91Èȱ¬

As a biologist by education I know that there are no pure races or ethnicities. Yet even now my compatriots are killing each other in southern Kyrgyzstan as I discussed in my last post, finding justification in skin colour or eye shape.

My grandfather Obid-kori Mirzaraimov (shot dead in a Stalinian prison) was Kyrgyz by his father and Uzbek by his mother. He married my granny Oyimcha, an Uzbek girl of 16 years old, when he himself was 43, after spending 23 years studying Islamic theology in Bukhara. His life story - which I tried to describe in my book "The Railway" - is a testimony of the fluidity of those concepts, which are put in the basis of recent clashes clashes in Osh and Jalalabad. Here is an excerpt:

"Obid-Kori began his life with his precious and only Oyimcha, but he knew no peace inside him. He was tormented by the thought that Oyimcha - this highborn descendant of the Prophet - was only his because of the power of money. He was tormented by his awareness that every one of her countless relatives looked down on him; however well educated, however pious, however anything whatsoever he might be, he still remained 'only a Kirghiz'.

"Therefore he began teaching only Uzbek boys - the brothers of girls who had been sent to Oyimcha. But the simple Kirghiz - unsuspecting men from the mountain who came down every week to the Sunday bazaar - went on bowing to him out of respect for his late father Mirzarayim-Bey and did not notice that he was trying to avoid them, while the smug Uzbeks, full of themselves and their self-centered valley-dwelling ways, did not take the trouble to notice how much he wanted to be one of them."

In 1936 the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist republic was created and Naukat, where my grandfather and Oyimcha lived, became part of it.

"Obid-Kori was now the only literate Uzbek left in the village. Some had gone to Kashgar, some had been sent to the North, some had met their end in the mountains and nobody, nobody had returned. And it was not long before there were no other Uzbeks left in the village at all.

"Obid-Kori's nephew Shir-Gazi - who was married to the Kirghiz Noroon, daughter of Togolok the sheep-shearer - was the only literate Kirghiz in the village and so, after indigenization, he was appointed First Secretary of the Village Soviet. Togolok's family, who supplied the soviets with wool from Alay sheep, naturally spoiled Shir-Gazi, but he was still further spoiled by his power as First Secretary. The moment he became First Secretary, he had reclassified the entire population of Naukat as Kirghiz, imposed traditional tribal tribute in addition to the various Soviet taxes and even attempted to secure a fatwah from his uncle with regard to payment of this tribute. Obid-Kori, however, sent his nephew packing as briskly as if he were the devil himself - and for this reason Obid-Kori never got to be classified as Kirghiz. And so it happened that all of Naukat turned Kirghiz, but Obid-Kori remained inveterately Uzbek."

On the 12 June, 1938 at the height of Stalinian repressions, my grandfather Obid-kori was arrested and put in jail in Osh. In "The Railway" I describe it like this:

"Nothing had been forgotten. Obid-Kori was reminded that he had studied in a hotbed of opium for the people, and that he had participated in the Kokand bourgeois-nationalist congress, and that he had gone on believing in his illusory Allah during the epoch of militant materialism. He was also accused of treason towards the Motherland and betrayal of the Kirghiz people. And who, you may ask, charged him with all this under anti-Soviet article 58? Kukash-Snubnose, whom Obid-Kori had himself taught to read and write. This green-eyed young Uzbek - now a Kirghiz and an officer in the NKVD - was interrogating Obid-Kori every other day in the main jail."

And these were his last thoughts, which resonate with what is happening today:

"Yes, life turned out this way and what other way could it turn? Words can turn out other ways, words can be rewritten and retold, rehashed and rephrased, relayed and re-lied, words can be the tools of a green-eyed Judgment-Day-dog like Kukash-Snubnose - but life is one, and life is from Allah. And what do we know of it? It cannot be sensed or weighed between words any more than sunbeams can be sensed between leaves, between leaves. And only the leaves' shadow catches these little patches of light, surrounds, frames, defines, confines, arrests.

"Life happens in words. One person says or thinks of another: 'they did right' or 'they did wrong.' But what is this 'right' or 'wrong' outside of words? Or if words are turned upside down, turned head over heels? If, instead of leaves casting a shadow imposed by the light, the shadow gives birth to the leaves and light is the leaves' product?"

If you have read this and my previous post, you may guess which question torments me: is there anything else in human nature except of fear of law enforcement (police, rubber bullets, tear gas) which stops people killing each other under the flags of different skin or eye shape? Are great philosophers like Kant - who spoke about inbuilt moral imperatives in our nature - wrong? Are even crows - who don't peck eyes of other crows - more developed than us? Tell me what you think.