Sart

Etymology

The word sārt is an Indo-Aryan loanword from Sanskrit sārthaḥ ('caravan') and sārthavāha ('caravan-leader' or 'merchant') into Turkic languages, via an Iranian language (probably Sogdian or Parthian sartvā) and Uyghur sartbāu. It retained its original meaning of merchant until 11th century, when it increasingly came to mean 'town-dweller', or the Iranian-speaking settled population, as opposed to the Turkic nomads. Under the Mongol Empire, the derived terms like sartaul and sartaqtai were generally applied on Iranian Muslims, making it an ethnonym.

History and geography of the use of the term Sart

Sart is a term encountered in the history and ethnography of Persian-speaking and Central Asian societies. Originally, in the Old Turkic language, the word denoted a merchant. In this sense, it occurs in 11th-century written sources, such as the encyclopedic dictionary Dīwān Lughāt al-Turk (Compendium of the Turkic Dialects) by Mahmud al-Kashgari and Kutadgu Bilig (Wisdom Which Brings Royal Glory) by Yusuf Balasaguni.

At a time when Persians controlled the trade routes leading toward the nomads, Mongols and Turks referred to Persians as Sarts or Tajiks. Since the Persians were a settled Muslim population, the term Sart was extended to all settled Muslims regardless of language or place of residence.

In the post-Mongol period, "Sart" became synonymous with "Tajik" and referred to the Persian-speaking settled or urban population, in contrast to the term "Turk", which referred to the Turkic-speaking nomadic or semi-nomadic population.

In the 16th century, the nomadic Uzbeks who conquered Central Asia distinguished themselves clearly from the conquered settled population, which they referred to as "Sarts" regardless of linguistic or ethnic affiliation. The distinction between Uzbeks and Sarts (Tajiks) was now perceived more sharply than the earlier distinction between Turks and Sarts, since some pre-Uzbek Chaghatay Turkic tribes had already adopted a settled way of life. This use of the term Sart continued until the 19th century.

The mass migration of Turkic and Turkicised Mongol nomads into Transoxiana as a result of the Uzbek invasion led to a sharp intensification of the Turkicisation of the indigenous Iranian population. By the 19th century, both the Turkicisation of the Iranians and the adoption of a settled way of life by the Uzbeks had reached an advanced stage. The term Sart, which originally denoted settled Iranians and later Persian-speaking and Turkic-speaking urban inhabitants, came to be used mainly for Turkic-speaking or bilingual urban inhabitants. At the same time, the term Tajik, previously synonymous with Sart, came to be used specifically for Persian-speaking populations. Moreover, Sarts, as urban inhabitants or agriculturalists of Bukhara and Kokand, were contrasted with the nomads known as "Kazakhs", while in Khwarazm the corresponding contrast was with Turkmens.

Sarts of the Khanate of Kokand

Rashid Nabiev, in his 1973 book From the History of the Khanate of Kokand, explained that the term "Sart" referred to the settled agricultural and urban Uzbek and Tajik population of the plains of Turkestan.

Timur Beisembiev, a historian and Orientalist specialising in Persian- and Turkic-language manuscript sources and the history of the Khanate of Kokand, studied various manuscript copies of the Kokand historiographical work Tarikh-i Shahrukhi (History of Shahrukh) by Mulla Niyaz Muhammad Khokandi in the 1980s. The work covers the entire history of the Khanate of Kokand from the beginning of the 18th century to the early 1870s.

According to Tarikh-i Shahrukhi, the ethnic composition of the Khanate of Kokand was diverse. In addition to numerous nomadic peoples, the settled inhabitants of Fergana were described as Sarts, Tajiks, and Uzbeks. According to Beisembiev, the ethnonym "Sart" (sartiyya) in Khokandi's work had both a narrow and a broader meaning, the latter denoting the entire settled population of Fergana in opposition to the nomadic population (ilatiyya).

According to Khokandi's description of the ethnic composition of the regions of the Khanate of Kokand, the settled inhabitants of the Tashkent region and Kurama were Sarts, Tajiks, and "Andis". In the domain of Ura-Tyube, the settled population consisted of Sarts and Tajiks. Analysing the primary source, Beisembiev concluded that the most numerous populations in Fergana were Sarts, Kipchaks, and Kyrgyz, while in the Tashkent region and Kurama they were Sarts, Kurama, and Kazakhs.

