Desacralization

Concerns with morality were ubiquitous in new-method schools. Moral and ethical messages were never concealed below the surface in these readings, nor did moral education stop with such reading passages. Several textbooks published in Central Asia during this period were directly concerned with imparting purely ethical and moral advice. With names such as Adablik oghlan (The Boy Who Has Adab ) and Nasa'ih ul-atfal (Advice to Children),^[54] these textbooks harked back directly to the adab tradition of the maktab. Reading passages in these books described ideal modes of behavior and deportment. A well-mannered child "listens carefully, with all his soul, without looking to either side, to the teacher or the assistant [khalifa ] when they teach."^[55] The same text offers, as an example to be followed, the story of a little boy who is woken up by his father in the middle of the night, when the latter wakes up of thirst. The father sends the child to fetch water but falls back to sleep before his return. The child stands quietly at his father's bedside with the water until he wakes up again.^[56]

Religious instruction took up a substantial part of school time. The topics covered by the syllabus were quite traditional. The most commonly used textbook on Islam was the Hawa'ij-i diniya (Religious Requirements) by Munawwar Qari. Its three parts treated belief, ritual, and Islamic injunctions on social and commercial practices in the form of questions and answers. Children also learned to read the Qur'an according to the principles of tajwid (for which new textbooks also appeared), and they memorized passages from it, as well as learning to recite the five daily prayers. The use of mystical poetry continued and prayer was mandatory in new-method schools. School events began with the recitation of the Qur'an and the evocation of blessings on the Prophet.^[57]

[54] Muhammadjan Qari ibn Rahimjan, Adablik oghlan (Tashkent, 1912); Mominjan Muhammadjanov, Nasa'ih ul-atfal (Tashkent, 1912).

[55] Muhammadjan Qari, Adablik oghlan , 7.

[56] Ibid., 3-4.

[57] For example, the final examination for the 1912-13 school year at Abdulqadir Shakuri's school in Samarqand began with worship (salat ), invocation of blessings on the Prophet (mawlid ), recitation from the Qur'an (qiraat ) as well as of national poetry (milli she'r ), and recited supplication to God (munajat ). The religious ambiance of these schools could not be doubted, but the recitation of modern poetry was indicative of a growing concern with the community. Samarqand , 24 May 1913.

The numerous continuities with the maktab can be deceptive, though. Concerns with morality might seem little different from the kind of moral training and obedience to older men that was imparted in the maktab, but morality was now taught through specially created texts, not under threat of physical punishment. Similarly, religious tenets were conveyed to pupils not through mimetic practice but from especially designed textbooks in the vernacular; pupils were also expected to understand the meaning of the religious acts they were learning. In setting lessons aside for religion, the new-method schools began the process of marking off Islam from the rest of knowledge. In the maktab, all knowledge was sacral and tenets of Islam pervaded everything taught. In new-method schools, Islam became an object of study, knowledge of which could be acquired in the same way as all other knowledge. The Jadids thus constituted the domain of "religion," as a result of which certain practices and spaces now became exclusively "religious." Other domains of practice, by the same token, were desacralized and firmly placed in the realm of the "nonreligious."

This approach is clearly seen in the construction of "sacred history" as a field of study in new-method schools. The "tales of the Prophets" (qisas ul-anbiya ) were a respected genre in Muslim tradition, and Rabghuzi's thirteenth-century text was widely circulated throughout the Turkic world. However, the immediate inspiration for including sacred history in the curriculum came from Russian schools, which had always included sacred history in their syllabus. The Jadids sought to create a Muslim equivalent of this modern phenomenon.

All nations, whether Christians or Jews, teach the history of their religion and the lives of the prophets in their schools. Every Christian and Jewish student learns the guidance and formation of his religion and becomes acquainted with historical events. This is the cause of the growth of religious and national zeal and sentiment [ghayrat-u hammiyat-i diniya wa milliya ].
... The Europeans and [students] in the organized schools of Russia also study other religions [including] the history of Islam. A Christian student knows more about the history of Islam than a Muslim student.^[58]

Muslims students must know more a bout the origins of their religion, and

[58] Mahmud Khoja Behbudi, Mukhtasar tarikh-i Islam (Samarqand, 1909), 2.

this knowledge should be structured in the same way as in corresponding disciplines developed by Europeans. Behbudi and Fitrat published textbooks on the history of Islam, and Awlani wrote a history of the prophets, little different from the qisas genre in its content, but written in a vernacular style comprehensible to school-age children. In the process, Islam itself began to be historicized, with far-reaching consequences.

