The Jadids of Central Asia

In calling for society to reform itself, the Jadids of Turkestan set themselves up against the social order that had emerged in the generation after the Russian conquest. The Jadids most commonly called themselves ziyalilar (intellectuals) or taraqqiparwarlar (progressives). The term most often used by others in society was yashlar (the youth). The label usul-i jadidchilar or jadidchilar (proponents of the new method) was actually less frequently used, although it has acquired standard usage in scholarship. The emergence of the Jadids also created, largely as a residual category, their opponents, who came to be called usul-i qadimchilar , or qadimchilar (the proponents of the old method). The debate over reform had turned quotidian cultural practices into objectified traditions. But

the emphasis on the conflict of ideas implicit in these labels does not help us in locating the Jadids on the new social map, even though their place in society was to be of fundamental importance to their project.

The task of locating the Jadids in their society is not easy. Although the lives of the Jadids are chronologically not very distant, they can be extremely difficult to reconstruct. They were born in a society in which written documents did not mark a person's progress through life (although some of them developed a mania for documenting their lives), and few accumulated private papers. Even the concrete remains of their lives perished against the twin assaults of Stalinist repression and urban development. No plaques mark places where the Jadids lived and worked, for most have not survived; the few "house-museums" that exist have undergone so many changes that they fail to evoke the lives of their former occupants. Often the most basic details of their biographies are difficult to establish with any certainty. Nevertheless, as the following survey shows, it is possible to trace the basic outlines of a collective biography.

Behbudi remained the most respected Jadid in Central Asia down to the revolution. In Samarqand he found support from a number of active colleagues and disciples. His circles included Abdulqadir Shakuri, Ajzi, and Haji Muin. Shakuri's (1875-1943) father was an imam, and his mother ran a maktab for girls.^[37] He studied at the Arifjan-bay madrasa in Samarqand and taught children according to the old method in his village of Rajabamin on the outskirts of the city. Then he came in contact with Gasprinskii's Terjüman at a Tatar friend's shop and became a devotee of the new method.^[38] He opened one of the first new-method schools in his village and in time published three textbooks for use in such schools. He traveled to Kazan in 1909 and to Istanbul in 1912 to observe at first hand the workings of modern Muslim educational institutions.^[39] Sayyid Ahmad Siddiqi (1864-1927), who wrote under the pen name "Ajzi," was born in a family of modest means. Orphaned early, he was apprenticed to a watchmaker and worked for several years in this craft before going to Bukhara to attend a madrasa.^[40] He dropped out after two or three years and worked at various jobs, including a stint as a

[37] Wadud Mahmudî, "Muallim Abduqodir Shakurî," Sadoi Sharq , 1990, no. 8, 5.

[38] M. Fattaev, Vidnye pedagogi Samarkanda (Samarqand, 1961), 5-6; Mahmudî, "Muallim Abduqodir Shakurî," 7.

[39] Mahmudî, "Muallim Abduqodir Shakuriî," 22.

[40] Muhammadjon Shukurov, "Zindaginomai Ajzî," Sadoi Sharq , 1992, no. 2, 123-124.

scribe for the qazi of Khatirchi.^[41] Like all Jadids from Samarqand, Ajzi was perfectly bilingual in Persian and Turkic, and at about this time, he learned Russian from personal friends (two Russians and a Qazaq). Ajzi had inherited a parcel of land from his father, which he sold in 1901 to go on the hajj. He traveled in Turkey, Egypt, and Arabia (where he worked as a translator at the Russian consulate in Jeddah) for two years. On the way back, he visited Moscow and St. Petersburg before returning to Turkestan through the Caucasus. In Baku, he made the personal acquaintance of leading Transcaucasian Jadids. As for Behbudi, this trip acquainted Ajzi with contemporary intellectual life in other Muslim countries, and upon his return he opened a new-method school in his village.^[42] Ajzi was also active in publishing and started the Zarafshan Bookstore in Samarqand in 1914. He was an accomplished poet who contributed frequently to TWG as well as Behbudi's Ayina , but his biggest contribution to Jadid reform was two long poems in Persian (both later translated into Turkic), Anjuman-i arwah (The Gathering of Souls) and Mir'at-i ibrat (The Mirror of Admonition), which came to be the standard Jadid indictment of Turkestani society. Haji Muin ibn Shukrullah (1883-1942) was born in the family of a shopkeeper but orphaned at the age of twelve and brought up by his grandfather, whom he accompanied on hajj in. his youth. He established a maktab in Samarqand, which he switched to the new method in 1903. Over the next decade, he published a primer and poetry, in addition to being a regular contributor to both the Central Asian and Tatar press and translating between Turkic and Persian. After the success of Behbudi's first play in 1914, Haji Muin diverted his energies to writing plays for the stage and produced several pieces, of which three were published.^[43]

