By Ways of Memory: Identity and Pattern of the Past in H. Amirkhan's «Tawarikh-e Bulgharia»

Abstract

The article presents the thoughts of one of the first Tatar historians Husain Amirkhan (1814–1893) about the historical genealogy of the Muslims of the Volga-Urals and the Muslim tradition of the region as a whole. The original text, in many respects, conducts a dialogue and opposes the work of Hisamuddin Muslimi with the same title dated by the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Accents, in the form of the author’s historical memory, comply to the system of values in which the author was formed as a person, as an alim, as a historian. The perception of the past and the historical genealogy of one's people reflects the first attempt at a systematic analysis outside the methods of modern knowledge.H. Amirkhan calls his contemporaries “Muslims”, the word “Tatars” appears in the sections about the origin of the Bulgars and in the story about the history of Kazan after joining Russia. The existence of Islam and its history become the main context of the “stories” of the region, the author absorbs and adapts local stories within the history of the Muslims of the Volga-Urals. This is reflected in the use of shajara and the history of settlements.H. Amirkhan uses texts that were the part of the local tradition of historical writing, while actively engaging in polemics with them. Following the logic of written and possibly oral sources, the author most loyally and ethically presents a consistent and chronological narrative about the past of the Muslim population of the Volga-Urals and of the region as a whole. A created pattern of perception of the past, which, with certain assumptions, exists to the present.