Colonial Sensibilities in the Age of Empire
The Jadid project was predicated on a new sense of the world and of Central Asia's position within it. The cornerstone of this worldview was an assimilation of the idea of progress. The Jadids explicitly understood that their age was different from any other: "[In the past], one science or craft [used to] develop [at a time]," a Jadid textbook read. "In this century, [however,] all sciences and crafts develop [together].... This is the century of science and progress. The sciences seen in this century have never been seen before."[87] Science developed its own authority, as new discourses of hygiene and public health brought more and more aspects of life into the realm of human agency. The term used for "progress" was taraqqi , with a semantic range that covered "development," "growth," and "rise" (those who had achieved progress were mutaraqqi ).[88] The cen-trality of progress to the Jadid project was underscored by the fact that perhaps the most common term used to describe them as a group, both by themselves and by others (albeit with more derision than pride), was
[85] Ibid., l. 280b.
[86] Turkestanskii krai , 5 April 1916. Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay (La presse et le mouvement national , 168) count Turkestanskii krai as a "Muslim" newspaper. This assertion is not borne out by the evidence of the newspaper itself. The newspaper spoke in the idiom of Russian liberalism; its readership was overwhelmingly Russian, and it had no choice but to cater to their interests. As such, it scarcely differed from any other liberal Russian-language newspaper published in Turkestan.
[87] Ghulamuddin Akbarzada, Ta'lini-i sani (Tashkent, 1913), 27-28.
[88] See O. Usmonov and Sh. Hamidov, Özbek tili leksikasi tarikhidan materiallar (XIX asrning okhiri-XX asrning boshlari ) (Tashkent, 1981), 153, 231, for examples of usage.
taraqqiparwar , "proponents of progress." This progress was a universal phenomenon accessible to all who cultivated knowledge. Europe and Russia had achieved a higher level of progress because of superior knowledge; they were models to be followed. This attitude was subversive of the dichotomy of Russian and native (colonizer and colonized) on which the colonial order was based, but it served a crucial rhetorical purpose for the Jadids.
The idea of progress was predicated upon the growth of a historical conception of time among the Jadids. The Islamic tradition, it is probably fair to say, had never seen history as a road to progress; rather, the past was a sacralized record of divine intervention in the affairs of men. Just how new the idea of constant progress and change over historical time was becomes clear from the pains Abdurrauf Fitrat took to explain the notion from first principles in an article devoted to outlining the goals of life. Humanity was weak and bereft of knowledge and skills at the beginning of Creation, but slowly it conquered the elements:
It is impossible to deny the changes wrought by humans m the world. Are these changes ... progress or decline? That is, have humans [insanha ] been moving forward or backward from Creation to the present day? Of course forward, i.e., they have been progressing, and they have not stopped at a point to our day. For example, a few years ago, we considered the railway the ultimate means of transport. [But] after a while, the power of human knowledge invented the aeroplane and proved us wrong. Thus, it becomes obvious that humanity [bani Adam ] has progressed from Creation to our days, and after our time too, it will progress, that is, move forward."[89]
Fitrat then relates his theme to that of religion, but even there the notion of progress is prominent. God has provided guidance to humanity through the ages, but earlier prophets conveyed God's message to specific groups. Only after humanity had progressed to a certain level was it ready for God's final message. Fitrat thus grafts Islam on to an evolutionary vision of history. From our point of view, however, the article is important in that it unequivocally treats history as a record of human progress.
