Publics and Public Spheres

Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere has attracted much attention in recent years. Since Habermas very consciously defines his public sphere as a specific moment in the history of bourgeois Europe, its utility as a model for comparative research is limited (although it has been attempted). We are unlikely to find private individuals (each both "owner of goods and persons and one human being among others, i.e., bourgeois and homme ") "com[ing] together as a public [and] soon claim[ing] the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves" in settings other than the ones Habermas investigates, and least of all in the colonial world.^[1] Indeed, as a number of scholars have argued, Habermas's description of the public sphere remains highly idealized even for eighteenth-century Europe.^[2] Nevertheless, the emergence of the press, a substantial publishing trade, intensive sociability in discussion groups and benevolent societies all reconfigured the nature of cultural production in Central Asia. There may not have been any bour-

[1] Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989 long. 1962]), 27, 55.

[2] Robert Darnton, "An Enlightened Revolution?" New York Review of Books , 24 October 1991, 34. See also the essays in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 1992).

geois, but the transformation of the context in which culture was produced and reproduced was significant. In our disappointment at not finding an exact match with Habermas's description, it is easy to overlook the similarities. Jadidism as a critical discourse arose in a realm of public debate that had come into existence as a result of the transformations wrought by the Russian conquest. The advent of print had begun to redefine the parameters of debate in Muslim society, in which the authority of older elites could be challenged in public. The Jadids' enthusiastic advocacy of print and new forms of sociability was not incidental, for Jadidism's strength as a cultural or political force was directly related to the strength and extent of the new public sphere constituted by these new forms. This proved to be a formidable problem, for neither the economic nor the political situation was particularly salubrious for the public sphere, and Jadidism had constantly to maneuver between the twin perils of a weak market and a hostile colonial state in order to propagate its reform.

The colonial context marked the new public sphere in two fundamental ways. First, the state had a significant presence in it, both as protagonist and antagonist. From the earliest period, the authorities attempted to inculcate "useful knowledge" among the local population to counter what they considered its inherent fanaticism and to render it more amenable to Russian rule. They also kept a stern watch on the public, using their wide-ranging powers of censorship and oversight with abandon. Second, the "native" public sphere existed alongside, and alterior to, a local Russian public sphere. The existence of a public sphere in Russia, where autocracy jealously retained control over all matters of state import, is problematic in itself, although recent scholarship has seen plentiful evidence of it in the flourishing of a popular press and voluntary organizations in the postreform period.^[3] This form of public life also appeared in Turkestan, where a nonofficial Russian-language press emerged early.^[4] Although its relationship with officialdom remained tense, it could engage the state in political dialogue, especially after 1905. By contrast, the native public sphere was subject to different rules and the object of much greater offficial suspicion. Permission to publish newspapers was

[3] Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read (Princeton, 1985); Louise McReyholds, The News Under the Old Regime (Princeton, 1992); Edith Clowes, Samuel Kassow, and James West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, 1991).

[4] M.P. Avsharova, Russkaia periodicheskaia pechat' v Turkestane (1870-1917) (Tashkent, 1960).

granted by the governor-general himself. Once in business, editors had constantly to worry about the censors, for the slightest misstep could result in the closure of a newspaper. The administration could go to extremes of bureaucratic obscurantism to deny permission or to revoke it once it was granted. Writing in emigration, Mustafa Choqay recalled how an application he submitted was rejected because it was "too simply worded."^[5] With few qualified personnel to monitor vernacular newspapers, local authorities erred on the side of caution and suspended publication of newspapers at the slightest excuse.^[6] As Munawwar Qari wrote of the forced closure of Taraqqi in 1906: "When a Russian newspaper is arraigned before a court or prohibited from publication for some reason, it is allowed to publish under a new title so that subscribers keep receiving something. But this system apparently does not apply to Muslims."^[7] Officialdom also attempted surveillance over native society through a network of police agents whose presence, judging by the volume of the reports they filed, must have been quite pervasive. Given this suspicion, and Turkestan's disenfranchisement from imperial politics after 1907, the native public sphere became largely depoliticized. Eschewing a discourse of political rights aimed at the state, it focused largely on debates about culture and society. This accounts for the fact that the re-formist project was articulated in terms of a harsh critique of Central Asian society itself, in which all problems were the result of shortcomings of Central Asians themselves, and where the solution lay in self-improvement.

The difference between the Russian and native spheres was, however, primarily a matter of language, for there were no legal restrictions on the entry of "natives" into the Russian press. Rather, the exclusion was primarily based on cultural capital—the knowledge of Russian and professional or academic accomplishment in "Russian" domains, although attempts by natives to enter the sphere never failed to provoke official suspicion. Until 1917 the spheres remained distinct. The Russian-language

[5] Mustafa Chokaev, "Dzhadidizm" (ms., 1931), L'Archive de Moustafa Tchokai Bey, carton 7.

[6] Immediately after Sada-yi Turkistan began publication in April 1914, the governor of Syr Darya oblast asked the governor-general to delegate the task of monitoring it to a competent orientalist such as Ostroumov or Semenov because no person higher m rank than a translator could be found in the Syr Darya chancellery with the necessary linguistic skills. The chancellery of the governor-general, however, could not spare the services of the men requested and the task remained with the translator. The correspondence is in TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 957, ll. 1-5.

[7] "Afsus," Khurshid , 6 September 1906.

press in Turkestan had little in common in theme, tone, or content, with its vernacular counterpart. Few people were active in both spheres. Ubaydullah Khojaev, a trained lawyer who also published the newspaper Sada-yi Turkistan , was perhaps the only such figure. The Jadids were not hostile to the Russian sphere, however, for as I shall argue, the central goal of Jadid reform was to enter this sphere while retaining the bifurcation between Russian and native.

