Uways I
Uways I (Shaikh Uvais) (Oways) (b. 1341). Ruler of the Jalayirids (r.1356-1374).
Uways was a Jalayirid ruler of Iraq (1356-1374) and Azerbaijan (1360-1374). He was the son of Hasan Buzurg and the Chobanid Delsad Katun.
Shortly after Uways succeeded his father, the old enemy of the Jalayirids, the Chobanids, were overrun by the forces of the Blue Horde under Jani Beg in 1357. Malek Asraf was executed, and Azerbaijan was conquered. Following Jani Beg’s withdrawal from Azerbaijan, as well as his son Berdi Beg’s similar abandonment of the region in 1358, the area became a prime target for its neighbors. Uways, who at first had recognized the sovereignty of the Blue Horde, decided to take the former Chobanid lands for himself, even as a former amir of Malek Asraf’s named Akhichuq attempted to keep the region in Mongol hands. Despite a campaign that ended prematurely, as well as the brief conquest of Azerbaijan by the Muzaffarids, Uways conquered the area in 1360. In addition to Baghdad, he also had Tabriz, another large city, under his control.
During his reign, Uways sought to increase his holdings in Persia. He became involved in the power struggles of the Muzaffarids, supporting Shah Mahmud in his efforts against his brother Shah Shuja. Shah Mahmud married one of Uways’ daughters, and received support around 1363 in his conquest of Shiraz. In 1364 Uways campaigned against the Shirvan Shah Kai-Ka’us, but a revolt begun by the governor of Baghdad, Khwaja Mirjan, forced him to return to reassert his authority. In 1366 Uways marched against the Black Sheep Turkmen, defeating their leader, Bairam Khwaja, at the battle of Mush. Later, he defeated the Shirvan Shah, who had attacked Tabriz twice in the meantime. In an effort to extend further east, he fought against Amir Vali, who ruled in Astarbad, and defeated him in Ray. When his brother Amir Zahid died in Ujan, however, he was forced to turn back. The governorship of Ray was trusted in the hands of a Qutlugh Shah, who was followed two years later by ‘Adil Aqa.
Due to his campaigns, Uways spent a great deal of time in Persia. He died in Tabriz in 1374. During his lifetime, the Jalayirid state reached its peak in power. In addition to his military adventures, which were considerable, he was known for his attempts to revive commercial enterprise in the region, as well as his patronage of the arts. His chronicler, Abu Bakr al-Qutbi al Ahri, wrote of Uways’ deeds in the Tarikh-i Shaikh Uways. Uways was succeeded by his son Hasan.
Shaikh Uvais see Uways I
Oways see Uways I
Uways I (Shaikh Uvais) (Oways) (b. 1341). Ruler of the Jalayirids (r.1356-1374).
Uways was a Jalayirid ruler of Iraq (1356-1374) and Azerbaijan (1360-1374). He was the son of Hasan Buzurg and the Chobanid Delsad Katun.
Shortly after Uways succeeded his father, the old enemy of the Jalayirids, the Chobanids, were overrun by the forces of the Blue Horde under Jani Beg in 1357. Malek Asraf was executed, and Azerbaijan was conquered. Following Jani Beg’s withdrawal from Azerbaijan, as well as his son Berdi Beg’s similar abandonment of the region in 1358, the area became a prime target for its neighbors. Uways, who at first had recognized the sovereignty of the Blue Horde, decided to take the former Chobanid lands for himself, even as a former amir of Malek Asraf’s named Akhichuq attempted to keep the region in Mongol hands. Despite a campaign that ended prematurely, as well as the brief conquest of Azerbaijan by the Muzaffarids, Uways conquered the area in 1360. In addition to Baghdad, he also had Tabriz, another large city, under his control.
During his reign, Uways sought to increase his holdings in Persia. He became involved in the power struggles of the Muzaffarids, supporting Shah Mahmud in his efforts against his brother Shah Shuja. Shah Mahmud married one of Uways’ daughters, and received support around 1363 in his conquest of Shiraz. In 1364 Uways campaigned against the Shirvan Shah Kai-Ka’us, but a revolt begun by the governor of Baghdad, Khwaja Mirjan, forced him to return to reassert his authority. In 1366 Uways marched against the Black Sheep Turkmen, defeating their leader, Bairam Khwaja, at the battle of Mush. Later, he defeated the Shirvan Shah, who had attacked Tabriz twice in the meantime. In an effort to extend further east, he fought against Amir Vali, who ruled in Astarbad, and defeated him in Ray. When his brother Amir Zahid died in Ujan, however, he was forced to turn back. The governorship of Ray was trusted in the hands of a Qutlugh Shah, who was followed two years later by ‘Adil Aqa.
