Central Asian Arabs

[Wholegrain]

In Central Asia there are communities who still maintain an Arab identity and speak their own dialects of Arabic. They arrived in various waves, some from the first Arab conquest while alot are believed to be descended from prisoners of war Tamerlane brought to central asia.

This article is in Danish which at least one user here can read.

Usbekisk arabisk

Den arabisktalende landsby Jogari i Usbekistan
Den arabiske landsby Jogari ligger 2 km væk fra byen Jiduvan 30 km nord for Bukhara. Det er et af de meget få steder i Usbekistan, hvor man stadig taler usbekisk arabisk.

Det er ikke unormalt at møde mennesker i Usbekistan, som regner sig selv for arabere, især i områderne omkring Samarkand, Bukhara, Qashqadarya og Surkhandarya. Også navne på landsbyer og byer vidner om arabisk tilstedeværelse: Katta-Arab, Mish-Arab, Arab-Khona osv.

Araberne er vandret til det område, der i dag udgør Usbekistan gennem flere historiske perioder. Nogle var soldater, håndværkere eller intellektuelle, andre nomader. De ankom med den arabiske erobring af Centralasien og begyndte at slå sig ned i området efter 710 e.Kr. Det siges, at Timur Lenk senere, omkring 1200 e.Kr., førte håndværkere fra Damaskus dertil, og nomader af arabisk herkomst fra Afghanistan slog sig ned i det 16. århundrede. Henimod slutningen af det 19. århundrede og begyndelsen af det 20. flyttede nogle af araberne fra Usbekistan til Afghanistan for at komme væk først fra den russiske og senere fra den bolsjevitiske indflydelse.

Heres an English account, but it doesn't talk about the Arab community themselves, it just talks about Tamerlanes pillaging in Syria.

Tamerlane in Damascus

In December of 1400, Timur left the rubble of Aleppo and Hama behind, making his way to the outskirts of the first city of Syria: Damascus. By this time, an Egyptian army under the command of the Mamluk Sultan himself had arrived in Syria, engaging in several skirmishes with Timur’s forces. Then, abruptly, it headed back to Cairo at the start of the new year, ostensibly to prevent a rival from taking control in the Sultan’s absence. Newly vulnerable, the Damascene population sent a delegation of scholars and notables, including a famous visitor to the city, historian Ibn Khaldun, to negotiate with Timur. The Mongol leader ordered the Damascene representatives to write down the names of the quarters, squares, and streets of the city, so that his emissaries could systematically demand tribute and obedience from residents. Before Timur left Syria for good in mid-March 1401, he let his troops loose in Damascus for three terrible days of plunder, rape, and ruin, finally setting the city on fire as he marched off with its finest youth and artisans in captivity.

Central Asian Arabs marry local non Arab women like Tajiks and Uzbeks but don't let their own women marry the Tajik or Uzbek men. The children of these mixed marriages are considered Arabs and this practice keeps Arabic speaking mothers in the community.

They look heavily mixed with Uzbeks.

Usbekisk arabisk

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

Foto: © Umida Ahmedova

 

[Wholegrain]

Guram Chikovani has researched central asian arabs and their langauge.

Guram Chikovani | Free University of Tbilisi - Academia.edu

gchikovaniTIAA - YouTube

Two texts in the Arabic dialect of Khorasan

Ulrich Seeger

English translation by Sarah Dickins and Janet Watson

http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/md/semitistik/seeger-khorasan1.pdf

Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic
Edited by
Éva Ágnes Csató, Bo Isaksson, Carina Jahani

http://gchikovani.ge/gurami/Linguistic contacts in Central Asia.pdf

Uzbekistan Arabic: A Language Created by Semitic-Iranian-Turkic Linguistic Convergence
Otto Jastrow

http://iic.arizona.edu/static/resources/2010/11/30/uzbekistan-arabic-jastrow.pdf

The Qashqa-daria Arabic Dialect of Central Asia (Nominal Structures), Proceedings of the Third International Conference of AIDA, Malta, 2000more (This is in the Georgian language with romanization of Qashqa Darya Arabic)
by Guram Chikovani

