Chapter 7
Navigating the Nation

The recentering of social vision on the nation brought with it new responsibilities and new claims to leadership. The Jadids claimed to be motivated by the good of the nation, while their criticism of various groups in society emanated from the perception that these groups were not playing their proper role in the development of their community. Jadid authors routinely decried the selfishness and parochialism of their opponents, whether wealthy merchants who spent their money on extravagant feasts or traditionalist ulama who opposed the new method. More pertinently, it was the Jadids who, in the name of the nation, claimed the authority to define social roles and obligations for the new age. If the Jadids were important to the nation, so too was the nation important to them.

Overtly political action directed at the state occupied only a small part in the struggles of the Jadids before 1917. The possibilities for such action remained slim, even after 1905, as Turkestan's colonial position dictated its marginalization from the empire's experiment with quasiconstitutionclaim. When the greater self-assurance of the Jadids by 1914 led many of them to engage in politics, their strategies were defined by the twin needs of working within the existing legal framework and of asserting their claim to speak for the nation in the political realm. The nation of the Jadids was located at a specific point in Turkestani society, which their universal claims sought to hide. The Jadids' own position in society thus shaped their political action in fundamental ways.

The Location of the Nation

In attempting to locate the nation of the Jadids in society, we might begin by examining more closely their dire warnings about extinction and destruction. Whose survival was at stake? Quite clearly, there was no threat to the physical existence of the population of Central Asia in the way that was conceivable for, say, the Crimean Tatars. There was also no pressure of assimilation through proselytization or forced conversion, as had been the case with the Volga Tatars (which had left a deep imprint on Tatar Jadidism). Rather, the fear was of something else. For Behbudi, it was "imperative [that we] reform our schools, our shops, our workshops, our madrasas, [in short] everything, according to the needs of the age. Otherwise, we will lose everything and nothing will be left for us except menial labor."^[1] This fear of immiseration appears again and again in Jadid writing. The extinction that the Jadids warned about was the extinction of the elites of Muslim society.

The challenge therefore was to create an elite that could participate in the new imperial economy. The clearest expression of this again comes from Behbudi, who as a man of substance and consequently moderate tastes in politics realized the need to work through the system, a position that his generally cautious approach to politics tended to confirm. "We Muslims constitute the second largest nation [millat ] in the Russian empire," he claimed at a fund-raising event during the First World War, "but unfortunately, in the affairs of government . . . we are one of the smallest .... In order to benefit from the state and to enter government office, we must send our children to government schools."^[2] Elsewhere, Behbudi suggested that money spent by the wealthy on ostentatious feasts would be much better spent providing children with an education that would allow them to become "judges, lawyers, engineers, teachers [zamana maktabdari ], the supporters and servants of the community, i.e., deputies to the State Duma, technicians to reform our workshops [milli sanaatkhanalarimiz ], people who have studied the science of commerce to help us in commercial establishments and banks, i.e., men of commerce, [as well as] to develop people who, in city dumas and in the zemstvos to be introduced in the future for the Russian homeland [watan ], would work for the true faith of Islam, for the weak and the poor."^[3]

Other Jadids might have held a less rosy picture of the possibilities, but they shared Behbudi's basic attitudes. We need only recall the happiness brought by knowledge to characters in the fiction of Cholpan and Hamza (see Chapter 5) to understand this basic vision of success. Participation in the imperial mainstream thus became the Jadids' fundamental political goal.

Such elites would be able to undermine the Russian-native dichotomy that had framed Central Asian life since the conquest. The solution was not assimilation or Russification, however, but the modernization of Turkestani society. The new elite was to be modern but also Muslim and Turkestani. Jadid authors criticized those in Central Asia who aped Russian ways simply for the sake of imitation. Ubaydullah Khojaey once wrote that "wearing Russian dress in the way of education or official service is harmless, even required. It is a different matter when people put on a suit to look like Russians or to speak with Russian girls."^[4] (Of course, the distinction was hard to make, and many of the Jadids' opponents did not make it at all; for them, the Jadids were no different from the dandies criticized by the Jadids.) Similarly, the Jadids were at one with Russian officialdom in exhorting Central Asians to learn Russian,^[5] but they also criticized those who used Russian words indiscriminately in vernacular speech. Abdullah Awlani even elevated "preservation of the language [hifz-i lisan ]" to the status of a moral trait: "Learning Russian, the language of the state, is as necessary for our life and happiness as bread and food, but it is essential to keep it in its own place. Mixing [words] up like kedgeree cooked in linseed oil destroys the spirit of a language . . .. [and] the loss of the national language is the loss of the soul of the nation."^[6]

This was also why new-method schools were so essential. Russo-native schools offered a similar (or, as officialdom insisted, better) curriculum, but the Jadids' enthusiasm for them was always equivocal (even when some of them taught in such schools). Although Turkestani Jadids did not always share the harsh views of these schools held by Tatars, who saw in them a missionary plot, they nevertheless felt that Russo-native schools devoted inadequate time to teaching articles of the Muslim faith and taught "Russian to seven-year-old children who do not even know their

own language."^[7] Future members of the elite had to master their own faith and language before they could join the battle in the wider world.

Reform required resources that only money could buy. "In today's world, bravery resides in wealth... because people are necessary in order to have sovereignty; people require skills; skills require knowledge; and knowledge requires money."^[8] And it worked both ways, for wealth was a sign of success in the new economy, the just desert for effort and zeal. Jadid authors came to see the existence of millionaires as the sign of the progress of the community to which they belonged. Upon arriving in Baku on his way to Istanbul in 1914, Behbudi noted with approval that "in terms of the extent of Muslim wealth, this is the second city in Russia. Here there are several Muslims who own property and capital worth 100 million rubles; Muslim millionaires number more than 100, and the number of those worth half a million is even greater. There are thousands of Muslims worth 100,000 [rubles], while those whose capital is worth between 20,000 and 30,000 rubles number in the tens of thousands. Most of the property in this city is in the hands of Muslims. May God increase [their wealth]!"^[9] Behbudi's numbers are, of course, exaggerated, but his fascination with the numbers of wealthy Muslims was widely shared by his contemporaries (and in later decades used as damning evidence of the Jadids' bourgeois nationalism). The wealth of individuals was the wealth of the community and could (and should) be put to the communal good. For Awlani, all members of a society were interconnected: "The rich man depends on the poor, the poor on the rich; the teacher on the student, the student on the teacher; the parents on the child, and the child on the parents."^[10] At first sight this differs little from views long held in the Muslim tradition, but Awlani made service to the nation the yardstick for judging all actions. The proper functioning of society required that all its members recognize their duties to the nation. In more developed nations, these mutual dependencies were clearly recognized, and the Jadid press pointed to government expenditures on education or health in various countries, or to acts of organized philanthropy, as evidence of this. When Mirza Siraj toured Europe, he saw the fact that the theater he visited in Berlin cost 100 million marks to build,

or that tens of millions of marks were spent on the construction alone of the university in the same city, as evidence of the zeal of the people of Germany.^[11]

