Muslims from Central Asia remained enthusiastic travellers and passionate readers of travel accounts before and after the Russian conquest in the nineteenth century. Every year from early pre-modern times they visited the sacred sites of Islam in ‘noble Mecca and radiant Medina’ (the Ḥaramayn). Literate Muslim elites shared their hajj and ʿumra experience in letters, diaries, and pious travelogues known as ḥajjnāme, siyāḥatnāme, or riḥla. Numerous travelogues were printed by them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Arabic, Persian, and Turkic languages. Some of these narrative sources have been meticulously studied (Can 2020; Green 2015; 2013; Papas, Welsford and Zarcone 2012; etc.) and even translated into European languages (Chokri 2018; Ibrahim 2004; Marjani 2003). The abundance of traditional religious travelogue genres disappeared by the beginning of the 1930s when all the religious pilgrimages, which had been performed abroad and within Russia, were prohibited.
Hajj was resumed on the wave of relative liberalization of the Soviet policy toward Islam in 1944–1945 with a longer policy change in 1953–1991, but the traditional genre of ḥajjnāme disappeared already in the early Soviet times. Of course, Soviets ḥājjīs were less literate in terms of Islamic written tradition. Furthermore, during the Soviet era there were few pilgrimages and the number of pilgrims in a group never exceeded 21 (Akhmadullin 2016, 136–138, 182–189, 194–197, 201). Most of them never recorded their impressions. At the same time, the head of every pilgrim group was charged with submitting an official report (otchet) for ‘administrative use’ only. The State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) still keeps dozens of these documents (see Babakhanov 1963, 1–24; Babakhan 1945, 14–20). The Central Asian mufti Ziyauddin-khan Babakhanov, who composed numerous reports of this sort, was also a prolific author and published a book on contemporary Soviet Muslims (Babakhanov 1981). Sometimes writers, journalists and scientists (mostly medical doctors) took part in the pilgrimage. For instance, in 1974 the Tajik politician, journalist, scholar, and director of the academic Institute of Oriental studies Bobojan Gafurov visited Saudi Arabia and performed ʿumra (Akhmadullin 2014, 7). However, neither Gafurov nor the others published accounts of their hajj journey.
There is one intriguing exception to this rule. In April–May 1963 the young Tajik journalist Fazliddin Muhammadiev from Dushanbe made a journey with a group of Soviet pilgrims from Tajikistan to Moscow, then to Khartoum and Jedda, and eventually to Mecca and back. During the trip he kept a diary, which he turned into a novel under the title Dar on dunye (In the other world) and published it first in Tajik in 1965. Later it was translated into multiple languages, including Russian. It was the only hajj account (Borshchagovskiy 1976, 8) to be published in the Soviet Union. To date nobody has examined it as primary source of the late Soviet pilgrim’s experience, although many post-Soviet philologists referred to the novel in their studies of the Tajik language (Khomidova 2018; Grassi 2017; Murodov 2009; Bozorov 2002; Tursunov 1999 etc.). Recently, Moscow-based historian Viacheslav Akhmadullin used it to clarify some details about the still poorly-known factual history of Soviet Islamic policy (Akhmadullin 2016; 2020).
However, historians have overlooked the important cultural dimension of late Soviet religiosity as it was reflected in Dar on dunye. Using archival sources, contemporary responses, and memoir accounts, in this chapter I discuss the insights that a discourse analysis of the text provides with regard to hajj narratives in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.1 The research was guided by the following set of questions: How far does the novel reflect the writer’s personal experience of performing the hajj ritual? Is Muhammadiev’s fictional diary reliable enough to evaluate late Soviet religiosity as a whole? What written and oral evidence did the author base his account on? Did the novel contain any religious blasphemy? What role, in this respect, did translation play from Tajik into Russian and other languages? How did readers respond to the publication of the novel?
Figure 9.1
Bookcover of the 1970 Russian translation of Muhammadiev’s Travel to the Other World by Irfon Publishers in Dushande
photograph by the author1 The Author and His Journey
Fazliddin Muhammadiev was born in Samarkand in 1928 into a Tajik bookbinder’s family. In 1947 he started a career as news reporter with Tojikistoni surkh (‘Red Tajikistan’) in Stalinabad (today Dushanbe) before being sent to the Higher Komsomol School in Moscow, where he studied from 1949 to 1951. In the year of his graduation, Muhammadiev joined the Communist Party. After that he wrote for a number of Tajik periodicals, and he acted as executive secretary of Jovononi Tojikiston (‘Youth of Tajikistan’) (1951–1954), editor of Gazetai muallimon (‘Teachers’ Newspaper’) (1954), and section editor for a number of other publications, including Tojikiston Sovyeti (‘Soviet Tajikistan’) and the satirical journal Horpushtak (‘Hedgehog’) (1956–1957). He returned to Moscow at the end of the decade to attend advanced courses at the prestigious Gorky Literary Institute, graduating in 1962 (Muhammadiev 1978, 8rev, 11, 11rev, 12).
