Ahmad Yasavi and the Dog-Men:
Narratives of Hero and Saint at the Frontier of Orality and Textuality
ABSTRACT
Devin DeWeese (Indiana University)
A recurrent story within the relatively small narrative corpus focused on the figure of Khoja Ahmad Yasavi recounts this Central Asian Sufi shaykh's conflict with a particular community that dwelled near him. The causes for the conflict between Yasavi and this community are almost never explained in any detail, but the gist of the conflict itself is recounted in three ways: in some versions, the focus is on the murder of Yasavi's son by this community; in others, it is the false accusation by the community that Yasavi stole a cow from them; and in others, both elements are found, usually combined rather clumsily. The consequences of the conflict, however, are reported in much the same fashion in nearly all versions, and they are as peculiar, from the standpoint of the narrative's own logic, as they are dramatic: Ahmad Yasavi turns his enemies into dogs, but then reconciles with the community, though cursing them with some visible sign of their former enmity (usually the sign is the canine tails they are said to bear).
Fragments of this story are preserved in a number of hagiographical sources produced from the late 15th to the mid-19th centuries; the fullest versions by far appear in two works by Hazini, a 16th-century Yasavi shaykh from ²i²ir, in present-day Tajikistan, who established himself, and produced his known literary works, in Istanbul. Other versions of the story, in its basic outlines and with some more or less substantial alterations (in the names of characters and their ethnic affiliations, above all), have also been recorded in the late 19th and 20th centuries among the Qazaqs, Uzbeks, Qaraqalpaqs, and, especially, various Türkmen groups. The story has not drawn much attention in scholarship, but when it has, it has been approached as a more-or-less straightforward account of the historical Ahmad Yasavi's interaction with a community, typically understood as nomadic, dwelling in the middle Syr Darya valley in the 12th century; the prevalence of Türkmen versions among the modern, ethnographically recorded variants of the tale, has led to the story being used as historical evidence of the residence of particular Türkmen groups in the middle Syr Darya valley during that time, and one Soviet-era researcher, flush with antireligious fervor, insisted that the story reflected a memory that the migrations of the Türkmens were initiated in response to their oppression by the "Muslim clergy."
A more fruitful approach to the story of Ahmad Yasavi and the dog-men may begin by recognizing that in all likelihood it reflects the appropriation and adaptation of a narrative motif that was widespread in Inner Asia during the Mongol era (and probably earlier) in the context of multiple layerings of hagiographical traditions, focused on the saint, that were developed in quite different venues. The developments evident in the various versions of the narrative are important in their own right for the patterns they suggest in the religious history of Central Asia, and especially for the lessons they offer about the role of the Yasavi Sufi tradition in the process of Islamization during the Mongol era. For present purposes, however, the venues in which the hagiographical adaptation of the story of the dog-men unfolded seem to correspond well with particular modes of transmission, and as a result we can reasonably attempt to follow a narrative motif in and out of written sources over the course of several centuries.
The present communication will explore the evidence we have, in manuscript recordings of the narrative from the 16th-19th centuries and in 19th-20th century `ethnographic' recordings, for the mutual interaction of oral and written venues in the transmission and adaptation of the narrative motif of Ahmad Yasavi and the dog-men. The available evidence suggests that, regardless of the obvious value of a datable written recording, the written venues have several limitations (rooted not only in the interests of their constituencies, but in specific misunderstandings within an often `telegraphed' narrative form); more broadly, the evidence suggests caution in assuming the greater `reliability' or thoroughness of early written versions of such narratives, and the dangers inherent in understanding and interpreting such narratives entirely from within a particular textual or manuscript tradition.