Beyond this dichotomy of Russian and native publics, as we have seen, Central Asia was also located on the fringes of two other publics: one composed of the Muslims of the Russian empire and centered around Terjüman and other Tatar newspapers; and the other an international, cosmopolitan public of readers of newspapers from all over the Muslim world. Debates in these other publics influenced the tenor of Central Asian Jadidism, but the fortunes of the Jadids were determined on the ground.

Print and the Public

Printing arrived in Central Asia with the Russian armies. The new authorities' faith in the power of the printed word equaled that of the Jadids a generation later. One of Kaufman's first acts was the establishment of a printing press, complete with Arabic characters, which were used also to print TWG from 1870. The state also published a small number of booklets and brochures (some of them reprints from the TWG ) containing useful information (such as books about the history of Russia and the Romanov dynasty, a history of Egypt, a life of Columbus, but also pieces from Pushkin and Tolstoy in translation) or official reports and proclamations in Turkic. Commercial publishing took off only after the appearance of lithography in 1883, but then developed rapidly. In 1898, two British orientalists visiting the book market in Bukhara found "the counters of its shops ... piled high with standard works in lithograph editions, and here and there a manuscript. Great finds may sometimes be obtained by connoisseurs, though there are still enough native bibliophils in Bokhara to render good finds by Europeans exceptional."^[8] Manuscripts might have become a rarity, but it is impossible to speak of a printing revolution in Central Asia in the manner that many scholars

[8] F.H. Skrine and E. Denison Ross, The Heart of Asia (London, 1899), 371.

claim for early modern Europe.^[9] The new trade was coopted by the existing network of manuscript trade, and dealers in manuscripts (sahhaf, warraq ) were the first Turkestani publishers. The local publishing trade remained in the hands of the nashir (publisher), the individual who bore the cost and the risk of putting a new book on the market. The role of the publisher could range from that of a sponsor, responsible only for the financial outlay, to that of calligrapher, printer, and bookseller as well. The output of the printing trade was dominated by traditional genres. Lithographed books did not look any different from manuscripts, although they were far more ubiquitous. New genres appeared in local publishing only after the turn of the century and were largely the work of the Jadids.^[10]

Print was central to the strategies of the Jadids, many of whom were deeply involved in publishing. The bulk of publishing remained in the hands of individuals and hence subject to limited resources and the frailties of individual initiative. The Jadids sought to put the business on sounder footing and pioneered bookstores (kutubkhana ), larger corporate entities that served also as publishing houses. In 1910, seven men, including such well-known Jadids as Munawwar Qari, Abdussami Qari, and Abdullah Awlani, applied for permission to open a bookstore called Umid (Hope). The request was categorically denied,^[11] no doubt because Munawwar Qari and Awlani had earlier incurred the ire of the authorities with their involvement with independent newspapers between 1906 and 1908. Awlani was more successful in 1914, when he opened the Zaman (Time) Bookstore in the Russian part of Tashkent.^[12] In 1916, he joined with a number of Tashkent professional booksellers and philanthropists to form the Maktab Nashr-i Maarif Shirkati (Maktab Education Company).^[13] Behbudi's diverse activities included operating a bookstore, located in his house in Samarqand,^[14] where Abdulqadir Shakuri also started the Zarafshan Bookstore in 1915.^[15] The largest growth of bookstores, however, took place in the towns of the Ferghana valley,

[9] The strongest statement is made by Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent for Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe , 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979).

[10] For more attention to this point, see Adeeb Khalid, "Printing, Publishing, and Reform in Tsarist Central Asia," International Journal of Middle East Studies 26 (1994): 187-200.

[11] GARF, f. 102, op. 244 (1914), d. 74, ch. 74B, 1. 442.

[12] TsGARUz, f. 17, d. 17273, ll. 94, 95.

[13] "'Maktab' nashr-i maarif shirkatining qanuni," Turan (Tashkent), 5 May 1917.

[14] "Behbudiya kutubkhanasi," Ayina , 27 April 1914, 522.

[15] Wadud Mahmudî, "Muallim Abduqodir Shakurî," Sadoi Sharq , 1990, no. 8, 30.

where several such companies were launched between 1913 and 1915. Such bookstores had larger financial resources and, as corporate entities, were less vulnerable to the fickleness of individual fortunes. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that these bookstores were able to function like modern publishing concerns. Maktab, which began operation with a capital of 5,500 rubles, paled in comparison with such Tatar publishers as the Karimov Brothers of Orenburg, not to mention established Russian publishers.^[16] Ghayrat (Energy) was a larger operation. It had hoped to raise 50,000 rubles through the sale of shares, although success was limited. Primarily concerned with supplying textbooks and stationery to new-method schools and selling books and newspapers when it first received permission to operate on 27 February 1915, its executives were, by late 1916, aiming to acquire a printing press with the eventual goal of publishing a newspaper.^[17]

For all the moral urgency with which the Jadids invested it, publishing was a commercial enterprise in which the decision to put a certain text in print was largely, but not solely, determined by the need to sell. This was a fact of crucial importance for the fate of Jadid reform, since the Jadids constantly came up against the stark realities of a market in which they occupied only a small niche. Benedict Anderson has argued that "print capitalism" went a long way toward creating standardized languages and fostering a new sense of community in many parts of the world.^[18] For the Jadids, however, the market proved to be the most formidable obstacle. The market imposed harsh limits on what the Jadids could accomplish. They sought, instead, to bypass the market through recourse to philanthropy, patronage, and charity, but they were not entirely successful in institutionalizing philanthropy in Turkestan, and Jadid reform remained subject to significant economic pressures. (Indeed, it was only after the revolution, when the market was abolished, that print produced the kind of change that Anderson ascribes to "print capitalism" in early modern times.) Although books and newspapers were the stock in trade of Jadid reform, Jadid publications occupied only a

[16] The Karimov brothers received permission to start a company to publish and sell books in 1898. They began with an operating capital of 20,000 rubles; Abrar Karimullin, Tatarskaia kniga nachala XX veka (Kazan, 1974), 22; The Moscow firm of I.D. Sytin & Co. began with a capital of 75,000 rubles in 1884; by 1914, when it was the largest publishing concern in Russia, the company was worth 3.4 million rubles; Charles A. Ruud, Russian Entrepreneur: Publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851-1934 (Montreal, 1990), 27, 141

[17] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 1144, ll. :340b-36.

