The title damulla, a respectful designation for a senior scholar, entered into wide use across Eurasia in the last two centuries. A browse through sources and scholarship on Central Asia in this period and one is likely to encounter a plethora of such figures. Timur Beisembiev’s indices to the Kokandi chronicles lists more than a hundred damullas.

[i] In modern Uyghur the term exists as damulla.[ii] In Kirghiz the orthographically preferred form is daamoldo даамолдо, but variants such as daamïlda даамылда, dambïlda дамбылда, and damïlda дамылда are also known.[iii] The term even made its way into Kirghiz epic, with the character of Dambïlda featuring in some versions of the Manas saga. In Uzbek, the form is domulla. Shortened to domla, it remains the standard term for “teacher” throughout schools and universities. The term also exists in Kazakh as damolda дамолда, though seems to be less common. Further afield, the title became popular in the Volga Region and can be met with in Afghanistan too.

According to Ashirbek Muminov, damulla “was used in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, first in the eastern and then also in the western part of Central Asia, to designate a teacher at a primary (maktab) or secondary Muslim educational institution (madrasa). In the Volga–Ural region, this title was used for a teacher who had received his education in Bukhara. A damulla received a generous income, enjoyed great respect, and typically founded his own madrasa and gathered students (shāgird).”[iv]

Clearly, the word consists of two elements: da- plus the familiar word for an educated Muslim, mulla. But whence this da- prefix? Writing in the 1860s, Armin Vambery seems to have been the first to offer a suggestion here, interpreting damulla as a contraction of dāyī-mullā, i.e. deriving the da- prefix from a Turkish word for “uncle,” and by extension a way of referring to any elder male. His explanation was echoed by Lazar Budagov in his comparative dictionary of the Turkic languages, published shortly thereafter.[v]

There are multiple queries one might raise about this etymology. The Anatolian Turkish dayı was also borrowed into Persian, but as far as I can tell neither language has dāyī-mullā as part of its lexicon. The Turkish dayı did not travel as far as the Central Asian Turkic languages, furthermore, and cognate kinship terms there begin with a /t/. It seems difficult, therefore, to link Turkish dayı to Central Asian damulla.

A second suggestion is provided by the largest dictionary of modern Uzbek, which sees in da- a contraction of the Hindi term dādā.[vi] But this too strikes me as unlikely. The term dādā-mullā is not attested in any source that I am aware of.

Swedish missionary Gustaf Raquette, who lived in Kashgar and Yarkand in the early twentieth century, considered the da- prefix to represent Arabic duʿā, thus giving us a word meaning “prayer-mulla.”[vii] This is linguistically plausible in an east Turkistani context. We might compare the modern Uyghur word dakhan, which derives from duʿā-kh^wān.[viii] But again, examples of the full version duʿā-mullā are lacking in the (admittedly sparce) sources, and from a semantic point of view it seems a less plausible combination than duʿā-kh^wān.

Other scholarly handlings of the term that I have come across all derive it from Chinese da 大 “large, senior.” Aurel Stein considered it a “half-Chinese designation”, and Gunnar Jarring concurred in his Eastern Turki-English Dialect Dictionary.[ix] Muminov gives the same derivation in the encyclopedia entry mentioned above, thus positing a path of transmission from eastern to western Turkistan. It is this suggestion that I wish to explore in what follows.

It has always struck me as surprising that a Chinese-inflected term might gain such popularity across Central Asia in this period. What is equally surprising is that this hypothesis of Chinese origins has received, as far as I can tell, little to no comment. If this da- here is Chinese, then we presumably must be looking at a borrowing via Xinjiang at some point during Qing rule of the region (i.e. from 1759 onwards). How well can we substantiate this hypothesis?

To explore this question, it would be helpful to know when and where the term first emerged and chart its diffusion. The earliest examples in Beisembiev’s lists date to the first decades of the nineteenth century, so the term damulla had certainly been coined by this point. By comparison, references to damullas in the eighteenth century are quite rare. The Tarikh-i Badakhshan mentions one Damulla Mufti Akhund during the reign of Sulṭan Shah in Badakhshan, in the middle of the eighteenth century.[x] It must be kept in mind, though, that the terminology of Central Asian histories and hagiographies may not necessarily reflect the way people were referred to during their lifetime, i.e. the title “damulla” may reflect the choice of a work’s author or copyist. Stories of the life of Shah Mashrab, for example, who was active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, mention one Damulla Bazar Akhund.[xi] But there is no way to be sure how this figure was known in his day.

