GIVE AND TAKE: GENEALOGIES IN UYGHUR MUSIC AND ART

 

Nathan Light

Copyright © 1998

This is chapter 6 of my dissertation Slippery Paths: The Performance and Canonization of Turkic Literature and Uyghur Muqam Song in Islam and Modernity (Folklore, Indiana University, 1998. Henry Glassie, chair.).

This chapter has been slightly revised from the dissertation version, and greatly revised from the preliminary version I posted on the web at this address in 1997. I have left the footnotes off of this version, since it simplifies conversion of the document. Citations should refer to the page in my dissertation, since this web page is not paginated nor permanent. Images and more information about Uyghur culture can be found on my page on Uyghur culture and history.

CONTINUITY IN UYGHUR CULTURE HISTORY

My argument about continuity and change has followed the techniques and ideologies of Turkic poetic composition within the context of cultural politics in Turkic-Iranian-Mongol Central Asia. But this is only one strand of meaning in the complex culture history of Central Asia, and it supports little of the weighty construction of the Uyghur nation and its history. As I described in my first chapter, Uyghur intellectuals widely feel that the continuity of "Uyghur" cultural history is threatened by influences from foreign cultures, especially in language and literature. On the other hand, Uyghur scholars demonstrating cultural connections between Uyghur/Turkic culture and other cultures often stress music and religion, because they feel that in these fields the historical record shows the continuity of Uyghur culture, and its contribution to other cultures. In this chapter I examine the sources and narratives of Uyghur musical history.

In their ambiguous relationship to Islamic influences, many Uyghur intellectuals--like Mahmûd al-Kâshgharî before them--embrace the Islamic faith and yet see the cultural influences that came with it as external contamination. A Chinese state ideology of cultural autonomy also contributes to suppressing connections to Arab and Persian culture, but even in private most urban Uyghur intellectuals that I talked to clearly feel they should discount the importance of cultural debts and affirm narratives showing Uyghurs as culture donors. Their cosmopolitan intellectual commitments tend towards defining a unique secular ethnic history, while their spiritual commitments tend towards an international identity as Muslims. That al-Kâshgharî also had a similar conflict shows that this predicament is not unique to modernity, although the stakes are higher in the quest for a distinctive history and territory that is respected in the modern world, or what Robert Foster has called the "global ecumene."

In his review article, Foster concentrates on the cultural codes, practices and collective representations that people make into distinctive communal possessions and symbols for their nation-states, and most of what he says applies to creating the cultural substance of an ethnic nation as well. The local is made into the national: "Official histories frequently appropriate and revalue regional or local traditions, offering them up instead as indexes of unitary and common (that is national-communal) history" (242). Durkheim defined this as a task of the state: "The State is a special organ whose responsibility it is to work out certain representations which hold good for the collectivity" (247). But this article reflects the work of anthropologists who have investigated the creation and consumption of cultural codes and symbolic products (objects, sites, histories) more than national cultural performances such as the muqams. Of course, it is easier to investigate objects and codes because people creating and defining the nation try to deny process and define everything from language and literary tradition to musical canons as fixed. But cultural performances and events put culture back into history, and highlight the efforts to stop cultural creativity in order to transfix the culture of the nation.

In this chapter I investigate how the muqams are part of the processes of cultural change and exchange, and the stories that are used to explain these processes. I begin with several important contemporary interpretations of Uyghur music history, and then look at the historical context of cultural exchanges between China, Central Asia, and the Middle East. I end this chapter with a description of how historical sources have been made into a charter for present-day muqam editing and revival.

CULTURE AND HISTORY AS HOMELANDS

In denying cultural change and debts, Uyghurs strengthen their claim to Xinjiang as their homeland. Ignoring historical processes and foreign influences helps them connect present Uyghurs with the original essence of their distinctive past. As in many modern nations, modernist ideologies of national culture, history and territory have prompted Uyghur efforts to identify and exclude foreign contamination and return to the roots of original national purity and essential identity, which in this case includes construing a number of early oasis civilizations of the Tarim and Turfan basins as Uyghur.

Modernist territory and history are founded in ideologies of private property and exclusive ownership. Stability in space and limited historical change help legitimize such territorial claims. According to their understanding of this international paradigm for the ethnic nation, Uyghur modernists feel that the historical and cultural gap between Uighurs and Uyghurs must be limited, and the "foreign" influences that created the gap should be minimized. To be modern, these Uyghurs feel they must restore their cultural purity and emphasize its autochthonous origins, creating a shared culture in the present so that they will be recognized as the rightful heirs of a past both unique to the Uyghurs and internationally acknowledged as important.

Although obvious cultural debts to Arabo-Persian literature undermine attempts to show that Uyghur literature is distinctive and autochthonous, many Uyghurs feel they have made more reciprocal exchanges and contributions to world culture history in music and in the Buddhist, Manichean, and Nestorian Christian religions. They feel that music and religion connect Uyghurs not only to the Middle East and China, but even to Europe. One way that Uyghurs claim a respected identity within China and internationally is through histories that stress the Uyghur role as culture donors to the world.

CREATING AUTOCHTHONOUS UYGHUR MUSIC HISTORY

In order to demonstrate Uyghur cultural uniqueness historians work to define the history of autochthonous local origins and development, and to explain how these products of Uyghur culture were taken to other places and peoples. At the same time, they feel they must deny the importance of contributions to Uyghur culture from "foreign" donors.

The painter Ghazi Ämät has created prominent representations of autochthonous cultural history. He has been the president of the Xinjiang Art College since 1987, and his paintings have been the basis for several large murals around the city of Ürümchi. Three of these public artworks tell a story about the history of Uyghur music and dance. These include a fifteen- by thirty-foot enamelled tile mural depicting Xinjiang music and dance, located in the Xinjiang Regional Exhibition Hall on Youhao Road; a forty-foot long oil painting over the lobby of the 1950s era Kunlun Hotel also on Youhao Road: and a bas-relief mural carved into a wall about eight feet high and forty feet long erected in a park on Yanan Road near the Art College. While many of Ghazi Ämät's smaller paintings treat single scenes, these public murals narrate culture historical connections between modern Uyghur traditions of music and dance and Buddhist images of musicians and dancers. The subject matter of Ghazi Ämät's public art is split between past and present in a way that strongly suggests the split subjectivity of many intellectuals I met and whose works I read: their identity depends on their past.

In the tile mural entitled "The Country of Songs and Dances" (Nakhsha-usul makani, 1985), Ghazi Ämät narrates the origins of Uyghur performing arts by "quoting" from paintings of Buddhist apsara musicians and dancers. He sets these floating images in a green monochrome background behind his polychrome portrayals of idealized Uyghur folk performers. Performers from the smaller minorities of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region--Qazaqs, Qirghiz, Tatars, and Tajiks--are distributed around the periphery of the central Uyghur figures.

In his bas-relief carving in the park on Yanan Road, Ghazi Ämät similarly portrays Buddhist apsara musicians as a background for modern Uyghur folk performers. Moving left to right, his long painted mural (ca. 1990) in the Kunlun Hotel makes a similar transition from flying apsara musicians to Uyghur musicians and dancers.

The images of Buddhist musicians and dancers are drawn from Buddhist rock temple paintings in Xinjiang that were created during the first millenium in the Tarim and Turfan Basins. By connecting these figures directly to images of present musicians and dancers, Ghazi Ämät's narrative pushes aside Arabic and Persian musical influences on Uyghur musical terminology, instrumentation, form, and textual contents, especially in the muqams. By connecting Uyghur music and dance to Buddhist tradition, Ghazi Ämät argues for deep local roots to Uyghur culture, and because there are no living Uyghur Buddhists, avoids the problem of international religious alliances.

By linking Buddhist and Islamic periods, Ghazi Ämät unites modern Uyghurs with their local past, denying the cultural divide introduced by Arabic and Persian cultural influences. By overcoming the break in religious and artistic tradition, the modern ethnic group need not be divided by the historical differences between Kashghar Turks who converted to Islam voluntarily in the tenth century, and the Turpan and Qumul Uighurs who were converted by Moghul conquests in the fifteenth century.

Ghazi Ämät is not an artistic ideologue repeatedly expressing a single idea, but his narrative art obviously became popular among the Ürümchi politicians and planners who control the mounting of public art. This art supports Chinese national unity since it suggests that Uyghur cultural traditions developed within the present boundaries of Xinjiang, and hence wholly within present-day China. The reference to Buddhist images displaces Uyghur ties to Islamic cultures. Even though Buddhism and Buddhist art demonstrably originated outside Xinjiang, the many well-preserved Buddhist murals can be argued to show earlier and more extensive local development. These murals are more easily claimed as representing Uyghur culture because Uyghurs now live where this culture developed. Historical Uyghur Buddhism is not a political threat to national unity in the same way as Islam can be, since it is not presently a source of ideological influences originating from outside of China.

In contrast to these public representations of historical continuity, during this same period Ghazi Ämät painted many scenes from Uyghur traditional culture, including musical performances, market places, artisans, grape harvesting, local legends, and oghlaq tartish (a game in which horsemen battle for control of a carcass of a goat). Of these, only the painting of a large and varied group of recognizably Muslim Uyghur musicians entitled "Muqam" is reprinted and widely available in stores as a representation of performers of classical Uyghur music. But popular though this print was, it did not have the same prominent public display as his narrative murals. The simple mural on the 1991 school building, showing a dancing woman and two male musicians, and another mural in the Regional Exhibition Hall that depicts folk sports and games of the Uyghurs and other peoples, were the only murals I saw that did not suggest a historical narrative.

Public references to the Uyghur Twelve Muqams were common, but depended on public knowledge of muqam history. In addition to Ghazi Ämät's art, the muqams as items of public culture were constantly referred to in textbooks, speeches, poems, songs and lectures. These references depended on the authority and proof of historical sources and interpretations. Without studies and interpretations, there would be no fuller narrative history to refer to, and without documentation, these interpretations could be challenged.

MUQAM HISTORY ON FILM

The documentary film Uyghur On Ikki Muqami ('The Uyghur Twelve Muqams') broadcast on Xinjiang Television in November 1992 describes the Twelve Muqams as the culmination of the long linear historical development of Uyghur music and dance. The film narrator--an older turban-wearing man whose white beard and deep, resonant voice connote authority--describes the events of Uyghur muqam history to a young woman, his granddaaughter, who has a high, breathy voice that suggests childish wonder. The man explains that in the year 119 B.C.E. the Han dynasty diplomat Zhang Qian brought the tune sequence of the Moqdul songs ('Moqdul näghmisi yürüshläshkän ahañlar') from the Western Regions to the Han court, where they became the basis for a composition of twenty-eight songs. The film then portrays the origins of Uyghur dance, presenting an atäsh usuli ('fire dance') interpreted by men dressed in skins dancing around a bonfire. This dance form develops into sixth-century Kushan Buddhist court dance, which the film presents in a dance by women of the Kuchar performing arts troupe. These green-clad Buddhist dancers are filmed through a refracting lens that gives multiple images resembling the repeated figures in Buddhist murals. The narrator says that the çoñ küy ('great tunes') of Kushan (Kuchar) and Qocho (Turpan) music were popular in the Chinese courts of the Sui and Tang dynasties, and that it developed into the Çoñ Näghmä of the muqams.

