Sacred places and 'public' narratives: The Shrine of Ahmad Yasavī in hagiographical traditions of the Yasavī Sūfī order, 16th-17th centuries

Muslim World

Volumn 90, Issue 3-4, 2000, Pages 353-376

  DeWeese, Devin ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61449109333     PISSN: 00274909     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-1913.2000.tb03695.x     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. See my preliminary discussion of the much-needed revisions in our understanding of the Yasavī Sūfī tradition in "The Mashā'ikh-i Turk and the Khojagān: Rethinking the Links between the Yasavī and Naqshbandī Sūfī Traditions," Journal of Islamic Studies (Oxford), 7/2 (July 1996): 180-207.
2. On this phenomenon, see my "Yasavī Šayhs in the Timurid Era: Notes on the Social and Political Role of Communal Sufi Affiliations in the 14th and 15th Centuries," in La civiltà timuride comefenomeno internazionale, ed. Michele Bernardini [Oriente Moderno (Rome), N.S., 15 (76), No. 2 (1996)]: 173-88.
3. Even if one of these facile approaches is exchanged for one claiming heavy literary activity on the part of Ahmad Yasavī himself - through the ascription to him of the collection of mystical poetry known as the Dīvān-i hikmat - that work is often portrayed as equally "simple," as full of "heterodox" or "shamanic" or simply pre-Islamic elements, or as purposefully pitched to the supposedly low intellectual capacities of the Turkic nomads who are assumed - again, without foundation - to have been its principal audience. At best, it is wrongly put forth as the central literary monument of the Yasavī tradition, to the virtual exclusion of other sources, which in any case remain largely unexplored (here I would add that the ascription of the Dīvān-i hikmat to Ahmad Yasavī is almost certainly wrong in any meaningful historical or literary sense).
4. See my discussion in "The Yasavī Order and Persian Hagiography in Seventeenth-Century Central Asia: 'Ālim Shaykh of 'Alīyā bād and his Lamahāt min nafabāt al-quds," in The Heritage of Sufism, vol. III: Late Classical Persianate Sufism (1501-1750), The Safavid and Mughal Period, eds. Leonard Lewisohn and David Morgan (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999), 389-414.
5. That narrative material includes stories known primarily or exclusively from sources produced outside the Yasavī Sūfī tradition, most of which use Ahmad Yasavi as a foil or at best as a fossilized figure intended to legitimize some other saint. Yasavī is essentially fossilized in stories preserved in Bektāshī sources from Anatolia as early as the 15th century, which echo some narratives known from Central Asian sources but include others that have not survived elsewhere. All are miracle stories of the type discussed here, rather than anecdotes set in an actual Sūfī community. In sources from Khojagānī and Naqshbandī circles, by contrast, Yasavī is used primarily as a foil to demonstrate the supremacy of 'Abd al-Khāliq Ghijduvānī, "founder" of the Khojagānī tradition. One extensive narrative cycle, which evidently originated in Khojagānī circles, involves Yasavī's journey toward Mecca in the company of a huge throng of beasts, and Ghijduvānī's one-upmanship in bringing the Ka'bah to Central Asia and thereby sparing Yasavī and his entourage the trouble of proceeding on the hajj. This tale echoes stories, casting Yasavī in a more positive light, known from scattered allusions in Yasavī sources, and appears to mark an appropriation of a Yasavī miracle tale by a rival Sūfī community in order to turn the story into an affirmation of that community's superiority (the likely competitive context of the narrative's development is underscored by the version found in Hazīnī's Jāmi'al- murshidīn, which amounts to a Yasavī "response" to the Khojagānī version). In any case, all these tales are "grand" miracle stories - despite their adaptation in the context of communal rivalries - rather than anecdotes rooted in Sūfī life.
6. The only known copy of this work is preserved in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, MS Orient. Oct. 2847, described in Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, Band XIV, 1: Persische Handschriften, ed. Wilhelm Eilers, descr. Wilheim Heinz (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1968), 274-75, no. 352. I am indebted to Bakhtiyar Babajanov for bringing this work to my attention.
7. This work too survives in a single copy, MS Istanbul University T3893; it, and the acephalous Persian work bound with it in the same volume, served as a major source for the seminal study of the Yasavī tradition by Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, Türk edebiyatinda ilk mutasavvtflar (Istanbul, 1918; 5th Latin-script printing, Ankara: Arisan Matbaacilik, 1984).
