Confusing Black and White: Naqshbandi Sufi Affiliations and the Transition to Qing Rule in the Tarim Basin

Abstract

The role of Sufi brotherhoods as a force either of resistance or of accommodation has aroused interest in a variety of imperial contexts, and the case of Qing Inner Asia is no exception. Even those with only a passing acquaintance with the history of the region will probably have heard of the “khojas,” and may be familiar with the schism between the “Black Mountain” and “White Mountain” factions in the Tarim Basin, in the south of what is now Xinjiang. These khojas were members of the Naqshbandiyya, a Sufi brotherhood (.tarı̄qat) that spread from Transoxiana throughout Asia and the Middle East in the post-Mongol period. Descended along two different lines from a sixteenth-century saint of Samarqand, Makhdum-i A‘. zam, these khojas can hence be referred to collectively as Makhdumzada, “the sons of Makhdum.” “Black Mountain” is a term commonly applied to the family of Is . haq Vali (d. 1599), also known in the literature as the “Is . haqiyya.” The “White Mountain” khojas descend from Afaq Khoja (d. 1694), and hence also take the name “Afaqiyya.” A longstanding rivalry between these two camps has been thought greatly to outweigh any rupture that took place within either of them. Indeed, this rivalry has acquired the status of a grand narrative of Eastern Turkestan’s history, stretching from the middle of the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth.