KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN ISLAMISING SAINT

Edinburgh University Press
Chapter Title: KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN ISLAMISING SAINT: RETHINKING THE

ROLE OF SUFIS IN THE ISLAMISATION OF THE TURKS OF CENTRAL ASIA
Chapter Author(s): Devin DeWeese
Book Title: Islamisation

Book Subtitle: Comparative Perspectives from History
Book Editor(s): A. C. S. Peacock
Published by: Edinburgh University Press. (2017)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09v0p.22
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17
KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN

ISLAMISING SAINT: RETHINKING THE
ROLE OF SUFIS IN THE ISLAMISATION OF
THE TURKS OF CENTRAL ASIA
Devin DeWeese
T he figure of Ahmad Yasavi has taken on iconic status as a saint particularly

associated with the Turks, and with their Islamisation; the notion that he was
somehow instrumental in the spread of Islam among the nomadic Turks of Central
Asia is one of the standard assumptions about his historical and religious role to be
found in most of the longer or shorter accounts of him in the secondary literature.
The notion of Yasavi as an Islamising saint rests on several foundations. In the first
place, that reputation is now entrenched ‘on-site’, so to speak, namely at his shrine
in southern Kazakhstan. To some extent this reflects a standard ‘latter-day’ motif in
hagiological traditions, particularly in the post-Soviet world, where virtually any and
every shrine may be linked with a saint who tends to be identified as a bringer of Islam,
in part as a result of the loss of any awareness of the historical role or legacy of the
saint in question. ‘Who was such-and-such a saint, buried here?’ ‘He brought Islam
here’ is now the default answer.
In Ahmad Yasavi’s case, however, there are broader, if no less shallow, foundations
for his status as Islamiser-in-chief for the Turks, and most of them were articulated
in the century-old work of the Turkish scholar Mehmed Fuad Köprülü.1 Recently,
Reuven Amitai has rightly called attention to the role of Köprülü, along with that of
the Russian Orientalist Vasilii Vladimirovich Bartol’d, in formulating the notion that
Sufis were the chief bearers of Islam to the Turkic nomads of Central and Inner Asia;2
their separate efforts indeed helped cement in both Soviet and Turkish scholarship –
and for many decades few other academic communities took an interest in Islamic
Central Asia – the related propositions that (1) Islam was brought to the nomadic
Turks of Central and Inner Asia chiefly by Sufi shaykhs, and therefore (2) the Islam
received by those Turks was substandard, defective and, in some formulations, barely
related at all to ‘real’ Islam, which both Bartol’d and Köprülü understood to be the
product of the urban doctors of the law and of Arabic and Persian (rather than Turkic)
linguistic and cultural environments.
Köprulü’s chief contribution, in keeping with his focus on the religious prehistory of
the Turks who eventually came to Anatolia, was to stress three aspects of the developing
336
khwaja ahmad yasavi as an islamising saint 337
‘theory’ of Islamisation in Central Asia that came to dominate Turkish scholarship, but
may also be seen in Soviet and Central Asian scholarship.3 These three basic claims about
how and why Yasavi and the Yasavi Sufi tradition were successful in Islamising the Turks
have had a special impact on scholarship.
The first claim rests on Ahmad Yasavi’s modern-day reputation as a Sufi poet, who
supposedly wrote religious or mystical verse in Turkic. In all likelihood, the poetry
ascribed to him was produced much later than when he most likely lived, and in any
case cannot be linked to him historically, but this has not prevented a host of claims
about the purpose behind ‘Yasavi’s’ verse. The idea is that Yasavi wrote Turkic mysti-
cal poetry in order to convert the non-Muslim Turkic nomads to Islam; that is, his
verse was missionary poetry and conversion to Islam, in this scenario, happened ‘by
the book’. The notion of difficult Muslim religious and mystical teachings, full of
Arabic and Persian terminology, being versified in order to be recited to non-Muslim
Turkic nomads and thereby to change their minds and make them Muslims is on its
face ridiculous, and has been ‘called out’ in other contexts,4 but this idea remains
particularly strong as an ‘explanation’ for Islamisation among the Turks of Central
Asia. More broadly, the notion of ‘conversion by the book’ rests on other assumptions
about how conversion happens (for instance, on expectations rooted in Protestant mis-
sionary efforts aimed at bringing the Bible to the unconverted world) and ultimately
reflects the idea that Islamisation, and religious conversion more broadly, must be pri-
marily or exclusively a mental process, with Islamisation conceived of as the adoption
of intellectual propositions, overlooking the profound ritual and social components of
religion and religious change.
Ironically, however, given its implicit ‘intellectualisation’ of the process of conver-
sion, Köprülü’s claim that ‘Yasavi’s’ poetry was intended for use in proselytisation
was qualified by his second claim, which also became embedded in scholarship about
Sufism and Islamisation: Islamisation, in this view, consisted of teaching the uncon-
verted Turks about Islam; but, in the formulation of Köprülü and his followers (and
also in that of those who continued Bartol’d’s insistence that the nomads would not
readily ‘receive’ Islam from the doctors of the law, but needed the rustic Sufis to deliver
it to them), what the Sufis taught the Turks about Islam had to be dumbed down in
order for the nomads to understand it. Sufism, in this view, was ‘lax’ in terms of legal
and ritual observance, and was ‘permeable’ to extra-Islamic ‘doctrinal’ and ritual fea-
tures, thus appealing to nomads, as nomads (or to Turks, as Turks) on both counts.
This claim naturally depends on a host of assumptions about Sufis, and about the
intellectual capacities of nomads, that are in themselves misguided, but the assumption
that Sufis were necessarily more amenable to simplifying their teaching about Islam
than the jurists would have been is also a standard feature of many brief summaries
of the role of the Yasavi Sufis in Islamising the Turks, and indeed in summaries of the
religious history of Central Asia.
The third of Köprülü’s claims about the role of the Yasavi tradition in ‘selling’
Islam to the nomads is also reflected in Bartol’d’s ideas about the ‘personnel’ most suit-
able for delivering Islam to the Turks, but Köprülü’s formulation was more explicit:
he insisted that dervishes of the Yasavi ‘order’ were not merely devoted to ‘heterodox’
forms of Islam, and to antinomian displays of religious fervour, but were in fact vir-
tually indistinguishable in their appearance and demeanour from the ‘shamans’ to
338 islamisation
whom, in Köprülü’s vision of Turkic religious history, the nomadic tribes of Yasavi’s
era were devoted. In other words, the Turkic nomads of Central Asia were receptive
to Sufis as bearers of Islam because the Sufis looked and acted like the ‘tribal shamans’
who (presumably) presided over the religious life of the pagan Turks. This is in line
with Köprülü’s views regarding the ‘heterodox’ orientation – conceived, again, in pri-
marily doctrinal terms – of the Yasavi tradition.
