Jadidism (Jadid Movement)

Jadidism began as an educational movement. In 1883 Ismail Gasprinsky, a Crimean Tatar, opened a new-method school in Bakhchysarai and launched the newspaper Tercüman ("Interpreter"); figures such as Mahmud Khoja Behbudiy, Munawwar Qari and Abdurrauf Fitrat carried his ideas to Turkestan. An earlier new-method school founded in Crimea in 1884 spread rapidly among the Tatars but only sporadically in Turkestan until the early 20th century.

The new method

In a traditional maktab pupils memorised Arabic passages without learning Arabic, able to "read" only what they had already memorised. The Jadids taught the alphabet phonetically to produce functional literacy. New-method schools added secular subjects such as geography, history, mathematics and science, brought desks, blackboards and maps into classrooms, and introduced academic years, examinations and graded classes. Corporal punishment was abolished and girls were encouraged to attend, though few parents sent them; a new-method girls' school opened in Orenburg in 1897, and by 1916 there were over 5,000 new-method schools in the empire.

Conflict with the Qadimists

Jadid thought carried a distinctly anti-clerical tone. Conservative clergy denounced the new method as a heretical innovation and complained that Arabic was being replaced by Tatar. As Adeeb Khalid argues, however, the conflict was not a simple old-versus-new split but a contest between two understandings of knowledge and its transmission: in the manuscript age the written word itself was held sacred, whereas for the Jadids, who belonged to the age of print, the meaning of the text was what mattered. Print challenged the monopoly of the traditionally learned over authoritative discourse. Publishing newspapers such as Tercüman, and later books and periodicals across Central Asia, was therefore a struggle over cultural authority. Many Jadids were themselves products of traditional maktabs and madrasas and came from privileged families, which makes the conflict a contest over cultural values rather than a class struggle.

Press, politics, organisation

Ittifaq al-Muslimin, founded in August 1905 at Nizhny Novgorod with some 150 delegates, was represented in the State Duma, and after the 1905 revolution local-language newspapers began to appear in Turkestan. Print runs were small and censors watched them. Through the First World War and the revolutions of 1917, Jadid demands moved from constitutional monarchy toward republicanism and territorial autonomy, expressed in the Shura-i Islam in Tashkent and the Turkestan Autonomy proclaimed in Kokand; in Bukhara and Khiva the Young Bukharans and Young Khivans pursued the same ideas.

After 1917 and the purges

After October 1917 many Jadids allied with the Bolsheviks, helped build Soviet Central Asia and joined the Communist Party, but the aims differed: the Jadids wanted a Turkic nation, the Bolsheviks a Central Asia divided on ethnographic lines. That difference turned violent in 1917-1918, when the Kokand autonomy was crushed by the Tashkent Soviet. As Soviet power consolidated its Central Asian rule from the late 1920s, the Jadids suffered the same purges as the clergy they had opposed. Munawwar Qari, the publisher Cholpan, Abdurrauf Fitrat and Abdulla Qadiri disappeared in the 1930s; with Fayzulla Khodzhayev, paraded at the 1938 Moscow purge trial as part of an "anti-Soviet bloc", the Jadid generation was obliterated. After the dissolution of the USSR, Uzbekistan rehabilitated the Jadids as national heroes.

How to assess it

The Jadids did not oppose Russian colonial rule. Khalid argues that they did not fight to break free of the empire but sought to establish a Central Asian Muslim presence in mainstream Russian life, and the tsarist administration treated them with suspicion as a primarily political phenomenon. Better than calling the movement a national liberation struggle is to read it as a Muslim modernist reform that reorganised modern knowledge and European models under colonial conditions, limits and consequences included.