Jadidisms

Although it is impossible to date the beginning of Jadidism in Central Asia with any precision, by the end of the century poetry in praise of the theater and gimnaziia gave way to expressions of profound dissatisfaction with the current state of Central Asian society and passionate appeals for change. In its broad outline and its emphasis on elementary education, this new critique was inspired by similar currents of opinion among emergent cultural elites in other Muslim regions of the Russian empire. The term "Jadidism" came from the new (i.e., phonetic) method (usul-i jadid ) of teaching the Arabic alphabet pioneered by Gasprinskii in the Crimea in the 1880s. Gasprinskii traveled widely among the Muslim communities of European Russia (he visited Central Asia twice) spreading his message. In addition to the reform of the maktab, he advocated the acquisition of modern knowledge, the creation of new civic institutions, and the improvement in the position of women in Muslim society.^[26] From 1883 on, he single-handedly published the newspaper Terjü-

[24] "Raport Redaktora Turkestanskoi tuzemnoi gazety N. Ostroumova," 12 March 1910, TsGARUz, f. 1009, d. 150, l. 63.

[25] A small portion of this correspondence IS conserved m Ostroumov's personal archive (TsGARUz, f. 1009). When Gasprinskii died in 1914, TWG joined the Muslim press in mourning him; the obituary (TWG , 25 September 1914) was written by Mir Muhsin Shermuhammadov, and Ostroumov added an appreciation of his own.

[26] With work m the relevant archives not possible until very recently, the basic source on Gasprinskii's life remains the biography written by a disciple: Cafer Seydahmet, Gaspi-rail Ismail Bey (Istanbul, 1934); for a study of Gasprinskii's reform program, see Edward J. Lazzerini, "Ismail Bey Gasprinskii and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1973); and Lazzerini, "Ismail Bey Gasprinskii. (Gaspirali): The Discourse of Modernism and the Russians," in Edward Allworth, ed., Tatars of the Crimea: Their Struggle for Survival (Durham, N.C., 1988).

man to propagate his ideas.^[27] After an indifferent beginning, the new method became widespread among the Tatar populations of the Crimea and the Volga-Urals region. This success was linked to the emergence, after the middle of the nineteenth century, of an urban mercantile middle class among the Volga Tatars, who, living in the heartland of the empire, were directly affected by the escalating economic change in European Russia. The last half-century of the old regime saw an explosion of publishing activity among the Volga Tatars; modern schooling also become widespread and new genres of literary production emerged. Similar phenomena also developed in Muslim Transcaucasia.^[28]

The Russian conquest put Central Asia at the margins of the debates that accompanied the rise of Jadidism among those groups. As early as 1885, Terjüman had zoo readers in Turkestan,^[29] and it figures prominently in the intellectual biographies of every prominent Central Asian Jadid. Gasprinskii himself was held in the highest esteem by Central Asian Jadids, many of whom were acquainted with him personally. Similarly, Jadid schools used Tatar textbooks until (and sometimes even after) local editions became available, and after 1905, the Tatar press served as the model for its Central Asian counterpart. In addition, some Muslims from other parts of the Russian empire came to Central Asia to teach in new-method schools. However, to assert that Jadidism in Central Asia arose simply as a result of Tatar influence or that it remained a pale reflection of a better organized movement in European Russia is inaccurate.

The view of Tatars as the prime movers of Jadid reform in Central Asia comes from two mutually antagonistic sources. On the one hand, it is rooted in the fears and suspicions of Russian officialdom of the period. Russian officials in Turkestan were always suspicious of Tatar influence,

[27] On Terjüman , see Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse , 37-42; Edward J. Lazzerini, "Ismail Bey Gasprinskii's Perevodchik/Terciiman : A Clarion of Modernism," in H. B. Paksoy, ed., Central Astan Monuments (Istanbul, 1992).