Geography similarly provided the Jadids a completely different conception of their place in the universe. Modern geography brought with it new conceptions of space, as something that could be envisioned in the form of a map or a globe but that also was finite. It provided a sense
[89] Abdurrauf Fitrat, "Hayat wa ghaya-yi hayat," Ayina , 14 December 1913, 196-197, and 21 December 1913, 220-222; quote from 220.
of the interconnectedness of peoples and countries.[90] The study of geography occupied a very important place in Jadid thinking because it provided a graphic appreciation of the modern world. The Europeans had conquered the world by knowing it, Behbudi had implied; conquered nations likewise had to know the world. Munawwar Qari's geography textbook, for instance, provides detailed factual information (population, type of government, and capital city) about every country in the world; Munawwar Qari paid special attention to Muslim populations in each country.[91] The Jadids' fascination with maps, globes, and atlases went beyond the classroom. Behbudi published a four-color wall map of Central Asia inscribed in Turkic,[92] and his bookstore carried numerous atlases and maps, mostly of Ottoman provenance.[93]
The significance of the new writing then appearing in Tatar, Ottoman, and Arabic in shaping the worldviews of educated Central Asians was central. The new bookstores operated by the Jadids in the major cities of Central Asia stocked books published in India, Iran, Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut, as well as the various Muslim publishing centers of the Russian empire. In Samarqand, at Mahmud Khoja Behbudi's bookstore opened in 1914, the interested reader could find a large number of books in Tatar, Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian on topics such as history, geography, general science, medicine, and religion, in addition to dictionaries, atlases, charts, maps, and globes.[94] Among these imported books were many translations or adaptations of European works. In the absence of any significant local translations, these Ottoman and Tatar translations became Central Asia's window on Europe, a fact quite obvious to Behbudi: "Ottoman, Caucasian, and Kazan Turks daily increase the number of translations of works of contemporary scholars, which means that the person who knows Turkic knows the world."[95] But it is easy to overlook the continuing importance of Persian and Arabic. Persian printed books continued to be imported from India (and some booksellers even had their books printed in India),[96] and Persian-language
[90] Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994).
[91] Munawwar Qari, Yer yuzi (Tashkent, 1913).
[92] Ayina , 1 March 1914.
[93] Cf. price list in Ayina , 6 September 1914, 1095.
[94] Much of the information in the following section is derived from a number of detailed price lists of books published by Behbudi in Ayina in 1914.
[95] Behbudi, "Ikki emas, tort til lazim," Ayina , 26 October 1913, 13.
[96] G. L. Dmitriev, "Rasprostranenie indiiskikh izdanii v Srednei Azii v kontse XIX-nachale XX vekov," Kniga: materialy i issledovanua , no. 6 (1962): 239-254.
newspapers such as Chihra-numa (Cairo), Habl ul-matin (Calcutta), and the Siraj ul-akhbar (Kabul) were widely read in Jadid circles. The Jadids' madrasa educations also gave them access to Arabic. Hamza corresponded in it; Shakuri worked as a translator in the Russian consulate in Jeddah; and Abdullah Qadiri read the works of the modernist Arab historian Jurji Zaydan in the original.[97]
Jurji Zaydan was only one example of modern scholarship influencing Jadid thinking. It intruded in other ways as well. Fitrat, in his Tales of an Indian Traveler , quotes a long passage from "the great French professor" Charles Seignobos about the glories of medieval Islamic civilization.[98] European scholarship on history, linguistics, and anthropology was often held up as validating arguments made by the Jadids. References to Gustav Le Bon, John William Draper, and Reinhart Dozy show up frequently in Jadid writings. Such writing also influenced the style of Jadid argumentation. Fitrat imported Seignobos's anticlericalism whole cloth into his argument against the influence of the ulama in contemporary Bukhara, which he compares to the influence of the Church in the Dark Ages.[99] Almost all Jadids knew Russian, but it was not a significant channel for the transmission of modern knowledge to Central Asia.
In addition to the printed word, travel provided important links with Muslim movements and intellectuals overseas. When Jadids traveled, they invariably went to other Muslim countries. One of the transformative moments of Behbudi's life was his 1900 visit to Egypt, where he visited al-Azhar and, most likely, met with reformers such as Muhammad 'Abduh.[100] Behbudi visited Istanbul and Cairo again in 1914. In the meantime, he maintained his contacts in those places, so that when, a decade after his first trip abroad, a disciple of his left Samarqand to attend al-Azhar, Behbudi was able to provide him with letters of introduction to a benevolent society in Istanbul.[101] The Ottoman empire occupied a special place in the imagination of the Central Asian Jadids, who followed closely the debates of the Second Constitutional Period inaugurated by the Young Turk revolution of 1908, finding them much livelier than anything possible in the Russian empire at the time. They sympa-
[97] Qodiriy, Otam haqida, 59 .