Such views of society and social responsibility might be naive, but do they make the Jadids the ideologues of a nascent bourgeoisie, the chauvinist bourgeois nationalists of Soviet lore? The nation as imagined by the Jadids was, as we shall see, narrowly based in certain urban groups, and its core was provided by the wealthy. However, the wealthy were to be celebrated only as long as they fulfilled their duties to their community as defined by the Jadids. This they did only seldom, and far more prevalent in Jadid literature are criticisms of the wealthy for not fulfilling their duties properly. Ultimately, the Jadids' claim to leadership was in their own right. It was as intellectuals that the Jadids sought to set the direction for their society. "It is well known," wrote Awlani, "that the progress and exaltation of every nation comes from valuing the service of those who serve it with their lives, money, and pens. By celebrating the brave scholars and poets of the past with stipends, statues, and the pen, [other nations] increase the courage and zeal of those who work [for the glory of the nation]."^[12] The assertion of moral authority by new intellectuals had its problems. Awlani found his own situation rather different, for he complained that "unfortunately, we [Turkestanis], far from valuing such people, scorn them and even call them infidels [takfir qilmak ]."^[13] If the nation was a phenomenon of the modern age, a fact the Jadids well recognized, then it needed modern leadership, which only the Jadids could provide. They were to make this claim a significant feature of their bid for leadership in 1917.

The rhetoric of the nation served to conceal the Jadids' own position in their society and their vision of its functioning. That rhetoric precluded discourses of class, of which the Jadids had the greatest suspicion. Behbudi wrote of the Social Democratic party in 1906: "Our present epoch is not propitious for carrying out their program. . .. Their wishes appear fantastic and joining this party is extremely dangerous for us Muslims."^[14] The radical transformation of society advocated by this

party would be highly intrusive of Muslim society, its cultural practices and its solidarities, and, in the process, would jeopardize the Jadids' claim to lead reform. Of course, the predominance of Russians in the industrial work force in Turkestan, and the complete unwillingness of Russian socialist parties to attract their "native" co-workers to their cause, meant that Behbudi's fears remained largely groundless. Meanwhile, the older solidarities of craft guilds had been severely disrupted by the advent of capitalism. By the turn of the century, guild lodges (takiya ) were reported to be in disuse.^[15] Caught in this transformation, Muslim artisans and craftsmen could not formulate a voice of their own.

Although the Jadids spoke of "the 10 million Muslims of Turkestan," and although the settlement of Russian and Ukrainian peasants in the Qazaq lands of Semirech'e and the Steppe krai had become a political issue of sorts, the rural population remained virtually invisible in their writings. The silence is revealing enough, but the one piece in the Jadid repertoire to address the issue is even more so. The first issue of the Bukharan newspaper Turan carried "An Address to Our Peasant Brothers," in which the anonymous author wrote: "O peasant brothers, o children of the land [watan ], you are a pure and sincere people who, unaware of the world, spend your time in hard labor .... If you did not exist, our affairs would be in ruin. May God give you power and abundance. Amen. But our duty is to teach you and to open schools for you and to give you all possible help. . .. It is an obligation for us city dwellers to ensure that you are not oppressed."^[16] On a less positive note, many writers criticized "shameless lazybones," such as storytellers and Sufi adepts (qalandars ), who lived off the gullibility of others.^[17] Even more telling is a discussion of the fruits of knowledge in Hamza's New Happiness : "All unskilled peoples, such as drivers, tea shop owners, bakers, gamblers, thieves, sweepers, cobblers, watchmen, water carriers, doormen, and others like them, are uneducated. Educated people, even if young, are teachers, owners of large shops, clerks in good places, well dressed and

respected everywhere."^[18] This was a far cry from Narodnik-style populism. The nation included the peasants, but they had little to contribute to it. Only urban folk (and then, of course, only a few of them) were qualified to lead the nation in the battlefield of modern life.

The Jadid nation was coexistent with the reading (and hearing) public described in Chapter 4. Within that public, the Jadids were engaged in a struggle of elites for the right to lead the nation. As such, the Jadid vision of the nation was elitist, although this elitism was never fully articulated as a doctrine (as, for instance, was the case with the Young Turks)^[19] but rather the logical conclusion of the Jadids' position in their own society and the political constraints in which they operated. The same political constraints softened that elitism, for new-method schools (in many of which tuition was waived for poor children) were a far more egalitarian instrument of elite formation than the creation of universities (as in Muslim India with the Aligarh movement of Sayyid Ahmad Khan). Such struggles were an integral part of the establishment of the hegemony of the nation. Partha Chatterjee has argued that in colonial situations, nationalist elites have to declare the sovereignty of nationalism in native society before engaging the colonial state in a political struggle for independence.^[20] In Central Asia, that first struggle for sovereignty had not been resolved by 1917.

Women and the Nation

A critique of the position of women in Central Asian society formed an integral part of the Jadid project. In common with modernists elsewhere in the Muslim world, the Jadids of Central Asia criticized the practice of polygyny, the poor treatment of women, and their lack of education. Again, the Jadids sought legitimacy for these criticisms from an understanding of "pure" Islam acquired through modern education, but it was the nation, not religious reform, that drove them.

A proper assessment of the place of the "women's question" in Jadid thought is made difficult by our sketchy knowledge of changes affecting urban women's lives during the tsarist period. The lot of urban women was difficult in Central Asia: In the late nineteenth century, za'ifa ("weak") and naqis ul-aql ("deficient in judgment") were common terms

for "woman" in learned usage. The impact of the Russian conquest on local gender relations is difficult to gauge. As we have seen, the immediate result of the conquest was the valorization of traditional practices as hallmarks of local Muslim identity. It is likely that the need to assert respectability and propriety in the new conditions led to an increase in the seclusion of women. Several other factors tended to heighten the role of respectability as a status marker. The new wealth accumulated in the cities, which led to the marathon feasts often criticized by the Jadids, created new demand for it (it likely also made polygyny into a form of conspicuous consumption), while the appearance of legal prostitution further made respectability significant. (Most of the prostitutes counted in the census of 1897 were Central Asian; Russian and Tatar women remained a minority in the profession.)