From then on, he seems to have primarily earned his living as a writer, although he continued to sit on various boards, including that of Tajik Film studio (1965–1966), the publisher Irfon (1967–1968), and the Tajik Soviet Encyclopedia (1969–1973) (Muhammadiev 2012, 158; Muhammadiev 1968b, 29). In March 1963, he reported an impressive income of 276 roubles 50 kopecks per month, while the average Soviet wage was then 85 roubles 40 kopecks (Akhmadullin 2016, 203; Vyezdnoe delo 1963, 20; cf. Alaev 2020; Panarin 2020). Muhammadiev was a member of the Soviet Union of Writers and had a short tenure as the secretary of the board in its Tajikistan branch, from 1978–1981 (Muhammadiev 1968b, 14). From that point on he appears to have focused exclusively on writing (Vyezdnoe delo 1963, 15), but five years later his life was cut short: Muhammadiev was stabbed in an altercation with street thugs in June 1986 and died on October 6 the same year.
By the time Muhammadiev took part in the hajj, he had been publishing fiction for a decade and had achieved some recognition in the Soviet Union (Niyazi 2020; Makarov 1965, 15; Tursunzade 1964, 1). His early pieces trended toward the satirical or didactic side, particularly contrasting ‘old’ and ‘new’ types of people; in this sense, he was working with familiar master narratives established in the Stalin era (see Clark 2000). It seems that Soviet authorities were hoping to gain more propaganda value from the 1963 hajj than they had from previous ones. From 1956, hajj delegations began to include party members and, increasingly, members of the intelligentsia: high school teachers, journalists, and writers, as well as doctors. Muhammadiev’s companions included the Bashkir journalist and writer Zulfar Khismatullin, who worked for the satirical and anti-religious journal Henek (‘Pitchforks’) in Ufa, two doctors, a lecturer from an agricultural college in Ufa, and a teacher and student from the Mir-i ʿArab madrasa in Bukhara. Of the eighteen pilgrims, four were members of the Communist Party, including Muhammadiev himself (Materialy o palomnichestve 1963, I:168, 185, III:60). At the time of the hajj, Muhammadiev was not known outside the USSR. Authors like Mirzo Tursunzade, a classic of Soviet Tajik fiction, were too well-known as Soviet officials and high-ranking communists to pass as pious Soviet pilgrims when applying for a Saudi visa.
2 Journey to the Other World
The hajj pilgrimage narrated by Muhammadiev is reflective of a more general openness of the USSR to the world under Khrushchev’s rule (Kalinovsky 2013, 192, 202–204). To bring into the socialist block Muslim-majority countries in the Third World from the middle of 1950s, the Soviet Union began to court foreign tourists, cultural delegations, and students—particularly from post-colonial ‘Third World’ nations. It also became possible for separate Soviet citizens to travel and even work abroad, although the majority of ordinary people including Muslim believers had no hope of seeing the world outside the socialist bloc. Soviet travellers were encouraged to write about their experiences, and their accounts referred to in Tajik as safarnāme were often published (Bozorov 2002, 66–96). In the 1950s two popular all-Union book series were created for this purpose. The ‘Geografizdat’ publishers in Moscow issued Puteshestviia. Priklucheniia. Fantastika (‘Travels. Adventures. Science Fiction’). The orientalist branch of the Moscow-based ‘Nauka’ publishers set up by Gafurov in 1959 initiated another series devoted to the ‘Countries and Peoples of the East’ (‘Strany i narody Vostoka’). Like the novel of Muhammadiev, one of its books was entitled ‘Reportage “From the Other world” ’ (Riffaud 1961). This was an account of a French female reporter who blamed the colonial regime in Algeria of crimes against humanity.
Real and fictional travelogues became the preferred genre for young, teenage Soviets. They allowed Soviet readers to feel like real travellers in the wider world, and they provided them with an awareness of world affairs and the USSR’s role on the right side of history. Very few Soviet readers could expect to ever visit North Africa and almost none had a chance of ever seeing the two Holy Cities (al-Ḥaramayn) in Saudi Arabia. As a rule, Soviet travelogues of the 1950s–1980s followed similar arcs: they described the suffering of the country under colonialism that the writer had visited and its struggle for freedom, supplementing facts from Soviet publications with some eyewitness accounts. Often, the author pointed to the new nation’s yearning for friendship with the Soviet Union and Moscow’s willingness to extend a helping hand. Sometimes the writers expressed their nostalgia for home. All these tropes are presented in Dar on dunye.
Following the conventions of the safarnāme (Baruzdin 1989, 365), the narrator of Muhammadiev’s novel—his alter ego Qurbon Majidov—sees much that is strange, even wild, but is convinced that Soviet propaganda is essentially correct and tries to assure the reader of this belief: life in post-colonial Sudan and Saudi Arabia is shaped by the realities of American neo-imperialism. At the same time, the novel is a satire of western propaganda about religious oppression in the USSR: its destruction of historical and cultural monuments, the religious elite (‘ulamā’), wife-sharing,2 poverty of everyday life, and the persecution of believers.
