Jadid
The Jadids[1] were a political, religious, and cultural movement of Muslim modernist reformers within the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th century.
[3] Jadids maintained that Turks in Tsarist Russia had entered a period of moral and societal decay that could only be rectified by the acquisition of a new kind of knowledge and modernist, European-modeled cultural reform.
Intellectuals such as Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy, author of the famous play The Patricide and founder of one of Turkestan's first Jadid schools, carried Gasprinsky's ideas back to Central Asia.
In his Arabic publication al-Nahḍah ("the Awakening"), the Crimean Tatar educator and intellectual Ismail Gasprinsky published satirical cartoons in Cairo, British-ruled Egypt that depict Muslim clerics, such as mullahs and sheikhs, as rapacious and lustful figures who prevented Muslim women from taking their rightful place as social equals and exploited the goodwill and trust of lay Turks.
Central Asian Jadids accused their leaders of permitting the moral decay of Islamic societies, as seen in the prevalence of alcoholism, pederasty, polygamy, and gender discrimination among Muslims, while simultaneously cooperating with Russian officials to cement their authority as elites.
As historian Adeeb Khalid asserts, Jadids and the Qadimist Ulama were essentially engaged in a battle over what values should project onto Central Asian culture.
Jadids and Qadimists both sought to assert their own cultural values, with one group drawing its strategic strength from its relationship to modern forms of social organization and media and the other from its position as champion of an existing way of life in which it already occupied stations of authority.
Jadids maintained that the traditional system of education did not produce graduates who had the requisite skills to successfully navigate the modern world, nor was it capable of elevating the cultural level of Turkic communities in the Russian Empire.
Probably the most important and widespread alteration to the traditional curriculum was the Jadids' insistence that children learn to read through phonetic methods that had more success in encouraging functional literacy.
Early print matter created and distributed by commoners in Turkestan were generally lithographic copies of canonical manuscripts from traditional genres.
[21] Turkestani Jadids, however, used print media to produce new-method textbooks, newspapers and magazines in addition to new plays and literature in a distinctly innovative idiom.
[22] Adeeb Khalid describes a bookstore in Samarqand that in 1914 sold "books in Tatar, Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian on topics such as history, geography, general science, medicine, and religion, in addition to dictionaries, atlases, charts, maps, and globes."
[26] For example, the Bukharan author Abdurrauf Fitrat criticized the clergy for discouraging the modernization he believed was necessary to protect Central Asia from Russian incursions.
[27] Central Asian Jadids used such mass-media as an opportunity to mobilize support for their projects, present critiques of local cultural practices, and generally advocate and advance their platform of modernist reform as a cure for the societal ills plaguing the Turkestan.
Despite the dedication of their producers, Jadidist papers in Central Asia usually had very small circulations and print runs that made it difficult for publications to maintain their existence without significant patronage.
[40] The First East Turkestan Republic in Kashgar's Interior Minister was Yunus Beg, who previously worked with Maqsud Muhiti, a merchant who spread Jadidism in Turfan.
[44] Some Jadids and Muhammad Amin Bughra (Mehmet Emin) and Masud Sabri rejected the imposition of the name "Uyghur" upon the Turkic people of Xinjiang.
The Jadids, greatly attracted to the promotion of Central Asian liberation, embarked on language reform, "new-method" teaching, and expansive cultural projects with renewed fervor after 1917.
By the early 1920s, the Jadids finally felt comfortable allying the channels of Bolsheviks, allowing them to participate in the government on a more equal standing with the Russians.
[54] Essentially, the Bolsheviks wanted to opportunistically use the facilities they had established on the Jadids behalf to disseminate political propaganda and educate the Central Asian masses about the socialist revolution.
The Jadids hoped to establish a unified nation for all Turkic peoples, while the Bolsheviks envisioned a more divided Central Asia based on ethnographic data.
[56] As a formal challenge to the Bolshevik model of nation building, the Jadids founded a unified provisional government in the city of Kokand, with the intention of remaining autonomous from the USSR.
After lasting only one year, 1917–1918, Kokand was brutally crushed by the forces of the Tashkent Soviet; around 14,000 people, including many leading Jadids, were killed in the ensuing massacre.
As a result, the Bolsheviks established local Central Asian cadres who were ideologically bound to Socialist revolutionism and disconnected from Turkic cultural practice.
As a result of this consolidation, by 1926 the Communist Party felt secure in its Central Asian regional power to lead the charge against traditional authorities without the assistance of the Jadids.
[58] Throughout the remainder of the 1920s and 30s, virtually the entire intelligentsia of Central Asia, including leading Jadid writers and poets such as Cholpan and Abdurrauf Fitrat were purged.
