Introducing the Ferghana Valley

By S. Frederick Starr

Editor’s Note: A watershed moment occurred on January 8, 2025: for the first time in over three decades, the prime ministers of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan met to discuss their shared interests in the Ferghana Valley. This unprecedented trilateral meeting marks a potential turning point for one of Central Asia's most complex and culturally rich regions.

The timing feels particularly poignant, as our book 'The Ferghana Valley: The Heart of Central Asia' (2011) explored many of the cross-border challenges and opportunities these leaders are now addressing. As the region enters this new chapter of cooperation, we're sharing our book's introduction below to provide context for this historic development.

Besides its beauty and abundant natural endowments, nothing about the Ferghana Valley is simple. For one thing, it is not a linear valley defined by rivers, although it roughly corresponds to the basins of the lower Naryn and Kara Darya rivers and their confluence to form the Syr Darya River. Rather, it is a large and roughly oblong flatland defined by no fewer than five chains of surrounding mountains, the Kuramin, Chatkal, Alai, Ferghana, and Turkestan ranges. The distance from north to south is about 100 kilometers, while east to west it measures approximately 300 kilometers at its widest. On a very clear day between late October and April one can stand in the middle of this valley and see snow-capped mountains on the horizon in every direction. Another distinctive feature of the valley is that its name is not really Ferghana, or Fergana (forms that date from Russian colonial rule), but Farghona. However, given that the term Ferghana or Fergana has gained common usage we will use it, while acknowledging that a different name prevails locally. Either way, the single name suggests a degree of uniformity or unity that does not exist. This non-valley with a name imposed from without is divided both linguistically and politically, with parts ruled by three states: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. Yet, as if to emphasize the theme of complexity, the three national zones have as much or more in common with each other than they do with the rest of the states of which each is a part.

It is worth pausing further on the geography of this peculiar place. Though seemingly flat, Ferghana rises to broad terraces in the north and long, sloping terraces in the south, on which one finds the Kyrgyz town of Batken. Nature made Ferghana a high semi-desert, ranging from 400 to 500 meters in altitude. But like the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East and the Indus Valley in Pakistan, it was the site of ancient but highly efficient irrigation systems. Thanks to irrigation, this naturally dry zone supports a major cotton industry. Much of the rest of the land is devoted to water-consuming crops, including devzira, the widely available local rice, hot peppers, and husaini, the tasty finger-like grapes. The Syr Darya and other rivers are home to the large and abundant sazan fish, and the roads and avenues around the ancient silk-producing center at Margilan are lined with lush mulberries. Besides these “signature” crops, numerous other forms of agricultural produce thrive throughout the valley.

Further paradoxes abound. If the valley is broad, it is also surprisingly intimate. The central city of Namangan in Uzbekistan is a mere 60 kilometers from the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, which in turn is only 50 kilometers from Osh in Kyrgyzstan. From Kokand in Uzbekistan to Khujand in Tajikistan is also a mere 125 kilometers. Demographers identify the Ferghana Valley as one of the most densely inhabited areas on earth. Yet in the lush countryside one encounters empty vistas of green, and hay set out to dry on little-traveled trunk highways, while in the cities a leisurely and spacious life prevails, with no sense of teeming masses.

Life may be leisurely but, for many, it is not prosperous. Poverty exists amid natural wealth. And even though irrigation has been practiced in the valley for two millennia, the present system is one of the least efficient anywhere.

In a world of pressing global issues and a myriad of crises, what claim can the distant and paradoxical Ferghana Valley make on our attention? To start, the region can reasonably be said to lie in the heart of Central Asia. As such, the Valley has made an inordinate contribution to the history and culture of the region as a whole. Today, with a population of nearly twelve million, it accounts for approximately one-fifth of the total population of formerly Soviet Central Asia. Its population density on average is 360 persons per square kilometer and reaches 550 in some places. This compares with a density for all central Asia of a mere fourteen persons per square kilometer. Beyond this, residents of the valley comprise nearly one-third of the population of Tajikistan and of Kyrgyzstan, and close to one-quarter of the population of Uzbekistan. As such, whatever happens in the valley significantly affects all three of these countries in their economic, political, and religious spheres.

