n March 10, 1970, when Kurboon Idliev was 23 years old, Soviet helicopters landed in the remote Yaghnob Valley in northwest Tajikistan and forcibly removed every person from their house. “They transferred us to the lower flatlands to work on cotton plantations. Those who resisted were killed,” he recalls now. It would be 47 years before he returned to the valley again.
Officially, the Soviet government claimed that the Yaghnobi kishlaks—the local term for rural hamlets typically consisting of three to ten families each—were unsafe due to the threat of avalanches. A more likely motivation was the growing need for manpower in the cotton fields and the forced assimilation of isolated minority groups into the Soviet cultural system. Whatever the reason, Yaghnobis were legally denied access to their homes for more than two decades. [...]
In the 4th century, Alexander the Great defeated the Achaemenids and invaded Sogdiana, taking the Sogdian princess Roxana as his bride. From the Greek invasion until the 8th-cenutry Arab conquest, Sogdiana was passed from empire to empire, a remote province of the Greco-Bactrian, Kushan, and Sasanian empires. With the arrival of Islam, the Sogdians, refusing to relinquish their Zoroastrian faith, fled to the Yaghnob Valley. Though today Yognabis are mostly Muslim, they still preserve certain traditions from their Zoroastrian past, including their unique language; the celebration of Navruz, the feast of spring; and a clutch of ancient superstitions, including prohibitions against blowing out a candle and shaking water off your hands after washing. [...]
Since independence, the Tajik government has promoted national awareness of the country’s Sogdian heritage as an essential component of their national identity. As Tajik people develop a sense of nationhood, they have, for the most part, associated themselves with the Samanid Empire, the first Tajik-ruled state, which flourished in the 9th and 10th centuries and supported the revival of the Persian language. The Yaghnobi people, with their language and culture rooted in the distant Sogdian (i.e. ancient Persian) past, have become an important symbol of that heritage.
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