[18] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities , 2nd ed. (London, 1991).

small part of local production. According to the only accurate and reliable bibliographical information we possess, of the seventy printed editions of sixty-nine different works that appeared in Central Asia between October 1910 and August 1911 only eleven could be classified as Jadid publications. The balance of the publishing output comprised new editions of classical works or new works of poetry in the traditional idiom.^[19]

Publishing remained a precarious business, and many Jadid publications continued to be financed by their authors. The publishing career of Hamza Hakimzada's Milli ashulalar (National Songs), a collection of poetry for use in new-method schools, provides an example of publishing practices from the period. Hamza apparently completed the manuscript in February 1913, when he wrote to the printing press of the newspaper Vaqït in Orenburg for quotes on the price of printing the collection of verse. The Vaqït press was well known for the quality of its work, but apparently the quality work came at a price. The press asked 80 rubles for printing 1,000 copies, although an order of 1,500 copies would have cost only 105 rubles. This was apparently beyond Hamza's means (he had just returned from a long trip abroad), and he dropped the matter. In 1915, he approached Munawwar Qari at Turkistan Bookstore in Tashkent for publishing the work piecemeal. He was offered royalties of zoo copies for each printing if Turkistan were to publish the book of its own accord. Hamza chose a different option, whereby Turkistan supplied the paper and covered other expenses, but Hamza still had to pay the cost of printing, which, for 1,000 copies, came to 28 rubles. For its services, Turkistan retained 285 copies (another 15 went for "censor, etc."), leaving Hamza 700 copies to sell for himself. For publishing later parts of the series, however, Hamza turned to two friends, Iskandar Baratbaev and Said Nasir Mirjalil oghli, who published seven parts during 1916 and 1917, receipts from the sale of one part apparently financing the publication of the next.^[20] Hamza could, moreover, count on the support of friends in his search for ready cash needed to publish his work.

[19] L. Zimin, "Bibliografita," Sredniaia Azua , 1911, nos. 2, 3, 4, 6, 8. It should be noted that as low as these figures might be, they are significantly higher than those generally quoted in the literature. Soviet sources usually cited a figure of thirty-three titles in "Uzbek" for the year 1913 (Istoriia knigi v SSSR 1917-1921 [Moscow, 1986], III: 168); these figures were also used by Edward Allworth, Central Asian Publishing and the Rise of Nationalism (New York, 1965), 36.

[20] This correspondence can be followed in Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziy arkhivining katalogi , 2 vols. (Tashkent, 1990-1991), II: 9, 28, 283-284, 286-290, 293-294, 305; see also Tokhtamurod Zufarov, "Milliy She"rlar Majmualari"ga doit yangi hujjatlar," Ozbek tili wa adabiyoti , 1989. no. 1, 42-52.

In July 1914, for instance, sixteen friends raised a total of 139.50 rubles among them for printing and publishing Yangi Saadat .^[21] But the onus for mustering resources remained on the authors themselves in the publishing world of Turkestan before 1917.

The Press

Economic constraints similarly haunted attempts to establish an independent vernacular press in Turkestan, although officialdom was responsible for the demise of many newspapers. The newspaper held a particular fascination for the Jadids, who celebrated the mere existence of newspapers as a sign of progress and a source of enlightenment. A writer in one of the earliest Turkic-language newspapers in Tashkent likened newspapers to true sages and skilled physicians (hukama-yi sadiq wa atibba-yi haziq ) who cure the ills of the community, and several years later, Behbudi saw newspapers as leaders of society through their constant criticism of its shortcomings.^[22] Newspapers also provided information about the rest of the world, making their readers aware of world affairs and of progress achieved by other peoples. Articles extolling the virtues of newspapers became a staple in the Jadid press, and protagonists in Jadid literature spent a lot of time reading newspapers.^[23]

We do not know whether the TWG owed its monopoly solely to officialdom, which denied permission for publication of other vernacular periodicals, but we do know that Turkic and Persian newspapers published in the Ottoman empire, Iran, and Europe, as well as Terjüman , were widely read in Central Asia. The postal system, which reached Central Asia with the conquest, made this possible, and although officialdom saw censorship as an immutable right, it did not extend to a complete ban on imported publications. The political liberalization in the wake of the revolution of 1905, along with the political enthusiasm it aroused, led to the appearance of the unofficial press in March 1906. The first independent vernacular newspaper was also the most unusual. It was published by I.I. Geier, a local Russian of moderate socialist persuasion, with the aim of acquainting the local population with the new political ideas. Much of the copy was translated from Russian newspapers by Mu-

[21] Hamza arkhivi katalogi , I: 306.

[22] Behrambek Dawlatbaev, untitled article, Taraqqi , 23 July 1906; Mahmud Khoja [Behbudi], "Gazit chist" Samarqand , 3 May 1913.