Similar assumptions underlay the Jadids' critique of the madrasa. The madrasas of Bukhara and their professors became the butt of criticism and ridicule in the press all over the Turkic world. Again, the most influential critique came from Abdurrauf Fitrat in the form of a debate between a Bukharan mudarris, in India on his way to hajj, and a European sympathetic to Islam and extremely learned in it. The European asks the Bukharan about the curriculum of Bukharan madrasas and is appalled at the list of commentaries and supercommentaries that he hears: "I didn't think I'd ever hear such nonsense [khurafat ] even in my dreams. What a waste of time the people of Bukhara are engaged in! After spending twenty-seven years of their lives in a futile place, they start teaching the same empty and meaningless subjects. But when do they study the most important subjects such as tafsir, hadith, and fiqh?"^[59] As we saw in Chapter 1, the madrasa was the site of the reproduction of a knowledge of Islam mediated through several layers of glosses and commentaries, in which the practice of commentary and interpretation was Islam. That set of practices had become a bundle of nonsense and sophistry now, since real knowledge lay in the scriptural sources of Islam. This new textual view of Islam subverted the interpretive practice that was the foundation of Bukharan madrasas and thus opened the way for a new understanding of Islam itself. The point was to acquire a "true" knowledge of the pristine textual sources of Islam, bypassing the glosses and commentaries, which now came to be seen as nothing more than centuries' worth of corruption and a source of moral and social decline.

There were other problems with the madrasa, too. For all his years spent studying Arabic grammar, Fitrat's mudarris cannot speak Arabic properly. (By using phonetic transcription of standard Bukharan [mis]-pronunciation of Arabic, Fitrat makes a point of highlighting the mudarris's poor Arabic.) The European, who has studied it through the new method, can speak Arabic fluently and corrects his interlocutor in several places. Elsewhere, madrasa teachers and students were criticized for

[59] Fitrat Bukhara'i, Munazara-yi mudarris-i bukharayi ba yak nafar-i farangi dar Hindustan dar bara-yi makatib-i jadida (Istanbul, 1911), 17.

their lack of interest in the affairs of the nation and their selfish opposition to those who had the interest of the nation at heart.^[60] Fitrat's Indian traveler finds professors having affairs with their students.^[61]

The Jadids' disdain for traditional ways of knowing Islam was rooted in this fundamental transformation of their worldview. In their desacralized universe, where all phenomena were liable to rationalist explanation, correct understanding of Islam required not insertion in a chain of authoritative masters but mastery of the textual sources of Islam in the original, now available in print. Hence the emphasis on fluency in Arabic and the acquisition of hadith, tafsir, and fiqh. In 1916, Fitrat published The Guide to Salvation , an ethico-didactic tract in which he sought the justification for all Jadid exhortations in the Qur'an itself. The text is peppered with quotations from the Qur'an in Arabic, which alone for Fitrat provide the true measure of the merit of social and individual endeavor.^[62] These new emphases denigrated the cultural possessions of the traditionally learned and were thus profoundly subversive of their authority. They also opened up access to the practice of interpretation to those outside the ranks of the madrasa-educated elites. As the seventeen-year-old Maryam tells the sextogenarian ishan who has married her, "I am educated and know religion better than you."^[63]

The Jadids may not have been "secularists," for they constantly sought justification for their arguments from Islam, but their understanding of Islam was situated squarely in a desacralized world defined by progress through history. The shariat and true Islam were entirely compatible with the needs of the age, as we saw, and could only be brought about through modern knowledge. The implementation of Islamic law was never an issue in the politics of the Muslim nation; that attitude toward the Islamization of law belongs to a later generation. At the same time, theological debate was conspicuously absent from Central Asian Jadidism. The Jadids doubtless followed the debates of other modernist Muslims, such as Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, the Islamists in the Ottoman empire, and Muhammad 'Abduh and his followers in Egypt, but we have no evidence of any local debates that went beyond the permissibility or other-

[60] M. Sh., "Mullalarimizda daraja-yi fikriya," ST , 15 January 1915.

[61] Fitrat, "Bayonoti sayyohi hindî," ed. Kholiq Mirzozoda, Sadoi Sharq , 1988, no. 6, 33.

[62] Abdurrauf Fitrat, Rahbar-i najat (Bukhara, 1915); cf. "Rohbari najot," ed. Muhabbat Jalilova, Sadot Sharq , 1991, no. 7-8, 16-59; no. 9, 8-54.

[63] Hamza, Zaharli bayot (1916), m his Tola asarlar toplami , ed. N. Karimov et al., 5 vols. (Tashkent, 1988-1989), III: 27.

wise of the new method or the theater. The Jadids' priorities tended to be the concerns of the community rather than of the faith.