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67Запад - Восток, № 8, 2015
УДК 94(47)"17/1917"(470.4)
Возникновение джадидизма в мусульманском обществе Среднего Поволжья в XIX веке
О. Б. Земцова
ФГБОУ ВПО «Марийский государственный университет», Йошкар-Ола, Россия
Статья посвящена анализу реформ в мусульманском обществе Среднего Поволжья в XIX веке. Изменения в философии мусульманской элиты, касающиеся отношений с имперским центром, образом жизни и образовательной системы постепенно привели к возникновению феномена джадидизма. Термин, поначалу применяемый в образовании для обозначения новометодной системы, позже распространился на другие сферы жизнедеятельности.
Ключевые слова: джадидизм, мусульманские реформы, мусульманское образование.
The issue of education of Muslim Tatars of the Middle Volga, and especially of the Kazan province, is a multifaceted problem which, although discussed in the present-day historical research, still retains several aspects to explain and to uncover, actors to introduce and outcomes to analyze [1; 2; 3; 8; 12; 13]. This relatively closed Muslim community, in the second half of the nineteenth century experienced internal reforms, which were first characterized as reforms within Islam, but gradually acquired a more social and political coloring. Muslims’ encounter with modernity steadily led to their social mobilization and to transformation of the communal identity.
The first changes in the philosophy of the Middle Volga Muslim thinkers are connected with the name of Usman Utyz-Imiani al Bulgari who became the leader of Tatar theologians protesting against the Muslim Spiritual Assembly (the highest official Muslim body established in 1788 by Catherine II). Utuz-Imiani regarded the Assembly as an institution that controlled, among other things, Muslim process of schooling and supported those mullahs who did not teach the shakirds (students) other than Qur’an and scholastic texts. That was why the majority of shakirds did not even understand what they were studying since most of the texts were written in Arabic and Persian.
Utyz-Imiani, assessing the laws of the sharia, came to the conclusion that learning the laws themselves did not provide good Islamic education. That is why, he claimed, it was necessary to revise critically the works of Muslim thinkers, to get rid of scholasticism at madrasah and, supporting the idea of another prominent scholar Al Kursavi to ‘open the doors of idzhtikhad, meaning the ability of every Muslim to pass judgments
© Земцова О. Б., 2015
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in the questions of faith. He came to the idea of necessity of reform in the laws of sharia which became known as ‘the concept of Utuz-Imyani’ - development of critical thinking, idzhtikhad, which was not - and could not be - accepted by the mullahs-traditionalists [9, p. 33].
Quite a different line of reform was the Vaisov movement, described by Robert Crews as a ‘distinctive product of the Russian imperial environment.’ [2, p. 319]. Indeed, the claims of the leader demonstrate the reaction to the outside influence and also show that the process of Muslim reformation was not homogenous. Bakha ad-din Vaisov, a peasant of the village of Molvino, protested against the mullahs and Muslim Spiritual Assembly who, as he thought, misinterpreted Islam. He claimed that constant living together with the Russians influenced the life in Tatar communities. Tatars began to copy the Russian way of life, women stopped covering their faces; madrasah’s curriculum started to let in the European education and young Muslims stared to enter Russian educational institutions. These innovations, Vaisov believed, were contrary to the teaching of the Qur’an. Thus, according to him, one should not go to a mosque and believe mullahs nor trust local authorities but only the tsar.
As a manifestation of his protest, Vaisov organized a society called ‘God’s regiments’ (bozh’i polki) [9, p. 35] of Muslim Old Believers (musul'manskie starovery). The term ‘Old Believers’ was used in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Muslim community while the word ‘Muslim’ distinguished them from the Orthodox Old Believers [21]. Claiming to be the descendants of the Volga Bulgars and underlining the difference between themselves and Tatars, the members of the sect said on various occasions: ‘The difference between us and Tatars is equal to the difference between the sky and the earth’ [16].
The attitude to Vaisov’s people from the Muslim community was generally quite positive, as to the people of the same faith whose delusions could be tolerated. Followers of Vaisov promised that those who joined the sect were safe from Russian missionaries who could otherwise baptize them, make them study at Russian schools and subject them to conscription [14]. In the end, more than three hundred families took part in the movement.