It is not accidental that Muhammadiev makes his alter ego in the novel a doctor: his profession hints at the author’s identity, class perspective, and nationality. ‘Ba gumoni shumo man kistam? Man dukhturi soveti hastam! Soveti, fahmided?’ (‘Whom do you take me for? I am a Soviet doctor! I am Soviet [emphasis added by the author, vb], really!’), confesses Qurbon at the beginning of the story (Muhammadiev 1965, no. 3: 47). According to the plot, he works in a hospital in the capital of Tajikistan, often visits Moscow, but like the majority of Soviet nationals he never travelled abroad. In the journey to the Other world, medicine embodies Soviet modernity for him. As a doctor, Majidov is particularly perturbed by the lack of hygiene, for example the hajj bans on cutting one’s fingernails or hair, on shaving, or on using soap or toothpaste during the pilgrimage—all highlighting the distance between modernity and what he considers anachronistic medieval fanaticism of religious injunctions. But he can also highlight how the USSR has helped its own citizens and humanity more broadly by training doctors, building modern comfortable hospitals, advancing medical science, and making its benefits widely available.
The narrative about the ‘foreign Orient’ as the ‘Other world’ (on dunye) is not central to the novel, but to a significant extent it determines the intended reading of the novel. Along these lines, the Soviet critic Alexander Borshchagovskiy compared Muhammadiev to the Georgian painter Niko Pirosmani (Borshchagovskiy 1976, 5), as an artist who does not like half-tones. The narrator constantly compares ‘our country, homeland’ with ‘foreign land[s]’ like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. This dichotomy reflects Cold War ideological orientations and their orientalist backdrop (Fort 2019, 44, 63–64, 198–199). Typical for classical colonial orientalism is the comparison of the Muslim East and the Christian West; here, however, the dichotomy is between the foreign Orient and Soviet Central Asia. The former is full of disease, pollution, dirt, poverty, and is under the heel of ‘shameless American imperialism’ (Muhammadiev 1970, 241). The latter is a country of industrial cities, science, doctors, hospitals, space exploration, Yuri Gagarin, and the dog-cosmonaut Layka, familiar even to the pious Muslims whom the narrator meets abroad (ibid., 16, 19, 44, 145, 261). When we hear about industrial sites being built in Sudan, Somalia, or Egypt, it is because these countries are receiving the fraternal assistance of the Soviet Union (ibid., 64).
The particularities of post-war Soviet orientalist approaches to the foreign Orient are most clearly presented in the narrator’s ruminations on seeing a crowd of pilgrims making the ritual circumambulation of the Kaʿba (ṭawāf), hurried along by soldiers wielding whips:
I couldn’t help thinking ‘Asia … Asia … Once you were the cradle of human culture. Wasn’t the first written language, pencil and paper, the first lines of poetry and the first architectural drawing a result of your sons’ mental efforts? Was not the first surgery scalpel, the first book about health a result of your children’s wisdom? Why did you give yourself over to evil spells and sorcery? Who needs your deep sleep, in which you’ve been for so many centuries? Truly, the time of sleep has passed into eternity. The light of a new day has shown upon half the world, and yet, land of mine, your children still come here in search of sleep, and asking for soporifics …’
Muhammadiev 1965, no. 4: 89
The title of the novel contains a pun that is lost in the Russian translation. In Tajik, dunyo can mean ‘World’ in a general sense. This word of Arabic origin entered the Persian and Tajik languages also in the sense of ‘wicked mortal life’ opposed to eternal celestial bliss in paradise known as akhirat. Believers who are able to resist its temptations will escape the tortures of hell and enter paradise (Tritton 1991, 626; Lane 1968, 922). Theoretically, every pilgrim should reject all the habits of mortal life when in the Ḥaramayn. The narrator claims that this obligation is impossible in the capitalist countries of the Third world visited by Soviet pilgrims. In Mecca he feels himself thrown from the twentieth century into the ‘hellish sufferings of the middle ages,’ which he associates with practices such as veiling, marrying off underage brides, the punishment of a hungry man who has stolen 10 rials worth of food by chopping off his hand, the presence of domestic slavery, and the spread of epidemiological diseases (Muhammadiev 1970, 91, 124, 131, 143–144, 180, 217, 234–235, 246, 255).
It is noteworthy that similar complaints appeared in the late nineteenth century in many hajj diaries written in Arabic, Turkish, Tatar, Persian, and Urdu.3 Although Muhammadiev could not read them, because he did not know these oriental languages (Muhammadiev 1978, 2; Vyezdnoe delo 1963, 15) and these writings were unavailable in libraries in Dushanbe, upon his return to the Soviet Union he probably compared his observations of Saudi Arabia with similar critical notes of Russian-speaking tsarist agents in the Hijaz, including Shakirzian Ishaev from Samarkand, Dmitry Sokolov, and Mikhail Nikolsky (cf. Nikolsky 1911, no. 4: 274–276; Sokolov 1902, 637–647; Ishaev 1896, no. 11: 21–24, 34).
