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The comparative study of three memorial narratives on the faction struggles among the body of Bukhara’s ulemas during the colonial period allows us to reconstruct the role of the systems of personal protection in the transmission, during the early 1920s, of a memory of Transoxiana’s pre-Soviet past. The strength of the traditional didactical genres of Central Asian Persian literature, characterized by an unprecedented expansion of normative biography and autobiography from 1917 onwards, instils into these narratives a peculiar logic, borrowed from the classical genres of maq?m?t and tazgkira. In the same time, these sources reveal the political content of the systems of personal protection (hg im?ya) and male affinities ( asgabiyya-s) which fulfill historiography in the territories of Islam. These texts show in particular the decisive role of the Manghit emirs of Bukhara in the very shaping of the faction struggles peculiar to the body of the ulemas in the context of Russian domination. Far from the requirements of a metatext penetrated with the reference to the gest of the Prophet Muhammad and his struggle against the pagans of Mecca, the urban factions which develop in the world of Bukhara’s madrasas between the 1860s and the 1920s appear as fluctuant entities, with close and complex mutual relations. These characteristics bring us far from the stereotypes of colonial literature on trans-historical “clan struggles” with immutable outlines; they put the political fact back in the centre of learned sociability in Transoxiana, during the decisive period which preceded the seizure of power by the Soviets.