It is again a narrative fraught with misguided assumptions (beginning with several
about the so-called ‘shamans’ of the Turks), but it too has become part of the stock
account of Central Asia’s religious history (and of the basic explanation of why Islam
there is not quite really Islam). The irony here is especially strong, insofar as Köprülü
was in many respects the founder of modern Turkish ‘nationalist’ scholarship; taken
together, these views are in fact quite unflattering to the Turkic nomads, who are taken
to be so dense and stupid that they were easily lulled into adopting Islam by Sufis who
looked enough like shamans that the dim-witted nomads could not tell the difference,
and who recited to the nomads not-very-good Turkic poetry filled with Arabic and
Persian terminology of Islamic doctrine and practice that the nomads could hardly
have understood.
These views and assumptions are still very much with us in the literature, despite
their obvious flaws; they reflect the legacy of mostly discredited assumptions and
approaches regarding religious life current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, when the works of Bartol’d and Köprülü appeared, and they have persisted
more for ideological and political reasons than for reasons of intellectual soundness or
explanatory power. They overlook, to begin with, the intellectual traditions of Sufism;
they overlook the broader pattern of an ‘inclusive’ approach to membership in the
Muslim community that distinguished Islam in Central Asia even before the emergence
of Sufi traditions; they overlook the close association between the Sufis and the ulama
through most of Central Asian history; they overlook the inevitably wide spectrum of
approaches to the sharia in particular Sufi traditions active in the region, as well as the
‘rigorist’ approach of some major Sufi groups in the region; and they essentialise sup-
posed ethnic or ‘ecological’ preferences in terms of religious attitudes and behaviour
(‘Turkic Sufism’ or ‘Qïrghïz Islam’ is full of pre-Islamic survivals, Islam sits lightly
upon nomads, and so on).
With regard to specific correctives about the role of Sufis in the process of Islami-
sation, several recent studies, by Jürgen Paul, Deborah Tor and Reuven Amitai,5
have undercut the general notion of Sufis as Islamisers in the pre-Mongol period;
Paul, in particular, argued effectively and at length that there is simply no basis for
such an understanding of Islamisation in the pre-Mongol era, or, for that matter,
of Sufism in that era. The particular assertions of Köprülü, however, regarding the
ways in which Ahmad Yasavi supposedly shaped the Islamisation of the Turks have
yet to be discarded, and indeed they still shape the understanding of Yasavi’s histor-
ical role found in the secondary literature. One response to Köprülü’s claims must
involve rethinking our understanding of Islamisation, whether in the pre-Mongol
or post-Mongol eras, as a basis for questioning whether the images of Yasavi the
missionary poet, of Yasavi the simplifier of Muslim dogma or of Yasavi the quasi-
shaman actually make any sense at all in the context of religious encounter and
change. Another response must reassess more basic elements in what Köprülü and
his followers assumed about when Ahmad Yasavi lived, and about the social and
political environment in which he lived.
In particular, the assumption that Yasavi died in 1166–7, and therefore lived chiefly
in the era of Seljuq domination in Central Asia, has skewed the chronological param-
eters of Yasavi’s supposed ‘missionary’ activity, linking him with an earlier phase of
Islamisation among the Turks of Central Asia – not the earliest phase, to be sure, but
certainly in the era before the Mongol conquest. For a host of reasons that cannot be
addressed here, however, the date typically assigned to Yasavi’s death is clearly too
early, perhaps by as much as half a century, and situating him in a more appropri-
ate chronological framework means also situating him in the political context of the
expanding state of the Khwarazmshahs, and perhaps in that of the Mongol conquest
of Central Asia, but certainly not that of the Seljuq period in the region. It stands to
reason, then, that any early reputational link to Islamisation on Yasavi’s part would
have to reflect traditions first circulated in the thirteenth century, not in the twelfth.
This is significant, I would argue, because it moves Ahmad Yasavi – and, especially,
the formulators and transmitters of the hagiological stories focused on him – firmly
into the Mongol era.
A related assumption underlying the notion of ‘Yasavi the Islamiser’ reflects a
broad lack of familiarity with the social and political environment of the region in
which Ahmad Yasavi lived, namely the middle Syr Darya valley; though the region was
indeed something of a frontier with the steppe region inhabited by nomadic Turks –
earlier the Qarluqs and related peoples, later the Qïpchaqs, but only rarely the Oghuz,
and never, once again, the Seljuqs – it was a predominantly urban region marked by
commercial towns in which Islam had been relatively firmly established by the tenth
century at the latest. Towns of this region are well represented among the nisbas of
prominent jurists, both Hanafi and Shafiʿi, active during the eleventh, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, belying the supposition that Yasavi’s native region – whenever he
lived – was unacquainted with the intellectual and institutional foundations of urban
Muslim culture.
What little we do know of Yasavi’s life and Sufi career thus places him not among
the nomadic Turks of the steppe, but among settled Turks inhabiting the mercan-
tile towns of the Syr Darya valley; indeed, early traditions about Ahmad Yasavi’s
immediate successors link them not with nomadic lifestyles of the steppe, but with
urban crafts and sedentary occupations. They also show Yasavi himself as a typical
‘mainstream’ Sufi leader of this era, managing a Sufi hostel or khānqāh (another
urban institution) and training his community of disciples in a predominantly, and
long-standing, Muslim environment.6 Whatever Trimingham’s characterisation of
the Yasavi Sufi tradition, in his classic but flawed study of the Sufi orders, as ‘a
ṭarīqa of wanderers’ might have meant, in terms of a conceptualisation of Sufi his-
tory, it was not based on any actual evidence about Yasavi or his early followers
and reflected the sort of cluelessness about Yasavi’s Central Asian environment that
characterises much of the literature that champions the role of Yasavi in the Islami-
sation of the Turks.