Ideally, we would investigate this question on the basis of datable documents. I have not made a comprehensive search of such sources, but so far, references to damulla in published collections do not push the chronology back very far. Among a set of documents from the Al-Beruni Institute, for example, the earliest mention of a damulla is in a decree dated to 1810 from the Kokand Khan Alim (r. 1801-1810), appointing one Akhund Damulla Mir Fużayl to the position of qadi in Tashkent.[xii] In a catalogue of documents from the Samarkand Museum edited by Thomas Welsford and Nouryaghdi Tashev, the earliest damulla is in an IOU made out to one Damulla Muḥammad Raḥim in 1821.[xiii]

We can thus be confident that the term was circulating in western Turkistan by the end of the eighteenth century, with questions remaining as to earlier use. What about Xinjiang though? After all, if da- is indeed Chinese, then damulla would have to have originated here. Documentary sources from Xinjiang are not as readily available as they are from regions to the west. In 1994 a collection of contracts and waqf documents ranging from 1773 to 1949 was published in Chinese translation. Here, it is not until 1925 that we find the first occurrence of damulla.[xiv] Imam ʿAli Qunduzi's verse compilation of Kokandi and east Turkistani biographies, the mid-nineteenth century Tawarikh-i Manẓuma, includes a dozen or so damullas, but only one of these can be confidently identified as a native of the Tarim Basin. Qunduzi refers to this man as “Mulla ʿAbd al-Ghafur Akhund Kashghari, who was known as ‘damulla’” a phrasing that might be interpreted to imply that the title was relatively rare among such locals.[xv] Mulla Musa Sayrami’s Tarikh-i Ḥamidi (written in the first decade of the twentieth century) presents a similar picture: the only damullas mentioned here are immigrants from neighbouring Kokand.[xvi]

In official Qing sources on Xinjiang occurrences likewise few and far between. In the Manchu-language archive, I have only been able to locate two damullas so far, both of them foreigners. The earliest is Damulla Ḥafiẓ (Ma. da molo Apis), who was sent to Yarkand as an envoy from Hunza (or Kanjut, as it was known to the Qing) in 1766.[xvii] For the time being, this man would seem to be the earliest confidently dateable damulla anywhere in Central Asia—a striking fact in and of itself. The second is a man who served as envoy from Kokand to Kashgar in 1791 and 1800, Damulla Muḥammad Salim (Ma. da molo Maimaselim).[xviii] In Chinese-language sources one anonymous “Damulla” (Ch. Damoluo 大莫洛) is listed among Kirghiz in the Uchturfan region who received imperial rewards for their support in repelling the 1847 revolt of the Seven Khojas.[xix]

Of course, the absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence. The sphere of Islamic learning in the oasis towns of Xinjiang was in large part beyond the ken of Qing officialdom. By the end of the nineteenth century, the term was well established in this sphere. The Russian Mikhail Pevtsov (1843-1902), who travelled through the Tarim Basin in 1889-90, observed that “All educational institutions in each district are supervised by a damulla—an inspector of these schools.”[xx] But clearly, the sources cited here do little to support a hypothesis that damulla first emerged in an environment of Chinese influence and travelled westward.

If we widen the lens, the connection to China gains a degree of plausibility. One point of comparison presents itself from Tibetan Buddhism, where Da Lama (Tib. ta bla-ma) was both an honorific and in some circumstances an official position. In 1685, for example, the Kangxi emperor granted the Ilagugsan Khutugtu, a key intermediary in Qing relations with the Junghars, the title jasaqtu da lama.[xxi] The title formed part of the administration of Tibet during the Qing. Luciano Petech defines it as “half-Chinese title, granted to the mk‘an-drun c‘e-ba [the senior member of the Dalai Lama's ecclesiastical council—DB] and to other high ecclesiastic dignitaries.”[xxii] In Mongolian (da lam-a, да[а] лам), the term indicated the abbot of a monastery.[xxiii] But the fact remains that there is no evidence of the use of damulla as a Qing title to compare to the use of da lama.