Due to his campaigns, Uways spent a great deal of time in Persia. He died in Tabriz in 1374. During his lifetime, the Jalayirid state reached its peak in power. In addition to his military adventures, which were considerable, he was known for his attempts to revive commercial enterprise in the region, as well as his patronage of the arts. His chronicler, Abu Bakr al-Qutbi al Ahri, wrote of Uways’ deeds in the Tarikh-i Shaikh Uways. Uways was succeeded by his son Hasan.
Shaikh Uvais see Uways I
Oways see Uways I
Uymaq
Uymaq. Term which, in Iran and Inner Asia, refers to a chieftaincy under the authority of a headman supported by military retainers and allied lineages.
Uymaq. Term which, in Iran and Inner Asia, refers to a chieftaincy under the authority of a headman supported by military retainers and allied lineages.
Uzbek
Uzbek (Ozbek). The most numerous non-European peoples in Central Asia are the Uzbek. By the far the greatest number live in Uzbekistan. A large number live in Afghanistan, while a few live in China and Mongolia. The Uzbek are the world’s second largest Turkic-speaking group after the Anatolian Turks.
The early Uzbek were probably one of the components of the Turko-Mongolian Golden Horde, which dominated Russia and western Siberia from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries. The ethnonym “Uzbek” may have its origin in the name of Uzbek, Khan of the Golden Horde from 1313 to 1340. The term itself means “self-lord” or “one’s own prince.” With the breakup of the Horde during the fifteenth century, the nomadic Uzbek moved southward and established themselves by mid-century in the lower reaches of the Syr and Amu rivers. There they challenged the power of the Timurid rulers of Transoxiana, the last of whom, Babur, they displaced in the early sixteenth century. (Babur went on to found the Mughal dynasty in India.) Further Uzbek expansion southward was blocked by the Safavid dynasty of Iran.
Over the years, the Uzbek became increasingly sedentary, engaging mainly in agriculture, but with some involvement in commerce and crafts. They became participants in the area’s Turko-Iranian variant of the Islamic civilization. Three Uzbek dominated khanates had emerged by the eighteenth century. Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva. The majority of the Uzbek were incorporated into the Russian Empire during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the course of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917-1923) more than 500,000 Uzbek migrated to northern Afghanistan, where they are a major component of the Uzbek community found there presently. In 1924, Soviet authority having been established in Central Asia, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was organized, incorporating within its boundaries most of the Uzbek in the Soviet Union. The first capital of the Uzbek republic was Samarkand, a traditional cultural center; Tashkent, the former czarist administrative center of Turkestan Province, bcame the capital in 1931. Under Soviet Russian direction a modernization program was pursued, consisting of secularization, collectivization, industrialization and education.
The Uzbek are Hanafi Sunni Muslims, with some pre-Islamic shamanist and Zoroastrian influences remaining in folkways. Islam was brought forcibly to Transoxiana by the Arab conquerors during the eighth century. Conversion to Islam did not become extensive in
the steppes until the fourteenth century. At the end of the fifteenth century, when the early Uzbek began their move into Transoxiana, they were already Muslim. The Uzbek khanates supported Islamic cultural institutions. With the establishment of Soviet power the religious life of the Uzbek changed. They became subject to officially sponsored secularization, which included invalidating Muslim law, abolishing adat and sharia courts, confiscating waqfs and closing maktab and madrasa schools. Many mosques were closed, and the Islamic clergy persecuted. The overt practice of Islam was discouraged.
Uzbeks were rivals to the Safavids in the sixteenth century.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars and travelers followed earlier chroniclers, such as the Khivan ruler Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan (r. 1642-1663) in his Shajara-i Turk, in holding the view that the Uzbeks took their group name from the last powerful Golden Horde potentate, Uzbek (or Ozbeg) Khan (r. 1312-1340), the Islamic proselytizer. Logically, the domain of that khan became the realm of the Uzbek and, it was thought, thereby acquired the designation Uzbekistan. Arabic and Persian sources referred to the Uzbeks as the followers of the ruler of the Golden Horde as well as to an Uzbek land located astride the Volga River with its capital at Sarai. These sources thus placed the center of the Uxbek territory near the prominent westernmost bend in the lower reaches of the Volga.
For modern historians, placing the Uzbek lands so far south and west in the Dasht-i Kipchak (Kipchak steppe) created interpretive tension, because the large tribal confederation of medieval Uzbeks was elsewhere, according to early manuscripts, and remained some sixteen hundred kilometers distant to the northeast for decades after 1340. This contradiction persuaded several European and Russian researchers to look for an etymological explanation of the name Uzbek that would avoid the link to a specific terrain. Some scholars accepted the idea that the Turkic reflexive pronoun oz (“self”) had combined with the noble title bek to form a type of name common in various languages in many tribal societies beyond the Uzbek one. That combination would mean, they reasoned, “master of himself, ” “the man himself, ” and the like.
As a personal name, Uzbek had been known and recorded at least a century before the rise of Uzbek Khan on the Volga. But by the late twentieth century, scholars had lost enthusiasm for the theory of an eponym like him or for the idea that the Uzbek group name must have come from one of their own chieftains -- a practice quite well known among Mongol-Turkic people.