We know even less about the Jadids' personal lives or their private attitudes toward women. Hamza married a Russian woman who converted to Islam and seems to have played a small role in Jadid activities (she was invited to the annual examinations at new-method schools).^[21] We also have a photograph, although of unknown date, of Munawwar Qari with his wife, who is unveiled.^[22] Our main source, therefore, are the Jadids' writings. These are marked by a great sympathy for women and a concern for bettering their position. Again, the inspiration came from Tatar and Ottoman debates. Magazines by and for women, such as Ælem-i nisvan (Women's World), edited by Gasprinskii's daughter Shafika Hanum in Bahchesaray, and Suyüm Bike , which appeared in Kazan from 1913 to 1917, had created a women's voice in the new discourses of the nation then being articulated. Veiling had disappeared among the Tatars by the turn of the century, and Tatar women in Central Asian cities were visible symbols of the change local Jadids wanted to bring about in their society; and to the extent that women had a voice in this debate, Tatar women were also agents of reform.

Women wrote poetry, of course, and in 1914 the Kokand poet Ibrahim Dawran published an anthology of verse written by women. Some of the poets included in the anthology had lived in the nineteenth cen-

tury, but most were contemporaries. The anthology had a marked reformist character, with numerous poems lamenting the difficult position of women in Central Asian society, exhorting women to acquire knowledge, and calling on men to enable women to do so.^[23] Women, especially Tatar women, also wrote in the press, particularly in Sada-yi Turkistan , which debated the women's question at some length. The themes as well as the mode of argument remains embedded in a nationalist discourse on women.

"In case you do not know [already], know clearly: We too are human beings and Muslims [biz insan balasi insan, musulman balasi musulmandirmiz ]," wrote a woman schoolteacher from Tashkent, "and as such we need, and have the right to, education." Similarly, Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada of Bukhara wrote in an article entitled, "Women's Rights": "Women are the mothers of all humanity: Prophets, messengers, kings, scholars, writers, and poets are all children of these esteemed mothers." Therefore, he argued, citing the Qur'an, Islam had accorded equal rights ("apart from a few partial exceptions") to them. "But we leave them without education, we marry off fourteen-year-old girls to old men of sixty or seventy for money, and we lock women up in dungeonlike houses as if they were thieves. Is this justice? Is this equality? Is this the condition of women who are the lights of civilization [madaniyat chiraghi ]?"^[24]

All these themes appear in Jadid literature and theater. In Abdullah Awlani's comedy, Is It Easy to Be a Lawyer ?, the only sympathetic character is a woman who comes seeking divorce from her abusive husband. Dawran-bek, the Russian-trained lawyer who is Awlani's protagonist, is agitated:

O cruel civilization! When will you take root among us Turkestanis? When will you liberate us from this dungeon of ignorance? Until we start domestic education and enlighten our women, such terrible things will continue in our midst. Instead of being married to a man of her own choice, one she had seen and wanted, she was given off, like an animal . . . to a cruel man. The whole life of this innocent has passed in suffering, sorrow, and distress. . .. Now to abolish such terrible things from our midst, we must expend all our might in the way of educating our women and acquainting them with knowledge and civilization [maarif wa madaniyat ].^[25]

Haji Muin's play, The Oppressed Woman , describes the evils of polygyny. Ozaqbay is a rich merchant contemplating taking a new wife: "New wives bring back a man's lust and make his mouth water. Now I too have to take a fourteen-year-old for a wife and enjoy life. This [present] wife of mine has borne three or four children and is approaching thirty. There's no joy left in life with her." He is egged on in his thoughts by Ishan Baba, a man who has performed the hajj seven times and appears on stage with a long string of prayer beads. A new-method teacher, on the other hand, tries unsuccessfully to dissuade Ozaqbay. Polygyny is permissible, he argues, only if the husband can treat all his wives justly and equally, which is never possible in practice. Ozaqbay's present wife, Tunsuq Ay, is a devoted mother and a loving wife who insists that their fourteen-year-old son attend a new-method school. She is devastated by the news that Ozaqbay is contemplating taking a new wife, but her feelings are of as little consequence as the imprecations of the teacher, and Ozaqbay, on the strength of his wealth, finds himself an eighteen-year-old wife. But the new wife, Suyar Ay, spells disaster from the beginning. After six months of this menage, Suyar Ay accuses Tunsuq Ay of theft; Ozaqbay believes the allegation and in a fit of anger begins beating his first wife. The play ends in tragedy: Ozaqbay discovers the error of his ways ("I didn't take a second wife, I took on a calamity"), but Tunsuq Ay is already mortally ill and dies in the last scene.^[26]

The biggest cause of Jadid concern, however, was the fact that women were denied education. Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada's argument that women's right to knowledge was granted by Islam itself was repeated again and again by other writers and accompanied by exhortations to men to educate women.^[27] Not only were women being denied a right granted by Islam itself, but doing so was bringing irreparable harm to the nation. "The progress and civilization of a nation is dependent upon the educational, moral, and intellectual progress and civilization of women,"^[28] because of the crucial role of women as mothers of the next generation. "In the hands of ignorant [jahila ] mothers, the young, innocent children of the nation grow up untrained, unclean, and deprived of delicacy and morals. Full of meaningless tales and superstitions heard from the mouths of their mothers, children's brains become insensate, like roses pulled up from their

roots. Removed from reason and reality, they incline toward unnatural suppositions."^[29] The solution, of course, was education: Child rearing was a science just as engineering or accountancy, and in civilized nations, it was taught to women in schools.^[30] The nation demanded changes in the status of women, and the nation's needs were to determine what the new status was to be.

The nation also demanded a strong, stable family, for that alone could provide the preconditions for progress. This was the fundamental reason behind the Jadids' opposition to polygyny. In The Oppressed Woman , the second wife disrupts the tranquillity of the family and distracts attention from the education of Ozaqbay's fourteen-year-old son. Taking child brides or very early marriage similarly made for insecure families and inadequate upbringing. The idea of the monogamous family as the bastion of the nation was introduced to Central Asia by Behbudi, who, in a long series of articles on "Family Health," expounded the latest wisdom on the matter extracted from contemporary Ottoman and Arabic manuals. Marriage was a natural instinct for human beings, but its place in society must be clearly understood. Puberty introduces thoughts and ideas that, if left unchecked, could cause great harm; therefore civilized Muslims make their children read books explaining these dangers. Semen has to be used in the right manner, for "just as it is incorrect to use it before its time, so it is to delay its use."^[31] Late marriage or bachelorhood were equally harmful, and Behbudi cited statistics from France and Holland to prove that most "crimes, murders, and sins" are committed by unmarried men and women. Sex outside of marriage creates limitless disease and is, moreover, a sin. Similar, only greater, dangers lurk behind other misuses of semen and lust: adultery, pederasty, masturbation, and excessive intercourse of any kind weaken the body, deaden the brain, and make it impossible to develop one's intellectual faculties.^[32] Similarly, Awlani, saw "lust [as] a valuable treasure. If used in a legal manner [surat-i mashru'a ], it becomes the alms of the body, indeed the center of life itself.... If used improperly, it represents the embezzlement of a trust... [which] destroys virtue and ruins life."^[33] Fitrat wrote a full-length book, appar-

ently no longer extant, called Family, or the Duties of Housekeeping , in which he set out to define the true Islamic (sbar'i ) manner of taking a wife, performing the ceremony of marriage, and raising children, as well as the rights and obligations of spouses as prescribed by Islam. He was especially critical of polygyny, on which he took the usual modernist position, seeing it as permissible, but only under conditions that are impossible to fulfill in normal life. Practiced in the absence of the required conditions, polygyny only caused grave moral harm.^[34]