What about other words that accrue a da- prefix? Chinese-language sources on Xinjiang yield several instances of da ahun 大阿渾, or da ahong 大阿訇, but this may simply be a Chinese source’s way of referring to someone who was a “chief akhund” (elsewhere, for example, we find the Manchu amba ahun to refer to such figures).[xxiv] In the late 1940s, during the period of the East Turkistan Republic, there was an influential figure by the name of ʿAbd al-Maqṣum Da Akhund in Ghulja, but this example seems isolated.[xxv]

A slightly more suggestive case involves the term da khoja. I have come across only one occurrence of this term, but it is one worthy of mention. In 1784, a series of Turkic-language letters turned up in Kashgar, ostensibly sent by the exiled Khoja Samsaq, son of Khoja Burhan al-Din. The discovery of these letters triggered a political scandal in Kashgar, and they were sent to Beijing with accompanying Manchu translations. One of these letters contains the following line, referring to the execution of Samsaq’s father Burhan al-Din and his uncle Khoja Jahan in Badakhshan in 1759:

maḫfī qalmağaykim ikki Dā Ḫ^wajam daraja-i šahādat tapğanlarïdïn beri[xxvi]

“May it not be concealed that since the two Da Khojas attained the rank of martyrdom…”

For the sake of comparison, another letter in this cache renders this phrase slightly differently:

maḫfī qalmağay kim ḥażrat ikki qiblagāhimni sagī Sulṭān Šāh daraja-i šahādatkä yetküzüp[xxvii]

“May it not be concealed that the dog Sulṭan Shah [of Badakhshan—DB] raised their eminences, my two sources of guidance, to the rank of martyrdom…”

Clearly, da khoja is a term of respect for the two White Mountain khoja brothers, who sought to rule Kashgar and Yarkand in the late 1750s before being evicted by the final Qing invasion of the Tarim Basin in 1759. The semantic function of da thus seems close to that of Chinese da大 (the Manchu translators of this letter rendered da khoja as amba hojom, i.e. “great khoja”), but it remains hard to directly link the two. It may be worth noting that Khoja Burhan al-Din, as the elder of the two White Mountain brothers, was known in Chinese as Da Hezhuo 大和卓 (Ma. Amba Hojom, i.e. “Elder Khoja”). Samsaq spent his life outside Xinjiang, but it is not impossible that ongoing contacts with allies in Kashgar led his circle of peripatetic exiles to pick up and reinterpret this Chinese nomenclature as a general term of respect for khojas, as per the usage above. But this is already speculative, and it would even more speculative to imagine this borrowing in turn generating a productive da- suffix that gives us damulla—a term, we must remember, that was in use in Hunza by the 1760s. The opposite may well be the case, i.e. that this letter’s da khoja represents an extrapolation from a still-to-be-explained damulla, which we know was coming into fashion in the territories in which Samsaq resided.

In short, any strong evidence that the word damulla represents a Sino-Arabic amalgam is thin to non-existent, and the precise origins of the term remain something of a mystery. On the weight of evidence, my provisional conclusion here would have to be that the term most likely originated somewhere outside Xinjiang and was gradually imported to Qing territory in the course of the nineteenth century. That a term of obscure provenance quickly became a prestige title borne by the leading scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Central Asia is a surprising fact that still requires explanation.

(With thanks to Devin DeWeese for reading an earlier draft of this piece. He is of course in no way responsible for the author’s interpretations).

[i] T. K. Beisembiev, Annotated Indices to the Kokand Chronicles (Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2008), 200-209.

[ii] Abliz Yaqub, Ghänizat Ghäyurani, and Äkbär Eli, eds. Uyghur tilining izahliq lughiti (Beijing: Millätlär näshriyati, 1991), 3:29.

[iii] K. K. Iudakhin, Kirgizsko-Russkii slovar’ v dvukh knigakh, okolo 40,000 slov (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1985), 179, 183.

[iv] Ashirbek Muminov, “Damulla,” in Islam na territorii byvshei Rossiiskoi imperii: entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. Stanislav M. Prozorov (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 2006), 1:125.

[v] Ármin Vámbéry, Ćagataische sprachstudien, enthaltend grammatikalischen umriss, chrestomathie, und wörterbuch der ćagataischen (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1867), 288; Lazar’ Zakharovich Budagov, Sravnitel’nyi slovar’ turetskotatarskikh nariechii (Saint Petersburg: Tip. Imperaterskoi Akademii nauk, 1869-71), 550.

[vi] E. Begmatov, et al., eds. O’zbek tilining izohli lug’ati (Tashkent: O‘zbekiston Respublikasi Fanlar Akademiyasi, Alisher Navoiy nomidagi Til va Adabiyot Instituti, 2006), 642.