The history of the nomadic Uzbeks, in contrast to the record of Uzbek Khan’s followers, shows their emergence from the wreckage of the Shaiban ulus (“domain”). Shaiban (d. 1249), a grandson of the Mongol conqueror Jenghiz Khan (d. 1227), held sway in his time in western Siberia north of the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash, east and southeast of the Ural chain of hills. The Uzbek center, Tura, west of the Tobol River, served as the capital of the earliest known Uzbek confederation of tribes under young Abu al-Khair Khan between 1428/1429 and 1446. In fact, most relevant sources observe that the Uzbek lands remained in northwestern Siberia until almost the middle of the fifteenth century. Some twenty years after Abu al-Khar Khan moved his capital south to the warmer country on the east bank of the middle Sayhun (Syr Darya) River, an onslaught of Kalmuk Mongols pushing westward from Dzungaria devastated the Uzbeks, costing the Uzbeks their khan and their lands in 1469. Only two years earlier, Uzbek tribal unity had suffered a permanent blow when large dissident numbers split away to become what are today Kazakhs.
Although the polity and territory of the Uzbeks once more lost focus, no later than 1488 a new leader appeared to rally what were reputed to be the ninety-two Uzbek tribes around him. This was Abu al-Khair Khan’s educated grandson, Muhammad Shaibani Khan (r.1451-1510). Trained at combat by his grandfather, Muhammad Shaibani Khan gave most of his attention and huge energy to penetrating even farther south into the realm of the Timurid dynasty (1370-1506) southwest of the Syr Darya, which included the historic cities of Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Herat. By 1499, the Uzbeks had invaded Transoxiana in full force, and they proceeded to drive out or destroy all meaningful Timurid opposition.
This mass migration of Uzbeks from the Kipchak steppe brought with it a great political change and significant alteration of ethnic (Uzbek) and dynastic (Shaibanid) names. It reconstituted the basis for an Uzbekistan on entirely new ground. The new rulers of the area, like their predecessors in Transoxiana, were Muslim, but less tolerant than earlier rulers, who had heterodox and Shi‘ite tendencies. The Shaibanids viewed this new territory not as Uzbekistan, however, for they remained indifferent to an ethnic definition of their homeland. Instead, dynastic reach and power held political attention, and Islam, along with Turkic and Persian aesthetics, pervaded cultural life. Uzbek leaders invariably headed the governments, khanates, and amirates that followed one another in the southern part of western Turkestan throughout the next five centuries. These entities, remembered by dynastic names linked either to a human eponym (Shaiban), regions (Astrakhan, Khiva, Bukhara, Khokand), or tribes (Manghit, Ming, Qongrat) never selected the name Uzbek for their states throughout that five hundred years.
After 1924, the Russian authorities formed a new political administrative unit within the Soviet Union called the Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic, a constituent part of the Soviet Union. However, Soviet managers allocated large parcels of land to Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and similar units in a pattern that appeared to constitute a sort of negative ethnic gerrymandering intended to disperse and dilute the Soviet Uzbeks beyond and within their unit boundaries. The 1979 Soviet census told the story. Of the 12.5 million Uzbeks then inhabiting the Soviet Union, 15 percent lived outside the Uzbekistan, mainly in Tajikistan, Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. At the same time, well over 1.3 million non-Uzbek Central Asians resided in Uzbekistan, principally Kazakhs, Tajiks, and Kirghiz.
The motive of the Soviet policy of “dilution” was to diminish the influence of Uzbeks throughout Central Asia’s southern reaches, an expanse they dominated almost until the twentieth century. The census report also recorded a persistent rapid growth in the numbers of Soviet Uzbeks inside and outside their assigned eponymous territorial unit. By 1979, Uzbeks had become the third largest ethnic group as well as the leading Turkic nationality of the Soviet Union. This trend generated between 1959 and 1979 a modest rise (to 68.6 percent) in the proportion of Uzbeks among the population of Uzbekistan. Russian and Ukrainian colonists settling in the region of Uzbekistan beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through the twentieth moved mainly to urban centers. They largely account for the low proportion of Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. Also, the presence of these outsiders reduced Uzbeks to a minority or slight plurality of inhabitants in Tashkent, the capital, and in most other large towns of the constituent republic. As a result, the outsiders also held a significant percentage of industrial and bureaucratic employment, leaving 70 percent of the Uzbeks in Central Asia still residing in the countryside in 1979. This distribution promised to change only slowly, for Uzbeks in Uzbekistan could not readily find either adequate housing or suitable employment in the city. Moreover, Uzbeks, like other Central Asians, did not choose to migrate in any substantial numbers to colder, culturally alien parts of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, its growing numbers gave the Uzbek group some grounds for confidence in its ultimate physical survival, despite its brief modern experience as a politically constituted namesake group for Uzbekistan.