The invocation of the norms of scripturalist Islam should not blind us to the real source of this new sexual morality, which lay squarely in contemporary bourgeois Europe. Behbudi's Ottoman and Arabic sources banked heavily on contemporary European medical science and reproduced whole cloth the sexual morality that underpinned it. (Not only did Behbudi cite crime statistics from France and Holland, but he also reproduced in great detail the tale of a fifteen-year-old English boy whose addiction to masturbation could not be cured by anything other than marriage.)^[35] Modernist Muslim discourses on women invoked the authority of science as quickly as they invoked that of the shariat, but their concerns were strictly circumscribed by the broader interests of the nation.

The impact of this discourse on actual social practices was minimal. Traditionalists rebutted Jadid claims about the equality of women's rights with equally authoritative verses from the Qur'an.^[36] The connection of the debate with Tatar practices also had its disadvantages; and although Jadid authors could point to Tatar (and Istanbul) women as proof that the changes they advocated were the norm among other ("more civilized") Muslims, their opponents could dismiss the whole argument as one more example of the Jadids aping the Tatars, who, for many, existed at the outer limits of Muslimness. Sayyid Ahmad Wasli, a Samarqand mudarris with substantial Jadid credentials, parted company with other Jadids on this issue. He was happier publishing doggerel in honor of veiling ("The veil is a beautiful treasure for women and girls/the veil is the curtain of chastity on the face of shame and honor,"

and so on^[37] ) than following the Tatars in their misguided ways: "[Turkestani newspapers] take inspiration directly from Tatar life and therefore alienate the people of Turkestan. For example, if a Tatar writer describes Turkestanis as polytheists [mushrik ], all local newspapers also start calling [Turkestanis] polytheists. Trying to imitate the Tatars, they are also call for letting loose our women [khatun-qizlarimiz qachmasun dedilar ]. Therefore, the number of buyers for these newspapers is small."^[38] A pseudonymous author wrote in TWG that the "freedom of Tatar women is nothing more than the freedom to go around barefaced and mix with unrelated men." All his suspicions were confirmed, he stated, when a Tatar family moved in next door: "The women do not cover their faces, do not pray, and have no idea of adab or proper manners."^[39]

Regardless of what Wasli insinuated, the question of unveiling was never explicitly raised in Central Asia before 1917, and Jadid attitudes on gender issues remained conservative. In 1915, Abdulwahhab Muradi, a locally resident Tatar fired off another letter to Sbura with the usual criticisms about the position of women in Turkestan and the lack of attention given to their education. No local newspaper has published anything on the issue, Muradi informed his Tatar audience, and al-Islah , far from discussing the need to educate women, has started to talk about veiling. Ignorant women in a veil only bring harm, as the author himself had witnessed at a fair in Tashkent recently, where all sorts of illicit things happened under the veil.^[40] In response, Zuhuriddin Fathiddinzada, who had argued for the equality of women's rights, jumped to the defense of al-Islah and Turkestan: "Sir! No Muslim journal (including al-Islah ) desires the unveiling of women, and no son of Turkestan [Turkistan balasi ] (and the editorial team at al-Islah is not exempt from this) would agree that his mother or sister should dress up her hair in the Paris fashion and promenade on boulevards in a décolleté dress."^[41]

The Jadids in Politics

Official Russia feared political awakening in the borderlands of the empire primarily for its potential for "separatism." The same fears that cul-

tural reform would inevitably lead to separatism (here made worse by the fanaticism of the local population and the intrigues of Ottoman emissaries) underlay the reaction of the local administration to the growth of Jadidism in Turkestan. Russian official discourse therefore treated Jadidism primarily as a political phenomenon, a view that historians, both in Russia and the Soviet Union and abroad, have tended to adopt. This fear was largely unfounded, though, for two fundamental reasons: There existed no institutional framework within which local political interests could be articulated, and Jadidism had not vanquished its opposition within Muslim society. Jadidism remained a cultural movement rather than a political movement asserting claims against the state. What little political activity the Jadids engaged in before February 1917 bore the marks of these constraints.

The elective offices introduced by the Provisional Statute of 1867, and largely retained by the legislation of 1886 (see Chapter 2) were not meant to, and did not, lead to the emergence of organized politics. Russian legislation intended these offices to mediate between state and society, not to articulate any political goals. As such, these offices remained the domain of the informal politics of personalities.^[42] Such notables also monopolized the "native" seats in the Tashkent City Duma when the city was brought under the Municipal Legislation of 1870 (modified to restrict Muslim representation to only one-third of all seats).^[43] Said Azim-bay won election to the body early in its existence, and the seat stayed in the family for most of its existence.^[44] The Tashkent City Duma did not serve as a forum for the articulation of political demands, Russian or Muslim.

The Jadids were a fledgling group when the revolution of 1905 created vast new possibilities for political action. Although they lacked any organizational basis or experience, they attempted to make use of the new freedoms in the cause of their reform. However, they could not always turn their energies into practical results. Although many writers exhorted their compatriots in the newly founded newspapers to make use of the new freedoms, they were unable to play a significant role in the brief period of political activity that followed.^[45] Much of that activity in-

volved petition campaigns waged by the established elites. However, these petitions seldom went beyond religious issues to the question of political rights of the Central Asian population.