Tashkent was the largest center of Jadid activities. Its publishing trade was the largest, and its new-method schools most numerous in Turkestan. Munawwar Qari Abdurrashid Khan oghli (1878-1931) was in many ways Behbudi's counterpart there. Also born in a family of cultural accomplishment (his father and two elder brothers were mudarrises), Munawwar Qari attended the Yunus Khan madrasa in Tashkent before spending some time at a madrasa in Bukhara. He returned to

[41] Ibid., 124.

[42] Ibid., 125-126; Fattaev, Vidnye pedagogi , 20-21; see also Begali Qosimov, "Shoir khotirasini izlab," Sharq yulduzi , 1989, no. 10, 178-184; Shuhrat Rizaev, "Khalqdin yorliq istarman ...," Guliston , 1990, no. 8, 9-10.

[43] R. Muqimov, "Hoji Mum kim edi?" Muloqot , 1994, no. 5-6, 27.

Tashkent in 1901 and opened a new-method school. We know little about his personal motivation, although one author has recently hinted at the significance of his friendship with a Crimean Tatar.^[44] This school eventually became the largest and the most organized new-method school in all of Turkestan. Munawwar Qari also wrote numerous textbooks, ran a bookselling and publishing business, was instrumental in publishing at least two newspapers, and also became involved with theater after 1914. He was at the center of a gap , or a discussion circle, in Tashkent that provided the focus for Jadid activity in the city.^[45] Munawwar Qari's friends, disciples, and acquaintances included practically everybody involved in reform in Central Asia.

One of his closest comrades was Abdullah Awlani (1878-1934), whose father was allegedly a weaver^[46] but whose family was prosperous enough for Awlani to own a house in Tashkent, which he converted into a new-method school. In his youth, Awlani had attended both the maktab and madrasa. In his own words, around the age of fourteen, "I began reading Terjüman and became aware of the world."^[47] In 1908, he published the short-lived newspapers Shuhrat and Azya , subsequently authored several textbooks and collections of poetry (often for classroom use), and organized a reading room in Tashkent. He, too, was involved in publishing and was partner, along with ten other Tashkent Jadids, in the Maktab publishing company floated in 1914. After 1914, Awlani also wrote a number of plays for the theater, with which he was involved also as actor, director, and manager, founding Turkestan's first regular theater troupe in 1916.^[48]

In Ferghana, with its cotton-boom economy and many small towns, Jadid circles were more numerous and dispersed. One of the first advo-

[44] Sirojiddin Ahmad, "Munawwar qori," Sharq yulduzi , 1992, no. 5, 107.

[45] GARF, f. 102, op. 244 (1914), d. 74, ch. 84B, l. 71.

[46] This information comes from Awlani's own account of his life, written in 1933, when the need to find such proletarian origins was quite pressing; see Abdulla Awloniy, "Tarjimai holim," in Toshkent tongs, ed. B. Qosimov (Tashkent, 1979), 373-374. Despite Awlani's prominent position in the official pantheon, details of his life are sketchy, as existing biographies tend to focus on the period after 1917. See A. Bobokhonov and M. Mahsumov, Abdulla Awloniyning pedagogik faoliyati wa ta" lim-tarbiya toghrisidagi fikrlari (Tashkent, 1966); Abdulla Abdurazzakov, "Pedagogicheskoe nasledie uzbekskogo prosvetitelia Abdully Avloni" (Candidate's diss., Tashkent, 1979); U. Dolimov, "Abdulla Awloniy—atoqli metodist olim," in Milliy uyghonish wa ozbek filologiyasi masalalari (Tashkent, 1993), 40-50; and OSE , I, 14-15, s.v. "Abdulla Awloniy."

[47] Quoted by Bobokhonov and Mahsumov, Abdulla Awloniyning pedagogik faoliyati , 32-33.

