Women and the Nation
A critique of the position of women in Central Asian society formed an integral part of the Jadid project. In common with modernists elsewhere in the Muslim world, the Jadids of Central Asia criticized the practice of polygyny, the poor treatment of women, and their lack of education. Again, the Jadids sought legitimacy for these criticisms from an understanding of "pure" Islam acquired through modern education, but it was the nation, not religious reform, that drove them.
A proper assessment of the place of the "women's question" in Jadid thought is made difficult by our sketchy knowledge of changes affecting urban women's lives during the tsarist period. The lot of urban women was difficult in Central Asia: In the late nineteenth century, za'ifa ("weak") and naqis ul-aql ("deficient in judgment") were common terms
[18] Hamza Hakimzada Niyazi, Yangi saadat: mi11i roman (Kokand, 1915), 21-22.
[19] M. Sukru Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York, 1995), 203-208.
[20] Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, 1992).
for "woman" in learned usage. The impact of the Russian conquest on local gender relations is difficult to gauge. As we have seen, the immediate result of the conquest was the valorization of traditional practices as hallmarks of local Muslim identity. It is likely that the need to assert respectability and propriety in the new conditions led to an increase in the seclusion of women. Several other factors tended to heighten the role of respectability as a status marker. The new wealth accumulated in the cities, which led to the marathon feasts often criticized by the Jadids, created new demand for it (it likely also made polygyny into a form of conspicuous consumption), while the appearance of legal prostitution further made respectability significant. (Most of the prostitutes counted in the census of 1897 were Central Asian; Russian and Tatar women remained a minority in the profession.)
We know even less about the Jadids' personal lives or their private attitudes toward women. Hamza married a Russian woman who converted to Islam and seems to have played a small role in Jadid activities (she was invited to the annual examinations at new-method schools).[21] We also have a photograph, although of unknown date, of Munawwar Qari with his wife, who is unveiled.[22] Our main source, therefore, are the Jadids' writings. These are marked by a great sympathy for women and a concern for bettering their position. Again, the inspiration came from Tatar and Ottoman debates. Magazines by and for women, such as Ælem-i nisvan (Women's World), edited by Gasprinskii's daughter Shafika Hanum in Bahchesaray, and Suyüm Bike , which appeared in Kazan from 1913 to 1917, had created a women's voice in the new discourses of the nation then being articulated. Veiling had disappeared among the Tatars by the turn of the century, and Tatar women in Central Asian cities were visible symbols of the change local Jadids wanted to bring about in their society; and to the extent that women had a voice in this debate, Tatar women were also agents of reform.
Women wrote poetry, of course, and in 1914 the Kokand poet Ibrahim Dawran published an anthology of verse written by women. Some of the poets included in the anthology had lived in the nineteenth cen-
[21] Hamza Hakiimzoda Niyoziy arkbivining katalogi , 2 vols. (Tashkent, 1990-1991), II:10.
[22] The photograph is reproduced m San"at , 1990, no. 12, 9. Soviet sources provide some information on individual women's lives: Islam i zbensbchiny Vostoka: istoriia i sovremennost ' (Tashkent, 1990); OSE , 1: 343-44, s.v. "Anbar Otin"; ibid., IV: 39, s.v. "Dilshod otin." See also Marianne R. Kamp. "The Otin and the Soviet School: The End of Traditional Education for Uzbek Girls," paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boston, 1996.
tury, but most were contemporaries. The anthology had a marked reformist character, with numerous poems lamenting the difficult position of women in Central Asian society, exhorting women to acquire knowledge, and calling on men to enable women to do so.[23] Women, especially Tatar women, also wrote in the press, particularly in Sada-yi Turkistan , which debated the women's question at some length. The themes as well as the mode of argument remains embedded in a nationalist discourse on women.