Soviet political and cultural leaders continued to manipulate the content and meaning of national identity in the Soviet Union. One important instance of this management of group identities occurred about 1947, when Russian and Uzbek authors writing official histories of Uzbekistan (no unofficial ones could appear under Soviet censorship) began to treat the ages before the sixteenth century in a special way. Few of the older scholars seemed to have participated in this abrupt switch, which was led not by an Uzbek scholar but evidently by the Russian Marxist historian Alexsandr Yakubovskii (1886-1953). He and his associates chose the new Uzbek republic as a geographical reference point, declaring all history prior to 1925 on that land and all Turkic people found there at any time before that year to be Uzbek back to deepest antiquity.
Approved Soviet historiography for Central Asia since World War II, therefore, features Timurid dynastic, political, and cultural leaders as Uzbeks but, with noticeable selectivity, ignores the important role of the Shaibanids and their successors in shaping the life and civilization of western Turkestan. This revisionist policy has produced, among other effects, a confusion of historical identities for the main actors in the formative fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Soviet histories gave, without qualification, the Uzbek to the archenemies of the contemporary Uzbeks: the Timurid rulers Ulug Beg (1394-1449), Timur’s grandson; and Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483-1530), whom the Uzbek troops routed from his small realm in Central Asia. These articulate leaders, along with Muhammad Shaibani Khan, expressed themselves clearly in regard to each other. Babur despised the Uzbeks, he said. Ulug Beg was defeated by them in combat against the forces of the predecessors of Abu al-Khair Khan near Saghanak in 1427, a loss that led to disgrace for him and his field commnaders.
Both Marxist periodization and Soviet ideology necessitated this rewriting of Uzbek history in order to permit a highly selective class interpretation of Central Asian history. To downplay the active Uzbek nomadic place in Uzbekistan’s history, this new conception substitutes a racial and territorial foundation for Uzbek group identity for the old sense of unity based on group name and tribal legacy. These complex guidelines, followed carefully by subsequent Uzbek historians, were never fully absorbed in the group consciousness of the Uzbeks. After World War II, the Uzbeks remained unchallenged by any new school of Marxist thought studying Central Asian history. Added to these doctrinal treatments of Uzbek history, the lingering imperfections of the 1924-1925 ethnic partition of Central Asia, seemingly blurred the Uzbek consciousness into a feeling of broader Central Asian identity, an attitude consistent with the actual situation of the Uzbeks up to the Russian invasion that began in the 1850s.
The Uzbek habitat, which they share with the Tajik and other ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan, is an arid zone that has inland drainage systems and a continental climate. It includes sedentary agriculturalists, but the pattern of semi-sedentary groups dominates, particularly in Afghanistan. Local ecology greatly influences livestock distribution. Fundamentally, sheep and goats are mountain animals, although sheep are less adaptable than goats and tend to flounder in the snow. Both fat-tailed (fat used as cooking oil) and karakul (Persian) lamb skins are major exports from both sides of the Amu Darya River. Cattle and camels (dromedaries) thrive in transitional forest steppes and semi-deserts. The most important modern beast of burden, however, is the donkey. Horses, prestige animals, are ridden, and sometimes the Uzbek drink kumyss, fermented mare’s milk.
After 1973, Afghanistan was racked by coup d’etat, civil war and the 1979 Soviet invasion. The one million Uzbek (the largest Turkic speaking minority in Afghanistan), along with other Afghan minority groups, hoped that the founding of the Republic of Afghanistan in 1973 would guarantee them wider participation in political life above the tribal level. The plans of the republic (never implemented seemed to move towards more equitable distribution in regional economic development and more regional autonomy for the minority groups.
Even after the April 1978 coup d’etat and formation of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), the leftist power elite initially indicated it would respect the uniqueness of the minority groups. Unwise reform programs instituted by the DRA struck at the core of many basic cultural patterns, however, and the Uzbek among others, felt the government to be anti-Islamic, anti-Uzbek, pro-Communist and pro-Russian.
Ozbek see Uzbek
Uzbeks were rivals to the Safavids in the sixteenth century.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century scholars and travelers followed earlier chroniclers, such as the Khivan ruler Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur Khan (r. 1642-1663) in his Shajara-i Turk, in holding the view that the Uzbeks took their group name from the last powerful Golden Horde potentate, Uzbek (or Ozbeg) Khan (r. 1312-1340), the Islamic proselytizer. Logically, the domain of that khan became the realm of the Uzbek and, it was thought, thereby acquired the designation Uzbekistan. Arabic and Persian sources referred to the Uzbeks as the followers of the ruler of the Golden Horde as well as to an Uzbek land located astride the Volga River with its capital at Sarai. These sources thus placed the center of the Uxbek territory near the prominent westernmost bend in the lower reaches of the Volga.
