Chapter 5
Knowledge as Salvation

The merchant Ghazi-bay was an ignorant person who neglected to educate his son Abdulqahhar. Instead of sending him to school, he married him off at the age of sixteen to Maryam. Out of ignorance, Abdulqahhar fell into bad habits and soon managed to waste away his fortune on drinking and gambling. When all was lost, he pawned his house and disappeared, leaving Maryam to care for herself and their two children. But Maryam was intelligent and knew the value of knowledge, and despite all the hardship—she had to go from door to door, doing menial labor for neighbors—gave her son Alimjan the beginnings of education. Alimjan was a kind, studious child who went to the mosque regularly instead of playing in the street. Then one day Ahmadjan, a friend, took Alimjan to the new-method school he attended. The teacher was very kind to Alimjan and admitted him to the school, waiving tuition and providing him with the necessary school supplies. Given his mother's good training, Alimjan flourished, finishing two grades in one year. At the examination, he outshone his peers and, by answering all the questions posed by visiting dignitaries, brought credit to himself, the school, and the new method. In time, he graduated and was given a job as secretary by a merchant who had attended the final examination. Alimjan's knowledge and diligence won him the trust of the merchant, who gave him his daughter in marriage. In the meantime, Alimjan got word that his father was alive, eking out an existence in a hovel in Tashkent. Alimjan went to Tashkent to rescue his father (spending the sixteen hours on the train journey from Ko-

kand reading) and thus reunited the family. Alimjan's father-in-law conveniently died soon afterward, leaving his fortune to Alimjan, who, along with his family, lived happily ever after, thanks entirely to knowledge.^[1]

Such was the new happiness of which Hamza Hakimzada wrote in his "national novel" in 1915. This view of knowledge as the panacea for all ills, individual and social, as a font of happiness, wealth, and progress, was the point of departure for all Jadid thinking. But it was also clear to the Jadids that existing maktabs and madrasas were not producing such knowledge. Reform had to begin with the schools, the most crucial aspect of which was the adoption of the phonetic (or new) method (usul-i jadid ) of teaching the alphabet. The creation of schools that would teach by the new method became the centerpiece of Jadid reform and, indeed, provided the movement its name.

The reform of the maktab (and the attempted reform of the madrasa) aroused extreme passions in Muslim society. Opposition to the Jadids is usually dismissed as the fanatical reaction of obscurantists opposed to all change, but taking the opposition—and the ensuing debate over the meaning of culture—seriously allows us to appreciate the extent and mechanism of change advocated by the Jadids. The knowledge that the Jadids celebrated came off the printed page and was predicated on the acquisition of functional literacy. This view of knowledge threatened to undermine existing practices surrounding the transmission of knowledge and the patterns of cultural and moral authority they engendered. Knowledge, and its place in society, was being redefined in the debate over the new method.

The Jadids' cult of knowledge also placed them firmly in the mainstream of the enlightenment project. The faith in the power of knowledge to transform societies was shared by the rulers of Russia and those sent to administer Turkestan, as well as Russian society in general, which also sought answers to its problems in knowledge and education. "Only knowledge can conquer this region spiritually," Kaufman once told Ostroumov. "Neither weapons, nor legislation can do this, but the school,

[1] Hamza Hakimzada Niyazi, Yangi saadat (milli roman ) (Kokand, 1915). This basic plot is to be found in numerous Jadid works of verse and prose; see also Sadriddin Ayni's epistolary novel, Khanadan-i khushbakht , in his Tahzib us-sibyan (Samarqand, 1911); Abdulhamid Sulaymani, [Cholpan], "Dokhtor Muhammadyar," serialized in ST , 1914. The ultimate source of this vision was a novel by Gasprinskii, The Muslims of the Abode of Happiness (Darurrahat Musulmanlar'i [Bahchesaray, 1906]), which was translated into Persian by Fitrat in 1916 (Musulmanan-i Dar ul-rahat [Bukhara, 1916]).

and only the school, can."^[2] This faith in the power of knowledge and education remained with Kaufman's successors, even when they abandoned policies he had initiated. The same faith in the power of knowledge, however, also produced a fear of the wrong kind of knowledge, which could exacerbate the "fanaticism' of the natives. Kaufman's worries about the malign influence of sedentary Muslims over the nomads and his successors' concerns about the influx of "pan-Islamic" ideas from the Ottoman empire shared this fear. As a promoter of an enlightenment suitable for Russian state interests and a jealous watchdog over rival forms of it, the state saw itself as a significant actor in the realm of education. Indeed, the earliest efforts to transform Central Asian society through education came from the state, and it is here that we begin our examination.

Educating the Natives

The dismal record of Russian educational institutions in attracting students from the local population led to a reappraisal of Kaufman's policy upon his death. In 1884, the new governor-general, N.O. Rozenbakh, seeking a different ploy to get Muslims to send their children to Russian schools, came up with the idea of "Russo-native schools" (russko-tuzemnye shkoly ), in which Russian and traditional Muslim education would coexist. In the morning, a Russian teacher would teach Russian and arithmetic, while a damla would give lessons identical to those in the maktab in the afternoon.^[3] The course of study was four years, by the end of which students were expected to be able to write and speak Russian. Reading lessons in the fourth year introduced students to Russian geography and history.^[4] Local notables were pressed into service in

[2] N.P. Ostroumov, Konstantin Petrovich fon-Kaufman, ustroitel' Turkestanskogo kraia: Lichnye vospominanua N. Ostroumova (Tashkent, 1899), 54-55.

[3] The parallels with the Russo-Tatar schools that had begun to appear in the Volga region m the 1870s can be misleading. Muslim religious instruction m the Tatar schools was admissible, but possible only if paid for by the community (although this requirement was often bypassed). In the first year of the school, instruction was in Tatar, but gradually Russian became the sole language of teaching; see A. Kh. Makhmutova, Stanovlenie svetskogo obrazovanua u Tatar (Kazan, 1982), ch. 2. The Tatar precedent seems not to have figured m the debates in Tashkent over the introduction of Russo-native schools; see K. E. Bendrikov, Ocherki po tstorii narodnogo obrazovaniia v Turkestane (1865-1925 gody ) (Moscow, 1960), 181-185.

[4] Bendrikov, Ocherki , 308-309. A formal curriculum was drawn up only m 1907; a copy is in TsGARUz, f. 47, op. I, d. 903, ll. 4-5.

this novel intervention in local cultural life, and the first Russo-native school opened in Tashkent in the house of Said Karim-bay, Said Azim's son, in December 1884.^[5] Notables were asked to provide funding and students. Most of the students of the first school in Tashkent were children of local notables, who also served as patrons of these schools, charged with promoting the school in society. Annual examinations were public occasions to which local dignitaries were invited to see for themselves the benefits of the new school. High-ranking officials acted as chief examiners, and graduates received prizes for completing the course of studies. (Abdullah Qadiri received a gold watch from the governor-general himself upon his graduation in 1912.) Yet the treasury remained reluctant to release any funds for these schools, leaving many of the first schools dependent on local revenues. The first school in Tashkent received 700 rubles from the treasury and 1,300 rubles from the city, while the rooms were donated by Said Karim-bay.

The schools had a shaky beginning, as parents refused to send their children to them. In the first few years of their existence, it was even common for notables to pay children of the poor to attend, the police bearing the responsibility for finding the children.^[6] In many locations, schools were supported by special levies (maktab puli ), which served to heighten their unpopularity.^[7] The situation changed by the turn of the century. With the growth in the economy, many more people encountered Russian and came to see it as an important skill. Table 5 shows the significant increase in the number of such schools in the first decade of the twentieth century. The growth was greatest in Syr Darya oblast, where the number of such schools almost doubled in the last six years of the old regime.

The primary goal of the schools was to impart functional skills in spoken and written Russian, and over the years the Russian sections of these schools became their real focus. Although many observers remained skeptical, a graduate of the four-year course was supposed to have acquired a facility in reading and speaking Russian and to be able to write basic bureaucratic or business documents.^[8] The "native" part, on the other hand, was meant to gain the trust of the local population by assuring it that the school would transmit the knowledge that parents

[5] TWG , 31 December 1884.