[23] E.g., Behbudi, "Gazet ne dur?" Tojjar , 11 November 1907; "Ba'zi fawa'id-i ruznama," Bukhara-yi sharif , 11 March 1912.

hammadjan Aydarov, an interpreter retired from official service. This made for ponderous prose, which showed up even in the title of the newspaper, Taraqqi —Orta Aziyaning umr guzarlighi (Progress—Central Asian Life). There were already several new-method schools in Tashkent, and the Jadids, then still a small group, took the opportunity to appear in print. Munawwar Qari, who never contributed to TWG because of personal and political differences with Ostroumov, published his first articles here. Nevertheless, the brief career of this newspaper (it folded for financial reasons after seventeen issues spread over three months) is important mostly because it represented one of the very few attempts by local Russians to include the native population in political dialogue.

The newspaper's failure did not deter Ismail Abidi (Gabitov), a Tatar Social Revolutionary, from trying again. Abidi brought out Taraqqi (Progress), which managed to appear nineteen times before being shut down by the Tashkent high court. Taraqqi had much in common with its predecessor, except that its political views were more radical and it avoided the infelicities of language that had plagued Taraqqi-Orta Azyaning umr guzarlighi . Again, local reformers flocked to the newspaper to take advantage of the forum and to air their criticisms of society. Such criticisms created their own scandals, but the undoing of the newspaper was its radical tone, directed in the fashion of those days against bureaucracy as the enemy of the newfound liberties of the land, which proved too much for local officialdom to bear. Problems began early as police raided its offices after the publication of its third issue and confiscated several hundred unsold copies because inaccurate translations of two editorial articles had led them to believe that the newspaper favored killing members of educated nationalities. Abidi was called to the police station and released only on bail.^[24] The newspaper was shut down after nineteen issues by court order for publishing an editorial containing unacceptable material.^[25]

Within three weeks of Taraqqi's closure, Munawwar Qari brought out his own newspaper, Khurshid (The Sun). It had Taraqqi's feisty tone and did not shun explicitly political topics (it published several articles about Russia's still volatile political situation, as well as covering political events in Iran, Egypt, and India with overt anticolonial sympathies).

[24] See his account of the incident m "Baylar, buyraqaratiya wa ghazita," >Taraqqi , 27 July 1906.

[25] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 4, d. 1003, ll. 117, 119, 188.

All of this invited official wrath, and after only ten issues the newspaper was ordered closed for its "extremely harmful direction."^[26] The same fate befell Shubrat (Fame), published in December 1907 by Abdullah Awlani with the cooperation of Ahmetjan Bektimirov and Munawwar Qari, which also lasted ten issues, as well as its successor Aziya (Asia), which could manage only five issues. The much more moderate Tojjar (Merchants), published by Said Karim-bay, the decorated notable, shunned politics ("Our purpose is not opposition to the government [unlike Taraqqi and Khurshid ] but rather to be the friends and supporters of the Russian state in a way that does not harm religion"),^[27] but could not attract enough readers to pay its way, and Said Karim-bay apparently being unwilling to foot the bill himself, folded after thirty-seven issues. By March 1908, the independent vernacular press had ceased to exist in Central Asia.

The first attempt to revive it came in Bukhara in 1912 and took a more institutionalized form. In 1912, a group of Bukharan Jadids managed to secure permission for the publication of a Persian-language newspaper called Bukhara-yi sharif (Bukhara the Noble) in Kagan. The newspaper was financed by a joint-stock company for which 9,000 rubles were raised almost immediately.^[28] Mir Jalil Mirbadalov, the chief translator at the Russian Political Agency, was apparently instrumental in securing permission, although the agency reserved the right to censor the newspaper. Edited by an Azerbaijani, Bukhara-yi sharif published daily (although in July, when it launched a biweekly Turkic supplement titled Turan , its frequency declined). The two newspapers survived on their own for several months but were closed down in January 1913 by Russian authorities at the request of the amir.^[29] In April of that year, Behbudi, who by this time was deeply involved in writing and publishing, launched Samarqand as a biweekly newspaper. The venture was not successful financially, and in September he abandoned the newspaper and channeled its finances into Central Asia's first magazine, Ayina (The Mirror), which he managed to put out almost weekly for the next twenty months. Again, sales were poor and the onset of war did not help matters. At the end of the first year, the number of paid subscribers was 234, and

[26] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 536, l. 16.

[27] "Matbuat alami," Tojjar , 21 August 1907.

[28] A. Samoilovich, "Pechat' russkikh musul'man," Mir Islama 1 (1912): 478n.

[29] Sadriddin Ayni, Bukhara inqilabi tarikhi uchun materiyallar (Moscow, 1922), 94-101.

the situation does not seems to have improved.^[30] When Behbudi was told by his doctors in the summer of 1915 to take the waters, he closed the magazine down.^[31] It was never published again.

But 1914 had been the banner year for journalism in Central Asia. In March, Munawwar Qari, Abdullah Awlani, Ubaydullah Khojaev, and four others launched Sada-yi Turkistan (Voice of Turkestan) as a joint-stock venture in Tashkent.^[32] Almost simultaneously, Abidjan Mahmudov, Jadid activist and merchant of the second guild in Kokand, began Sada-yi Farghana (Voice of Ferghana). The two newspapers, alike in many ways, shunned politics and focused on educational and cultural goals, ceaselessly exhorting their compatriots to wake up (a favorite metaphor) to the necessity of reform. In early 1915, when reformist ulama in Tashkent launched their own magazine, al-Islah (Reform), five periodicals (including TWG ) were being published in Turkestan. But this situation did not last; although political caution saved them from the censor's axe, all but al-Islah fell victim to the market, the small readership being unable to sustain them. Sada-yi Turkistan folded in May 1915 for financial reasons, Sada-yi Farghana followed soon afterward, and Ayina's last issue came out in June 1915. There were two attempts to publish news sheets containing only agency reports in translation and an unsuccessful bid to revive Sada-yi Turkistan in Andijan in 1916.^[33] When the old order was cast asunder by revolution in March 1917, the only unofficial vernacular periodical being published in Central Asia was al-Islah. .^[34]

The Jadid press had a marked didactic flavor. For the Jadids, the newspaper was a platform from which to broadcast their exhortations to reform. The model for the Central Asian press was provided, of course, by Gasprinskii's Terjüman , which for a generation had stood as the only unofficial Muslim newspaper in the Russian empire of any consequence, but Turkestan newspapers shared the general attitudes and style common to much Muslim journalism of the turn of the century, in both the

[30] "Muhtaram khwanandalargha!" Ayina , 16 November 1914, 40-41.

