Piety, Commitment and Duty: Molla-Hojaly Myrat-Berdi-ogly and the Impact of His Stories about the Poets of the 18th Century on the Formation of Turkmen Cultural Identity

Abstract

Historians see the emergence of Turkmen national identity as a result of activities by local progressivists inspired by the Jadid literature at the beginning of the 20th century. According to this vision, the progressivists proposed a program of homogeneous and “mechanized” educational system aimed to fill the concept of “nation” by unified and standardized meanings. However, there are several opponents for this vision. They argue that before the local intellectuals accepted the modernist concept of “nation”, the Turkmen community was already unified by a concept of ethics and social relations. The basis for this centrality of ethics was orthopraxy. This article focuses on the historical narratives written by mullah Hojaly Myratberdi-ogly. He served as a secretary of the colonial administration of the Transcaspian region. By addressing the Islamic hagiographical discourse, he described the paths of some key local personalities who were the examples of piety, commitment, and servanthood for Turkmens. Can modern-day historians consider those narratives as the ethical basis for the local communal order? Was Hojaly a unique collector of those stories? Why did he publish several stories in the newspapers of the local colonial administration? Were those tales in demand by the following generations of the Turkmen intellectuals? By analyzing the context of Hojaly’s activity, this article argues that at the beginning of the 20th century the Turkmen polymaths (such as Hojaly) tried to collect the knowledge about their community to preserve and transmit it to following generations. To do so, they used the established infrastructure for knowledge exchange created by the colonial administrators. In their turn, the local orientalists analyzed those stories by using the positivist claim for demythologising local knowledge. Hence, they reinterpreted those texts by changing their meanings from ethics to culture. Therefore, the translation of those texts and methodological search by the following generations of Turkmen intellectuals created the conditions for transition from orthopraxy to the modernist concept of “national culture”.