The first chapter of Tarikh-i Shahrukhi, in its account of the accession of Shah Rukh Khan in 1709 and the foundation of Kokand, states that numerous settlements around the site where Kokand would later be founded were inhabited by Uzbeks and Sarts.

Sarts of the Khanate of Khiva

The Orientalist Yuri E. Bregel conducted research on the subject and published a study entitled The Sarts in the Khanate of Khiva in 1978.

The main conclusions of his research were:

First, the Sarts of the Khanate of Khiva differed from the Uzbeks, at least until the first half of the 19th century. They differed in origin: the Sarts descended from the ancient settled population of Khwarazm. They differed in cultural traditions, as they were urban inhabitants or peasants. They differed geographically, as the Sarts were concentrated mainly in the southern part of the state. They also differed in social status: the Sarts were rayas, that is, a tax-paying estate, while the Uzbeks were sipahis, or warriors. There was also a distinction in the role played by their leaders in the administration of the state.

Second, the term Sarts was a self-designation of this population group until 1917. The Sarts were clearly regarded by the Uzbeks as a separate ethnic group, or another people.

Third, although the Sarts of Khwarazm spoke a Turkic dialect in the 19th century that was close to but distinct from the dialect of nomadic and semi-nomadic Uzbeks, there were indirect indications that they were probably bilingual and that at least some of them also used Persian or Tajik.

Fourth, the gradual integration of these two parts of the population of Khwarazm, Sarts and Uzbeks, occurred at all levels. Geographically, Uzbeks settled in the southern parts of the country and mixed with the Sarts. Socially, Uzbeks became taxpayers, while Sarts began to serve as nukers. Politically, the Sart aristocracy more or less successfully began to share power with the Uzbeks. Culturally, the Uzbeks adopted a settled way of life and became urban inhabitants or peasants. Linguistically, the Turkicisation of the Sarts was probably completed in the 19th century. However, because this linguistic process was recent, integration had not been fully completed by the beginning of the 20th century.

Consequently, both from the perspective of the self-identification of the local population and that of European observers, they remained two distinct peoples, although very closely related to one another.

Sarts of East Turkestan

The modern ethnonym "Uyghur" was not used in Russian-language sources of the 19th century. The terms "Kashgaris", "Sarts", and "Tatars of Eastern (Chinese) Turkestan" were used instead.

N. V. Bogayavlensky, who had served as a Russian consul in western China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, noted in his description of the city of Kashgar that Chinese and Muslims lived separately there. The Chinese consisted only of the administration and troops, and "the Chinese element disappears among the Turkic one", while the Muslim population of Kashgar was "represented exclusively by Sarts". By Sarts, the author meant the Uyghurs.

Zarubin considered the Kashgaris of East Turkestan to be a Turkicised Iranian population that differed from the Uzbek Sarts "only by minor dialectal features". He claimed that the Taranchis called themselves Sarts and later, together with the Kashgaris, adopted the name Uyghurs.

Origin of the term "Sart"

In the 1890s, Bartold conducted a special study of the origin of the term "Sart" and its use during different historical periods. This study was prompted by his scholarly dispute in the press with Ser-Ali Lapin, an ethnic Kazakh translator working for the governor of Samarkand.

The term "Sart" carried different meanings during different periods. As Bartold noted, the term Sart occurs in 11th-century Turkic literature, but "not as a name of a people", but as a common noun denoting a merchant.

In Turkic Buddhist literature, the word sartbau, a distorted form of the Sanskrit sarthavaha or sarthabaha, meaning "caravan leader", occurs. According to Bartold, through linguistic reinterpretation the Turks transformed it into sartbashi, "chief of the Sarts", from which the word "Sart" in the sense of "merchant" developed.

Mongols of the 13th century used words derived from this root, such as "sartaq" and "sartaul", in the sense of "Tajik" and "Muslim". Sartaqs referred not only to Persians but also to Muslim Turks.