The valley’s economic contribution to each of the three countries is enormous. Until the collapse of the USSR, powerful figures from Leninabad (now Khujand) in the Ferghana Valley ruled Tajikistan; and today’s president of Kyrgyzstan, who hails originally from Jalalabad, served earlier in the Ferghana city of Osh. Religious movements in the Ferghana Valley clearly impact the surrounding regions and countries; indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that many of the most important religious, and hence social, currents in all three countries began in the Ferghana Valley.

Heightening these factors is the fact that the Ferghana region as a whole constitutes the largest and most concentrated market in all Central Asia. Even though this market has yet to be developed in the context of a post-socialist economy it is there, an attractive opportunity for investors from the region and elsewhere. Through it passes one of the most ancient east-to-west roads connecting China and India to Europe, a route to which a rail line and a gas pipeline may soon be added. It is already home to an oil refinery and an international automobile plant, and it is the heart of the Central Asian cotton industry, the world’s second largest. These factors alone should warrant the world’s attention. However, the Ferghana Valley recently has come to the world’s notice for an entirely different reason, namely, as a major source of instability now extending over more than two decades. It is true that the Ferghana region was always prone to disasters. A powerful earthquake and resulting floods in the seventeenth century forced Namangan and other cities to move, while a powerful earthquake in 1920 obliterated scores of settlements, killing thousands. But beginning in late Soviet times, the main source of instability became social and cultural conflict, not geology.

Even before the USSR imploded, violence erupted between forcibly resettled Meskhetian Turks and their neighbors in several Ferghana cities in 1989. Then, in 1990 ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz fought bitterly in Osh, Kyrgyzstan’s second largest city, situated at the eastern entrance to the valley. In 1992 the Uzbek city of Namangan witnessed an outbreak of religious-based violence that presaged the founding of the radical Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. In 1999 a Tajik colonel, Mahmud Khudoiberdiev, took control of large areas of the Tajik sector of the valley in an attempt to oust President Emomali Rakhmonov. That same year, and again in 2000, bands of Muslim extremists intent on moving into the valley as a whole invaded the Kyrgyz province of Batken, on the valley’s south side adjoining Tajikistan. Later, on March 18, 2005, demonstrators took over the governor’s offices in Jalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan. President Askar Akaev had just been pushed from office, and the Jalalabad events figured centrally in what later became known as Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution. Only two months later, on May 13, 2005, heavily armed religious extremists attacked city offices and a maximum security prison in the nearby Uzbek city of Andijan, taking and killing scores of hostages and giving rise to reprisals from government forces that left large numbers of people dead.

The Kyrgyz sector of the valley once more exploded in conflict in April 2010, this time in the wake of a coup in Bishkek against the corrupt rule of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, an ethnic Kyrgyz from the country’s south, specifically Ferghana. Impoverished locals, stirred up by Bakiyev holdouts, lashed out in frustration at the steady decline of their region’s fortunes since the demise of the USSR, with Kyrgyz killing up to a thousand Uzbeks and the latter responding in kind.

Individually and collectively, these and other incidents have given rise to the notion that the Ferghana Valley is fundamentally unstable. The image is one of a zone of crisis, with a generalized state of turmoil lying just beneath the surface which can at any time burst into the light of day. An ample literature on the Ferghana Valley has emerged, much of it the product of freshly coined experts who have read ten articles in order to write the eleventh. Most of these writings can be characterized as “catastrophizing,” in that they regard the various explosions of instability as intimately linked with one another causally and arising from supposedly age-old ethnic hostilities across the Ferghana territory. Thus, one study speaks of the valley as an ethnic tinderbox that somehow must be “calmed,”¹ while many others, accepting this hypothesis, confidently trace the source of all recent conflicts to specific governmental policies.²

Such speculations—and they are only that—have in common a failure to consider these various incidents in any kind of broader context. Admittedly this is no simple matter, for to do so demands an understanding of very diverse aspects of human activity, including economics, social relations, politics, culture, religion, and a myriad of sub-elements within each of these spheres. This in turn calls for an array of skills that cannot be found in any one analyst or scholar, or even a small group of them. Only a team of social scientists, historians, and linguists could sketch for us the full context of Ferghana life in a manner that would enable us better to understand not only worrisome past events but also future developments, be they positive or negative. Equally important, such a three-dimensional picture of the Ferghana Valley might help policymakers, business leaders, and members of the active public to appreciate the area’s full potential and design programs and policies that will allow the region to flower while minimizing existing forces of instability.

