The legacy of the Qalandar Sufi community and of the poet Babarakhim Mashrab (Diwana Mashrab, ca. 1657–1711) in Russian and Soviet Oriental Studies
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC Gotemba, 2025
Mashrab’s works were widely spread among the population, becoming an integral part of both Sufi gatherings and entering the repertoire of wandering dervishes-qalandars, who performed them in the squares and bazaars of Central Asian cities. Using Mashrab as an example, one can trace what features the people were inclined to attribute to the holy fools-diwana they revered and how they described the “techniques of ecstasy” inherent in them. At the beginning of the 20th century the story of Mashrab was researched and translated into Russian by the military and administrative figure of the Turkestan region, the remarkable orientalist N.S. Lykoshin, whose book was published in Khujand (Khujand) in 1910. In 1923, an article entitled “The Fergana mystic Divan-i Mashrab” appeared by the famous archaeologist and orientalist V.L. Vyatkin, in which he attempted to identify the features of Mashrab’s mysticism. Uzbek historian and writer, ideologist of Jadidism Abdurauf Fitrat also dedicated an article to Mashrab in 1930, published in Tashkent in the journal “Ilmiy Fikr”. In 1937, A. Kartsev published an article “The Life and Ghazals of Mashrab” in the journal “Literary Uzbekistan”. In the works of the Stalinist period, a tendency to “cleanse” Mashrab’s work from “ecclesiastical obscurantism” and to refuse to recognize him as the forerunner of “proletarian poetry” is evident. In the post-war years, Mashrab’s work continued to be studied from a philological (but not religious) point of view; his poems were translated into Russian by V. Lipko (1959) and repeatedly published in Uzbek by A. Khaitmetov, P. Shamsiev, A. Abdugafurov, V. Rakhmanov, K. Israilov, Zh. Yusupov, and I. Abdullah. Mashrab’s legendary biography (maqamat) was not republished during the Soviet era (it was published with abridgements only in 1991 in the magazine “Sharq Yulduzi”). These publications allow us to examine the change in the assessments of Mashrab’s personality and work, as well as the qalandars community as a whole, in pre-revolutionary and Soviet literature and to establish the reasons why Mashrab and his followers continued to remain attractive in some ways for Soviet oriental studies.