A common demand in these petitions was the creation of a Muslim "spiritual assembly" patterned after the three that existed in European Russia, and whose creation in Turkestan had been opposed by Kaufman. In a petition signed by the notables of Kokand in December 1905, for instance, seven of the sixteen demands concerned the formation and functions of such an assembly, while another seven concerned the reform of the office of the qazi. It also demanded complete freedom to import and publish locally books and periodicals. The petition thus sought to rescue the process of the appointment and removal of qazis from the electoral principle and to return it to the ulama. The petitioners also wanted the qazis to have jurisdiction over foreign Muslims visiting Turkestan and for them to have freedom from intervention by Russian courts in cases involving blasphemy. The last section of the petition, asking for the abolition of Section 64 of the Turkestan Statute of 1886 (which gave police officers sweeping rights of imprisonment without charge), was the only part of the petition with any directly political implications; it was also the only one to mention the term "Turkestan."^[46]

Petitions for the creation of a "spiritual assembly" were no doubt political to the extent that they asserted local rights against the state and demanded a change in the structures of power. Purely religious demands could turn into political ones, as was the case with the Tatars' struggle to wrest control of the Orenburg spiritual assembly from the state. But whereas the Tatar movement sought to make the assembly entirely elective, and hence free of government control, the petitions in Turkestan were geared toward undoing some of the damage done to the moral authority of the ulama by Russian legislation. Hence the insistence on revoking the electoral principle in religious alfairs in Turkestan and its replacement by the moral authority of the traditionally learned. In any case, such petitions often disappeared into the abyss of the bureaucracy without a trace.^[47]

The All-Russian Muslim Movement

The October Manifesto of 1905 conceded the right of political assembly and popular representation to the population of the empire. The nascent elites of the Muslims of European Russia and Transcaucasia seized this opportunity to launch an empire-wide political movement that sought to speak in the name of all the Muslims of the empire in the newly granted institution of popular representation, the State Duma. Both in the All-Russian Muslim movement and in the Duma, however, Turkestan's participation remained minimal.

Existing scholarship has tended to endow the All-Russian Muslim movement with immense authority. Its creation, and the convocation of three congresses in the years 1905-1906, is seen as proof of the existence of a political and cultural unity among the empire's Muslim population. In fact, the movement was dominated by Tatar and Transcaucasian public figures, many of whom had received foreign educations, and the third congress was the only one to include delegates from Turkestan. That congress decided to create a political party (Rusya Musulmanlarïnïng Ittifaqï, Union of Russian Muslims) to work for the defense of the religious and cultural rights of the Muslims of the empire through the new quasiconstitutional means allowed by the October Manifesto.^[48] As such, this congress marked the political victory of Jadidism among the Muslims of Russia and Transcaucasia, but it had little impact on Turkestan. The congress also decided to ally the movement with the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) in mainstream Russian politics. This alliance was hardly surprising. Jadid thinking consistently saw the enlightenment of individuals as the true path for the progress of society. This individualistic thrust of their thinking gave the Jadids a natural affinity for political liberalism. The political program adopted by the Muslim Faction was hardly distinguishable from that of the Kadets except for a few clauses specifying Muslim religious rights.^[49] Tatar and Transcaucasian Muslim elites could by now speak the language of Russian politics and engage the state (and other political parties) in a discourse of political rights that

required a vocabulary entirely different from the discourse of cultural reform within Muslim society. In Central Asia, on the other hand, no groups yet existed that could participate in such an enterprise. The disparity between the language of the program of the Muslim political movement and that of cultural debate in Turkestan is indicative of the marginal position Turkestan occupied in the political movement. The agenda of the political movement was set by the largely secular elites of the Muslims of European Russia, with little contribution coming from Turkestan. There were no Central Asian delegates at the first two congresses and only a few at the third,^[50] where the question of creating a Muslim spiritual assembly for Turkestan received some attention.^[51] Only one Central Asian was elected to a commission of the congress.^[52] In any case, the congress's deliberations never took practical form, and the organs of empire-wide organization of the Muslim community remained on paper only.

On 3 June 1907, Prime Minister P. Stolypin dissolved the Second Duma and revamped electoral laws in an attempt to manufacture a more pliant legislature. Representation of inorodtsy was cut drastically, and Turkestan was completely disenfranchised. This coup also put an end to the Muslim congresses, and their deliberations came to naught. The state never allowed the Ittifaq to register as a political party^[53] and in the increasingly repressive political climate after 1907, even the purely cultural and educational activities of the body atrophied. Muslim political activity was restricted to a small Muslim Faction in the Duma. Legal action had strict limits, as the attempt by members of the Muslim Faction to organize a Fourth Muslim Congress with official permission showed. The conference, convened in St. Petersburg in June 1914 to allow members of the Muslim Faction to discuss educational and religious issues with their constituents, was attended by forty officially approved delegates, who met behind closed doors. In this era of restricted activity, Turkestan again took a back seat. Now that the Muslim Faction in the

Duma did not contain even a token Turkestani contingent, its concerns focused more and more on Tatar and Transcaucasian issues. Of the forty delegates invited to attend the Fourth Muslim Congress in 1914, only three represented Turkestan (and one of them was a Tatar), even though the agenda included the creation of a spiritual assembly for Turkestan.^[54] Turkestani newspapers expressed their disappointment at this snub, but they could do little but bemoan the lack of qualified and committed individuals in Central Asia.^[55]

Turkestan in the State duma

Turkestan's experience with the State Duma was similarly short-lived and marginal. Turkestan's representation in the State Duma was subject. to special election rules, which were still being drafted when the First Duma opened in April 1906 in St. Petersburg.^[56] It was dissolved well before elections could take place in Turkestan.^[57] Turkestan did send delegates to the Second Duma: Seven "non-native" and six "native" deputies were elected from separate curiae. Not only was the local population vastly underrepresented, but the election of its deputies took place in four stages, rather than the two for the election for the Russian deputies.^[58] The franchise was limited by strict property requirements as well as a knowledge of Russian.

The Jadids had great enthusiasm for the Duma, which they saw as a tribune of liberty and equality. Even Munawwar Qari,far more skeptical of Russian officialdom than someone like Behbudi, wrote passionately of the need to elect worthy individuals as deputies of the nation.^[59] The reality proved to be rather different. There existed no political parties among the local population of Turkestan at this time. The Union of Muslims projected by the Muslim congresses remained only a hope, and Rus-

sian political parties restricted their activity in Turkestan to the Russian population. Therefore, as in the elections to the Tashkent City Duma, most of the successful candidates from the local population came from the notables. Makhtumquli Nur Berdikhanov, the deputy from Trans-caspia, belonged to the Akhal Tekke aristocracy and had actually taken part in the defense of Gök Tepe against Skobelev's armies in 1881 before going into Russian service.^[60] Tashpulat Abdulkhalilov and Salihjan Muhammadjanov, deputies from Samarqand and Ferghana oblasts, respectively, were merchants, while Tö1euli Allabergenev, the deputy from Syr Darya oblast, was a Qazaq tribal chief.^[61] In Tashkent the election descended into farce. The forty eligible voters met for the final election on 7 February to choose from two candidates. One of the candidates withdrew, leaving the other, Arif Khoja, a son-in-law of Said Azim-bay winner by default. Later in the day, however, the presiding officer had doubts about the legality of election without voting, and therefore he convened the electors again the next day to confirm the winner by casting actual votes. At this time, Arif Khoja withdrew "for personal reasons," leaving the field open again. New candidates were hastily found, but to the consternation of the presiding officer, the election resulted in a tie, with both candidates receiving eighteen votes, and the decision was made by the drawing of lots. The winner was Abdulwahid Qari ,the mudarris at Mirza Abdullah madrasa in Tashkent.^[62] He took no discernible part in the proceedings of the Duma, but his election made the Okhrana suspicious of him. Two years later, he was arrested for conducting "nationalist-separatist propaganda" among the local population and exiled to Tula province for five years.^[63] Muhammadjan Tinïshpaev (Tanyshbaev), a scion of the Qazaq aristocracy who held an engineering degree from the Alexander I Institute of Rail Transport in St. Petersburg, elected from Semirech'e, was the only one of the six with whom the Jadids might have felt strong affinity.^[64]

