relations between Bukhara’s Sunnis and Shiites during Soviet times. He was a retired teacher I met at the Shiite “holy place” in the “Trikotazhka” district.

I don’t go to the mosque myself, though my father was a Shiite mullah. Basically, the Sunni mullahs were at fault for the events of 1910. They deceived the people back then, stirred up trouble, just like now. They were illiterate back then, and it’s the same thing now, they don’t know Arabic, but they sit there lecturing people. Basically, I think that it wasn’t just us in Bukhara who had troubles in 1910, there was also the revolution in 1905, and all that’s obviously connected. You ask what relations used to be like, and I’ll tell you honestly, not too good. We didn’t like each other. It’s now that everyone’s mixed together, some have a Sunni wife or Sunni relatives, everything’s different now.^[29]

Turning to the transformation of memory representations, which shed certain details over the course of many years and take on new meanings, I want to provide an excerpt from a conversation with a religious Iranian a little over 45 years old:

I’ve read Bartol’d and Sukhareva, so that’s all correct from the history point of view. Why did that happen in January 1910? There was the prime minister Astankul under the Emir, also an Iranian Shiite. Things were going well in the emirate under him, and because of that, the Sunnis hated him, and tried everything to get rid of him. Basically, like Faizulla Khodzhaev wrote, the one who did the revolution in Bukhara, it was the Bukharan intelligentsia and the peasants from Ferghana, there were really a lot of them back then, who came either to work or to study in the madrasas. Then the ones in the madrasas, the mulla bacha, when ashuri started, and the Shiites went to the center of the city for the parade, from our district of “Trikotazhka,” and from nearby villages—Afshar mahalla, Tor-tor mahalla, they all went with their swords for gama zani, some of them with chains to beat themselves. But in the madrasas, the mullahs told the students, go and watch. They did go and watch the ashuri like some kind of entertainment. There was an Iranian blacksmith then, Safar Ali, he warned the mulla bacha several times: stop laughing, this isn’t for your entertainment. When they started laughing again, he couldn’t help it, and he gave it to one of the mullah bacha like he deserved and he died, but you know, a blacksmith’s fists are heavy. Then things got going, all the Sunnis had been waiting for it, things got going like according to someone’s command… And at that time, Emir Alimkhan was the bek in Karshi, and he heard about the riots in Bukhara and came from there with his soldiers, and then he instilled order.^[30]

Here, it is interesting the way the narrative has transformed, completely excluding mention of how Russian forces were involved in restoring order in the city. This can be largely explained by the observed tendency toward complete de-Sovietization in Uzbekistan in the post-Soviet period. For many informants, “Soviet” is a synonym for “Russian,” and I often heard similar comparisons in which some residents, mentioning the Soviet period, called it the “period of the Russians.” The merging of the Russian with the Soviet, in turn, occurred in the form of leveling out the local particularities of the Russian culture in exchange for a generic Soviet culture, in which cultural patterns of urban cultures from the big cities (Moscow, Saint Petersburg) played an active role.

The Sunni–Shiite conflict of 1910, in large part, was a forbidden and painful topic for Iranian informants of the older generation (older than age 60), many of whom openly expressed the opinion to me that this topic ought not to be brought up at all, much less be the subject of an article. With respect to the Iranians of the city, various opinions circulate, which I often heard in chance conversations. First of all, I was able to perceive in them a certain reserve, whereby many of them did not want to allow outsiders into their circle. There will be some reasons, one of them is fear that new relatives will be descendants of Sunni Muslim active members who took part in the 1910 event:

“I have a friend, he met an Iranian girl and wanted to marry her, but her parents were totally against it. But they’re basically Bukharans just like us, only different with their ‘Iranian faith’ (Shiism), but otherwise, we are the same as them.”^[31]

At the same time, however, I also heard narratives about the “newcomer” or not “local” origins of Bukharan Iranians, excluding them from the status of the city’s “autochthonous” population. During my winter 2018 trip, I happened to have a conversation with a driver, an Uzbek man about 40 years old, who expressed similar thoughts:

You came to study our Bukharan Iranians. I’ll tell you, they’re like us now, but before, they were slaves. My grandma and grandpa told me that our ancestors bought those Iranians at the bazaar under the Emir. They worked for my ancestors. There were even documents about that, about owning slaves, but then they were set free. So they stayed in Bukhara and live here now.^[32]

