2017 02/15 Adeeb Khalid

Adeeb Khalid

The Making of Uzbekistan: Re-Rethinking Soviet Nationalities Policies

Adeeb Khalid is Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor of Asian Studies & History, Carleton College. He is the author of multiply awarded publications: The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (University of California Press, 1998); Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (University of California Press, 2007); and Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR (Cornell University Press, 2015).

Graduate student inquirer: Zukhra Kasimova, UIC History Department

Summary

Standard accounts of Soviet nationalities have been upturned in the last two decades. From the Cold War-era notion of the Soviets as enemies of nations, we have come to see them as makers of nations. In his examination of the making of Uzbekistan in 1924, Adeeb Khalid questions some of the premises of the new historiography. Uzbekistan was not simply a product of Soviet policies but the (perhaps surprising) realization in Soviet conditions of a project of the prerevolutionary Central Asian Muslim intelligentsia. Understanding the origins of the Uzbek national project, Khalid argues, also involves the enormous transformation in the worldview of the Muslim intelligentsia, a transformation was a veritable cultural revolution.