The First Generation

The advocacy of comprehensive modernizing cultural reform was not the "natural" outcome of Russian conquest. Indeed, the dichotomy of Russian and native served to reinforce existing cultural practices as essential markers of difference. The authority of the decorated notables rested on their status as intermediaries between Russians and natives; the clear demarcation of boundaries between the two as separate entities came to be of crucial importance to them. Cultural practices—texts, dress, food, posture, gesture—and the manner of their reproduction became the bedrock of a traditional way of life that differentiated natives from Russians, Muslims from Christians. The ultimate authority for this newly objectified tradition rested in "Islam," which was inextricable, as I have argued, from the practices surrounding its transmission. The Russians had seen in Islam the essence of Central Asia's otherness. For rather different reasons, an appeal to Islam became the source of the new elites' authority.

The notables, as intermediaries between society and the colonial regime, kept a foot in both worlds. Wealthy merchants such as Said Azimbay built houses in the new Russian cities; many ulama accepted decorations from the state, learned Russian and sometimes sent their sons to Russian educational institutions. Sattar Khan Abdulghaffar oghli (1843-1901), a qazi in Chimkent at the time of the Russian conquest of the city, exemplifies the trajectory of many such individuals. In the dislocation following the Russian conquest of the town, Sattar Khan lost his position. He made the acquaintance, however, of a Muslim officer in the Russian army, a certain Yenikeev, from whom he learned Russian. Sattar Khan became convinced of the need for Central Asians to learn Russian; for three years, between 1871 and 1874, he taught Russian in a school that he established in Chimkent. Later, in 1881, he moved to Tashkent, where he worked as a translator for various government departments, including the offices of the TWG . In Tashkent, he lived in the Russian part of town in a house furnished in the European manner and sent his sons to the gimnaziia .^[3] Muhiddin Khoja, son of the last qazi kalan of Tashkent, was decorated with the orders of St. Stanislav and St. Anna. He

[3] N. P. Ostroumov, Sarty: etnograficheskie materialy (obshchu ocherk ), 3rd ed. (Tashkent, 1908), 190-215.

remained a qazi all his life, but he learned Russian and consorted with Russian officials. Although initially opposed to it, he taught Russian to his sons, one of whom attended the gimnaziia . But Muhiddin also taught that son the usual madrasa texts at home and married him off at the age of sixteen.^[4]

The colonial regime had left the practice of Muslim law intact; it also allowed for the survival of the maktab and the madrasa. Kaufman's cultural policies stemmed from his general outlook on Islam. Properly ignored and deprived of state support, maktabs and madrasas would automatically lose their attraction for the population. The state was to be concerned with attracting the local population to Russian schools, where they would study together with Russian students. Kaufman saw as the aim of the educational system the creation of "useful citizens of Russia" regardless of religion.^[5] Since the basic aim of public education in the region "must be its development in the direction of Russian interests ... the religious convictions of the natives must remain without any encroachment and schools for natives must not have a confessional character."^[6] The state was to support only Russian schools, where Russians and natives would study together, for only such education could produce the useful citizens Kaufman foresaw. Kaufman concentrated his efforts on the Qazaqs, where education would allow "[us] to fulfill the humanitarian responsibility of drawing them into the family of civilized peoples ... [as well as] to distance them from Muslim influence that have already begun to appear among the nomads."^[7]

The local population in its turn steadfastly ignored the new institutions (see Table 4). The numbers of Muslims in Russian institutions remained minuscule, and most of this small number belonged to Tatar or Qazaq families, or were sons of the decorated notables. On the other hand, the maktab and the practices associated with it continued. Traditional Muslim education retained its prestige and its value after the conquest. To be sure, the period of conquest did prove disastrous for many madrasas, as in the confusion many waqfs were embezzled and turned into private property.^[8] Upon the conquest of Samarqand, waqfs benefit-

[4] Ibid., 121-131.

[5] Ostroumov, Konstantin Petrovich fon-Kaufman, ustroitel' Turkestanskogo krata (Tashkent, 1899), 49.

[6] S. M. Gramenitskii, Ocherk razvitiia narodnogo obrazovamia v Turkestanskom krae (Tashkent, 1896), 4-5.

[7] Quoted by K. E. Bendrikov, Ocherki po tstorn narodnogo obrazovaniia v Turkestane (1865-1925 gody ) (Moscow, 1960), 64.

