"Evading Reality" treats the great ideological/political struggle embroiling
literate Central Asia during the early 20th century. One of the region's leading
cultural intellectuals, cAbdalrauf Fitrat (1886-1938), in his Bukharan and
Turkistan homeland, for over two decades fought against the restrictive notions
of arch-conservative Muslim hierarchies as well as the rigid dogmatism of
communists. This study translates and analyzes three (one in two versions) of
Mr. Fitrat's key writings composed in the second stage of this war of ideas. The
early 1920s, already a period of state thought control, obliged him to evade the
ostracism of authorities by speaking out both deceptively and disarmingly at one
time. In the