The presence of ideas about the “newcomer” status of the Iranians, in my view, consequences of the nation-building politics, both Soviet and post-Soviet. In this view, Uzbekistan is described as the cradle of Uzbek culture, and various periods of history, including the pre-Islamic period, are considered integral parts of Uzbek statehood. While certain similarities can be observed with respect to Tajiks, Kazakhs, and other Central Asian peoples, partly thanks to the Soviet experience, when it comes to Iranians, there is a visible, direct connection to the state of Iran, which for many residents of Uzbekistan looks foreign and alien, and has visible dissimilarities in the form of a different twentieth-century history and different political structure.

As a result of such accusations against Bukharan Iranians as “newcomers,” among that community, narratives can be heard of incorporation into the historical discourse of independent Uzbekistan, as well as the local, Bukharan historical discourse. One aspect of the former has to do with the way local authorities actively promote cultural landmarks in Bukhara as historical achievements of “Uzbek statehood” dating back to antiquity, whereas many Iranians see them as evidence of the long-lasting presence of Persian culture in the region. Their names, the use of the Persian language in documents stored in the government museums in Bukhara, and the inscriptions in the doorways of the old mosques and mausoleums of Muslim saints are all evidence for this. In addition, there are works by various historians and reference sources on the population of Uzbekistan, for example the Ethnic Atlas of Uzbekistan, indicating the presence of Iranians in ancient times. Literary sources play a significant role: for example, there is Abu Bakr Muhammad Narshakhi’s work, History of Bukhara, which includes a plotline about the hero Siyavush building the Ark. Some older participants opine that he was an Iranian, since he is also described in the Persian epic, the Shahnameh. Such materials make the presence of Iranians in Central Asian territory archetypal, giving them subjectivity and, to a certain extent, the role of kulturtrager. We can also add inclusion in the state historical narrative, for example the various events held in Uzbekistan in connection with the 2700th anniversary of the creation of the central text of Zoroastrianism, the Avesta, in 2001. Here, Zoroastrianism is perceived by many participants as an Iranian religion, which proves, once again, that Iranians lived in the region. At the same time, the existence of various rites using fire in the Bukharan cultural realm (lighting candles at the “holy places,” bonfires in the groom’s path during a wedding ceremony, and more) is seen by many participants—thanks in part to the work of Soviet ethnographers who described such things as “remnants of pre-Islamic faiths”—as a continuation of the “Iranian” (Zoroastrian) tradition, which exerted a significant influence in Central Asia.^[33]

Incorporation into the local context, which also uses the state historical narrative, looks like the following: many Muslim holy sites are seen as Shiite, places where many of the buried traced their ancestry back to the Prophet Muhammad as seyids:

“Look, here in Bukhara we have the mausoleum of Bakhautdin Nakshbandi. He’s a seyid and that means he’s a Shiite. How could he not be a Shiite if he’s a seyid? But before, they probably concealed their faith, and many people consider them Sunnis.”^[34]

Another argument that makes active use of a religious framework comes from the numerous “holy places” in the republic connected with Imam Ali or his sons Hasan, Husayn, and Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya. A “sacred site” (visited by saints), or cenotaph associated with Imam Hasan and Imam Husayn, for example, is situated 160 km north of Bukhara, not far from the city of Nurota in Navoiy Province. In this same province, in the settlement of Gazgon, there is a holy place where, according to hagiographic legends, Imam Ali himself once visited. While for a majority of the republic’s population (Hanafi Sunnis) such spots are places all Muslims revere, for Bukharan Shiites, they are evidence that venerated figures of Shiism visited Central Asia. They also take this as clear evidence of Shiism’s presence in the region: “If there weren’t Shiites here among us, who did those imams come to visit? Surely not to the Sunnis?”