"In case you do not know [already], know clearly: We too are human beings and Muslims [biz insan balasi insan, musulman balasi musulmandirmiz ]," wrote a woman schoolteacher from Tashkent, "and as such we need, and have the right to, education." Similarly, Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada of Bukhara wrote in an article entitled, "Women's Rights": "Women are the mothers of all humanity: Prophets, messengers, kings, scholars, writers, and poets are all children of these esteemed mothers." Therefore, he argued, citing the Qur'an, Islam had accorded equal rights ("apart from a few partial exceptions") to them. "But we leave them without education, we marry off fourteen-year-old girls to old men of sixty or seventy for money, and we lock women up in dungeonlike houses as if they were thieves. Is this justice? Is this equality? Is this the condition of women who are the lights of civilization [madaniyat chiraghi ]?"[24]
All these themes appear in Jadid literature and theater. In Abdullah Awlani's comedy, Is It Easy to Be a Lawyer ?, the only sympathetic character is a woman who comes seeking divorce from her abusive husband. Dawran-bek, the Russian-trained lawyer who is Awlani's protagonist, is agitated:
O cruel civilization! When will you take root among us Turkestanis? When will you liberate us from this dungeon of ignorance? Until we start domestic education and enlighten our women, such terrible things will continue in our midst. Instead of being married to a man of her own choice, one she had seen and wanted, she was given off, like an animal . . . to a cruel man. The whole life of this innocent has passed in suffering, sorrow, and distress. . .. Now to abolish such terrible things from our midst, we must expend all our might in the way of educating our women and acquainting them with knowledge and civilization [maarif wa madaniyat ].[25]
[23] Ibrahim Dawran, Ash'ar-i niswan (Kokand, 1914). I have not been able to locate a copy of this book, but it is discussed (with extensive quotations) by Tokhtamurod Jalolov, Ozbek shoiralari, 3 rd ed. (Tashkent, 1890), 125-173.
[24] Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada, "Huquq-i niswan: musawat," ST , 12 November 1914.
[25] Abdulla Awloniy, Advokatlik oson mi (1916), in Toshkent tongi , ed. Begali Qosimov (Tashkent, 1979), 312-313.
Haji Muin's play, The Oppressed Woman , describes the evils of polygyny. Ozaqbay is a rich merchant contemplating taking a new wife: "New wives bring back a man's lust and make his mouth water. Now I too have to take a fourteen-year-old for a wife and enjoy life. This [present] wife of mine has borne three or four children and is approaching thirty. There's no joy left in life with her." He is egged on in his thoughts by Ishan Baba, a man who has performed the hajj seven times and appears on stage with a long string of prayer beads. A new-method teacher, on the other hand, tries unsuccessfully to dissuade Ozaqbay. Polygyny is permissible, he argues, only if the husband can treat all his wives justly and equally, which is never possible in practice. Ozaqbay's present wife, Tunsuq Ay, is a devoted mother and a loving wife who insists that their fourteen-year-old son attend a new-method school. She is devastated by the news that Ozaqbay is contemplating taking a new wife, but her feelings are of as little consequence as the imprecations of the teacher, and Ozaqbay, on the strength of his wealth, finds himself an eighteen-year-old wife. But the new wife, Suyar Ay, spells disaster from the beginning. After six months of this menage, Suyar Ay accuses Tunsuq Ay of theft; Ozaqbay believes the allegation and in a fit of anger begins beating his first wife. The play ends in tragedy: Ozaqbay discovers the error of his ways ("I didn't take a second wife, I took on a calamity"), but Tunsuq Ay is already mortally ill and dies in the last scene.[26]
The biggest cause of Jadid concern, however, was the fact that women were denied education. Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada's argument that women's right to knowledge was granted by Islam itself was repeated again and again by other writers and accompanied by exhortations to men to educate women.[27] Not only were women being denied a right granted by Islam itself, but doing so was bringing irreparable harm to the nation. "The progress and civilization of a nation is dependent upon the educational, moral, and intellectual progress and civilization of women,"[28] because of the crucial role of women as mothers of the next generation. "In the hands of ignorant [jahila ] mothers, the young, innocent children of the nation grow up untrained, unclean, and deprived of delicacy and morals. Full of meaningless tales and superstitions heard from the mouths of their mothers, children's brains become insensate, like roses pulled up from their
[26] Haji Muin b. Shukrullah, Mazluma khatun (Samarqand, 1916).