The film narrator next describes how the coming of Islam resulted in the substitution of Arabic names for the Uyghur musical forms, and the suites came to be called "muqams." This information is presented in narration over scenes of the supposed tombs of Mahmûd al-Kâshgharî and Yûsuf Khâss Hâjib in Kashghar.

When the narrator's granddaughter asks about creating the Twelve Muqams, the narrator explains that the Uyghur muqams were organized into the Twelve Muqams by Âmânnisâ Khân, a wife of Sultân `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân who ruled the Yarkand Khanate from 1533-60. The film represents this period through a stage performance in present-day Yarkand (Yärkän) that portrays Âmânnisâ Khân and Yûsuf Qidîr Khân defending their right to create this music and dance in the face of stiff opposition from the Sopi-Ishans (Sufi Ishans, Naqshbandi Shaykhs) who were trying to impose their strict interpretation of Islam. The leader of the Sopi-Ishans plays the characteristic instrument of the Eastern Turkistani qalandar, the sapayi (safa'il), hitting it against his shoulder. With the support of `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân, Âmânnisâ Khân and Qidîr Khân succeed in defeating the forces of religious orthodoxy and complete their great song and dance composition. Here the film ends its narrative of the historical development of the muqams and begins describing their role in the modernization and internationalization of Xinjiang as a world economic and cultural presence.

This film, like the majority of muqam histories published in China, focuses on the development of musical culture in the area that is now Xinjiang, and claims it all as part of the Uyghur heritage. This version of Uyghur cultural history defines a civilized, settled, oasis-dwelling identity, completely ignoring the nomadic Uighurs and Turks whose language Uyghurs have inherited. The film ignores pre-modern cultural exchanges with geographic areas outside of China, and thus conforms to Chinese government ideas about Uyghurs as autochthonous in Chinese national territory, with strong ties to Chinese culture.

But even in this film, being part of China causes subtle conflict. The film uses images of petroleum production to suggest the modernization of Xinjiang. It first suggests traditional Uyghur use of Xinjiang petroleum, showing a donkey-riding rewap-playing muqam singer performing at the edge of a puddle of bubbling black ooze, and then contrasts this to the massive extractive industry that now exports oil to "inland" China. In the midst of this cultural documentary, the use of adoring images of the glistening oil industry and long lines of tank cars stretching off towards China ties Uyghur pride in their indigenous Twelve Muqams to Uyghur pride in their indigenous oil reserves.

Not only is cultural development in the form of muqam research, training and recordings supported by industrial development, but cultural heritage and natural resources are brought together as Uyghur possessions. The suggestion is that the indigenous Uyghur oasis dwellers should have rights to the oasis cultural creations of the distant past, as well as rights to the oil discovered in their desert. Implicit in this film, and in many ethnic nationalist discussions of Uyghur culture history, is the desire for a uniquely Uyghur land and history. Little of Uyghur ethnic pride is directed at aspects of their cultural heritage and historical geography that they share with Mongols, Qazaqs and Qirghiz. Unique creativity and resources demonstrated by national and international consumption best support local ethnic pride.

Since there are no obvious competing heirs to the Indo-Iranian Buddhist civilizations created in the Tarim oases by Tokharians, Khotanese and other peoples, modern Uyghurs have claimed them as their own. According to one paradigm for modern nationalism, present collective identities arise from unified and continuous territory, history and culture. Ruptures and discontinuities must be excluded from the tale of national holism. In order to lay the strongest possible claim to their autonomous region, Uyghurs see themselves as heirs of all that has happened in their land. Although a stable relationship between land and identity is only one modern justification of identity, it has become one of the strongest defenses indigenous people have against colonizers of land and history. When the putative original inhabitants of a territory lack the power to expel colonizers from their land, their weakness itself can be used to prove that they did not voluntarily give up their autonomy.

GENEALOGY AND IDENTITY

Genealogical narratives of the descent of culture and ethnic genealogies get twisted together into stories that define the present. Narratives of cultural and genetic exchange and interaction enable symbolic and actual interaction in the present. If the Uyghurs can lay claim to a great past according to the artistic, religious, and musical standards of modernity, they are justified in considering themselves a people of international importance, deeply appreciated for their contributions to the modern world. An identity recognized by others is a valuable resource for creating the collective self.

Uyghur musicians and scholars with whom I worked often gave examples showing international recognition of Uyghur culture and history: Uyghurs had performed their muqams to great acclaim in London and Berlin, Singapore and Japan. The great historian Lewis Henry Morgan had stated that the Tarim Basin was the key to world cultural history. World-renowned scholars such as Aurel Stein and Gunnar Jarring had visited Xinjiang.

My first exposure to many ideas about Uyghur history came from Shir Mämät, a tämbur teacher at the Art College. Shir Mämät is an excellent musician, and a scholar and wonderful narrator of Uyghur history who is intent on making a name for Uyghurs as important culture bearers in world history. He explained that in the sixth century a Uyghur musician named Suzup (Suzhipo in Chinese) had invented the chromatic scale of seven whole-tones and five half-tones and taken it to China. Abû Nasr al-Fârâbî (870-950), the Central Asian Turk who became one of the greatest Islamic philosophers and wrote an extensive study on music, took this same musical system to the Arabs, whence it spread to Europe and became the basis for modern European music theory.

Shir Mämät and several other historians of Uyghur culture interpret historical evidence to claim prominence for Uyghur culture within the world of contemporary international modernity, which they correctly perceive as obsessed with the evolution of civilization and with the connections between cultural origins and modern societies. These historians feel that if the Uyghur people can gain recognition as an important source of modern civilization, Uyghurs would receive international respect. Despite political and economic weakness, they seek to found Uyghur ethnic self-respect in past accomplishments.

Sulayman Imin, a Uyghur composer at the Art College, maintained that the idea of the symphony had arisen with the Uyghur muqams, and had been taken by the Arabs, who introduced it to Western Europe. This idea was not widely supported, but Uyghur and even a few Han Chinese composers, including my teacher Zhou Ji, had taken to basing orchestral compositions in the muqams.

Shir Mämät argued that although the names for many of the musical instruments are Arabic, they were invented by the Uyghurs. Just as the twelve-tone scale had been taken by al-Fârâbî to the Arabs and then to Europe, so the ghejäk had been made into the violin, and the çañ into the piano. The Arabic `ud, the Persian barbat and the European guitar are all derived from the tämbur. The Persian and Arabic words for the dutar, satar, rewap, and muqam came after the things already existed. He demonstrated this by analogy to himself: although he is a Uyghur, his name Shir Mämät ('the lion of Muhammad') was borrowed from Arabic. Likewise, their musical instruments and forms are Uyghur, but were given Arabic and Persian names. Like many Uyghur musicians, Shir Mämät felt that the large number of songs that make up the muqams proved that they were a Uyghur invention, since they were more complex and longer than other maqâm traditions.

Shir Mämät also used the etymology of the word tämbur itself to show that the instrument was Uyghur, not Persian as some maintained. He interpreted the name as a description of the tuning of the strings of this five-stringed long lute: two pairs of strings each have one pitch, while another single string is tuned to a different pitch, so the name probably comes from the Uyghur täñ-bir 'equal-one.' Shir Mämät also renamed the wire plectrum that is attached to the forefinger for playing the tämbur. It had been called a nakhun, from the Persian for 'fingernail,' but he renamed it a simtir, from the Uyghur words sim 'wire' and tirnaq 'fingernail.'

Escaping the overwhelming dominance of Arabic and Persian names was important to the literary scholar Abdushukur Turdi as well. He argued that the muqam names Rak, Bayat, and Çapbayat (as he spells them) are not derived from Arabic, Persian, or Central Asian Turkic, but from Sanskrit and Old Uyghur, and thus claimed these muqams probably came into existence as a group of pre-Islamic third and fourth century "classical Uyghur tunes."

Shir Mämät and a few other musicians I talked to were proud of their ability to learn typical American and European music easily--Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Blue Danube were tunes I often heard--but foreigners (I was an excellent example) and Han Chinese could not easily learn Uyghur tunes and songs. This showed that Uyghur musical skills were more developed. The greater complexity of Uyghur music could also be seen in the fact that Wan Tongshu, the Han Chinese musicologist who had prepared the first transcription of the Uyghur Muqams, had given them the puraq ('taste, flavor') of Han music.

On the other hand, the musician and researcher Hüsäyn Kerim did not feel that difficulty and difference necessarily meant Uyghur music was superior. He used another metaphor when he described Wan Tongshu's mistakes, saying, "It is like drawing a face, the person draws it according to the details he knows. If he is Qazaq, the face looks like a Qazaq, if he is Han, it looks Han. He cannot capture the flavor of another ethnic group. Most Han look with horror at the difficulty of Uyghur songs, and if they do learn a song, it sounds Han."

Hüsäyn was also one of the few people I talked to who not only felt that Arabic and Persian influences on Uyghur music were very likely, but was committed to using documentary sources to figure out the historical relationships. His ideas about the muqams and about Uyghur culture were not as firm and positive as those Shir Mämät and Sulayman Imin. Hüsäyn depended on historical evidence and recognized it as open to interpretation, and was criticized for this by those who accepted the dominant linear and autochthonous interpretation. The clear linear history of Uyghur music history that was dominant in public art and film was also more acceptable to public scholars and officials. Hüsäyn's challenging voice was excluded from public debate on the muqams because offical admission of the complexity of cultural processes would leave room for competing genealogical narratives.

Yet many people around Ürümchi respected Hüsäyn's intelligence and persistence. He appealed to people as a rebel who threw caution to the wind and as a martyr to the cause of historical truth. Best of all, he was good company because he never stopped entertaining people with his ideas and critiques. He compensated for the uncertainties of his historical method by outspoken criticism of his colleagues for speculating without evidence when they wrote about Uyghur music and history. Using the Uyghur metaphor in which knowledge is contained in the stomach, he said, "They sit down and simply write whatever comes out of their belly." He felt that it was impossible that there were muqams in the Tarim region before they appeared in Arabia. For him, saying that the Uyghurs gave the muqams to the Hindus, Arabs, and Persians was like saying the child passes tradition to the parents.

Hüsäyn's critical attitude and search for documentary evidence contrasted with more optimistic historians who assumed the importance of Uyghurs in world history and used limited evidence to demonstrate this foregone conclusion. The Uyghur historians who sought a key role for Uyghurs in world cultural history are like historians all over the world who strive to characterize a people's uniqueness and justify pride in their culture and identity. They integrate personal, local, and collective origins and identities into important history and powerful symbols, joining the self and the group with valued origins and great events. Powerful origin myths are those that tie a group defined in genealogical, cultural, class, ethnic, racial, or national terms to original heroes and distant forces.

For the Uyghurs these stories include ties to the Huns and Turkic conquerors of China and western Asia, and recognition by great historians such as Lewis Henry Morgan. In Europe the stories tell of ties to the Greek "founders" of philosophy and democracy. Strong stories linking the past, the distant and the international to the present and the local answer needs for personal and collective significance. Like Sufis desperately seeking a response from an aloof God, individuals creating collective identities desire history's answering love, and the renown that comes with it.