It is unlikely, however, that Muhammadiev shared demands of some pre-Soviet ḥājjīs for religious reform (Green 2015, 208, 209). Rather, the narrator of Dar on dunye dreams of his Soviet homeland. The further the narrator gets away from the USSR the more he feels that he is interacting with a land and people stuck in the past. But these daydreams are not solely about the ‘big homeland’, the USSR, but also the narrator’s home republic, Tajikistan. The narrator imagines himself conversing with his good friend Iskandar, a fellow radiologist doctor and man of science, with whom he always finds an understanding. The squalid, petty life of Tajik émigrés in Mecca who fled from Central Asia during the collectivization is contrasted in his mind with great modern factories, mines, theatres, hospitals, schools, and institutes in his homeland, kolkhoz markets like that in Leninabad, and huge palaces of culture including the magnificent building constructed in the kolkhoz ‘Moscow’ (today Arbob Cultural Palace in Hujand) (Muhammadiev 1970, 37–38, 134). He thinks about the meaning and importance of Soviet patriotism:
What man in his right mind would renounce his homeland?! If you have no more homeland, what do you have left?! As one folk song says, ‘He who has lost his homeland is a slave in a foreign land!’
Muhammadiev 1970, 41, 139
3 A Guide to the Holy Cities of Islam
While many of the above tropes are common to other Soviet travel writings about the post-colonial ‘Third World’, Muhammadiev’s novel is unique in its description of the rites of the great pilgrimage (ḥajj akbar) and the ironic commentaries made about the stories behind these rites from the hagiographic lives of the prophets (qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ). These two elements represent the most important interlocking narratives of Dar on dunye and together comprise the greater part of the novel. The narrator devotes most of his attention to the road from Jedda to Mecca, Medina, al-Ṭāʾif, and back, starting from the journey of the Soviet pilgrims into the state of iḥrām before their departure from Khartoum (ch. 6). If it were not for the ironic commentary that accompanies Muhammadiev’s descriptions of the hajj stages (manzils), the novel could be read as the kind of devout ḥajjnāme popular among pilgrims from Central Asia and the Volga-Ural region up to the beginning of the twentieth century.4 But writings of Muhammadiev’s pre-Soviet predecessors focus primarily on the believer’s thoughts and impressions on the way to the Ḥaramayn and back as illustrated by the diary of the famous Tatar scholar Shihab al-Din Marjani (1818–1889), who performed his hajj in 1880. In the centre of Marjani’s work are the books he read during the journey, different rituals among pilgrims he encountered on the way to Mecca and back, as well as accounts of his discussions with Arab and Ottoman scholars (Marjani 2003, 185–186, 190–194; cf. Can 2020, 37).
Muhammadiev, by contrast, concentrates on providing substantial details on the ṭawāf (ch. 10, 11, 16), the ritual running (saʿy) between the hills of al-Ṣafa and al-Marwa (ch. 10–11), the standing at the foot of mount ʿArafa, or wuqūf (ch. 12), the stoning of Satan with pebbles from Minā (ch. 13–14), the sacrifice (ch. 14), and the exit from iḥrām (ch. 14–15). He lists all of the prohibitions affecting pilgrims who have donned the iḥrām (Muhammadiev 1970, 75–76), discusses the norms of behaviour for pilgrims while on the territory of the Ḥaramayn in Saudi Arabia, and writes out in Cyrillic the entire talbiya prayer, also providing a Russian translation. Muhammadiev also describes the exterior of the Kaʿba, the Grand Mosque, the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, the valley of ʿArafa, the pillars of Satan, the opulent beauty of the summer residences of the Saudi elite in al-Ṭāʾif, and other important sites on the path of the pilgrims. In this respect his narrative is closer to that of Russian travellers and imperial officials in the Hijaz (Nikolsky 1911, no. 4: 256–292, no. 5: 603–638; Sokolov 1902, 616–649; Ishaev 1896, no. 11: 60–81, no. 12: 43–83). If authors of pre-Soviet hajj accounts happened to write about these duties, rites, and stages of the hajj, which would have been known to all practicing Muslim believers, they often asked readers to excuse them for their trivial descriptions (Chokri 2018, 63–64).
In this respect, it is interesting to take a closer look at the lexicon Muhammadiev refers to when recording his own hajj experience. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marjani and other pilgrims introduced in their travel notes a new European vocabulary for steamships and trains: distances are measured mostly in kilomitars; stages, or manzils, of yore, are mentioned only in the Ḥaramayn. They use neologisms for rail transportation and sea travel, including new words for train (rel-ghari), station (estashan), train compartments (kabin), the railway itself (rah-e ahan), aghbut (literally ‘fire ship’), and kishti-ye bukhar (a calque for ‘steamship’) (Marjani 2003, 184–189, 192; see also Green 2015, 224–226; Metcalf 1990, 85–86). Contrary to these prior hajj accounts, Muhammadiev’s novel is saturated with old-fashioned oriental loan-words and phrases. There are numerous oriental terms of Arabic origin in it—in both the Tajik original and especially in the Russian translation. Some pages contain long lists of such words and even whole Muslim prayers and pious formulations of the hajj rites in Arabic are recorded in Cyrillic. Here is a characteristic passage of such linguistic usage that appears at the very beginning of the novel:
Traveling inside the IL-18 [aircraft, vb], we are going on the hajj. There is eighteen of us. Seventeen are clerics—mullahs, imams, mudarrises, khaṭībs, mutawallīs and others. I am the eighteenth member of the group, your humble servant, doctor therapist, as the saying goes, ‘a victim (shahīd) of the science among the dead men.’