[6] V. Nalivkin, Tuzemtsy ran'she i teper ‘ (Tashkent, 1913), 104

[7] A.E. Izmailov, Prosveshcheme v respubhkakh sovetskogo Vostoka (Moscow, 1973), 44. In Semirech'e, this tax was the only source of revenue for Russo-native schools: D. Aitmambetov, Dorevoliutsionnye shkoly v Kirgizii (Frunze, 1961), 50-51.

[8] A copy of the academic program as revamped in 1907 is in TsGARUz, f. 47, op. 1, d. 903, l. 2-40b; see also TWG , 5 November 1915; 8 November 1915.

expected from a maktab, a point Russian officials took care to emphasize repeatedly. "Remember," Governor-General Teviashev told the audience while inaugurating a new school in 1905, "that the education administration by no means hinders your religious customs and allows your children to study religion in this school in exactly the same manner that you studied it in your schools."^[9] Native teachers were, therefore, left free to teach as they pleased. Sporadic attempts to establish a standardized curriculum produced no tangible results. By the turn of the century, many native teachers had begun to use the phonetic method to teach the alphabet and to use textbooks. In 1902, at Ostroumov's initiative, the local educational administration commissioned Said Aziz Khoja, a "native" teacher in one of the Tashkent schools, to write a textbook especially for the first year to replace the Tatar manuals that had hitherto been used.^[10] The resulting text, Ustad-i awwal (The First Teacher), was the first new-method textbook to be published in Central Asia. A reader for the second year followed two years later.^[11] The native section imparted basic literacy in Turkic (or Persian in a few schools in Samarqand) and the ability to recite the Qur'an and to answer questions

[9] Quoted by Ostroumov, "Musul'manskie maktaby i russko-tuzemnye shkoly v Turkestanskom krae," ZhMNP , n.s.. 1 (1906): otd. narod. obraz., 148.

[10] Iuldash Abdullaev, Ocherki po metodike obucheniia gramote v uzbekskoi shkole (Tashkent, 1966), 107-118. Said Rasul Khoja (1866-1938), a native of Tashkent, learned Russian on his own initiative while a madrasa student and therefore found employment in the first Russo-native school to open in Tashkent. B. Qosimov, "Reformator pedagog, ma" rifatparwar," Sorer maktabi , 1967, no. 5, 76-79.

[11] On the creation of these textbooks, see Abdullaev, O metodike , 107-126.

about religious obligations and rituals.^[12] While many schools had two or three Russian teachers, all made do with only one "native" teacher, so that often by the fourth year "native" instruction amounted to no more than a half-hour a day.^[13]

Over time, local administrators came to attach high hopes to these schools. Writing in 1909, Governor-General P. I. Mishchenko saw them as "the best means for promoting Russian citizenship [grazhdansvennost '] and language" among the natives. His suggestion of increasing their budgetary allocations in view of the political benefits they were likely to accrue fell victim to the paucity of resources, however, and was never realized.^[14] To the end of the old regime, numbers of Russo-native schools remained small, and only one offered more than the basic four years of instruction. Yet, they were the most likely channel for the local population to learn Russian.^[15] At the same time, there remained considerable dissatisfaction about their efficacy. N. S. Lykoshin, a longtime administrator, felt that "the Sart merchant considers it sufficient if his son, after graduating from [a Russo-native] school, can write the address in Russian or a letter or a simple business telegram; but the development of the child does not go beyond this in a direction desirable to us."^[16] Even so, the numbers of students graduating remained small; only forty-seven students finished the four-year course in 1910, and sixty-three in 1913, when Tashkent's schools were the most successful in the whole province.^[17] The situation was far worse in Ferghana, where as many as seventeen of the twenty schools did not graduate a single student in 1907, and three schools in the oblast continued to exist without producing a single graduate among them after 1903.^[18]

The New Method

The growth in the numbers of Russo-native schools after the turn of the century was part of a broader phenomenon that included the emergence

[12] This is what children were examined for at the public annual exams; see, e.g., TWG , 19 May 1911, 10 April 1914.

[13] TWG , 8 September 1910; 19 May 1911.

[14] TsGARUz, f. 2, op. 2, d. 369, ll. 10-11.

[15] Several Russo-native schools also offered evening courses in Russian for adults; cf. Aitmambetov, Dorevoluitstonnye shkoly , 75.

[16] N.S. Lykoshin, Pol zhizm v Turkestane (Petrograd, 1916), 58.

[17] TWG , 20 May 1910, 23 May 1913.

[18] A. Mukhammadzhanov, Shkola i pedagogicheskaia mysl' uzbekskogo naroda XIX-nachala XX v . (Tashkent, 1978), 74; A. F. Ardashirov, "Russko-tuzemnye shkoly v dorevoliutsionnom Andizhane," Uchenye zapiski Andizhanskogo gospedinstituta , no. 6 (1957): 123-124.

of new-method schools beyond the purview of officialdom. Indeed, Mishchenko's enthusiasm for Russo-native schools was provoked at least in part by his concerns about the growth of new-method schools in Turkestan. Pioneered in the Crimea by Gasprinskii, who opened the first such school in 1884, new-method schools were the staple of Muslim reform in the European parts of the Russian empire. By the turn of the century, these schools dominated elementary education among the Tatars, and new-method madrasas were being founded in Ufa and Kazan. In Turkestan, the first new-method schools appeared in the early 1890s, usually among the Tatar communities in Turkestani cities, but they had spread among the local population as well by the turn of the century. By the time Mishchenko wrote, these schools had become the object of concern for officialdom as well as the focus of the biggest debate in Muslim society.

Scholars have been too content to see the new-method school as the creation of Gasprinskii's genius alone. In fact, the new-method school was part of a secular trend toward functional literacy and the organization of general schooling in which new domains of cultural practice were elaborated. Such practices had first appeared in Western Europe, and they came to Central Asia from two sources. The first was Russia, where concern with elementary schooling had emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century. This experience was reflected in the Russo-native schools, with which new-method schools shared many characteristics. Many "native" teachers (Haji Muin in Katta Qorghan, Sayyid Ahmad Ajzi in Samarqand, Ashur Ali Zahiri in Kokand, Said Rasul Rasuli in Tashkent) were prominent in Jadid circles; and many of the younger Jadids attended Russo-native schools. The second, more relevant, source was the Ottoman empire, where, for reasons very similar to those in Russia, low rates of literacy among the empire's Muslim population had come to be a pressing concern in Ottoman circles by the early 1860s. In the ensuing debate, non-Ottoman Muslims, such as the Iranian statesman Mirza Malkum Khan and the Azerbaijani Mirza Fathali Akhundov (Akhundzadeh), both of whom were in Istanbul at this time, took an active role. The diagnosis varied. For Malkum Khan and Akhundov, the cause was the difficulty of the Arabic script, and the remedy a reform of the script. Others, such as the poet Namik Kemal, felt that poor methods of teaching the alphabet were to blame for low rates of literacy and that more efficient methods of instruction would solve the problem.^[19]

[19] Hamid Algar, Mirza Malkum Khan: A Study in the History of Iranian Modernism (Berkeley, 1973), 82-95.