In short, the notion that Ahmad Yasavi was involved in Islamisation among the
nomads, in the steppe, reflects neither the likely historical era in which he lived nor
the likely sociopolitical context in which he was active; in fact, that notion more likely
340 islamisation
reflects stereotypical assumptions about Sufis, and about nomads, as well as anachro-
nistic projections based on the devotion of later nomads – the Qazaqs – not to Ahmad
Yasavi the Sufi shaykh (like humans and dinosaurs, the Qazaqs did not ‘overlap’ with
Ahmad Yasavi), but to the shrine of Ahmad Yasavi.7
At this point, we might ask whether there is any aspect of Ahmad Yasavi’s reputa-
tion as an Islamiser that might be preserved; though my aim is not to save something of
that image, which I would argue has been quite poorly drawn, I believe there are some
aspects of the Yasavi tradition that do reflect an involvement in Islamisation of sorts –
not in the way Islamisation has tended to be viewed, but in ways that point towards a
better understanding of Islamisation as a historical process.
I have elsewhere discussed the involvement of Sufi shaykhs of the Yasavi tradi-
tion, active in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the formation of social bonds
with nomadic Turkic communities in Central Asia,8 and I would argue that impor-
tant correctives to our understanding of both Islamisation and Sufi history may be
derived from focusing on the social development through which such communities
became formal disciples of Sufi leaders, mostly within hereditary lineages, linked with
the Yasavi tradition; but here I would stress another kind of process, one for which
that social development no doubt provided the context. I have in mind several sets of
narratives that suggest Ahmad Yasavi’s portrayal as an Islamising saint, evoking motifs
and narrative structures common in other conversion narratives of the Mongol era;
they are, of course, just narratives, and we should not take them as accounts of what
happened, and thereby misconstrue them as ‘evidence’ of Ahmad Yasavi’s historical
role in bringing Islam to the rulers or peoples mentioned in the accounts. At the same
time, as products of the Mongol era, these narratives remind us of a significant differ-
ence between the period that produced them and the pre-Mongol period for which we
may now discard any notion that Sufis were the key bearers of Islam to the Turks, to
the nomads, or in general.
With the Mongol era, that is, there is a noticeable change in the rhetoric and ‘poet-
ics’ of Islamisation, reflecting changes in the organisational structure and appeal of
Sufi communities: figures linked with ‘Sufism’ became the quintessential ‘holy men’
suitable for the role of bringing Islam to powerful infidels, in narrative traditions, and
it became advantageous, in the Mongol era and later, to claim credit for guiding par-
ticular rulers to Islam (a phenomenon that shaped later versions of conversion tales set
in pre-Mongol times as well). The latter issues must be kept in mind in evaluating the
narrative traditions themselves; we must refine our understanding of how Sufis might
have been involved in Islamisation in and after the Mongol era, and the narratives may
help us do this if properly handled, but not even narrative traditions circulated in the
pre-Mongol era portray Sufis as Islamisers. We thus face different issues when attempt-
ing to evaluate the role of Sufis in Islamisation in these two periods.
With regard to Ahmad Yasavi, it is largely because of the scarcity among nar-
rative traditions focused on him of the kinds of stories typically associated with
Sufi shaykhs – stories of his guidance of disciples, of issues that arose in khānqāh
life, of rivalries with other shaykhs, and so on – that the stories signalling his iden-
tification as an Islamising saint form such a substantial component of his saintly
persona. The narrative cycles in question, reflected in a wide range of hagiographi-
cal sources and also often in more recent ethnographically recorded oral tradition,
may be grouped into three broad frameworks.9 Here it is not possible to fully
unpack the narratives, but I will briefly outline the basic stories and suggest some
conclusions.
The first is a series of stories, which I have reviewed elsewhere,10 involving Ahmad
Yasavi’s enclosure in a subterranean seclusionary retreat in which he (sometimes with
his disciples) endures intense heat, performs the Sufi dhikr (invocation), sweats pro-
fusely and not only remains unharmed, but ‘breaks out’ of the enclosure to demon-
strate his sanctity and power, sometimes in the presence of a ruler, sometimes for
a still wider audience (the accounts involving a ruler show Ahmad Yasavi thereby
gaining the devotion of ‘Qazan Khan’, whose name is most likely not an echo of the
Islamising Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan, but rather an echo of the heroic figure of
Salur Qazan, hero of the Oghuz epic tales linked with the figure of Dede Qorqut). As
suggested in the earlier study, the imagery of the fiery hot enclosure is central here,
and closely resembles the imagery more fully and directly evoked in connection with
the Islamising saint Baba Tükles, credited with the conversion to Islam of Özbek
Khan, ruler of the Golden Horde.11 According to a narrative first recorded in the six-
teenth century, this saint was enclosed within a fiery oven pit, but was spared from the
flames to emerge, drenched with sweat, and confirm the power of Islam to an infidel
khan and his subjects. While he was confined within the oven chamber, the sound
of his dhikr could be heard outside, and even the manipulation of cups described
in the account of Baba Tükles, involving a drink made of honey, is dimly reflected
in the element of the khum-i ʿishq (lit. the ‘wine vat of mystical love’) found in the
stories about Yasavi – a miraculous drinking vessel variously described as containing
the sweat of dhikr-performing Sufis, as quenching the thirst of the same Sufis and as
‘congealing’ from fire itself, and then passing miraculously to Yasavi and to one of
his disciples.
The imagery is masked in Yasavi’s case by the fragmentation of the narrative as a
whole, in the various sources in which the elements of the story are recorded and by
the ‘spiritualising’ Sufi interpretations applied to the dramatic imagery, piecemeal and
as a whole, in the hagiographical sources.12 Despite this fragmentation and the inter-
pretative intervention by the later hagiographers, however, these stories taken together
clearly suggest that the figure of Ahmad Yasavi was infused with the motifs and frame-
works associated in the Mongol era with other saints credited with Islamisation. This
reminds us, in turn, that among the constituencies that preserved and adapted the
memory of Ahmad Yasavi’s saintly persona were communities involved in Mongol-era
Islamisation in some way, whether as agents or representatives of Islamisation, or as
groups ‘targeted’ for Islamisation, but in either case commemorating the success of the
process using the rhetorical language of the Sufi conversion narrative.
Moreover, the demonstration of the saint’s power in the presence of a ruler, noted
above as part of the cycle involving the ‘fire pit’, figures prominently in a second nar-
rative, itself likely a composite, in which Ahmad Yasavi as a child feeds a multitude
with a single piece of bread, conjures and then allays a storm, and moves a mountain,
all to demonstrate his power in the presence of a ruler and all following the failure
of the saints first convened by the ruler to accomplish the moving of the mountain.
