Description:

Please join the East Asia Reasearch Forum as they host Ron Sela (Indiana University), Director, Islamic Studies Program.

Three different stories, from 18th-century Bukhara, 14th-century Khorezm, and 19th-century Khoqand, recorded in three distinct genres – apocryphal heroic biographies, Stories of the Prophets (Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ), and dynastic chronicles, respectively – make powerful political, social, religious, and moral claims about the Turks of Central Asia. In this talk, I introduce these stories and offer an old Turkic proverb – ‘An Orphan Cuts Its Own Umbilical Cord’ (öksüz özkindīgīn özï késār) – as a methodological framework that may increase our understanding of Turkic self-representation, individual and collective, in Central Asia’s history.

Ron Sela is Associate Professor of Central Asian history at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, where he serves also as Director of the Islamic Studies Program and as Director of the Sinor Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. Among his publications, Sela has authored The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia (Cambridge, 2011) and co-edited (with Devin DeWeese and Paolo Sartori) Muslim Religious Authority in Central Eurasia (Brill, 2023). 

Please register for this event.