Chinese historians describe the unique cultural heritage of the Han Chinese. Western Sinologists in love with the massive documentary resources of China laud the gifts of Han culture to the world. Historians and anthropologists do battle over the importance of the Iroquois confederation in the design of the American Constitution. The notion that the Iroquois are a source of American democratic ideals threatens the Euro-American faith in democracy as a heritage from Athenian Greeks. The idea that Greek civilization owes something to that of Egypt, and is hence partly African is also a threat to the dominant ideology. On April 1, 1998, a report about changing the pronunciation of the Boston Celtics name from seltiks to keltiks on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" news program was accompanied by an interview with an Irish anthropologist who claimed to have found evidence that the Irish invented basketball. That this apparent April Fool's joke was so convincing reflects widespread cultural irredentism. As I describe below, Muslim Turks decided that they were descended from Turk, the first son of Yafes (Japhet), son of Nuh (Noah).

Establishing important shared culture in the present and connecting it to important origins in the past are two aspects of creating national culture. These are mutually reinforcing efforts: the more the collective values a cultural form, the more vigorously repeated its origin narratives will be, and vice versa. My discussion above of Mahmûd al-Kâshgharî's work on Turkic language and culture shows the great similarities between the effects of the expansion of Islam as universal religion and its Arab and Persian cultural elites, and the expansion of modernity as a universal ideology borne by European cultural elites. Local response has to rely on local resources but has to present it in internationally authoritative forms.

In Ürümchi, some Hans and Uyghurs defended their ethnic pride through stories of Uyghurs and culture donors, while others such as Hüsäyn could accept that Uyghurs had borrowed as much as they had given, without feeling that this threatened their ethnic pride. Although not all Hans and Uyghurs allowed ethnicity to determine their historical beliefs, in discussing history people always had to acknowledge these conflicting interpretations, and often discredited each others arguments by accusations of ethnic bias.

Much of the debate over what kind of history Uyghurs should have took place in private because the stakes were high, and the penalties severe for saying the wrong thing. A Han historian told me that he thought that the Japanese and Turkish studies and symposiums on the Silk Road were good since they challenged Uyghur scholars who wanted to deny foreign and non-Islamic influences.

But a Uyghur historian pointed out that the importance of Persian in Uyghur literature was like that of Latin throughout Europe, or French at the Russian court. The attempt to create Uyghur terms to replace foreign words was unnecessary, as were the Chinese government guidelines that said new Uyghur words should not be borrowed from European or Middle Eastern languages, but should be native or come from Chinese.

Another Uyghur historian felt that the idea of the muqams as an independent Uyghur creation was a Han idea and obedient Uyghur scholars had gone along with the idea. He told me, "The Han say the sun rises in the north, and then they give nice clothes and travel opportunities to those who agree with them." This same historian also felt that the Chinese were trying to suppress the importance of the muqams because they did not want to acknowledge the long cultural history of the Uyghurs and the greatness of their cultural accomplishments.

None of this debate about the ethnic basis for ideology was made public because the underlying antagonisms were too threatening. Ethnicity influenced beliefs about history, but ironically both the Uyghur nationalists and their opponents, the apologists for Chinese imperialism, agreed that Uyghur history should be seen as autochthonous, while the few Han and Uyghur scholars who allowed for influences from abroad were to be rejected by these dominant voices.

Linear narratives of Uyghur history centered on their present territory gave a more vital sense of Uyghur identity than those with a broader perspective in which cultural exchange was messy and confusing. Shir Mämät demonstrated to me how culture created structural coherence and continuity, and resisted decay. One day while we sat in his parlor (mihman khana), he explained to me that musical works should be put together like buildings. He used the example of a sixty-three year-old mosque builder in Aqsu whose skills were part of a long tradition passed down from father to son.

Scholars could not understand how he built the mosques so straight and tall with simple tools. But the builder did it as one must put music together: he advanced through firmly connected pieces and constantly returned to strengthen the base. The muqams are like this, said Shir Mämät: they build from the base of the Çoñ Näghmä, Dastan and Mäshräp, progressing through an ordered sequence of closely linked tunes and rhythms, with a märghul between each song. Using a matchbox and a cigarette case on the table between us, Shir Mämät demonstrated to me how misalignment of the parts of a building would cause it to fall (F 4/2/93).

Shir Mämät's metaphor may not concretely teach one how to make music, but it conveys an idea of the goal: solidity through the use of techniques with a long tradition, beyond scholarly understanding. The metaphor nicely describes making a tradition stable in time and space through frequent returns to its origins and through repeated connections among its parts. The coherence and order of tradition and of a musical work are the durable results of orderly, consistent, continuous construction. The image is readily extended to coherent histories that hold up well because they give events a linear order and avoid ambiguities that could make things unstable.

In another conversation about the muqams, Shir Mämät used a building metaphor again. He explained that people claim that the muqams are finished, complete, but in fact they need more research to fill in gaps. Like fixing old buildings in Italy or France, the editors need to add cement, but they should do research first to decide what kind. They have to repaint, but the color must be right: if it should be blue [kök] they should not use red. He used a tape cassette set on edge to show how the muqam structures needed reinforcement to correct their tilt and make them firm again (F 5/20/93).

In this remarkable metaphor, Shir Mämät suggests ideals about how to authentically restore the past. European preservation of monuments offers a model for researching past culture and returning it to its original sturdiness. The built objects are concrete cultural forms that stand in for more abstract and fluid traditions. They endure from the past as they were originally made, but demand maintenance. The maintenance must not use present techniques, but should be authentic to the original, not changing the object's essence or its connection to its origins. Shir Mämät implies that those who restore a building or tradition properly can use its authentic continuity to authenticate their own continuity with their past.

Shir Mämät's history of musical connections extended towards China as well as towards the Middle East and Europe. He told me that Suzup had taken Uyghur music to China. When they first encountered the Uyghurs, the Chinese had no stringed instruments. They had borrowed the Uyghur ghejäk and created their erhu from it, while the tämbur was the origin of the pipa (F 12/20/92). He had the support of Chinese historical sources that show musical exchanges to be an important part of China's international contacts. But through his story he gave a coherent organization to the fragmented sources and made yet another demonstration of the centrality of Uyghur culture for world history.

SOURCES ON MUSIC IN CHINESE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Culture (wenhua), civilization (wenming) and cultivation or refinement (wenya) have long been marks of personal and collective merit in China, especially within the Confucian tradition. While Han ethnic nationalism stresses shared aspects of Han culture, the courtly cultural ideals of Han Chinese literati provided standards for judging individuals. These ideas have endured into the present in the form of assessments of the cultivation of individuals and groups in terms of "cultural level" (wenhua shuiping) and "population quality" (renkou zhiliang, renkou suzhi).

According to ideas of traditional Chinese statecraft, to the extent that people have learned the habits of thought and behavior that are associated with these ideals of elite culture, they deserve authority and power. Those without such habits were considered to be outside the cultivated world of China and had to be controlled and cultivated through force and cultural exchange. But this became difficult when those who should be controlled invaded and became the rulers of China through force. In such cases, cultivation began at the court through instruction by the literati bureaucrats.

Few historians of Chinese music have examined the ways in which Chinese court officials used music to cultivate the various "barbarian" peoples with whom they came into contact. But even the most cursory acquaintance with the history of Chinese international relations reveals many records of musical exchange in both directions.

I found detailed analysis of ongoing musical exchange only studies of Sino-Korean relations. From the Song dynasty to the twentieth century, Korean Confucian court rituals used music and dance ensembles whose size and arrangement connoted the Koreans' cultural and ideological subordination to China. Instruments and dancers were given to the Koreans by the Chinese court, but eventually the Koreans claimed that they preserved more authentic and pure Confucian performance practices, while the Chinese had distorted the original tradition. Finally in the later fifteenth century Emperor Sejo substituted Korean compositions for the Chinese music that had been used in sacrifices to royal ancestors.

The Chinese use of music in diplomacy derived from its use in rituals for cultivating and regulating the Chinese state. Traditional thinking analyzed music into court or ya 'refined, sophisticated, elegant,' folk or su 'vulgar, common,' and hu 'foreign, barbarian' styles of music. The court music included Confucian ritual music which was felt to ensure an orderly empire. In Chinese theories of ritual, there must be a balance of music and ceremonies: music establishes internal affective connections, while ceremonies create external order and hierarchy. The Yueji (Record of Music) explains the role of music in rituals: "Music unifies, ceremonies set things apart. In unifying there is a mutual drawing close; in setting things apart there is mutual respect. If music overwhelms, there is dissolving; if ceremonies overwhelm, there is division."

Chinese political philosophers felt that ritual and music preserved the equilibrium and order of the state. The Han dynasty historian Sima Qian argued that the decline of the Zhou dynasty resulted from the loss of the ritual and music that earlier kings had used to pacify the Chinese kingdom. Ceremonies and music were "never distant from their bodies even for a moment." They reached feudal lords and everywhere within the four seas, and were practiced "until the transformation through governance was complete . . . ."

Just as the loss of proper ritual and music could bring the downfall of a government, legitimating a new dynasty through revival of traditional ritual music was a common historiographic motif. Reviving proper traditions often involved purifying native tradition of foreign contamination. At the Southern Song court in the early twelfth century, music was used to re-establish authentic "Chinese" cultural traditions after defeat by Jürchen invaders. A similar nativism motivated an effort to purify Ming court culture of Mongol and Central Asian influences in music and culture. One contemporary commentator wrote, "Our civilization surpasses the ancient past; how can we then possibly still follow bad examples?"

Cultivating foreign leaders and peoples was part of the diplomatic process of tying them to China as cultural and political subordinates. When Emperor Huizong gave musical instruments to the Korean king in 1116 C.E., he described them as a reward for the king's honor and virtue and his close ties to China. The Emperor quoted the Classic of Filiality (Xiaojing): "For rectifying customs and cultivating the unrefined, there is nothing like music" (Pratt 1976: 209). The Yueji describes Confucian ceremonies and music as "instruments by which the minds of the people are assimilated, and good order in government made to appear."

In general, stately, measured, and happy music was valued for its influence on the morals and attitudes of the listeners, and more generally, on the state as a whole. Despite some challenges to the theory that music had direct moral and emotional influences on people and that it influenced the condition of the state and its relations to social and supernatural forces, it remained the dominant theory of music.

Even in present debates over music and modernization there are still many who think that music directly affects popular morals, and many officials try to control what music may be performed in public and broadcast through the media. Richard Kraus and Andrew Jones show this in their studies of the politics of Western styles of classical, popular and rock music in modern China. Jones's historical perspective is narrower, and he ignores the long tradition of Chinese moral theories of music in his discussion of modern debates over rock music, but Kraus explicitly parallels Confucian and Communist uses of music as moral guidance for the masses (1989: 29, 211).

Music and dance are complex cultural vehicles and their international exchange is fraught with difficulties. Claudia Strauss aptly describes the paradoxical appeal of foreign music and dance to otherwise nationalistic Chinese Communist ideologues. She shows that Confucian ideas about the use of dance and music to reinforce state morality remained important to the Communists, although their ideas about the form and class origins of such moral expression changed. Although they did not want to promote disorderly popular influences, Communist officials also felt that the Confucian stress on harmonious and orderly music and dance was part of the repression of working class expression, and, like the binding of women's feet, discouraged dramatic and athletic movement in the arts.