I have not discussed this narrative in any depth elsewhere, so it may be worth closer
consideration here.
342 islamisation
The story is found only in two works by Hazini, a Yasavi shaykh originally from
the region of Hisar, in present-day Tajikistan, who moved to Istanbul and wrote sev-
eral important sources on Yasavi traditions during the second half of the sixteenth
century; the narrative finds no echo in the early seventeenth-century Lamahat min
Nafahat al-Quds, the most important Yasavi hagiography, nor in any other source I
have found. The versions given in Hazini’s works differ somewhat, suggesting his own
developing appreciation for the story, but suggesting also that his approach to ‘spiri-
tualising’ the narrative and clothing it in specifically Sufi garb shifted as well, in the
process concealing some important and likely original elements in the tale.
In the later of Hazini’s works to include this story – his Ottoman Turkish Cevahirü’l-
Ebrar13 dated 1002/1593–4, better known because of its use already by Köprülü – we
are told that a ruler named Yasavi (!) held sway over Mawarannahr, spending his winters
in Samarqand and his summers in the mountains (ṭāğistān) of Turkistan. One summer,
he sought to hunt near one of the mountains there called ‘Qarachuq’,14 but could not
due to the impassable terrain; wishing that ‘the mountain of Qarachuq might become
a broad, expansive plain’ (ḳarāçuḳ ṭāğı daşt-u-hāmūn ola), he summoned the saints of
his realm to have them remove the mountain altogether, through their prayers. When
the saints gathered and failed to achieve the ruler’s aim, they realised that ‘Khwaja
Ahmad, the son of Shaykh Ibrahim, the ʿAlid’ (ʿalavī-zāda, no doubt alluding to his
descent from Muhammad b. al-Hanafiyya15), had not been invited because he was still
young; they summoned him from Sayram and so Khwaja Ahmad went to Yasï to ‘the
assembly of the saints of God’, presenting as his offering a single piece of bread (bir
dāne atmek) that he had brought wrapped up in a meal-cloth left to him by his father.
He reserved to himself, however, the right to divide up the bread, and when he did so
it proved sufficient for all those present. The assembled 99,000 saints of God, together
with the ruler and his troops, acknowledged the boy’s greatness, and implored him to
accomplish the original task of the gathering: to remove the mountain. At that point,
Khwaja Ahmad, wearing his father’s khirqa (Sufi cloak), entered a contemplative state
and at once a great storm arose, flooding the land with rain. The assembled shaykhs,
floating on their prayer rugs, cried out for help. When Ahmad thereupon removed his
khirqa from his head, the storm stopped at once and, as the sun came out, everyone
saw that the Qarachuq mountain had disappeared. In its place, the account continues,
is the village of Qarachuq, ‘which was the dwelling place and homeland of most of his
descendants and posterity (awlād wa dharīyāt)’. The ‘ruler Yasavi’, meanwhile, sought
the young saint’s aid in ensuring that his name would last until the Day of Resurrec-
tion; Ahmad agreed, affirming that, ‘Whoever in the world loves me, let him make
mention of me through your name.’ And for that reason, the saint came to be known
as Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi.
The version given in the earlier of Hazini’s two works that present this story – the
Persian Jamiʿ al-Murshidin16 dated 972/1564–5 – begins by affirming that ‘a ruler
named “Yasavi”, based in Samarqand, once went to hunt in Turkistan’; he had never
hunted before at ‘a mountain near the town of Yasi, called Qarachuq ṭāqï’ (qarīb
bi-shahr-i Yasī kūhī būd kih ānrā Qarāchūq ṭāqī mīguftand), and sought advice from
one of his viziers, explaining that past rulers had all left monuments and that he
wished his legacy to be the removal of ‘this mountain of Qarachuq’ and its replace-
ment by a hunting ground (shikār-gāh). In this version, it is the vizier, asked to find
a way to accomplish this task, who advises ‘the ruler Yasavi’ to gather the saints and
make use of their power to remove the mountain. The ruler approved, and assembled
in his presence ‘the officers of the court of lawfulness and the wise men of the palace
of obedience’ (chāwūshān-i dargāh-i ḥalāl wa bā-hūshān-i bārgāh-i imtithāl) as well
as the recluses (khalwatīyān wa ʿuzlatīyān). All the assembled saints tried to accom-
plish their task, but to no effect, ‘until they brought the holy Sultan Khwaja Ahmad’,
to whom all the other saints appealed even though he had not yet reached maturity.
Yasavi had with him a small barley loaf and managed to divide it equally among the
99,000 assembled saints.
After this miracle, the account explains (as in the Cevahirü’l-Ebrar) how Ahmad
entered a contemplative state while wearing the khirqa of his father, Ibrahim Ata,
producing a heavy rainstorm that subsided when he raised his head from the khirqa;
when he did so, the storm was calmed, the sun was shining and the mountain was gone
without a trace. Seeing this wonder, the ruler fell at Ahmad’s feet ‘and repented’; the
assembled saints ‘all entered his silsila (chain of initiatic transmission)’ and, from then
on, Ahmad became known as ‘the chief of 99,000 saints’. The ruler, meanwhile, asked
Ahmad to perform a wonder that would link him with the saint forever, whereupon
‘Ahmad declared, “My name is Ahmad, and his name is Yasavi; whoever loves me will
say my name with his name attached, so that he may attain his goal of kinship.” For
that reason, they call him “Ahmad Yasavi”.’
The account from the Jamiʿ al-Murshidin is thus more or less the same as that
given in the Cevahirü’l-Ebrar, but two elements in the story were changed, slightly,
during the thirty years that separated the two works. One is the result of the chief
miracle. In the later work, the Cevahirü’l-Ebrar, there is no mention, even, that the
ruler and the saints were impressed by the feat they had sought in the first place; the
miracle leads to the ‘clearing’ of a place for the settlement in which Yasavi’s descen-
dants would dwell, and it yields also, implicitly, the ruler’s desire to have his name
preserved by being linked with the prodigious saint. In the earlier work, by con-
trast, the miracle yields the ruler’s ‘repentance’ and the collective entry into Ahmad
Yasavi’s silsila by the assembled ‘saints’; it seems likely that even this presentation
reflects Hazini’s interpretation, in line with Sufi terminology, of an ‘original’ nar-
rative in which the miraculous demonstration of power in removing the mountain
of Qarachuq prompted the ruler’s conversion, rather than ‘repentance’ (as with the
demonstration of power in the presence of the ruler ‘Qazan’ noted above), and the
communal conversion via ‘discipleship’ not of a group of less powerful ‘saints’, but of
the ruler’s non-Muslim subjects.