For modern historians, placing the Uzbek lands so far south and west in the Dasht-i Kipchak (Kipchak steppe) created interpretive tension, because the large tribal confederation of medieval Uzbeks was elsewhere, according to early manuscripts, and remained some sixteen hundred kilometers distant to the northeast for decades after 1340. This contradiction persuaded several European and Russian researchers to look for an etymological explanation of the name Uzbek that would avoid the link to a specific terrain. Some scholars accepted the idea that the Turkic reflexive pronoun oz (“self”) had combined with the noble title bek to form a type of name common in various languages in many tribal societies beyond the Uzbek one. That combination would mean, they reasoned, “master of himself, ” “the man himself, ” and the like.
As a personal name, Uzbek had been known and recorded at least a century before the rise of Uzbek Khan on the Volga. But by the late twentieth century, scholars had lost enthusiasm for the theory of an eponym like him or for the idea that the Uzbek group name must have come from one of their own chieftains -- a practice quite well known among Mongol-Turkic people.
The history of the nomadic Uzbeks, in contrast to the record of Uzbek Khan’s followers, shows their emergence from the wreckage of the Shaiban ulus (“domain”). Shaiban (d. 1249), a grandson of the Mongol conqueror Jenghiz Khan (d. 1227), held sway in his time in western Siberia north of the Aral Sea and Lake Balkhash, east and southeast of the Ural chain of hills. The Uzbek center, Tura, west of the Tobol River, served as the capital of the earliest known Uzbek confederation of tribes under young Abu al-Khair Khan between 1428/1429 and 1446. In fact, most relevant sources observe that the Uzbek lands remained in northwestern Siberia until almost the middle of the fifteenth century. Some twenty years after Abu al-Khar Khan moved his capital south to the warmer country on the east bank of the middle Sayhun (Syr Darya) River, an onslaught of Kalmuk Mongols pushing westward from Dzungaria devastated the Uzbeks, costing the Uzbeks their khan and their lands in 1469. Only two years earlier, Uzbek tribal unity had suffered a permanent blow when large dissident numbers split away to become what are today Kazakhs.
Although the polity and territory of the Uzbeks once more lost focus, no later than 1488 a new leader appeared to rally what were reputed to be the ninety-two Uzbek tribes around him. This was Abu al-Khair Khan’s educated grandson, Muhammad Shaibani Khan (r.1451-1510). Trained at combat by his grandfather, Muhammad Shaibani Khan gave most of his attention and huge energy to penetrating even farther south into the realm of the Timurid dynasty (1370-1506) southwest of the Syr Darya, which included the historic cities of Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Herat. By 1499, the Uzbeks had invaded Transoxiana in full force, and they proceeded to drive out or destroy all meaningful Timurid opposition.
This mass migration of Uzbeks from the Kipchak steppe brought with it a great political change and significant alteration of ethnic (Uzbek) and dynastic (Shaibanid) names. It reconstituted the basis for an Uzbekistan on entirely new ground. The new rulers of the area, like their predecessors in Transoxiana, were Muslim, but less tolerant than earlier rulers, who had heterodox and Shi‘ite tendencies. The Shaibanids viewed this new territory not as Uzbekistan, however, for they remained indifferent to an ethnic definition of their homeland. Instead, dynastic reach and power held political attention, and Islam, along with Turkic and Persian aesthetics, pervaded cultural life. Uzbek leaders invariably headed the governments, khanates, and amirates that followed one another in the southern part of western Turkestan throughout the next five centuries. These entities, remembered by dynastic names linked either to a human eponym (Shaiban), regions (Astrakhan, Khiva, Bukhara, Khokand), or tribes (Manghit, Ming, Qongrat) never selected the name Uzbek for their states throughout that five hundred years.
After 1924, the Russian authorities formed a new political administrative unit within the Soviet Union called the Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic, a constituent part of the Soviet Union. However, Soviet managers allocated large parcels of land to Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and similar units in a pattern that appeared to constitute a sort of negative ethnic gerrymandering intended to disperse and dilute the Soviet Uzbeks beyond and within their unit boundaries. The 1979 Soviet census told the story. Of the 12.5 million Uzbeks then inhabiting the Soviet Union, 15 percent lived outside the Uzbekistan, mainly in Tajikistan, Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. At the same time, well over 1.3 million non-Uzbek Central Asians resided in Uzbekistan, principally Kazakhs, Tajiks, and Kirghiz.
