Tatars and Education - history notes

“Rather than resist, the middle classes became the bearers of a new cultural and political consciousness. Since the early nineteenth century the University of Kazan had been the principal center for the communication of Russian culture to Tatars and Kazakhs, and after the middle of the century the Russians vastly expanded their educational effort. Nicholas II'minskii created schools which would give Tatars a Russian and European education, imparted by native instructors using native languages. While some Tatars resisted this program because they feared forced Russification, and some Russians were concerned about an education which would encourage national languages and separatism many Tatars welcomed the new education as a means of spreading modernism and of entering into the life of the Russian state.

In Turkestan, Russian education came to Muslims as a result of different policies. Here Governor-General von Kaufman decided to create schools for Russian settlers (1876) which had no religious or confessional bias, and wait for Muslims to voluntarily enroll and adopt a superior Russian civilization. In 1884 the first Russian native school to teach Russian language, arithmetic, geography, history , literature, and other secular subjects in the morning, and Muslim religion and local language in the afternoon, was founded. A small number of schools sufficed to create a cadre of Muslim translators, teachers, and intellectuals. Generally, however, Muslims found them unsatisfactory because of their poor teaching of Muslim subjects and the fear that their children would be weaned away from Islam. By 1917 Muslim education was still mostly in the hands of the “ulama”.”

However, Russian conquests and colonization led to the development of a native bourgeoisie, and Russian education favored, as in colonial situations the Muslim world over, the emergence of a small intelligentsia. Under the influence of Russian education, and of new ideas from Turkey and Iran, this intelligentsia began to demand reform of Muslim practices, self-improvement, cultural enlightenment, and eventually, political autonomy. Some of the new intelligentsia stressed national development, some religious reform. After the turn of the century there would be advocates of socialism as well.

The most significant of the new cultural tendencies was the usul-i-jadid, or New Method, a program of educational reform that gradually developed into a political movement. The usul-i-jadid had its origin among wealthy and highly Europeanized Kazan and Crimean Tatars, often educated at the University of Kazan, who had not only become assimilated to Russian culture but sensitive to their own Turkish and Muslim heritage and aware of their backwardness. The Volga and Crimean Tatar bourgeoisie carried the new concept into Kazakhstan, Turkestan, and Bukhara, where it influenced other Muslim intellectuals. In the latter regions, however, the impact of jadid was slight and the preponderance of educational and religious influence remained with the old-fashioned Muslim 'ulama'.

The Tatar intellectual revival began early in the nineteenth century under the leadership of Abu Nasr al-Kursavi (1783-1814), a young Tatar theologian and teacher in a madrasa in Bukhara, who proclaimed the primacy of reason over dogma. He was exiled, but his views were taken up by Shihab al-Din Marjani (1818-1889), who called for freedom of reasoning and of independent judgment in religious matters, the abandonment of the fixed dogmas of the past, a new education based on the teaching of the Quran, hadith, and the history of Islam, and instruction in Russian language and modern science. His progam was oriented toward a reform of Islamic belief and teaching and to a modernization and integration of Islam with Russian culture. Marjani thus represented a combination of the reformist and the modernist orientations.

A principal contributor to the creation of a Muslim literature which could communicate modern ideas was “Abd al-Qayyim Nasiri (1824-1904), the son of a village religious teacher, educated in the madrasas of Kazan and Bukhara, learned in Arabic, Persian, and Chaghatay, who taught himself Russian and taught for a time in a Russian theological seminary. In 1871 he left the seminary and opened his own school. Basing his work on his own pedagogical concepts, he taught not only Muslim subjects, but Russian language, arithmetic, geography, history, music, and drawing. For this enterprise Nasiri created his own texts, including a syntax for Tatars trying to learn Russian, and a Tatar-Russian dictionary. He also wrote on European sciences and published material on trade and industry. A folklorist who accumulated Tatar songs and legends, he preserved the knowledge of pre-Islamic beliefs. Though he was opposed to the conservative religious leaders and their concept of education, he was in fact a devout Muslim and published numerous religious works including studies of the life of the Prophet and stories of Muslim saints. In his own lifetime he was largely ignored, but as an encyclopedist and vulgarizer he was a pioneer in joing Muslim reform to Muslim modernism.