The other element revealing a slight shift between the two works is the reason for
the ruler’s wish to move the mountain. In the later source, his wish to hunt at the site
is mentioned, but seems incidental; however, in the earlier work, the ruler is specifi-
cally said to seek the transformation of Qarachuq into a hunting ground (shikār-gāh).
If we keep in mind that, in Central Asia by the sixteenth century, the chief meaning
attached to the old term for a sacred, reserved space used for royal burials or other
rituals – qoruq – was simply a hunting ground reserved for royal use, it is likely that
Hazini misunderstood the role and significance of the qoruq in the version of the
story he received, and so interpreted it simply as a royal hunting ground. His earlier
rendering of the story may thus be taken as signalling the circulation of a still-earlier
344 islamisation
version in which – as in the case of the conversion narrative involving Baba Tükles –
the challenge, ‘contest’ and miraculous display of power through which Ahmad Yasavi
induced the conversion of this ruler and his subjects were set in the ritually charged
sacred space of the qoruq.17
To be sure, the imagery is again masked, somewhat, by the improbable purpose
of telling the story in its hagiographical context – it supposedly explains how Ahmad
Yasavi came to be known by that name, which he took from the ruler whose name
was Yasavi (though it also serves as an etiological legend for the town of Qarachuq,
‘founded’ through a saint’s miraculous prowess) – but it suggests not only the kind of
‘contest’ of saintly powers, in a ruler’s presence, that figures in conversion narrative,
but an adaptation of ‘weather magic’ as well, as a demonstration of a saint’s, and a
religion’s, power. Given the miraculous deeds themselves, the setting and the trans-
formation at the end, with the ruler ‘repenting’ and the ‘failed saints’ joining Yasavi’s
community, it seems likely that the narrative antecedents of this tale involved a narra-
tive of Islamisation with a familiar pattern, as the saint in the story receives the submis-
sion of a king and his people following a display of superior power.
A third narrative complex – involving Ahmad Yasavi and the Dog-Men – is far
more extensive, in terms of the venues in which it has been recorded and in terms of
the number of versions available; it is preserved in hagiographical works dating from
the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and also in oral tradition recorded
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among diverse tribal and village communi-
ties today classed as Türkmens, Uzbeks, Qazaqs and Qaraqalpaqs. It is also, I would
argue, among the narrative cycles noted here, the most powerful reminder of the ways
in which Sufis may indeed have been involved in the process of Islamisation in the
Mongol era, not as ‘preachers’ of Islamic doctrine or writers of ‘missionary’ poetry or
counterparts to shamans, as in Köprülü’s assumptions, and not as wielders of miracu-
lous transformative powers as in some of the narratives themselves, but as purveyors
of a social idiom of reconciliation and assimilation, and as embodiments of that idiom
in concrete communal terms.
There is unfortunately insufficient space for an exposition and analysis of the
full range of variants, recorded in written sources or by ethnographers; I have out-
lined several versions of this narrative complex, however, in an earlier article,18 with
attention to the major variants and to the echoes, in the narratives, of motifs and
imagery known from Inner Asian hero stories linked with Oghuz Turkic traditions.
My focus there, however, was on features in various versions of the story that seem
to signal phases of oral and written transmission, and although it may suffice to refer
the reader to that earlier study for most references, it is important for present pur-
poses to contextualise the narratives in the framework of Islamisation during the
Mongol era.
The stories comprising this narrative complex are noteworthy for several reasons:
first, they link the origin of the community in question with the life of Ahmad Yasavi,
but they do so by stressing the communal ancestors’ conflict with the saint; second,
they clearly reflect patterns and mythic structures used to narrate sacred origins evi-
dent in pre-Islamic times, among many Inner Asian peoples, but have adapted them
to Muslim contexts; and, third, they have typically been studied in isolation from one
another by ethnographers and historians, not only preventing a broader appreciation
of the patterns they illustrate, but also fostering some curious misinterpretations that
reveal the predilections of some modern historiographies.19
This narrative complex, focused on the conflicts between Ahmad Yasavi and a par-
ticular community living near him, includes two basic sets of stories, sometimes found
independently and sometimes found together. One set of narratives focuses on the
hostile community’s staged accusation that Ahmad Yasavi stole an animal from them:
the community’s leaders place the animal’s carcass in Yasavi’s khānqāh (or some other
structure belonging to him), but, when they come to investigate, Yasavi addresses them
as dogs, and they thus turn into dogs. In some versions of this basic narrative, the rest
of the community is also transformed into dogs, but reverts to human form when they
acknowledge their offence and Yasavi reconciles with them; in other versions, the rest
of the hostile community is spared the actual canine transformation but is nevertheless
profoundly transformed by it, whether through migration – as the still-canine leaders
turn on the community and chase it to a new homeland – or through vicarious chas-
tisement – as the community watches its now-canine leaders devour one another – or
through a physical marking – as the community is ‘cursed’ to bear canine tails ever
afterwards as a sign of its hostilities with the saint. In all cases, the saint’s ‘victory’ over
the community, marked by the canine transformation of at least some of its members,
is understood as the formative moment in the community’s history.
The other set of narratives ostensibly involves the same community, which murders
Ahmad Yasavi’s only son; instead of seeking vengeance, however, the saint reconciles
with the murderous community. He becomes, in effect, their spiritual counsellor, and
in some versions he establishes marital ties with them, giving his daughter in marriage
to the killer. Here too the saint’s enemies become his disciples, in effect, or even his
kinsmen, and their initially hostile involvement with the saint is what brings about
their transformation.
