Religious and Theological Concepts of Islam in Bashkir, Uzbek and Tajik Proverbs: A Perspective from the Theory of Cultural and Linguistic Transfer

Abstract

Introduction. The article shows how Bashkir, Uzbek and Tajik proverbs reflect religious ideas of the Islamic peoples. Goals. The study examines a certain thematic group of Bashkir, Tajik and Uzbek proverbs containing religious and theological concepts to illustrate how the Muslim profession of faith yielded somewhat linguistic and cultural transfer. Materials and methods. The paper analyzes patterns contained in the authors’ proverbial database compiled via continuous sampling from a variety of dictionaries (75 publications) and survey results of different aged Bashkir, Tajik and Uzbek native speakers (20 individuals). The employed techniques rest on value criteria when it comes to select value constants, highlight some semantic condensate, and conduct comparative analyses. Results. The contrastive insights into proverbial collections of the three languages that form a sort of a triangle of interconnections (Bashkir and Uzbek — cognate languages, Tajik and Uzbek — contacting ones) are indicative of which religious and theological ideas of Islam did prove most required by the latter’s speakers, stable in relation to external influences, and would receive further axiological comprehension as ‘their own’. Conclusions. The identification of semantic dominants shows a commonality of the languages under consideration. The partial coincidence of the three paremiological clusters is explained by the cultural and linguistic transfer, when Muslim ideas penetrated into the Turkic language environment through Iran and its cultural mediation, while it is through Central Asia that the former arrived in the South Urals. All this attests to a complicated and multi-stage cultural and linguistic transfer ignited by Islam.

Keywords

• islam
• quran
• value
• religious and theological concepts
• cultural and linguistic transfer
• bashkir proverbs
• uzbek proverbs
• tajik proverbs