[27] See, e.g., Hamza, "Erlar wa qizlar laplari," in his Tola asarlar toplami , ed. N. Karimov et al., 5 vols. (Tashkent, 1988-1989), II: 31; many poems in Ash'ar-i niswan also take this view.
[28] "Khanimlar tawushi," ST , 11 July 1914.
roots. Removed from reason and reality, they incline toward unnatural suppositions."[29] The solution, of course, was education: Child rearing was a science just as engineering or accountancy, and in civilized nations, it was taught to women in schools.[30] The nation demanded changes in the status of women, and the nation's needs were to determine what the new status was to be.
The nation also demanded a strong, stable family, for that alone could provide the preconditions for progress. This was the fundamental reason behind the Jadids' opposition to polygyny. In The Oppressed Woman , the second wife disrupts the tranquillity of the family and distracts attention from the education of Ozaqbay's fourteen-year-old son. Taking child brides or very early marriage similarly made for insecure families and inadequate upbringing. The idea of the monogamous family as the bastion of the nation was introduced to Central Asia by Behbudi, who, in a long series of articles on "Family Health," expounded the latest wisdom on the matter extracted from contemporary Ottoman and Arabic manuals. Marriage was a natural instinct for human beings, but its place in society must be clearly understood. Puberty introduces thoughts and ideas that, if left unchecked, could cause great harm; therefore civilized Muslims make their children read books explaining these dangers. Semen has to be used in the right manner, for "just as it is incorrect to use it before its time, so it is to delay its use."[31] Late marriage or bachelorhood were equally harmful, and Behbudi cited statistics from France and Holland to prove that most "crimes, murders, and sins" are committed by unmarried men and women. Sex outside of marriage creates limitless disease and is, moreover, a sin. Similar, only greater, dangers lurk behind other misuses of semen and lust: adultery, pederasty, masturbation, and excessive intercourse of any kind weaken the body, deaden the brain, and make it impossible to develop one's intellectual faculties.[32] Similarly, Awlani, saw "lust [as] a valuable treasure. If used in a legal manner [surat-i mashru'a ], it becomes the alms of the body, indeed the center of life itself.... If used improperly, it represents the embezzlement of a trust... [which] destroys virtue and ruins life."[33] Fitrat wrote a full-length book, appar-
[29] Nushirvan Yavushev, "Khatun-qizlarimizga bir nazar," ST , 3 June 1914.
[30] Tashkandlik bit muallima, "Turkistan muslimalari tarfidan bir sada," ST , 20 May 1914; Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada, "Huquq-i niswan," ST , 10 December 1914.
[31] Behbudi, "Hifz-i sihhat-i aila," Ayina , 13 September 1914, 1127-1129.
[32] Behbudi, "Hifz-i sihhat-i aila," Ayina , 27 September 1914, 1172-1173; 4 October 1914, 1196-1197; 16 October 1914, 1218-1120.
[33] Awlani, Turki Gulistan , 65-66. The societal aspect is foregrounded here as well, for Awlani presents, by way of the consequences of improper use of lust, the example of "many of our youth . . . [who] fall victim to the oppressive disease of syphilis" and spend their hard-earned money (and waste their precious lives) in finding a cure.