These two sets of stories – often combined, as noted – may be understood to reflect
two strategies for marking and memorialising the Islamisation of the offending com-
munity, transformed by their encounter with Ahmad Yasavi. Significantly, both sets
of stories evoke imagery and motifs found in legends of origin and hero tales among
non-Muslim peoples brought into contact with the Muslim world, specifically with
communities of dervishes claiming the legacy of Ahmad Yasavi. The image of the
canine transformation naturally evokes stories of canine or lupine ancestry among
Inner Asian peoples, but the imagery of the murdered son likewise echoes stories
drawn from Turkic lore circulating in the Mongol era.20 These evocations suggest that
the Sufi purveyors of these stories were engaged in ‘reclassification’ as a strategy of
Islamisation; that is, they were taking elements of the indigenous lore of non-Muslim
communities and infusing it with meaning in a Muslim context, with the encounter
with a saint marking the hinge of the transformation.
If the elements of Inner Asian tradition and narrative patterns reflected in the
sources noted here, all focused on the Oghuz, suggest some of the possible building
blocks of the narratives about Ahmad Yasavi and the Dog-Men, and if the dozens of
ethnographic recordings of versions of the story attest to its ongoing usefulness and
meaningfulness as a way of recounting communal origins, what do the earlier hagio-
graphical recordings of the narrative, or of its fragments, reveal? As in the case of the
other narrative cycles discussed here, the stories of the butchered ox and the murdered
346 islamisation
son have been overlaid with Sufi interpretations to some extent, but here the narrative
logic is both more dramatic and more difficult to mask.
The stories are themselves, I would argue, artefacts of the period of Islamisation,
and they speak directly – if in ‘mythic’ hagiographical language – to the social environ-
ment we must envision when we try to take stock of what Islamisation entailed. That
is, as the stories depict Ahmad Yasavi grieving for his son but then establishing marital
ties with his son’s killers, they provide a religious idiom by which to show enemies,
responsible for bringing death and destruction in the most intimate terms, in effect
becoming kinsmen in the most intimate terms; in this way, they both encapsulate and
narrate the assimilative social process of Islamisation in the Mongol era and suggest
the role that Sufi groups might have played in that process. In one of the earliest echoes
of the story of the murdered son, already recorded in the fourteenth century – still in
the midst of the process of Islamisation in Mongol-ruled Central Asia – Yasavi is made
to pray on behalf of the killers and to explain that returning evil for evil is the path of
the sharia, while returning good for evil is the way of the Sufi ṭarīqa;21 it is difficult not
to see here the distinctive inclusive and assimilationist ground being claimed on behalf
of the Yasavi Sufi community in a narrative context that elsewhere inspired stories
filled with similarly distinctive metaphors of social reconciliation and kinship.
Indeed, a key feature linking these stories is a complex of conflict, sacrifice and
reconciliation combined with elements of exchange, transformation and a sacrificial
meal. In the story of the stolen ox, the ox itself is a sacrificial victim brought to Yasavi,
but consumed by the killers, and the canine transformation marks the beginning of
the community’s repaired relationship with the saint; the sacrificial motif is presaged
by Yasavi’s comment, in one version, when he dismisses the calumnies of the hostile
tribe by saying, ‘Let them eat my flesh if they want.’22 In the story of the murdered son,
the slain boy is the victim, brought to Yasavi, his severed head spoken of as a melon
ready to eat; yet the culprits reconcile with the saint and are indeed bound to him more
strongly, as he forms marital bonds with them.
Moreover, in both stories the offending ‘tribe’ is both enemy and ancestor: in the
stolen ox story, a descent group is formed through the miracle worked by Yasavi, who
is thus genealogically linked with the outcome of the conflict; in the murdered son
story, more obviously, the killers are enemies who are then made relatives through gift
exchange and marital ties, with Yasavi again implicated genealogically in the commu-
nal consequences of the conflict.
At the same time, focusing on the distinctive ‘miracle’ featured in these narratives
– the canine transformation – also suggests the ‘interpretative’ role of Sufis during the
Mongol era in reframing an earlier stratum of communal legends of origin. Indeed it
seems likely that Ahmad Yasavi’s appearance in the story itself reflects a key stage in
the narrative’s Islamisation. That is, we might suppose that a particular Islamising com-
munity familiar with legends of origin asserting canine ancestry used the saint as the
pivotal agent for ‘explaining’ the ancestor’s canine character. The implicit reversal of
the story’s mythic logic may be significant as well, in the context of the displacement
or overturning of previous symbolic or ritual patterns that is often evident in tales of
Islamisation: in the hypothetical pre-Islamic tale, the ancestors are conceived of as dogs
or wolves, whose descendants implicitly turn into human beings, but this development
is turned around in Yasavi’s transformation of a community’s human antecedents into
dogs (in some versions, moreover, that transformation is only partial or temporary).
The insertion of the saint’s role here is quite simple, of course, but it has far-reach-
ing consequences (for both content and structure), and may indeed help us understand
that the narratives of Yasavi and the Dog-Men were shaped not merely by elements
of a pre-Islamic communal legend of origin, but by the evocation of those elements
within an updated framework in order to supply a story of Islamisation. Indeed, the
key equation in this process identifies ‘Islamic origins’ with ‘communal origins’ and
casts the saint – instead of the ancestor – as the key player. From this perspective, we
may envision a threefold process in which a pagan tale of communal origins is mined
for narrative elements to recount the community’s adoption of Islam, with the latter
then marking the beginnings of a ‘new’ Islamised community and thus reverting to a
tale of communal origins (in which the community’s Muslim character is assumed).
The essential change in structure, of course, occurs at the time of the tale’s initial
Islamisation.
It is perhaps the curious aftermath of the story, in its earliest recordings, that most
strongly suggests an original focus on Islamisation; indeed, the aftermath – in which
the hostile people repent and Yasavi is reconciled with them (even to the point of
establishing marital ties with them) – seems to make much more sense if we interpret
the whole tale as one in which Islamisation is being substituted for an original focus
on communal origins. The saint, we may understand, did not simply chastise a hostile
community for offending him, but turned it from a group of pagan ‘doubters’ and
enemies into a Muslim community; the ‘conversion’ is effected by the canine transfor-
mation, which not only constitutes, as a miracle, the decisive proof that induces the
people’s adoption of Islam (and their submission to the saint), but ‘marks’ them as
well, assuring that their descendants bear a sign not of their canine ‘origin’, but of the
canine episode that was the key to their Islamisation.23
Conclusion
The narrative complexes briefly reviewed here suggest one of the ways in which Sufis,
and those of the Yasavi tradition in particular, may be understood to have played a role
in the process of Islamisation during the Mongol era. There were other ways, as well,
beyond the roles of the Sufi preacher or poetical proselytiser still often imagined: Sufis
served as prominent ‘reclassifiers’, identifying or asserting correspondences between
Mongol and Turkic genealogical and historical traditions; they were purveyors of
specialised knowledge in the occult sciences; they embodied sacred ancestry in ways
amenable to kinship traditions in Mongol and Turkic societies; they formed corporate
structures with substantial economic and political influence; they were closely linked
with shrine traditions that mediated between Muslim and Mongol societies; and they
served as sources of social cohesion in the context of the disruptions of nomadic tribal
and social structures entailed by Mongol empire-building and military organisation,
offering social bonds (framable in familial terms but also in terms of the bonds of
master and disciple) and mediating other social, political and economic connections.