The Religious Component in the Representation of the Past

I heard this kind of narrative from more religious people. In these ideas, figures revered in Shiism play an important role, as described above, and in addition, so do the Shia places on the map of Bukhara: the auliyo of Muhammad al-Baqir and Ja’far al-Sadyq and the Shiite mosque named for Haji Mir Ali:

My father told me how he was working in one company as night watchman in the 1960s and he had a buddy who was a Sunni. Then one day he said, what an awesome auliyo you guys have. Remember when there were riots in Bukhara in 1910? I was there, all us Sunnis got together, a lot of us, some had a knife, some had clubs, we wanted to go and murder you Shiites. When we got to the Karakul Gates [located currently in the “Trikotazhka” district], there was the Iranian neighborhood behind them. The Emir’s soldiers closed the gates and wouldn’t let us through, but there weren’t many of them, maybe ten men. We told them to open the gates anyway or we’d kill the soldiers too. They opened the gates, and there, you wouldn’t believe it, there were troops and in front of them a man in a black cloak, and under that we could see the split-tipped sword Zulfikar. He was Imam Ali. We all got scared and ran away in different directions, then after a while, they opened the gates again, but nobody was there anymore.^[35]

As evidence to support his stories, the participant added that the Sunni who told that story was a religious man even in Soviet times and would not have lied. Another participant, who I met in Haji Mir Ali Shia mosque, told me about the history of Shia doctrine, and the venerated figure of Imam Ali. As he states:

You know, when all that started in January 1910, many of us Shiites ran here to the mosque to take shelter. Many started to pray to escape death. The gates to the mosque were closed, but the Sunnis were banging on them, they wanted to break them down to get inside. At one point, a light appeared from the hussainiya’s mihrab (meaning the Hussainiya on the grounds of the Haji Mir Ali mosque), and Imam Ali himself walked out with his sword Zulfikar. He walked out through the mosque’s gates and struck down everyone who wanted to kill us Shiites.^[36]

In analyzing narratives like these, I can say that they perform a compensatory function, mitigating the traumatic representation of the past. We must not forget that the Shiites were long a minority, and even oppressed by the Sunni majority. This is the source of their concept of themselves as a small group which, at the same time, is constantly defending their rights to the authenticity of their faith. Often, among the various Shia groups among which I have been able to conduct fieldwork (Moscow and southern Dagestan), there is a self-concept of being the not very numerous followers of Imam Husayn at the battle of Karbala, who despite the risk of death, remained loyal to their imam. Such loyalty is rewarded with divine protection in life’s difficult moments.

Here we can see similar ideas, by which the Bukharan Shiites, blameless victims, suddenly find assistance from the first Shiite imam, Ali ibn Abu Talib, who Shiites believe is the champion of justice. After all, the events of 1910 were perceived by many Bukharan Iranians as an act of injustice and a conspiracy against them. In this sense, the incorporation of Shiite places in the city into the narrative is no accident. For many participants, the Shiite mosque itself, aside from being a place for everyday religious practice, acts as a kind of sacrosanct local center. This is confirmed by multiple stories about miraculous healings and children born after a visit to the Shiite mosque. Moreover, some protagonists in these tales are not Shiites or even Muslims, which again proves the power of the Shiite mosque.

In large part, such stories also serve compensatory functions, showing that the Shiites also have their own places with sacred power, whereas the above-mentioned pilgrimage destinations in Nurota, with significance for all Muslims, are overseen by Sunni managers, which somewhat limits Bukharan Shiites’ ability to conduct various rituals there. On the grounds of Shiite places, on the other hand, there are no such limitations, and stories like these are again designed to prove the truth of the Shiite beliefs study participants follow. These kinds of stories may have appeared as a reaction to local Sunnis’ accusations and arguments against Shiites that their beliefs were incorrect.

To a certain extent, it is appropriate to consider such narratives through a research lens connected with the ontological turn in anthropology—with the interaction between the world of people and the world not of people. Through narratives like these, it is clear that local Shiite spaces, in the understanding of certain informants, are endowed with agency and “come alive” through interactions with persons who are revered in Shiism.

At the same time, memory of the past has found reflection in the religious sphere of a new generation. Among the older generation, in the past as well as in the present, ideas still circulate that it is better not to advertise one’s Shiism. This is expressed in a ban against online advertising of mourning gatherings in Muharram, and against holding processions outside the mosque, or even, up until recently, a ban against self-flagellation with chains (zinjir zani); in light of this, many participants had made special trips to the village of Zirobod, where it is not forbidden. At the same time, the younger generation sees such bans and limitations as artificial, as they watch on social media as Shiism develops in Samarqand and want to see a similar situation in Bukhara. Participants of the older generation told me that these bans are necessary to avoid giving an opening to the Sunnis, for whom the public display of mourning by Shiites served as a trigger for mass murder and riots more than a hundred years ago.

