Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia by James Pickett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia by James Pickett Alisher Khaliyarov (bio) James Pickett, Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 301 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-1-5017-50830. James Pickett's Polymaths of Islam is another great contribution in line with recent works of scholars on the history of Bukhara and its role in Eurasian history. Although the essential role that Bukhara's global connections played in its history in the early modern period has been well-established in the literature, Polymaths of Islam nonetheless builds on recent scholarship by showing the social orbit of this connectivity. The main argument of the book is that a specific elite class of Bukharan ulama emerged as "polymaths of Islam" by the nineteenth century. This was a unified social group that mastered the multiple social genres of Perso-Islamic writing during the nineteenth century and raised the centrality of Bukhara to a new level in the "Persianate cosmopolis." Pickett defines this cosmopolis as shorthand for the "transnational high culture" that was derived from Arabic and Islamic textual practices in Central Asia but was closely intertwined with power in the region. The ulama's mastery in law, medicine, astronomy, occultism, and beyond allowed them to wield substantial power by guarding their prerogative moral authority over knowledge, culture, and religion. Polymaths of Bukhara were the core personalities of knowledge centers of this "Persianate cosmopolis," which operated in the regional "inner ring" of Balkh, Badakhshan, and Farghana Valley (P. 75) through their intellectual networks. Despite the book's major focus on a slim layer of intellectuals, the scope of the research includes several regions and centuries. Pickett integrates a great deal of archival sources from almost every country in the region including untapped ones, which shows his great familiarity and erudition in multilingual sources. The author's scrupulous analytical skills with a dose of humor makes the Polymaths of Islam both an entertaining and enlightening book to read. The book consists of three thematic parts. In the first part, Pickett introduces and explains the concept of Persianate society and the Persianate cosmopolis. He explains that it is impossible to understand the Persianate cosmopolis through today's nationalist categories, which he finds "unhelpful at best and actively misleading at worst" (P. 18). The Persianate cosmopolis was built on the mixture of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic cultures and inclusive Islamic discourse, in which each of these nested in the others by creating [End Page 230] transregional knowledge networks. A representative of each cultural background could compete for the level of polymathy with necessary knowledge set in "'Speaking Persianate,' which meant articulating their world through a symbolic discourse that monopolized the available trajectories of social and political advancement" (P. 40). The second part of the book locates Bukhara in space and time with its uncontested role as a cultural and religious center. The educational infrastructure of Bukhara increased over centuries since the Shaibanids and reached its zenith under the Manghits who oversaw the staggering number two hundred madrasas by the twentieth century. The vast religious infrastructure allowed the flourishing of multiple genres of textual reproduction and compilations while also connecting the scholarly activities of the regional knowledge centers that Pickett calls "little Persianate spheres." The Islamic scholars who graduated from Bukharan education centers gradually placed the centrality of Bukhara over centuries by localizing Islamic sacred history, which the author calls the "mythologization project" (P. 44). The process accelerated over the course of the "long nineteenth century" (which the author identifies as from 1747 to 1917), making Bukhara the peerless center of the Persianate cosmopolis. The last part of the book (chapters 5 through 8) explains how the polymaths emerged and describes their relations with the Turkic nobility (the Manghit rulers of Bukhara). In these chapters, the author argues that by the nineteenth century, from the ulama of Bukhara emerged multitalented polymaths who were educated in interdisciplinary fields of Perso-Islamic knowledge including Sufism, jurisprudence, art, astronomy, and beyond, which made them uniformly eclectic. This skill set allowed them to work in various influential social roles and positions including qadi...