The motive of the Soviet policy of “dilution” was to diminish the influence of Uzbeks throughout Central Asia’s southern reaches, an expanse they dominated almost until the twentieth century. The census report also recorded a persistent rapid growth in the numbers of Soviet Uzbeks inside and outside their assigned eponymous territorial unit. By 1979, Uzbeks had become the third largest ethnic group as well as the leading Turkic nationality of the Soviet Union. This trend generated between 1959 and 1979 a modest rise (to 68.6 percent) in the proportion of Uzbeks among the population of Uzbekistan. Russian and Ukrainian colonists settling in the region of Uzbekistan beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through the twentieth moved mainly to urban centers. They largely account for the low proportion of Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. Also, the presence of these outsiders reduced Uzbeks to a minority or slight plurality of inhabitants in Tashkent, the capital, and in most other large towns of the constituent republic. As a result, the outsiders also held a significant percentage of industrial and bureaucratic employment, leaving 70 percent of the Uzbeks in Central Asia still residing in the countryside in 1979. This distribution promised to change only slowly, for Uzbeks in Uzbekistan could not readily find either adequate housing or suitable employment in the city. Moreover, Uzbeks, like other Central Asians, did not choose to migrate in any substantial numbers to colder, culturally alien parts of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, its growing numbers gave the Uzbek group some grounds for confidence in its ultimate physical survival, despite its brief modern experience as a politically constituted namesake group for Uzbekistan.
Soviet political and cultural leaders continued to manipulate the content and meaning of national identity in the Soviet Union. One important instance of this management of group identities occurred about 1947, when Russian and Uzbek authors writing official histories of Uzbekistan (no unofficial ones could appear under Soviet censorship) began to treat the ages before the sixteenth century in a special way. Few of the older scholars seemed to have participated in this abrupt switch, which was led not by an Uzbek scholar but evidently by the Russian Marxist historian Alexsandr Yakubovskii (1886-1953). He and his associates chose the new Uzbek republic as a geographical reference point, declaring all history prior to 1925 on that land and all Turkic people found there at any time before that year to be Uzbek back to deepest antiquity.
Approved Soviet historiography for Central Asia since World War II, therefore, features Timurid dynastic, political, and cultural leaders as Uzbeks but, with noticeable selectivity, ignores the important role of the Shaibanids and their successors in shaping the life and civilization of western Turkestan. This revisionist policy has produced, among other effects, a confusion of historical identities for the main actors in the formative fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Soviet histories gave, without qualification, the Uzbek to the archenemies of the contemporary Uzbeks: the Timurid rulers Ulug Beg (1394-1449), Timur’s grandson; and Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483-1530), whom the Uzbek troops routed from his small realm in Central Asia. These articulate leaders, along with Muhammad Shaibani Khan, expressed themselves clearly in regard to each other. Babur despised the Uzbeks, he said. Ulug Beg was defeated by them in combat against the forces of the predecessors of Abu al-Khair Khan near Saghanak in 1427, a loss that led to disgrace for him and his field commnaders.
Both Marxist periodization and Soviet ideology necessitated this rewriting of Uzbek history in order to permit a highly selective class interpretation of Central Asian history. To downplay the active Uzbek nomadic place in Uzbekistan’s history, this new conception substitutes a racial and territorial foundation for Uzbek group identity for the old sense of unity based on group name and tribal legacy. These complex guidelines, followed carefully by subsequent Uzbek historians, were never fully absorbed in the group consciousness of the Uzbeks. After World War II, the Uzbeks remained unchallenged by any new school of Marxist thought studying Central Asian history. Added to these doctrinal treatments of Uzbek history, the lingering imperfections of the 1924-1925 ethnic partition of Central Asia, seemingly blurred the Uzbek consciousness into a feeling of broader Central Asian identity, an attitude consistent with the actual situation of the Uzbeks up to the Russian invasion that began in the 1850s.
The Uzbek habitat, which they share with the Tajik and other ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan, is an arid zone that has inland drainage systems and a continental climate. It includes sedentary agriculturalists, but the pattern of semi-sedentary groups dominates, particularly in Afghanistan. Local ecology greatly influences livestock distribution. Fundamentally, sheep and goats are mountain animals, although sheep are less adaptable than goats and tend to flounder in the snow. Both fat-tailed (fat used as cooking oil) and karakul (Persian) lamb skins are major exports from both sides of the Amu Darya River. Cattle and camels (dromedaries) thrive in transitional forest steppes and semi-deserts. The most important modern beast of burden, however, is the donkey. Horses, prestige animals, are ridden, and sometimes the Uzbek drink kumyss, fermented mare’s milk.
After 1973, Afghanistan was racked by coup d’etat, civil war and the 1979 Soviet invasion. The one million Uzbek (the largest Turkic speaking minority in Afghanistan), along with other Afghan minority groups, hoped that the founding of the Republic of Afghanistan in 1973 would guarantee them wider participation in political life above the tribal level. The plans of the republic (never implemented seemed to move towards more equitable distribution in regional economic development and more regional autonomy for the minority groups.
Even after the April 1978 coup d’etat and formation of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA), the leftist power elite initially indicated it would respect the uniqueness of the minority groups. Unwise reform programs instituted by the DRA struck at the core of many basic cultural patterns, however, and the Uzbek among others, felt the government to be anti-Islamic, anti-Uzbek, pro-Communist and pro-Russian.