[48] T.T. Tursunov, Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsiia i uzbekskii teatr (Tashkent, 1983),10-12.

cates of reform in the region was Ishaq Khan Tora Junaydullah oghli (1862-1937), who began writing in TWG in the 1890s. Like Behbudi, he came from a well-to-do family and likewise possessed madrasa knowledge (he had attended madrasa in Kokand and was qazi in his native village of Tora Qurghan). He had traveled in Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and Chinese Turkestan for five years between 1887 and 1892. Upon his return home, he went into the publishing trade, which he used to publish his own work, including such useful books as a six-language lexicon and a compendium of scripts used all over the world. In 1908, he purchased a printing press, which he devoted largely to propagating the message of reform.^[49] By that time, new-method schools were widespread in Ferghana, and their teachers provided a substantial core for Jadidism. Again, many came from the older cultural elite. Ashurali Zahiri (1885-1942?), a prominent contributor to the press and author of the first guide to the orthography of Central Asian Turkic, had attended madrasas in Kokand and Bukhara.^[50] But perhaps the most active proponent of reform in Ferghana was Hamza Hakimzada Niyazi (1889-1929), whose background and activities encapsulated many characteristics of Central Asian Jadidism.

Hamza's father had studied in Bukhara and was one of the most renowned apothecaries of Kokand. He also wrote poetry and mingled with the literary elite of Kokand. He had traveled extensively in Chinese Turkestan and India, which is evidence of a certain prosperity.^[51] Hamza's education was traditional: After the maktab, he spent seven years in a madrasa in Kokand. Hamza wrote poetry in Persian and corresponded with his father only in Arabic. But by 1907, he began reading Vaqït and Terjüman , and, as he later recalled, "I began to think about old superstitions, about [reform] of the madrasas, changes in the people's life, civilization, and society."^[52] He had started working as a scribe in the office of Abidjan Mahmudov,^[53] but in 1910 he went to Bukhara to perfect his Arabic. He arrived, however, just as riots broke out in the city, and in-

[49] O. Usmon, Ozbekistonda rus tilining ilk targhibotchilari (Tashkent, 1962), 40; Aziz Bobokhonov, Ozbek matbaasi tarikhidan (Tashkent, 1979), 112-113; Ulughbek Dolimov, Ishoqkhon Ibrat (Tashkent, 1994).

[50] Iuldash Abdullaev, Ocherki po metodike obucheniia gramore v uzbekskoi shkole (Tashkent, 1966), 147.

[51] Siddiq Rajabov, "Ozbek pedagoik fikrining asoschisi," Ozbek tili wa adabryoti , 1989, no. 5, 15.

[52] Hamza, "Tarjimai hol," in Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziy, Tola asarlar toplami , ed. N. Karimov et al., 5 vols. (Tashkent, 1988-1989), IV: 293.

[53] Personal document in Hamza, Tola asarlar toplami , V: 185.

stead he worked in a printing press in Kagan and returned by way of Tashkent.^[54] It was during this visit that he first saw a new-method school. He also made the acquaintance of a number of Jadids in that city. Upon his return to Kokand, Hamza opened his own school and began teaching. At some point during this period, Hamza had learned Russian (perhaps at a Russo-native school).^[55] In 1912, he married a Russian woman who converted to Islam. Almost immediately afterward, Hamza left, via Afghanistan and India, for hajj. He also visited Syria and Istanbul before returning through Odessa and Transcaspia to Kokand.^[56] Over the next five years, Hamza opened a number of schools in various cities of Ferghana, although some of them do not seem to have lasted very long. He also wrote a number of textbooks and primers for his use, although none was published. Other works did get published: articles in the Jadid press, several volumes of "national" poetry, a piece of fiction that may be considered the first attempt to write a novel in Central Asia, and several plays. Hamza was also involved in publishing and bookselling, a benevolent society (it does not seem to have had a very successful career), and a theater troupe. We have practically no information about Hamza's private life and only the sketchiest knowledge of his financial situation. Teaching seems to have been an economic necessity as much as a passion for Hamza, but he could also look for support from wealthy friends. He had worked for Abidjan Mahmudov in 1908, and when Mahmudov brought out the newspaper Sada-yi Farghana in 1914, Hamza wrote for it. His friends also included merchants such as Mir Zahid Mir Aqil oghli of Kokand and Said Nasir Mir Jalilov of Turkestan, both of whom helped him out with loans in times of need.^[57]

Hamza's roots were firmly in the tradition of Muslim knowledge reproduced in the madrasa, and he could utilize all the resources available to a well-connected man in cultivated society.^[58] Indeed, the number of Jadids who emerged from the cultural elite of the pre-Russian period is striking. A number of the most prominent Jadids were ulama in their own

[54] Hamza, "Tarjimai hol," 293-294.