8. The entire manuscript has been published, with the Javāhir in transcription and the Persian work in facsimile: Hazini, Cevâhiru'l- ebrâr min emvâc-t bihâr (Yesevî Menâkibnamesi), ed. Cihan Okuyucu (Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi, 1995). The Manāqib of Yasavī appears on pp. 64-105 in the manuscript, renumbered as ff. 33a-53b in Okuyucu's publication (pp. 40-62).
9. On this work, see my "The Yasavī Order and Persian Hagiography." When that article was in press, I learned that a facsimile publication of a late manuscript (copied in 1251/1835) of the Lamahāt had appeared in 1986: Muhammad 'Ālim Siddīqī, Lamahāt.min nafahāt al-quds (Islamabad: Markaz-i Tahqīqāt-i Fārsī-i Īrān va Pākistān, 1406/ 1986), with an introduction by Muhammad Nadhīr Rānjhā. Citations here are to the earliest known manuscript, copied in 1036/1626-27: MS St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, No. C1602, ff. 1b-124b, described in N.D. Miklukho-Maklai, Opisanie tadzhikskikh ipersidskikh rukopisei Instituta narodov Azii, vyp. 2, Biograficheskie sochineniia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1961), 133-35, No. 187;
10. cf. Persidskie i tadzhikskie rukopisi Instituta narodov Azii AN SSSR (Kratkii alfavitnyi katalog), ed. O.F. Akimushkin, V.V. Kushev, et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), 478, No. 3659.
11. As we will see, even the Lamahāt offers few stories about Ahmad Yasavī that resemble the typical hagiographical anecdotes passed down in sūfī communities. It does offer many such narratives in the case of subsequent Yasavī shaykhs; Hazīnī's works offer no such anecdotes until the time of Hazīnī's own master, Sayyid Mansūr, in the 16th century.
12. Javāhir, MS, 77-84.
13. The first of these, which involves the miraculous erasure of the books, and the mind, of a doubting scholar, is given much the same way in the Jāmi'al-murshidīn (ff. 74b-76b), and is echoed (with different names and details) in the Lamahāt (f. 39a); the story ends with the scholar becoming Yasavī's disciple, and the scholar's shrine, north of Turkistān, is still shown today.
14. The second story presents the miracle of the fire and the cotton, in which Yasavī bests his learned doubters - who criticized him for allowing men and women to participate together in his devotional sessions - by sending a box containing cotton and a burning coal, with the cotton preserved from burning and the coal preserved from cooling. This story is not found in the Lamahāt or in any of Hazīnī's other works, but does appear in another 17th century hagiography devoted to a saint from a Sayyid Atā'ī lineage, the Manāqib al-akhyār (see my "A Neglected Source on Central Asian History: The 17th-century Yasavī Hagiography Manāqib al-akhyār, "in Essays on Uzbek History, Culture, and Language, eds. Denis Sinor and Bakhtiyar A. Nazarov [Bloomington: Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1993; Uralic and Altaic Series, Vol. 156], 38-50).
15. Javāhir al-abrār, MS, 66-70; ed. Okuyucu, 41-43;
16. Jāmi'al-murshidīn, ff. 70a-71b.
17. Javāhir al-abrār, MS, 101-105; ed. Okuyucu, 60-62;
18. Jāmi'al-murshidīn, ff. 76a-78a.
19. A Turkic description of rites at Yasavī's shrine from 1914 ("T.," "Khalvat," Shūrā[Ufa], 1914, No.5 [16 Rabī' II 1332/ 1 March 1914], 145-48) records the tradition that Yasavī lived 125 years, but at age 63 dug a pit into the earth ("in his own house") and entered into it, in imitation of the Prophet's example, to spend the rest of his life there; according to A.I. Dobrosmyslov, Goroda Syr-Dar'inskoi oblasti. Kazalinsk, Perovsk, Turkestan, Aulie-ata i Chimkent (Tashkent: Tipo-litografiia O.A. Portseva, 1912), 150, not far from Yasavī's shrine, "the shaykhs of Turkistān point out the place where the saint lived in a pit for 60 years" (a small mosque built at the site, writes Dobrosmyslov, was evidently meant to correspond to the dimensions of Yasavī's small cell).
20. Javāhir, MS, 89-90, ed. Okuyucu, 53-54;
21. Jāmi' al-murshidīn, ff. 66a-67a. This narrative is conspicuously absent from the Central Asian hagiographical tradition; neduced in Yasavī circles even hints at the story of Ahmad Yasavī's retirement beneath the earth at age 63 (though the Lamahāt assumes a different kind of underground activity, as we will see), and I have not found it reflected in a wide range of Central Asian hagiographies of non-Yasavī provenance.