Ozbek see Uzbek
Uzun Hasan
Uzun Hasan (Uzun Hassan) (b. 1423/1425, Amida [now Diyarbakır, Turkey] - d. January 6, 1478, Tabrīz [now in Iran]. Most important ruler of the Akkoyunlu dynasty (r. [1453?] 1457-1478). The nickname Uzun, “the Long,” referred to his height.
From 1453, he was a prince of Diyarbakr, and from 1467 until his death sovereign of a powerful state comprised of Diyarbakr, eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan. In the west, he made alliance with the Qaramanids against the Ottomans. In 1467, he defeated the Qara Qoyunlu Jihan Shah and conquered the Timurid Abu Sa‘id. He entered into negotiations with Venice against the Ottomans, but the latter routed him in 1473. He thrice invaded Georgia, and succeeded in coming to an agreement with the Burji Mameluke about the frontier between Egypt and his own lands.
A Turkish tribal conqueror in the mold of Timur, Uzun Hasan extended Akkoyunlu power over most of Persia, excluding Khurasan. He extinguished the rival Karakoyunlu dynasty in 1467 and defeated the Timurid Abu Sa’id in 1469. He played an active role in international politics, allying with Venice against the Ottomans and martyring the Christian princess Theodora Komnene of Trebizond.
The Akkoyunlu arose at a time and in an area of religious heterodoxy. Although Uzun Hasan was a Sunni Muslim who patronized the religious establishment, he also had high regard for popular religious leaders. He formed an alliance, cemented by marriage ties, with the Shi‘ite Safavid family, partly in opposition to their common enemy, the Karakoyunlu. However, under Shah Isma‘il (Uzun Hasan’s grandson), the Safavids drove the Akkoyunlu from Persia.
Uzun Hasan promoted a number of state laws to regularize and centralize revenue collection, and instituted more equitable land taxes. He was a great builder who created a magnificent palace complex and maidan (now destroyed) in his capital, Tabriz.
Uzun Hasan was decisively defeated by the Ottomans in1473, a blow from which the Akkoyunlu never recovered. He died at the age of fifty-two and was buried at the Nasriyya mosque in Tabriz.
With the death of Kara Osman, founder of the Ak Koyunlu dynasty, in 1435, a civil war ensued among his descendants. By 1453 Uzun Ḥasan had emerged victorious and succeeded to the throne. His principality, centered at Amida, was surrounded by two hostile powers. In the east, the rival Turkmen dynasty of Kara Koyunlu, led by Jahān Shāh; and in the west, the growing power of the Ottomans. Uzun Ḥasan entered into a series of alliances to secure his western flank. He made a major move in 1458 by marrying Catherine, the daughter of Kalo-Ioannes, the Christian emperor of Trebizond (in northeastern Anatolia). He also strengthened diplomatic ties with Venice, Muscovy, Burgundy, Poland, and Egypt and with the Karamanid dynasty of south-central Anatolia.
In 1461 Uzun Ḥasan began his campaigns against the Kara Koyunlu. With the death of Jahān Shāh in 1467, Uzun Ḥasan was able to annex territories in Azerbaijan and Iraq. By 1469 he had occupied all of Iran. Uzun Ḥasan’s support of the Karamanids, however, precipitated war (1472) with the Ottomans (August 1473), who decisively defeated the Ak Koyunlu at the Battle of Terjan and thus emerged supreme in Anatolia.
Hasan, Uzun see Uzun Hasan
Uzun Hassan see Uzun Hasan
Hassan, Uzun see Uzun Hasan
Uzun Hasan (Uzun Hassan) (b. 1423/1425, Amida [now Diyarbakır, Turkey] - d. January 6, 1478, Tabrīz [now in Iran]. Most important ruler of the Akkoyunlu dynasty (r. [1453?] 1457-1478). The nickname Uzun, “the Long,” referred to his height.
From 1453, he was a prince of Diyarbakr, and from 1467 until his death sovereign of a powerful state comprised of Diyarbakr, eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan. In the west, he made alliance with the Qaramanids against the Ottomans. In 1467, he defeated the Qara Qoyunlu Jihan Shah and conquered the Timurid Abu Sa‘id. He entered into negotiations with Venice against the Ottomans, but the latter routed him in 1473. He thrice invaded Georgia, and succeeded in coming to an agreement with the Burji Mameluke about the frontier between Egypt and his own lands.
A Turkish tribal conqueror in the mold of Timur, Uzun Hasan extended Akkoyunlu power over most of Persia, excluding Khurasan. He extinguished the rival Karakoyunlu dynasty in 1467 and defeated the Timurid Abu Sa’id in 1469. He played an active role in international politics, allying with Venice against the Ottomans and martyring the Christian princess Theodora Komnene of Trebizond.
The Akkoyunlu arose at a time and in an area of religious heterodoxy. Although Uzun Hasan was a Sunni Muslim who patronized the religious establishment, he also had high regard for popular religious leaders. He formed an alliance, cemented by marriage ties, with the Shi‘ite Safavid family, partly in opposition to their common enemy, the Karakoyunlu. However, under Shah Isma‘il (Uzun Hasan’s grandson), the Safavids drove the Akkoyunlu from Persia.
