Response to comments on *The Thirty Boys* (Ottuz Oghul). 2019. Mukaddas Mijit, director. Uyghur Meshrep Project, SOAS, University of London.<fnref n="1" />

At a screening of *The Thirty Boys* as part of the Central Eurasia Workshop held in Paris in 2023, the film aroused a number of questions from an audience that included several specialists in contemporary Uyghur society as well as in ex-Soviet Central Asia. These questions focused on the shared features and specificities revealed by the documentary between the male sociability of the Uyghur meshrep and what Soviet and current ethnography has revealed about community gatherings in other parts of Central Asia.

What the documentary awakens for many specialists in contemporary Central Asia is, first and foremost, a sense of familiarity, whether this feeling is fed by ethnographic readings or by personal observation. Two categories of these sociabilities have been the subject of study over the past half century. First, the *gap* or *gashtak*: men's or women's banquets that bring together members of a local solidarity group on a regular date (Mills and Rahmoni 2015; Alexandrov 2017). Then there are the literary gatherings (*mahfil, majlis*) that bring together literate people for poetic jousts long dominated by the culture of Arabic and Persian metric poetry ('*arūz*). A third category is linked to the two preceding ones, sharing their ritual character as well as a certain number of symbols and functions: these are the evening gatherings which, in the entourage of a Sufi guide, precede a *dhikr* (ceremony of

collective invocation of the divine, led by the master) at dawn. These meetings are relevant to our discussion insofar as—like the meshrep—their purpose is to maintain and enrich the group's memory through the transmission of the lives of the group's spiritual ancestors, based on edifying tales imbued with a sense of the marvelous, and which the early morning dhikr serves to punctuate. The theme of collective memory and oblivion, in a period of intense social and economic change, is at the heart of this film.

Many of the characteristics of the gap and gashtak of Central Asia can be found in these Uyghur meshrep filmed in southern Kazakhstan by Mukaddas Mijit. To mention just a few: the calendar regularity of these banquets, which can bring together up to several dozen people, and the hosting by a member of the group in rotation. Both west and east of the Tengri Tagh (Heaven Mountains), the regular organization of such banquets often requires the participation of wealthy merchants in search of respectability and with the means to contribute to philanthropic action. “We’ve got jobs, we’ve got money, we’ve got time” (*ishimiz bar, pulimiz bar, waqtimiz bar*), says a young entrepreneur in the Almaty region who has set up a meshrep bringing together people in his age group. The meshrep, gap, and gashtak share this practice of philanthropy with some contemporary Sufi traditions. In addition to this elite dimension, recruitment is also generational; gatherings are usually made up of men or women from the same age group. Although one of their aims is to encourage the younger

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<footnote n="1">1. Trailer: http://www[meshrep.uk/the-thirty-boys-uyghur-meshrep-trailer/]. Full film: https://youtu.be/wWCOflBRQjo.</footnote>
generation (*yashlarimiz*), they are invited not to join the meshrep or gap of their elders but to form their own.

Another characteristic common to meshrep, gap, and other gashtak, and also present in many of the literary assemblies (maḥfil, majlis) of Central Asia, is a mixture of communitarianism (expressed by the wearing of elements of “traditional” costume) and the ability to integrate people from other (usually Muslim) groups, a demonstration of literary or musical virtuosity being the best introduction (Dudoignon and Zevaco 2009). In the Uyghur, Uzbek, and Tajik worlds, there is a particular attachment to the transmission of Islamic ethical codes and standards of etiquette known as *adab*, which originated in Arabic and are conveyed by a didactic literature (*adabiyāt*) in Persian and/or Turkic.

This gives rise to a religious dimension, which can be seen in the assertive modesty of dress and behavior, in expressions of piety, and in the presence of concepts shared with Sufism—starting with the idea of “service” to the elders, as shown in the film by the initiation to the use of the ewer for washing hands. Throughout Central Asia, testimonies also reveal the role played by women in transmitting this Islamic culture, through the teaching of classical poetry with music. They also highlight a highly developed culture of satire and parody, of mutual and self-mockery, known under the generic term of ‘*askiya*. In the meshrep shown in the film, this taste for parody is expressed in the “call to order” (*dawa-dastur*) sessions, a form of hazing or judging members of the group.

It is also worth highlighting the expression in these forms of sociability of a particular village or city bond, which is often the result of a particular migratory history combined with the demographic engineering of the Soviet period. For a long time under the USSR, the *propiska* (registration) system was used to link a person to her or his place of birth, with the aim of preventing rural exodus and maintaining a supply of labor for the cotton monoculture. As a result, immigrants from Xinjiang in the early 1960s, like some of the Thirty Boys in the film, found themselves settled not in the city but on *kolkhoz* (collective farms), which in many cases lay close to the city.

This town/country intimacy has older roots, due to the bazaar economy and the solidarities it establishes (the ‘*aṣabiyāt* dear to Ibn Khaldun and his many modern commentators) between segments of the bazaar and segments of the rural locality specializing in a particular type of crop or livestock. In ex-Soviet Central Asia, having a rural base also means maintaining close links with

the many public institutions responsible for overseeing this world. Thus the kolkhoz is cited by some of the older interviewees as the crucible for the redeployment of Uyghur culture in exile. Among the rural or provincial institutions mentioned as key to these new beginnings are the regional theaters which enabled Uyghurs arriving in Kazakhstan in the 1960s to learn about “folk” music in small local orchestras, and even—like the Nightingales of Yerkent—to find employment which enabled them to become semi-professional. The role of this type of institution proved decisive in the early development of niches of private enterprise in the Soviet economy, as well as the integration of recently arrived groups into mainstream society.

