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

Abstract

James Pickett’s much-anticipated book derives from his 2015 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation, and the comparatively slim end product only hints at the wealth of research that lies beneath and beyond. Pickett’s work on the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Bukharan ulema’s education, world-view, career networks, institutions and relationship with the state, is the product of truly exhaustive digging through the incompletely-catalogued manuscript collections of the al-Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies in Tashkent, and those of the obstructively-managed National Archives of Uzbekistan, as well as other collections in India, Russia, the United Kingdom and Tajikistan. He cites no fewer than sixty unpublished manuscripts in Persian and Arabic, including thirteen Jung, or working notebooks used by these ‘Polymaths of Islam’, which can contain texts on a bewildering range of topics, ‘Sufi litanies, occult diagrams, love poems, legal excerpts and medical remedies, all jotted within the margins of a single volume’ (p. 245). Their very eclecticism is both proof and expression of the many different roles both the ulema as a social group and individual scholars could play. The same man might write a juridical opinion condemning the consumption of alcohol and poetry celebrating wine, and while this created tension it was no more than most of them were prepared to live with. Pickett makes a compelling case for not separating the Sufi who renounced power to live as a dervish and the qāḍī who took on a powerful state office and the rewards that came with it—both roles might be played by the same person at different stages in their lives. He gives that simple and ubiquitous but often uninformative label—the ulema—a new depth, resonance and interest that those writing on other parts of the Islamic world would do well to note and imitate. He also ensures that the caricatured view of a ‘traditional’ Islamic education as something narrow, blinkered and dogmatic which we gain from the memoirs of Muslim reformists—Sadriddin Aini’s probably being the best-known example—can no longer stand.