[8] N. S. Lykoshin, Pol zhizni v Turkestane (Petrograd, 1916), 68.

ing properties located in Bukhara were confiscated while the amir of Bukhara refused to allow muitawallis ("trustees") from madrasas in the conquered territories to collect revenues in his domains.^[9] According to the 1886 legislation, endowed populated lands passed into the possession of those who worked them, while the status of other kinds of waqf property had to be verified and confirmed by the local uezd administration.^[10] New waqfs could be established only with the permission of the governor-general himself, and waqf property was subject to local taxes.^[11] This process proceeded with the usual glacial speed, and many claims were rejected on technicalities.^[12] Despite such difficulties, though, the cultural authority of madrasas and the knowledge to be acquired in them remained intact and young men continued to consider spending several years in residence a worthwhile experience. According to some reports, the numbers of madrasas actually increased after the conquest, especially when the introduction of cotton through the 1890s increased the income of their waqfs manifold.^[13] During this period, the madrasas of

[9] N.A. Maev, "Dzhizak i Samarkand," Materialy dlia statistiki Turkestanskogo krata , 2 (1874): 271; Beliavskii, Matertaly po Turkestanu (n.p., n.d. [St. Petersburg, 1884]), 60.

[10] Polozhenie obupravlenii Turkestanskogo krata (St. Petersburg, 1886), §§ 265, 267.

[11] Ibid., § 266.

[12] V.P. Nalivkin, "Polozhenie vakufnogo dela v Turkestanskom krae do, posle ego zavoevaniia," Ezhegoduik Ferganskoi oblasti , 3 (1904): 1-56.

[13] This prosperity was, however, relative. According to Ostroumov, the combined waqf income of the thirty-seven madrasas in the city of Kokand was "not more than 50,000 rubles" on the eve of the First World War (N. P. Ostroumov, Vvedenie v kur's is-lamovedeniia [Tashkent, 1914], 183). Similarly, the waqf income of madrasas in Andijan city totaled 34,955 rubles in 1908 (A. Sharafiddinov, "XIX asr okhiri-XX asr boshlarida Farghona oblastida madaniy hayot tarikhidan," Obshchestvennye nauki v Uzbekistane , 1978, no. 2, 27). In contrast, in 1908, the Tashkent men's gimnazna alone had an annual budget of 73,913 rubles (although tuition fees accounted for 21,512 rubles): K.K. Palen, Otchet po revizii Turkestanskogo krata, proizvedennot po Vysochaishemu poveleniiu Senatorom Gofmeistorom grafom K. K. Palenom , 19 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1910), VI: 153.

Kokand were especially densely populated and attracted students even from Bukhara. New madrasas were founded after the conquest: Of the fifty-eight madrasas in existence in Samarqand oblast in the years 1892-1893, no fewer than ten had been founded since the conquest, and thirty-six in the nineteenth century.^[14]

The earliest commentaries on the changed fortunes of Central Asia came in traditional genres. The feeling of a world turned upside down expressed in these lines by Zakirjan Furqat 1858-1909), the popular Kokand poet, was widely shared in the literary milieu of the first generation after the conquest:

Ah! The commonfolk are honored, the learned wretched
The unwise hold their heads high, and the wise are trampled underfoot And the exalted have become lowly, and the lowly exalted.^[15]

Chronicles by disaffected court officials such as Ahmad Makhdum Danish and Abdulaziz Sami in Bukhara continued to cast the narrative of the decline of Muslim fortunes in Central Asia in the same framework well after the turn of the century.^[16] Many poets, however, went beyond such laments and used verse to describe, with praise or satire, many of the new phenomena they witnessed. Much of this poetry appeared in the TWG , which, along with its longtime editor N. P. Ostroumov, played a central (if seemingly paradoxical) role in the articulation of new voices.

Historians have tended to dismiss the TWG all too hastily. In the influential opinion of Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, "Despite the considerably important role of Muslims in its publication, it [TWG ] was conservative, [and] very hostile to all manifestations of Jadidism.... Edited by Russians, [it] cannot be considered a true 'Muslim' newspaper."^[17] A closer look shows that the newspaper's

[14] V.P. Nalivkin, "Svedeniia o sostoianii medrese Samarkandskoi oblasti v 1892/93 uchebnom godu" (ms., ca. 1894), TsGARUz, f. 455, d. 1, l. 20b.