Gradually the phonetic, or new, method (usûl-i cedid ) for teaching the alphabet won official favor when the authorities passed a law making elementary education compulsory.^[20] This debate was known among Muslim elites in the Russian empire and had even made it to the pages of TWG , which in 1876 published an article (unfortunately anonymous) propounding the need for a more efficient method of teaching the alphabet.^[21] Said Rasul Khoja, a teacher in Tashkent's first Russo-native school and author of Ustad-i awwal (The First Teacher), the first new-method primer in Central Asia, wrote in its preface: "After this [kind of] First Teacher became popular in Istanbul, and the advantages of imparting instruction with it in the maktab became known..., the scholars of Kazan translated it into their own language [and started using it in their maktabs] .... The advantages of this way of teaching were also realized at some Russian schools in Tashkent."^[22] Gasprinskii himself was understandably reluctant to draw attention to the Ottoman antecedents of the school he pioneered, since that would have laid him open to official suspicion, but the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming. But while there can be no doubt about the Ottoman pedigree of the new-method school, it was more than simply a transplant. In the Ottoman empire, the new method was introduced in a network of state-sponsored and state-funded schools (although financial constraints kept funding levels low);^[23] in the Russian empire, on the other hand, such schools existed in the often tenuous space provided by the state to the "confessional" schools of its religious minorities. The organization and support of such schools remained the concern of society, rather than the state, with all the attendant problems.

Disowning the Maktab

The new-method school acquired such a central position in Jadid reform across the Russian empire because political realities allowed it. As "confessional" schools, maktabs had existed in the semi-public niche allowed by the state to religious communities. A reform of these schools could be carried out through purely civic initiative in considerable freedom from government control. But the reform also arose from a profound dissatis-

[20] Bayram Kodaman, Abdulhamid Devri Egitim Sistemi (Ankara, 1991), 63.

[21] Anon., 'Ta'lim-l, ulum khususida," TWG , 5 February 1876.

[22] Said Rasul Khoja Said Aziz Khoja oghli, Ustad-i awwal (Tashkent, 1902), 1.

[23] Osman Ergin, Türktye Maarif Tarihi , 5 vols. (Istanbul, 1977), IV: 460-475.

faction with the state of the maktab. Judged by the needs of the age, the maktab was found wanting. Haji Muin's 1916 play Old School, New School opens in a maktab, "dark as a dungeon with a stove in the middle; a bastinado hangs on the wall; on one side lies a filthy container of water, on the other side, on a torn carpet, sits the teacher, wearing several layers of dirty clothes, short-tempered and with the looks of an opium addict."^[24] The teacher is more concerned with food (he sends a pupil off to get tea) and gifts (he insistently asks for his weekly gift of food from the parents of another pupil) than with the welfare of the children in his charge, who learn absolutely nothing. Chaos reigns in the school, as fights break out between children frequently and provoke intemperate physical punishment from the teacher.

New conditions demanded schools where children could acquire literacy, a basic knowledge of "arithmetic, geography, history, especially the history of Islam," as well as "religious obligations [wajibat-i diniya ], i.e., proper recitation of the Qur'an, questions of faith... prayers, fasting, hajj, and almsgiving."^[25] This valorization of functional literacy as a transposable skill was connected with the new ubiquity of the written word made possible by print. As I argued in Chapter I, the juncture of orality and literacy at which the maktab existed rendered functional literacy less than a necessity. Now that literacy came to be a highly valued skill, the absence of literacy instruction became the maktab's biggest liability. Similarly, the complaint, repeatedly made, that poor children wasted several years of their lives in the maktab without even acquiring the rudiments of literacy bespoke a newfound sense of efficiency. The maktab was fully imbricated in the rhythm of everyday life, in which the teacher's qualifications in the maktab lay in his knowledge and piety acquired through interaction with a recognized master. "Teaching" as such was not a separate domain of practice, nor was "learning" to be measured by such means as examinations and grades. Now this became lack of method and organization, and hence a major shortcoming of the maktab.

The new method involved teaching the alphabet using the phonetic method instead of the syllabic method used in the maktab. Instead of memorizing the names of the letters, the emphasis here was on teaching children the sounds that the letters represented; the aim was to impart

[24] Haji Mum b. Shukrullah, Eski maktab, yangt maktab (Samarqand, 1916), 3.

[25] Munawwar Qari, "Bizni jahalat, jahl-i murakkab," Taraqqi —Orta Azyaning umr guzarlighi , 14 June 1906.

the ability to read and write rather than an "implicit" knowledge of certain canonical texts. The texts used in new-method schools were specially devised primers that introduced pupils to the alphabet, with the most commonly used letters coming first and letters representing the specifically Semitic phonemes of Arabic being left to the last. Beyond literacy, new-method schools also sought to teach such "contemporary" (zamancha ) subjects as arithmetic, geography, science, and history.

The new method made both the Russo-native and Jadid schools qualitatively different from the maktab. This fact was underscored by the insistence of new-method teachers on calling themselves muallim , after Tatar and Ottoman fashion, rather than damla or maktabdar , the terms traditionally used in Central Asia for teachers in maktabs. The physical appearance of new-method schools was also different. The new school in Haji Muin's play "accords with the rules of public health. Maps hang on the walls. On one side, the teacher sits on a chair behind a table and next to a blackboard. Across from him, behind two desks, sit four students .... As the curtain rises, the children rise to their feet and greet the teacher."^[26] Desks, chairs, maps, and globes became fetishes of the new-method schools. The very act of sitting on chairs in orderly rows, with the teacher standing facing the class, rather than sitting on the floor in a circle around the damla , meant, for the Jadids, a leap from the disorder and backwardness of the maktab to the scientific order of the school. A pedagogical manual written by Gasprinskii (and apparently well known in Central Asia) came complete with a diagram of the ideal classroom, with windows, maps, globes, blackboard, and desks neatly laid out in rows.

The Schools

If so far this description of new-method schools seems like a Foucauldian delight, we need to remember the many ways in which such ideals did not become reality. It is impossible to determine the exact number of new-method schools in Turkestan, for although the new-method school was a more tangible entity than the maktab, with records of admissions and enrollments, the discrepancies between archival figures and unofficial information are substantial. Many schools quickly folded for lack of interest on the part of parents, active opposition from them, hostility of the state, or financial problems. Others existed unofficially, beyond

[26] aji Muin, Eski maktab , 40.

the domain of the bureaucracy, especially after 1912, when new legislation sought to control them.

The first new-method schools in Turkestan were opened by Tatars for their own use. The first school for Turkestanis for which we have concrete evidence was opened in Andijan by Sultan Murad-bay, owner of a cotton-cleaning factory, who hired a Tatar teacher to teach the children of factory workers,^[27] but it was not until the turn of the century that these schools became widespread. Munawwar Qari opened the first new-method school in Tashkent in 1901,^[28] and by late 1903 the city was reported to have more than twenty such schools.^[29] Abdulqadir Shakuri started the first school in the Samarqand area in 1903,^[30] while the first schools in Kokand also opened in the first years of the century.^[31] The actual numbers of these schools are difficult to determine, though. Mandatory registration began only in 1912, and even then many schools escaped the state's notice. The wide range of figures to be found in bureaucratic correspondence of the day indicates that officialdom had little idea of the precise number of schools in existence. According to official figures, there were thirteen schools with 1,1000 students in the old city of Tashkent and thirteen in Kokand.^[32] Yet, the inspector of schools in Ferghana oblast reported twenty-three new-method schools in his jurisdiction in February 1910, but only "about twenty" three years later.^[33] However, according to a correspondent to Ayina , Kokand then had thirty-one schools with 3,000 students, making it the leading city in Turkestan.^[34] In 1914, the Samarqand area had at least a half-dozen substantial schools.^[35] These figures, in all likelihood, understate the number of schools in existence for the contemporary press gives the impression that new schools were being opened frequently. We might also consider the evidence of the textbooks. The last decade of tsarist rule saw the

[27] A.F. Ardashirov, "K voprosu o rob novometodnykh maktabov," Uchenye zapiski Andizhanskogo gospedinstituta , no. 6 (1957): 131.

[28] Sirojiddin Abroad, "Munawwar Qori," Sharq Yulduzi , 1992, no. 5, 107.

[29] Turkestanskie vedomosti , 2 November 1903, 552.

[30] Muallim Mulla Abdulqadir Samarqandi, "Aja'ib bir zaman emish," Tojjar , 2 October 1907.