The Qashqa-daria Arabic Dialect of Central Asia (Nominal Structures), Proceedings of the Third International Conference of AIDA, Malta, 2000 | Guram Chikovani - Academia.edu

TSERETELI INSTITUTE OF ORIENTAL STUDIES TBILISI INSTITUTE OF ASIA AND AFRICA
GURAM CHIKOVANI
CENTRAL ASIAN ARABIC DIALECTS
QASHQA-DARYA DIALECT Text, Translation, Comment
Tbilisi 2007

http://gchikovani.ge/gurami/Qashqadarya Arabic Dialect _GE_.pdf

Language Contact Influence on the Morphological Typology of the Arabic of Bukhara
Keri Miller (University of Arizona)

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/bls/past_meetings/bls38/BLS38abstracts/miller.pdf

http://education.adelphi.edu/files/2012/01/Miller_Abstract.pdf

Abstract 8
The Morpheme /-in-/ in Central Asian Arabic: Conservative versus Innovative Morphosyntactic Strategies

http://www4.uwm.edu/letsci/conferences/arabic_symposium/pdf/abstracts/miller.pdf

http://members.home.nl/marcmarti/yugur/biblio/EallUzb.pdf

KUNSTKAMERA Jeinov - We Arrived (Uzbekistan Arabs: Images of Traditional Culture)

http://www.necsi.edu/afghanistan/text_data/Ethnologue_report_for_language_codeabh.txt

Influence of the Tajik language on the vocalism of Central Asian Arabic dialects.

Influence of the Tajik language on the vocalism of Central Asian Arabic dialects - by Lian Slayford-Wei - Helium

The influence of the Tajik language on the vocalism of Central Asian Arabic dialects
George V. Tsereteli

Cambridge Journals Online - Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies - Abstract - The influence of the Tajik language on the vocalism of Central Asian Arabic dialects

JSTOR: An Error Occurred Setting Your User Cookie

The central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan: pastoral nomadism in transition - Thomas Jefferson Barfield - Google Books

The Central Asian Arabs of Afghanistan: Pastoral Nomadism in Transition - Thomas Jefferson Barfield - Google Books

Afghanistan Arab - Flags, Maps, Economy, History, Climate, Natural Resources, Current Issues, International Agreements, Population, Social Statistics, Political System

http://seeger.uni-hd.de/english/chorasan_e.htm

http://www.arabistik.uni-bayreuth.de/de/download/pre-diasporic_arabic.pdf

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Diachronica 22.2

http://german.lss.wisc.edu/Diachronica/Owens/Owens.data.pdf

http://german.lss.wisc.edu/Diachronica/Owens/Owens.Background.pdf

http://www.unice.fr/ChaireIUF-Nicolai/Archives/Symposium/Symposium_Textes/Heine-Kuteva_Leipzig07.pdf

Morphologie / Morphology. 2. Halbband - Google Books

Shared Grammaticalization: With Special Focus on the Transeurasian Languages - Google Books

Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian ... - Éva Ágnes Csató, Bo Isaksson, Carina Jahani - Google Books

 

[Wholegrain]

Kashkadarya Arabs: Mosque

Bukhara Arabs

 

[al-Hasani]

Another very interesting thread Wholegrain. You must be some professor of some kind with all those very useful links and new very interesting threads. I personally did not know about a Arab community in Uzbekistan of all places although I knew about Central Asian Arabs.

Very interesting. Will have to do a lot of reading.

Yes, they look heavily mixed with Turkic/Mongolian features but some of them have Arab facial features too. Very interesting.

That old grandmother is not one to be messed with on picture 4! Just like the Arab ones.

Amazing the first man in the video below looks like a typical Arab that could fit anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula. Who would have thought that after so long time and mixture? Quite stunning.

In fact all of the men (3 minutes in) have strong Arabic/Semitic features!

We pray to Allah (swt) that he will protect the Arab Muslim communities in Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries so they do not suffer from persecutions, killing, poverty or vanish!