Five of the six Muslim deputies from Turkestan sat with the Muslim Group in the Duma. (Tinïishpaev, the only one of the six with a Russian education, was elected on a Kadet ticket.) Tinïshpaev and Abdulkhali1ov won election to the Agrarian Commission of the Duma, but otherwise Turkestani deputies left little mark on the proceedings. On 22 May 1907, in the only speech ever delivered at the Duma by a Turkestani Muslim, Abdulkhalilov criticized a bill submitted by the Ministry of Finance proposing a tax levy on unirrigated lands in Turkestan.^[65] The speech drew applause from the center, but the Stolypin coup was less than two weeks away.

A Muslim Voice in Turkestan

To understand the real dimensions of Jadid political action in Central Asia, however, we have to lower our sights to the local level. Jadid concerns revolved around not separatism but a quest for participation in Russian political life; or, in the terms outlined in Chapter 4, it involved an attempt to overcome the split between the Russian and native publics through the entry of Muslims into the Russian sphere. Only by creating a Muslim voice in the Russian public could political claims be made on the state.

The fundamental problem remained that of resources. Not many Jadids had the command of Russian necessary for such participation, and the few Central Asians with Russian educations tended, as we saw in Chapter 3, to develop a different profile. Unlike the Jadids, who spoke in the idiom of Muslim cultural reform, the secular intellectuals spoke the language of modern Russian liberalism. Few of the Russian-educated intellectuals took part in Jadid activities such as teaching in new-method schools or publishing. The differences were by no means unbridgeable, however, and a rapprochement between the two groups is discernible after 1914, when many Jadids turned more and more to political action.

The bridge between the two groups was provided by Ubaydullah Khojaev (1886-1942). Born in Tashkent, Khojaev attended a Russo-native school. Upon graduation, he found work as translator for a Russian justice of the peace, whom he accompanied to Saratov when the latter was transferred there. Khojaev stayed in Saratov for several years, during which he acquired considerable legal training. He returned to Tashkent early in 1913 and set up a legal practice. At the same time, he became

involved in local Jadid affairs. He was a partner in the Umid Bookstore as well as the editor of the newspaper Sada-yi Turkistan .^[66] Khojaev began his public career in Tashkent. In February 1914, he sued the publisher of Turkestanskii kur'er on behalf of such local Jadids as Munawwar Qari and Mirza Hakim Sarimsaqov for publishing a poem they deemed blasphemous.^[67] This was an attempt to assert the religious rights of the Turkestani population through channels provided by Russian law as well as a move by the Jadids to challenge the monopoly of the decorated notables as spokesmen for the local population vis-à-vis the state. Protestations of loyalty, of course, were seldom transparent. In 1914, as editor of Sada-yi Turkistan , Ubaydullah suggested that Muslim society in Tashkent should celebrate the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Russian conquest of the city: "The friendly Russian state took our city and our sovereignty from us. What harm came to us out of this? The Muslims of Turkestan have suffered no harm from the Russian government. On the contrary, our country has flourished." To celebrate the auspicious occasion, Khojaev suggested that society establish either a teachers' college or a new-method college [aliya madrasa ] such as those that existed in Ufa and Orenburg.^[68] After all, Gasprinskii had obtained permission to publish Terjüman only on the occasion of the centenary of the Russian annexation of the Crimea. In Tashkent, Khojaev's plea went unheeded, but it provides a crucial insight into the political strategy of the Jadids. By appropriating the discourse of the state, they sought to create a civic space in which the nation could organize itself, using toward that goal the institutions of the state to their advantage.

Khojaev also ran for election to the Tashkent City Duma in 1914. He used his newspaper to good effect, criticizing the general apathy surrounding the election even among the small electorate in a matter of such great importance. The duma was a forum in which the most respected men from each nation spoke in their nation's interest, for there "wealth does not matter, but carefully reasoned speeches attract attention."^[69] He and a number of sympathizers ran on the basis of their claims to providing just that kind of service to the nation, with modest success. Khojaev was one of six new members elected that year.^[70] He entered the new

forum with enthusiasm, speaking out against arbitrary activities of the police in the old city and unlawful imprisonment of those searched.^[71]

Such activities had increased after the outbreak of war in Judy 1914. The declaration of war had provoked the usual declarations of loyalty to the tsar from the decorated notables in Turkestan,^[72] but the Jadid press, then at the moment of its greatest success, was not far behind. Khojaev, writing in Sada-yi Turkistan , called for support of the Russian army, especially since it included "many of our coreligionists."^[73] Behbudi reminded his readers of the need for patriotism during this hour of difficulty for "the Russian state [which] is home for us Russian Muslims." This patriotism could take the form of "help to the state in cash or kind, to the extent possible."^[74] The message was also conveyed through patriotic poetry. In his "Prayer for the Emperor," Hamza declaimed:

Give your lives to the Land, be an example
Find success, o tiger-hearted armies
Long live the nation, long live our Emperor

The tiger-hearted armies were encouraged to "raze Hungary to the ground/conquer and destroy German cities."^[75] Hamza was hardly unusual. Ibrahim Dawran wrote an ode "To Our Soldiers" and Mir Muhsin asked the Kaiser, "Who's the Coward?"^[76] The Russian empire was unequivocally the homeland (watan ) and, as such, the recipient of all the obligations due to a homeland.

The situation was complicated by the entry into war of the Ottoman empire in October, especially as the Ottoman government sought to play the pan-Islamic card. The Seyhulislam declared the war to be a holy war (Cihad-i Mukaddes ) in which aid to the Ottoman empire was incumbent upon all the Muslims of the world. In his fetvâ (legal opinion), the Seyhulislam also answered "Yes" to the following question: "Is it absolutely forbidden to Muslim subjects of the aforementioned [Entente] powers, at war with the Muslim government, to fight against the armies of the Muslim government even if they were coerced with threats to their life and even of the destruction of their families; and if they do so, do

they deserve ... the fires of hell?"^[77] The C.U.E regime had chosen, under German pressure, to place a greater burden on pan-Islam than Abdülhamid had ever done in his three decades at the helm. Ironically, the decision to seek the fetvâ was motivated by the same assumptions about the nature of Muslim opinion that underlay European fears of pan-Islam: that it was monolithic in its religious motivation, and that it could be molded (and manipulated) by Ottoman proclamations. The reality was quite different.