[vii] G. Raquette, English-Turki Dictionary: Based on the Dialects of Yarkand (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1927), 103.

[viii] Yaqub, Ghäyurani, and Eli, Uyghur tilining izahliq lughiti, 3:5.

[ix] Aurel Stein, Innermost Asia: Detailed Report of Explorations in Central Asia, Kan-su and Eastern Iran, Carried Out and Described Under the Orders of H.M. Indian Government (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1928), 2:787; Gunnar Jarring, An Eastern Turki-English Dialect Dictionary (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1964), 80.

[x] A. N. Boldyrev, ed. Ta’rikh-i Badakhshan: faksimile rukopisi, izdanie teksta, perevod s persidskogo (Moscow: Vostochnaia literatura, 1997), 44.

[xi] N. S. Lykoshin, Divana-i-Mashrab: Zhizneopisanie populiarneishego predstavietelia mistitsizma v Turkestanskom krae (Samarkand: Samarkandskii oblastnii statisticheskii komitet, 1915), 9.

[xii] A. Urunbaev, G. Dzhuraeva, and S. Gulomov, Katalog sredneaziatskikh zhalovannykh gramot iz fonda Instituta vostokovedeniia im. Abu Raikhana Beruni Akademii nauk Respubliki Uzbekistan (Halle: Orientwissenschaftliches Zentrum der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 2007), 67, doc. 121.

[xiii] T. Welsford, and N. Tashev, A Catalogue of Arabic-Script Documents from the Samarqand Museum (Samarqand: IICAS, 2012), 72, doc. 58.

[xiv] Wang Shouli 王守礼, and Li Jinxin 李进新, Xinjiang Weiwuerzu qiyue wenshu ziliao xuanbian 新疆维吾尔族契约文书资料选编(Ürümchi: Xinjiang shehui kexueyuan zongjiaosuo, 1994), 72.

[xv] Imam ʿAli Qari Qunduzi, Tavarikh-i Manẓuma (IVAN RT 204), f.380b.

[xvi] Musa Sayrami, The Tarikh-i Ḥamidi: A Late-Qing Uyghur History, trans. Eric Schluessel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023), 236, 331.

[xvii] First Historical Archives, Beijing (FHA) 04-02-001-000047-0060, memorial from Elgingge dated QL31/4/21.

[xviii] FHA 03-18-009-000140-0005 court letter dated QL46/10/19; 03-0196-3611-013, memorial from Fujun dated JQ5/r4/22.

[xix] Guan Shouxin 管守新, ed. Qingdai shangyudang: Xinjiang ziliao jilu 清代上谕档·新疆资料辑录 (Ürümchi: Xinjiang Daxue chubanshe, 2022), 3:665, decree dated DG27/12/18 (23 January 1848).

[xx] M. V. Pevtsov, Puteshestvie po Vostochnomu Turkestanu, Kun-Luniu, severnoi okraine Tibetskogo nagor’ia i Chzhungarii v 1889-m i 1890-m godakh (Saint Petersburg: M. Stasiulevich, 1895), 183.

[xxi]Qing shilu KX24/4/9 (11 May 1685).

[xxii] Luciano Petech, Aristocracy and Government in Tibet (Rome: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1973), 8, 236.

[xxiii] Ferdinand Lessing, ed. Mongolian-English Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 211. Lessing sees here the Manchu noun da “leader, chief” (Jerry Norman, A Comprehensive Manchu-English Dictionary [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013], 63). I am more inclined to interpret it as Chinese. When Manchu da refers to a head of a collective, it is usually in the form X-i da, e.g. hūdai da “chief merchant”)

[xxiv] For examples of da ahun大阿渾, see Qing shilu entries for DG7/4/19 (14 May, 1827), DG11/1/27 (11 March 1831). For amba ahun, see e.g. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan 中国第一历史档案馆, and Zhongguo bianjiang shidi yanjiu zhongxin 中国边疆史地研究中心, eds. Qingdai Xinjiang Manwen dang’an huibian 清代新疆满文档案汇编 (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2012), 34:351, memorial from Šuhede, QL23/11/18.

[xxv] David Brophy, et al., eds. A Decade in Sino-Soviet Diplomacy: The Diaries of Liu Zerong 1940-49 Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 840.

[xxvi] FHA 03-0190-3010-009.

[xxvii] FHA 03-0190-3010-014.