Transmission of a Little Known Kubravi silsila from Central Asia in a Local Manuscript Tradition (late 16th – mid 18th century)
Résumé
Until very recently, following F. Meier (1957) and D. DeWeese (1988), the general opinion prevailed that in later Central Asia, unlike in Iran, the Kubravi order practically disappeared after Sheikh Ḥājjī Muḥammad Khabūshānī (d. ca. 937-938/1530-1532) and the first generation of his disciples. However, very recently, two publications based on private collection waqf documents and texts linked to the Kubravis in Central Asian urban milieu (E. Karimov 2008; F. Schwarz 2008) have independently shown that this opinion needs a reassessment.
In a light of a new discovery (M. Szuppe 2014), this paper discusses the issue of long-term continuity of the written transmission of Kubravi traditions, and their circulation in late Central Asia. It aims at demonstrating that some late branches of the order remained active not only in main urban centres (i.e. Samarkand…), but also in the remote mountainous areas such as the Ferghana valley (present-day Uzbekistan, Kirghizistan and Tadjikistan) and the Qarategin region (the Rasht valley, Tadjikistan).
Our case study is a recently found manuscript volume kept in the Ferghana Regional Museum (Uzbekistan), copied in 1286/1869 by a local scribe in a mountain village of the Ferghana valley. This manuscript contains several works in Persian by a Kubravi affiliate, Muḥammad Ādīna Qarātegīnī (ca. mid-18th c.?), among which his commentary on a major theological treaty by a Sufi master named Mullā Thānī Jāmī Qarātegīnī (active ca. 1013/1603-04) and a versified Kubravi genealogy (silsila-yi kubravīya) linking this particular master to a figure of the mid-16th century Kubraviyya, Sheikh Khabūshānī. Neither of these two Qarātegīnī Sufis was previously known to the modern scholarship: their names have not come up in any known sources before now, and their works remain unpublished. However, our findings show that the Ferghana Museum volume is by no means unique. On the contrary, many other copies of their works have surfaced in Dushanbe, in Tashkent, and in Saint-Petersburg manuscript collections, showing that texts by Muḥammad Ādīna and Mullā Jāmī Qarātegīnī were frequently copied with care, and circulated as recently as the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
The present paper will focus on two aspects: 1) the Kubravi genealogy legitimizing the Jāmī Qarātegīnī sheikh through the figure of Khabūshānī (period 16th –17th c.); 2) particularities of the scribal tradition in transmitting the texts of value to the community, such as the layout of the main text and of it’s commentary, the practice of producing the “facsimile copy” of the copied model, references to a possible autograph, etc. (period 17th to early 20th c.)