[98] Fitrat, "Bayonoti sayyohi hindî," ed. Kholiq Mirzozoda, Sadoi Sharq , 1988, no. 6, 28.
[99] Ibid., 27-28.
[100] Haji Mum, "Mahmud Khoja Behbudi."
[101] Äbdusalam Azimi, "Behbudi haqqida khatira wa taasuratim," Zarafshan , 25 March 1923. Abdussalam Azimi also carried a letter of introduction to Gasprinskii, with whom Behbudi was on close terms.
thized primarily with the Islamists rather than the Turkists, but. they also picked and chose among other ideas.[102] There existed a considerable community of Central Asian students in Istanbul in the years preceding the outbreak of World War I. Muhammad Sharif Sufizada (1869-1937), who was born in Chust in Ferghana, spent his life traveling. He went to Istanbul in 1902 and after three years of serving as imam in various Sufi lodges, he entered the Imperial Teachers' College (Darülmüallimin-i Sahane) in 1905. He did not finish the course but returned to Turkestan in 1906, in order, he claimed, "to serve his own coreligionists and compatriots."[103] Over the next eight years, he taught according to the new method in various cities of Turkestan as well as in Qonghirat in Khiva. In 1913, he opened a new-method school in Chust, but opposition from neighbors forced him to close it and leave town.[104] He went to Afghanistan where he contributed to the Siraj ul-akhbar . In 1919, when the government of Soviet Turkestan sent a diplomatic mission to Afghanistan (Awlani was one of its members), Sufizada served as its translator and returned home with it.[105]
The most famous Central Asian to study in Istanbul, however, was Fitrat (1886-1938), who spent the tumultuous period between 1909 and the summer of 1914 in Istanbul.[106] The son of a merchant who had traveled extensively in the Ottoman empire, Iran, and Chinese Turkestan, Fitrat attended the Mir-i Arab madrasa in Bukhara, but in 1909 the Tarbiya-yi Atfal (Education of Children) society gave him a scholarship to study in Istanbul. Fitrat's years in Istanbul were formative, although the precise details of his activities remain frustratingly elusive. During this time, he published his first three books, at least two of which (Debate between a Bukharan Mudarris and a European and Tales of an Indian Traveler ) achieved great popularity back in Central Asia. He first
[102] The Ottoman Islamists were modernists very critical of traditional practices of Islam; few of them came from traditional Ilmiye backgrounds. Rather, they shared the theological views of the Egyptian modernist Muhammad 'Abduh (whose writing appeared frequently in the leading Islamist Journal, Sirat-i Miistakim [later Sebilurresad ]). Their rhetoric of awakening and strength through knowledge was very similar to that of the Jadids of Central Asia, but their most fundamental problem was to ensure the survival of the Ottoman empire on the basis of Muslim solidarity. See Tarik Zafer Tunaya, Islâmcilik Cereyani (Istanbul, 1962); Ismail Kara, Türkiyede Islâmcilik Diisuncesi: Metinler, Kisiler , 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1986-1987), I: xv-lxvii.
[103] Khurshid , 19 October 1906.
[104] On this incident, see TWG , 3 February 1914.
[105] OSE , X: 478-479, s.v. "Sofizoda."