In connection with all of these, however, Sufis served as developers and purveyors
of narratives of Islamisation that featured Sufis in leading roles. The narratives, we
should understand, do not tell about Islamisation as much as they embody it them-
selves, adapting earlier narrative structures and themes into a Muslim framework and
providing a model whereby conquering enemies could be envisioned as becoming
348 islamisation
neighbours and kinsmen. This, after all, is how Ahmad Yasavi and the later represen-
tatives of the Yasavi Sufi tradition may be understood to have been active in Islamisa-
tion among the Turks of Central Asia: they framed the narratives about him to reflect
their experience on the social ‘front lines’ of Islamisation.
Notes
1. Köprülü’s contributions to the study of the Yasavi tradition begin with his Türk Edebiyatında
İlk Mutasavvıflar, first published in Istanbul in 1918; see now the English translation:
Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, ed. and trans. Gary Leiser
and Robert Dankoff (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
2. Reuven Amitai, ‘Towards a Pre-History of the Islamization of the Turks: A Re-reading of
Ibn Faḍlān’s Riḥla,’ in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.), Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus
locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle, Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Associa-
tion pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008), pp. 277–96 (esp. pp. 281–3).
3. For a broader discussion of Köprülü’s views on Ahmad Yasavi and the Yasavi Sufi tradition,
see my Foreword to Köprülü, Early Mystics, pp. viii–xxvii.
4. See, for instance, the comments regarding ‘Sufi missionaries’ in the Indian context, in Carl
W. Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 157–60.
5. Jürgen Paul, ‘Islamizing Sufis in Pre-Mongol Central Asia’, in Étienne de la Vaissière (ed.),
Islamisation de l’Asie centrale: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle,
Cahiers de Studia Iranica 39 (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes,
2008), pp. 297–317; D. G. Tor, ‘The Islamization of Central Asia in the Sāmānid Era and
the Reshaping of the Muslim World’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
72, no. 2 (2009), pp. 279–99; Amitai, ‘Towards a Pre-History’.
6. See my discussion in ‘Aḥmad Yasavī in the Work of Burhān al-Dīn Qïlïch: The Earliest
Reference to a Famously Obscure Central Asian Sufi Saint’, Asiatische Studien/Études Asi-
atiques 67, no. 3 (2013), pp. 837–79.
7. The ethnonym ‘Qazaq’ refers to the titular nationality of the country known as Kazakh-
stan, a name that reflects a Russian alteration of the native ethnonym (to distinguish it, in
Cyrillic script, from the Russian term kazak, used to refer to the people known in English
as Cossacks); the name of the country is now enshrined in international usage (though as
transcribed from the country’s official language it would be ‘Qazaqstan’, leading to a short-
lived post-independence attempt to promote the official form ‘Kazakstan’), but there is
little reason to refer to the people using the Russianized form ‘Kazakh’. The form ‘Qazaq’
reflects the Arabic-script spelling of the term (often as qazāq) in historical sources, the
modern pronunciation in the Qazaq language and the standard transcription of the name
from literary Qazaq. On the role of the Yasavi Sufi tradition, and Ahmad Yasavi’s shrine,
among the Qazaqs, see my ‘The Yasavī Presence in the Dasht-i Qïpchaq from the 16th
to 18th Century’, in Niccolò Pianciola and Paolo Sartori (eds), Islam, Society and States
across the Qazaq Steppe, 18th–Early 20th Centuries, Österreichische Akademie der Wis-
senschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte 844 (Vienna: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2013), pp. 27–67.
8. See my ‘Yasavī Šayḫs in the Timurid Era: Notes on the Social and Political Role of Commu-
nal Sufi Affiliations in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, in La civiltà timuride come fenomeno
internazionale, ed. Michele Bernardini (= Oriente Moderno [Rome], n.s., 15 [76], no. 2
[1996]), pp. 173–88; reprinted in Devin DeWeese, Studies on Sufism in Central Asia, Vari-
orum Collected Studies VII (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
9. In fact, a fourth narrative complex featuring Aḥmad Yasavi also suggests its likely formu-
lation and circulation in the context of Islamisation in Central Asia, with some versions
seemingly evoking the ritual displacement or reclassification of Inner Asian funerary prac-
tices involving the sacrifice of horses; this complex, however, appears to have been articu-
lated chiefly in Naqshbandi sources and in the context of Naqshbandi–Yasavi rivalry, and
the other distinctive problems it presents – and the wide range of narrative motifs and
variants included in it – preclude its consideration here.
10. Devin DeWeese, ‘Sacred Places and “Public” Narratives: The Shrine of Aḥmad Yasavī in
Hagiographical Traditions of the Yasavī Sufi Order, 16th–17th Centuries’, Muslim World
90, nos 3–4 (2000), pp. 353–76; reprinted in DeWeese, Studies on Sufism in Central Asia,
Variorum Collected Studies X (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).
11. See my Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and Conver-
sion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1994).
12. Elements of this narrative complex appear in two works by Hazini, the leading Yasavi hagi-
ographer of the second half of the sixteenth century, and in the major hagiographical source
on the Yasavi tradition, the Lamahat min Nafahat al-Quds by ʿAlim Shaykh ʿAliyabadi,
completed in 1035/1626. The ‘spiritualization’ of the imagery, with interpretations using
familiar Sufi technical terminology, appears much stronger in Hazini’s works than in the
Lamahat; see DeWeese, ‘Sacred Places,’ pp. 362–6.
13. Hazini, Cevâhiru’l-Ebrâr min Emvâc-ı Bihâr (Yesevî Menâkıbnamesi), ed. Cihan Okuyucu
(Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi, 1995), pp. 41–3; MS Istanbul University, T3893, ff. 66–70.