Uzun Hasan promoted a number of state laws to regularize and centralize revenue collection, and instituted more equitable land taxes. He was a great builder who created a magnificent palace complex and maidan (now destroyed) in his capital, Tabriz.
Uzun Hasan was decisively defeated by the Ottomans in1473, a blow from which the Akkoyunlu never recovered. He died at the age of fifty-two and was buried at the Nasriyya mosque in Tabriz.
With the death of Kara Osman, founder of the Ak Koyunlu dynasty, in 1435, a civil war ensued among his descendants. By 1453 Uzun Ḥasan had emerged victorious and succeeded to the throne. His principality, centered at Amida, was surrounded by two hostile powers. In the east, the rival Turkmen dynasty of Kara Koyunlu, led by Jahān Shāh; and in the west, the growing power of the Ottomans. Uzun Ḥasan entered into a series of alliances to secure his western flank. He made a major move in 1458 by marrying Catherine, the daughter of Kalo-Ioannes, the Christian emperor of Trebizond (in northeastern Anatolia). He also strengthened diplomatic ties with Venice, Muscovy, Burgundy, Poland, and Egypt and with the Karamanid dynasty of south-central Anatolia.
In 1461 Uzun Ḥasan began his campaigns against the Kara Koyunlu. With the death of Jahān Shāh in 1467, Uzun Ḥasan was able to annex territories in Azerbaijan and Iraq. By 1469 he had occupied all of Iran. Uzun Ḥasan’s support of the Karamanids, however, precipitated war (1472) with the Ottomans (August 1473), who decisively defeated the Ak Koyunlu at the Battle of Terjan and thus emerged supreme in Anatolia.
Hasan, Uzun see Uzun Hasan
Uzun Hassan see Uzun Hasan
Hassan, Uzun see Uzun Hasan
‘Uzza, al-
‘Uzza, al- (“the Powerful”). Ancient, pre-Islamic Arabian (Meccan) goddess, who was especially associated with the Banu Ghatafan, but whose principal sanctuary was in the valley of Nakhla on the road from Ta’if to Mecca. She gradually acquired a predominant position among the Quraysh, and formed with al-Lat and Manat a trinity, called “Allah’s daughters” by the Meccans. Al-‘Uzza was also worshiped by the Lakhmids of al-Hira. After the taking of Mecca, the Prophet sent Khalid ibn al-Walid to destroy the sanctuary of al-‘Uzza.
Al-Uzzá was one of the three chief goddesses of Arabian religion in pre-Islamic times and was worshiped as one of the daughters of Allāh by the pre-Islamic Arabs along with Allāt and Manāt. Al-‘Uzzá was also worshiped by the Nabataeans, who equated her with the Greek goddess Aphrodite Ourania (Roman Venus Caelestis). A stone cube at aṭ-Ṭā’if (near Mecca) was held sacred as part of her cult. She is mentioned in the Qur'an Sura 53:19 as being one of the female idols that people worshiped.
Al-‘Uzzá, like Hubal, was called upon for protection by the pre-Islamic Quraysh. "In 624 at the battle called 'Uhud', the war cry of the Qurayshites was, "O people of Uzzā, people of Hubal!" Al-‘Uzzā also later appears in Ibn Ishaq's account of the Satanic Verses.
The Powerful see ‘Uzza, al-
‘Uzza, al- (“the Powerful”). Ancient, pre-Islamic Arabian (Meccan) goddess, who was especially associated with the Banu Ghatafan, but whose principal sanctuary was in the valley of Nakhla on the road from Ta’if to Mecca. She gradually acquired a predominant position among the Quraysh, and formed with al-Lat and Manat a trinity, called “Allah’s daughters” by the Meccans. Al-‘Uzza was also worshiped by the Lakhmids of al-Hira. After the taking of Mecca, the Prophet sent Khalid ibn al-Walid to destroy the sanctuary of al-‘Uzza.
Al-Uzzá was one of the three chief goddesses of Arabian religion in pre-Islamic times and was worshiped as one of the daughters of Allāh by the pre-Islamic Arabs along with Allāt and Manāt. Al-‘Uzzá was also worshiped by the Nabataeans, who equated her with the Greek goddess Aphrodite Ourania (Roman Venus Caelestis). A stone cube at aṭ-Ṭā’if (near Mecca) was held sacred as part of her cult. She is mentioned in the Qur'an Sura 53:19 as being one of the female idols that people worshiped.
Al-‘Uzzá, like Hubal, was called upon for protection by the pre-Islamic Quraysh. "In 624 at the battle called 'Uhud', the war cry of the Qurayshites was, "O people of Uzzā, people of Hubal!" Al-‘Uzzā also later appears in Ibn Ishaq's account of the Satanic Verses.
The Powerful see ‘Uzza, al-
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