[31] "Idaradan," Ayina , 15 June 1915, 442.

[32] GARF, f. 102, op. 244 (1914), d. 74, ch. 84B, l. 125.

[33] Ziyo Said, Ozbek waqtli matbuoti tarikhiga materiallar (1927), in his Tanlangan asarlar (Tashkent, 1974), 101.

[34] On the press m Central Asia, see Said, Ozbek waqtli matbuoti ; the sections on Central Asia in Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, La presse et le mouvement national chez les musulmans de Russie avant 1920 (Pans, 1964), otherwise the standard work on the subject, are often incorrect and should be used with caution.

Russian and Ottoman empires, as well as in the Ottoman and Iranian diasporas. Newspapers ran to four pages and appeared usually twice a week (the exception being Bukhara-yi sharif , which appeared daily). They carried news, mostly from other newspapers or from telegraph agencies, since none could afford to post correspondents, but the bulk of the space was occupied by essays, editorial and opinion pieces dealing with the usual themes of education, progress, and admonition. Poetry, usually critical or exhortatory, was a prominent feature. Readers from all over Central Asia wrote to comment on shortcomings or problems in their localities or in Central Asia in general. The central feature of all newspapers remained the filyatun (feuilleton via the Russian), a long essay which often took up as much as a quarter of each newspaper. The filyatun was either critical or informative, usually both, as authors managed to inform readers about the achievements of other societies while using the invidious comparison to Turkestan to exhort their readers to reform, to act as the "society's physicians." Sometimes the filyatun was written as fiction; Cholpan's Doctor Muhammadyar , perhaps the first modern short story in Central Asian Turkic, appeared as a series of filyatuns in Sada-yi Turkistan in the summer of 1914. Behbudi's Ayina had a similar tenor of exhortation and admonition, although he also published a great deal of informational material, such as a series of articles on the antiquities of Samarqand, a long essay on "Why Did the Turkish State Decline?" reprinted from Terjüman , and Behbudi's own observations on a two-month trip to the Ottoman empire in 1914.

It was this content that distinguished the Jadid press from the TWG on one side and al-Islah on the other. The earliest voices of reform appeared in TWG , which also featured the filyatun . The tone, however, was never so single-mindedly exhortatory as it was in the Jadid press. Filyatuns in TWG were generally "informational," such as numerous articles on the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913, the centenary of the Napoleonic invasion, or the history of the conquest of Turkestan. Indeed, the appearance of an independent Muslim press after 1905 brought about a change in the character of the newspaper, which seems to have become more circumspect in giving voice to reform. Much of the copy in the last decade of its existence was written by its native editor, one Mulla Alim, a protégé of Ostroumov, who frequently sparred with editors of other periodicals, both Central Asian and Tatar. Al-Islah , on the other hand, did not write about seeking admonition from Europeans; the reform to which it was committed emanated from different

sources. Its prose, heavily larded with Arabic and Persian expressions, was also broken up with lengthy quotations in Arabic (without translation) which served, among other things, to demarcate its readership.

With the exception of al-Islah , the ulama did not attempt to join the fray by launching their own publications. Because they did not leave a published record, it is difficult to surmise their reasons. Significant no doubt was the traditionalist ulama's distaste for engaging in debate with those outside their own circles, those who had not dedicated themselves for years to the acquisition of knowledge and adab . However, a second, more fundamental reason for the ulama's absence from the world of journalism was that the bulk of their constituency continued to exist in a largely oral world in which literacy remained a sacralized skill. For the traditionalist ulama, written knowledge was still transmitted through face-to-face interaction, and the impersonal use of the written word inherent in the newspaper was not widely accepted by them. Reading, even for those who were literate, was primarily a devotional activity. Attention to such different uses of the written word and different (culturally valued) reading habits might also help explain the lack of financial success the Jadids met in their publishing efforts. The obvious reasons for the low demand for newspapers and magazines, and for the printed word in general, were the low purchasing power of consumers in a poor agrarian economy and the low levels of literacy among the population. But as I argued in Chapter 1, low levels of literacy did not in themselves mean a lack of education or of interest in the literate tradition. Texts could always be read aloud and shared by those who could not read themselves. Therefore, we have to look further than low levels of literacy for possible explanations of low demand for the printed word.

Historians of Europe have remarked on the transition from "intensive" to "extensive" reading practices in the eighteenth century. "Intensive" reading involved the communal reading and rereading, often aloud (and accompanied by memorization) of a small number of texts belonging to only a few genres; such reading was embedded in reverential attitudes toward both the act of reading itself and the book being read. "Extensive" reading, which developed in the age of print, is marked by the reading, silently and individually, of a large number of texts devoid of any reverential or sacral meaning.^[35] Such a line of inquiry yields fruit-

[35] For an excellent introduction to this literature, Roger Chartier, "Du lire au livre." in Chartier, ed., Pratiques de la lecture (Marseilles, 1985), 69ff.

ful insights into the Jadid experience with disseminating reform through the printed word.

