This book is a much revised version of a PhD dissertation. The author tackles the task of describing and analyzing the social and intellectual world of Central Asia, in particular Bukhara, during the long nineteenth century. This long century is practically coterminous with the rule of the Manghit dynasty (1753–1920); it lasts from the reestablishment of autochthonous rule following the Iranian intermezzo (Nadir Shah's conquest of Transoxiana and Khwarazm in the 1740s) to the end of autocratic rule after the October Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic.
The polymaths quoted in the title are Islamic scholars: ulema, graduates, alumni, and teachers of the famous Bukharan madrassas. Pickett not only considers them scholars, legal experts, qadis, or muftis, but also mystics, poets, healers, experts in occult sciences, astronomers, and astrologers, hence the term “polymath” in the book's title. The world of these polymaths was undoubtedly the Persianate (Sunni) sphere, covering—in the nineteenth century—still much of the eastern Islamic world, in particular Central Asia and what is today Afghanistan, parts of the Indian subcontinent, and reaching out into the Turkic-speaking world, the steppes of Eurasia, Tatarstan, southern Siberia, and Xinjiang. These regions formed the catchment area of the Bukharan educational system, with Bukhara and wider Transoxiana at the center, followed by the mountainous regions that today belong to Tajikistan and the northern rim of the Hindu Kush. All other regions had a more marginal position in this world. Pickett shows that these areas were indeed home for the majority of students of the Bukharan madrassas. Students from Shiʿi Iran were not on the archival record examined in this study.
Polymaths of Islam meticulously analyzes prosopographical sources and biographical dictionaries that record the lives and deeds of scholars (mostly jurists), poets, and others. Together with narrative and archival sources (e.g., foundation deeds), these materials provide us with a much more detailed picture of the Bukharan madrassas than what has previously emerged. In light of Pickett's historicization of Bukhara, the image we have today of the city as an ancient center of Islamic learning, going back perhaps even to the earliest centuries of Islam, has to be revised: Bukhara the Noble, or Bukhara-yi sharif, owes its fame as an educational center to the vast and continuous building and founding activities under the Manghits, and we can even suppose that there was a good deal of active promotion going on. Bukhara competed not with neighboring centers (such as Samarqand and Herat), but with the great capitals of the Persianate world. Bukhara faded only where Lahore and Delhi made their influence felt. On the other hand, Bukhara did not radiate into Shiʿi Iran even if the religious boundary was not as tight as is frequently assumed. In any case, at the end of the nineteenth century there were as many madrassas in Bukhara as in Istanbul, and they were rather busy.
Pickett does not analyze his polymaths of Islam in a social vacuum. They are one of several groups of notables, the other important group being the Turkic emirs who held political and military power, and monopolized a majority of influential positions in the Manghit state. Whereas scions of Turkic noble families could and sometimes did attend madrassas to a degree that made them part of the scholarly elite, this was impossible the other way round: no amount of teaching could allow a man not born into a relevant family access to certain offices and positions. Descent, and not learning, was the decisive factor here. Both groups of notables—the Islamic scholars and the Turkic emirs—depended on each other, however, to a degree that came close to symbiosis. Other important social groups, such as merchants and nobles engaged in long-distance trade, simply do not show up because there are no sources about them. No one ever had the idea to compile a biographical dictionary of the great traders of Bukhara. This also is true for many other parts and periods of the Muslim world: landowners, traders, and others appear in the prosopographical literature only insofar as they won recognition as scholars, poets, or doctors.
The historical sources also allow a glimpse into the inner workings of the Bukharan madrassas, their curricula and syllabi. Pickett distinguishes a core curriculum comprised of Arabic—most of the works studied are in that language—logic, rhetoric, speculative theology, and philosophy. The rest, in particular substantive law, was taught in the selective courses, much of it in later years of education. The result is surprising, perhaps even for the author: “The curriculum aimed at cultivating intellectuals who were capable of grasping the underlying principles of their subject matter” (p. 111). This is very much in contrast to what previously was assumed: learning in late madrassas was learning by rote, deadly for the spirit, narrow in outlook, killing initiative and inspiration, and certainly not a path to using one's own critical thinking. Moreover, it was hardly efficient on top of all that, with ignoramuses graduating in large numbers. Bukharan madrassas, until now, were judged along the lines established by the modernizers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Central Asia, the so-called Jadids (the “New or Young Ones,” the name is derived from the new methods in learning they set out to establish), in particular perhaps Sadriddin ʿAyni, the famous Tajik litterateur (1878–1954). Their judgment of Bukharan madrassas was pungent, and they frequently covered their former colleagues with acrimonious scorn and mockery. This view of the Bukharan madrassas and their graduates and teachers survived into the Soviet period: no wonder, then, that the Bukharan madrassas were depicted as supposed dens of superstition, made to instill ignorance and prevent the intellectual awakening of the toiling masses.
Research on Central Asian intellectual and educational history has concentrated very much on the Jadids, with much less space allotted to the “old” ones, or the Qadims: if there is something new, by necessity there must be something old, and if there is a Jadid movement, it follows that all the others were partisans of the old system. These people of course were the vast majority of Bukharan madrassa graduates until 1920. Serious attempts to deal with their intellectual production were made only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Pickett's work is not the first, but one of the best documented books on them, and he shows a richness and complexity of intellectual activities that were a revelation to this reviewer. Pickett achieves this in particular because of his broad scope of sources. In addition to the prosopographical literature, chronicles, and archival material (in Uzbek, Persian, and Russian), he has used a hitherto practically unknown type of manuscript source, the so-called jung. Jung books are notebooks, mostly kept by men working in the judiciary for their own use. There are quite a lot of these notebooks; in Tashkent (in the holdings of the Beruni Institute for Oriental Studies) there are about fifty of them, and smaller collections are kept in Dushanbe and Saint Petersburg. To the best of my knowledge, Pickett is the first researcher to have made use of this type of source material for studies of social history.
Overall, the jung notebooks reflect the multifarious activities of their writers: they have a lot of legal material, in particular copies and drafts for legal statements (fatwas), but also other legal documents, together with, for some manuscripts, a large number of original papers with their seals. Besides this scholastic and legal material, they include poetry, mystical treatises, correspondence, texts on occult sciences, recipes for medicine, and guides to drawing up talismans and other magical agents. They also contain some economical information: lists of how much a qadi would earn in a given place, notes on debts, the lending of books and money, and so forth. Thus, they reflect exactly what Pickett has set out to show: that the qadis and muftis in late nineteenth-century Bukhara were more than just legal scholars; they were indeed polymaths. The merit of this book lies primarily in the profound reevaluation of the Bukharan madrassas and their graduates.