 

[Wholegrain]

Bukhara Dialect: Abdu Jalol Jahonkulov and his family

Bukhara Dialect: Little Ahmad Ali Rajabov (part 2)

Bukhara Dialect: Little Ahmad Ali Rajabov (part 1)

 

[Wholegrain]

Kashkadarya Arabs

Kashkadarya Dialect: Shoimardonkul Dostmahmad and Jerakul Azizov are telling stories

Kashkadarya Dialect: Shoimardonkul Dostmahmad, Jerakul Azizov, Ruzkol Bint Chirimboy

 

[al-Hasani]

Kashkadarya Arabs: Mosque

Bukhara Arabs

We must immediately help these people. I wonder why we never learnt about the giant Arab diaspora in school? We should help them economically especially the rich GCC countries. This is very great footage. Maybe many of them have now died and their children or grand-children have forgot their language, culture and heritage? We hope not because then they will be extinct very soon.

We must also thank the Uzbek people for protecting them if they have not persecuted them. Is there Uzbek members here we can ask questions to.

This is all new for me.

We hope that they can make us proud and be a good example - even better than us Arabs living in the Arab world!

 

[Wholegrain]

Kashkadarya Dialect: Informant Avaznazar Mahmadnazarov

Kashkadarya Dialect: The family of Avaznazar Mahmadnazarov

 

[Wholegrain]

Another very interesting thread Wholegrain. You must be some professor of some kind with all those very useful links and new very interesting threads. I personally did not know about a Arab community in Uzbekistan of all places although I knew about Central Asian Arabs.

Very interesting. Will have to do a lot of reading.

Yes, they look heavily mixed with Turkic/Mongolian features but some of them have Arab facial features too. Very interesting.

That old grandmother is not one to be messed with on picture 4! Just like the Arab ones.

Amazing the first man in the video below looks like a typical Arab that could fit anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula. Who would have thought that after so long time and mixture? Quite stunning.

In fact all of the men (3 minutes in) have strong Arabic/Semitic features!

We pray to Allah (swt) that he will protect the Arab Muslim communities in Uzbekistan and other Central Asian countries so they do not suffer from persecutions, killing, poverty or vanish!

I'm a student like you.

There is also an Arab village in Khorasan (its on Iran's eastern afghan border, on the other side of Iran, not like the ahwazi arabs who are close to Iraq) called Khalaf where they speak their own arabic dialect

Khorasan-Arabic

 

[Wholegrain]

In Jogari, Kashdarya, Bukhara (in Uzbekistan) and in Khalaf, Khorasan (Iran) they have preserved their own Arabic dialects.

But the ones who fled to Afghanistan from the Czarist Russian conquests cannot speak Arabic but they maintain their identity.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+af0043)

Afghanistan - Arab

Afghanistan Arab - Flags, Maps, Economy, History, Climate, Natural Resources, Current Issues, International Agreements, Population, Social Statistics, Political System

Afghanistan Arab

Sources: The Library of Congress Country Studies; CIA World Factbook
<< Back to Afghanistan Society
Large groups of Sunni Arab living in the vicinity of Bokhara in Central Asia fled to northeastern Afghanistan following Russian conquests in the nineteenth century. By the 1880s they were, with the Uzbek with whom they established close ties, the second most populous ethnic group in present day Kunduz, Takhar and Baghlan provinces. Smaller groups settled in scattered communities as far west as Maimana, Faryab Province.

The Arab are pastoralists who raise sheep and grow cotton and wheat. Some among the eastern groups make summer migrations of up to 300 kilometers to reach the lush high pastures in Badakhshan. Government development schemes, especially those which brought large numbers of Pushtun to the area in the 1940s, relegated the Arab to a small proportion of the population and the Arab ceased to hold a monopoly on long distance migration. Bilingual in Dari and Uzbeki, but speaking no Arabic, they continue to identify themselves as Arab although they have had no contact with the Arabs of the Middle East since the late fourteenth century.

Data as of 1997

The Soviets forced the alphabet change from Arabic to latin and then to cyrillic, so they now maintain literacy mostly in Uzbek but not Arabic. They spoke their own arabic dialects at home.

 

[al-Hasani]

I'm a student like you.