In the tradition reproduced by the maktab, texts were sacralized objects accessible only through the mediation of a recognized master. The newspaper represented a completely new use of the written word. Its impersonal text, usually in quotidian language rather than rhymed prose or verse, was a desacralized commodity that did not fit existing patterns of usage for the written word. And while the newspaper itself was the best source for the dissemination of new reading habits, the continued existence of older reading habits proved to be the major obstacle in its growth. The new-method schools inculcated different reading practices, and a new generation of their graduates might have formed a reading public to support Jadid publishing efforts, but in the period under review, such was not the case. Newspapers published by the Jadids therefore failed to attract a wide readership and consequently faced severe financial hardships. Shuhrat had a print run of only 300 when it was closed down by the administration,^[36] and as noted above, the number of paid subscriptions to Behbudi's Ayina hovered around zoo for most of its existence.

A New Literature

The Jadids' first attempts to write prose fiction also date from this period. Ostroumov had published pieces by Tolstoy in the. TWG , and prose fiction in Tatar and Ottoman had made its appearance in Central Asia. A translation from Azerbaijani of Robinson Crusoe published in 1912 by Fazilbek Atabek oghli introduced the term roman to Central Asia. Hamza Hakimzada Niyazi called his 1915 story of the happiness brought by knowledge a "national novel" (milli roman ). The Jadids hoped for nothing less than to create a new canon more in keeping with the needs of the moment than the existing literature, which they harshly criticized for its obsolescence and decadence. Hamza wrote his New Happiness for the following reasons: "This book is not for use in the maktab; rather it was written with the aim of providing a book for reading [qiraat risalasi ] for use in place of the books currently read by the common people, such as Jamshed, Zarqum, Aldarkusha , [various] bayazes, Dalla Mukhtar, Gul andam, Afandi , etc., which are all full of superstition and

[36] TsGARUz, f. 461, op. 1, d. 57, l. 6070b.

nonsense, injurious to morals, and [entirely] baseless."^[37] Much like the press, Jadid literature remained firmly subordinated to an overriding didactic concern. This was especially true of the plays which usually culminated in lengthy speeches in which a mouthpiece of the Jadids would rouse the audience by pointing to the moral of the story. There is no character or plot development and no concern with the internal struggles of human beings. The interiorized self of bourgeois modernity is nowhere to be found in the Jadid literature of this period. For all their denigration of the oral romance tradition, the Jadids could not escape its conventions. Many characters did not even have individual names but rather represented social types. The plot served to highlight social ills and to present Jadid remedies for them, but assertion took the place of demonstration through plot development. The effect was rather lugubrious, and most theater evenings were leavened with the inclusion of light comedy (although the didactic intent was never far beneath the surface even in comedy: a skit called Tim Fool puts the difficulties encountered by a country bumpkin in the city to generic ignorance, whereas in Is It Easy to Be a Lawyer? , the lawyer frequently rises above the antics of his humbling clients to lecture the audience about the need to reform).^[38] Nevertheless, many of the writers who began writing in the last years before 1917 went on to become accomplished men of letters in the following decade, and the history of modern Central Asian literature can scarcely be imagined without the names of Fitrat, Cholpan, Qadiri, and Hamza (although generations of Soviet scholarship attempted to do precisely that).

Poetry, however, retained its central place in Central Asian literary life, and much of the Jadid exhortation took this form. Sadriddin Ayni's characterization of "Tajik" literature of this period as "old in form but with new topics" applies also to literary output in Turkic.^[39] The Jadid press regularly published poetry (odes to the press were a standard feature), and poetry had an important place in the curriculum of new-method schools. Sayyid Ahmad Ajzi wrote two long poems in the masnawi tradition ruing the fallen state of the Muslim community and exhorting it to reform. But there were new uses for poetry, too. The advent of the gramophone had made folk tunes respectable, and both Aw-

[37] Hamza Hakimzada Niyazi, Yangi saadat: milli roman (Kokand, 1915), 2.

[38] Abdullah Badri, Ahmaq (Samarqand, 1915); Abdullah Awlani, Advokatlik asan nu ? (1916), in Abdulla Awloniy, Toshkent tongi , ed. B. Qosimov (Tashkent, 1978), 300-319.

[39] Sadriddin Ayni, Namuna-yi adabiyat-i Tajik (Moscow, 1926), 529.

lani and Hamza wrote lyrics with "national" (i.e., reformist) themes for folk melodies.

Modern Theater

Theater exercised a deep fascination for Jadids throughout the Russian empire. Looking back on a quarter century of reform, Ismail Bey Gasprinskii could write in 1901 on the emergence of theater as a major achievement.^[40] As with newspapers, the mere existence of theater was deemed a sign of progress and civilization. Modern theater came to Central Asia with the Russian conquest, but until the turn of the century, theatrical activity was confined to the Russian community in the larger cities. A dramatic literature and professional troupes had developed among the Muslims of Transcaucasia and the Tatar lands by the end of the nineteenth century. Transcaucasian and Tatar troupes toured Turkestan in 1911, after which such tours became common.^[41] In addition, dramatic activity was sustained locally by expatriate Tatars who began staging plays for their community at least as early as 1905, and by 1913, this activity was strong enough to support a standing Tatar theater group in Tashkent led by Zeki Bayazidskii.^[42]

The repertoire of these troupes came whole cloth from European Russia or Transcaucasia, and it was performed in the languages of those areas. Local Jadids realized the advantages of the medium and sought to use it for their own goals. Mahmud Khoja Behbudi wrote The Parricide , the first play to be set in Central Asia, as early as 1911, but difficulties with the censor delayed its publication until 1913 and its performance until 1914. When it did first play, in Samarqand on 15 January 1914, it was an instant success.^[43] The group that performed it, composed of seven Central Asians, a Tatar, and an Azerbaijani, traveled to Kokand,

[40] Ismail Bey Gasprinskir, "First Steps toward Civilizing Russian Muslims," trans. Edward J. Lazzerini, in Lazzerini, "Gadidisni at the Turn of the Century: A View from Within," Cabiers du monde russe et soviétique , 16 (1975): 257.