To this end, the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute undertook to assemble such a group of scholars. The initiative for this ambitious undertaking came from Dr. Pulat Shozimov of the Tajik Academy of Sciences in Dushanbe, and Dr. Inomjon Bobokulov of the University of World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent. Both were Fellows at the Institute in Washington. In the spring of 2005 they asked the Central Asia–Caucasus Institute to mount the project, and for me to serve as general editor, to which I eagerly consented. From the outset, Drs. Shozimov and Bobokulov conceived the “Ferghana Project” as a regional undertaking, involving scholars from all three Ferghana countries. Accordingly, they added to their directorate Dr. Baktybek Beshimov, then provost at the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, and subsequently a distinguished member of the Kyrgyz Parliament. All three had conducted previous research on the Ferghana region in their respective disciplines. Thus was born the Ferghana Project.

The first task was to map out the parameters of a three-dimensional study of the Ferghana Valley. Members of the core group at once agreed that it would be essential to view the region over time, from its early history to the present. A second axiom to which all assented was that the study must embrace not just the obvious fields of politics, economics and religion, but also ethnography, sociology, and culture. The Ferghana Project’s third underlying principle was that it had to include the insights of leading scholars from all three Ferghana countries. The idea was for each scholar to focus on his or her own national territory within the Ferghana region, while also offering insights on the whole.

But how to do this? One approach would have been to commission parallel essays for each chapter heading. But besides rendering the book unreadable, such an approach would have implied greater degrees of disagreement throughout than may in fact exist. Worse, it would have robbed participating scholars of the possibility of comparing their various insights, identifying common elements, and of appreciating legitimate differences where they exist. A better alternative soon presented itself. We decided to commission three “national” essays for each topic, and then designate a “principal author” who would combine and synthesize the various contributions into a single chapter for publication. These “principal authors” would work with the “contributing authors” to assure that all national territories were adequately covered, while also faithfully identifying areas of agreement and disagreement. In the end, however, the published chapters would be the work of the principal authors alone. To assure overall balance, it was agreed that we would impose a rough balance in the number of principal authors from each country.

Two chapters presented a special challenge: Chapter 4 on the delineation of borders during the Soviet period and Chapter 11 on water. These topics are of such great political sensitivity that it was agreed that the principal authors should be drawn from outside the Ferghana countries. In both cases the final choice was obvious. Not only is Dr. Sergey Abashin of the Institute of Ethnography and Anthropology in Moscow an expert on the historical archives in which records pertaining to the delineation of borders are preserved, he also could bring to bear his deep understanding of Soviet policymaking in the 1920s and 1930s. Regarding Ferghana water issues, Dr. Christine Bichsel’s recent dissertation for the University of Bern, Switzerland, came immediately to attention, as did her about-to-be-published major monograph on the subject. Each of these principal authors has benefited from the research of the national contributing authors.

This, then, is the process that informed the preparation of this book. Note that it involved the close collaboration of no fewer than twenty-seven scholars from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic, and one each from the Russian Federation, Switzerland, and the United States. Drafting involved constant and intense interchange among contributing authors, between contributing authors and principal authors, among principal authors, and between principal authors and the four editors. This culminated in a two-day conference in Almaty in August 2008. Had the goal of the Ferghana Project merely been to produce a series of unconnected essays, such close collaboration would have been unnecessary. But the editors and authors aspired to an overall synthesis that simultaneously would be respectful of legitimate differences of fact and interpretation wherever they exist. Considering the number of contentious issues the three Ferghana countries must address as they coexist in the great valley, the Ferghana Project stands as a noble model of collaboration and mutual respect.