According to Bartold's research, in the 15th century the descendants of the Mongols in Turkestan used the word "Sart" in the sense of "Tajik", contrasting the language and literature of the Sarts with Turkic language and literature. A 14th-century anonymous Arab philologist, in a work on the Mongolian language, translated the word "sartaul" as "Muslim". As Bartold noted, the words "Sart" and "sartaul" were used in the states of Central Asia and Persia established by the Mongols and united under Timur's rule at the end of the 14th century as synonyms for "Tajik". Under Timur's descendants, references began to be made to the language and literature of the Sarts in contrast to the language and literature of the Turks, meaning that Sarts generally referred to Persians. Bartold also noted that the description of the Kabul region by Babur, found by A. N. Samoylovich, in which it is stated that Sarts differed from Tajiks, stands completely alone. Elsewhere in Babur's work Tajiks are not mentioned. Thus, in his description of Fergana, only the Sarts and their language are contrasted with the Turks and their language.

In the 16th century, nomadic Uzbeks began referring to all settled inhabitants, both Turks and Tajiks (Persians), as Sarts. After Turkic became the main language of the settled population, the word "Sart" came to be used in literature and everyday life in the sense of an "urban inhabitant" or "rural inhabitant" who spoke Turkic rather than Persian. Sarts were now contrasted not with Uzbeks, who by that time were mostly settled, but with "Kazakhs".

Sarts in the Russian Empire

In Russia, perceptions of the composition of the population of Central Asia remained quite approximate even in the mid-18th century, although attempts at classification were made. Classifications could place "Kirghiz-Kaisaks" and "Tashkentis" alongside one another. Russians were familiar with the terms "Uzbeks" and "Tajiks", but there was no clear understanding of who these groups were or how they differed from each other. There was also no clear understanding of what should constitute the "unit" of description.

In the 19th century, the principal basis for classifying the population became an ethnic, or, as it was then called, "tribal", criterion. However, as Bartold wrote in the early 20th century, "the settled inhabitant of Central Asia considers himself first and foremost a Muslim, and only then an inhabitant of a particular city or locality; the idea of belonging to a particular people has no significance for him".

By the middle of the 19th century, a simplified binary Uzbek/Tajik classification had been adopted. After the incorporation into the Russian Empire of the Khanate of Kokand, which included the Fergana Valley and the city of Tashkent, Russian researchers encountered the term "Sart". Initially, Sarts were equated with Tajiks, but it became clear that the local population distinguished between Sarts and Tajiks. Although similar to Tajiks in appearance, way of life, and culture, the Sarts of Fergana and Tashkent spoke a Turkic language that was regarded as the language of the nomadic Uzbeks. The way out of this confusing situation was to regard the Sarts as a separate people.

Sarts in the administrative system of the Russian Empire

In the second half of the 19th century, during the Russian conquest of Central Asia, Orientalists and the colonial administration encountered the term "Sart". It was used as a self-designation by settled Uzbeks in the Tashkent, Fergana, and Khwarazm oases, while nomadic peoples such as the Kazakhs and semi-nomadic Uzbeks used the term in reference to settled Uzbeks and, in part, lowland Tajiks.

In 1867, the Russian Emperor Alexander II established a new imperial administrative unit from the conquered territories of Central Asia, the Turkestan Governor-Generalship. Its internal administration was governed by the "Regulation on the Administration of the Semirechye and Syr Darya Oblasts". The "native population of Turkestan" was administratively divided into two parts corresponding to the territories inhabited by "two nationalities—the Sarts and the Kirghiz". According to the authors of the regional statute, the Sarts led a settled way of life, while the Kirghiz were nomadic. Each group was provided with its own form of self-government and judicial administration, separate rules for land ownership and use, and different taxation.

From the second half of the 19th century, Russian Orientalists referred to the Turkic speech of the settled population of Transoxiana as "Sart". Grammars and dictionaries of the Sart language were published. In Tashkent, the centre of the Turkestan Governor-Generalship, the Turkestan Native Newspaper (Turkistan wilayatining gazeti) was published in Old Uzbek (Sart) and Old Kyrgyz.