[31] A report from the Ferghana oblast educational establishment to the governor-general from 1913 provides details on four of the most important schools in Kokand, the first of which opened "ten to twelve years ago" (TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 943, ll. 57ob-58).

[32] Sh. Ismoilov, "XIX asrning okhiri, XX asr boshlarida Turkistondagi yangi usul maktablan," Obshchestvennye nauki v Uzbekistane , 1976, no. z, 56-58.

[33] TsGARUz, f. 19, d. 35019, ll. 18-180b (for 1910); f. 1, op. 31, d. 943, 1. 65 (for 1913, reported by the governor of Ferghana to the governor-general).

[34] Mulla Ishaq Jan, "Jawab," Ayina , 4 January 1914,, 257.

[35] Ayina , 6 September 1914, 1105-1106.

publication of scores of textbooks locally, many of which went into several editions. Since publishing was largely a commercial enterprise, we can safely assume that enough demand existed for publishers to put these textbooks on the market. The usual print run for local publications was 1,000 copies. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that new-method schools numbered in the hundreds in Central Asia during the last decade of the old regime. At the very least, it is quite clear that by the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century new-method schools had become a constant feature of urban life in Turkestan.

New-method schools varied a great deal in size, organization, and stability. Some, such as Munawwar Qari's in Tashkent and Abdulqadir Shakuri's in Samarqand, had over a hundred students, but many—per-haps the majority—had far smaller enrollments and existed in spare rooms in teachers' or patrons' houses. The novelty of some schools did not extend beyond the use of the phonetic method to teach the alphabet, whereas others offered four years of general elementary education.^[36] The scarcity of financial and material resources remained the most formidable obstacle. They may have come from reasonably prosperous backgrounds, but few Jadids possessed the resources required for establishing schools. Several Jadids opened schools in their own houses, but others depended on the cooperation of those who had the means and the public authority to support their efforts. Many schools were founded by merchants and other notables, either in their own houses or in rooms especially constructed for the school. In Tashkent, the Imdadiya benevolent society provided a subsidy of fifty rubles per month to some schools.^[37]

The practice of charging tuition brought its own ambiguities, for such frank exchange of knowledge for money went against the adab of knowledge (in the maktab, we will recall, the teacher received gifts of food or clothing from the parents, but almost never money) and was distasteful to many parents, but it also laid teachers open to the charge of being interested only in the money. This caused deep anxieties among the Jadids, who claimed to be "servants of the nation" first and foremost. The ambiguity was never resolved, since teaching was the main source of livelihood for many new-method teachers. Jadid publications carried many

[36] See, e.g., reports of annual examinations at a school "with old-method order but new-method form" (usul-i qadima tartiblarinda wa usul-i jadida suratinda ) in TWG , 15 July 1910; 16 June 1911. Such schools were quite widespread, but it is impossible to establish their numbers.

[37] Gr. Andreev "Novometodnye maktaby," Turkestanskie vedoniosti , 21 October 1915.

cautionary tales about the corrupt teachers for whom even new-method teaching was a source of private enrichment rather than a way of serving the nation.

Hopes of creating an organized system of schools remained unfulfilled. A shortage of teachers similarly bedeviled new-method schools. Until 1912, Tatars taught in many schools, but this practice became hazardous after new regulations went into effect that year. One solution was to send students to Tatar schools in European Russia for a higher education and to start summer teacher training courses locally,^[38] but available resources again fell woefully short. Many new-method schools in Turkestan remained one-man shows in which the only teacher was an autodidact whose commitment to reform often outweighed his ability to teach. Ironically, although the Jadids insisted that maktab teachers were ignorant of the science of education, few if any in their own ranks had a higher education, let alone pedagogic training. Jadid textbooks, too, were the work of amateurs, very committed and dedicated, but amateurs nevertheless. For the same reasons, several attempts to impose a uniform curriculum came to naught because there existed no institution that could enforce uniform standards. An attempt in Kokand to teach according to a common program failed because few teachers could teach all the subjects included in the syllabus.^[39] The Jadids of Central Asia could not bring any uniformity or system to their schools down to 1917.

The Advent of Schooling

The program in Table 6 accompanied twelve identical applications for permission to open new-method schools in Tashkent submitted in June 1910. Unfortunately, it does not provide any information about the allocation of time in the classroom (and even if did, it could not be taken as a true indication of what went on in the classroom, since dodging the Russian school inspector was not very difficult). In the more established new-method schools, instruction took place four or five hours a day, six days a week.^[40] The first year was largely devoted to learning the alphabet. By 1917, teachers in Central Asia had a choice of at least a dozen locally

[38] N.Y., "Muallimlar tayyarlamaq usuli," Ayina , 19 April 1914.

[39] Ozbek, "Maktab masalasi," Ayina , 28 December 1913, 234-235.

[40] See, for instance, the teaching plans of several Andijan schools in Ardashirov, "K voprosu," 157-159.

produced primers to use in the classroom. Said Rasul Khoja's Ustad-i awwal (The First Teacher) was used in Jadid schools, but it was eventually displaced by Munawwar Qari's Adib-i awwal (The First Writer, 1910).^[41] The next few years saw the appearance of several other primers, including several in Persian. These books had much in common: They introduced the Arabic alphabet in stages, giving each letter its phonetic value, and providing exercises in joining the various letters. These led to exercises in forming words and, toward the end of the year, whole sentences. Certain primers contained passages for reading.

In the second year, students read longer passages in readers specially designed for children. The passages were largely in prose, but textbooks were also liberally sprinkled with verse. These texts differed from those used in the maktab in that they were specially written for children in their native language using a simple vocabulary. Although the readings remained didactic in intent, they now included fairy tales or stories about animals. Munawwar Qari's Adib-i sani , for instance, contains forty-five passages of literary, scientific (fanni ), and moral content. The "scientific" passages provide basic information such as the months of the year in the lunar calendar, as well as the Arabic, Russian, and Ottoman solar calendars,^[42] or word lists of animals, items of clothing, geographical terms, and so forth. The ethics lessons deal with common Jadid themes such as the superiority of knowledge over wealth, the status of teachers, the sad fate of a habitual liar, and notions of generosity, miserliness, and wastefulness. Thus, the story of a rich man who refuses to give a circumcision feast for his son because it would become wastefulness (israf ) if he invited only his rich friends, and donates the money instead to schools and madrasas was recounted with approval.^[43] In another story, a rich man who would not send his son to school because tuition cost one ruble per month deprives his son of the ability to tell right from wrong. As a result, the son becomes a wastrel and spends his entire fortune. The moral: "Such is the fate of the wastrel and of the wealth of the miser."^[44] The genealogy of these textbooks remains to be examined. The most immediate model was provided by Tatar textbooks, but these were themselves

[41] For a critical survey, see Haji Muin, "Alifbalarimiz," Hurriyat , 19 January 1918; 22 February 1918. An extensive bibliography of pre-1917 textbooks and primers is in Adeeb Khalid, "The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reforma: Jadidism in Tsarist Central Asia" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993), 448-454.

[42] Munawwar Qari ibn Abdurrashid Khan, Adib-i sani, 3rd. ed. (Tashkent, 1912), 13-14.

[43] Ibid, 44.

[44] Ibid., 40-42.

deeply influenced by Russian pedagogical tools. Said Rasul Khoja also indicates an Ottoman connection, with its roots in French models. In style and format, the new primers of Central Asia replicated developments in European pedagogy.