As work on the project got underway, the authors immediately faced a perplexing question: what is reality? As is normal in human affairs, the same situation can give rise to very different answers. Thus, to take one example, mention was made of the bloody political and religious conflict that exploded in the Uzbek city of Namangan in 1992. This culminated in a frontal confrontation between a band of militants and newly independent Uzbekistan’s new president Islam Karimov. Some argue that this had been the work mainly of a former Soviet Army soldier named Jumabai Khojiyev (nom de guerre, “Namangani”), and did not reflect the local public’s sentiments. Others argue to the contrary, and assert that such tensions still simmer just beneath the surface of daily life.

Today there are some 400 madrassas in the Namangan district, but the area is peaceful. At the same time, the city boasts of modern foreign enterprises including Nestle, Tip Top, and others from the Netherlands, Turkey, and Oman. The priests of three churches maintain cordial links with local Muslim leaders at the Khuja Amin Kabri Mosque. When evening falls, young couples sip juice or locally made cognac at open-air restaurants, the women fashionably adorned in stylish scarves that expose their necks. Back in their family homes, elders still prefer to use the more formal plural “you” as a mark of politeness, reflecting the region’s traditional civility.

Which of these images represents the “true” Namangan? In the end, the authors concluded that their task is not to choose between alternative perspectives, each of which may reflect different elements of reality, but rather to present all aspects of the picture, accurately and fairly.

This affirmation has important corollaries. For one, it required that the insights of many disciplines be brought to bear on one and the same situation. The reader will therefore notice that many important subjects appear in more than one chapter, often in quite different lights. Another corollary is that it was important to identify a few fundamental questions that would be addressed again and again throughout the book. In the end, the authors framed nine such questions, each of which will be outlined here.

First, the Project has asked what parts of the valley’s long past are relevant to the present. This question lends itself to both simple and complex answers. One might argue, for example, that the collapse of the USSR and subsequent division of the valley into national sovereignties largely shaped what we see today. Or that the last decades of Soviet rule so fundamentally transformed the region that everything that came before was merely a preparation. Does not the forced-march (forty-day) construction of the enormous Ferghana Canal and the unbounded expansion of cotton culture thereafter dwarf all that came before it, and go far toward defining the present? Or maybe the watershed occurred with the delineation of Soviet borders in 1924, which produced a map with all the madcap complexity of a jigsaw puzzle? Yet soon we find ourselves immersed in much earlier events: the brief Turkestan autonomous republic, the tsarist imperial era, the age of the Kokand Khanate . . . or clear back to dim antiquity, recalling how Stalin countered Hitler’s boastful claims about Neanderthal Man with his own Ferghana Man. The appearance of those fossil fragments in Ferghana earned their discoverer, a Jew, the Stalin Prize!

Second, the Project has sought to determine whether the Ferghana Valley is in some sense a center—or is it merely a peripheral zone to other centers? This question, too, can be approached in many ways. One might cite the many great trading centers and capitals that once existed there: Kasansai near the Qaratogh Mountains in the east; Ershi near Batken; Babur’s birthplace at Aksikent; Andijan in the post-Mongol period; the emirate controlled from Kokand; Novyi Margilan (now Ferghana City) in the tsarist era; and Khujand through the centuries. Surely, one might argue, these suggest that Ferghana’s being a central place in politics and economics was long the rule, not the exception. And yet a more present-minded observer might stress the opposite, that the inevitable consequence of the establishment of Soviet national republics was to subordinate all three parts of the Ferghana Valley to distant power centers and to marginalize it.

Third, is there in some sense a “Ferghana” history and culture, and if so what is the role of localism within the Ferghana Valley? The case for localism is strong. Most men wear black caps called do’ppi, whose design signifies their town of origin. Most Valley residents live within an hour of where they were born, each region prepares the traditional rice and lamb dish in a distinctive manner, and local accents are strong. Going back in time, one encounters the high-wheeled Kokand wagons, distinctive local pottery types, and even special designs stamped in the center of loaves of bread.