There is also an Arab village in Khorasan (its on Iran's eastern afghan border, on the other side of Iran, not like the ahwazi arabs who are close to Iraq) called Khalaf where they speak their own arabic dialect

Khorasan-Arabic

Yes, I have posted that link before. It is very interesting. Sounds really cool.

Since I am currently studying in Denmark, I am not there currently, but I speak/understand Danish on a ordinary level but I also asked 1 friend who speaks fluent Danish and this should be a perfect/correct translation of the Danish text to English. I made a few mistakes, LOL, but I helped with the English:

Den arabisktalende landsby Jogari i Usbekistan
Den arabiske landsby Jogari ligger 2 km væk fra byen Jiduvan 30 km nord for Bukhara. Det er et af de meget få steder i Usbekistan, hvor man stadig taler usbekisk arabisk.

Det er ikke unormalt at møde mennesker i Usbekistan, som regner sig selv for arabere, især i områderne omkring Samarkand, Bukhara, Qashqadarya og Surkhandarya. Også navne på landsbyer og byer vidner om arabisk tilstedeværelse: Katta-Arab, Mish-Arab, Arab-Khona osv.

Araberne er vandret til det område, der i dag udgør Usbekistan gennem flere historiske perioder. Nogle var soldater, håndværkere eller intellektuelle, andre nomader. De ankom med den arabiske erobring af Centralasien og begyndte at slå sig ned i området efter 710 e.Kr. Det siges, at Timur Lenk senere, omkring 1200 e.Kr., førte håndværkere fra Damaskus dertil, og nomader af arabisk herkomst fra Afghanistan slog sig ned i det 16. århundrede. Henimod slutningen af det 19. århundrede og begyndelsen af det 20. flyttede nogle af araberne fra Usbekistan til Afghanistan for at komme væk først fra den russiske og senere fra den bolsjevitiske indflydelse.

The Arabic-speaking village Jogari lies in Uzbekistan.

The Arab village, Jogari, lies 2km from the city Jiduvan that is located 30km north of Bukhara. It is one of the very few places in Uzbekistan where Uzbek Arabic is still spoken.

It is not uncommon to meet people in Uzbekistan, that regard themselves as Arabs, especially in the areas around Samarkand, Bukhara, Qashqadarya and Surkhandarya. The names of towns and villages in that area, such as Katta-Arab, Mish-Arab, Arab-Khona is also a testimony of an Arab presence.

The Arabs have travelled to the area that is today known as Uzbekistan in several historical periods. Some were soldiers, carpenters or intellectuals, others nomads (Bedouins probably). They arrived during the Arab conquest of Central Asia and started to settle down in the area after year 710. It has been said that Timur Lenk later, around year 1200, transported carpenters from Damascus to the area, and nomads (Bedouins?) of an Arab descent from Afghanistan settled in the area in the 16th century. At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th century some of the Arabs moved from Uzbekistan and settled in Afghanistan to escape the Russian and later the Bolshevik influence.

 

[KingMamba]

Timur was a bastard who only killed Muslims and called it a jihad.

Just wanted to throw that out there.

 

[Aslan]

If I am not mistaken alot of Arabs settled in Samarkand and Bukhara, after they had conquered the area. And many of their children were forced to flee the area specially during the mongol invasion.

 

[KingMamba]

If I am not mistaken alot of Arabs settled in Samarkand and Bukhara, after they had conquered the area. And many of their children were forced to flee the area specially during the mongol invasion.

Yes and they came down to Punjab.

Mongols were stopped from invading Indian subcontinent by I believe the Delhi Sultanate.

 

[Wholegrain]

@al-Hasani

Arab "Nationalist" Baathists know who their "best friend" is.

Arabic Language Handbook - Mary Catherine Bateson - Google Books

in the Soviet Union, for instance, several modified Cyrillic alphabets have been developed for writing the Arabic dialects spoken by groups of Arabic speakers in Central Asia (the residue of the furthest wave of conquests), effectively democratizing the language and at the same time fragmenting these groups and cutting them off from Arab nationalism and a share in the old and new cultural wealth of the Arab world.

And going back to what I already posted about the Czarist Russian invasion of Bukhara and them driving the Arabs to Afghanistan, if one seeks to blame the Soviets for all of it.