[55] Rajabov, "Ozbek pedagogik," 15.

[56] Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziyning arkbwining katalogi, 2 vols. (Tashkent, 1990-91), I, 305. The fact that Hamza was a haji was never brought up in his Soviet biographies.

[57] Cf. several unpublished private documents in Hamza, Tola asarlar toplami , V: 189-192; see also Ghaffor Mominov, "Hamza biografiyasining bit sahifasi," Hamza ijodi baqida (Tashkent, 1981), 140-141.

[58] This needs to be reiterated given the misrepresentation of Hamza's life in Soviet biographies. See, e.g., Laziz Qayumov, Hamza: esse (Tashkent, 1989), 17-18.

right. Behbudi and Munawwar Qari both possessed the cultural capital that came from the possession of madrasa knowledge and maintained personal relationships with noted ulama. It is important to remember, too, that the ulama were not as benighted a group as they are often portrayed. Edward Allworth, for instance, in describing the qadimcbilar as "internally governed by fixed habit and rigid tradition.... ultraconservative officials and clerics [who] could not imagine that they might benefit from the notions of these cultural-social thinkers [the Jadids],"^[59] unreflexively adopts the rhetoric of the Jadids. In practice, the lines separating the Jadids from their opponents were considerably more porous. Others active in the Jadid cause were even more closely tied to the madrasa milieu. Sayyid Ahmad Wasli (1870-1920) of Samarqand wrote copious poetry in praise of the new method but accepted an appointment as mudarris at the Hazrat-i Shah madrasa in 1915.^[60] His support for reform was more circumscribed, stopping short, as we shall see, of the embrace of theater and changes in the place of women in society. The Beglarbegi and Kokaldash madrasas in Tashkent were the center of considerable literary activity; such poets as Tawalla, Kami, Khislat, and Sidqi (all of whom appeared as champions of reform in the Jadid press) lived and wrote there.^[61] Abdullah Qadiri's early biography also reminds us of the impossibility of drawing strict boundaries between the ulama and the Jadids. Qadiri (1894-1938), who was to become the first Uzbek novelist after the revolution, came from a learned family. His maternal grandfather was a muezzin , and the poet Miskin (1880-1937) was a maternal cousin.^[62] His father was in his seventies when Abdullah was born, and the family was in dire financial straits. After the maktab, Abdullah held a number of menial jobs in succession before being hired by a merchant as a scribe. His employer put him in a Russo-native school so he could learn Russian.^[63] He spent four years in this school, after which he went to work for another merchant. He became interested in writing and published his first play in 1915. Yet, after all this involvement in Jadid reform, he went back to a madrasa in the years 1916-1917.^[64]

[59] Edward Allworth, The Modern Uzbeks: A Cultural History (Stanford, 1990), 120.

[60] Ayina , 1 June 1915, 430.

[61] Begali Qosimov, "Tawallo (1882-1939)," preface to Tawallo, Rawnaq iil-Islom , ed. Begali Qosimov (Tashkent, 1993), 4.

[62] Habibulla Qodiriy, Otam haqida (Tashkent, 1983), 5-24.

[63] Abdulla Qodiriy, "Tarjimai hol" (1926), in Kichik asarlar (Tashkent, 1969), 205.

[64] Ibid., 206.

Other ulama, in Tashkent as well as elsewhere, were involved with different versions of reform. Abdulqadir Sayyah, for instance, fits the profile of many Jadids: He traveled extensively, he was a copious author and was involved in publishing, and in 1915 he began publishing the magazine al-Islah (Reform). But he was no enthusiast of the new method of education. The reform he advocated in his magazine concerned questions of religious purity and exactitude. Although it too sought to rectify what it saw as the current perversion of Islam, it derived its authority not from the discourse of progress and knowledge but from a strengthening of the tradition itself. We know rather little about such intellectual currents in Central Asia, but it seems likely that the contributors to al-Islah formed a revivalist movement akin to that of the modernized madrasa at Deoband in India. Contacts with ulama in India had survived the Russian conquest, and by the turn of the century older patterns of travel had been reversed and many ulama now went to India to study. The modernized madrasa at Deoband received students from as far away in the Russian empire as Kazan. In 1914, there were enough students at Deoband from Bukhara and Kazan to form an association.^[65] Although al-Islah remained inimical to the main thrust of Jadidism, its pages did see some discussion of proposals to reform madrasas. One set of proposals, submitted by a mudarris from Bukhara, suggested a fifteen-year curriculum, with two subjects being taught every year. These proposals would have gone some way in turning madrasas into colleges, with the introduction of a fixed curriculum, grades, and examinations.^[66]

