IMPERIAL REPRESENTATION AND THE POLITICAL IMAGE OF SAYYID ABDULAKHAD KHAN IN RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH-LANGUAGE SOURCES (1885–1910)
Keywords:
Bukharan Emirate ,Sayyid Abd al-Ahad Khan, political portrait, representation of power, russian protectorate, imperial protocol, russian sources, English-language travelers.Abstract
This article reconstructs the political image of Sayyid ʿAbd al-Ahad Khan, Emir of Bukhara (1885–1910), on the basis of late nineteenth–early twentieth-century Russian and English-language sources, as well as selected Russian-language studies introduced into scholarly circulation for comparative analysis. The focus is not only on the question of the Bukharan Emirate’s dependence on the Russian Empire, but above all on the mechanisms of power representation: succession rituals, journeys to imperial centers, court ceremonial, practices of gift-giving and charity, and the visual-symbolic framing of monarchical status. The study demonstrates that Russian and English-language accounts construct an ambivalent image of the ruler: on the one hand, a loyal and pragmatic actor who preserves dynastic and Islamic legitimacy; on the other, a monarch who compensates for the regime’s structural constraints through symbolic and representational resources. Methodologically, the article relies on a comparative reading of narratives while taking genre differences into account (journalistic writing, travelogues, memoir-ethnographic descriptions, and political-administrative texts).
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