<Articles>Who are the Sarts? : Debates on the Ethnonym in Modern Central Asia

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  • <論文>サルト人とはだれか --近代中央アジアの民族名論争--
  • サルト人とはだれか : 近代中央アジアの民族名論争
  • サルトジン トワ ダレカ : キンダイ チュウオウ アジア ノ ミンゾクメイ ロンソウ

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Abstract

The Jadids, modernist Muslim intellectuals, emerged in Russian Turkistan after the Russian Revolution of 1905. Propagating sociocultural reformist projects through newspapers and journals, they challenged the status quo of the Muslim society under the Russian rule. Among their demands, we find an interesting issue related to the ethnonym Sart, which was used widely and officially throughout the Empire to denote the sedentary population of Russian Turkistan. They asked, “who are the Sarts?” Claiming that “Sart is unknown and has a pejorative meaning, ” they urged that the ethnonym Sarts must be replaced by the ethnonyms “Turks” or “Uzbeks” according to which ethnicity they identified with. The emergence of Turkistani Jadids' national identity can be traced to this discussion. Their claim led to wide-ranging debates not only in the Russian Muslim press, such as the Shūrā and the Terjumān, but also in the Turkistani press, such as the Āyina and the Turkistān Vilāyatining Gazeti, between 1911 and 1914. Although the Russian Muslim press favored the claim of the Turkistani Jadids, the official Turkistān Vilāyatining Gazeti was opposed, thereby putting an end to the debates immediately before the First World War. According to the opponents of replacing the ethnonym Sart, Sart was to be maintained as a historical and respectable term. There is no doubt, however, that the debates threatened the legitimacy of the term Sart. In fact, this term was replaced by “Uzbek” after the Russian Revolution in 1917. At the same time, the debates led the Jadid intellectuals to produce a history of Turkistan. It was not a traditional dynastic history but a national history to be taught in Jadid (new-method) schools. Tatar intellectuals played a leading role in promoting the project. These efforts aimed to construct a new group identity adapted to the modern world similar to the identity other Muslim intellectuals were searching for in the Ottoman Empire, Russia's Volga-Ural region, and Chinese Turkistan. This paper examines the development of the debates and their significance based on periodical articles published in the first half of the 1910s.

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  • 西南アジア研究

    西南アジア研究 94 59-92, 2022-06-30

    The Society for Western and Southern Asiatic Studies, Kyoto University

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