The New Dominion

Äsät Sulayman. Özlük wä Kimlik – Yawropa Qirghaqliridin Märkiziy Asiya Chongqurluqlirigha Qarap. Ürümchi: Shinjang Uniwersiteti Näshriyati. 2006. Pp. 443. 47.00 RMB. (English title: Ego & Identity – Cultural Dialogue between Inner Asia and Scandinavia)

I should begin this review of Dr. Äsät Sulayman’s recent work, Özlük wä Kimlik, with a note on the translation of the title. Both özlük and kimlik can be translated, in a sense, as “identity”, which is the focus of the book: the experiences and formation of group and individual identity. Özlük, translatable as “selfhood” or “individuality”, carries a strong sense of self-reflection – it indicates an individual’s concept of his or herself. Kimlik, a term used for one’s public identity, including his or her official identity card, could be translated literally as “who-ness” – it is the identity of a person in reference to his or her surroundings and community. The subtitle, in Uyghur, translates as “looking at the depths of Central Asia from Europe’s shores”.

We can consider the book in these terms. Özlük wä Kimlik is, first of all, a personal memoir of the year Dr. Äsät (Eset) Sulayman, a professor at Xinjiang University and an influential intellectual voice, spent at Stockholm University in Sweden, where he studied, taught, and worked. While living there as an immigrant, away from his family and native land, he spent several months in the Royal Archives of Sweden and the archives of Stockholm University, cataloging the records of Swedish missionaries who operated in Xinjiang from 1892 through the late 1930’s, records previously left nearly untouched by researchers. This forms the other half of the book, detailing the lives of these missionaries and discussing the ways in which their activities, especially in the fields of printing and education, altered the evolution of Uyghur society.

With evidence from these archive materials, Äsät Sulayman essentially argues that the introduction of printing technology to Xinjiang, coupled with the missionaries’ focus on primary education, aided the formation of a Uyghur intellectual class, as well as providing a foreign, Christian foil for an evolving local Turkic Muslim identity. He has since returned to this argument in a more focused academic work (also in Uyghur)¹. Apart from proselytizing largely unreceptive natives, many of whom received a “modern” or “scientific” education in their schools, the missionaries operated the only press in the region until 1938, producing texts beyond their own evangelical purposes, including some of the earliest printed works in Turki. Perhaps more importantly to the formation, codification, and promotion of a modern Uyghur language, the press produced early textbooks (including alphabet books) and grammars of “Altä Shähär Turki”. The story of Swedish or Scandinavian involvement in Xinjiang, dating back to the eighteenth century, forms the nominal backbone of the book, though it hardly makes its presence known in the text. True, Dr. Sulayman presents information about Swedish people in Xinjiang and analyzes the effects of their presence and activities, but, in terms of the book’s composition, the “cultural dialogue between Inner Asia and Scandinavia” is more of a general theme, incidental to the narrative, than it is a force to order that narrative or any argument.

Äsät Sulayman viewed the history he rediscovered through the eyes of an outsider in a strange land. It is his memories of life in Sweden that form the bulk of the book and that bring him to his final conclusions. His descriptions of the deepening Swedish winter and the people he encountered among the “fluttering” snowflakes become somewhat repetitive, but they are effective in framing the commonality he felt with other immigrants, even strangers, as well as with the Swedish, whose “national character” he spends a very long chapter describing and reassessing. He recounts, for example, his repeated need to explain where he is from, an experience common to Uyghurs who go abroad. How does one account for a Uyghur face and a Chinese passport? This constant defense of his own identity, as for many people who have lived abroad, causes him to reevaluate and reflect on it outside of the ever-present Chinese system of ethnic classification.

This, I believe, is Äsät Sulayman’s main point: Uyghur identity and history can be considered outside of the Chinese context. His points of cultural and historical comparison are located in Sweden and Xinjiang, respectively. When he speaks of his “homeland”, he clearly means “Xinjiang”, hardly making mention of China. Indeed, it seems that his natural place in Sweden’s international community is among Uzbeks and other Central Asians. He places Uyghur history and identity on the same level of importance as those of any other ethnic group or nation. His discussion of relative population size favorably compares the Uyghur population to that of most European countries, as does his contrast of the size of different language communities. The Uyghur community, in this narrative, does not simply generate or form within its test tube autonomous region. Rather, it is acted upon by and acts upon non-Chinese outsiders. This is, if not a direct challenge to or rejection of officially-approved accounts of Uyghur history and identity, a major paradigm shift in the more popular literature on ethnicity in China. In this mode, however, it remains very modernist in its outlook, never casting doubt on the naturalness or reality of ethnonational communities, no matter how they may be constructed. This is, I think, part of the book’s appeal to its target audience of at least moderately educated Uyghurs: it changes their ethnic world view in a way still seems logical and natural.

Özlük wä Kimlik, given its wide readership and popularity in the Uyghur intellectual world, has already changed and will continue to affect at least some of its readers’ attitudes towards the question of Uyghur ethnic identity. Äsät Sulayman, himself an historian of literature, recognizes and thinks in terms of intellectual, idealist history. This leads him, it seems, to begin to reassess accepted ethnonational narratives in China, which are overwhelmingly Marxist-materialist. The ideas of identity that he puts forth in this work, as well as its derivative papers, remind me a great deal of the theories of Frederick Barth, while his emphasis on print culture hints of Benedict Anderson, although he does not reference them – nor has he, to my knowledge, read them. This may be the book’s greatest contribution: a diversification of the popular discourse of Uyghur identity, a discourse that is currently primarily concerned, even among independence-minded Uyghurs, with elaborating the concrete trans-historical characteristics of a putative ethnonational group as defined by a state ethnological apparatus. It is, in a sense, a sign of a natural post-modern shift in thought arising from an awareness of and interest in history and literature, which are gaining more acceptance and intellectual freedom, along with anthropology, as fields of inquiry. Furthermore, this is a perspective that comes from (or appears to come from) within a group that regards itself as marginal, though the rejection of this marginal status seems to be a goal of Sulayman’s writing.

This perspective seems to be reinforced by the couching of intellectual inquiry within the structure of a personal narrative. This is reminiscent of a very common strategy for Uyghur writers who want to communicate about history – history is novelized (as in Iz, Oyghanghan Zemin, Ana Yurt, and other books) and, thus, protected from certain kinds of censorship. Äsät Sulayman is doing the same here, I think, with experimental ideas about history and identity that are not otherwise ready for academia.

Özlük wä Kimlik: Yawropa Qirghaqliridin Märkiziy Asiya Chongqurluqlirigha Qarap is an interesting piece of writing by any measure, as well as a possibly very important and influential work in the Uyghur intellectual work. Indeed, its place as a classic is assured, and not just by Dr. Äsät Sulayman’s well-established reputation – the book’s first and second printings, totaling several thousand copies, both sold out quickly, and the book is now a hard-sought favorite in Ürümchi used-book stores.

¹Äsät Sulayman. “‘Qäshqär basma buyumliri’ wä ötkünchi däwrdiki Uyghur tili mädäniyiti – Chaghatay tilidin hazirqi zaman Uyghur tiligha mäzgilidiki ‘ötkünchi däwr Uyghur tili’ wä uning tarixiy, ijtima’iy, mädäniyät arqa körünüshi” in Shinjang Pedagogika Uniwersiteti Aliy Zhurnali (Pälsäpä – Ijtima’iy Pän Qismi), No. 4, 2007, pp. 1-11.