14. The toponym ‘Qarachuq’ has referred, since at least the eleventh century, to the mountains
to the north of the middle Syr Darya, in the south of present-day Kazakhstan, known now
as the Qaratau.
15. On this element of Yasavi lore, see Devin DeWeese et al., Islamization and Sacred Lineages
in Central Asia: The Legacy of Ishaq Bab in Narrative and Genealogical Traditions, vol.
1: Opening the Way for Islam: The Ishaq Bab Narrative, 14th–19th Centuries/Islamizat-
siia i sakral’nye rodoslovnye v Tsentral’noi Azii: Nasledie Iskhak Baba v narrativnoi i
genealogicheskoi traditsiiakh, tom 1: Otkrytie puti dlia islama: rasskaz ob Iskhak Babe,
XIV–XIX vv., with an appendix by Alfrid Bustanov (Almaty: Daik Press, 2013).
16. Hazini, Jamiʿ al-Murshidin, MS Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz,
Orient. Oct. 2847, ff. 70a–71b; see the description of the manuscript in Verzeichnis der
orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland, vol. 14, part 1: Persische Handschriften, ed.
Wilhelm Eilers, descr. Wilhelm Heinz (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1968), pp. 274–5,
no. 352.
17. See my discussion of the qoruq’s role in Islamisation narratives in Islamization and Native
Religion, chs 3 and 4.
18. Devin DeWeese, ‘Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men: Narratives of Hero and Saint at the
Frontier of Orality and Textuality’, in Judith Pfeiffer and Manfred Kropp (eds), Theoretical
Approaches to the Transmission and Edition of Oriental Manuscripts: Proceedings of a
Symposium Held in Istanbul, March 28-30, 2001, Beiruter Texte und Studien 111 (Beirut:
Orient-Institut; Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2007), pp. 147–73.
19. Most discussions of these narratives were offered by Soviet historians familiar with the
oral recordings of the tales and with some of the echoes of Oghuz traditions noted here;
predictably, given Soviet academic predispositions, these scholars sought in the narra-
tives not religious language reflecting historical circumstances, but straightforward his-
torical evidence on the migrations of particular peoples during the presumed lifetime of
Ahmad Yasavi. One Soviet researcher insisted that ‘probably these legends reflect events
connected with the Seljuq and Qarakhitay migrations’ (A. Dzhikiev, ‘Narodnye predaniia
o proiskhozhdenii turkmen’, in Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie po ètnogenezu turkmenskogo
naroda: Tezisy dokladov i nauchnykh soveshchanii, 23-25 febralia 1967 goda [Ashkhabad:
Akademiia nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, Institut istorii im. Sh. Batyrova, 1967], pp. 16–17);
elsewhere the same scholar insisted that the stories reflect the period when the Türkmens
350 islamisation
lived along the Syr Darya (A. Dzhikiev, ‘Materialy po ètnografii mangyshlakskikh turkmen’,
in Trudy Instituta istorii, arkheologii i ètnografii Akademii nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, vol.
7, Seriia ètnograficheskaia [Ashkhabad: Izd-vo Akademii nauk Turkmenskoi SSR, 1963],
pp. 192–202), while another simply stressed that the similarity of the legends recorded among
the Türkmens and Qaraqalpaqs demonstrated the close contacts and kinship between these
peoples (L. S. Tolstova, Karakalpaki za predelami Khorezmskogo oazisa v XIX–nachale
XX veka [Nukus and Tashkent: Karakalpakskoe Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1963], p.
183 n. 1). In other cases, Soviet researchers stressed the stories of conflict between the
groups who transmitted these stories and Ahmad Yasavi, a ‘religious’ figure, as evidence
of popular hostility towards the Muslim clergy and as historical evidence that particular
pagan Turkic communities fought against ‘Muslim missionaries’ (see A. Dzhikiev, Ètno-
graficheskii ocherk naseleniia Iugo-Vostochnogo Turkmenistana (konets XIX–nachalo XX
v.) [Ashkhabad: Ylym, 1972], pp. 44–50); K. Niiazklychev, ‘Nekotorye voprosy ètniches-
koi istorii turkmen-chovdurov’, Voprosy ètnografii turkmen (Sbornik statei prepoda-
vatelei TGU) (Ashkhabad: Ministerstvo Vyschego i Srednego Spetsial’nogo Obrazovaniia
Turkmenskoi SSR, Turkmenskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet im. A. M. Gor’kogo, 1980),
pp. 17–28 (esp. pp. 22–3), saw the story as evidence that some groups among the Türkmens
were ‘unhappy with their oppression by the Muslim clergy’.
20. The closest parallels, briefly, include Rashid al-Din’s account of Oghuz Khan’s campaign
into the land of Qïl Baraq, ruled by It Baraq, where the men resembled dogs (a story
echoed, and applied to the Mongols, in a Latin source from the mid-thirteenth century);
the account of the Oghuz hero Salur Qazan’s hostilities with the tribe of the It [Dog]
Bechene, recorded in the seventeenth-century Shajara-yi Tarakima of the Khwarazmian
khan Abu’l-Ghazi; the tale of the pillaging of the home of the same Salur Qazan in
the famous collection of Oghuz epic tales, recorded most likely in the fifteenth century,
known as the Book of Dede Qorqut; and another story, recorded by Rashid al-Din, about
a descendant of Oghuz Khan with special powers and a sacred dog. See my discussion in
‘Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men’, pp. 152–3.
21. See DeWeese, ‘Aḥmad Yasavī and the Dog-Men’, p. 161.
22. Jamiʿ al-Murshidin, ff. 76a–77a.
23. This interpretation may also help us understand why the ‘mark’ assigned to the community
could be recalled without shame, despite the circumstances that produced it; it became a
sign of their Islamisation and reconciliation with Yasavi, not of their initial crimes. We
should not lose sight of the fact that the canine transformation in the story evokes a par-
ticularly disgusting image in a Muslim context, and that the story indeed hinges on a sense
of disgust: the hostile tribe reveals its bestial character as the prelude to its ‘redemption’ and
Islamisation.
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KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN ISLAMISING SAINT

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KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN ISLAMISING SAINT

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Edinburgh University Press

Chapter Title: KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN ISLAMISING SAINT: RETHINKING THE

Book Title: Islamisation

KHWAJA AHMAD YASAVI AS AN

T he figure of Ahmad Yasavi has taken on iconic status as a saint particularly

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