ently no longer extant, called Family, or the Duties of Housekeeping , in which he set out to define the true Islamic (sbar'i ) manner of taking a wife, performing the ceremony of marriage, and raising children, as well as the rights and obligations of spouses as prescribed by Islam. He was especially critical of polygyny, on which he took the usual modernist position, seeing it as permissible, but only under conditions that are impossible to fulfill in normal life. Practiced in the absence of the required conditions, polygyny only caused grave moral harm.[34]
The invocation of the norms of scripturalist Islam should not blind us to the real source of this new sexual morality, which lay squarely in contemporary bourgeois Europe. Behbudi's Ottoman and Arabic sources banked heavily on contemporary European medical science and reproduced whole cloth the sexual morality that underpinned it. (Not only did Behbudi cite crime statistics from France and Holland, but he also reproduced in great detail the tale of a fifteen-year-old English boy whose addiction to masturbation could not be cured by anything other than marriage.)[35] Modernist Muslim discourses on women invoked the authority of science as quickly as they invoked that of the shariat, but their concerns were strictly circumscribed by the broader interests of the nation.
The impact of this discourse on actual social practices was minimal. Traditionalists rebutted Jadid claims about the equality of women's rights with equally authoritative verses from the Qur'an.[36] The connection of the debate with Tatar practices also had its disadvantages; and although Jadid authors could point to Tatar (and Istanbul) women as proof that the changes they advocated were the norm among other ("more civilized") Muslims, their opponents could dismiss the whole argument as one more example of the Jadids aping the Tatars, who, for many, existed at the outer limits of Muslimness. Sayyid Ahmad Wasli, a Samarqand mudarris with substantial Jadid credentials, parted company with other Jadids on this issue. He was happier publishing doggerel in honor of veiling ("The veil is a beautiful treasure for women and girls/the veil is the curtain of chastity on the face of shame and honor,"
[34] Abdurrauf Fitrat, 'A'ila. yakhud waza'if-ikhanadari (Bukhara, 1916); my discussion is based on a review by Haji Muin (in Hurriyat , 22 September 1917) and an advertisement for the book that reproduced its table of contents (Hurriyat , 28 November 1917).
[35] Behbudi, "Hifz-i sihhat-i aila," Ayina , 25 October 1914, 1241-1244.
[36] "Mozhet h zhenshchina byt' kaziem," TWG , 15 July 1912; Bir Musulman, "Zhenshchina ne ravna s muzhshchinoi," TWG , 20 Septmber 1912; "Sotrudmku gazety 'Sadai Turkestan'," TWG , 30 November 1914 (a direct response to Fathiddinzada).
and so on[37] ) than following the Tatars in their misguided ways: "[Turkestani newspapers] take inspiration directly from Tatar life and therefore alienate the people of Turkestan. For example, if a Tatar writer describes Turkestanis as polytheists [mushrik ], all local newspapers also start calling [Turkestanis] polytheists. Trying to imitate the Tatars, they are also call for letting loose our women [khatun-qizlarimiz qachmasun dedilar ]. Therefore, the number of buyers for these newspapers is small."[38] A pseudonymous author wrote in TWG that the "freedom of Tatar women is nothing more than the freedom to go around barefaced and mix with unrelated men." All his suspicions were confirmed, he stated, when a Tatar family moved in next door: "The women do not cover their faces, do not pray, and have no idea of adab or proper manners."[39]
Regardless of what Wasli insinuated, the question of unveiling was never explicitly raised in Central Asia before 1917, and Jadid attitudes on gender issues remained conservative. In 1915, Abdulwahhab Muradi, a locally resident Tatar fired off another letter to Sbura with the usual criticisms about the position of women in Turkestan and the lack of attention given to their education. No local newspaper has published anything on the issue, Muradi informed his Tatar audience, and al-Islah , far from discussing the need to educate women, has started to talk about veiling. Ignorant women in a veil only bring harm, as the author himself had witnessed at a fair in Tashkent recently, where all sorts of illicit things happened under the veil.[40] In response, Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada, who had argued for the equality of women's rights, jumped to the defense of al-Islah and Turkestan: "Sir! No Muslim journal (including al-Islah ) desires the unveiling of women, and no son of Turkestan [Turkistan balasi ] (and the editorial team at al-Islah is not exempt from this) would agree that his mother or sister should dress up her hair in the Paris fashion and promenade on boulevards in a décolleté dress."[41]