The Tragedy of Anarkhan, an Uyghur Woman Tragic Saint?

By Eric Schluessel (The George Washington University)

Many years ago, in the Xinjiang University Library, I came across a peculiar manuscript dated 1380 AH/November 1, 1960 CE. Its author was the important Kashghari intellectual Imir Ḥusayn Qutlugh Ḥajjiyov (1900–1986), also called Imir Hüsäyin Qazihajim. Imir Ḥusayn was a well-known expert on local history in the early People’s Republic of China, and the text was evidently originally part of his larger work Events of Kashghar (Wāqiʿa-i Kashghar).

What struck me at the time was the title: ‘A Recollection of the Epic of the Tyranny of the Tyrant Ma Titai’ (Zalim Matitäyning zulum dastanidin bir äslätmä khatirä). Ma ‘Titai’ — from the Chinese titai 提台 ‘colonel’ — refers to Ma Fuxing 馬福興 (1864–1924), a Hui (Dungan) military officer who in 1916 was made the circuit intendant of Kashghar. Uyghur collective memory construes his eight years of rule as a reign of terror, during which Ma employed cruel and violent punishments in his quest for personal gain up until his execution at the hands of his successor, Ma Shaowu 馬紹武 (1874–1937).

Those events are discussed at length in another curious text which I have translated, Ghulam Muḥammad Khan’s (n.d.) ‘The Events (or Death) of Ma Titai’(Mā Tīṭayning wāqiʿasi), completed in 1927 and included in the Lund University Library manuscript of the Tarikh-i Ḥamidi, Jarring Prov. 163. This manuscript seemed to belong to the same tradition, and, like Ghulam Muḥammad’s text, it presents the mixture of prose and verse common to the dāstān ‘epic’ genre. Imir Ḥusayn even states that he collected the story within through oral history in 1348 AH/1929–30 CE, placing the narrative close in time to Ma Fuxing’s death and Ghulam Muḥammad’s account.

The contents, however, are strikingly different. In this text, Ma Fuxing is the chief villain in a tragic story of anti-feudal struggle told through the language of Maoism, the hero of which is a young woman named Anarkhan. At the beginning of the story, Anarkhan’s father has died while conducting labour forces to build Ma Fuxing’s palace, while her mother Sarikhan struggles to survive. Ma Fuxing’s officers kidnap the beautiful young Anarkhan and take her to the palace, where Ma attempts several times to rape her. Anarkhan escapes each time with the aid of other members of the working class, Uyghurs and Hui alike, but most who aid her meet with tragedy. Eventually, Anarkhan flees into the wilderness, which punishes her body in ways that reflect her abuse at Ma’s hands.

Seeing no hope, she ends her own life by diving into a river, which preserves her beautiful body in ice. The text again eroticizes Anarkhan, emphasizing her physical beauty and sexual attractiveness, as well as her resistance to the sexual advances of outsiders, which suggests that she acts a metaphor for the purity of the nation, much like Nazugum, the woman hero of Ili Uyghur folklore who met a similar fate. Yet the trope of envelopment in the ground suggests a connection with Islamic hagiography through the trope of the ground consuming a saint to protect them from harm.

The hagiographic dimensions are borne out in the story’s last part, when Ma Fuxing has Anarkhan buried secretly inside a tomb-shrine (mazār). Her mother, Sarikhan, finds the tomb and sleeps beside it, keeping vigil. One night, Anarkhan returns to present Sarikhan with a vision. In a strange inversion of both hagiographical tropes and the heroic anti-feudalism narratives of the early Mao era, Anarkhan bids her mother come and join her in death.

The manuscript presents a number of difficulties to the research. First, it is written in a highly inconsistent mixture of modern Uyghur and Chaghatay orthographies, which the writer evidently did not distinguish in a way we would now find familiar. At one point, he writes madhhab, an Arabic word indicating a school of jurisprudence, as m.ä.dh.ḥ.ä.b مەذحەب, reflecting a correct use of Arabic dh and misuse of Arabic ḥ, neither of which letters was allowed in modern Uyghur orthography, while adding the modern use of h for ä as in Uyghur. He then glosses this term as m.z.h.b مزھب, using modern Uyghur letters but omitting the vowels as in Arabic orthography. It is also lexicographically complex, as it borrows significant vocabulary from Russian, especially terms related to communist ideology — pomeshchik for ‘rich peasant’, for example — as well as Chinese. These linguistic details reflect Imir Ḥusayn’s madrasa education and his life during a time of transition when the Uyghur language was undergoing uneven waves of standardization.

This story, like Anarkhan, has enjoyed a strange afterlife. A version of it was edited and published by Abdurehim Hashim in 2002 under the title Ma Titai and the Tragedy of Anarqiz. Hashim based this version on a manuscript of the same name recording a story with identical characters and a very similar plotline. It appears to be a separate, probably slightly later and more finished, manuscript: Where the Xinjiang University Library manuscript includes marginalia and some blanks to be filled in, the base for the published version seems to have resolved them into the text. The book includes a preface from the author, who confirms that the work is based on oral histories from 1929 to 1931 — while this preface is new, it corroborates the text’s common origin with the 1960s manuscript. Hashim, in his introduction, relates that Imir Ḥusayn wrote the original work in 1954, and then rewrote it in 1960. At some point, his daughter gave it to a member of the Kashghar People’s Standing Committee, who in turn passed it on to Hashim in 2000.

Hashim describes some of his interventions into the text, many of which meant to facilitate the modern reader’s understanding. A comparison of the 1960 manuscript with the 2002 book, however, indicates a number of other changes: Many of the verse sections are missing, while others have been added, and those that remain have often been rearranged or. The plot has also been changed, certainly to fit political circumstances, and the hagiographical elements are more limited. Nevertheless, the story ends in just the same way, with mother and daughter united in death, both of them having escaped tyranny at last. In this sense, the Anarkhan/Anarqiz story belongs to the class of pseudo-hagiographical works that Rian Thum has identified as a core part of the canon of modern Uyghur nationalism.

The Anarkhan story also appears to form some part of the basis of the 1962 film Anarkhan 阿娜爾罕, which borrows some elements from this story but otherwise alters the plot and setting to conform to Mao-era sensibilities. Traces of this tale — particularly, I would argue, its eroticization of Anarkhan — remain in the 2013 television series of the same name. Further exploration of the manuscript and its adaptations would illuminate some of the ways in which elements of Turkic Muslim history-writing, narrative, and historical consciousness, particularly hagiography and orality, have persisted beyond 1949.

Figure 1: A page from the manuscript, showing the combination of prose and verse, occasional use of punctuation, and combination of orthographies.

References

Abramson, Kara, ‘Gender, Uyghur Identity, and the Story of Nuzugum’, The Journal of Asian Studies 71/ 4 (2012): 1069–91.

Qazihajim, Imir Hüseyin, Matitäy we Anarqiz paji’äsi, ed. Abdurehim Hashim (Kashghar: Qäshqär Uyghur neshriyati, 2002.

Schluessel, Eric, ‘Anarkhan before Anarkhan: The Pure Body of a Mao-Era Uyghur Saint’, in Aysima Mirsultan, Eric Schluessel, Eset Sulaiman, eds., Community Still Matters: Uyghur Culture and Society in Central Asian Context (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2022), 66­–81.

Eric Schluessel, The World as Seen from Yarkand: Ghulām Muḥammad Khan’s 1920s Chronicle Mā Tīṭayning wāqiʿasi (Tokyo: TIAS, 2014).

Thum, Rian, Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).