Professor, Doctor of Sociological Sciences Ovezdurdy Mukhammetberdiev teaches at the Department of International Relations and Diplomacy of the Institute of International Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan. One can envy future Turkmen diplomats who have the opportunity to communicate with a recognized luminary of the humanitarian disciplines, owner of a sharp mind and broadest erudition. A man of diverse academic interests and truly encyclopedic knowledge, he entered the history of Turkmen national science as one of the first professional sociologists.
Having a basic university education in mathematics, the young scientist almost half a century ago became interested in sociology, conducted hundreds of specialized studies, many of which were truly revolutionary in the then academic environment of the country. The professor’s friends and favorite students know that his hobbies are not limited to science. They speak with admiration of his enduring, selfless interest in music, literature, painting. Having reached the grandmaster milestone of his own 75th birthday, Ovezdurdy has not lost his inquisitiveness of thought and inclination to an unconventional scientific approach. This article is the best evidence of this. Congratulating our regular author Professor Mukhammetberdiev on his jubilee, the editors of the international magazine “Turkmenistan” look forward to continued cooperation.

Turkmen people have presented themselves and the world with a unique, unparalleled artistic product of practical use – an original carpet. However, as rich as the palette of this handmade product, which is comparable to a real miracle, there are quite modest attempts to understand it in a broader (both applied and special) context and, above all, in the socio-philosophical one. In other words, one can state that there is a certain gap between the social interpretation of this obvious phenomenon and the very fact of its real existence.
To bridge this gap, it is necessary to try a new approach – a philosophical one. The essence of such an approach is based on the assumption that if being determines consciousness, then the latter, in turn, likens the former (i.e. being) to itself, reconstructs it in its own way, in its own image and likeness in accordance with the complex of ideas and concepts that it (consciousness) has at a given time and makes its content. Taking this assumption into account, one can mentally reconstruct the course of reasoning (of course, adjusted for the the greater possibilities of expressing thoughts in language) of the ancestors of the Turkmens at the dawn of their carpet weaving.
I will take the liberty to suggest that our ancestors, being under the overwhelming supremacy of the desert, thought in the following way. There is a desert space all around, the sands of the Karakum desert are a certain infinity, a hard-to-cross continent, a path leading into the unknown. Accordingly, the environment, the natural context, and, more broadly the existence perhaps prompted them to reason as follows: we must reckon with the harsh reality that is beyond our control. It has power over us, and we, being in it, are dependent on it, on this endless desert. But if such is the reality surrounding us, then is it possible to reverse the relation “we are in the environment” to the opposite one, i.e. “the environment (desert) is in us (in our head, in our consciousness)? And if this is feasible, then it (the desert) will be ours, under our control.”
And if we assume that this is exactly how our ancestors thought or something like this, then we are dealing not just with an illusion or an unfulfilled fantasy (pure subjectivity), but with a mental (ideal, spiritual) translation of the desert into human perception, which took the form (appearance) of a carpet in the head, a small “desert” as a veil (protection) from the big one.
It seems that one can see direct correspondence between the image of the desert and its imagined analogue. If the desert itself is difficult to cross, then one can easily separate from its imaginary-transformed likeness by a partition – a carpet curtain which was devised, or rather suggested by the desert. One only needs to realize this idea. In other words, one needs to weave the imaginary with hands, turning it into a carpet. It seems that this was roughly the logic of the initial subconscious actions of the ancestors of our people during the time of the emergence of carpet weaving as a unique type of applied art.
As for the genesis of the artistic and expressive side of the Turkmen carpet, namely the features of its ornament and color scheme that is built, as is known, on the variety of shades of red, then one can imagine the following picture: does not a black storm of sand in the rays of the yellow Sun give (looking with screwed up eyes) a reddish background sparse with gaps?
The “raging” streams of sand are, of course, chaotic. But man is certainly a human being. And certainty presupposes a certain harmony, orderliness of the material at his disposal. Isn’t this where the geometrization of the carpet ornament originates from?
This is, in the most general terms, another possible version of the emergence of the phenomenon named Turkmen carpet.
In addition, I would like to note that this version does not really contradict the concept according to which the territory of present-day Turkmenistan, 80 percent of which is occupied by the Karakum desert, has long been the area where the origin and formation of the Turkmen ethnos took place, and the other one that follows from it (from the first concept), according to which the Turkmens are the heirs of civilizations and cultures that existed earlier on this land.
This conclusion is self-evident when tracing and drawing a parallel between the monuments of former cultures preserved on the Turkmen land and the national culture of the modern Turkmen people. The example of the carpet is just one of them.
Afterword. I came to the above version of the genesis of the Turkmen carpet quite a long time ago, when in the late 80s and early 90s of the last century I began to study such spiritual substances as national identity and national mentality, which were directly related to the topic of my doctoral thesis. It became clear that it was impossible to explain their nature within the framework of materialistic monism, according to which consciousness (i.e. everything spiritual) was assigned a passive secondary role, determined by substance (being). My research was crowned with success when I decided to take as a basis the then not so well-known (in Soviet social science) Husserlian position on the activity of consciousness, its “meaning making” character and focus on the object. (See: Husserl E. Krisis der evropaishen Wissernschhaft die transzendentalie Phanomologia. Hamburg, 1982) Based on it, I developed my concept of national self-consciousness, the essence of which was that it (in its functional purpose) acts as a spiritual expression of self-determination of a nation, ideologically ensuring the entire course of its progressive development, and that it is inseparable from the transformation of the national community from a pre-subject (the nation “in itself”) into a genuine subject (the nation “for itself”) and invariably accompanies it from beginning to end throughout the entire life cycle of the nation.
The idea of drawing a parallel between the Karakum desert and the peculiarities of the national mentality of the Turkmen people, and at the same time formulating the question of the genesis of the unique carpet created by them was inspired by the thoughts of the great Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, who, discussing “the landscape of the Russian soul,” noted that “…the Russian soul resembles the landscape of the land on which it was formed: the same immensity… aspiration to the infinite.” Based on this statement by Berdyaev, I came to the conclusion that the same can be said about the Turkmens, whose habitat and formation as an ethnos was the wide, boundless Karakum desert, which influenced both their mentality and national art, including the emergence of the carpet.