Every year on the Qurban Bayram festival (sacrificial feast) a group of Muslims visits (ziyorat-i/ziyāra) Mecca and Medina in order to redress their sins and get thawāb (religious merit) in the Prophet’s homeland. Pilgrims are usually accompanied by a doctor who takes care of their health, but this time, like a roofer who repairs others’ roofs but whose own roof is leaking. The physician fell ill, and I was privileged to accompany our prominent Muslims to the land of the Prophet for him.
Muhammadiev 1965, no. 3: 43
Considering that few Soviet Muslims had been on the hajj or ʿumra since the late 1920s, and that religious education was heavily circumscribed from the 1930s, Muhammadiev’s account provided a unique source of information for readers interested in rites of Islamic pilgrimage. The usage of numerous words of Arabic origin in Cyrillic letters most likely attracted Muslim readers to his novel. In the 1960s being unable to go abroad, some pious Muslims relegated the performance of hajj to rare Soviet pilgrims who had already been to Mecca, according to the tradition of ḥajj-badal (Babakhanov 1963, 24). Even more people wished to feel for themselves the real ḥājjīs and to use their imagination to pass through all the stages of the great pilgrimage. At the same time, Muhammadiev ‘orientalized’ his record of the hajj. Laymen among his readers surely encountered difficulties when reading the Arabic terms. Those who did not belong to the limited, specialized audience of practicing Muslim clergy and academic experts in Islam would have required the glossary that was attached in some Russian editions of the book. Most of the Oriental words, names, and expressions in the 1970 Russian edition were footnoted. Their total number exceeds 165! Almost every page is accompanied by one or more footnotes.
4 Satire of the Clergy or Religious Blasphemy?
Muhammadiev draws a distinct line between Qurbon Majidov and the other pilgrims. The first and the last chapters of the novel are even called ‘17 + 1’ and ‘1 + 17’ (Muhammadiev 1965, no. 3: 43, no. 6: 65). It is by accident that Qurbon went on the pilgrimage, so he is more an observer (and comments sarcastically) than a participant. Muslim pilgrims are portrayed in a caustic, orientalist manner. They are all older clergymen (sviaschennosluzhiteli) preoccupied with religious precepts. They speak Arabic a bit but do not know Russian fluently, shave their heads, have beards, and wear turbans and dressing gowns (chalmy i khalaty). Their clothes, habits, and views date back to pre-Soviet colonial Central Asia but look anachronistic in the twentieth century (Mukhammadiev 1970, 9, 14, 20). The narrator blames them for exploiting religious superstition of ignorant believers and for being ignorant themselves. According to his pessimist conclusion, ‘people also need servants of religion, alas, not for today and tomorrow’s urgent matters but for the respect for relics of the past’ (Muhammadiev 1965, no. 4: 71).
Much of the orientalist, anti-religious narrative of the novel belongs to Muhammadiev personally and to the milieu in which his early career as a writer took shape, including his work as editor of the satirical journal Horpushtak (‘Hedgehog’) in Dushanbe from 1956–1957. During the Thaw years, in 1955–1964, journalists were encouraged to probe the failings of Soviet institutions, as long as they did not challenge the Soviet order as such. This meant satirizing both the ‘internal’ opponents, such as bureaucrats, as well as alleged slackers (tuneiadtsy), sectarians, religious bigots, and others. These satirical tools are used against the pilgrims in the novel who are ‘far from being exemplary Soviet people’ (Mukhammadiev 1970, 40, 140). For example, there is Mullah Urok-aka, always smoking other people’s cigarettes, and the pompous and round-bellied Mahsum Abdirazikdzhan-aka. Out of the seventeen pilgrims, only twelve are mentioned by name, and even fewer receive something like an individual portrait. The rest appear as wordless and comic fat old men in turbans, something underlined in the illustrations by the Soviet Jewish artist Sergei Vishnepolsky, which accompanied the most popular Russian edition (ibid., 2, 6–7, 13, 16, 20–21, 82–83, 92, 95, 102–103, 166, 177, 185, 199). As already noted, not everyone is subject to the same level of satire: Qori-aka and Isrofil both get a sympathetic portrait, but the upshot is that in both cases the narrator laments that these smart and talented individuals did not do something more useful with their lives.
The narrator laughs at the dogmatism and superstition he finds among believers. In Khartoum, Allanazar-qori confuses Fahrenheit and Celsius and tries to convince the others that the temperature had reached 102 degrees—that is, above the boiling point (ibid., 52–53).
Qurbon is similarly perturbed that his companions seem to believe that turnips originated from black rocks:
all these pundits never doubted that turnips came into being from miracles performed by Goody Fatima; that rice came from a tooth of the Prophet which fell out; that wheat had been brought to earth from the seventh heaven by hazrat Adam; that mice came out of the nostril of a pig, and the cat from the mouth a tiger, when the latter happened to sneeze while on hazrat Noah’s Ark …
ibid., 141–142
Even the educated Qori-aka believes that birds avoid flying over the Kaʿba and therefore respect the Almighty Allah, even as the pilgrims see birds flying directly over it (ibid., 126–127). The superstitions of his companions mystify the narrator and cause him discomfort; their behaviour belongs to the ‘Other’ world, which belongs to the past but has somehow made its way into the present.
