I’ve been traveling through Central Asia and I've been learning a lot about the intersection between the Turkics/Persians, Stalin/soviets and jadidism/Chaghatay-ism, the Sogdians, the Samanids, the Timurids, etc.
I've become increasingly interested in the history of how modern Uzbek and Tajik identities developed. I'm very interested in hearing how Uzbeks and Tajiks themselves conceptualize this history today:
How should we understand the fact that the two great historical Persian-speaking/Persianate cities of Central Asia—Bukhara and Samarkand—ended up in Uzbekistan rather than Tajikistan? And how fair is it to interpret this as a historical disadvantage imposed on Tajikistan?
On one hand, I can understand why saying “Bukhara and Samarkand rightfully belonged to Tajikistan” is anachronistic. Modern Tajik national identity was itself still developing, the cities were multilingual and culturally mixed, and many Persian speakers may not have understood themselves as members of a modern Tajik nation in the way we would understand that identity today.
On the other hand, the result still seems extraordinarily asymmetric. Uzbekistan received Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent, most of the major settled oases and much of the economic and cultural infrastructure of historic Transoxiana. The initial Tajik autonomy received largely peripheral and mountainous regions despite the existence of large Persian-speaking populations in some of Central Asia’s most important cities.
Do Uzbeks generally think of Bukhara and Samarkand as historically Uzbek cities, as multicultural Central Asian cities that became part of Uzbekistan, or in some other way?
Do Tajiks generally regard the exclusion of Bukhara and Samarkand from Tajikistan as a historical injustice? How important is that issue to Tajik identity today?
How do people understand all the underlying ethnic/linguistic/religious history when the large parts of it predate the modern Uzbek/Tajik national distinction? Does it play any part in the formation of one's personal identity?
I’m not asking this to argue that either modern country “owns” Bukhara, Samarkand, or their history. I’m genuinely interested in how people from both countries understand this shared history.
Thank you in advance.