[106] The only full-length biography of Fitrat is in Japanese: Hisao Komatsu, Kakumei no Chuo Ajia: aru Jadudo no shozo (Tokyo, 1996); otherwise, see Begali, Qosimov, "Fitrat (chizgilar)," Sharq yulduzi , 1992, no. 10, 170-180.
appeared in print the Islamist newspaper Hikmet , published by Sehbenderzade Filibeli All Hilmi, a prominent Islamist whose difficulties with the C.U.P. government led to the closure of the newspaper on several occasions; Fitrat also contributed to Sirat-i Müstakim , the flagship Islamist journal edited by Mehmet Âkif (Ersoy).[107] But in 1914 Fitrat was enrolled in the Medreset ül-Vâizin,[108] a reformed madrasa created earlier that year to prepare a new kind of religious functionary. Its wide-ranging curriculum included Turkic history, taught by Yusuf Akçura, the chief ideologue of pan-Turkism.[109] Behbudi's intellectual range was similarly broad. The reading room he organized in Samarqand received Sirat-i Müstakim , and Behbudi sent its editors copies of his publications (along with a recent copy of TWG) as a gift.[110] But he also maintained commercial relations with the main Turkist organ Türk Yurdu (whose offices in Istanbul stocked Behbudi's map of Turkestan inscribed in Turkic),[111] and in his own Ayina , he reprinted articles from the entire spectrum of the Ottoman press until the war cut relations.
Istanbul at the time was probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world, and a cauldron of Muslim opinion, as émigrés and exiles from all over the Muslim world gravitated to it. The role of Muslim émigrés from the Russian empire, such as Yusuf Akçura and Ahmed Agaoglu (Agaev), in laying the foundations of pan-Turkism is generally recognized, but the substantial presence of Iranian exiles in the city has provoked less interest.[112] Fitrat, who at that time wrote exclusively in Persian, was clearly influenced by the Travels of Ibrahim Bek by the Iranian exile Zayn ul-'Abidin Maragha'i, published in Istanbul, for the parallels between the novel and Fitrat's own Tales of an Indian Traveler are striking.[113] Simi-
[107] Abdurrauf, "Hasbihal bahamwatanan-i bukharayi," Hikmet , 18 November 1910; Buharali, Abdurrauf, "Buhara Veziri, Nasrullah-bi, Pervaneçi Efendi Hazretlerine Açik Mektub." Tearüf-i Muslimin , 25 November 1910, 10 (only the title and the byline are in Ottoman; the text is in Persian). On Hikmet and its publisher, see Kara, Türkiyede Islâmcilik , I: 3-4.
[108] Ayina , 17 May 1914, 588.
[109] Huseyin Atay, Osmanlilarda Yuksek Din Egitimi (Istanbul, 1983), 308-311.
[110] "Samarkand'dan," Sirat-i Mustakim , 16 September 1910, 66-67.
[111] "Turkistan Bukhara Khiwa kharitasi," Ayina , 1 March 1914, 356.
[112] Jamshid Bihnam, "Manzilgahi dar rah-i tajaddud-i Iran: Islambul," Irannama , 11 (1993): 271-282; Thierry Zarcone and Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, eds., Les iramens d'Istanbul (Paris, 1994).
[113] The novel was published m several instalments between 1903 and 1910, in Cairo, Istanbul, and Calcutta, and has enjoyed considerable popularity ever since. See H. Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge, 1966), 17-21; M.R. Ghanoonparvar, In a Persian Mirror: Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction (Austin, 1993), 39-43.
larly, in using the dialogue format in his Debate , Fitrat followed a practice common in Iranian modernism.
The Jadids were part of a cosmopolitan community of Muslims knit together by readership of common texts and by travel. They lived in the last generation when Muslim intellectuals in different countries could communicate with each other without the use of European languages. Central Asian Jadidism was located squarely in the realm of Muslim modernism. It was Muslim because its rhetorical structures were rooted in the Muslim tradition of Central Asia and because the Jadids derived ultimate authority for their arguments in Islam. The Jadids never disowned Islam in the way that many Young Turks had done well before the end of the nineteenth century.[114] Rather, modernity was fully congruent with the "true" essence of Islam, and only an Islam purified of all accretions of the ages could ensure the well-being of Muslims. Informed by a new vision of the world, the Jadids arrived at a new understanding of Islam and what it meant to be a Muslim.
[114] For an excellent exposition, see M. Sukru Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York, 1995), ch. 2.