In subsequent years, primers were supplemented by collections of poetry written by various Jadid authors specifically for use in schools. Unlike the mystical poetry of the maktab, these poems propagated the basic message of Jadid reform, such as the fallen state of Turkestan, the need for knowledge, the excellence of schools, and a passion for the nation. Often these poems were written to the tune of newly respectable folk tunes and meant for recitation or singing. By 1913, weekly poetry lessons were common in many schools.^[45] This was a major change from the maktab, where singing and profane poetry (let alone the singing of profane poetry) had no place. Munawwar Qari also introduced physical exercise at his school, but the experiment did not last long. Physical exercise of this kind contravened the conventions of adab , and many parents, even those convinced of the superiority of the new method, could not countenance it. Many parents also feared that physical training would inevitably lead to conscription of their children into the army and therefore began to withdraw them from the school.^[46]

Elementary Arabic was taught in some schools, but the teaching of Russian was still the exception rather than the rule in new-method schools, the result of a combination of parental suspicion and a lack of capable teachers. Munawwar Qari started teaching Russian in his school in 1911,^[47] and four years later it was being taught twelve hours a week by a Russian teacher.^[48] The curriculum of new-method schools often included lessons in hygiene and elementary science, for which Tatar textbooks were used. Arithmetic was commonly taught, and some schools even taught geometry in higher grades. Locally published textbooks for elementary arithmetic became available in 1913, but Tatar manuals, themselves translations of Russian textbooks, continued to be used for higher classes.

Jadid criticism of the maktab went beyond its inefficiency and disorder and questioned the very suitability of its texts for young children.

[45] Cf. Bobrovnikov, "Russko-tuzemnye uchilishcha, mekteby i medresy v Srednei Azii, ZhMNP , n.s., 46 (1913): 66-70; Andreev, "Novometodnye maktaby v Turkestane," Turkestanskie vedomosti , 11 December 1915.

[46] Andreev, "Novometodnye maktaby v Turkestane," Turkestanskie vedomosti , 21 October 1915.

[47] Application dated 11 February 1911, in TsGARUz, f. 47, d. 1149, l. 4.

[48] Andreev, "Novometodnye maktaby," Turkestanskie vedomosti , 21 October 1915.

Abdullah Awlani echoed Munawwar Qari when he wrote: "Everyone knows that the books used in the Muslim schools of Turkestan, such as Char kitab, Sabat ul-Ajizin , Fuzuli, Nawa'i, Khoja Hafiz, Bedil, and Maslak ul-Muttaqin , are, one and all, books of poetry. Some of them are concerned with difficult problems of dogma and practice [e'tiqadat wa amaliyat ],... [and] as most of them are in Persian, it is impossible for young children to benefit from them, or even to understand them. Teaching these books is like reaching for the stark while sitting on the ground ... Even if [the children] understand the meaning of these apparently romantic poems, what good do they do?^[49] Others went further and claimed that romantic poetry memorized in the maktab actually spoiled the morals of little children and was the cause of widespread pederasty in Central Asia·^[50]

Children needed books specially designed for them that paid attention to their levels of comprehension and provided material they would find interesting· "It would be more beneficial to pupils just embarking on the study of literature," Munawwar Qari once suggested to Hamza, "if you included short, interesting tales, such as those about the actions of people and animals, in short tales accessible to the faculties of children, rather than [dealing with] difficult topics such as ... honor, courage, nation, and nationalism, or other such dry admonitions.... Experience shows that pupils are troubled not by the size of our present books of literature but by the difficulty of their vocabulary and subject matter."^[51]

A Russian orientalist visiting Munawwar Qari's school in 1915 noted that punishments meted out to children were very mild and that teachers used the polite form of speech in addressing the children.^[52] The Jadids' horror of physical punishment, repeated on numerous occasions by other writers, stemmed from the same sources as their new-found disgust with mystical poetry. This was the Jadids' discovery of childhood.^[53] The maktab treated young boys essentially as men on a small scale·For

[49] Abdullah Awlani, Adabiyat, yakhud nulli she'rlardan (Tashkent, 1909), quoted in A. Bobokhonov and N. Mahsumov, Abdulla Awlomyning pedagogik faoliyati wa ta" limtarbiya toghrisidagi fikrlari (Tashkent, 1966), 45.

[50] Haji Muin ibn Shukrullah, "Jawanbazhkning sabablari," Ayina , 31 May 1914, 637; Alimcan el-Idrisi, "Buhara da Tahsil," Strat-i Müstakun , 8 October 1909, 111-112, made the same argument about madrasas in Bukhara.

[51] Munawwar Qari to Hamza Hakimzada, 1 January 1916, in Hamza Hakunzoda Niyoziy arkhwining katalogi , 2 vols. (Tashkent, 1991), II: 286-287.

[52] Andreev, "Novometodnye maktaby v Turkestane," Turkestanskie vedomosti , 28 October 1915.

[53] Philippe Ariüs, Centuries of Childbood , trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962).

the Jadids, childhood was a special period of life, marked off from the rest of life, a period in which the obligations and gravity of adulthood did not apply. However, such a period also provided the opportunity for molding and training the intellect, morals, and even the body of the child, all the subject of the new, "scientific" discipline of pedagogy.

Desacralization

Concerns with morality were ubiquitous in new-method schools. Moral and ethical messages were never concealed below the surface in these readings, nor did moral education stop with such reading passages. Several textbooks published in Central Asia during this period were directly concerned with imparting purely ethical and moral advice. With names such as Adablik oghlan (The Boy Who Has Adab ) and Nasa'ih ul-atfal (Advice to Children),^[54] these textbooks harked back directly to the adab tradition of the maktab. Reading passages in these books described ideal modes of behavior and deportment. A well-mannered child "listens carefully, with all his soul, without looking to either side, to the teacher or the assistant [khalifa ] when they teach."^[55] The same text offers, as an example to be followed, the story of a little boy who is woken up by his father in the middle of the night, when the latter wakes up of thirst. The father sends the child to fetch water but falls back to sleep before his return. The child stands quietly at his father's bedside with the water until he wakes up again.^[56]

Religious instruction took up a substantial part of school time. The topics covered by the syllabus were quite traditional. The most commonly used textbook on Islam was the Hawa'ij-i diniya (Religious Requirements) by Munawwar Qari. Its three parts treated belief, ritual, and Islamic injunctions on social and commercial practices in the form of questions and answers. Children also learned to read the Qur'an according to the principles of tajwid (for which new textbooks also appeared), and they memorized passages from it, as well as learning to recite the five daily prayers. The use of mystical poetry continued and prayer was mandatory in new-method schools. School events began with the recitation of the Qur'an and the evocation of blessings on the Prophet.^[57]

[54] Muhammadjan Qari ibn Rahimjan, Adablik oghlan (Tashkent, 1912); Mominjan Muhammadjanov, Nasa'ih ul-atfal (Tashkent, 1912).

[55] Muhammadjan Qari, Adablik oghlan , 7.

[56] Ibid., 3-4.

[57] For example, the final examination for the 1912-13 school year at Abdulqadir Shakuri's school in Samarqand began with worship (salat ), invocation of blessings on the Prophet (mawlid ), recitation from the Qur'an (qiraat ) as well as of national poetry (milli she'r ), and recited supplication to God (munajat ). The religious ambiance of these schools could not be doubted, but the recitation of modern poetry was indicative of a growing concern with the community. Samarqand , 24 May 1913.

The numerous continuities with the maktab can be deceptive, though. Concerns with morality might seem little different from the kind of moral training and obedience to older men that was imparted in the maktab, but morality was now taught through specially created texts, not under threat of physical punishment. Similarly, religious tenets were conveyed to pupils not through mimetic practice but from especially designed textbooks in the vernacular; pupils were also expected to understand the meaning of the religious acts they were learning. In setting lessons aside for religion, the new-method schools began the process of marking off Islam from the rest of knowledge. In the maktab, all knowledge was sacral and tenets of Islam pervaded everything taught. In new-method schools, Islam became an object of study, knowledge of which could be acquired in the same way as all other knowledge. The Jadids thus constituted the domain of "religion," as a result of which certain practices and spaces now became exclusively "religious." Other domains of practice, by the same token, were desacralized and firmly placed in the realm of the "nonreligious."

This approach is clearly seen in the construction of "sacred history" as a field of study in new-method schools. The "tales of the Prophets" (qisas ul-anbiya ) were a respected genre in Muslim tradition, and Rabghuzi's thirteenth-century text was widely circulated throughout the Turkic world. However, the immediate inspiration for including sacred history in the curriculum came from Russian schools, which had always included sacred history in their syllabus. The Jadids sought to create a Muslim equivalent of this modern phenomenon.

