The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform

partnership with society that the autocracy found unacceptable even after the
revolution of 1905. In Turkestan, administrators hoped that Russian society
would recognize its duty to empire and act in the interests of state, and they
expressed astonished dismay when it failed to do so. The political agent in
Bukhara wrote in 1906 of the deleterious effects of the revolution on "Russian
prestige" in Bukhara, and in 1910, Governor-General Mishchenko turned literary
critic in order to remind the editor of the Tashkent journal Sredniaia Aziia of
his duties to Russian power in the region. Presented with a complimentary copy
of the new publication, he found "extremely weak in literary terms" a sketch
that presented in a poor light the behavior of army officers. "This story
belongs to phenomena," he wrote, "that are altogether undesirable, especially in
Central Asia."[92] Russian society did not always agree with officialdom. It was
the only segment of Turkestan's population to be involved in the revolution of
1905; in the ensuing elections to the State Duma, local Russians largely voted
for radical parties of the left.[93] The files of the political police indicate
that the state found itself governing settler society almost as sternly as
native society.
Along with the Russians came members of other groups that further complicated
the dichotomy between Russian and native. Some, such as Ukrainians,
Belorussians, and even Poles and Germans, tended to be lumped together with the
Russians both in terms of perception and legal privileges. Others, such as Jews,
Armenians, and Tatars, occupied separately delineated spaces in the new colonial
society. A sizable Jewish community had existed in Bukhara since at least
pre-Mongol times and played a significant role in the area's economic life. In
1833, Bukharan Jews were granted the same rights to trade in Russia as Muslim
merchants from Bukhara and Khiva, and this pattern of equal legal treatment for
all subjects of the amirs of Bukhara was maintained after the conquest.
[92] TsGARUz, f. 1, op. 28, d. 1119, l. 112. 
[93] On the considerable revolutionary activity among the Russian population of
Turkestan, see A.V. Piaskovskli, Revoliutsua 1905-1907 godov v Turkestane
(Moscow, 1958).
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Kaufman saw Bukharan Jews are a good influence in Turkestan as well as a channel
for Russian influence in Bukhara. Under the terms of the 1873 treaty with
Bukhara, Bukharan Jews had the right to own property and to settle anywhere in
Turkestan, a right denied Russian Jews. As a result, large communities of
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Bukharan Jews appeared in Tashkent, Samarqand, and the cities of the Ferghana
valley, where they were very successful in business. This success, as well as
general anti-Jewish sentiment of the reign of Alexander III (r. 1881-1894), led
to a gradual curtailment of their favored status, culminating in a 1910 law that
made it illegal for Bukharan Jews to reside in all but a few towns of Turkestan
unless they could prove that their ancestors had lived in the area before the
Russian conquest. The needed documents were duly produced, and many Jews
remained in Turkestan.[94] Some of them had acquired sizable fortunes,
especially three families in Ferghana that had concentrated a great part of the
raw cotton export to Russia in their hands. According to one estimate, the
Vodiaevs alone managed 60 percent of this trade.[95] In 1914, there was a large
enough Jewish community in Kokand to support a newspaper, Rahamin . The wealth
of the community, as well as its contacts abroad (extremely sketchy notices in
contemporary travelers' accounts refer to the fact that many local Jews had
contacts in Western Europe and that many spoke French fluently), allowed it to
negotiate increasing legal disabilities.
An Armenian community similarly developed in the major urban centers of
Turkestan, performing similar entrepreneurial functions in the economy, its
arrival facilitated by the Transcaspian Railway. But for our purposes, the most
important community was the Volga Tatars. Under Russian rule since the middle of
the sixteenth century, the Tatars enjoyed affinities of language as well as of
religion with Central Asia and had played a central role in Russia's trade with
Central Asia during this period. Bukharan madrasas were also a common
destination for Tatar ulama. A number of Tatars moved to Turkestan after the
Russian conquest, partly because their familiarity with both Central Asia and
Russia gave them a considerable competitive advantage in the area. True to form,
the administration attempted to stem this unauthorized movement of people,
although the repeated prohibitions are evidence of a distinct lack
[94] On Bukharan Jews, see Michael Zand, "Bukhara vii: Bukharan Jews."
Encyclo-pœdta Iramca , IV: 530-545, with an exhaustive bibliography.
[95] Catherine Poujol, "Approaches to the History of Bukharan Jews' Settlement m
the Fergana Valley, 1867-1917," Central Asian Survey 12 (1993): 553-554.