Against this is a welter of Ferghana-wide customs. Ferghanans lustily sing a capella at weddings and teahouses (chaikhanas), and the Tajiks and Uzbeks share a common instrumental tradition in their variant of the classical shashmakom. Unlike their neighbors, they endlessly concoct askiya, short poems rich with word play and double meanings on such immortal themes as politics, food, gossip, sex, and the good life. Which of these trends—regional or local—is waxing and which waning?

And what meaning does this evolution have for the valley as a whole?

Fourth, what is the interplay between isolation and contact in the life of Ferghana, past and present? One scarcely has to look to find examples of Ferghana’s rich involvement with the outer world. As early as the eighth century the region’s greatest thinker lived within a few meters of the Silk Road as it passed through the center of Margilan. For centuries, artisans in Aksikent fashioned razor-sharp sabers for the immense Chinese market, while other locals surpassed most of China in their silk exports to the West. The cars rolling off the Korean-American assembly line in Andijan are today’s equivalent. And, when the pious elders of Kokand built their new Friday mosque in the eighteenth century, to do so they hauled ninety huge wooden columns all the way from India.

In this connection it is also worth noting that the population of the Ferghana Valley has always been in flux. Waves of migrants have swept in from every direction, including not only Turkic and Iranian peoples but also Russians and other Slavs, Armenians, Germans, and Crimean Tatars. More recently, male laborers from the valley have left to find work elsewhere, whether in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, or the Persian Gulf states.

But such examples must be balanced against inescapable signs of inward-looking withdrawal. How else could the local population withstand onslaughts from abroad, whether from Alexander the Great, who supped on chicken and bread (murgh va nan) in Margilan and found a wife in Khujand, or Russian and then Soviet conquerors, or the goods that flood in from China today?

Fifth, what has been role of religion and of secularism in the Ferghana Valley— and what is that role today? On this crucial subject no less than four alternative narratives compete with one another. One holds that the Ferghana region always has been a land of religious diversity and hence, of necessity, one of tolerance. Until the twelfth century one could find Zoroastrian temples, Buddhist stupas, Syrian Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and Muslim mosques in close proximity to one another in most

Ferghana cities. In the early twenty-first century, governments still defend this pluralism as the norm. That concept competes with the notion of Ferghana as part of the Muslim heartland, the land where the worldly Hanafi school of Sunni jurisprudence was codified, then spread to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and on to India.³

Yet another notion stresses the role of secular education in the valley, and in particular the so-called Jadid tradition of the early twentieth century. While the Jadids were themselves pious Muslims, many of the reforms they advocated fed into the Soviet policy of secularism until 1992. And finally one must speak of Muslim fundamentalism, which appeared under tsarist rule and rose to prominence in recent years, with its venomous hostility not only to secularism but to more orthodox traditions of Sunni Islam. An important challenge facing our scholars was to determine how these various strains interact and what the sources of their respective strengths are today.

Sixth, one must ask whether change in the Ferghana Valley characteristically has been driven from within or without, and what prevails in this regard today? Closely related to several of the questions posed above, this demands that we consider different levels of culture. Clearly many changes, from the introduction of sericulture to cell phones to the Olympic tennis center in Andijan, have come from without. Indeed, all the religions that flourished there, with the exception of ancient local deities and Zoroastrianism, came from without as well, as did the transformations wrought by Russian and Soviet rule. But the Ferghana Valley is not a cultural blank slate on which any outsider can write at will. We are obliged to weigh the importance of local responses in many spheres. Specifically, this requires that we consider not only the manner in which foreign ways have been adopted in the valley but also the process by which they have been reworked and adapted by the forces of local culture to meet local circumstances.

Seventh, have tensions in recent decades arisen from stagnation or from too rapid change? The very process of framing this question poses an intellectual challenge. Surely, one may object, it is possible for each of these seeming opposites to arise out of the other. Is this not precisely what occurred through the process of collectivization after 1929, when age-old patterns of local life were ruthlessly uprooted, but as a result of which whole extended families or local communities moved smoothly into the collective farms, thus transforming them from agents of revolution into breeding-grounds of social stagnation? This possibility creates one of the most elusive questions before us, yet also one of the most important.