Some even acted as embryos of civil society for the benefit of these migrants, particularly in the early 1960s when the *new Uyghur arrivals* were struggling to establish themselves in a reemerging bazaar economy in which they did not yet enjoy any system of solidarity or protection. According to the interview in the film with Burhan Tajidinov, this was the case for cultural clubs or centers such as the Uyghur Cultural Center of Awaz Country or the Uyghur Youth of Kazakhstan which is credited with playing a decisive role in the emergence of a new generation of meshrep among young Uyghur entrepreneurs at the turn of the 2020s. In this institutional network, we can see a Soviet substratum in which an institution such as the theater or the cultural club played a key role in the socialization of migrant groups, both in rural contexts and in an urban environment undergoing rapid change.

What Mukaddas Mijit’s film also shows, however, is that the meshrep have several aspects that distinguish them from their counterparts in ex-Soviet Central Asia. The first, which is striking for anyone specializing in gap or gashtak, is undoubtedly the role played by traditional music, dance, and songs which, according to one interviewee, “give voice to Uyghur history.” “We can’t live without music,” confirms another. Certainly, the presence of music, like that of parody games, increases the appeal of the sessions and encourages attendance and recruitment. “It’s important that those who come have a good time,” says the young creator of a new meshrep in Gheyret.

The emphasis on transmission “from generation to generation” (*ewlattīn ewlatta*), in a diaspora context, of a national memory threatened by the destruction wrought in the Uyghur Region since the 2000s, explains the frequent evocation of the sufferings of the Uyghurs

Uyghur newcomers

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in the songs, and it lends an exceptional narrative quality to the meshrep as a whole. This dimension is further enhanced by the archival research and collection of oral traditions undertaken by some of the Zharkent group, for example, on the history of the community and its place of residence since the Tsarist era. Emphasized in the documentary by the choice of a still shot and uninterrupted monologues, the sequence of interviewees called upon by the filmmaker takes on the appearance of a succession of reciters. And the *dastan* (epic), which was a key genre in Soviet literature and philology, seems here to constitute the intertext par excellence for more than one of the stories collected, more so than Muslim hagiography, which is apparently less well known to contemporaries despite the undeniable similarities in writing, content, and even distribution between dastan and the lives of saints in modern and contemporary Central Asia.

It's no coincidence either that many of the songs praise a particular place, a particular territory: from the banks of the river Qash in Ghulja, to the landscapes of a sometimes tragic migration, to the places where they put down roots in Soviet territory. The "Song of the Woodland" (Ösek sadasi) is introduced as the anthem of the meshrep movement. There are several explanations for this particular territorialization. The first is historical: the migrants who arrived from Xinjiang in the 1960s were initially only able to develop their musical sociability on a very local scale, that of the collective farm into which they were integrated. For example, the Nightingales of Yerkent were for a long time only able to perform "inside the kolkhoz," as leading musician Adiljan confides.

Across Central Asia, contemporary discourses of place draw on literary genres from the Turkic-Muslim tradition (from epics to pilgrim guides to shrines) as well as the Russian-Soviet heritage. One of the functions of these

discourses is to celebrate the culture of solidarity and autonomy developed by a particular community, reinvented as a populus in the face of ruling groups or a hegemonic political culture. For Uyghur communities in the diaspora, language is a key area of expression for this culture, at a time when in Xinjiang since the 2000s Uyghur has been increasingly confined to the domestic sphere and is threatened with extinction. The interviewees insist on the schooling of children in the Uyghur schools of Kazakhstan, and in of one of the meshrep we even hear the *beg* (head of ceremony) admonish a group of young people by telling them to learn to "express themselves in their own words," without always repeating the elders' words. This centrality of the linguistic question, linked to the transmission of culture reinterpreted as heritage, is found right across contemporary Central Asia. We need further research, in the fields of philology and ethnography in particular, to take a comparative and holistic approach to this phenomenon.

## References

* Alexandrov, Timour. 2017. "Shaking hands with money: The phenomenon of gap in modern Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan." *Europe-Asia Studies* 69 (6): 897–920.

* Dudoignon, Stéphane, and Ariane Zevaco. 2009. "Sur le 'Mail des Rhapsodes': Sociabilités traditionnelles, groupes de statut, ethnies minoritaires en Asie centrale soviétique." *Asiatische Studien/Études asiatiques* 63 (2): 273–321.

* Mills, Margaret, and Ravshan Rahmoni. 2015. "Gashtak: Oral/literary intertextuality, performance and identity in contemporary Tajikistan." In *Orality and textuality in the Iranian world*, edited by Julia Rubanovich, 316–41. Leiden: Brill.

Stéphane A. DUDOIGNON is a CNRS Research Professor at GSRL, Paris, and a historian of Islam in the modern frontier societies of West Asia. He is currently managing the ANR collaborative research project "A red golden legend? Hagiographic experiences in the former USSR and popular democracies."

Stéphane Dudoignon
dudoignon@aol.com

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