Khalid noted that in Russian bureaucratic practice the term "Sart" was used exclusively to designate the Turkic-speaking part of the settled population of Central Asia, while the term "Tajik" was reserved for the Iranian-speaking settled population, and widespread bilingualism was ignored.

In 1897, the first general census of the Russian Empire was conducted. According to the scientific concepts prevailing at the time, "nationality" or "peoplehood" was determined by "native language", and the 1897 census did not ask about "nationality" but about "native language".

Modern researchers are critical of the results of this census with regard to ethnicity and consider the use of linguistic criteria as a tool for determining nationality to have been ineffective.

Scholarly and public debates

The first Russian ethnographic classification of the peoples of Central Asia was created in the first half of the 19th century. It was a highly simplified classification based on a binary Uzbek–Tajik opposition and corresponded to contemporary perceptions of the history of the Middle East. Uzbeks were described as speaking a Turkic language, having Mongoloid physical features, and leading a nomadic way of life. Tajiks were described as speaking an Iranian language, having European physical features, and engaging in agriculture and crafts. This scheme was followed by N. V. Khanykov and E. K. Meyendorff, who studied the Emirate of Bukhara in the 1830s, and by V. V. Veliaminov-Zernov in his description of the Khanate of Kokand.

By 1875, following the Russian conquest of a significant part of Central Asia, it became apparent that the binary scheme did not work. Much of the population of Fergana and the environs of Tashkent spoke a Turkic language but did not display pronounced Mongoloid features and led a settled way of life. The general term for them was Sarts.

Sarts are Tajiks. In the mid-19th century, a majority of specialists on Central Asia agreed that Sarts were Tajiks, or some related people, since both groups were physically indistinguishable and led similar ways of life. This view was shared by Alexander Burnes, Arminius Vambery, Yuri D. Yuzhakov, Alexander Khorooshkhin, and Afanasiy Grebenkin.

Over time, many Russian scholars came to understand that the concept of "Sart" confused researchers because of its ambiguity. Various interpretations began to emerge.

Sarts are settled inhabitants. The view that Sarts were settled inhabitants was shared by Alexei P. Fedchenko, Lev F. Kostenko, Leonid N. Sobolev. In his 1874 work Geographical and Statistical Information on the Zeravshan District, Sobolev wrote that "...Sart is not a separate tribe... A Sart is indiscriminately an Uzbek or Tajik who lives in a city and engages in trade. It is a kind of petty bourgeoisie, an estate..." The same view was held by Charles-Eugene Ujfalvy, Samuil M. Dudin, and V. I. Kushelevsky.

Sarts are a mixed nationality. Another line of argument held that the Sarts were a distinct people of mixed origin.

Sarts under Soviet rule

The 1917 Revolution destroyed the previous structure of the state, and the new authorities entered into dialogue with the local Muslim elite. According to Abashin, the parties had to find a formula for an agreement that would both preserve the unity of the former country and provide some degree of political agency to the former "aliens" within the future political structure. One point of this informal agreement was the decision to abandon the term "Sart", which many considered to symbolise the great-power character of imperial rule during the period of "Tsarism". As a result, following the national delimitation of 1924–1925 and the all-Union census of 1926, the name "Sarts" disappeared completely from the ethnographic map of Central Asia.

In spring 1924, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), in agreement with local leaders, decided to carry out the national delimitation of Central Asia. The largest state in the region became the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, whose creation represented the final point in the compromises and agreements between the Bolsheviks and the local elite. The choice of the titular name "Uzbek" for the national state satisfied both sides. The Bolsheviks regarded it as a retreat from radical pan-Turkism, while local leaders, including the Jadids, gained a large Turkic space in which to implement their cultural projects.

As Bregel noted, the term Sart ultimately disappeared from administrative and political usage as a result of an administrative decree. In 1920, while preparing the national delimitation of Central Asia, V. I. Lenin wrote a short directive to prepare a map of Turkestan with its "division into Uzbekia, Kirghizia, and Turkmenia". There was no "Sartia" on the map, and therefore the Sarts were simply included in the category "Uzbeks". This was officially confirmed by the 1926 census, in which enumerators were instructed that persons who identified themselves as Sarts were to be recorded as Uzbeks. Accordingly, after 1926 the Sarts disappeared from the ethnographic map of Central Asia.

