Sart

Sart is a name for the settled inhabitants of Central Asia and the Middle East, which has had shifting meanings over the centuries. Sarts, known sometimes as Ak-Sart in ancient times, did not have any particular ethnic identification, and were usually (though not always) town-dwellers. Since the 16th century and onward Mughal historians referred to the Tajiks of the Kabulistan (now Afghanistan) and surrounding regions as Sarts.[1]

Origin

There are several theories about the origin of the term. It may be derived from the Sanskrit "sarthavaha" (merchant, caravan leader), a term supposedly used by nomads to describe towndwellers. It may be a corruption of the Sogdian ethnonym "Soghd."

The earliest known use of the term is in the 1070 Turkic text Kutadgu Bilig ("Blessed Knowledge") in which it refers to the settled population of Kashgaria. Then, the term apparently referred to all settled Muslims of Central Asia, regardless of language.

Rashid-al-Din Hamadani in the Jami' al-Tawarikh writes that Genghis Khan commanded for Arslan Khan, prince of the Muslim Turkic Karluks, to be given the title "Sartaqtai", which he considered to be synonymous with "Tajik" (It is possible, however, that Rashid al-din, who was Persian, misunderstood the meaning of this, as "Sartaqtai" was the name of one of the Genghis Khan's sons).

A 13th-century Mongolian source, "Secret History of the Mongols", states that the Mongols called people from Central Asia, most notably Khwarezm, "Sartuul". "Sar" in Mongolian means "moon" so sart or sarta would mean "ones with (flag with) moon" since the Muslims had Hilal symbol on their flags. One of the Mongolian tribes living in the Zavkhan province is made up of descendants of merchants from Khwarezm who resided in Harhorin and is still called Sartuul.

Alternative meanings

In the post-Mongol period we find that Ali Sher Nawa'i refers to the Iranian people as "Sart Ulusi" (Sart Ulus, i.e. Sart people), and for him "Sart tili" (Sart language) was a synonym for the Persian language. Similarly, when Babur refers to the people of Margelan as "Sarts", it is in distinction to the people of Andijan who are Turks, and it is clear that by this he means Persian-speakers. He also refers to the population of the towns and villages of the vilayat of Kabul as "Sarts".

In the country of Kābul there are many and various tribes. Its valleys and plains are inhabited by Tūrks, Aimāks, Afghans, and Arabs. In the city and the greater part of the villages, the population consists of Tājiks* (Sarts).[1]
— Babur, 1525

A further change of use seems to have occurred with the arrival in the oasis regions of Turkistan of the Uzbeks under Shaybani Khan. They distinguished between themselves as semi-nomadic speakers of a Kipchak dialect, and the settled Turkic-speaking populations already living in the oasis towns, most of whom spoke the Uyghur dialect. It is at this date that the distinction between the terms "Sart" and "Tajik" seems to have made itself felt, as previously they were often used interchangeably. Even after the Uzbeks switched to a settled way of life, they continued to maintain this distinction between Turkic-speakers who were members of one of the Uzbek tribes, and "Sarts" who were not.

In June 2010 The term "SART" was used in ethnic conflict between Kirghiz and Uzbeks on Southern Kirghistan to indicate less mongoloid race, Uzbeks from Kirghiz.

Development of Ethnic identity in Central Asia

Sart woman wearing a paranja (Samarkand, between 1905 and 1915)

Throughout the Qing Dynasty, the sedentary Turkic inhabitants of the oases around the Tarim speaking Qarluq-Chagatay dialects were still largely known as Taranchi, Sart, ruled by their Moghul rulers of Khojijan or Chagatay lineages. Other parts of the Islamic World still knew this area as Moghulistan or as the eastern part of Turkestan, and the Qing Chinese generally lumped all of its Muslim subjects under the category of Hui, without making distinctions among the Chinese speaking Dungan-Hui and other language groups such as the Taranchi, Sart, Salar, Monguor, Bonan etc. This is akin to the practice by Russians lumping all Muslims connected to Ottoman or Muslim Chinggisid spheres "Tatar", irrespective of their linguistic group.

In 1911, the Nationalist Chinese, under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, overthrew Qing Dynasty rule and established the Republic of China.