These Communists advocated using European ballet techniques in revolutionary opera to unleash the revolutionary spirit of women, peasants and workers. The acrobatic and martial movements that were added to Beijing opera served two purposes: China would be more competitive on the international stage, and workers' culture could find more liberating dramatic expression. At the same time, ballet had the advantage of not promoting immoral European bourgeois dancing in couples, although this meant that the pas de deux had to be largely eliminated from ballet.

Despite the stress on elite indigenous musical creations in official court and ritual music, popular and foreign music have long been important in Chinese ideas about music. Confucius himself is said to have collected and edited the Shijing (Book of Odes) from popular songs. The Han dynasty in particular was very concerned with popular music, and it was widely felt that an important responsibility of the Emperor was to know the feelings of the people through direct knowledge of their songs and talk. This would overcome the distancing effect of the official bureaucracy. Suppression of popular dissent through overbearing officials would lead to violence: "it is more difficult to stop up the mouth of the people than to stop up a river . . . . [W]hen you control a river you allow an escape route. When you govern the people you allow them freedom of speech."

At least one Emperor felt that the court music of the early Western Han dynasty was boring and soporific, and Emperors often sponsored performances of popular music from their native regions and from elsewhere. Thus even at court, official musical theory was contested. One response was the creation of the Bureau of Music around 200 B.C.E. This institution was responsible for ensuring the purity of ritual music while at the same time researching and "improving" the regional popular musics that were enjoyed at the court, and collecting the songs of the streets and villages to ascertain the state of popular sentiment. At the time of its partial abolition in 7 B.C.E., the Bureau of Music employed 829 people, of whom 441 were removed from their post because they worked on popular music. During its heyday, the Bureau of Music collected music from fifteen different countries, including some outside of the Chinese Empire such as Sogdiana.

When Emperor Ai ended the Bureau of Music's involvement in popular music, he did so for the same reasons that Confucius created the Shijing as a canon of acceptable ritual music that would displace the morally corrupt popular music from the country of Zheng. Emperor Ai argued that the wide-spread taste for popular music was detracting from the appreciation of the official ritual music and causing the people to lose respect for their superiors.

In her study, Sabine Trebinjac demonstrates that the history of the Bureau of Music is not arcane and ancient history to Chinese today. The history of the Han dynasty is basic to the historical consciousness of Han Chinese intellectuals, and the Han ethnonym itself refers to this period. At the end of her comparison of the work of the Bureau of Music with modern Chinese government sponsorship of collecting, research, editing, and re-creation of folk music, she concludes that there is again a Bureau of Music in the Chinese Central government. But this apparent hyperbole is not her own argument: it is the director himself of the institution charged with collecting, editing and publishing folk music who "insisted that the present Bureau perpetuates, twenty-two centuries later, the yuefu [Bureau of Music of the Han dynasty], and that the recent collections of songs participated in a straight line of descent from the Book of Odes [Shijing] compiled by Confucius."

As I shall discuss below, this Chinese official was not the only one using history to legitimate official intervention in folk tradition. Säypidin Äziz, Qawul Akhun and several other Uyghurs said that their editing of the muqam tradition was analogous to Âmânnisâ Khân's creation of the Twelve Muqams from a variety of folk traditions in the sixteenth century.

FOREIGN MUSIC IN CHINA

The partial closure of the Bureau of Music notwithstanding, many Chinese elites remained fascinated by popular and foreign music. Despite the Confucian belief that ritual music induced elevated sentiments and could civilize both commoners and barbarians, and the tendency of Chinese literati to view foreign music as crude and uncultivated, foreign musicians and dancers were very popular at the courts of the Wei, Sui and Tang dynasties, as well as later during the Mongol Yuan and Manchu Qing dynasties.

The records of this attraction for foreign music are extremely diverse, again reflecting how important music was in Chinese elite culture. But despite a number of useful studies, the musical tastes, skills and lives of these foreign musicians and their audiences in the capital cities and in outlying cities are still little known.

China during the first millenium was quite cosmopolitan. Its ruling classes were multi-ethnic and its important diplomatic and economic ties to foreign countries brought many foreigners to live in China permanently. Turk, Sogdian, Iranian, and Middle Eastern traders, performers, artisans and soldiers established communities in port cities as well as along the inland trade routes, heavily influencing court politics and introducing their Buddhist, Nestorian, Zoroastrian, Jewish, Manichean and Muslim religious beliefs. Although most of these religions has little long-term impact, large Muslim communities exist to this day in many of the same places where these early travellers settled.

One source depicting Tang Dynasty court performers are the polychrome terracotta figures widely found in Tang dynastic tombs. Jane Gaston Mahler discusses these figures in connection to Tang sources the mention dress and coiffure. She cites sources that reveal a debate over the moral effects of borrowing foreign food and clothing which resembled the debate over borrowing music. One narrative from Tang history describes the ongoing conflict of urban fashion and the imperial edicts that tried to restore propriety. During the Kaiyüan era (713-741) palace women began to wear Western-style hats and expose their painted faces. The common people emulated them. Eventually commoners and the high-born could not be distinguished.

But even before the cosmopolitanism of the Tang dynasty, performers were brought to the Chinese courts as part of diplomatic contacts. In Western studies the narrative of Suzhipo (Suzup) mentioned above by Shir Mämät is widely mentioned as a watershed in Chinese court music and music theory, in which Indian or Iranian--rather than Uighur--musical culture was brought on a large scale to the Chinese court. Like Feng Qinjün and Ämätjan Äkhmidi, Marcel Courant interprets Suzhipo as the Sanskrit name Sujiva, and cites the same Chinese sources that show him coming in the entourage of the Turk princess Muhan, daughter of the Ashina Turk Khân of Kucha (Kushan), when she married the Chinese Emperor Wudi around 567 C.E. Suzhipo was a master of the barbarian pipa, or lute, which he had learned from his father, a renowned musician in the Western Regions. Suzhipo brought a seven-tone scale to court, and a system of seven modal transpositions for these notes. The Chinese musician Zheng Yi apparently added five transpositions to create a total of eighty-four scales and proposed this as a reform to the court music. The names that Suzhipo gives for his notes are apparently derived from Sanskrit, but even though the historical source translates the words into Chinese and gives them in transliteration, only a few have been identified. Äkhmidi explains this latter fact as proof that these were Suzhipo's own developments (1992: 82).

More recent evidence of important influences from the Western Regions is the description by Ghiyâth al-Dîn, a member of an embassy from Timurid Herat to Beijing in 1419-1422. In the Ming capital he heard a performer on the yâtûghân (probably the Chinese qin) play twelve maqâm that were not from China. Another Timurid musical theorist, `Abd al-Qâdir ibn Ghaibî (d. 1435) describes several other instruments of China and the Persian modes `Ushshâq, Nawâ, and Bûsalîk that the Chinese musicians could play.

FÂRÂBÎ AS PHILOSOPHER OF MUSIC AND TURKIC CULTURE HERO

Abû Nasr Muhammad al-Fârâbî (870-950) was a Turk from the village of Farab in the Balasaghun region (to the south of Issiq köl) of the Qarakhanid Empire. Because of his Turk origins, Fârâbî has been claimed as a culture hero by several modern Central Asian Turkic nations. In Kazakhstan, he appears on the bir teñge note printed in 1993. In Xinjiang, when setting forth a charter outlining the scope and purpose of the journal Bulaq, the literary historian Imin Tursun includes Fârâbî in the "Uyghur" literary tradition. Imin Tursun explains the importance of Arab philosophers in transmitting Greek philosophy to Europe, and recounts a story about Ibn Sînâ learning Aristotle's metaphysics through a book written by al-Fârâbî. Imin Tursun makes no attempt to suggest that al-Fârâbî's philosophy was Turkic, but Fârâbî's prominence in the development of Islamic music scholarship has led Uyghurs such as Shir Mämät to argue that he taught "Uyghur" music to the Arabs.

Fârâbî has great symbolic importance to Uyghur music scholars. The frontispiece to Abdushukur Muhämmät Imin's Uyghur khälq kilassik muzikisi "On Ikki Muqam" häqqidä consists of a line drawing of Fârâbî done by Tashpolat Hashim. The description reads "The Uyghur Qarluq scholar, the Aristotle of the Middle Ages, Abu Nasr Muhammat ibni Muhammat ibni Tarkhan ibni Uzluq Farabi." He is wearing a turban, reading from a Qur'ân, and behind him are books and a qalun set into alcoves in the wall. This image of Fârâbî is reinforced by his frequent citation as an authority in manuscript works on music.

Before examining his image in later writings, I want to look at Fârâbî's own writings on music because he strongly defended empirical field study and had some valuable insights into the process of moving between practice and theory. There is little to suggest that Fârâbî drew on Turkic ideas about music. His Kitâb al-Mûsîqî al-Kabîr shows that although he places practice before theory, in his writings he felt that working out a theoretical system based in that of the Greeks was an important goal. He ends up describing musical practice in systematic abstractions of rhythm and scale derived from analysis of the courtly and folk repertoires of his time.

He begins by explaining that the Greeks' works were complete and correct, but in need of corrections due to the errors introduced by loss and poor translation. He takes on the task of elaborating and explaining Greek theory: "The ancients have well-established certain principles that we find in their works, but they have not explicitly demonstrated them. Nor have those of our contemporaries that have followed in their footsteps further defined them." He relates music and imagination through abstract descriptions of the mental forms of melodies and their physical realization, and through characterizing the skills involved in composing music and performing music. He discusses the three kinds of music: one gives relaxation and pleasure by acting "on the ear as a decorative design does upon the eye," the second suggests images and inspires and expresses ideas as does imitative painting, while "the third kind of music is inspired by our passions, by the state of our soul" in the same way that animals express feelings with their voices (13).

Fârâbî compares musical compositions to poems and to language more generally. "In a poem the first elements are the phonemes; they compose the feet such as the sabab or watad or combination of these meters. These feet form hemistichs, which in their turn, compose verse. In music the notes are the first elements; they play the role of the phoneme in poetry; but musical composition contains other intermediary elements that I will not explain here" (26). He rejects the Pythagorean idea that the planets and stars creates sounds with their motion because music, like language, is the product of art, not nature (28). But he does point out later that phonemes are purely conventional in rank or sequence, while nature determines the rank of musical pitches (43-44).

Making a strong argument for the separation of theoretical knowledge and practical skills, Fârâbî distinguishes them in terms of consciousness: "When a man attains the point of being able to perceive what passes in his mind, he finds he has knowledge he does not know when nor how he acquired. One has the impression that these are things which belong to intuition, to instinct, that they are innate in us and develop with us" (31). Fârâbî explains that although experience is central to perception and learning, the principles of some sciences are learned from childhood through sensation, while other sciences develop from explicitly demonstrated principles. The science of music depends on several sources. It develops from instinct, from experience, and from the teaching of explicit principles borrowed from foreign science. But Fârâbî concludes that the scientific theory is not as closely related to the practice of music as one might expect: "musical practice long preceeds musical theory. The latter only appeared when practice had already attained its full development, when the melodies already existed, when complete musical compositions and other aspects of music felt natural" (32-34). He gives an example that shows that theoretical knowledge of music is neither necessary nor sufficient to create music. "We know the story of a jeweller who was also a talented musician, but could not sing unless seated and working" (9). Since the interaction of performer and context is complex and the sources and purposes of music are many, musical skill must come from personal experience, not theoretical knowledge (15-19).