As Khalid noted, asserting the Turkic character of the population of Central Asia meant rejecting other designations of national belonging. Even before 1917, the Jadids objected to the term "Sart". What primarily dissatisfied the Jadids was that the term did not reflect the "actual" Turkic character of the groups to which it was applied. The criticism was so intense that by 1917 the word "Sart" disappeared from the political lexicon. As Khalid writes, its subsequent use provoked a sharp reaction from the nationalising intelligentsia. When the term "Sart" was used in 1922 in the Kazakh newspaper Ak Zhol in reference to the population of Tashkent, the writer Abdulla Qodiriy entered the debate. He wrote that the term "Sart" recalled the "times of Mr Ostroumov" and clearly insulted "us, Uzbeks, [who] fought against the word 'Sart', regardless of who attached it to us and for what reasons". The Sarts were also excluded from the political and ethnographic lexicon because no group claimed the right to be designated by this term.

Historiography of works on the Sarts

In 2008, the American Orientalist Yuri E. Bregel published the review article "Recent Publications on the Sarts: A Review Article" on the historiography of works concerning the Sarts. Although the Sarts disappeared from the ethnographic map of Central Asia in 1926, they did not disappear from scholarly debates and frequently appeared as "so-called Sarts", with explanations that the name referred to Uzbeks who lacked or had lost their tribal affiliation.

In the same year, 1926, the prominent Russian linguist Evgeny Polivanov published in Tashkent his study Ethnographic Characteristics of the Uzbeks, Issue 1: The Origin and Name of the Uzbeks, in which he attempted to determine the language spoken by the Sarts. He noted that it differed from the language of the nomadic Uzbeks through a stronger influence of Tajik. In his view, it would be incorrect to perceive the Sarts in the early 20th century merely as "settled Uzbeks", although the difference between Sarts and Uzbeks was often blurred and varied from region to region.

From the mid-1920s until the 1940s, very little was written about the Sarts. In 1941, the Soviet Orientalist A. Yu. Yakubovsky published in Tashkent the pamphlet On the Question of the Ethnogenesis of the Uzbek People, in which he presented his theory of Uzbek ethnogenesis, which was supported in 1943 by the Soviet archaeologist S. P. Tolstov. According to this theory, the Uzbek nation had developed since ancient times in the territory it currently occupies. Yakubovsky argued that the nomadic Uzbeks were merely the final ethnic component of a population that had gradually formed in Transoxiana and other settled regions of Central Asia, and that only the name of the new conquerors "was transferred" to the existing population.

This idea was adopted in all general histories of Uzbekistan both under Soviet rule and in independent Uzbekistan. According to this theory, the Sarts were to be regarded as one of the constituent elements of the modern Uzbek nation. This was done in the book by the historian Mavlyan Vakhabov, The Formation of the Uzbek Socialist Nation, published in Tashkent in 1961. Within this paradigm, Vakhabov wrote: "...the original core, the ancient stratum of the Uzbek people ... was called Turks until the 16th century, while part of the Turks living in cities later acquired the name Sarts". He also wrote: "...in the 13th century there were large settlements and cities in Fergana with a Turkic population that received the name Sarts after the 16th century".

Works by authors from the post-Soviet states of Central Asia

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 and the emergence of independent states in Central Asia revived interest in the "Sart problem". The "Sart problem" became a convenient pretext for rewriting history and attempting to make political and moral claims.

Contemporary discussion of the "Sart problem" reproduces the debate of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some researchers (A. Koichiev) regard the Sarts as a distinct ethnic community, others (R. Masov and A. Mirbabaev) identify the Sarts as Tajiks, while others (P. D. Shozimov, N. Tursunov) consider the Sarts to have been a social rather than ethnic group. According to Abashin, references to the Sarts by Kyrgyz and especially Tajik scholars have an "anti-Uzbek" purpose. Their attempt to separate the history of the Sarts from that of the Uzbeks calls into question the very concept of the "Uzbek nation", and therefore the territorial configuration of the "national republics" established in the 1920s. Uzbek researchers instead adopted a strategy of "silence", implying that the Sarts were exclusively part of the Uzbek people and that this should not be a subject of dispute.