The distinction between such revivalist ulama and the Jadids is a crucial one, for it points to a significant characteristic of Jadidism; as such, it is well worth a short digression. A number of scholars in the West have sought to ground Jadidism in an indigenous Muslim tradition of re-

[65] "'Dar ul-ulum Deoband'dagi Rusyali Islam talabalaridan tashakkur," Ayina , 16 October 1914, 1225. During the first century of its existence (1867-1967), Deoband graduated 70 students from "Russia (including Siberia)" (Barbara D. Metcalf, Islamic Revwal in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900 [Princeton, 1982], 110-111). Although the figure of 70 students is an aggregate for the entire century, the great majority, if not all, of these students must have matriculated before 1917. To put the number of Russian Muslim students in context, ir must be remembered that the total for all students from outside South Asia was only 431 for this period. The college at Deoband was founded by reformist ulama m the late 1860s; it offered mstruction only in religious subjects, but it was organized along modern lines, with annual examinations, grades, and division into classes (ibid., ch. 3).

[66] Mudarris Sayyid Ahmad Wasli, "Himmat ur-rijal taqla' ul-jibal," al-Islah , 15 July 1915. 392-394; Wasli, "Islah-i, tadris haqinda," al-Islah , 15 September 1915, 514-516; Qari, Ziya'uddin Makhzum b. Damla Fayzurrahman Mudarris, "Insanning birinchi wazifasi wa ham maya-i sa'adat," al-Islah , 15 September 1915, 516-519.

form.^[67] Jadidism was the outcome, according to this view, of a long struggle in Bukharan madrasas to break the bonds of taqlid (obedience to canonical opinion) and for a return to the scriptural sources of Islam. This view was a corrective to Soviet-era conceptualizations of intellectual history as a battle between "enlighteners," secular, antireligious, and progressive by definitions, and upholders of various reactionary ideologies, of which Jadidism was one.^[68] By pointing to the origins in Islamic theology of the reformism of such Tatar figures as Abdunnasir Kursavi (1776-1812) and Shihabiddin Märjani (1818-1889), scholars situated Tatar intellectual history in its Muslim context.

But such a view is much more difficult to maintain with respect to Central Asian Jadidism. To be sure, much of the reformism of Kursavi and Märjani owed a great deal to their educations in the madrasas of Bukhara, but we have very little evidence to date of debates about taqlid among Bukharan ulama, and Jadidism's connection to such debates is even more problematic. The problem is usually solved by seeing the Bukharan savant Ahmad Makhdum Danish (1826-1897) as the "theoretical precursor" of the Jadids, indeed a figure so important that "few men have shaken ... traditional attitudes as deeply as he."^[69] Unfortunately, Danish's own work scarcely bears this heavy burden. Much of his work is marked by a sensibility that belongs very much to the world whose passing he mourns, rather than the brave new world that the Jadids celebrated, and his literary style aims to reproduce the golden age of Persian prose of yore. Furthermore, Danish wrote while in disgrace, and his work remained in manuscript until well after his death. Danish's influence was no doubt substantial in the literary circles of Bukhara, but his name never once appeared in a Jadid publication before the revolution. His reputation as the first of the moderns was created almost single-

[67] This is the theme of several articles by French, Uzbek, and German scholars published in "Le réformisme musulman en Asie centrale: du "primier renouveau" à la so-viétisation, 1788-1937," ed. Stéphane Dudoignon and François Georgeon, in Cahiers du monde russe 37 (1996): 7-240; for comment pertaining specifically to Central Asia, see Dudoignon, "La question scolaire à Boukhara et au Turkestan russe, du "premier renouveau" à la soviétisation (fin du XVIIIe siècle-1937)," 140-146.

[68] Edward J. Lazzerini, "The Revival of Islamic Culture in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Or, Why a Prosopography of the Tatar Ulema? " in Ch. Lemercier Quelquejay et al., eds., Passé turco-tatar, présent soviétique: études offertes à Alexandre Bennigsen (Paris, 1986), 367-372.

[69] Carfare d'Encausse, "The Stirring of National Feeling," 172; Carrère d'Encausse has made the same claim elsewhere as well (Réforme et révolution chez les musulmans de l'empire russe , 2nd ed. [Paris, 1981], 105-109), and the view has recently been repeated by Stéphane Dudoignon, "La question scolaire," 142.

handedly in the 1920s by Sadriddin Ayni, whose view has been accepted much too readily by scholars.