All nations, whether Christians or Jews, teach the history of their religion and the lives of the prophets in their schools. Every Christian and Jewish student learns the guidance and formation of his religion and becomes acquainted with historical events. This is the cause of the growth of religious and national zeal and sentiment [ghayrat-u hammiyat-i diniya wa milliya ].
... The Europeans and [students] in the organized schools of Russia also study other religions [including] the history of Islam. A Christian student knows more about the history of Islam than a Muslim student.^[58]

Muslims students must know more a bout the origins of their religion, and

[58] Mahmud Khoja Behbudi, Mukhtasar tarikh-i Islam (Samarqand, 1909), 2.

this knowledge should be structured in the same way as in corresponding disciplines developed by Europeans. Behbudi and Fitrat published textbooks on the history of Islam, and Awlani wrote a history of the prophets, little different from the qisas genre in its content, but written in a vernacular style comprehensible to school-age children. In the process, Islam itself began to be historicized, with far-reaching consequences.

Similar assumptions underlay the Jadids' critique of the madrasa. The madrasas of Bukhara and their professors became the butt of criticism and ridicule in the press all over the Turkic world. Again, the most influential critique came from Abdurrauf Fitrat in the form of a debate between a Bukharan mudarris, in India on his way to hajj, and a European sympathetic to Islam and extremely learned in it. The European asks the Bukharan about the curriculum of Bukharan madrasas and is appalled at the list of commentaries and supercommentaries that he hears: "I didn't think I'd ever hear such nonsense [khurafat ] even in my dreams. What a waste of time the people of Bukhara are engaged in! After spending twenty-seven years of their lives in a futile place, they start teaching the same empty and meaningless subjects. But when do they study the most important subjects such as tafsir, hadith, and fiqh?"^[59] As we saw in Chapter 1, the madrasa was the site of the reproduction of a knowledge of Islam mediated through several layers of glosses and commentaries, in which the practice of commentary and interpretation was Islam. That set of practices had become a bundle of nonsense and sophistry now, since real knowledge lay in the scriptural sources of Islam. This new textual view of Islam subverted the interpretive practice that was the foundation of Bukharan madrasas and thus opened the way for a new understanding of Islam itself. The point was to acquire a "true" knowledge of the pristine textual sources of Islam, bypassing the glosses and commentaries, which now came to be seen as nothing more than centuries' worth of corruption and a source of moral and social decline.

There were other problems with the madrasa, too. For all his years spent studying Arabic grammar, Fitrat's mudarris cannot speak Arabic properly. (By using phonetic transcription of standard Bukharan [mis]-pronunciation of Arabic, Fitrat makes a point of highlighting the mudarris's poor Arabic.) The European, who has studied it through the new method, can speak Arabic fluently and corrects his interlocutor in several places. Elsewhere, madrasa teachers and students were criticized for

[59] Fitrat Bukhara'i, Munazara-yi mudarris-i bukharayi ba yak nafar-i farangi dar Hindustan dar bara-yi makatib-i jadida (Istanbul, 1911), 17.

their lack of interest in the affairs of the nation and their selfish opposition to those who had the interest of the nation at heart.^[60] Fitrat's Indian traveler finds professors having affairs with their students.^[61]

The Jadids' disdain for traditional ways of knowing Islam was rooted in this fundamental transformation of their worldview. In their desacralized universe, where all phenomena were liable to rationalist explanation, correct understanding of Islam required not insertion in a chain of authoritative masters but mastery of the textual sources of Islam in the original, now available in print. Hence the emphasis on fluency in Arabic and the acquisition of hadith, tafsir, and fiqh. In 1916, Fitrat published The Guide to Salvation , an ethico-didactic tract in which he sought the justification for all Jadid exhortations in the Qur'an itself. The text is peppered with quotations from the Qur'an in Arabic, which alone for Fitrat provide the true measure of the merit of social and individual endeavor.^[62] These new emphases denigrated the cultural possessions of the traditionally learned and were thus profoundly subversive of their authority. They also opened up access to the practice of interpretation to those outside the ranks of the madrasa-educated elites. As the seventeen-year-old Maryam tells the sextogenarian ishan who has married her, "I am educated and know religion better than you."^[63]

The Jadids may not have been "secularists," for they constantly sought justification for their arguments from Islam, but their understanding of Islam was situated squarely in a desacralized world defined by progress through history. The shariat and true Islam were entirely compatible with the needs of the age, as we saw, and could only be brought about through modern knowledge. The implementation of Islamic law was never an issue in the politics of the Muslim nation; that attitude toward the Islamization of law belongs to a later generation. At the same time, theological debate was conspicuously absent from Central Asian Jadidism. The Jadids doubtless followed the debates of other modernist Muslims, such as Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, the Islamists in the Ottoman empire, and Muhammad 'Abduh and his followers in Egypt, but we have no evidence of any local debates that went beyond the permissibility or other-

[60] M. Sh., "Mullalarimizda daraja-yi fikriya," ST , 15 January 1915.

[61] Fitrat, "Bayonoti sayyohi hindî," ed. Kholiq Mirzozoda, Sadoi Sharq , 1988, no. 6, 33.

[62] Abdurrauf Fitrat, Rahbar-i najat (Bukhara, 1915); cf. "Rohbari najot," ed. Muhabbat Jalilova, Sadot Sharq , 1991, no. 7-8, 16-59; no. 9, 8-54.

[63] Hamza, Zaharli bayot (1916), m his Tola asarlar toplami , ed. N. Karimov et al., 5 vols. (Tashkent, 1988-1989), III: 27.

wise of the new method or the theater. The Jadids' priorities tended to be the concerns of the community rather than of the faith.

Struggles Over Schooling

The debate surrounding the new method is not easy to chronicle. Unlike the copious critique of the maktab produced by the Jadids, critics of the new method did not appear in print very often, and we are left to glean the nature of those criticisms from the Jadids' criticism of their critics in newspaper debates. Opponents of the new method also appear, in heavily caricatured form, in Jadid literature and drama.

The fundamental criticism of the new method was that it contravened customary practices surrounding the transmission of knowledge. If the possession of those practices made one a member of the Muslim community, then their contravention was construed by many as an act of secession from that community. As Fitrat's mudarris put it simply, "These schools turn our children into infidels [kafir ]."^[64] Nor was this merely a literary topos: in December 1913, the imam at the Ulugh Bek mosque in Samarqand declared in a Friday sermon that the new method of education and learning Russian were against the shariat and that those who sent their children to a new-method school were infidels.^[65] In 1914, a new-method school in the Maddahi quarter of Samarqand was prevented from opening by residents who would not allow a "Russian school" in their midst,^[66] while in late 1916, posters bearing a similar condemnation appeared in Bukhara.^[67] These schools also did away with the texts traditionally used in the maktab, which popular opinion held to have been established as part of the canon by Imam Abu Hanifa (the founder of the Hanafi school of fiqh) himself.^[68] New-method schools were considered unacceptable also because they used a simplified alphabet and because children sat on benches, "like Russians."^[69] The new body language inculcated in new-method schools provoked, not surprisingly, a great deal of debate and hostility toward the Jadids. The Jadids' denigration of the standard texts of the maktab as nonsense and sophistry, and their re-

[64] Fitrat, Munazara , 37.

[65] Mahmud Khoja [Behbudi], "Bizm hallar wa ishlar," Ayina , 18 January 1914, 200-202.

[66] Ayina , 14 January 1915, 154-155.

[67] Abdurrauf Fitrat, "Jahilana taassubgha misal," Shura , 15 January 1917, 34.

[68] Munawwar Qari, "Bizni jahalat."