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of success.[96] Some Tatar and Bashkir officers served in the Russian army and
therefore appeared in administrative roles; many more served as interpreters and
guides; but the vast majority of Tatars living in Central Asia were connected
with trade and private business. As inorodtsy , they suffered from a number of
legal disabilities—they could not legally own immovable property—and were often
the objects of suspicion, but they nevertheless occupied a space quite distinct
from the local population. They were not tuzemtsy , and as Table 3 again shows,
were much better integrated into Russian social classifications. Their position
with regard to local society was, however, always ambivalent; their religious
and linguistic affinities with it had made them the natural intermediaries in
the Russian trade before the conquest, but they nevertheless remained outsiders.
"A number of Noghays [the Turkestani term for Tatar] have arrived in these parts
lately," a newspaper reader stated in 1876. "Some want to buy property here and
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marry locally because life is good here and the climate is better. But local
Sarts and Qazaqs don't want to give them their daughters."[97] The disdain was
mutual, however, as the Tatars in Turkestan soon formed a close-knit community,
which self-consciously delineated itself from the local population and looked to
phenomena in the Tatar lands of European Russia for inspiration. Numerous
markers separated them from the local population: Most chose to live in Russian
quarters, far more Tatars sent their children to Russian schools, and Tatar
women followed different codes of dress and comportment than Turkestani women.
The Tatar community in Tashkent organized a benevolent society with its own
school in 1902, which further served to demarcate it from the rest of Muslim
society.[98] 
Yet for all the intermediary groups and the differences within Russian society,
the Russian-native dichotomy came to provide the parameters within which
difference and hierarchy were imagined in Turkestan. The settler population's
oppositional proclivities did not render it sympathetic to the native
population. The otherness of the native population was too widely shared in
Russian discourse for that, and the emergence of a colonial economy tended to
reinforce the differences. Even though the entire spectrum of Russian political
life appeared in Turkestan, all sections of it were united in taking for granted
the exclusion (or disre-
[96] TWG , 29 March 1874, 19 December 1874.
[97] TWG , 28 July 1876.
[98] Tashkand shahrining orus chastida istiqamat etub masjid-t jami 'imizga qawm
bulub turghuivchi hamma abl-t mahalla noghay khalqiga ruski tatariski
ishkolaning paptchitilstvasining predsidatilidan daklad (Tashkent, 1902).
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gard) of the natives from mainstream politics. This fact was to be of
fundamental importance in 1917. But the dichotomy was also shared by non-Russian
groups in Turkestan, who appropriated it for their own uses. The vocabulary of
progress and backwardness inherent in the dichotomy was also to figure
prominently in the politics of cultural reform in Muslim society itself, which
was made necessary by changes in society noted above and the need to make new
choices in new circumstances unleashed by the Russian conquest.
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Chapter 3 
The Origins of Jadidism
In 1899, a young man of twenty-five boarded the Transcaspian Railway in
Samarqand and headed off to Transcaucasia on his way to Istanbul, Cairo, and
Mecca. The journey was to be a turning point in the life of Mahmud Khoja ibn
Behbud Khoja, who later took the surname, in the Tatar fashion then becoming
popular, of Behbudi. In his travels Behbudi saw current developments in public
education in the Ottoman empire and Egypt and met leading figures concerned with
cultural reform. Upon his return to Samarqand eight months later, he took out a
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subscription to the newspaper Terjüman , published by the Crimean Tatar reformer
Is-mail Bey Gasprinskii (1851-1914) in Bahchesaray. Behbudi's public career
began with the appearance of his first essays in the official Turkistan
wilayatining gazeti (TWG) in 1902 and proved to be the most illustrious of his
generation. He also supported a school that taught literacy according to the new
method championed by Gasprinskii. Over the years, he wrote a number of general
information books as well as primers for new-method schools; he edited and
published a newspaper and then a magazine of his own. His publishing activities
expanded considerably and in 1913 he opened a bookstore that stocked books from
all over the Muslim world. That same year he became Central Asia's first
playwright when his Padarkush (The Parricide) opened in Samarqand. Down to the
premature end of his life in 1919 he continued to exhort his compatriots to
"awake from their sleep of ignorance" and acquire the knowledge that the new age
demanded.
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Yet for all his enthusiasm for reform, Behbudi (1874-1919) came from the old
cultural elite of Turkestan. His father was qazi in the village of Bakhshi Tepe
on the outskirts of Samarqand, and Behbudi was taught the standard madrasa texts
of the time at home by his father and uncles. But his father died when Behbudi
was twenty, and he was forced to find work. He worked as mirza (scribe) to an
uncle who served as qazi, before becoming a qazi himself.[1] The family was
prosperous enough for Behbudi to travel abroad, and he was astute enough not to
squander his wealth. In 1913, he owned houses in both the Russian and native