But there is a further, more fundamental problem with a continuity between debates over taqlid and Jadidism, for it places Jadidism in the realm of "religion" (or, to be more precise, theology) rather than in that of cultural transformation. As I will argue, theological argumentation was conspicuous by its absence in Jadid writing, even though the Jadids made use of modernist theology being produced elsewhere. The trajectory of Jadidism that I have outlined in this chapter places it in the transformations of Central Asian society wrought by the Russian conquest, as a modern "response" to modernity, which sought to reconfigure the entire world, including Islam. If there was widespread debate in Bukhara in the nineteenth century on the questions of taqlid and a return to scripturalist Islam, its inheritors were not the Jadids but the revivalist ulama who published al-Islah .

The relationship between the Jadids and the moneyed elite of Turkestan was also ambivalent. Said Karim-bay, Said Azim's son, published the newspaper Tojjar in 1907 and occasionally wrote for it, too. He was a founding member in 1909 of the first Muslim benevolent society in Tashkent, in which the prime movers were Munawwar Qari and Awlani. Said Ahmad, Said Karim-bay's son, was a partner in the Maktab Publishing Company, launched in 1914. Mirza Hakim Sarimsaqov, a textile merchant, was a collaborator of Munawwar Qari and Ubaydullah Khojaev in publishing Sada-yi Turkistan (to which he contributed) and a partner in the Turkestan Bookstore.^[70] But the most prominent merchant in Jadid ranks was Abidjan Mahmudov of Kokand, merchant of the second guild, who, in addition to his substantial business, was active in the publishing trade. In 1914, he established his own printing press and published the newspaper Sada-yi Farghana .^[71] The Jadids and the new moneyed elite were part of the same phenomenon, i.e., the transformation of the Central Asian economy under Russian rule, but the two elites had different stakes in the future. As a new cultural elite, the Jadids proceeded from the assumption that it was necessary to transform the cultural tradition they inherited in order to cope with the new conditions. The moneyed elite, on the other hand, had fared well under the new regime, and most, content to make money from the new opportunities without changing the old ways, saw no pressing need for reform.

[70] TsGARUz, f. 461, op. 1, d. 1311, l. 2420b, 255.

[71] TsGARUz, f. 19, d. 19074, ll. 14, 30-300b.

They flaunted their newly acquired status in ostentatious displays of wealth at various feasts (toys ). For the Jadids, the wealth possessed by the merchantry represented a great resource that could free the Jadids from economic constraints if used according to their priorities. But the merchants (bays ) only occasionally spent their wealth in the service of reform, especially since that reform was articulated by a marginal group of youth. As we shall see, in their literature and drama, the Jadids presented their ideal of the bay as a philanthropist patron of reform. In pressing the wealthy of their own community for help, Turkestani Jadids pointed to the example of the Tatar and Transcaucasian Muslim middle classes, who provided considerable financial assistance to their compatriots. The results were indifferent; Turkestan saw nothing comparable to the large-scale philanthropy of the Taghievs of Baku or the Hüseyinovs of Orenburg.

The Jadids came from various backgrounds. What they had in common was a commitment to change and a possession of cultural capital. This disposed them to conceive of reform in cultural terms, and the modicum of comfort that most enjoyed in their lives allowed them to devote their energies to it. In the end, the Jadids were constituted as a group by their own critical discourse. Their sense of cohesion came from their shared vision of the future as well as their participation in common activities and enterprises. The basic institution of Jadid reform was the new-method school itself. These schools were the site of the struggle for the hearts and minds of the next generation. Through them the Jadids disseminated a cognitive style quite different from that of the maktab and thus created a group in society that was receptive to their ideas. These schools were also crucial to the social reproduction of the movement. If the first new-method schools were founded single-handedly by a few dedicated individuals, by 1917 new-method schools were often staffed by their own graduates.^[72] The Jadids also enthusiastically adopted such new forms of sociability as benevolent societies. Ultimately, though, the structure of the movement was quite diffuse, with a correspondingly wide range of sensibilities and attitudes toward other groups in society as well as the state.