Such fears are not ungrounded, for the most part, and they have some resonance in the post-Soviet period. Relations between the city’s Sunni majority and the Iranians in that period, according to study participants, have been different. There were incidents when a conflict escalated to verbal confrontations (but without the use of physical force in support of their religious arguments) in conversations with more “orthodox” Sunnis. While, as study participants often emphasized, local Sunnis are more inclined to be peaceful and loyal regarding differences with Shia religious practices, young believers (Sunnis), especially in Ferghana, have begun agitating against local Shiites there. This was typical of the 1990s, when Uzbekistan, like other Central Asian countries, was shaken by the so-called “Islamic revival.” One center of this “rising” was the Ferghana Valley;^[37] there, this phenomenon of the present time had the same outlines as an image from the past: remember that according to historical sources and oral narratives, the instigators of the 1910 riots were madrasa students from the Ferghana Valley.

Such fears are also reinforced by repression by the government; according to the website AsiaTerra,^[38] the imam of the Shia Haji Mir Ali Mosque was arrested in 1999 and given a five-year sentence. In addition, that same year, the authorities shut down five Shiite mosques, leaving only two open: one in Bukhara and one in Zirobod. The authorities have erected certain obstacles to re-opening them. Aside from the arrest of the mosque’s imam, in 2017 another member of the Shia community was arrested and charged with illegally distributing Russian-language Shiite religious materials that were banned in Uzbekistan.^[39] Such examples clearly reinforce the idea that too blatantly displaying one’s Shiite identity is not desirable.

Absence of a Traumatic Framework of Memory in the Post-Soviet Generation

 As mentioned above, for many young believers under age 40, the older generation’s prohibitions are completely incomprehensible. One of the reasons for this is the fact that many of the young believers have practically no concept of the events of 1910. Many were even surprised when I told them about it. This split has much to do with the post-Soviet period, where the transformation of society and changes in historical policies initiated by government authorities, has been no place for traumatic representations of the past. On the other hand, with the relative liberalization of the religious sphere, and the opportunity to openly position oneself as a believer within the boundaries permitted by the state, the demand for such memory baggage has also fallen, having been left behind in the Soviet period.

While in the past, this sort of family memory played a role as a kind of identity marker, in the present, it has been actively replaced by the religious component. In furtherance of this thesis, I can cite the fact that in the Soviet period, due to government policies, people lived with the memories of how their fathers and grandfathers could freely exercise their religious beliefs in the past, while they did not have the same ability in the present. This cycling back to the past also occurred in everyday religious life, when people used old religious texts and books handed down and preserved as family relics. Considering that true religiosity, along with religious knowledge, had been left in the past, this can be called the conservation of the past. Yet in the present day, meaning in the post-Karimov period in Uzbekistan, the present is actively advancing to replace the past. This is revealed in the accessibility of various religious sources in various formats (audio and video lectures from various Shiite internet preachers, even in Russian), the ability to travel to Shiite centers, and connection to Shiite religious networks (both local and trans-local). The younger generation is no longer afraid to express and position themselves as Shiites, and in that sort of conservation of the past, they see a hindrance to the development of their own religious community. That is to say that being a Shiite is no longer about considering oneself a victim or a member of a small, local community, but primarily about being a participant in a large, virtual Shiite community.

Many members of the younger generation are actively involved in Shiite religious networks. Labor migration to Russia’s major cities, such as Moscow, is one factor facilitating this. There are various types of Shiite centers located there (Hussainiyas and groups of believers) with which they can forge low-level contacts. Another factor that facilitates the development of such religious networks is the appearance of accessible Shiite content in cyberspace, dedicated to questions of Shiism.

Conclusion

As can be seen from the examples of memory representations among members of various generations and groups in the Bukharan Shiite environment, there are various representations, and outside narratives are actively being inserted into them. All this demonstrates that collective memory is not memory about the past as such; rather, it is a reflection of the present social and political situation in a society, which has various breaks inside the group, through people’s generational, religious, and social status. We could say that collective memory can be broken down into individual fragments and is a place where each member of society chooses the fragment they need, the fragment they find interesting and appropriate to their position.