True, the Balkan wars had created a groundswell of sympathy for the Ottoman empire in Central Asia, which carried over into the world war. Central Asia was rife with rumors, all dutifully transcribed by Okhrana agents, of an Afghan invasion of Central Asia, and many prayed for Ottoman successes with German help. Many in Central Asia, especially members of the traditionalist religious elite, openly expressed their antagonism to the Russian cause in the war. Russian authorities stepped up their vigilance, resulting in an upsurge in arbitrary searches and arrests. The Jadids, however, figure nowhere in the Okhrana's catalogue of its fears and anxieties. The Ottoman empire no doubt was the focus of the Jadids' sympathies, but those sympathies did not override the political realities they faced at home. The process of building a civic space for Central Asian Muslims could not be sacrificed at the altar of quixotic support for the Ottoman cause. "There is nothing to be done," Behbudi wrote of the entry of the Ottoman empire in the war, "except to express sorrow that the fires ignited by the Germans have engulfed Russia and Turkey.... We, the Muslims of Turkestan, are subjects of Russia and co-religionists of the Turks. Our common religion and common race [hamdin waya , ham-uruqlikimiz ] cannot hinder our friendship with Russia, because this war is not a religious war, but one for political gain, indeed a German war."^[78] The "friendship" here was, of course, a euphemism for the civic space Central Asian society enjoyed under Russian rule, but even that space (which made Jadid reform possible) would be threatened if the state was provoked by overt opposition to the war. "It should be well understood that any ignorant and impolite action would destroy our fifty-year friendship."^[79] Behbudi went on to wish that the Turks had never entered the war, but since they had been duped by the Germans,

he advised his readers to "remain peaceful and help the wounded to the extent possible," because "the war between Turkey and Russia is 3,000 to 5,000 chaqirim away from us and it will stay there.... One should not trust the word of those who, knowing nothing about history, geography, or politics, claim to be ishans or divines. Those who want to know [about the war] should read the telegraph and newspapers, read the books of history and geography, and look at the map of the world to acquaint themselves with ... the warring states."^[80] The "ishans and divines" were obviously those in Central Asia who hoped for liberation from Russian rule through the war. Behbudi here was arguing, on the basis of his new-method knowledge, that such hopes were not justified by the geopolitics of the war. The war was too far away to benefit Turkestan; a look at the map also told Behbudi that rumors of an Afghan intervention in Central Asia in the name of Islam were mere fantasies (Behbudi could not have known that the German and Ottoman high commands were to try to make them come true in the following years). Since liberation by Ottoman arms was not a possibility, Behbudi urged his readers to value the "friendship" of Russia.

Nor was this the personal opinion of Behbudi alone. Most Jadids displayed the caution he suggested. The police reports from the period meticulously record countless rumors, many of them outlandish, overheard by agents, but none of them mention anyone active in Jadid reform except Munawwar Qari .Instead, the Jadids began organizing a number of events to raise funds for wounded soldiers and their families. Over the three years of its existence, Jadid theater was staged at least as often to raise funds for the war effort as for Jadid cultural activities. The most popular causes with Turkestani Jadids were a field hospital for Muslim soldiers and aid to the victims of war on the Kars front. Patriotic, pro-war sentiment continued to be expressed in Jadid poetry and journalism after the Ottoman entry into the war.

The war came to Central Asia in June 1916, when, faced with two years of disasters in the battlefields, the government decided to revoke Central Asians' exemption from military service and to levy troops for work at the rear. Since no records of births existed, lists of men to be conscripted were to be drawn up by volost administrators enjoying considerable discretionary powers. Both the decree and the manner of its proposed implementation provoked hostility from the beginning. Throughout the sedentary regions of Turkestan, crowds gathered at volost offices

demanding the destruction of the lists and the revocation of the decree. These gatherings were accompanied by mob justice, in which volost administrators and accompanying troops were attacked and killed. In Jizzakh uezd of Samarqand oblast, such opposition turned into open revolt, as insurgents destroyed railway and telegraph lines and attacked Russian settlements. But it was in the nomadic areas of the Steppe krai and Semirech'e that the colonial peace was shattered most dramatically. There, Qazaq and Qïrghïz nomads refused to be conscripted and went on the offensive. Unlike in the core oblasts of Turkestan, where native functionaries were often the target of the rebels, in the nomadic areas resentment over massive state-sponsored settlement over the previous decade made Russian settlers the focus of attack. These attacks were accompanied by flight by large numbers of nomads (as well as the sedentary Dungans) into Chinese territory.^[81]

Russian control could be reestablished, and then tenuously, only by reinforcements from Russia, who, along with armed settlers, repaid the atrocities with usurious interest. At the height of the uprising, A.N. Kuropatkin, an old Turkestan hand, was appointed governor-general of Turkestan. He arrived in Tashkent resolved to set matters right using the methods he had used in Andijan in 1898. Land where "Russian blood had been spilt" (in the Przheval'sk, Pishpek, and Jarkent uezds in Semirech'e, and in Jizzakh uezd in Samarqand) was confiscated. Kuropatkin also contemplated separating Russian and "Kirgiz" (the generic Russian term used to denote both Qazaq and Qïrghïz nomads) populations in large parts of Semirech'e, cleansing the area around the Issiq Köl and the Chu River of its Qazaq and Qïrghïz population, and creating a "Kirgiz"-only uezd in the Narïn region. In more practical terms, Russian soldiers and settlers wreaked vengeance on those nomads who remained behind. Those who had fled to Chinese territory, where they spent the winter in miserable conditions and were preyed upon by Chinese officials, returned to find their crops destroyed, their grazing land taken over by Russian settlers, and their cattle lost en route. The total Russian losses were substantial, although they were concentrated mostly in Semirech'e (a total of 2,246, of which 2,108 were in Semirech'e), but in typical colonial fashion, native casualties far outnumbered them. According to early So-

viet figures, in Przheval'sk oblast, 70 percent of the Qazaq and Qïrghïz population, and 90 percent of the cattle, died. In Semirech'e as a whole, 20 percent of the population, 50 percent of the horses, 39 percent of the cattle, 55 percent of the camels, and 58 percent of the sheep were lost.^[82] The atrocities continued well into the summer of 1917.