To properly analyze music the theoretician does better to listen and judge another playing than to play himself. If he does not have musicians to listen to, "he must accept the shared opinion of practitioners who have learned through means of sensation." In fact, Fârâbi tells us, many reputed theoreticians of antiquity did not have educated ears allowing them to recognize notes and melodies. Aristotle in the Final Analytics also said that many things that were known in theory but not by sense. Fârâbî concludes that when we cannot understand by the senses, we need to use metaphor and relationships of comparison to get there.

Fârâbî treats musical performers as the primary experts, but he seeks to transform their practical knowledge into theory through careful study and discussion with the experts, and then through techniques such as metaphor to transcend the limits of the senses. In the end, although he describes musical instruments concretely, his analysis of musical performance is put into the abstract systems that he has worked out.

MODERN UYGHURS AND THE HISTORY OF MUSIC

Despite claiming Fârâbî as part of the "Uyghur" literary tradition, no one I met in Xinjiang acknowledged reading his works on music. He remains a symbolic path for cultural gifts to Arabs and Europe, but offers little substance for a strong argument.

On the other hand, Suzhipo's set of seven note scales supports beliefs in musical origins based not merely on geographic connection, but on formal resemblances as well. Shir Mämät argued that Suzhipo's scales resemble European scales because they are in fact the same system that Fârâbî took to the Arabs. Shir Mämät felt that the Arabs developed this system and passed it on to Europe where it was developed further, while the Uyghurs sat in their isolated kingdoms and their musical knowledge stagnated. According to him, the music and instruments that the Arabs gave Europe must have been taken from the Uyghurs, because the level of Arab cultural development was low in the seventh century. The Uyghurs in the Tarim had a developed musical culture when people in Europe were not even wearing pants yet (F 11/24/92).

The most important document for modern Uyghur ideas about their music history is a brief manuscript called History of Musicians (Tavârikh-i mûsîqiyyûn), written by Mulla `Ismatulla binni Mulla Ni`matulla Mû`jiz in 1271 A.H. (1854-55 C.E.) on the basis of historical sources and oral traditions. This is the most significant manuscript source about music history that originates in Eastern Turkistan, and it the only description of Âmânnisâ Khân and Qidîr Khân creating the Twelve Muqams at the court of `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân in the sixteenth century. Mû`jiz has great authority among modern Uyghur historians because he is presumed to be closer to authentic oral historical tradition and know Persian and Arabic historical sources better. He fills a gap in the history of Uyghur musical culture, and like Âmânnisâ Khân, Turdi Akhun and Rozi Tämbur, he himself has become a culture hero, a preserver of the vanishing Uyghur cultural past, and a protector of Uyghur cultural identity.

The History of Musicians was found in Khotan in the late 1950s, bound with a copy of Navâ'î's Kulliyat. It was copied at the latest in 1338 A.H. (1919-20) since it is inscribed as being given as a gift in that year.

Mû`jiz wrote the History of Musicians at the request of the "Shâh" of Khotan, `Alî Shîr Hakîm Beg (ruled 1828-1864 and 1878-1882) (TM 73n6). The Hakîm Beg is quoted as saying "from Pâdishâh to beggar, from saints (avliya) to Christians, the science of music makes all happy," but he goes on to complain that now many performers do not know who the great scholars and masters of this science were. He asks Mû`jiz to draw on his great command of literature, poetic composition, and music to write a treatise (risâla) for musicians (24-25). According to Mû`jiz's introduction, most of his sources are Persian and Arabic works. He usually does not name his sources in each biography, but he does mention in his introduction Târîkh-i Rashîdî, Tavârikh-i Tabirî, Tavârikh-i Ravzat as-Safâ, Tavârikh-i Hukamâ, Tavârikh-i `Ajam, Tavârikh-i `Arab, and elsewhere he mentions works by Pythagoras (Fîsâgûrs), Fârâbî, `Abd ar-Rahman Jâmî, `Alî Shîr Navâ'î, Bâbur, and the wrestler (koshtîngîr) and scholar Pahlavân Muhammad Abû-Sa`îd (Bâbur calls him Bû-Sa`îd).

Although it is also partly biographical, the Risâla-i Musiqi of the early seventeenth-century author Dervish `Alî shares little content with Mû`jiz's work. Dervish `Alî describes many more musicians and scholars, but the few figures such as Sâhib Balkhî, `Abd ar-Rahman Jâmî and `Alî Shîr Navâ'î who do appear in both works are treated very differently. Dervish `Alî and Mû`jiz clearly draw on different traditions and apply different principles of selection. Dervish `Alî begins with a detailed discussion of the maqâm system and gives more musicological details in his biographies. He does not seem at all interested in the spiritual dimensions of musical performance. Mû`jiz is more a hagiographer of musical mystics, describing musicians' teaching and spiritual accomplishments, and the miracles that occur during their performances, while giving few musicological details.

Mû`jiz's work conforms to an episodic and genealogical style of history writing that was common in several genres of Persian and Turkic historiography. In political histories, this style consists of sequences of episodes with varying degrees of connection between the episodes, and often little connection between sequences. Many of these histories are organized genealogically, following the fortunes of a lineage. They almost always start with explanations of the first people, usually descending from Nuh (Noah), but also include genealogies of some figures descended from the ahl al-bayt (the family of the Prophet), from the pre-Mongol legendary Turk Oghûz Khân, from Satûq Bughrâ Khân, from Chingiz Khân, and from the Turanian hero Afrâsiyâb. The proliferation of sources and genealogies meant that there were many different ways to organize material related to different figures. The most common method was to simply present the different genealogies without too much concern for how they related to one another, except that Nuh was usually placed at the origin of all the genealogies.

Hagiographic works tended to be organized by the lineage or silsila ('chain') along which doctrine was transmitted from one shaykh to another. Each biography would describe a shaykh's sayings, teachings, feats, and murîds (disciples, students). But as we have seen, some hagiographers such as Jâmî and Navâ'î compiled more wide-ranging Sufi hagiographies with less strict doctrinal and lineage links.

In the History of Musicians, Mû`jiz follows a broadly hagiographic convention, narrating a history of music through the great deeds and miracles of scholars and performers from Greek, Arab, and Central Asian tradition. He consistently enumerates the work each musician did in teaching murîds or shâgirds ('apprentices'), and mentions the treatises they wrote. He also seems to prefer figures who taught other aspects of Islamic tradition, such as sharî`a and reciting the Qur'ân. This suggests that from the vast time and space his work covers, he selects people who fit his ideals about Islamic musicians, rather than following lineage connections or other links. He begins with several different founding heroes, but then moves quickly to more recent periods. In only a few cases does he mention connections among the figures he describes.

By his selections, Mû`jiz seems to have intended his synthesis of history and hagiography to give religious legitimacy to musicians and poets generally, but he may only be reflecting an extant acceptance of music as a spiritual practice in Khotan. In any case, the result is a loosely connected genealogy of musicians and their accomplishments seen from the Khotan region of Eastern Turkistan in the mid-nineteenth century. Mû`jiz connects Khotan directly to sacred history when he writes that Nuh's (Noah's) great-grandson Kharz sent his descendants to settle Yarkand and Khotan. He associates Fârâbî with the Qarakhanid capital Balâsâghûn, and he connects current musical practice with traditions established at Timurid courts and in the Yarkand Khanate.

In his conclusion he acknowledges that this is not the whole history of music, and explains that although in every century and every city there are a hundred or even a thousand musicians, in this brief work he can only consider one in a thousand.

Most of the biographies Mû`jiz includes in this compilation concern musicians who performed maqâms, but he includes other important musicians as well. He begins by connecting the origin of ethnic groups from Nuh's sons to the origin of music, citing the Tavârikh-i Ravzat as-Safâ and Târîkh-i Rashidî as his sources for the narrative of Kharz, son of Turk, son of Yafes, son of Nuh.

The narrative of Turk and Kharz appears in Rehatsek's English translation of the Tavârikh-i Ravzat as-Safâ, but the details are somewhat different. Turk is Yafes's successor, and the most intelligent of his sons. It is Turk's son Fuduk who discovers the salting of food. And Kharz is a younger son of Yafes who invents cremation and musical performance at funerals when his father dies.

Other Eastern Turki histories vary widely in their treatment of these origin myths, but none make Mû`jiz's strong connections among Nuh's sons, the invention of music, and Khotan. Clearly, Mû`jiz is interpreting this story--or drawing on written or oral sources that interpret it--so that the people of Khotan and Yarkand are connected genealogically to the first Turk, and culturally to the musical inventions of his son Kharz.

The next expert of musical science that Mû`jiz describes is Fîsâghûrs (Pythagoras). He is said to have travelled widely, and ended up performing in Antâkiya, which Mû`jiz places in Farangistan (Europe), although it should be Antioch. Fîsâghûrs played the satâr and sang poetry, and Mû`jiz summarizes his ethical teachings in proverb-like form, much as if they were those of a Turkic Sufi shaykh:

Fîsâghûrs worked musical miracles. The people of Antâkiya had never heard poetry or music before and were fascinated. The Pâdishâh came and was amazed. He invited Fîsâghûrs to live in his court, where he taught the people of the city the science of music. "In ten years he trained 40,000 apprentices to perfection in the science of music." Then Fîsâghûrs asked permission to go to India, where he studied their astronomical sciences, and taught still more people the sciences of music. Mû`jiz states, "After the Pâdishâhs Jamshid and Kayqubâd, the greatest nurturer of the seed of music is Fîsâghûrs."

In the third narrative, Mû`jiz describes the life of Shaykh Abu Nasr Fârâbî, saying that he comes from the city of Balâsâghûn in the Altây mountains. According to Mû`jiz, Fârâbî reached greater spiritual attainments than the Muslim philosophers Ghazzâli and Fakhrî Râzî, and his science was greater than that of Ibn Sînâ. His many fields of expertise are listed, and then his skills in music described. He built, stringed and tuned a qânûn ('qalun' in modern Uyghur) with his own hands, played it and taught apprentices. He created and spread Râk, `Ushâq, and `Ushâq marghûla, teaching them to his apprentices. He composed the Ôzhâl maqâm and its first, second and third marghûla, which are well-known to present performers (28, ms. 12).

Mû`jiz quotes Fârâbî from his Risâla-i Mughanniyun (Treatise on Performers) on spiritual and emotional aspects of music:

Although in the treatise I discussed above, Fârâbî said little about the religious significance of music, his discussion of muñ and samâ` in this Eastern Turkistani text puts him solidly in the tradition of Sufis who use music to expand their spiritual and emotional attunement to God, and to help others do so as well. Mû`jiz's other quote from Fârâbî makes even clearer that he had come to be seen as representing an ecstatic alternative to Islamic verbal practices. "If you pray for one hundred years and do not receive abundance (fayz), take it from the strings of my qânûn" (TM 29, ms. 12). Mû`jiz mentions Fârâbî's 114 books, and then expresses his intent, God willing, to translate the Risâla-i Mughanniyun into Turkic.

