The translocality perspective elaborated in this volume helps us to understand the role of mobility in connecting and transforming places, as well as in circulating practices, skills, and competencies across the region (see in particular Henryk Alff in Chapter Five).
Immigrants of Central Asian origin were able to make notable contributions to the development of the economies, cultures, and environments of their host countries. The exiled Bukharan elite, mostly the Jadids, supported King Amanulla Khan in his efforts to modernize Afghanistan. Some of them, including the Ferghanan qurbashi (commander) Shermuhammad (Kurshermat) even defended Amanulla from the attacks of insurgents in 1928–1929. The exiled Basmachis of Bukharan origin under the leadership of Ibrahimbek, however, supported the opposite side, that of the new Amir of Afghanistan, Habibulla Bacha-i Saqqao. More traditional Persian-speaking (Tajik) Bukharans chose Afghanistan, while Turkestani Turks (mostly Uzbeks) opted for Turkey as their host country. The second generation of exiled Bukharans had ensured Afghanistan’s cultural progress in the 1960s having founded the practice of journalism, modern pedagogy, and the study of the history of Persian literature in Afghanistan (Abdullaev 2009:451–70). In Turkey, the Turkestani émigrés took an active part in the foundation of Ankara University, especially its agricultural department.
Many Central Asians with extensive Russian contacts, especially those from the second wave of emigration of 1926–1934, were more educated than the local Afghans and Xinjiangies, and took a more modern approach to life. These migrants fostered the cultivation of corn
and beets, introduced silk-making, enlarged the herds of the famous Hisor lambs, and developed carpet weaving in Afghanistan (Abdullaev 2009:451–70, 510–12). Soon after the Soviets began cotton production in Southern Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, the young Afghani Abdul Aziz Londoni, realizing that Qataghan had similar natural conditions to the best cotton producers in Central Asia, bought up lands populated by émigrés in the Qunduz area and later established a company called Spin Zar (White Gold, in Pashto) giving a big boost to cotton production in Afghanistan (Shalinsky 1993:27–29).These emigrant activities changed the societal, economic, cultural, and natural environment of Afghanistan.
At the same time, the development of Northern Afghanistan eased the introduction of Central Asians to life in exile and transformed their mentality towards modernization within the framework of a Muslim state, and towards becoming Afghan citizens, thus widening the gap between them and their former compatriots from the Soviet part of Central Asia.
The international migration of the early Soviet period contributed to important changes in demography, ethnic composition and, subsequently, the political landscape of the entire region of Central and Southern Asia. The majority of those who escaped from Central Asia were Uzbek semi-nomads from the pre-frontier zone of Tajikistan, and Uzbeks from other provinces of Soviet Central Asia who emigrated during the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. In Afghanistan, they joined the local Uzbeks (in particular the Qataghani tribe), who were subjugated by Pashtuns during the 1860s. Together, Afghan Uzbeks formed the third-largest ethnic community and one of the strongest political and military forces during the Soviet-Afghan war and the Taliban period.
Simultaneously, on the other side of the border, in the Tajik south, the flight of semi-nomadic Uzbeks, whose tribal chiefs, before the arrival of Red Russians in the 1920s, used to control and even to oppress local Tajik sedentary peasants, allowed the movement of land-hungry Tajiks from Hisor and other internal provinces to this area. Not surprisingly, they were sympathetic to Soviet rule, as they saw the Soviets as liberators and and viewed their arrival as an opportunity for economic gain. The liquidation of Basmachism by the mid-1930s put an end to the Uzbek control of Tajik-populated Eastern Bukhara and allowed
for the irrigation of the Vakhsh Valley and the cultivation of a much-needed thin fibre (grey) cotton to secure the strategically vital ‘cotton independence’ of the Soviet Union.
Summing up, the large-scale Muslim migration processes from Bukhara, Russia and the USSR in the early Soviet period had a crucial impact on the reconfiguration of Muslim society and culture in what we know as ‘modern South Asia’ and ‘the Middle East’. The migration of the
‘exiles of Bolshevism’ was caused by the invasion of the Red Army and subsequent military conflict and it brought suffering and deprivation to the region. However, from a translocal research perspective, this migration emerges as a complex phenomenon that challenges the state-based static vision of history that is commonly accepted in Central Asia, which relates identity to a distinct, unique, and fixed culture, ethnicity and territory. This migration provided major actors with more social power and more options, and enhanced their ability to realize various life schemes and societal goals; it did not leave them as helpless refugees and defeated insurgents. People, ideas, symbols, and skills were able to transgress conservative political, ‘civilizational’, national, regional, technical, and other boundaries.
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