[41] Gulam Mammadli, "Azarbayjan teatri Orta Asiyada," in Iskusstvo Azerbaidzhana , vol. 3 (Baku, 1950), 228-229; M. Buzruk Salihov, Ozbek teatr tarixi ucun materiallar (Tashkent, 1935), 58.

[42] Salihov, Ozbek teatr , 57, 61.

[43] According to the report m Ayina , admittedly written by Behbudi himself, the audience numbered 370 (the theater seated 320, so another 50 seats had to be installed temporarily) and many others had to be turned back; Behbudi, "Turkistanda birinchi milli tiyatir," Ayina , 25 January 1914, 227. The play again attracted a sellout crowd when it came to Tashkent on 6 March 1914; see TWG , 6 March 1914.

Tashkent, and Katta Qurghan in the next few weeks.^[44] By early September, The Parricide had been performed fifteen times by different groups in Turkestan, often without the permission of the author.^[45] The next three years saw intense activity in local theater.^[46] Central Asian Jadids favored plays that dealt specifically with local issues over those translated from Tatar or Azerbaijani, and therefore many of them turned playwright and produced a number of plays addressing questions of purely Central Asian interest.^[47] Samarqand was the greatest center of this activity where Behbudi's disciples Haji Muin b. Shukrullah and Nusratullah b. Qudratullah produced a number of scripts. In addition, Hamza in Kokand, Awlani in Tashkent, and Abdullah Badri in Bukhara wrote numerous plays in this period, several of which were never published.^[48] Theatrical performances, often in the form of artistic soirees, became commonplace even in smaller towns like Osh, Namangan, and Katta Qurghan. This activity was paralleled by visits from Azerbaijani and Tatar troupes, who also began to perform local plays. Moreover, a number of Tatar and Transcaucasian plays were translated into local Turkic and sometimes adapted to a Central Asian setting.^[49] Local amateur theater groups began to form immediately after the first performance of The Parricide . The original cast of the play, which rehearsed at Behbudi's house in Samarqand, coalesced into a troupe and began touring Turkestan. Behbudi had apparently directed the troupe in the beginning, but later the position passed to the Azerbaijani director Ali Asghar Askarov.^[50] Other amateur groups formed in Tashkent and Kokand as well as in smaller towns. Hamza was at the center of one such group in Kokand, which performed plays written or translated by Hamza himself. The first

[44] Mamadzhan Rakhmanov, Uzbekskii teatr s drevneishikh vremen do 1917 goda (Tashkent, 1968), 280.

[45] Mahmud Khoja [Behbudi], "Padarkush wajhidan," Ayina , 13 September 1914, 1130.

[46] For an overview, see A. Samoilovich, "Dramaticheskaia literatura sartov," Vestnik Imparatorskogo Obshchestva Vostokovedemia , 1916, no. 5, 72-84; Edward Allworth, "The Beginnings of the Modern Turkestanian Theater," Slavic Review 23 (1964): 676- 687; Allworth., The Modern Uzbeks (Stanford, 1990), 147-152.

[47] See, for instance, Khalmuhammad Akhundi, "Namangandan maktub," Ayina , 16 May 1915, 399. Local reviews and reports of theatrical performances m Ayina also expressed disapproval of Tatar actors for various reasons: "Samarqanda tiyatir," Ayina , 1 February 1914, 263; "Katta Qorghanda tiyatir," Ayina , 29 March 1914, 349.

[48] Buzruk Salihov (Ozbek teatr , 82-84) lists seventeen locally written plays that were staged before February 1917. In addition, another twenty-four plays of Tatar, Transcaucasian, and Ottoman origin had been staged by that time.

[49] Samoilovich, "Dramaticheskaia literatura," 73.

[50] Rakhmanov, Uzbekskii teatr , 280.

engagement of the group was Hamza's Zaharli hayat (A Poisoned Life), performed in October 1915.^[51] In Tashkent, a group formed around Awlani, who had been involved in local Tatar theater since at least 1909. In 1916, the group was formalized as the Turan Amateur Dramatic Society, with the mission to "develop the love of serious drama among the population . . . [and] to stage spectacles for the people, [in order to] provide healthy diversions to them."^[52] In Bukhara, dramatic activity remained in the hands of local Tatars, who were, however, allowed to stage their plays in old Bukhara.

In founding a modern theater in Central Asia, the Jadids sought to distance it from the long tradition of folk theater known as maskharabazlik . Satire was the stock in trade of this theater, and maskharas could poke brutal fun at various aspects of society, including the khans and Islam itself.^[53] Yet, in preconquest Central Asia, the whole enterprise was located beyond the pale of adab (adabdan kharij ) and hence denied any moral authority. Moreover, the maskharas' use of music was always susceptible to attack by the ulama on Islamic grounds, and their bodily movements contravened the rules of proper deportment conveyed by the maktab. To be a maskhara was the opposite of being a cultured individual; for cultured individuals to take on the activities of the maskharas was scandalous. The Jadids sought to make theater respectable through an appeal to the nation and the needs of the age. For Behbudi, for instance, "theater is a place for preaching and exhortation [majlis-i wa'z-u nasihat ]" for society and in its lofty purpose had nothing in common with the crude craft of the maskharas.^[54] The Jadids drew inspiration from the modern, print-based theater of Europe, which had also been adopted by other Muslim communities of the Russian empire. Indeed, the print antecedents of Jadid theater need to be emphasized. Unlike the maskharas, the Jadids transmitted their theatrical work in print. The Jadids published the transcripts of many of their plays, partly in the hope that all productions of the same play would convey a uniform message. In conveying its message orally, Jadid theater still aspired to the uniformity made possible by print.