Friends and colleagues who knew him personally insisted that Muhammadiev did not attack religion, but only superstition and bigotry (Niyazi 2020; Kuhzod 2009, 7; Tursunov 1999, 86; Baruzdin 1989, 365). Of course, this was also the official Soviet position towards religion. Nevertheless, Muhammadiev’s descriptions and commentary of episodes from the lives of the prophets and Muhammed’s companions suggest a satire that goes to the very foundations of the faith. This includes his description of the Prophet Ibrahim, who in the Islamic tradition has (re-)built the Kaʿba (Muhammadiev 1970, 108–109, 169–171), and Muhammad himself, who made it the main holy site of Islam (ibid., 55, 114–115, 225–226, 230). Retelling in a sarcastic manner some controversial episodes from the Prophet’s biography mentioned in the sīra (biography of the Prophet Muhammad) and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ (tales of the prophets) by the Khwarazmi poet Naṣr al-Dīn Rabghūzī (1309–1310), Muhammadiev presents the Prophets Ibrāhīm and Muhammad as old and lustful men, and the latter also as a cuckold. He does not spare ʿĀʾisha, the Prophet’s favourite wife, accusing her of having an affair (ibid., 226–228); he even pokes fun at the angel Jibrīl for helping the prophets (ibid., 84–85, 203–204). He explains the tradition of donning iḥrām as a primitive pagan ritual (ibid., 76), and he states repeatedly that the water from the Zamzam source is polluted (ibid., 106–107, 111).
It is noteworthy that the blasphemous connotation of the Journey to the Other world was accentuated in the Russian translation by Iurii Smirnov. The styles of the Tajik original as well as the early Uzbek version that appeared in Tashkent in 1968 were different from the other translations that addressed mostly non-Muslim readers. Despite all the late Stalinist attacks against Iranian and Arabic terms and other national minority languages in the 1930s, there was no distinction between sacred and secular vocabulary in literary Tajik and Uzbek languages in the 1960s. Many abstract notions, even those expressing the Soviet realities and ideas, were borrowed from Iranian and Arabic. Correspondingly, any blasphemous play on religious words was less sensitive for pious Muslim readers of the Tajik (and Uzbek) versions of the novel. As the Tajik hajj lexicon retained mostly authentic Islamic terms of Arabic origin, readers of the novel from Central Asia would not be offended by ambiguous jokes and word play based on the Orthodox Christian synonyms used in the Russian translation.
The novel’s offensive connotations towards believers may have been strengthened by anonymous, atheistically-minded experts in Islamic and religious studies from different centres in Dushanbe, Tashkent, and Moscow, who seemed to consult Muhammadiev when they worked together to edit the Russian translation of the book. Sources do not mention their names. However, the style of footnotes and spelling of Oriental terms in the 1970 Russian edition (Mukhammadiev 1970, 5, 10, 12, 48, 55, 74, 105, 114, 125, 137, 167, 170), some misprints which occurred in it (ibid., 14, 87, 98, 213, 222), as well as memories of Muhammadiev’s close friends (Niyazi 2020; cf. Kemper 2009, 93–133) allow us to suggest that Muhammadiev edited the manuscript in Moscow with the help of Lucian Klimovich, who chaired the department of Literary Translation at the Gorky Literature Institute and specialized in atheistic criticism of Islam, as well as other academic Orientalists, including specialists in Iranian and Arabic studies from the academic Institute of Asia’s Peoples (Prozorov 2020). Its director Gafurov, whom Muhammadiev mentioned in passing in the novel (Muhammadiev 1970, 134), might have asked them to help the writer.
In the most popular edition, which was published in 1970 and was issued in 100,000 copies, the effect of the Russian translation (that appears to be a collaboration with Muhammadiev himself doing a word-for-word translation and Smirnov then making the text more literary) was emphasized by the cartoons of Vishnepolsky. Through them readers saw vivid street scenes and caricature portraits: Mullah Urok-aka smoking the narrator’s cigarettes; Mahsum ‘the Chewer’ contemplating his white American underpants; a group of old clergymen staring at the water-skiing Sudanese girl in a skimpy swimsuit; the mob of sweaty angry pilgrims in iḥrām clothes circumambulating the Kaʿba; four veiled wives following their salafi husband in a single-file line; the narrator’s bare heels sticking out of a pilgrims’ tent on the slope of ʿArafa; a half-naked pilgrim clothed in iḥrām drinking Coca-Cola; another skinny pilgrim riding on his sacrificial sheep over the bridge Ṣīrāṭ in the Afterlife; a pilgrim-mullah carrying a bunch of illegally imported goods; two pilgrims beating each other in the valley of Minā; the emigrant Sufi master Ishan Ahmad seducing an old man’s wife; the American guy placing his legs on the table, cowboy style, and many other genre pictures (Muhammadiev 1970, 12, 50, 69, 81–82, 198–199, 131, 136, 164, 167, 178, 180, 238). The cartoonist readily mocks different people but avoids picturing heroes and events of Islamic sacred history. Not one of his 49 cartoons contains any apparent anti-religious references.
