Central Asia Reader
Authors: Juraev Farkhad S. 
Published: December 2020

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of new independentstates has generated great interest among scholars and politiciansin the history and contemporary situation in the region. CentralAsia is not an exception to this case. Viewed in this light, Central Asia: The Rediscovery of History is a welcome contribution towardintroducing the western scholarly community to the politics of CentralAsia.The book is composed of a number of articles published by Turkiclanguage specialists from 1904 to 1990, and of official documents fromCentral Asia and Azerbaijan. The integration processes of the Turkicpeoples, which began during the Soviet period, are now in full force. In1990, the heads of the Central Asian republics signed a treaty for economicand cultural cooperation. The treaty was also signed by Tajikistan,the only representative of the Indo-European family in CentralAsia. The integration envisioned a united economic space betweenKazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgystan. In the 1992 and 1994 summitsheld in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey and five newly independent Turkicstates confirmed their desire to cooperate in the economic and politicalarenas. Therefore, attention to Central Asian problems and the publicationof several scholarly works from this region are symbolic, to someextent, of the attention being paid to the significance of a commonTurkic tradition and the possibilities of a meaningful integration in the“Great Turan.”The book begins with Ayaz Malikov’s “The Question of the Turk:The Way out of the Crisis.” This chapter actually sets the tone for thewhole book by making a case for the need to attract the attention ofscholarly and political circles from around the world to the problems ofthe Turkic nations and their suffering under Soviet rule. His statementthat “our peoples do not have their own history” seems to be true, forall of the nations (not only the Turkic ones) in the former Soviet Unionhad to study mainly the history of the Russian state at the expense ofdeveloping their own historical consciousness. No doubt the author isright in his claims about Soviet violations of the rights of Turkic communitiesin Russia, especially the right to study in their own languagesat schools and universities and even the right to listen to programsbroadcast by western radio stations in their native languages. Arguingthat the political history of the Turkic nations extends backwards formore than two thousand years (p. 4), Malikov calls for the right ofTurkic peoples to seek unification without fear of being charged withadvocating “Pan-Turkism” (p. 6). The author appeals for the formationof a terminological commission that will be entrusted with seeking theunification of the Turkic language.All of the other chapters-Muhammad Ali’s “Let Us Learn about OurHeritage: Get to Know Yourself,” Zeki Togan’s “The Origins of theKazakhs and Ozbeks,” and Kahar Barat’s “Discovery of History: TheBurial Site of Kashgarli Mahmud”-are attempts to prove the Turkic originsof Central Asia since antiquity. Ali’s attempt to connect the term“Turan” with the ethnic term “Turkic” by referring to the Shah-ndma ofAbul Qasem Firdousi is quite novel, if not eccentric, as is his attributionof the Iranian language’s dominance in Central Asia as being the result ...