By 1920, Jadidist Pan Turkism challenged the Qing and Republican Chinese warlords controlling Xinjiang. Turpan poet Abdulhaliq, having spent his early years in Semey (Semipalatinsk) and the Jadid intellectual centres in Uzbekistan, returned to Xinjiang with a pen name that he later styled as a surname: Uyghur. He adopted the name Uyghur from the Soviets, who gave that name to his ethnic group in 1921 at Tashkent. He wrote the famous nationalist poem Oyghan, which opened with the line "Ey pekir Uyghur, oyghan!" (Hey poor Uyghur, wake up!). He was later executed by the Chinese warlord Sheng Shicai in Turpan in March,1933 for inciting Uyghur nationalist sentiments through his works.

Modern meanings

Vasily Bartold argues that by the 19th century those described as "Sarts" had become much more Turkicised than had previously been the case. In the literature of Imperial Russia in the 19th century the term was sometimes used to denote the Turkic-speaking peoples of Ferghana, Tashkent, Chimkent and the Southern Syr Darya Province, (also found in smaller numbers in Samarkand and Bukhara). "Sart" was also commonly employed by the Russians as a general term for all the settled natives of Turkestan. There was a great deal of debate over what this actually meant, and where the name came from. Barthold writes that "To the Kazakh every member of a settled community was a Sart whether his language was Turkic or Iranian". Nikolai Ostroumov was firm in his conviction that it was not an ethnic definition but an occupational one, and he backed this up by quoting some (apparently common) local sayings: "A bad Kirghiz becomes a Sart, whilst a bad Sart becomes a Kirghiz". This confusion reached its peak in the 1897 Russian Empire Census: the Ferghana Province was held to have a very large Sart population, the neighbouring Samarkand Province very few but a great many Uzbeks. The distinction between the two was often far from clear. Although historically speaking the Uzbeks were descended from tribes which arrived in the region with Shaibani Khan in the 16th century, Sarts belonged to older settled groups. It seems that, in Khorezm at least, Sarts spoke a form of Persianised Oghuz Turkic while Uzbeks spoke a Kipchak dialect closer to Kazakh. In Fergana the Sarts spoke a Karluk dialect that was very close to Uyghur and is believed to be the earlier dialect of modern Uzbek. In 1924 the Soviet regime decreed that henceforth all settled Turkic-speakiing peoples in Central Asia (and many others who spoke Persian such as in Samarkand and Bukhara areas) would be known as "Uzbeks", and that the term "Sart" was to be abolished as an insulting legacy of colonial rule., despite the fact that Lenin himself used the term in his communiques! For the first few years, however, the language chosen by the Soviet authorities for the new Uzbek SSR was not the modern Uzbek that is found today, but the nomadic, less Persianized and quite exotic dialect of the city of Turkistan in modern Kazakhstan.

"The Uighurs are the people whom old Russian travellers called Sart (a name which they used for sedentary, Turkic-speaking Central Asians in general), while Western travellers called them Turki, in recognition of their language. The Chinese used to call them Ch'an-t'ou ('Turbaned Heads') but this term has been dropped, being considered derogatory, and the Chinese, using their own pronunciation, now called them Weiwuerh. As a matter of fact there was for centuries no 'national' name for them; people identified themselves with the oasis they came from, like Kashgar or Turfan."[2]

This dialect proved itself to be largely incomprehensible to most inhabitants of the primary cities, from Tashkent to Bukhara. It was therefore replaced by the modern, fundamentally Persianized "urban Uzbek" which is consequently the only Turkic language in the world without any vowel harmony.

It is thus very difficult to attach a single ethnic or even linguistic meaning to the term "Sart". Historically the various Turkic and Persian peoples of Central Asia were identified mostly by their lifestyle, rather than by any notional ethnic or even linguistic difference. The Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Turkmens were nomads, herding across steppes, mountains and sand deserts, respectively. The settled Turks and Tajiks, on the other hand, were Sarts, as they either lived in cities such as Khiva, Bukhara or Samarkand, or they lived in rural agricultural communities.

Use by the Dongxiang

Interestingly, the Muslim, Mongol-speaking Dongxiang people of Northwestern China call themselves Sarta or Santa. It is not clear if there is any connection between this term and the Sarts of Central Asia.

Use in Siberia

Sart was one of the names applied to the Siberian Bukharans who settled in Siberia in the 17th century.

See also

Footnotes

  1. 1 2 John Leyden, Esq.; William Erskine, Esq., eds. (1921). "Events Of The Year 910 (1525)". Memoirs of Babur. Packard Humanities Institute. p. 5. Retrieved 2010-08-22.
  2. ↑ Lattimore (1973), p. 237.

References

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