At this point Mû`jiz leaves these distant founders of music and the musical sciences to describe a number of fifteenth-century figures from the Timurid areas of Iran and Iraq. The originary figures above are sacralized as culture heroes with little explicit reference to Islam, but Mû`jiz's descriptions of Timurid figures use more elements from Islamic hagiographies, perhaps because he uses different sources. He begins to refer to each figure with the religious honorific hazrat, usually in the even more honorific plural hazratlar.

Mavlânâ `Alî is from Khorasan. He wrote the books Asl al-vasl and Murtâz. He composed a piece well-known to singers, Çöl Iraq maqâm, even though he never went to the deserts (çöl) of Iraq. He invented the dûtâr. In his time, he was without peer for writing poetry and putting it to music. He died from excessive use of opium which caused him to lose his mind.

Mû`jiz briefly describes Khoja Shihâb ad-Dîn, who had more than two hundred apprentices, and `Abdullah Marvârîd from Samarqand who wrote many treatises on music and had around one hundred apprentices. Next Mû`jiz tells of `Abd ar-Rahman Jâmî, the important Persian poet who was `Alî-Shîr Navâ'î's literary and spiritual teacher. He compares Jâmî to Fârâbî in his broad range of knowledge and his skills on the tanbûr, the satâr, and the qânûn among other instruments. Jâmî invented (ikhtira` qilip irdilâr) a maqâm called `Ajam and two of its marghûla. He wrote a book on music called Risâla-i Davvâr. He died in Herat at 79 years of age, in 897 A.H. (TM 30-31, ms. 15-6).

Amîr Nizâm al-Dîn `Alî-Shîr Navâ'î was a prolific poet, who wrote thirty-six books besides his Kulliyât, his Chahâr Dîvân, and his Khamsa. He learned the science of music from hazrati Jâmî. Every evening he would play the satâr or the tanbûr, and while singing praises (of God) with his own ghazals, he would become unconscious. He created and publicized a maqâm called Navâ. He was born in 843 A.H. on Jumâdî as-sâni, and died of a stroke (säktä) at age 63 in 906 A.H. in Herat (TM 31).

Ustad ('master') Muhammad Khwârazmi is briefly mentioned as someone who put a lot of effort and genius into subtle expression [ihtimâm-mahârat mâlâ-kalâm] in his studies of music. He had more than two hundred apprentices. He wrote on the secrets of music. He died in 852 A.H. (1448 C.E.).

Mavlânâ Na`mân Samarqandî was a persevering Qur'ân reader who taught five hundred people to memorize the Qur'ân. And he was a moving singer and musician. He would perform at gatherings (majlis) of `ulamâ (scholars, Mû`jiz uses `âlîmlâr here) and shaykhs. One day the Samarqand `ulamâ had a majlis at which Mavlânâ Samarqandî sang ghazals by Mavlânâ Shams al-Dîn Tabrizî and played on the satâr. One by one the `âlîms fell asleep. From his unconscious state, Mavlânâ `Alî [apparently the musician described above] passed away during the majlis. The Pâdishâh ordered Mavlânâ Samarqandî thrown in jail. In 865 A.H. (1460 C.E), after five years in jail, he died. He taught more than three hundred musicians, several hundred scholars of sharî`a and several thousand Sufis (Sûfîlâr). He offered the people of the path of music (mûsîqînîñ tarîqat ahli) a book Mi`râj us-salikîn containing the results of his researches on music (TM 31-32, ms. 19-20).

Mavlânâ Sâhib Balkhî taught five or six hundred tâlibs (seekers, students) in sharî`a. He magically made the tanbûr speak. Bâbur Shâh could not part with him for a moment, and employed him in his court. One day at a prodigious majlis of Bâbur Shâh in Kabul, with many of the great and powerful attending, Mavlânâ Balkhî picked up his tanbûr and began playing the Çöl Iraq maqâm. After passing the second avj and reaching the third, a nightingale came and perched on the tuning pegs of the tanbûr and began to sing. The people at the majlis began to shout in astonishment, and several wept, lost consciousness, and rolled about. They hit the tanbûr and after seven or eight blows, the nightingale fell to the ground dead. Mavlânâ Balkhî was greatly affected, and throwing down his tanbûr he lost consciousness. Most of the unconscious ones were given alcoholic drinks and revived, but Mavlânâ Balkhî did not return to consciousness, despite the efforts of many experts. He died in 844 A.H. (1440 C.E.) This story is in Bâbur's Asrâr-i mûsîqî (The secrets of music) (TM 32-33, ms. 20-22).

These descriptions of Amîr `Alî-Shîr Navâ'î, Mavlânâ Samarqandî and Mavlânâ Balkhî clearly reflect ideas about Sufi musicians creating within spiritual tradition. Their greatness is revealed by their ecstatic experiences and their mastery of esoteric skills. While such religious experiences are not indispensable to musicians generally, Mû`jiz seems to want to show that music can be an essential part of a spiritually meritorious life and death.

The next biography describes Shaykh Safâyî Samarqandî. There were no maqâm tunes he did not know nor musical instruments that he could not play. He had more than two hundred apprentices. He wrote a book on music, the Nashâ'at-i mûsîqî, and composed several songs and ghazals. He died in 869 A.H. (1464 C.E.) at the age of fifty-six (ms. 22-23).

The next biography is the first of those in which Mû`jiz treats local founders of Eastern Turkistani musical tradition, and suggests that Mû`jiz felt local musical tradition was less religiously inspired. He describes Qidîr Khân Yârkandî:

Sultân `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân would not eat or drink nor go to sleep without him. Qidîr Khân created a maqâm entitled Visâl and taught it to his apprentices. He died two years after `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân (ca. 1560 C.E.).

The description of Qidîr Khân's apprentices coming from throughout Central and Western Asia is now important for suggesting that Uyghur music was taken to many countries in the Islamic world, and for portraying the Yarkand Khanate as an important participant in international cultural exchange.

After Qidîr Khân, Mû`jiz returns to Timurid musicians and describes the great wrestler and scholar Pahlavân Muhammad. Despite the greater significance of Navâ'î and Jâmî in later literary traditions, Mû`jiz obviously considers Pahlavân Muhammad an important artist. He gets his information from Navâ'î's Halât-i pahlavân Muhammad Kushtîgîr dedicated to this figure.

Since Pahlavân Muhammad wrote mostly Persian poetry, he has no place in the present ethnic canon of Uyghur literature and art, but in the context in which Mû`jiz wrote, Persian culture was an important part of learned arts such as maqâm song. Mû`jiz was as interested in the work of Jâmî as in that of Navâ'î. Rather than thinking in terms of a contained and pure Turkic tradition, Mû`jiz, like most authors between the thirteenth and the twentieth century, drew on the valued cultural traditions that were part of the Islamic synthesis.

We have seen that there were attempts to create linguistically distinct traditions, but even when linguistic form was differentiated, literary and historical contents were much less so. Heroes and heroines from many traditions were made the subject of poetry and genealogical histories. Synthesis and conflation made more interesting plots and genres than differentiation of the past according to present geography and ethnic groups.

When Navâ'î advocated writing in Turki, the form of his arguments make clear that linguistic distinctions did not eliminate literary synthesis. Despite attempts by Mahmûd al-Kâshgharî and others to define ethnically distinct culture and literary traditions, already at the time Navâ'î wrote, the Islamic intellectual and cultural tradition in Central Asia included Greeks, Arabs, Persians and Turks, among others, although their respective roles and statuses varied from one social context to another.

Kâshgharî himself did not worry about including Alexander (Dhû-l Qarnayn) and Afrâsiyâb as important culture heroes for the Turks. The broader cultural tradition can also be found in the extant Eastern Turkistani manuscript tradition, in which Persian works seem to be at least as numerous as those in Turki, although there were few native speakers of Persian living in the region.

In his description of Pahlavân Muhammad, Mû`jiz goes into detail about his musical compositions and gives examples from the poetry that he used. He writes that Pahlavân Muhammad Koshtîngîr was of such miraculous superiority that he was an elite among scholars (ûlûgh `ulamâ), a pole among the friends of God (qutbu'l-avliyâ), and the greatest of heroes. In one thousand years such a hero is not found: a poet, a singer, and very wealthy. There was no one so good natured as he. He wrote a book on music, and created songs (naqsh), chants (qavl), and tunes. Among his compositions based in the maqâm systems (özlârî yâsîghân maqâm-i `amallârnîñ birisi) is the Chahâr Zarb maqâm. It was considered more beautiful and heart-rending (khosh va dilkash) than all the compositions of other masters. Among his great maqâms were Chahâr Zarb and Chahârgâh. Mû`jiz gives the matla` of a Persian ghazal by Mavlânâ Tûtî that Pahlavân Muhammad used in his Chahârgâh. This couplet is an address to a cupbearer, asking that they enjoy themselves today, for who knows what tomorrow may bring. He named it Mir Buzrûk Termizî. This was such a beautiful muqam that no singers in Khorasan, Iraq, Samarqand, and Yarkand did not know it (34-5, ms. 24-5).

For his Dûgâh maqâm Pahlavân Muhammad used a verse by Mîr Khusrau Dehlivî, and called the maqâm Bâbur Sultân. Again Mû`jiz gives the Persian couplet, which praises the beloved's cheeks and hair. Using a verse of Mavlânâ Kâtibî, he created a Panjigâh maqâm which was famous in the cities of `Ajam (Iran) and Mâvara'n-Nahr (Transoxiana). Mû`jiz gives both the matla` and the final couplet of this Persian ghazal, the maqta`. Pahlavân Muhammad called this maqâm Sultân Abû Sa`îd Mîrzâ because of the maqta`:

Pahlavân Muhammad also composed many more ghazals, maqâms and tunes (âhañlâr). In addition to the Chahâr Zarb, his Dûgâh, Sîgâh, Chahârgâh, Panjigâh, Mushavrak and Bayâdak were all famous from east to west. He served at first in Bâbur's court, and then had a high position in the palace of Mîrzâ Abû Sa`îd. After this he was an intimate (muqarrab) of Sultân Sâhib Qirân Husayn Bahâdir Khân (ms. 27). He was a good friend of Navâ'î. Mû`jiz quotes Navâ'î's comments on their forty years of friendship. He wrote many books on music, and wrote his own poetry, of which Mû`jiz gives a sample line in Persian. His takhallus was Kûshîgîr [sic] (ms. 28).

Pahlavân Muhammad did many good works around Herat. He built a Sufi lodge (langar) called Ni`mat-i Âbâd with rooms and gardens for 5000 people. Faqirs, dervishes, musâfirs and other travellers would come and stay for months or even years, and get food three times a day. Shaykhs and `ulamâ would come and stay for five or ten years (ms. 29). Hâtam-i Tayy (an Arab renowned in Islam for his generosity) was never so generous. From the Pâdishâh to beggars, from holy men to Christians, there was no one to whom he was not a friend.