[69] Haji Mum, Eski maktab , 42.

placement of these texts by primers and textbooks, also provoked suspicion. In the tradition of the maktab, the written word possessed a sacred aura; the use of lighthearted stories about animals and of songs in the new-method curriculum offended many sensibilities.^[70] Customary practices had been valorized into immutable tradition partly as a result of the Russian conquest and now served as markers of the local Muslim community and of the status of elites within it. The maintenance of such markers was especially important to the notables created by Russian rule itself if they were to act as intermediaries between two distinct communities. Jadid reform, and most specifically the new-method school, threatened to undermine the status quo.

The Jadids argued for the legitimacy, and indeed the superiority, of their method through recourse to the nation, Islam, and science. Fitrat's response to the charge that new-method schools turn children into infidels was to claim that, on the contrary, these make children "perfect Muslims and well-trained patriots [mu'addib watanparwaran ]."^[71] At the same time, the Jadids argued that it was the maktab that failed to transmit "proper" Islamic knowledge to children. Fitrat was more caustic in 1917 in his response to the anonymous posters in Bukhara; pointing to the poor grammar and spelling of the posters' text, he wrote: "Even if the backwardness of Bukharans in commerce, morals, science, and industry ... is not obvious to the writers of the posters, it is obvious to others.... Even when we see the scientific wonders of the world, such as the telephone, the telegraph, or the railway, we do not have anybody who can learn their secrets. We do not even have people who, having graduated from a madrasa, could write posters ... correctly.^[72] Munawwar Qari argued that it was simple ignorance (jahl ) to think that the canon used in the maktab had been created by Abu Hanifa because poets like Fuzuli, Sufi Allah Yar, and Bedil had not been born in Abu Hanifa's time.^[73] The Jadids also pointed to the example of other Muslim countries where the phonetic method had long been in use.^[74] As for sitting on benches, Haji Muin invoked the authority of modern science to

[70] This is scarcely peculiar to Turkestan or to Muslim society. Ben Eklof (Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861-1914 [Berkeley, 1986], ch. 9) has described very similar reactions to new schools among Russian peasants, who had only disdain for primers that made children read such lighthearted stuff, but nothing useful or "beneficial."

[71] Fitrat, Munazara , 23.

[72] Fitrat, "Jahilana taassubgha misal," 34.

[73] Munawwar Qari, "Bizni jahalat."

[74] Fitrat, Munazara , 23; Munawwar Qari, "Bizm jahalat."

argue that it was far more sanitary and hygienic than sitting on the ground because children were thus protected from the harmful moisture of the ground.^[75]

In the end, though, the best argument for the new method was its efficacy in imparting functional literacy, which had increasingly become more valued. Consequently, the Jadids borrowed from Russo-native schools the custom of making the annual examinations a public occasion to which local notables were invited to see for themselves the achievements of the new system. Visitors could ask children questions, and the children recited prayers and read from the Qur'an to impress skeptics. Such occasions, complete with printed invitations and elaborate notices in the press (including the TWG ), became important public events in the consolidation of Jadidism as a social phenomenon.

Official Suspicions

The state, once it had decided to intervene in local cultural life, proved to be very jealous of its turf and wary of initiatives from other sources. As early as 1871, Said Azim-bay had petitioned Kaufman for funds to enable the teaching of Russian script in certain madrasas. The suggestion aroused some interest in Kaufman but died a natural death in the labyrinths of bureaucracy.^[76] Similarly, in 1892, Ismail Bey Gasprinskii "took the liberty" of sending Governor-General Vrevskii a brief printed memorandum he had prepared the previous year for a functionary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, identified only as Vashkevich, who had been sent to the Crimea to report on the possibility of reorganizing the religious and educational administration of the region's Muslims. The only reason Gasprinskii gave for this approach was that he knew that Vrevskii was "interested in everything that pertain[ed] to the Muslim school,"^[77] but he obviously hoped that his views would at some level influence official policy. In the memorandum, Gasprinskii suggested that the "weak urge among Muslims to learn Russian, explained usually by their fanaticism or their isolation," stems from rather different reasons. The traditional maktab was so time consuming that it left children no time to devote to Russian; the solution was to make the teaching in the

[75] Haji Mum, Eski maktab , 42.

[76] On this episode, see Bendrikov, Ocherki , 68-70.

[77] Gasprinskii to Governor-General, 5 June 1892, m TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 11, d. 806, l. 1.

maktab more efficient, which would free up time necessary for learning Russian. The note described Gasprinskii's own successful experience in this regard:

Close study of this question showed me that the entire six-year wisdom of the maktab may be managed in two years if certain order is brought about and the hojas (maktab teachers) are given clear, organized elementary guides for teaching reading and writing. The three or four years thus saved may be devoted to the teaching of Russian right there in the maktab without transgressing the way of life of the Muslims.... For this it is necessary to popularize the new method of teaching and new-method maktabs, so that later the same person, best of all a hoja or mulla , could teach Arabic, Turkish, and Russian.^[78]

For Gasprinskii, the solution lay in the creation of "higher madrasas," reformed madrasas, funded where possible from waqf funds, where Russian language and principles of law and pedagogy would be taught; such madrasas would serve as channels for obtaining religious and pedagogical positions.

Much of this did not apply directly to Turkestan, where no spiritual administration existed, but it was still a very modest proposal, couched in terms that officialdom would understand. It sought justification for the new-method maktab not in the backwardness of Muslim society and the need for self-improvement, as was to become the norm in Central Asian Jadid rhetoric in the following decades, but in the need for Muslims to learn Russian. This was where Gasprinskii hoped his proposal might strike a chord with Turkestan authorities, exercised by the lack of interest among the local population in learning Russian. Nevertheless, the memorandum encountered much hostility in Tashkent. The governor-general's chancellery passed the memorandum on to two local orientalist-administrators, Ostroumov and V.P. Nalivkin, for comment. Nalivkin found Gasprinskii's main point, the need for Muslims to learn Russian, to be "incontestable," but felt that very similar actions had already been undertaken by the administration itself; Gasprinskii's attention was not welcome because he did not know local conditions and his primer, written in Crimean Tatar, was of little use in Turkestan. "It would be lamentable," Nalivkin concluded, "if in the matter of the enlightenment of the natives of Turkestan Russian authorities turned for help to Tatars in general, and to a Tatar such as Mr. Gasprinskii in particular. As editor of the Crimean Tatar newspaper Terjüman , Mr. Gasprinskii has, over

[78] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 11, d. 806, ll. 2-3.

the course of many years, distinguished himself by a direction so anti-Russian that there remains no possibility of believing his readiness to serve Russian affairs. In the note presented by him, I see nothing more than an attempt to secure ... some influence in the affairs of the Muslims of Turkestan."^[79] Ostroumov, too, was appalled at the temerity of an inorodets to meddle in a question of state: "In the matter of the education of inorodtsy in Russia, we need the direction of a Russian member of the Ministry of Education, not that of a Tatar inorodets , vehemently defending the inviolability of inorodets way of life with all its peculiarities.... It would be absurd!"^[80] Not only was Gasprinskii meddling in affairs of the state, but he was a Tatar. The memorandum was therefore put to rest in the files of the bureaucracy. Gasprinskii traveled to Central Asia himself the following year and met officials in Tashkent, as well as Amir Abdulahad of Bukhara, but with little result.^[81] He opened Samarqand's first new-method school in the house of a Tatar merchant, but the school soon ran into trouble; a year later, when Gasprinskii wrote to Ostroumov, asking him to intercede, the school had still not received official sanction.^[82]

Official Russian reaction to Jadid schools stemmed from a long tradition of thinking about Muslim affairs in the empire. State officials and policy makers since Il'minskii and Pobedonostsev had been wary of a Muslim community (and inorodtsy in general) that, led by a modern-educated intelligentsia instead of the traditional religious elite, would demand its rights on a political plane. The Jadids represented political awakening and separatism. For conservatives such as Ostroumov, who set himself as the enlightener of the local population, any unsanctioned attempt to spread enlightenment was by definition a political act contrary to Russia's state interests. At bottom was a tension, never resolved, in official thinking between the universality of the enlightenment and the strategies dictated by empire. Knowledge was the antidote to fanaticism, to be sure, but it had to be the right kind of knowledge, officially sanctioned and monitored, for otherwise knowledge and modern education could become dangerous political phenomena, leading to political or even "separatist" claims. In this sense, the Jadids were the true believers

[79] Ibid., ll. 6-70b.

