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758 TATARS
even the most devout Muslim highlanders remember traditional religious practices,
Taqali's male elite asserts that such rituals disappeared with the establishment
of the kingdom. Only a few old women in Abbasiya mention the ceremonies
or leaders of the former religion.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Article
Elles, R. J. "The Kingdom of Tegali." Sudan Notes and Records 18:1 (1935): 1-35.
Unpublished Manuscript
Ewald, Janet J. "Leadership and Social Change on an Islamic Frontier: The Kingdom
of Taqali, 1783-1900." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1982.
Janet Ewald
TATARS The terms "Tatar" (meaning "archer") and its European pejorative,
"Tartar," conjure images of marauding Mongol hordes with all manner of
barbaric customs wreaking violent disruption on civilized European communities.
Tartar is especially synonymous with terror because it is a term that applies to
the legendary people of Tartarus who rose up from the depths of the earth.
One of the most confusing of ethnonyms, Tatar is a name given to a variety
of both Turkic- and non-Turkic-speaking peoples long before the coming of
Islam. After Islam arrived, Russians tended to call all Muslims Tatar.
Today the name is used to describe several related, but spatially disparate,
peoples. Most of the modern Tatars cannot be regarded as direct descendants of
the Tatar-Mongols of Manchuria who overran much of Eurasia in the thirteenth
century. Instead, the overwhelming majority of Tatars are distant scions of the
Turkic-speaking Volga-Kama Bulgars, who first adopted the name as their own
in the sixteenth century.
Though racially mixed, Tatar relatives of the early Mongol armies are comparatively
few in contemporary Soviet society. These are the Crimean Tatars,
who as a whole may number half a million people, or under 8 percent of all
Tatars. During World War II, the Soviet government forcibly removed the Crimean
Tatars from their homeland in the Crimean peninsula, falsely accusing
them of collaborating with German occupying forces. They were resettled in
several locations in Siberia and Central Asia, mostly in Uzbekistan. Their precise
number is not known; however, they probably compose the majority of the
650,000 Tatars listed in the 1979 census as residents of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist
Republic. They, like the Volga Tatars, are Muslim.
The picture is also muddled by the variety of names used by the Tatars
themselves. For instance, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, many Volga Tatars