Tajik historiography. Tajik scholars paid considerable attention to the Sarts in the early 2000s. For them, the "Sart problem" became one of the grounds for debating who the "Tajiks" were and for interpreting the national delimitation of the 1920s as an injustice committed against Central Asian Tajiks and as a continuation of the aggression of Uzbek newcomers against the indigenous Iranian-speaking Tajik population.

Soviet Tajik historian R. Masov, in his 2003 book The Tajiks: Dispossession and Assimilation, wrote that the Sarts were a "mixed nationality" that arose "from the merging" of Iranian-speaking populations with Turkic-Mongol "newcomers", with "Tajik blood being much more prevalent among the Sarts". He had previously written that "essentially, Sarts were not only Turkic-Tajik metis, but the absolute majority of the Sart population consisted precisely of Tajiks who, for a number of objective and subjective circumstances, had forgotten the Tajik language and their ethnic origin".

In 2002, Soviet Tajik researcher A. Mirbabaev, in his work On the Term "Sart" as a Synonym of the Ethnonym "Tajik", noted that Soviet historiography had passed over the Sart question in silence. In his view, in the 15th–17th centuries the term "Sart" was applied to Tajiks, "especially to the urban trading and artisan stratum, in whose hands spiritual authority was also concentrated". He also stated that "Sarts are Tajiks, not Uzbeks and Kyrgyz", and that the "Sart language" consisted of "Tajik words" mixed with "Uzbek dialects". Sarts-Tajiks interacted with Turks, and therefore "developed bilingualism"; the "process of Sartisation of Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Turks, Kurama, and other Turkic tribes of Central Asia, especially the Fergana Valley, occurred rather late, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century" and was associated with the arrival of the Russians and "the establishment of peace and tranquillity in the region". Mirbabaev further wrote that in the 1920s the authorities ordered the replacement of the term "Sart" with "Uzbeks", after which the two concepts "were merged into one". The Tajik scholar called the attempt "to regard the Sarts as a separate ethnic group" a "misconception".

Modern research

The French Orientalist Olivier Roy defines Sarts as a settled, non-tribal group of rural inhabitants bound together by cultural ties regardless of language. The Canadian Iranist Richard Foltz defined Sarts as the settled urban population of Central Asia, contrasting them with nomads, and noted that before the 20th century they were predominantly Persian-speaking, while at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries they became bilingual, speaking a highly Persianised form of Turkic. The American Orientalist Scott Levi defines the term "Sart" as a social category referring to settled agriculturalists, whether Turks or Tajiks, in contrast to nomadic Turkic tribes.

In 2000, an analysis of debates about the Sarts in the interpretations of I. Zarubin, A. Samoylovich, and others appeared in a study by the American historian Francine Hirsch.

In 2001, the Orientalist philologist Paolo Sartori reached a different conclusion, arguing that the term "Sart" was used as an ethnonym in the Zeravshan Valley and the territory of the Emirate of Bukhara.

In 2002, the sociologist A. Ilkhamov used the term "Sart" as an ethnonym in the Ethnic Atlas of Uzbekistan. This provoked a new round of controversy, which Bregel commented on in his 2008 article as follows: "Neither Ilkhamov nor other participants in the disputes that he provoked contributed anything new to the question of the ethnicity of the Sarts and their role in the history of the Uzbeks".

In 2007, Kazakh researchers argued that "if an individual was born thousands of miles away but nomadises among the Kazakhs, he is a nomad, he is a Kazakh. If his parents are Kazakhs but he lives in the city of Isfijab, he is a Sart. He is not a Kazakh. Only a nomadic nomad was a Kazakh". Soviet Kazakh historian Nurbulat Masanov defines Sarts as a settled population.

In 2008, the Russian ethnologist S. Abashin defended a dissertation on the Sarts of Central Asia. According to his concept, before the arrival of the Russian Empire, "society lacked boundaries that could have been used to delineate groups by attaching to them an 'ethnic' label. It was only with the arrival of Russia in Central Asia that more or less stable identities emerged". He believed that the selection of the terms "Uzbek", "Uyghur", "Tajik", and others as national names in Central Asia was largely arbitrary.