[80] Quoted in Bendrikov. Ocherki , 254.

[81] This episode is treated in detail by Edward J. Lazzerini, "From Bakhchisarai to Bukhara in 1893: Ismail Bey Gasprinskii's Journey to Central Asia," Central Asian Survey , 3, no. 4 (1984): 77-78. See also Bendrikov, Ocherki , 253-256.

[82] Gasprmskii to Ostroumov, 19 November 1893, TsGARUz, f. 1009, d. 50, l. 19.

in the universality of enlightenment; Gasprinskii's denial of Muslim fanaticism subverted the colonial order and therefore rendered him suspect for pursuing the enlightenment project too far. In another memorandum of 1901 on "the progressive movement among Tatars," Ostroumov had taken to task all Tatar publicists for harboring anti-Russian sentiments.^[83] The solution was to foster organic change in the madrasa while fostering officially supervised education "in the spirit of Russian state interests," using administrative regulations, inspections, and censorship to ensure compliance.

All these fears seemed to be vindicated in 1905, when maktabs and madrasas remained immune from the political activity that seized all other educational establishments of the empire. The revolution produced a honeymoon between officialdom and traditional maktabs and madrasas. In an article in the Journal of the Ministry of Education , Ostroumov waxed lyrical about the particular attention to strong discipline and obedience paid in the madrasas of Central Asia, which he compared to Orthodox seminaries of old Russia.^[84] After 1965, therefore, the state came to favor the old-style maktab more and more. As the minister of internal affairs wrote in a 1913 circular to governors of all provinces of the empire with a Muslim population, the traditionalist ulama, "being motivated purely by religious conviction, are, without realizing it themselves, ... allies of [the state] Power in the struggle with the undesirable (from the state's point of view) nationalization of the Muslim school."^[85]

In Turkestan, however, real concern with Jadid activity emerged only in 1908, when the education administration received an application for permission to open a new-method school. The school opened by Gasprinskii had left little trace in the files of the bureaucracy, and others had long existed without any permission being requested or granted. In the best traditions of Russian bureaucracy, the request was denied because no clear guidelines existed for schools that, unlike confessional schools, would also provide instruction in nonreligious subjects. An interdepartmental correspondence regarding the status of these schools ensued, which resulted in Governor-General A.V. Samsonov writing to the min-

[83] Ostroumov, "Po voprosu o narozhdaiushchemsia vo srede tatarskogo naselenria Rossii progressivnogo dvizhenua," 30 January 1901, TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 123, ll. 8-13.

[84] Ostroumov, "Madrasy v Turkestanskom krae, ZhMNP , n.s., 7 (1907): otd. narod. obraz., 20ff.

[85] Circular from Minister for Internal Affairs, 22 September 1913, TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 31, d. 943, l. 3.

ister of education for guidance on the question in September 1911.^[86] Once word was received from St. Petersburg, Samsonov issued a circular on 25 January 1912, outlining the new regulations that were to govern new-method schools in Turkestan down to 1917. The new regulations allowed new-method schools to be opened with due permission from the Inspectorate of Education in Tashkent.^[87] Applications were to be accompanied by a lesson plan and a list of textbooks to be used.^[88] It was to be strongly recommended to each applicant that Russian be taught in the school. Most important of all, these schools were brought under imperial legislation of 27 October 1907, which required teachers in elementary schools for the inorodtsy to be either Russian or else belong to the same nationality (plemia , literally "tribe") as the students.^[89] The law further required that teachers be properly certified according to legislation dating from 1892, which restricted certification to those who had completed their education in the Russian empire.

The new legislation was directed especially against the Tatars who were prominent among teachers in new-method schools. Jadid teachers were in short supply in Turkestan, and founders of new-method schools in the region often found it more convenient to hire Tatars, even though they did not speak the vernacular, than to find potential teachers locally. The law was meant to cripple the fledgling new-method schools of Turkestan by depriving them of their surest supply of teachers. Henceforth, each community was to produce teachers from among its own numbers, or else be dependent on Russo-native or Russian schools. These regulations created grave difficulties for Jadid schools by providing the state any number of pretexts for closing them, although the enforcement of these regulations remained, as ever, subject to individual zeal. As a matter of fact, the law forbidding teachers to teach children of other nationalities had already been enforced by city authorities in Kokand in December 1910. Seven schools were closed down in Kokand despite the

[86] TsGARUz, f. 47, d. 1148, l. 54.

[87] TsGARUz, f. 47, d. 1149, ll. 10-100b. These regulations have also been published in, inter alia , A. Mukhammadzhanov, Shkola i pedagogicheskata mysl' uzbekskogo naroda XIX-nachala XX v . (Tashkent, 1978), 79-80.

[88] In practice, it seems, an application for a new school also required information about the place where the teacher received his education (or the books he used for self-study) as well as his domicile. The application was to be submitted to the local pristav (prefect), who would then investigate the admissibility of the schools as well as the political reliability of the teacher before granting permission (Mahmud Khoja [Behbudi], "Maktablargha rukhsat almaq tariqasi," Ayina , 17 May 1914, 574-576).

[89] "Vysochaishe utverzhdany Pravila o nachal'nykh uchilishchakh dlia inorodtsev," enacted by P. fort-Kaufman, Minister of Education, in TsGARUz, f. 19, d. 35019, l. 51.

intercession of Russian and German members of the Kokand chamber of commerce (birzhevyi komitet ) on behalf of local notables.^[90] On 23 January 1911, when parents of the affected children petitioned the governor of Ferghana to allow the Tatars to continue to teach, the governor disallowed the petition because "the same, and even better, results may be obtained in Russo-native schools, about the opening of which the petitioners may present an application with an undertaking to take the expenses upon themselves."^[91] Even greater problems arose in Semirech'e, which had a small, mixed urban population of Tatars, Ozbeks, and Qazaqs, and where practically every school was ethnically mixed. The inspector in Przheval'sk was indulgent (he was highly impressed by the academic achievements of students he had inspected in such schools), but the one in Vernyi closed down six schools.^[92]

The fear of the new-method schools also took the form of constant suspicion about the textbooks used in them. In September 1911, the education administration in Tashkent sent out a circular asking local officials to investigate reports that certain Jadid textbooks contained passages from the "oppositional" newspapers of 1906-1908.^[93] Although no such passages were found, S.M. Gramenitskii, director of schools in Syr Darya oblast, suggested tightening censorship over textbooks used in new-method schools.^[94] This would, of course, have been an impossible undertaking considering that the local administration had only a few bureaucrats trained in local languages. There were numerous expressions of the sentiment that these schools could not be outlawed because of the "fanatical" nature of the local population, or, more realistically, because such an action would serve only to push them underground, and hence render them more difficult to control.^[95] Wary of phenomena it did not understand, and yet unwilling to ban them outright, the state chose instead to keep them on a short leash.

[90] TsGARUz, f. 19, d. 35019, l. 630b; Bobrovnikov, "Russko-tuzemnye uchilishcha," 71-73.

[91] The petition with 351 signatures and the governor's reply is in TsGARUz, f. 19, d. 35019, ll. 63-630b.

[92] TsGARUz, f. 47, d. 1149, ll. 38, 48-51, 69-75.

[93] TsGARUz, f. 47, d. 1148, ll. 59, 62.

[94] Ibid., l. 161.

[95] See, e.g., the opinion of the Inspector of Schools of Ferghana oblast, 1 February 1910, in TsGARUz, f. 19, d. 35019, l. 90b; also S.M. Gramemtskii, Polozheme morod-cheskogo obrazovanna v Syr-Dar'mskoi oblasti (Tashkent, 1916), 71-72.