[28] Dzh. Validov, Ocherk istorii obrazovannosti i literatury tatar (Moscow, 1923; reprint ed., Oxford, 1986); Abdullah Battal Taymas, Kazan Turkleri , 3rd ed. (Ankara, 1988), chs. 11-14; Azade-Ayse Rorlich, The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience (Stanford, 1986), chs. 6-9; S. Hakan Kirimli, National Movements and National Identity among the Crimean Tatars (1905-1916 ) (Leiden, 1996); Alan W. Fisher, The Crimean Tatars (Stanford, 1978), ch. 10; Huseyin Baykara, Azerbaycanda Yenilesme Hareketi: XIX. Yuzyil (Ankara, 1966); Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905-1920: The Shaping of National ldentity in a Muslim Community (Cambridge, 1985); Audrey L. Altstadt, The Azerbaijam Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule (Stanford, 1992), esp. ch. 4.

[29] Z. Radzhabov, Iz istorii obshchestvenno-politicheskoi mysli tadzhikskogo naroda vo vtoroi polovine XIX i v nachale XX vv . (Stalinabad, 1957), 387.

pernicious by definition, over their new wards. Kaufman had early attempted to minimize such influence by attempting to ban Tatar printed books from his domain; lack of success in such attempts only strengthened the suspicions. Ostroumov complained to Gasprinskii in 1900: "I cannot, of course, determine the course of history, but I always regret that in three and a half centuries Tatars have remained aloof from the Russians and ... pass along their aloofness to other inorodtsy of the Muslim faith."^[30] Similar sentiments are legion in official correspondence from the period. Scholars, both Soviet and Western, have tended to accept this official view as an accurate reflection of a reality that was far more complex.^[31] This picture of Tatar influence also fit well with the self-image of many Tatars, who saw themselves as the natural leaders of the Muslim community in the Russian empire. It was their mission to awaken Central Asia to the cause of reform, and many took for granted that they would be able to dictate the terms of this awakening. Ultimately, however, Tatars wrote for a Tatar audience, in which Central Asians occupied a marginal place, and as their responses indicate, Central Asian Jadids were fully aware of this fact.^[32]

Professions by later émigré historians of a common bond against the Russians need not hide from view the ambivalence of Tatar opinion about Central Asia. On the one hand, the region exercised a fascination for many Tatar intellectuals, who saw it as the cradle of Turkic civilization, and in the years before the revolution, Nurshirvan Yavushev and Zeki Velidi (Togan) traveled to Central Asia for scholarly purposes.^[33]

[30] Ostroumov to Gasprinskii, n.d. [1900], TsGARUz, f. 1009, d. 90, l. 540b.

[31] Hélène Carrère d'Encausse ("The Stirring of National Feeling," m Edward All-worth, ed., Central Asia: A Century of Russian Rule [New York, 1967], 178), for example, in speaking of the leading role of the Tatars m Turkestan, cites A.V. Piaskovskii (Revoliutsua 1905-1907 godov, v Turkestane [Moscow, 1958], 102), who in turn cites a memorandum from the military governor of Syr Darya oblast to the Department of Police expressing disapproval of the spread of pan-Turkic ideas m Turkestan through Terjüman .

[32] Perhaps the most striking evidence of this is the long essay, "Turkistands bugunke hayat" (Contemporary Life in Turkestan), serialized in the Orenburg magazine Shura in 1916 and 1917. It yeas written by Abdurrauf Muzaffer, a Tatar functionary who served for many years m Turkestan. During his stay in Tashkent, he was involved m local cultural life, primarily as a regular contributor to ST (1914-1915). The tone of the essay is purely ethnographic, explaining an exotic land and its people to a home audience; the concern with the Turkestan, lack of progress is firmly pushed to the background.

[33] Yavushev, who spent several years m Turkestan and Chinese Turkestan, wrote copiously m both the Tatar and the Central Asian Jadid press about his travels as well as the history of the areas he visited. He died in 1917; his obituary is in Hurriyat , 17 November 1917. Ahmed Zeki Velidi (1890-1970) went on to become the leader of the Bash-kit national movement during the revolution and civil war, and later, in emigration, under the surname Togan, found renown as one of the foremost Turkologists of the century.