5 Audiences and Responses
We do not know how the general public responded to the novel when it first appeared in Sadoi sharq in 1965. Sources are silent on this matter. Ironically, the only known vocal opponent of the novel was Sharif Kaiumovich Shirinbaev (1908–1982), the head of the Council for Religious Affairs for the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, a Committee for State Security colonel and party member, and, like Muhammadiev, originally from Samarkand. In the summer of 1966, he intervened to stop the first Russian edition from appearing in Zvezda vostoka, a Russian-language literary journal published in Tashkent. Shirinbaev then wrote to Vladimir Kuroedov, the head of the all-Soviet Council of Religious Affairs, asking him to stop further editions of the novel (Shirinbaev 1966, 195). According to a close friend of Muhammadiev, the author then appealed to Ziyauddin-khan Babakhanov, the head of SADUM (Ecclesiastical Board of Central Asia and Kazakhstan Muslims), and with the latter’s support he had the novel published as a book in Tajik in 1966 and in the spring of 1967 in Russian in Zvezda vostoka (Kuhzod 2009, 7).
Shirinbaev had a number of complaints about the novel. He accused the writer of revealing a state secret by publishing extracts from instructions to Soviet pilgrims and other documents for ‘administrative use’ only (Shirinbaev 1966, 199; cf. Perechen’ svedenii 1976, 89–90, 95, 98). But most of Shirinbaev’s criticism concerned the novel’s treatment of Islamic rituals. According to Shirinbaev, the novel’s militant atheism was too outdated and would not help anti-religious activists within the USSR. Abroad, it could actually be used for anti-Soviet propaganda, since it suggested that the USSR sent atheists on the hajj, something that would make future pilgrimages more difficult (Shirinbaev 1966, 199, 198). Shirinbaev then cited a number of passages which he found particularly insulting to believers, including the narrator’s behaviour (which clearly violated hajj norms) and attitude towards Islamic dogma: the idea of heaven and hell, Judgement day, his disrespectful descriptions of the hajj, his drinking of cognac on the way to Mecca, and so on (ibid., 196–198; cf. Muhammadiev 1970, 24, 36–37, 102–103, 106–107).
Muhammadiev prevailed in his conflict with Shirinbaev, but was forced by Glavlit censors to accept some cuts and changes in most editions both in 1966–1969 and again in the 1973 edition. In all I found 35 changes, all of them relatively minor. These included jokes about the Saudi flag (ibid., 130), removed presumably to avoid offending Riyadh. They also concerned the comments about instructions to pilgrims, the description of customs procedures in Moscow, the comment that pilgrims were instructed to move around as a group while they were abroad (ibid., 11, 13–14, 22, 178), as well as an allusion to Stalin’s ‘personality cult’ (ibid., 45). The remaining deletions were mostly those requested by Shirinbaev, such as removing the mockery of Soviet mullahs and references to their habit of picking their noses in public (ibid., 40, 58–59, 193), depictions of behaviour unbecoming of Soviet citizens, as well as certain observations of the hajj itself, including the Saudi soldiers whipping pilgrims during ṭawāf, the Zamzam well as a source of infection (ibid., 103, 106–107, 111), the illnesses of Soviet pilgrims at ʿArafa (ibid., 153), and unhygienic conditions in Minā after the end of Qurban-Bayram (ibid., 184). Otherwise, the novel maintained its structure, style, and most of the episodes and meditations of the narrator.
The first full Russian translation under the extended title Journey to the Other world: Tale of the Great Hajj appeared in Druzhba narodov in 1967 (Muhammadiev 1967). The journal, published by the USSR Union of Writers, showcased work from writers across the USSR, along with criticism and debates about Soviet literature. In 1966 Sergei Baruzdin, as a new editor, decided that rather than publishing what was best for each republic, Druzhba narodov would try to select the best pieces for the whole Soviet Union. Whatever the literary merits of Muhammadiev’s work, an account of the hajj would have been a first for readers of the journal. If Soviet authorities hoped to use the novel as a demonstration of Soviet respect for religion, Druzhba narodov was the natural place to introduce the novel to the wider reading public.
From that point on the novel went through a number of editions, throughout the USSR and eventually abroad. The Journey to the Other world became a Soviet best seller. In 1966 the Dushanbe publisher Irfon released the novel in book form with additional printings in 1968, 1980, and 1989. In 1968 the Uzbek translation was released in Tashkent (Muhammadiev 1968a) in 15,000 copies. The Russian version served as the source of further translations into Armenian, Ukrainian, Estonian and Latvian (1982), Turkmen (1992), Hungarian (1978), Czech (1979), German, Romanian and Bulgarian (1980), and even Arabic. All in all, the book saw 32 editions with a total print run of over 1 million copies.