The fact that the Jadids were not involved in the uprising is not surprising. They had no presence in the rural areas, let alone the nomadic territory where the uprising was the strongest. What is surprising, however, is their enthusiasm for recruitment and their dismay at the uprising. Ubaydullah Khojaev was involved in the process and chaired the Tashkent city committee for recruitment.^[83] Others sought to cooperate with the authorities. Tawalla welcomed Kuropatkin upon his arrival in Tashkent, at the height of the uprising, with a poem in TWG .^[84] When the first batch of one thousand conscripts left Tashkent on 18 September 1916, the ceremonies included patriotic poetry recited by members of Awlani'sTurin theatrical troupe and students of new-method schools. (The latter were rewarded with zoo rubles and candy by the city's governor.)^[85] The new volume in Hamza's series of National Songs , published in November 1916, was entirely dedicated to poetry in support of the war effort. The refrain of his poem "A Sincere Prayer" was quite unequivocal: "O compatriots, be true to our King / until even our lives are sacrificed."^[86]

This is strange behavior for pan-Islamists or nationalists. It becomes impossible to explain if we insist on seeing Turkestani society as a monolithic whole in its response to colonial rule. Rather, we have two different strategies located in very different parts of society. The nomads and peasants of Turkestan, operating along the solidarities of tribe and clan, sought to drive the Russians (functionaries and settlers) out of their lands. The Jadids sought to use the conscription edict as an opportunity to establish a Central Asian Muslim presence in mainstream Russian life. Behbudi for one had long seen Turkestan's exemption from military service as a practice of exclusion;^[87] the 1916 edict, born of necessity, was a chance to overcome this exclusion and, by contributing to the war ef-

fort, stake out a place in Russian political life after the war. Indeed, the mobilization in itself was a political issue, even before the ensuing uprising made it a matter of empire-wide importance. While he helped organize the mobilization, Khojaev also traveled to Petrograd along with the Andijan millionaire Mir Kamil-bayand Khojaev's friend Vadim Chaikin, a Social Revolutionary, to invite a delegation from the State Duma to visit Turkestan and examine the situation themselves. The quest was successful, and a two-member delegation, consisting of Kutlugmurad Tevkelev, the chairman of the Muslim Faction, and the Social Revolutionary deputy Aleksandr Kerenskii (who was born in Tashkent), toured the province in August. Upon his return, Kerenskii gave a two-hour speech, highly critical of Russian policy in Turkestan, in a closed session of the Duma. At the same time, Khojaev's success in bringing two worthies from Petrograd increased his influence in Tashkent. Russian officials noted with concern that many people in Tashkent had begun to think of him as an aristocrat and had begun to address him directly with their grievances as someone enjoying great power.^[88]

The alliance between Khojaev and Chaikin provided one of the few instances in prerevolutionary Turkestan of political collaboration between members of the Russian community and the native population, but it is a good example of Jadid strategy in this tumultuous period. Its origins remain unclear. When Sada-yi Turkistan collapsed due to financial problems in May 1915, Khojaev moved, his membership in the Tashkent City Duma notwithstanding, to Andijan ,where he started a legal practice. By summer 1916, Khojaev was on friendly terms with several Russians of Social Revolutionary persuasion, such as Vadim Chaikin and I. Ia. Shapiro. Chaikin had been arrested in Kursk province in June 1908, for agitating among the peasants, for which he had spent five years in exile in Yakutia. In 1916 he worked with his brother Anastasii, who as an "honorary citizen" had far more solid credentials.^[89] Shapiro was a lawyer who had a long history of antigovernment activity and who had first been arrested in Kharkov in 1904.^[90] After the events of the summer of 1916, they launched the Andijan Publishing Company as a joint-stock venture, in which Ubaydullah Khojaev was apparently a shareholder. The company hoped to publish two newspapers, one in Russian and one in Turkic, called The Voice of Turkestan , although finan-

cial constraints meant that only the Russian version (Turkestanskii golos ) ever saw the light. The Ghayrat Company of Kokand was also interested in publishing the Turkic version (to be called Sada-yi Turkistan ),and negotiations were under way between the two organizations in November 1916. Preparations were far advanced, for in December 1916, Cholpan ,on behalf of the editorial board, solicited the customary poem in praise of the new newspaper from Hamza.^[91] The Russian version remained a Russian newspaper, catering to local Russian society but, unusually, providing comment favorable to Muslim positions on issues such as Russian settlement in Semirech'e.^[92] The activities of this group went beyond publishing, however. The offices of the newspaper had become the meeting place for local Jadids, who counted among their numbers merchants, interpreters, and booksellers.^[93] In 1916, they launched a campaign of petitions and denunciations against corrupt local officials, as a result of which a number of officials were dismissed. Again, as with the lawsuit over blasphemy, the purpose of this campaign was to assert the presence of the group in local society by forcing the administration to play according to its own rules. The campaign was successful enough to attract the notice of oblast authorities, who, not surprisingly, did not share this view of accountability. The governor of Ferghana oblast, took a dim view of the situation and the people involved. What he had on his hands was a "local party called 'Taraqqiparwar,' which covers itself in pan-Islamist ideas, but which in reality pursues the goals of profit through blackmail, vile slanders, graft, intrigues, and lies." These unscrupulous individuals—corrupt interpreters, slimy lawyers, self-serving members of the Russian community, and Jews—had "terrorized" the population and succeeded to the extent that "power had passed from the hands of the administration to this group." The governor recommended exiling the whole group from Turkestan.^[94] The matter was still being investigated when revolution broke out in the streets of Petrograd.

Of National Interest

Jadid political strategies aimed at the creation of a Muslim voice in Turkestan and of Muslim participation in the imperial mainstream. To this

end, they sought alliances with sympathetic Russians in their midst and attempted to work for the state. The continuation of this strategy during war and insurgency was the only choice open to the Jadids, who had no roots in the countryside that would allow them to launch a popular movement of armed resistance against the colonial regime. Indeed, as the foregoing should have made clear, they had no interest in doing so even if they had the resources. The logic of a modernist, urban, intellectual-led political movement and that of rural insurgency remained fundamentally incongruent. Rather, their ultimate hope remained that politically cautious participation would bear fruit and produce political concessions after the war from which the nation, and the Jadids as the nation's leaders, would benefit. National interests do not exist beyond the competing parochial interests of the social agents that compose the nation, but are articulated in the struggles of those groups.

Ultimately, the strategy was unsuccessful. Russian officialdom mistook the striving for inclusion for separatism, and the campaign against corrupt functionaries became, in its eyes, terrorism. Jadid involvement in the mobilization of 1916 was either easily forgotten or else ascribed to the opportunism of ambitious individuals. The revolution of 1905 had not dented autocracy's will to exclude all social groups from matters of political import in the colonial periphery that was Turkestan. Turkestan might be defined by the "fanaticism" of its inhabitants, but the ambitions of its modern elites were equally, if not more, dangerous. Official hostility proved insurmountable. That was only half the battle for the Jadids, however. Equally significant was conflict within their society. Officials investigating the dark deeds of Khojaev and his associates in Andijan had no trouble finding people in Andijan and elsewhere to fill its dossiers with denunciations of the group.^[95] The nation was deeply divided just as revolution in distant Petrograd hurled it into a new era of political opportunity.