TY - JOUR
T1 - Īrān-o Tūran
T2 - On Iranian (and Quasi-Iranian) in the Ruhnama
AU - Shapira, Dan D.Y.
PY - 2010/10/1
Y1 - 2010/10/1
N2 - After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, political élites of some of the former Soviet republics, especially the Turkic-speaking ones, found themselves in ideological limbo. The first President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov (Saparmyrat Nyýazow), has trodden his way out from the vacuum of legitimacy in the most original and interesting manner. In 2001, Niyazov, known also as Turkmenbashi (Türkmenbaşy), made public his book, Ruhnama, which later has been translated into about fifty languages. The book, appealing to the Oǧuz Turkic heritage of the Turkmen nation, to her remote Parthian past, and to vague Islamic cultural inheritance, was supposed to provide guidelines for nation-building and cohesiveness. Atatürk's Nutuk was one of the literary models of Niyazov's book. Having fixed the newly-invented national mythology in writing, Niyazov was not only shaping his society in the desirable manner, but also legitimising his own rule. This paper analyses fragments of different-and not identical-versions of the first part of the work in several languages, mostly in Turkmen, Turkish, Russian, and English. The author suggests that the text of the Ruhnama was updated several times, with different translations reflecting different stages of fixing the original; the English text was translated faithfully from the elaborated Turkish translation, not from the Turkmen.
AB - After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, political élites of some of the former Soviet republics, especially the Turkic-speaking ones, found themselves in ideological limbo. The first President of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov (Saparmyrat Nyýazow), has trodden his way out from the vacuum of legitimacy in the most original and interesting manner. In 2001, Niyazov, known also as Turkmenbashi (Türkmenbaşy), made public his book, Ruhnama, which later has been translated into about fifty languages. The book, appealing to the Oǧuz Turkic heritage of the Turkmen nation, to her remote Parthian past, and to vague Islamic cultural inheritance, was supposed to provide guidelines for nation-building and cohesiveness. Atatürk's Nutuk was one of the literary models of Niyazov's book. Having fixed the newly-invented national mythology in writing, Niyazov was not only shaping his society in the desirable manner, but also legitimising his own rule. This paper analyses fragments of different-and not identical-versions of the first part of the work in several languages, mostly in Turkmen, Turkish, Russian, and English. The author suggests that the text of the Ruhnama was updated several times, with different translations reflecting different stages of fixing the original; the English text was translated faithfully from the elaborated Turkish translation, not from the Turkmen.
KW - NATIONAL MYTHOLOGY
KW - POST-SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA
KW - POST-SOVIET NATION-BUILDING
KW - RUHNAMA
KW - SAPARMURAT NIYAZOV
KW - TURKMEN LITERATURE
KW - TURKMENBASHI
KW - TURKMENS
KW - UZBEKS
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=78649553654&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1163/157338410x12743419190188
DO - 10.1163/157338410x12743419190188
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AN - SCOPUS:78649553654
SN - 1609-8498
VL - 14
SP - 265
EP - 278
JO - Iran and the Caucasus
JF - Iran and the Caucasus
IS - 2
ER -