22. See the description and diagram in T. N. Senigova, "Unikal' noe kul'tovoe sooruzhenie Aulie Kumchik-Ata v raione g. Turkestana," Proshloe Kazakhstana po arkheologicheskim istochnikam(Alma-Ata: Nauka, 1976), 105-21 [107]. To be sure, the directions and, especially, distances do not appear to match precisely. To judge from the archeological descriptions and diagrams, for example, the passageway leading to the domed chamber runs northwest and then due west, and the smaller vault is actually to the west-northwest of the domed chamber; the total length of the first passageway, moreover, appears to be no more than ten meters, and with a gaz roughly equivalent to a meter, we may assume Hazīnī's figure of 40 gaz to be a generic way of saying "a respectable distance" rather than a real measurement. Nevertheless, allowing for imprecise orientation at the site or simple lapses in reconstructing the site's layout from memory, Hazīnī's description matches the general appearance of the diagrammed excavation - involving the underground passageway, the domed chamber, and small attached vault - quite remarkably. The archeological report describes the domed chamber - despite Hazīnī's comment about its durable construction - as having been repeatedly repaired (Hazīnī might have found in this constant renovation still further evidence of the influence of Khizr or Ilyās, but the archeologists did not).
23. This specification of the "dhikr of the heart" is particularly unusual insofar as the Yasavī style of dhikr was well recognized as the vocal type; here again Hazīnī's account may be read as implying that what is described here is simply Yasavī's burial, and the "silent" performance of the dhikr by the heart of a saint in his grave.
24. Does this story conceal a tradition affirming that the site now identified as the subterranean enclosure, rather than the place where the shrine built by Timur's command stands, was Yasavī's actual or original burial place? Does the story of the "chest-splitter" reflect an early archeological discovery during the course of excavations for the foundation of Yasavī's shrine, perhaps, in vvhich a mummified body buried in non-Muslim fashion - with knees drawn up to the chest - was unearthed and explained, and Islamized, as the posture of a devoted dhikr-performer constrained by his narrow enclosure? Most likely, we need not appeal to such "naturalistic" explanations; the ambiguity surrounding the nature and purpose of the subterranean enclosure, as well as the unusual terminology used to describe the effects of Yasavī's bodily mortification, may signal understandable "explanatory" developments of a narrative tradition originallly marked by a much different meaning, as suggested below.
25. The description of rites at Yasavī's shrine from 1914, cited above, includes the author's account of his visit to the pit, where he was shown the hole in the wall through which Yasavī miraculously traveled to Bukhārā for the Friday prayer ("T.," "Khalvat," 146, 148); the hole was to serve as a reminder of how Yasavī could travel by, in effect, boring through the earth ("yerni tešüb yürüleri"), and so was not filled in or covered up.
26. Javāhir, MS, 98-100, ed. Okuyucu, 58-59;
27. Jāmi' al-murshidin, ff. 67a-68a. Once again the Lamahāt lacks this story, but includes a different sort of "breakout" from Yasavī's subterranean enclosure.
28. The story is mentioned, but with "Khakim Ata" (i.e. Hakīm Ata) assigned the role of Yasavī's disciple, in a description of pilgrimage practices at Yasavī's shrine, written in the 1980s in Arabic-script Qazaq, and recently published in Cyrillic Qazaq (see Sadïq Sapabékǔlï, "Türkǐstandaghï tarikhi ziyarat," ed. Khamid Imanjanov and R. Jüzbaeva in Yäsaui Tagbïlïmï, ed. Mekemtas Mïrzakhmetǔlī [Turkistan: "Mǔra" baspagerlǐk shaghïn käsǐpornï/ Qoja Akhmet Yäsaui atïndaghï Khalïqaralïq Qazaq-Türǐk Universiteti, 1996], 123-132 [ 130-131]).
29. A version recorded in M.E. Masson, Mavzolei Khodzha Akhmeda Iasevi (Tashkent: Syr-Dar'inskoe otdelenie Obshchestva izucheniia Kazakstana, 1930), 20-21, specifies that Yasavī flew to Mecca every day (not just every Friday) on a white camel to perform his prayers, turns the hapless disciple into a Jew who doubts Yasavī's powers, and identifies the ruler in the story as Zholbars Khan, an 18th-century Qazaq ruler buried at Yasavī's shrine.