Munawwar Qari represented perhaps the conservative end of the Jadid spectrum. Police documents indicate that many of his closest associates

[72] See, for example, A.F. Ardashirov, "K voprosu o roli novometodnykh maktabov (po materialam Andizhanskoi oblasti)," Uchenye zapiski Andizhanskogo gospedinstituta , no. 6 (1957): 132-172.

were ulama not otherwise associated with the Jadid cause, and his writings remained, in terms of genre and content, the most traditionalist. Other Jadids were far more outspoken in their criticism of the old order and the role of the ulama in it. Indeed, it is possible to discern a second "generation" of Jadids in Turkestan by 1910. Younger, and with a less thorough grounding in the madrasa tradition, they were more impatient with the current state of their society and harsher in their tone. Abdulhamid Sulayman oghli, who wrote under the name Cholpan, began publishing in the last years before 1917. He was the scion of a wealthy family and had attended a Russo-native school after the maktab.^[73] Mirmuhsin Shermuhammadov (1895-1929) attended a new-method school in Tashkent and started writing in TWG in 1914. A prolific writer (he also contributed to other periodicals), he fearlessly took on every topic and every person, including Behbudi himself.^[74] Even Hamza, whose madrasa credentials were impeccable, was fond of harsh criticism, as in this ashula (poem set to a folk tune):

Cry, cry o Turkestan
May soulless bodies swing, cry o Turkestan
Is there a nation like ours, sunk in infamy?
Deceived into foolishness, devoid of chastity?^[75]

This powerful language contrasted to the more cautious tone of Behbudi or Munawwar Qari. When Hamza sent Munawwar Qari a manuscript for publication, he was told to tone down the language and to avoid using impolite (adabdan kharij ) words.^[76]

The first Jadids in Central Asia were, by and large, men of the old order whose personal experiences had convinced them of the need to change. Yet, they were also products of their time. Many of them had traveled extensively. They possessed the cultural capital of the past, but almost none had experienced a purely Russian education. Many of them knew Russian, but it was usually self-taught in adult life; they had not been through the formative experience of Russian education. This con-

[73] A.Z.V. Togan, Hâtrralar: Tiirklstan ve Diger Miisluman Dogu Turklerinin Milli Varlik ve Kiiltiir Mucadeleleri (Istanbul, 1969), 118-119; Ibrohim Haqqulov, editor's introduction to Cholpon, Bahorni soghindim (Tashkent, 1988), 4; for a full biography of Cholpan, see Naim Karimov, Abdulbamid Sulaymon oghli Cholpon (Tashkent, 1991).

[74] Begali Qosimov, "Mirmuhsin Shermuhamedov (Fikri) wa uning adabiy muhiti" (Candidate's diss., Tashkent, 1967); OSE , VII: 274, s.v. "Shermuhamedov, Mirmuhsin."

[75] Hamza Hakimzada Niyazi, Milli ashulalar ucbun milli she'rlar majmuasi (Eski Marghilan, 1916), 1.

[76] Munawwar Qari to Hamza Hakimzada, 4 November 1915, in Hamza arkhivining katalogi , II: 283-284.

trasts markedly with the Jadids of European Russia and Transcaucasia, many of whom had a Russian (and, in some cases, even a European) education. Gasprinskii, who had attended a military academy in Moscow and worked for two years in Paris as Turgenev's secretary,^[77] is hardly unusual in that respect. Central Asian Jadids, on the other hand, remained much closer to the Islamic cultural tradition than Jadids in other parts of the Russian empire.

Yet, for all this, their youth was a striking characteristic. Ishaq Khan and Ajzi, born in the 1860s, were by far the oldest members of the cohort. Behbudi was twenty-eight when he launched his public career and Munawwar Qari only twenty-three; Awlani began writing poetry at the age of sixteen. Those who became active in the last few years before the revolution were even younger. Hamza was twenty-one when he opened his first school in 1910, the same age at which Abdullah Qadiri wrote his first play. When Cholpan sent in his first poem to the newspaper Shuhrat in 1908, he signed the accompanying letter "a maktab pupil." He was probably only ten years old then.^[78] The youth of the Jadids was testimony to their prodigious talent and a source of their seemingly inexhaustible energy but, in a society where age was cultural capital in itself, also their greatest handicap.