Pahlavân Muhammad taught thousands sharî`a and to recite the Qur'ân from memory, and thousands of apprentices to perform music. There was no one so wealthy in that time. Husayn Bahâdir Khân would not have a majlis without him.

Pahlavân Muhammad lost consciousness and died unexpectedly from a fall one day, and all of Khorasan, from Pâdishâh to beggars mourned as if the Last Judgment (qiyâmat-i qâyim) had arrived. He had dug his own tomb at Ni`mat-i Âbâd while still alive, and every night had gone and meditated there. In 899 A.H. (1493 C.E.) he was buried (ms. 28-31).

Mû`jiz's source for the above description was Navâ'î's work. Like Navâ'î, Pahlavân Muhammad was both a great artist and a wealthy patron in his own right. But since his poetry and compositions were in Persian, the Uyghur scholars who edited Mû`jiz's work could not even identify him. This section reveals two important aspects of the Uyghur muqam tradition that are no longer acknowledged. First, many of the poems were in Persian at least through the sixteenth century. We will see more examples of this below.

The second fact that becomes clear in Mû`jiz's writing is that a maqâm should be seen as a musical system that composers would use for singing a poetic text. Although he does not distinguish shu`ba and maqâm, Mû`jiz does separate the canonical fifteenth-century shu`ba systems--Dûgâh, Sîgâh, Chahârgâh, Panjigâh, etc.--from Pahlavân Muhammad's compositions based in them. Pahlavân Muhammad has given each of these compositions a new name. His Dûgâh he called Bâbur Sultân, his Chahârgâh he called Mir Buzrûk Termizî, his Panjigâh he called Sultân Abû Sa`îd Mîrzâ. It is not clear exactly the status of the Chahâr Zarb as maqâm-i `amal ('maqâm form, method, system'), since this could mean a new composition based in an unspecified maqâm system such as Chahârgâh, or it may imply that this is a new system Pahlavân Muhammad created.

Mû`jiz does not always make the distinction between system and composition explicit, perhaps because he depends on his sources and on his own familiarity with particular maqâm names for deciding whether a composer created the maqâm as system or a composition in an existing system. He describes Fârâbî as creating and introducing (îjâd va kashf qil-) Râk, `Ushâq, and Ôzhâl and some of their marghûla, while Jâmî invented (ikhtira` qil-) "a maqâm known as `Ajam" and its two marghûla, and Qidîr Khân invented (ikhtira` qil-) "a maqâm named Visâl."

He differentiates Fârâbî's creations by the verbs used, and by implying that Râk, `Ushâq and Ozhâl are so well-known that he need not write "a maqâm called . . . ." It is not clear if Mû`jiz uses the latter phrase to introduce a new compositions based in an unspecified maqâm system, or a new maqâm system itself, or both. But Mû`jiz may be correct in associating the `Ajam maqâm with Jâmî, since there is no mention of it before Jâmî's time, and its name suggests a connection with Jâmî's takhallus.

Mû`jiz seems to understand the maqâms that he says Fârâbî created and disseminated as maqâm systems, but his inclusion of Râk is interesting since it appears in no other early sources, and it is still unclear whether the name comes from rakb or some other source such as Hindi raga. Since Fârâbî is not elsewhere described as creating these maqâms, and Mû`jiz here spells the name Ozhâl as it is pronounced, rather than in its common written form `Uzzâl, Mû`jiz must be using contemporary performers as his source here.

In the next two biographies, Mû`jiz returns us to the Turkic poets of the Timurid period who I discussed above as precursors to Navâ'î's own Turkic poetry.

Mavlânâ Lutfî is from Moghûlistân. In science he is like Fârâbî, in wisdom like Ibn Sînâ, in poetry like Navâ'î, in singing like Qidîr Khân. More than five hundred people studied science and reciting the Qur'ân from him, and around two hundred people learned music from him. He compiled more than twenty books. Navâ'î called him "my master" in sciences. But he said to Navâ'î, "you are my master, and two of your misrâ` surpass the 10,000 misrâ` I have completed in my life." He died in 878 A.H. (1473 C.E.)

Mû`jiz then describes Yûsuf Sakkâkî. He was like Fârâbî and Lutfî in sciences. He had thousands of tâlibs. "In the sciences of oration, locution, and eloquence (mantiq, fasâhat, balâghat) he was unique. In the science of poetry, this thoughtful man from Moghûlistân exceeded all others." He wrote a book on locution and eloquence, especially in the Qur'ân, called Talkhîs. He wrote treatises on music. He invented (ikhtira` qil-) and taught to his apprentices a maqâm named Bayât, which is well-known among present day singers.

The seventeenth and final biography introduces us to a figure unique to Eastern Turkistan, and little known in other sources. Princess (malîka) Âmânnisâ Khân (Khenim "my khan" is also used for her title), who moved from obscure poverty to become the wife of Sultân `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân, has become the culture hero most closely associated with the creation of the Twelve Muqams in the sixteenth-century court of `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân. As shown by the film above and in many works of history and fiction, she is now widely seen as the primary cause of the sixteenth-century composition, collection and organization that made the Twelve Muqam tradition. The story of Âmânnisâ Khân has become a charter for the modern re-creation of the muqams.

Mû`jiz is the single significant source for the story of Âmânnisâ Khân but his narrative has become offical historical doctrine used to demonstrate that `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân's rule was a period of Uyghur cultural efflorescence. Mû`jiz tells us,

Mû`jiz recounts the events leading up to the Sultân's marriage with Âmânnisâ Khân (I paraphrase most of this).

With all these details, including the names of two books she wrote, it is hard to imagine that Mû`jiz is drawing only on oral sources for his history of Âmânnisâ Khân. Nonetheless, there are no other extant sources that even mention Âmânnisâ Khân.

Some aspects of this story may come from traditional motifs. The story that appears in the Shâhnâma of Bahram Gur discovering and falling in love with the musician Arzu seems somewhat similar to `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân's discovery of Âmânnisâ Khân.

This is the last biography that Mû`jiz devotes to a single figure. After Âmânnisâ Khân, Mû`jiz ceases to provide biographies and instead summarizes some Iranian legends about the origins of music and musical instruments. He writes,

These accounts are common in Persian legendary history, and all of these figures appear in the Shâhnâma although the narratives are somewhat different.

Mû`jiz concludes, explaining that although among all the world's musicians he can only include one in a thousand, nonetheless each of those he has included either created a muqam naqsh or a musical instrument or wrote a treatise on the science of music. He closes with a fourteen couplet poem recapitulating the idea of the work and why and how he wrote it. He says that he "made this memorial [yâdkâr]" for the Hakîm Beg and "for the people of Khotan" (44, ms. 39).

Mû`jiz's work is important for several reasons. Mû`jiz did fine scholarship and had access to a variety of important Arabic and Persian sources. Although he put his biographies only in a rough chronological and geographic order, he seems to have known the traditions and materials well. Like much historiography of his time, his varied assortment of biographies shows multiple origins in Greek, Arab, and Iranian history, with emphasis on the recent artistic renaissances in the fifteenth-century Timurid courts and the Yarkand Khanate.

Mû`jiz is deeply aware of the spiritual significance of music, and recounts narratives to demonstrate it. He seems to have a general understanding of the maqâms, recognizes the names of the maqâms and maqâm compositions, and can identify those that are still well-known. And his description of composition shows the importance of Persian poetry. Judging by the poetry that Mû`jiz includes, Âmânnisâ Khân did not compose Persian poetry, but it certainly would not be surprising if she and Yûsuf Qidîr Khân sang maqâms in Persian, especially since the latter had apprentices from many parts of the Iranian world.

Not only is Mû`jiz's work important documentation of maqâm history and of the historiographic interests of his own time, but its recent discovery and canonization as a basic historical source in Xinjiang reveals much about the present search for connections between elite arts of the courts and indigenous popular culture. By his detailed portrait of a spirited but otherwise barely known woman, Âmânnisâ Khân, Mû`jiz helps modern Uyghur historians tie cultural activities at the Yarkand court to the shared ethnic culture of the ancestors of the modern Uyghur ethnic group. For many Uyghurs, the value of this portrait and its description of Âmânnisâ Khân's role in developing the great Uyghur song and music tradition far outweigh any criticisms of the accuracy of the Tavârikh-i mûsîqiyyûn as a historical source, or any problems brought up by Mû`jiz's detailed description of using Persian verse to create maqâm compositions.

Although his original intent was to compile a sweeping history of musicians and their spiritual attainments, for modern Uyghurs Mû`jiz's history suggests popular origins for maqâms in addition to the more recognized sources in elite and esoteric masculine spiritual culture. Of course, the many non-elite performers of maqâms throughout Eastern Turkistan should be enough to persuade people otherwise, but as a folk classical tradition the muqams are paradoxical, in that they must be both exclusive and difficult and yet rooted in folk culture. They are seen as high culture, supported at the court with full-time professional performers, but created by commoners and at least one woman.

Building on this interpretation and the knowledge that some of the Khoja Ishans opposed music, many writers and historians have promoted an image of Âmânnisâ Khân and Qidîr Khân defending Uyghur popular culture against the attacks of religious officials. Along with government support for the revival of the Twelve Muqams as shared Uyghur culture, Âmânnisâ Khân and Qidîr Khân have been canonized as progressive populists who repelled the effort of conservative clerics to restict popular culture. Most Uyghurs in Ürümchi seem to accept the reality of this heroic contest over Uyghur culture despite overwhelming evidence in Mû`jiz's history, in the muqams themselves, and in the practices of Sufis and other Muslims. The ready acceptance of this version of history testifies to the power of official and mass mediated cultural interpretations, and to a lingering memory of religious officials who did suppress music, particularly under Ya`qûb Beg in the late nineteenth century (see my introductory chapter).

That friends of mine from Kashghar could talk about joining in celebratory samâ` dancing on Muslim holidays while at the same time accusing Sufis of contributing to the suppression of traditional Uyghur music shows how public discourses are redefining memory and history, or at least successfully shaping popular understanding of Sufis and Sufism as representatives of conservative Islam. At the same time, as I mentioned in chapter five, modern historians of Uyghur literature claim interpret the works of the the Sufi poet Yasavî as a progressive critic of imams, qazis, and muftis.

`ABD AR-RASHÎD KHÂN

The Târîkh-i Rashîdî describes `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân as a great musician and singer. Likewise, the history by Mahmûd Churâs, simply called Târîkh and described as a continuation to Târîkh-i Rashîdî, describes `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân as a talented singer, poet, and musician (qoshuqçi). The latter work includes two couplets from one of his Persian ghazals, and a quatrain in Turki. Both poems use the vocabulary of love, and the Persian lines include his takhallus "Rashîdî."

A historical manuscript, known in Russia as Târîkh-i Kashghar (History of Kashghar) but edited and published by Haji Nurhaji in Kashghar under the name Çiñgiz Namä, describes `Abd ar-Rashîd and his father Sa`îd Khân as patrons of the arts in the Yarkand Khanate. Sa`îd Khân is said to write verse in both Persian and Turki, and the work includes a three-couplet ghazal and a quatrain by Sa`îd Khân, both in Turki and using the imagery of love, and a Persian four-couplet ghazal on a religious theme.