[15] Quoted in A. Abdughafurov, Zokirjon Furqat: hayoti wa ijodi (Tashkent, 1977), 20.

[16] Ahmad Makhdum Danish, Traktat Akhmada Donisha "Istoriia Mangytskoi dinastii ," ed. and trans. I.A. Nadzhafova (Dushanbe, 1967 [ms. ca. 1890]); Sami, Tarikh-t salatm-i manghitiyya (1906), discussed m Jo-Ann Gross, "Historical Imagination, Cultural Identity and Change: 'Abd al-'Aziz Sami's Representation of Nineteenth-Century Bukhara," m Darnel R. Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., The Russian Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples , 1700-1917 (Bloomington, 1997), 203-226.

[17] Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse et le mouvement national chez les musulmans de Russie avant 1920 (Paris, 1964), 25-27. Similarly, writers such as Baymirza Hayit (Turkistan Rusya ile Çin Arasinda , trans. Abdulkadir Sadak [Ankara, 1975], 168-170) and H. B. Paksoy (Alpamysh: Central Asian Identity under Russian Rule [Hartford, 1989], 19) see the newspaper only in the context of Ostrou-moves efforts to create a Sart language, and hence dismiss it as pernicious. For a recent defense of its place in Central Asian cultural history, see A. Jalolov and H. Ozganboev, Ozbek ma "rifatparwarlik adabiyotining taraqqiyotida waqth matbuotining orni (Tashkent, 1993), 17-59.

role was far more ambivalent. It began life in 1870 as a weekly supplement (with "Sart" and Qazaq editions alternating every week) to the Turkestanskie vedomosti printed at the newly established printing press at the military headquarters in Tashkent. In 1883, the Qazaq edition was abandoned altogether and the Sart version turned into a weekly newspaper in its own right; it became biweekly in 1908. The TWG was one of the first Turkic-language periodicals in the Russian empire, and except for two brief periods in 1906-1908 and 1913-1915, when a vernacular commercial press existed in Turkestan, it remained the only local newspaper in Central Asia in the tsarist period.

The newspaper was established by Kaufman's decree in order to "inform the populace of all manner of decrees issued by the governor-general." The first issue of the newspaper promised that "it will also include all kinds of news about trade and happenings in Tashkent and other cities."^[18] Its first editor was Shahimardan Ibrahimov, a Tatar from Oren-burg who worked as translator in the governor-general's chancellery. In its first years, the newspaper was aimed at native functionaries, whom it sought to keep abreast of the latest regulations and decrees; it also served to provide a record of Kaufman's comings and goings, and his conquests. The effect of these dreary reports (often written in convoluted prose that gave every indication of its origins in Russian bureaucratese) was lightened by the publication of tales from the Thousand and One Nights and random news bits from the Russian press. By the mid-1870s, however, the newspaper began publishing pieces by its readers, as well as "useful information" about the modern world. Useful information ranged from an account of the world's geography and the names of important states, through descriptions of hot-air balloons, railways, and telephones (as early as 1881), to instructions about the cultivation of cotton and silkworms. In 1879, when Ibrahimov went to Europe on vacation, he sent back descriptions of his travels for readers of the newspaper, thus providing the first description of Berlin in Central Asian Turkic. Readers' contributions usually recounted local affairs and scandals, but they also began to air opinions about the shortcomings of Central Asian society.

[18] TWG , 28 April 1870.

The arrival at its helm of Nikolai Petrovich Ostroumov in 1883 changed the newspaper. A student of Nikolai Il'minskii at the Kazan Spiritual Seminary, where he specialized in Arabic, Turkic languages, and Islam, Ostroumov (1846-1930) arrived in Tashkent in 1877 in the capacity of inspector of schools for Turkestan.^[19] Over time, he was to serve as director of the newly founded Turkestan Teachers' College, and then the director of the Tashkent men's gimnaziia . His education was solidly missionary, but in Turkestan, where Kaufman had prohibited proselytization by the Church, Ostroumov saw himself as an upholder of "Orthodox monarchism," using his orientalist learning to ensure the state's best interests in the region. His orientalist credentials attracted the attention of the authorities, and he soon had easy access to Kaufman and Cherniaev, who, during his brief tenure as governor-general between 1882 and 1884, appointed him editor of TWG , in which position he served until 1917. Over the years, Ostroumov became the resident expert on everything connected with local life, and the authorities routinely solicited his opinions on subjects ranging from Islamic dogma to policy concerning new-method schools; he also served as censor for books published locally. In addition, he maintained a copious correspondence with missionaries and orientalists, in Russia as well as abroad, and produced an astonishing amount of writing in a number of registers. His missionary interests are reflected in his translation of the Bible into "Chaghatay," as well as in the publication of a series of textbooks of Islamic studies. But such work was pushed to the background by his copious output on the archeology, ethnography, and history of Central Asia, which appeared in a steady succession of articles and monographs. As the epigraph to one of his books asserted, "It is necessary to study the moral constitution, the beliefs and the way of life of the Sarts in order to beneficially influence their lives."^[20]