Theater was immediately put to philanthropic use. The play itself spread the message while the performance was used to raise money for

[51] Ibid., 290.

[52] Quoted in T.T. Tursunov, Oktiabr'skaia revoluitsna i uzbeksii teatr (Tashkent, 1983), 10.

[53] See Rakhmanov, Uzbekskii teatr , 195-198, for examples.

[54] Behbudi, "Tiyatir, musiqi, she'r," Ayina , 18 December 1914, 111-114.

other Jadid causes. Since all the actors were amateurs, usually Jadid activists, there were no performance fees and a large percentage of the revenue could be used for other purposes. In the three years of its existence, Jadid theater was staged to benefit reading rooms, new-method schools, a Muslim field hospital on the war front, and wounded Muslim soldiers. Thus, the first ever performance of The Parricide in Samarqand raised 329.69 rubles for the city's Muslim Reading Room. This figure represented the entire net income from the evening after expenses of 170 rubles had been paid.^[55] A performance of the same play in Khujand raised 590 rubles for the Red Crescent in January 1915,^[56] and a performance of The Feast in Samarqand the previous December raised 245 rubles, a quarter of which was donated to the war wounded and the rest to new-method schools in the area.^[57] The popularity of theater led to the emergence of cultural soirees that combined cultural, economic, and political functions in one event. A soiree typically included at least one play in addition to music and a program of songs. The Tatar singer and Jadid activist Kamil ul-Mutigi Tuhfatullin toured Central Asia at least twice between 1913 and 1915, giving concerts of Tatar music, including poems by such prominent Tatar Jadids as Abdullah Tuqay set to music.

New Forms of Sociability

The activity surrounding the theater was crucial m forming a public that came together under new rules to discuss issues concerning society. It eschewed overtly political matters, but it redrew the boundaries of debate about cultural and social issues. Similarly, informal discussion circles remained the primary institutional form of Jadidism in Turkestan. (The situation was different in Bukhara, where official hostility drove the Jadids into secret societies.) The Central Asian tradition of gap , circles that brought together men of various crafts or neighborhoods for weekly or monthly gatherings of mutual hospitality, was appropriated for new aims by the Jadids. Munawwar Qari was reported by the tsarist police to be leader of one of the largest gaps in Tashkent.^[58] But for many Jadids such "modern" gaps were merely the beginning. For the Jadids, the key to progress and development lay in organized effort. Hamza saw all asso-

[55] Ayina , 25 January 1914, 237.

[56] Ayina , 30 January 1915, 206.

[57] Ayina , 30 December 1914, 135-137.

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

ciational endeavors, even commercial ones, as an expression of unity. When he wrote to prospective investors in 1914, he expressed this hope: "Maybe in this way our unity will develop, and the rule of joint organization [shirkat qanuni ] will take root among the Muslims of Ferghana and Turkestan, and soon all our affairs, currently decaying, will again turn to progress and development."^[59] The bookstores and publishing ventures described above were the most successful in this regard, and they do show a process of greater institutionalization throughout the decade preceding 1917. These ventures were commercial, to be sure, but by their nature they also served as an institutional basis for cultural reform. The Jadids, though, invested their highest hopes in benevolent societies, such as those which had flourished among the Tatars since the 1890s. As forms of institutionalized philanthropy geared to social (rather than individual) goals, such societies neatly tied together the various strands of Jadid reform in an institutional framework. The issue of establishing a benevolent society in Turkestan was raised in 1906 in the general atmosphere of enthusiasm,^[60] but nothing came of it until 1909, when the Imdadiya (Aid) society was formally established with Munawwar Qari and Abdullah Awlani, who had collaborated on the newspaper Shuhrat the previous year, among its founders. The society defined its aim as "the improvement of the moral and material position of needy persons of the Mohammedan faith in the Syr Darya oblast," through opening shelters for the poor, supporting hospitals, and helping students.^[61] The educational goals were broadened in 1913 to include the opening of schools and reading rooms and the establishment of scholarships.^[62] The society secured the financial help of Said Karim-bay (who also served as chair for a year), and it lasted until the revolution. It acquired a niche for itself in the public life of Muslim Tashkent without ever making the kind of difference its founders had hoped for. Membership dues (a modest six rubles) were the main source of revenue, although the advent of theater provided another. Still, the total expenditure for 1914 stood at only 1,975.20 rubles, roughly one-third of which went to students in various kinds of schools.^[63]

[59] Hamza arkhivi katalogi , I: 38.

[60] Taraqqi, 27 July 1906; 3 August 1906; 12 August 1906; "Tashkand Jamiyat-i khayriya," Khurshid , 21 September 1906.

[61] Ustav musul'manskogo obshchestva "Pomoshch'" v Tashkente (Tashkent, 1909).

[62] TsGARUz, f. 17, d. 17416, l. 29.

[63] ST , 21 January 1915.

Imdadiya remained the only benevolent society to operate among the native population of Turkestan, although numerous such societies existed among the European and Tatar communities in various cities. Other attempts at organized philanthropy also had limited success. Thirteen activists led by Behbudi founded a "Muslim reading room" (qiraatkhana wa mutaliakhana islamiyasi [sic]) in Samarqand in 1908. It began with 125 subscriptions, but by 1912, only seven members remained and daily attendance averaged barely ten persons a day.^[64] In 1912, Abdullah Awlani opened the Turan reading room in Tashkent, which received periodicals from all over the Muslim world, most of them obtained gratis from their publishers. Nevertheless, financial worries never left it, and it seems to have folded in early 1917.^[65]