A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Introduction 29
Tobolsk grew up at their confluence, but the site of another town slightly
upstream on the Irtysh deserves special attention: Sibir, headquarters of
the khanate of Sibir, conquered by the Russians in the final years of the
sixteenth century.Sibir, also known as Isker, lay in an area where the
Eurasian steppe belt merges with the continent’s forest zone, the taiga,
then sparsely populated by Finnic and paleo-Siberian peoples.The
khanate’s Turks, who absorbed some of these autochthones, came to be
known as Siberian Tatars.The Kipchak Turkic-speaking khans of Sibir
had ruled there from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, and their
realm represented the northernmost position ever occupied by an
Islamic state.
ethnolinguistic and religious identity of modern
inner asia
Ethnolinguistic Identity
(a) Turkic Languages
The principal nationalities in this group are the Kazakhs, Karakalpaks,
Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uzbeks, and Uighurs.They are called Turks because
this essentially linguistic concept, despite its shortcomings, is the most
practical common denominator recognized by medieval and modern
scholars alike.In the past as at present, a number of Inner Asian nationalities
have been felt to possess a common bond in the Turkic language
of which they speak their own diverse idioms – not unlike the Russians,
Czechs, Serbs, etc., who are Slavs because they speak their own versions
of Slavic.The only nationality which today applies this term to itself and
to its language to the exclusion of any other name, however, is that of
the Turks of Turkey: the not uncommon paradox of a group that maintains
certain features of its basic identity long after leaving its original or
earlier habitat.For the sake of clarity, Turkish is the term used in English
for the form of Turkic spoken in Turkey.
Linguists divide the Turkic languages into several groups.The most
commonly accepted system speaks of the Kipchak group (Kazakh,
Karakalpak), Turki group (Uzbek, Uighur), and Oghuz group
(Turkmen, Azeri, Turkish), although this classification has not received
unanimous recognition and scholars are at a loss where to put Kyrgyz –
whether to consider it Kipchak or Turki, or to propose yet another subdivision.For
our purposes, a more relevant question is how close they
are to each other, and whether they are mutually intelligible.The answer