`Abd ar-Rashîd Khân is described in the same work as having a close relationship to Sufis, and even travelling as a qalandar sometimes. This book includes two five-couplet verses by him, one in Persian, and one in Turki. These are both explicitly religious, rather than using the imagery of desire for earthly beauty as an allegory for the quest for sacred presence.

Also presented are two Turki quatrains from rubâ'îs. The first one is entitled Nurmar qadah (sic, nur-i marr?), and concerns drinking wine. The author of this biography then comments on `Abd ar-Rashîd drinking to be happy, and his skill in the science of music. "He composed the music `Ishrat Angiz. He can perform the 24 shu`ba of the 12 maqâms beautifully" (109). This suggests that Mû`jiz is correct that `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân did indeed take credit for Âmânnisâ Khân's maqâm composition. The earlier histories exclude her, while Mû`jiz's mid-nineteenth-century work seems to reflect an effort to include women as composers and performers in the maqâm/muqam tradition.

The remainder of the Târîkh-i Kashghar biographies include few examples of verse. That Sa`îd Khân and `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân are given so much space for their poetry in this eighteenth-century history shows that even two hundred years after they lived, they were seen as exemplary founders of cultural traditions, versed in Persian literary and maqâm musical skills, and patronizing musicians and Sufis. Now their image as benevolent, even populist, rulers has been resurrected in the present, although they have to be guided away from their religious interests by Âmânnisâ Khân and Qidîr Khân.

THE USES OF THE NARRATIVE OF ÂMÂNNISÂ KHÂN

In present-day Ürümchi the story of Âmânnisâ Khân is popular and well-known. She is generally seen as the most important founder of the muqams, as well as connecting the Moghul elite ruling class and the folk. This story was one way that knowledge of the Yarkand Khanate has entered Uyghur popular culture. Uyghur films, plays and documentaries describe this era as a moment of cultural and historical greatness in Uyghur history, a period in which rulers with local cultural roots patronized indigenous culture, and made links between elite and popular or folk culture. Uyghurs feel that before the Yarkand Khanate, the Mongol conquest had disrupted the continuity of Turkic/Uyghur civilization in Eastern Turkistan, while in the later Yarkand Khanate the power of the Khoja Naqshbandi Sufis, many of whom were from Western Turkistan, also suppressed cultural expression. Many Uyghurs now see the rule of Sultân Sa`îd Khân and Sultân `Abd ar-Rashîd Khân as bright spots in a long history of foreign domination and conflict that caused loss of culture and tradition. By aligning themselves with these rulers, modern politicians and cultural authorities can present themselves as benevolent populists as well.

Âmânnisâ Khân's image was often popularized in drama. Ömär Akhun, Qawul Akhun, Turnisa Salahidin and other musicians I knew were involved in stage and screen plays. The most important dramatic version was written by the former Chairman of the Xinjiang People's Congress, Säypidin Äziz. Not only was he involved in organizing the official effort to preserve the muqams in the 1950s and revive them in the 1980s, but he created literary representations of culture heroes who had worked on the muqams in the past. His stage play Amannisakhan was published in 1983, and was the basis for a movie that I have not seen.

The stage play opens with a twenty-year old Amannisa Khan practicing muqam performance with her sixty-year old instructor, Ömär Sazändä, playing satar and another apprentice of Ömär playing the small frame drum known as a dap. As the first dastan of Çäbbiyat Muqam, Amannisa Khan sings a ghazal said to be her own composition--but apparently composed by Säypidin--on a flower and nightingale theme (6). In chatting after this song, the audience finds out that Ömär Sazändä had been a teacher in the court at Yarkand, but had had to leave because of pressure on him from Ishans and Sufis to stop performing music (11).

Political conflict over religious restrictions on music is the dominant theme in this play. After describing his problems with Sufis and Ishans, Ömär suggests they perform the third dastan of Çäbbiyat Muqam, to which Amannisa Khan sings a ghazal by Saqi. Meanwhile Abduräshid Khan and his companion Äkräm have come upon the house as they are out hunting, and listen to the performance from under a tree. They decide to go in and ask to stay the night without revealing who they are. Äkräm warns Abduräshid Khan to be careful of what he says. They are welcomed inside and invited to stay. They meet Amannisa Khan, Ömär, and the other musicians. Abduräshid tells of their hunting trip, accidentally referring to his court and retainers. Äkräm has to nudge him to correct himself. Eventually they ask Omär to perform. They sing the Çoñ Näghmä of Çäbbiyat Muqam (18). Amannisa Khan sings one of Sä`id Khan's love ghazals that appear in the Çiñgiz Namä.

Abduräshid asks about the ghazal and finds out that Ömär had been a musician at Sä`id Khan's court but was expelled. Ömär, Amannisa, and the dap player describe the problems of Sä`id Khan's court and that of his successor Abduräshid Khan, especially criticizing the excesses of their officials.

Abduräshid's response is to pick up a dutar and play Bayat täzä while singing a ghazal about the difficulties of governing and the fleeting and deceptive nature of the world. The ghazal ends with the takhallus Rashidi (22). The older grammatical forms and the Persianate vocabulary suggest that this poem is by the historical Abduräshid, and it appears in the literary history by V. Ghopur and Ä. Hüsäyin, but they do not specify their source (1987: 720-21). Amannisa Khan sings the couplet given by Mû`jiz that insinuates that Abduräshid Khan is annoying her, and another couplet describing her heart as troubled by the misfortunes of love brought by this hunter. Thus the first poem in which Amannisa fairly clearly complained against the annoyances of Abduräshid Khan is turned into one suggesting the painful sparks of growing love for him.

Abduräshid replies singing a quatrain of a love poem using the rose and nightingale theme, and then leaves. Upon his departure, they discuss who he was and what he intended to do. Ömär is fairly certain that he is the Khan. The dap player is particularly concerned because in his vehement criticism of the rule of Abduräshid Khan (23).

The rest of the drama describes the marriage of Abduräshid Khan and Amannisa Khan, and Amannisa Khan working with her collaborators on editing the muqams. The Sufis and Ishans gradually become more organized in opposition to the performance of the muqams. The twentieth-century political overtones of this debate are subdued but constant. When an Ishan first voices some doubts about musicians, Ömär Sazändä explains that music is the voice of the people, reflecting their desires (30). The character playing Amannisa Khan in the documentary film said that the muqams are a thousand year-old heritage of the Uyghurs. Like the drama included within the documentary, Säypidin here stresses the opposition between Uyghur popular culture and elite religious restrictions.

The second act, consisting of scenes related to editing the muqams, begins with a performer playing the Chäbiyat Mustäzat on the khushtar. The khushtar is an instrument recently created in Xinjiang, but widely claimed to have been traditional. It is a bowed instrument larger and thicker than a violin, with a more rounded outline. It is eighty centimeters in length with four strings and seven sympathetic strings. Like the ghejäk, it is played in a vertical position, resting on the knee. This instrument was introduced largely by the efforts of Säypidin Äziz who had a hand in its design as well. In conversation with me, Rahman Ghejäk at the Art College described the revival of the khushtar as a good replacement for the ghejäk since the latter had a vulgar sound due to its resonant membrane. His daughter was studying the khushtar. Shir Mämät pointed out that it was more of a redesign of the ghejäk, with the name changed from häshttar to khushtar by Säypidin Äziz. So the hashttâr that Mû`jiz mentioned as an instrument played by Qidir Khan has become a reality, but invented to fill a perceived need for a more violin-like instrument among the Uyghur instruments. The motivation for using a different name for this revived or redesigned four-stringed instrument seems to be that hashtâr in Persian means "eight strings" while khush means "happy, pleasant" in Uyghur.

The second act is concerned with the debates over how to organize the muqams--which verses to use and music to play--and the difficulties and opposition they meet with in doing this work, especially from Ishans and Sufis.

Reading Qidir Khan's response to Amannisa Khan's complaints about the political difficulties of performing the Muqams, we might begin to suspect that Säypidin Äziz is asking for support in reshaping culture so it is acceptable to the secular Chinese state. "The situation is tense and complex. We must be careful. The most important is increasing the Sultan's [Abduräshid] security. We must help the Sultan . . ." (41). The ironic implication is that in his attempts to support Uyghur culture, Säypidin is like Abduräshid Khan, while China's central government bureaucrats are like the Ishans and Sufis who oppose traditional popular music and entertainment on ideological grounds. I did not hear anyone analyze the play in these terms, but his extensive cultural work suggests that Säypidin sees himself as a defender of Uyghur culture and popularizer of its history, so the analogy is not unreasonable.

In Säypidin's view, and that of many other Uyghurs, the muqams had been under threat from official Islam, while under Communism they were threatened by leftist extremists who wanted to do away with feudal traditions. Säypidin felt that reform and reinterpretation would best preserve Uyghur tradition.

Qidir Khan and Amannisa Khan discuss a possible plot against Abduräshid, and when Ömär Sazändä comes in he explains that he was already trying to figure out what he could do to help Abduräshid five years earlier when they first met at the house of Amannisa. He had been worried about Abduräshid's Sufi practices and beliefs, and was trying to draw him away from their influence.

In the next scene they are working on the Nava Muqam, using a chorus and groups of musicians (49). The performance is thus organized exactly as the muqams are presently performed on stage.

The next act is one week later, and they are rehearsing Nava Muqam again. They sing a verse by Rashidi, and then Amannisa sings the song of praise for Abduräshid that is given in Mû`jiz's work as the first song she sings for him. Then they begin debating the texts they are using, substituting easier words for ones that are difficult to understand (56-57). Ömär Akhun and others told me that Säypidin supported editing the modern muqams to make them more comprehensible, and there are many such changes in the modern edited texts.

Abduräshid Khan begins announcing reforms to curb the excesses of the Khan's officials, through reducing taxes and the salaries of officials, putting an end to executions as punishments, and improving the army (61-63).

In the next two acts, the local political conflicts go on, but modern international cultural politics are also clearly being invoked. Qidir Khan explains to Amannisa Khan why editing the muqams is so important:

According to my interviews with Ömär Akhun and Qawul Akhun this is exactly what the muqam editors were saying a few years after this drama was published. Säypidin's portrayal of Amannisa Khan and Qidir Khan closely parallels the editorial activities of Säypidin and others, and argues for the priority of the Uyghur Muqams internationally. He justifies the quest for local poetry that fits this indigenous music, rather than letting it be diluted by foreign poetry.

Not only is Säypidin describing the concerns related to editing the muqams in the 1980s, but he also describes the performance of the muqams as they were reshaped in the 1980s. The final act consists of a full performance of the muqams using verses apparently created by Säypidin. It begins with a single performer singing the free-rhythm bashlinish introduction and then the subsequent songs are done by a chorus with an ensemble of musicians.

The act begins with Abduräshid Khan's victory over his enemies at court, and abandonment of his interest in Sufism. He describes what he has learned about friends in a poem he recites (105-6). Then they begin rehearsing the muqams. Ömär Sazändä performs the free-rhythm bashlinish to the Pänjigah Muqam Çoñ Näghmä. He sings a ghazal that refers to all the muqams by incorporating each one into the text.