Once understood, however, Sarts had to be enlightened, and that task Ostroumov made his own. Ostroumov's appointment as editor was part of a broader shift away from Kaufman's policies, as his successors became concerned with the local population's continued disinclination to learn Russian. The TWG was to be an instrument of the new policy of cautious enlightenment, and it was to be used much more effectively than

[19] Ostroumov's life and work have largely escaped scholarly notice; the most detailed treatment is m B.V. Lunin, Istoriografiia obshchestvennykh nauk v Uzbekistane: biobibliograficheskie ocherki (Tashkent, 1974), 259-271.

[20] Ostroumov, Sarty , epigraph.

had been the case in Ibrahimov's tenure as editor. Orientalism could enlighten orientals and do so in such a way that their interests coincided with those of autocracy. The TWG published useful information, enlightening but politically harmless, in its columns with redoubled effort. In 1891, Ostroumov made the acquaintance of the poet Furqat. At Ostroumov's invitation, Furqat visited the gimnaziia and the theater in the Russian part of Tashkent and wrote poems describing them that Ostroumov published in TWG . Ostroumov ensured that Furqat received a modest honor for his efforts.^[21] In 1891, when Furqat left Tashkent to travel through Istanbul, Greece, Bulgaria, Egypt, Arabia, and India (he eventually settled in Yarkand in Chinese Turkestan), he maintained his correspondence with Ostroumov, who continued to publish his poetry and correspondence in TWG .^[22] At the same time, Ostroumov encouraged contributions from the local population, and the TWG often hosted lively debate among its contributors. For Ostroumov, it was much better to have the natives debate matters under his watchful eye than on their own. Hence his suspicion of those—Tatars, Jadids, even other Russian officials—who encroached on his turf. Many poets and writers developed lasting personal friendships with Ostroumov, for apart from any personal charms, Ostroumov offered patronage and protection from the caprices of the bureaucracy. Others, such as the numerous Jadid writers who wrote for the TWG , although not personally beholden to him, maintained proper relations with him, for the paper he edited offered them a unique forum. The bitterest criticism of Ostroumov invariably came from Tatar writers, who were more likely to focus on his missionary background and his official position. When TWG ran a polemic against an article in the very first issue of Taraqqi in 1906, Ismail Abidi (Gabitov), its Tatar editor, bitterly denounced "this newspaper whose publisher and editor is the famous missionary Nikolai Ostroumov, while Mulla Alim [its "native" subeditor and contributor] is a writer who for several years has been selling his honor for thirty or thirty-five rubles a month."^[23] For Ostroumov, the reason for this attitude was simple: "Not having great success among the natives, progressive Tatars do not hide their dislike of the Editor of the native newspaper [TWG ], calling him a missionary in the civil sense, i.e., a Russifier, since he defended and de-

[21] A. Abdughafurov, "Zokirjon Furqat haqida yangi ma"lumotlar," in Furqat ijodiyoti (Tashkent, 1990), 34-40.

[22] Abdughafurov. Zokirjon Furqat , 44-101.

[23] Taraqqi , 5 July 1906.

fends the autonomy of the nationality and language of the natives of Turkestan from Tatar attempts to involve the Sarts in the progressive Tatar movement. The native newspaper more than once expressed distrust of such attempts and printed direct indications that the constitutions of Turkey and especially Iran will bring no good. Recent events justify this conviction of the Editor."^[24] Yet, for all this, Ostroumov maintained a long, if sporadic correspondence with Gasprinskii, who started publishing his Terjüman in the same year that Ostroumov became editor of TWG . The two editors exchanged subscriptions and invariably maintained a high level of civility both in print and in correspondence.^[25]