Muhammadiev’s recognition as a classic of contemporary fiction began in Tajikistan after his premature death. From the mid-1980s his novels and short stories became the subject of numerous literary reviews and dissertations. Some Russian literary sources have suggested that Muhammadiev was killed because he refused the title of ‘ḥājjī’ after returning from the trip (Borshchagovskiy 1986). There does not seem to be any support for this claim, and it is especially unlikely considering that he was stabbed by drug addicted youths more than twenty years after the novel was first published. However, it should be noted that the article appeared just as Mikhail Gorbachev was promoting an anti-corruption drive and replacing elites around the USSR. More generally, the central Soviet press began publishing sensationalist articles on corruption, child labor, and other issues in Central Asia. At the moment, it is more likely that the reception of Dar on dunye by Soviet Muslims was more favourable than is usually thought of.
6 Conclusion
The novel under study is a complex and hybrid text in which diverse genres and narratives are intertwined. First, it can be read as a travel account of the fictional narrator, doctor Qurbon Majidov. He compares what he sees in the ‘Other world’ to realities at home. This procedure closely resembles late Soviet travel accounts that became popular in the post-war decades and were referred to in Tajik as safarnāme (Grassi 2017). The second narrative is a guidebook through which the author presents a description of the hajj ritual; it is as much an eyewitness description as an information bulletin explaining the meanings of the various rites. Here the author imitates, completes, and criticizes the genre of traditional pre-Soviet ḥajjnāme. The third narrative contains an ironic retelling of and sometimes even blasphemous commentary on the pious stories of Ibrāhīm, Muhammad, and some other prophets from Islamic sacred history, styled after modern European and Soviet atheist writings.
Dar on dunye shows well the outcome of the gradual transformation of the traditional travelogue genre of ḥajjnāme into a secularist sort of late Soviet version of the safarnāme. Fazliddin Muhammadiev did not follow basic conventions of his Muslim predecessors but rather parodied their pious hajj accounts. The plot of his novel is built on his own personal experience and a very individual reading of the pilgrimage rites. But, at the same time, within the text one can distinguish multiple factual and fictional sources, along with multiple written and oral sources, of different historical periods and cultural backgrounds. The novelist presented to readers competing narratives about the hajj he recorded from high-ranking officials of regional Muslim directorates, state bureaucrats, ordinary believers, and even academic scholars and literary translators.
Despite its fictional character Dar on dunye sheds light on the ambiguous development of the late Islamic discourse in relation to the Soviet Islamic policy in the Cold War period. On the one hand, the Soviet Union maintained its commitment to atheism and restricted freedom of worship. On the other hand, it proclaimed the right to religious freedom and touted this commitment in relations with the outside world. This became particularly important for the USSR in the late 1950s, when it began to support post-colonial states and liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, including Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, Egypt, and Syria. In this respect, pilgrims going to Mecca every year after the death of Stalin were also cultural intermediaries (Kirasirova 2011, 107–109) and agents in Soviet public diplomacy, particularly if they were Central Asians visiting countries where the USSR was trying to establish a foothold.
The domestic Islam policy of the Soviet state was still based on a hypothetic assessment that religion was practiced only by elderly believers. The persistence of belief and ritual was explained as a ‘survival of the past’. We should not assume that Soviet readers would have focused on the anti-religious aspects of the novel. Denunciations of religion had largely become a routinized discourse by the 1960s. Almost nobody took it seriously. What would have been completely new to Soviet readers, whether Muslim or not, were the descriptions of the hajj rites, which, for all of the author’s satire, are also highly detailed. The author’s direct, journalistic style, which he uses to try to show the ‘true’ nature of the capitalist world and religion, also makes it possible for a Soviet reader to imagine what it would be like to go on such a journey, although only a handful of them would ever have such an opportunity.
The first draft version of the chapter was written when the author worked at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Amsterdam. For feedback on earlier drafts and comments offered in conversation or in writing, I am grateful to editors of this volume as well as to Sergei Abashin, Vyacheslav Asadullin, Artemy Kalinovsky, Michael Kemper, Alexander Knysh, Shawkat and Aziz Niyazi, and Nikolay Ssorin-Chaykov.
‘Wife sharing’ was a Western stereotype of the Cold War period, suggesting that communists in the USSR shared their wives.
As the Indian pilgrim Sikandar Begum commented as early as 1864, ‘the city of Mecca is wild and melancholy looking and (…) has a dreary, repulsive aspect’; its air was bad owing to ‘the stupidity and carelessness of the inhabitants, who allow accumulations of dirt to taint and vitiate it’; and ‘the majority of the people are miserly, violent-tempered, hardhearted and covetous’ (Sikandar Begum 2007, 129, 131, 132). The Tatar pilgrim ʿAbd al-Rashid Ibrahim, who approached Mecca from Tara in Siberia through Singapore and Bombay in 1909, was stricken by the bad administration of the city. He noted that too many pilgrims were admitted for its size; its officials could not cope; there were no toilets for the many thousands of pilgrims; and everywhere its streets and public places were filled with excrement (Ibrahim 2004, 238–243).
In the Russian North Caucasus, this genre did not circulate widely.
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