The most famous jadid leader was Ismai'il Gasprinskii (1851-1914), a Crimean Tatar who had a European education and worked as a journalist in Istanbul and Paris. In 1883 he began to publish Tarjuman, which became the principal expression of the jadid campaign for the modernization and unification of Muslim peoples. Gasprinskii became a proponent of the modernist rather than the reformist orientation. He argued that Muslims must borrow from the West to revitalize their intellectual and social life. While Islam could remain a philosophic and theological system, Muslim peoples had to become part of modern technical civilization. He held up the positive example of the small Tatar community in Poland which was Muslim in religion but otherwise wholly assimilated, and the negative example of Bukhara as a benighted and backward Muslim society.

Gasprinskii pioneered in sponsoring jadid schools. By 1905 Kazan, Orenburg, Bakçesaray, and Baku had become important centers of jadid education. He also tried to develop a standard Turkish literary language based on Ottoman to replace the traditional use of Arabic, Persian, and Chagatay. Gasprinskii's ultimate object was to transmit European culture to Muslim peoples and to unify them on the basis of a common language, a rational form of religion, and a shared modern civilization.

Tatar merchants and intellectuals introduced the jadid schools to Tashkent and Bukhara where they were taken up by local cotton merchants and money lenders who had a Russian education or had been exposed to Russian ideas. Tashkent schools and the Turkestan Native Gazette, and official government publication produced in literary Uzbek with a Russian translation, were the main vehicles for the spread of interest in modernization. Stimulated by the Iranian revolution of 1906 and the Young Turk coup of 1908, Bukharans themselves founded additional schools which emphasized religion and provided supplementary studies of Russian language, arithmetic geography, physics, and chemistry. These contrasted with the reformist schools in Crimea and Kazan, which stressed secular rather than religious instruction. In 1910 a new society called the Union of Noble Bukhara was founded to print a journal and distribute literary materials. These Yeni Bukharlar (Young Bukharans) included intellectuals of merchant and 'ulama' background, many of whom were educated in Istanbul. They combined Young Turk-type reformism, Tatar jadidism, pan-Islamic, anti-Russian, and anti-feudal sentiments.

The leading ideologue of the Bukharan reform was 'Abd al-Rauf Fitrat'. He argued that Muslim civilization in Bukhara was in decline and that the conservative 'ulama' were responsible. The 'ulama', he argued, had distorted the teaching of the Prophet, put Islam at the service of the privileged classes and made it hostile to progress. He was equally opposed to popular religious practices and the worship of saints. He argued that the regeneration of the Muslim community would depend upon a new understanding of Islam which rejected ignorant leadership and blind fidelity. Fitrat believed that the regeneration of the Muslim community could only be realized by a spiritual renovation of individuals, based on a reformed education, and by a social and political revolution which would bring an end to foreign domination and to a corrupt political elite. He was the first Bukharan thinker to emphasize political action and to propound an Islamic identity based on the concept of vatan (fatherland) and millet (nation).

The jadid movement in Tsarist Russia was similar to reformist movements in other parts of the Muslim world. In social origin it was a movement of intelligentsia drawn from bourgeois and merchant strata of society, a movement not of a displaced but of an aspiring political elite. While it echoed 'ulama' reformism by its emphasis upon the Quran, Sunna, and itjihad, jadid appears primarily as a modernist movement which attempted to transform Islam into another version of modern technical and national civilization. In this respect it seems closer to the modernism of the Ottoman empire and Sayyid Ahmad Khan in India than to the refomism of the Sufis.

Cultural concerns, moreover, soon led to politics. Within the jadid movement, and alongside of it, the Tatars began to discuss their political identity and to debate whether Tatars were Turks or a separate nation. Emigrés in Turkey took the pan-Turanian view that Tatar, Turkish, Mongolian, and Finno-Ugaric peoples formed a single nation glorified by the conquests of Attila, Chinggis Khan, and Tamerlane. Tatars within Russia generally held that Tatars formed a distinct nation (millet), and aspired to assimilation into Russian society. They demanded individual equality of Muslims with Russians and imagined a future of cooperation between the two peoples. Rashid Ibragimov imagined a Russian-Muslim federation on the Austro-Hungarian model. Socialist ideas also began to spread among Muslim intellectuals in Kazan, Kiev, Tiflis, and Orenburg. Being a dispersed population without much hope of territorial separation from Russia, Tatars were most likely to affirm pan-Islamic or pan-Turkish causes.

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