Musa Sayrami

Mulla Musa Sayrami (; ; 1836–1917) was a historian from Xinjiang, known for his account of the events in that region in the 19th century, in particular the Dungan Rebellion of 1864–1877. While the ethnonym Uyghurs, with its modern meaning, was not yet used in Musa Sayrami's day, The place should not be confused with the larger city of the same name in Kazakhstan. In his youth he was sent to Kuqa to study at the madrassah of Mulla Osman Akhund. He became a close friend of one of his classmates, named Mahmudin (Muḥammad al-Dīn), a son of Burhān al-Dīn Khoja, an important member of the Khoja clan. Musa later referred to Mahmudin as "Khojam Padishah".

After the people of Uqturpan overthrew the Khojas in 1867, Musa Sayrami escorted the arrested Khojas to the headquarters of the new ruler of the region, Yaqub Beg. He then found a place for himself in Yaqub Beg's government apparatus, where he served under Mirza Baba Beg, the zakatchi (chief revenue officer) in Aksu. which he completed in 1903.

Tārīkh-i amniyya and Tārīkh-i ḥamīdi Tārīkh-i amniyya ("History of Peace") was written in the Chagatai language—the old literary language of Central Asia, which can be thought of as an ancestral form of today's Uyghur and Uzbek languages. According to modern scholars, the Chagatai of Musa Sayrami's manuscripts had been influenced by "modern" Uyghur language (i.e., the vernacular of Sayrami's own era). (Pantusov had apparently a special interest in the history of the region; he had earlier published a Russian translation of another work on the same topic, Mullā Bilāl's Ghazāt dar mulk-i Chín ("Holy War in China"), originally written in 1876. )

A modern Uyghur translation was published in Urumqi in 1988 as Tärikhi äminiyä.

Tārīkh-i ḥamīdi (History of Ḥamid) is a revised version of Tārīkh-i amniyya, completed in 1908. A modern Uyghur translation by Enver Baytur was published in Beijing in 1986. An English translation by Eric Schluessel has been published by Columbia University Press.

Modern assessment

In the view of the modern expert on the period's history, Kim Hodong, Sayrami is "one of the best historians that Central Asia has ever produced", and his books are the most important locally produced source on the Dungan Rebellion and the Yaqub Beg regime.

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