Eighth, has the Ferghana Valley characteristically been “over-governed” or “under-governed”— and what is the balance today? This issue, too, calls for fresh thinking from the outset. In all three of the countries that meet in the Ferghana Valley it is customary to speak of authoritarian rule. But the habit of governments imposing decisions from the top down does not necessarily mean that the affected region is over-governed. On the contrary, pretenses of authoritarian rule may coexist with a situation in which decisions are implemented poorly at the community level, or not at all. This in turn raises important questions about the actual interplay over the years between centralized administration and local civic initiatives.

Moreover, both pre- and post-colonial elites in the three distant capitals may be preoccupied with issues far removed from the realities of daily life in the Ferghana Valley. This can lead to a steady breakdown of services, even as the claims of a nominally strong government increase. Such a hypothesis may at first seem highly speculative. But the rise of such figures as the late Ahmadjon Adilov (Odilov in Uzbek), who in late Soviet times ran a virtual state within the state in large parts of the Ferghana Valley, forces us to consider that possibility seriously.

Finally, what is the balance between centripetal and centrifugal forces across the expanse of the Ferghana Valley, that is, between the forces of coordination and un-coordination, integration and disintegration? This is an absolutely central issue, not merely for the Ferghana Valley but for all three of the states that rule there. To a significant degree, developments in the Ferghana Valley not only affect but do much to define the polities of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and frame the terms in which leaders in Tashkent, Dushanbe, and Bishkek address their countries’ various challenges. For this reason, the task of correctly describing the interplay between integration and disintegration both within the Ferghana Valley and in the three new sovereign states assumes particular importance in our enquiry.

These, then, are nine of the key questions to which the authors of this volume sought answers. Taken together, the questions all pertain to issues of identity. What does it mean to be a citizen of Batken, Khujand, or Ferghana City? Is this compatible with being a citizen of the Ferghana Valley as a whole? And how does that identity, if it even exists, relate to the emerging national identities of the three post-colonial states that are still gradually emerging from the demise of the Soviet Union? Our distinguished scholars mulled these questions both individually and collectively, through numerous conversations, e-mail exchanges, sub-group meetings, and at our overall editorial meeting held in Almaty in August 2008. As they considered them, the authors also bore in mind comparable situations elsewhere in the world, both present and past.

Whenever twenty-seven experts come together, one can expect at least twenty-seven perspectives to emerge, if not many more. When they are drawn from three such different countries as comprise the Ferghana Valley, these divergent points of view will be all the more evident. Throughout the volume that follows, such differences have been respectfully acknowledged, and indeed have been treated as alternative sources of insight. In the end, the scholarly values of open-mindedness, genuine curiosity, rigor, and fairness led to more common ground than anyone might have expected at the outset. In the course of the Ferghana Project far more bridges were constructed than demolished.

If the reader finds himself or herself drawn into these debates, and if that reader is moved beyond clichés and stereotypes to embrace some of the universal questions posed by the life-story of this beautiful, complex, vexed, but in the end promising region, the twenty-seven authors will rest contented with their work. All of us have come to realize that to understand the Ferghana Valley is to begin to understand Central Asia itself.

S. Frederick Starr, Ph.D., is the founding chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center, and a Distinguished Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council. He co-founded the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and served as Vice-President of Tulane University and President of Oberlin College and of the Aspen Institute. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Nazarbayev University in Astana and of ADA University in Baku. His research on the countries of Greater Central Asia and Russia has resulted in twenty-two books and 200 published articles. He is the author of Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age, translated into twenty languages, and The Genius of Their Age: Ibn Sina, Biruni, and the Lost Enlightenment, published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

Notes

1. Council on Foreign Relations and Century Foundation, Calming the Ferghana Valley: Development and Dialogue in the Heart of Central Asia, Preventive Action Reports, Vol. 4, New York, 1999.

2. The literature on the 2005 Andijan events largely applies this hypothesis. See Saving Its Secrets: Government Repression in Andijan, Human Rights Watch, New York, 2005; and International Crisis Group, The Andijan Uprising, Asia Briefing no. 38, Brussels and Washington, DC, 2005.

3. The key figure in this development was Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani, 1152–1197 and his seminal code, Al Hidayah (The Guidance).