They also differed from the small number of Central Asians with a modern, secular Russian education. Ubaydullah Khojaev, the Tashkent lawyer and publisher, and the Samarqand doctor Abdurrahman Farhadi, who was appointed Russian consul in Najaf in 1914,^[79] were perhaps the only representatives of this group prominent in public life before 1917. (Several others, such as Tashpolat Narbutabekov and Nazir Toraqul oghli, became active in that year.) The vast majority of Muslims in Central Asia with a Russian secular education were Qazaq or Tatar. Whereas the Jadids originated in the old cultural elite of the region, these intellectuals often came from aristocratic elites. The Tatars came from among the ranks of the more prosperous sections of the community that had arrived in Turkestan after the Russian conquest. The Qazaqs, on the other hand, often came from aristocratic families and were southern analogues to a secular Qazaq elite that had formed in the Steppe province by the middle of the nineteenth century. The Qazaq elites of the steppe

[77] Seydahmet, Gaspirali Ismail Bey , 12-19.

[78] The newspaper was closed down by the authorities and its papers seized before it could be published. The poem is to be found in TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 489a, l. 31.

[79] Ayina , 7 December 1913, 167; see also Mahmudî, "Muallim Abduqodir Shakurî," 26.

had been sending their children to Russian schools since the first quarter of the nineteenth century.^[80] The absence among the Qazaqs of a tradition of book learning entrenched in madrasas made the transition to secular education easy, since the survival of a cultural elite was not at stake, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, this interaction had produced the genius of Choqan Valikhanov, equally at home in Qazaq and Russian society.^[81] A number of these secular intellectuals received a university education in Russia. Mustafa Choqay (1890-1941), who was descended from the Khivan royal family, attended the Tashkent gimnaziia on a substantial scholarship and went on to study law at St. Petersburg University.^[82] While in Petersburg, he worked at the offices of the Muslim Faction in the State Duma, drafting speeches for Muslim deputies.^[83] In choosing to wage his struggles in the sphere of politics rather than cultural reform, Choqay was typical of the secular intellectuals, whose activities went on in parallel with that of the Jadids. We find little evidence of interaction between the two groups before 1917. The Jadids represented the modernization of the Muslim cultural tradition of Central Asia; the secular intellectuals were fluent in the idiom of European thought. The Jadids spoke to Muslim society in order to achieve cultural change; the secular intellectuals spoke to the Russian state and Russian society in order to achieve political change. With Islam Shahiahmedov, a Tatar born in Tashkent and Choqay's contemporary in St. Petersburg who was arrested in 1907 for spreading revolutionary agitation in the Tashkent garrison,^[84] we have come a long way from Wasli and Munawwar Qari. Although a police report described him as "belonging to the

[80] An "Asiatic school" to teach Russian to Qazaq children with the aim of producing translators was opened at Omsk as early as 1786. A school directed at the children of the Qazaq aristocracy started at Khanskaia Stavka in 1841, followed by another one at Orenburg in 1850 (T. T. Tazhibaev, Prosveshchenie i shkoly Kazakhstana vo vtoroi polo-vine XIX veka [Alma Ata, 1962], 17, 22-23). Many Qazaqs also attended Russian civilian and military schools at Omsk and Orenburg.

[81] The Russian conquest of Turkestan brought the Qazaq steppe under greater influence of the Islam reproduced in madrasas, as madrasa students found it safer to travel to the steppe in the summer. Writing in 1910, Ahmet Bukeykhanov saw two competing new elites emerging in the Qazaq lands, one formed like him in Russian institutions, the other increasingly Muslim and formed in the madrasas of Central Asia and the Volga; see A. Bukeikhanov, "Kirgizy," in A.I. Kastelianskii, ed., Formy natsional'nogo dvizheniia v sovremennykh gosudarstvakh (St. Petersburg, 1910), 597-598.

[82] TsGARUz, f. 47, d. 787, l. 192.

[83] Dzhumabaev, "Nash vozhd'," in Iash Turkestan: pamiati Mustafy Chokai-beia (Paris, 1949), 5-6; see also Ozod Sharafiddinov, "Mustafo Choqaev," Sharq yulduzi , 1992, no. 4, 85-93.

[84] "Spravka" (12 May 1916), TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 1113, l. 28-280b.

so-called Bolshevist-Leninist current of the RSDWP,"^[85] Shahiahmedov contributed to both liberal and radical periodicals in St. Petersburg, and upon his return to Turkestan in 1915, he edited the "progressive, non-party" newspaper, Turkestanskii krai .^[86] In the heady days of 1917, when organized politics became a possibility, Jadids and Russian-educated intellectuals coalesced in a single political movement in which the latter tended to assume positions of leadership. The leading role of the modern educated intellectuals in 1917 was out of all proportion to their numerical strength or to their influence in local society before the revolution. Active politics required a command of the Russian language and of the Russian political idiom, and in this regard the Russian-educated intellectuals held a clear advantage over the Jadids.