To transition directly to the topic of my modest study here, we must clearly delineate the following positions. The clash between Shiites and Sunnis in January 1910 was reflected in the identity of Bukhara’s Iranians, in the sense that many of them stopped openly advertising their identity in the subsequent Soviet period. This period, in turn, played a dual role in this process. On one hand, it had a leveling effect, through its institutions and the creation, to some extent, of the “Soviet man” of Central Asia. On the other hand, it exerted a conservative influence on memory representations, whereby representations of the past became part of local history, endowing them with the status of family relics. In my view, one circumstance impacting this was that there was no official reporting on the events of 1910, and no evaluation of them conducted, at any level, by the authorities nor in works of art or films. This topic also remained forgotten by the Uzbekistani authorities of the period of independence and was never written into the historical imagery of the republic’s past.

Adding to this are the prohibitions concerning religious life by the Soviet-era authorities, the closure of Shiite mosques, the ban on Shiite gatherings, or even, as study participants recall, cases when it was prohibited to visit cemeteries where members of the Shiite community were buried. This, in my view, played a role reinforcing the process of the encapsulation of memory. Displays of their Shia identity were made only during mourning assemblies during the month of Muharram, in a domestic setting. Meanwhile, they feared sanctions by the authorities, and a revival of memories about the events of 1910 among the city’s other residents (non-Iranians), when a Shiite mourning ceremony held in public ended with mass violence and casualties on both sides. These two factors, memory and religious self-identification, merged into one, and became part of the local Iranian identity.

These served both as internal borders between, and identifying insignia of, “us” and “them.” In everyday life, the Iranians passing as Tajiks or Uzbeks could thereby make themselves stand out, for themselves, from the overarching Bukharan society through memory of the past and religious belonging, including the religious component in the representations of memory may also have been made possible in terms of the generational shift. According to Assmann, more religious people chose that component specifically as an extension of their self-identification (Iranian Shiite).

Another interesting phenomenon is the reinvention of the image of Iranians in local (Bukharian) society. Using various tools to insert themselves into the local and national historical context, Iranians from the “newcomer” group, with a low status, take on the status of a native group which has resided in Central Asian territory for a long time. Study participants found confirmation of this in everyday life, from the Persian language used in manuscripts, the names of historical buildings, and literary works to the local rituals linked to the region’s Zoroastrian past.

The complete lack of awareness of events that occurred centuries ago among the younger representatives I interviewed can be explained by the following: they are present in people of the older generation, who had the experience of Soviet socialization, which additionally included family relics in the form of traumatic past events linked to local identity (Bukharan Iranian Shiite). But for younger individuals, among whom there are plenty of religious people, such a tie to local identity can act as an unwanted burden. This is a time when pilgrimage practices, individual trips to Iran, reading and watching online resources, and labor migration have made many members of the younger generation part of a transnational Shiite space. They perceive and position themselves as Shiites, no longer as Bukharan Iranians.

It is this fact, along with a fundamental reconsideration of the events of the past eighty to one hundred years, which Assmann writes about, that played an important role in the younger generation’s forgetting the representations of the past and replacing and seeking out new ones.

Bibliography

Abashin, Sergei. “Islamskaia oppozitsiia v Ferganskoi doline: lokal’nye konflikty i global’nye ugrozy.” In Rossiia i Vostok: problemy vzaimodeistviia: Materialy VI mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii, 28-30 noiabria 2002 g, edited by Sergei Golunov, 282-296. Volgograd: Izdatel’stvo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2003.

Adams, Laura. The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Alieva, Fatima. “Irantsy.” In Etnicheskii atlas Uzbekistana, edited by Alisher Ilkhamov, 101–105. Tashkent: Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation Uzbekistan, 2002.

Aliev, Said Zhafar. Ternistyi zhiznennyi put’ (Sem’ pokolenii sem’i Alievykh). Bukhara, 2015.

Arapov, Dmitrii. “Musul’manskoe dukhovenstvo Srednei Azii v 1927 godu (po dokladu polnomochnogo predstavitelia OGPU v Srednei Azii.” Vestnik Evrazii, no. 4 (2006):  160–73.

Assmann, Aleida, Zabvenie istorii—oderzhimost’ istoriei. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2019), 217–218.

