October 2021 | BIPS Travel Grant
Persianate legacies in post-Soviet Central Asia and on contemporary Iran-Uzbekistan relations
The three-week-long—travel days included—fieldwork in Tashkent, Uzbekistan has been a culmination of some two years of travel-planning and thwarted attempts to schedule said fieldwork. Due to the Pandemic, my original preliminary travel dates moved from May 2020 to March 2022. Even the latter travel period—constrained by the need to wrap up before the start of the Nowruz break—had to eventually be moved by some six weeks. The reason for this was my fit-to-fly PCR test result turning out positive, a mere 12 hours before my scheduled departure from the UK.
This rather extensive spring 2022 fieldwork—a reproduction of sort of analogous fieldwork in Baku, Azerbaijan carried out in three weeks of autumn of 2021 and funded by the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre—had been preceded by a quick pre-Pandemic tour of the capitals of Iran, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan respectively in September-October 2019, marked by a rather ‘shoestring budget’. During those weeks (with an average of one week per country) I aimed to gauge the feasibility of acquiring institutional affiliation in all three cities and the feasibility of arranging semi-structured interviews with members of the academic, scholarly and diplomatic elite.
Out of all three capital cities, Tashkent appeared the most feasible for fieldwork on both points raised. This represented a unique opportunity, as Uzbekistan has just recently exited a period of near-three decades of intimidation-based patrimonial rule of President Islam Karimov, who died in September 2016. While Uzbekistan has remained an authoritarian state in its mode of governance, the current climate in Uzbekistan is perceptibly freer for both ordinary Uzbekistanis and for Western researchers aspiring to travel to Uzbekistan.
My optimism has been largely vindicated, the only exception being junior and senior staff at Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who had been markedly keener on talking to me in 2019. Any attempt now to reach out to them had been marred by prohibitive amounts of red tape. Given that diplomat interview responses tend to be very much in line with official government positions available on-line, this proved not to be as much of a loss. In contrast to diplomats, academics and retired diplomats tend to speak much more candidly. This had at least been my experience in Baku (last autumn) as it has been in Tashkent this spring.
More encouragingly, and largely thanks to one of my two doctoral research supervisor’s—Professor Roy Allison’s—personal contacts and thanks to my 2019 mini-fieldwork, I managed to acquire a loose institutional affiliation with the Department of International Relations, at the Faculty of International Relations of the University of World Economics and Diplomacy. Professor Ulugbeck Khasanov, head of the latter department, took it as his personal duty to ensure this semi-formal collaboration runs smoothly.
On my first visit of the department, I got some useful pointers whom in Tashkent should I meet—I only had a fraction of my final interviewees already lined-up via remote email correspondence by that point—, was asked to present at a graduate seminar on doctoral research design and finally also asked to be a one-off discussant at Professor Khasanov’s undergraduate International Relations tutorial. Other than people at the University of World Economics and Diplomacy, the latter institution interestingly-enough falling under the aegis of Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, further interview contacts have been found and spoken to at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan, at two distinct departments—most prominently the Department of contemporary history and international relations—of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences and at the Tashkent State University of Oriental Studies.
Most of these eight-or-so semi-structured interviews had been between 60 and 90 minutes-long and had not been recorded on audio, with me instead relying on extensive handwritten notes. With each local expert having a slightly distinct understanding of contemporary Iran-Uzbekistan relations and of their shared Persianate cultural heritage—undoubtedly informed by the interlocutor’s own academic sub-discipline and by his or her specific research interests—I managed to acquire a rather broad mosaic of perspectives interspersed with a handful of recurring narratives and ‘talking points’.
I also have to acknowledge the shortcomings of my fieldwork. Firstly, I only managed to conduct some two-thirds of the total number of elite interviews. In addition to issues in making headway at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the overall number of experts in Tashkent who have dedicated any amount of time and resources to the academic study of Iran is extremely small. Those Soviet-era experts who may have had some number of publications under their belt have in many cases had already passed away.
Secondly, I did not fully realize that instead of one day off work in light of the celebrations of the end of the Ramadan fast, the Eid al-Adha actually implied three full bank holidays, which forced me condense several of the interviews scheduled for the second half of my fieldwork to a small number of feasible days—namely Wednesday to Friday of ‘week 2’ and Thursday and Friday of ‘week 3’.
Throughout my entire stay, I had not left the capital of Tashkent at any point, as personal travel would have required a standalone department approval and travel insurance scheme. This proved rather unnecessary anyways, as I have visited all of Uzbekistan’s main ethno-cultural regions and its main historical cities of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand—with their striking Persianate material heritage—in 2016, the year I had been living and working in neighbouring Tajikistan.
The last element of my stay in Tashkent that assured that it would be worth every waking hour, had been my decision to commit to three weeks of intensive Uzbek language training in parallel to my efforts to arrange and carry out elite interviews. While mostly irrelevant to the current fieldwork, which had been conducted largely in Russian, my intimate familiarity with Tajiki Persian and with Anatolian and Azerbaijani Turkish—and my attendance of a virtual reading group of classical Chaghatai Turkish poetry during the pandemic—insured that I would be working off a robust pre-existing knowledge base. After 8 hours of one-on-one classes with Professor Saodat Adilova and 12 hours with Mr Rustam Rustamov, I achieved a level in which I have some degree of conversational ability and reading skills that will likely become of use for my future academic endeavours on and in the Persianate world—which by default also includes the closely-related Uyghur language.
On a whole, because of the ebbs and flows of actual feasibility of fieldwork in Iran and Afghanistan proper, exploring fieldwork avenues for modern-day polities and territories integral to the wider Persianate world appeared key. With the still relatively small number of researchers being fluent in both Persian and Russian, post-Soviet Azerbaijan and Central Asia represent a largely untapped potential for work by UK-based scholars.
Jan Tomek is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, and member of St Antony’s College.