Containing half the empire's Muslim population, Central Asia also became important to Tatar politicians who founded the All-Russian Muslim movement in 1904. For others, the desire to spread the message neatly coincided with the necessity of getting a job. Tatars (and Transcaucasian Muslims) held a competitive advantage in the field of new-method education in Central Asia. Nevertheless, Tatars formed distinct communities in Central Asia cities, with their own schools and organizations, and those visiting from European Russia found Central Asia quite alien. Traveling in 1893, Mehmed Zahir Bigiev found himself surrounded by backwardness. The students in the famed madrasas of Bukhara and Samarqand surprised him by "their complete ignorance of the world"; his guides could not answer his questions; numerous customary practices, "holdovers from paganism," contravened explicit commands of the shariat; and the position of women was "extremely pitiable." All of this Bigiev contrasted to the situation in "our Russia [bizim Rusya ]."^[34] According to a Tatar employee of the police department who traveled incognito in Ferghana in 1909 to gauge the "mood of the population" (a common exercise), Tatars had stopped interacting with the local population, which they referred to as iilek khalïq (dead people) for reasons of their political inertia.^[35] This impatience with Central Asia also led to constant criticism in the Tatar press. The Muslim press in Transcaucasia was no kinder to Central Asia. The illustrated satirical magazine Mulla Nasreddin of course spared nobody, but the Baku newspaper Iqbal also ran numerous articles harshly critical of Central Asia. A certain Muhammad Said from Transcaucasia visited new-method schools in Turkestan in 1913 and 1914 and was not impressed by what he saw. First he lectured the schoolteachers of Turkestan in the local press on the shortcomings of their schools and their methods of teaching, and then he went home and declared in Iqbal that "there is not a single genuine and selfless teacher in Turkestan."^[36] All through 1914 and 1915, Iqbal kept up a barrage of criticism of Central Asia that was harsh even by prevailing standards. If the Jadids could come in for such treatment, the rest of society could expect little mercy.

In the end, different elite strategies defined the various styles of Jadidism in the Russian empire. These various Jadidisms shared several fea-

[34] Muhammed Zahir Bigiev, Maveraiinnabrda styahat (Kazan, 1908).

[35] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 540, l. 1780b.

[36] Muhammad Said, "Adab wa tarbiya,"Ayina , 10 May 1914, 557-559; 17 May 1914, 567-568; "Imtihan masalasi," ST , 11 May 1914. The article in Iqbal prompted a response from Abdulhakim Sarimsaqov, "Izhar-i haqiqat ya bayan-i hal,"ST , 8 July 1914.

tures (the new-method school, an emphasis on education, readership of common newspapers), but their proponents faced markedly different struggles in society. Volga Tatar Jadidism was defined by the concerns of a nascent mercantile middle class facing the consequences of economic change in the center of the empire along with intense pressure from the Church, which threatened to obliterate the very existence of the Tatar community, which had already been turned into a demographic minority. Among the Crimean Tatars and the Qazaqs, reform was first championed by aristocratic elites who had been coopted into the Russian social hierarchy, many of whom had Russian educations. In Transcaucasia, Jadidism arose in a situation of conflict with neighboring non-Muslim communities that threatened to marginalize the Muslim population in an oil-based industrial economy. In Central Asia, in the new social terrain that emerged in the first generation of Russian rule, reform was articulated by a group occupying a different position in society. Although Central Asian reformers appropriated the rhetoric and methods of the Jadids of European Russia, their use of them was defined by imperatives, constraints, and possibilities peculiar to Central Asia.

Once it is located in society, Jadidism does not appear as an undifferentiated intellectual movement emanating from a well-defined center to the periphery. Instead, there were many Jadidisms in the Russian empire, each with its own concerns rooted in local social struggles. This accounts for the fruitlessness of repeated attempts at cooperation at the all-Russian level, as illustrated by the lack of success of attempts to create a common Turkic literary language (a favorite project of Gasprinskii's) or to create a fully representative political movement.