Dadabaev, Timur, Identity and Memory in Post-Soviet Central Asia: Uzbekistan’s Soviet Past. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Vladimir Bartol’d, “Uzbekskie khanstva.” In Istoriia kul’turnoi zhizni Turkestana (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1927), 104-118.

Germanov, Valery. “Shiite-Sunnite conflict of 1910 in the Bukhara Khaganate.” Oriente Moderno 87, no. 1 (2007): 117–40.

Gorshenina, Svetlana. “Uzbekistan’s ‘Cultural Inheritance’ in Constructing ‘Collective Memory’ in the Age of Independence.” In Central Asia at 25: Looking Back, Moving Forward, A Collection of Essays from Central Asia. Edited by Marlene Laruelle, Aitolkyn Kourmanova, 52–55. Central Asia Program, the George Washington University, 2010.

Ivanov, Pavel. Ocherki po istorii Srednei Azii. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi literatury, 1958.

Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New York: Routledge, 2017.

Samarkandskii oblastnoi statisticheskii komitet. Obzor Samarkanskoi oblasti za 1910 g. Samarkand: Tipo-Litografiia B.Gozarov i K.Sliianov, 1912.

Khamraev, A. “K voprosu o ianvarskikh sobytiiakh 1910 goda v Bukhare.” Trudy Sredneaziatskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta im. V. I. Lenina 62, no. 7 (1954): 65–75.

Liushkevich, Fania. “Nekotorye osobennosti etnicheskogo razvitiia gruppy ironi v Uzbekistane.” In Etnicheskie protsessy u natsional’nykh grupp Srednei Azii i Kazakhstana, edited by Roza Dzharylgasinova, Lada Tolstova, 202–12. Moscow: Nauka, 1980.

Logofet, Dmitrii. Strana bespraviia. Buharskoe hanstvo i ego sovremennoe sostoyanie, St. Petersburg, 1909.

Snesarev, Gleb. Relikty domusul’manskih verovanij i obryadov u uzbekov Horezma. Moscow: Nauka, 1969.

Sukhareva, Ol’ga. Bukhara XIX–nachalo XX veka (Pozdnefeodal’nyi gorod i ego naselenie). Moscow: Nauka, 1966.

Sukhareva, Ol’ga. K istorii gorodov Bukharskogo khanstva: (Istoriko-etnograficheskie ocherki. Tashkent: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk Uzbekskoi SSR, 1958.

Tokhtiev, Shukhrat. “Sunni-Shiite relations in the Emirate of Bukhara in the late XIX-early XX centuries.” Theoretical & Applied Science no. 78, (2019): 218–23.

Tsvilling, G. “Bukharskaia smuta,” Sredniaia Aziia no. 2 (1910): 3

Vokhidov, Rahim and Kosimova, Zevar. Yaxshilikka baxshida umr (Ibrohim Qosimiy hayotidan lavhalar). Tashkent: Abdulla Qodyryi nomidagi halk merosi nashriyoti, 2001.

“V Bukhare sudiat parnia-shiita, obviniaemogo v ekstremizme,” Radio Ozodlik, September 27, 2017. https://rus.ozodlik.org/amp/28757652.html.

“V Uzbekistane blokiruetsia otkrytie shiitskikh mechetei.” AsiaTerra, July 4, 2021. http://m.asiaterra.info/news/v-uzbekistane-blokiruetsya-otkrytie-shiitskikh-mechetej.

Interviews Conducted by the Author

Participant A., age about 45, small businessman, interviewed in Bukhara (November 2022).

Participant A., artist, age about 65–70, interviewed in Bukhara (January 2018).

Participant B., retiree, age about 70–75, interviewed in Bukhara (October 2022).

Participant N., entrepreneur, age about 45–50, interviewed in Bukhara (October 2022).

Participant Sh., photographer, age about 65, interviewed in Bukhara (January 2018).

Participant X., taxi driver, age about 40–45, interviewed in Bukhara (January 2018).

Participant X., retiree, age about 75, interviewed in Bukhara (February 2018).

Participant X., taxi driver, age about 40–45, interviewed in Bukhara (January 2018).

Participant V., age about 30, clerk in a building materials store, interviewed in Bukhara (February 2018).

Participant Z., chess teacher, age about 45–50, interviewed in Bukhara (November 2022).