30. MS Istanbul TY3893, 91-98, ed. Okuyucu, 55-58;
31. Jāmi' al-murshidīn, ff. 72a-73a.
32. An echo of this tradition may possibly be found in the rite, evidently practiced in the early 20th century, wherein pilgrims to the shrine of 'Ukkāshah Ata (northwest of Turkistān, and a typical destination for pilgrims following their ziyārat to Yasavī's shrine) were "tested" by having to "pull water from a deep well," a feat considered beyond the ability of a sinner (noted in Aširbek K. Muminov, "Veneration of Holy Sites of the Mid-Sïrdar'ya Valley: Continuity and Transformation," Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, eds. Michael Kemper, Anke von Kügelgen, and Dmitriy Yermakov [Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1996; Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, Bd. 200], 355-67 [p. 365]).
33. Lamahāt, f. 14a.
34. Joseph Castagné, "Le culte des lieux saints de l'Islam au Turkestan," L'Ethnographie, 46 (1951), 46-124 [p. 60].
35. I am indebted for this account to William Dirks, who made available to me transcriptions of oral tradition about Yasavī he recorded, together with Ashirbek Muminov, in Turkistan in November, 1994, from then 90-year old Alisher Khojaev, known as "Alish Baba."
36. Nothing is said of this origin in Senigova's archeological report, and the author's translation of the site's name, "Aulie Kumchik Ata," as "sandy hill of the holy father" (i.e. linking the name to "qum" "sand;" "Unikal'-noe kul'tovoe sooruzhenie Aulie Kumchik-Ata," p. 105), likewise suggests that she had not heard of any connection with the tale of the khum-i 'ishq.
37. See my Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994; Series "Hermeneutics: Studies in the History of Religions"), esp. 232-90.
38. What is distinctive about the clear evocation of these themes in connection with Yasavī and his Sūfī circle is their evidently stunted narrative development. Unlike other legendary cycles focused upon Yasavī, these stories do not appear to have been incorporated into broader genealogical traditions or legends of communal origin (and, as suggested, they were put to quite different use in the hagiographical context of Hazīnī's works and the Lamapāt).
39. In any case, we should noted that the symbolism of the cave-pit and the fiery enclosure and the spiritual sweating, while possibly drawn from imagery meaningful in indigenous Inner Asian religious tradition, should not be construed as indicating Ahmad Yasavī's own closeness to, or taste for, pre-Islamic Turkic rites or outlooks. Rather, what seems most significant about the use of such imagery is its conscious Islamization in connection with its application to Yasavī. If we suggest, for instance, that the stories about Yasavī's cave or retirement cell echo narratives in which the image of shamanic fire-ordeals played a central role, we must acknowledge that in this case, the "roasting" of the Sūfī adepts is removed from any distinctively shamanic context and combined instead with motifs of more general mystical symbolism (i.e. the imagery of drinking the fire of mystical love). More broadly, both the theme of enclosure and mystical ardor and the theme of breaking out of an enclosure (whether through miraculous travel or through Hakīm Ata's success in widening the cave) also play upon basic experiential polarities of Sūfī practice, with the notions of "contraction" (qabż) and "expansion" (bast). In short, we are dealing with narratives evoking a wide range of themes, of various origins, but in a quite consciously Muslim environment; neither the narrative content nor the interpretative accompaniment can justify a claim that Ahmad Yasavī himself, or his Sūfī tradition, was somehow devoted to pre-Islamic religious beliefs or practices.
40. This is clear in the sanction claimed by various rulers, through claims of dreams or visions at the shrine in which Ahmad Yasavī bestowed his blessing, and in the regular cultivation of the shrine-based constituencies through royal pilgrimages and donations to the complex. In this connection, the interaction of Sūfī circles with the "public" aspect of Yasavī's saintly charisma differs from the political use of that public (and often shrine-based) charisma; while in Hazīnī's case, we see the Sūfī turning to the shrine for narratives, perhaps the best example of an appeal to publicly accessible charisma for political legitimization, found in the Lamahāt (ff. 54b-55b), involves a ruler portrayed as a benefactor of, and pilgrim to, Ahmad Yasavī's shrine (Muhammad Shïbānī Khān), but as an enemy of the leading representatives of the Süfī order that traced its origins to Ahmad Yasavī (Shaykh Jamāl ad-Dīn and Khudāydād).
41. See my "The Politics of Sacred Lineages in 19th-century Central Asia: Descent Groups linked to Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi in Shrine Documents and Genealogical Charters," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31/4 (1999): 507-30.