However, neither Russian authorities nor the Muslim Spiritual assembly were willing to tolerate the sect: the members of the community did not use the state passports, kept their own registers, refused to serve in the army or pay taxes. The only tax they recognized and paid was the eight kopecks from each desiatina which had been introduced by Ivan IV in the sixteenth century. After several cases of confrontations between the sect and the authorities, Vaisov was sent to prison and, later, to a mental asylum while the majority of the sectarians were exiled to Siberia and the movement was suppressed.
Turning back to the transformations suggested by the Muslim learned community leaders, one cannot avoid mentioning the name of Shigabutdin Mardzhani. In the second half of the nineteenth century, his ideas reformed Muslim education and transformed the Tatar society itself, bringing it to the new level of development. The ideas of Mardzhani were more moderate than those of Vaisov, but they had a steadier conceptual basis: according to him, it was necessary to make a reform in the religious consciousness of the Muslims, without reforming the dogmas of Islam. He proposed the return to early Islam, its purification from the shortcomings of later development.
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An educated Muslim should know the sources of the religion and on their basis he should be able to make the idzhtikhad. Proper Muslim education, free of scholasticism should borrow the achievements of the western civilization and this combination was to trigger the rise of Tatar ethnic consciousness.
It is here that the Muslim ethnic claims appear - Mardzhani imagined that the reformed society would first get its autonomy in the Russian empire and then its own statehood [9, p. 36]. According to Uli Schamiloglu, Mardzhani was the first person who tried to identify the Muslims of the Volga-Kama region in ethnic terms. In 1880s he called them ‘Kazan Tatars’ and linked their genealogy to the Volga Bulgar state, existing in this region between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries [18]. The questions he studied were the ones that still now await their answers: ‘Did the Turkic-speaking Muslims in the Russian empire constitute a common ‘Turk-Tatar’/’Bulgar’/’Muslim’ nation or multiple small nations? And did the Volga-Ural Muslims descend from the Tatars of the Golden Horde, the Bulghar Khanate, or a combination of both?’ [15].
It was more the traditionalists who found fault with Mardzhani’s ideas, not the authorities, and his name often remains in the shade and he is called ‘not a real reformist.’ [1, p. 38]. Mardzhani’s views on education were progressive enough for his time, as he understood the necessity of both conscious studies of Islamic heritage and receiving modern Russian education. He maintained that learning Russian was not against the rules of the sharia as many mullahs tried to show (in fact, he taught Muslim religion in the Kazan Tatar teacher training College for nine years) and won the fame of a missionary, heretic and an apostate in the Muslim conservative circles. Marzhdani, being a religious reformer, claimed that Islam did not contradict European science and school reforms, but on the contrary could profit from coexistence with them.
Mardzhani’s student, Kh. Faizkhanov, suggested a project of Tatar lay secondary school similar to the Russian gymnasia. In 1857 he became a teacher of eastern languages in St. Petersburg University where he was teaching Turkic languages (Turkic, Tatar and Arabic). Besides, he spoke Russian, Chuvash, Mari, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Mari, Uzbek, Farsi. Faizkhanov was also the one to produce a ‘Short Grammar of the Tatar Language’ (1862). Having understood that it was important to borrow Russian and European values without having to renounce Muslim ones, in the 1860s he introduced his own project of ‘school reform’ [19, p. 34]. According to the project, schooling was to last ten years. During the first three years the students were to learn geography, geometry, Russian, Persian, Turkic and Arabic. After the third year the students were to be divided into two subgroups - the first one was to study mathematics, medicine, astronomy, natural sciences, literature and the Qur’an. The students of the other subgroup were supposed to study the program of a gymnasium to be able to enter a University later. Geography, natural sciences, medicine and European languages were to be taught in Russian and other subjects - in Tatar. Besides, the school was supposed to have its own Tatar print shop. The author thought that the school was supposed to be financially supported by the state and in case the state refused to pay, the money was to be collected from the Tatar community. It is unknown why it did not receive the state support. What concerns the community, an innovation like this was seen as a step against Muslim religious ideology and philosophy [11, p. 35].
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Kaium Nasyri, another Tatar scholar, also wanted to reform the traditional Tatar school which would include lay subjects and study history, traditions and customs of Tatars and Russians alike. In 1855 he became a teacher of Tatar in the Kazan Ecclesiastic School and later in the Ecclesiastic Academy where he worked until 1871. When he left the academy, he decided to devote himself to teaching Russian to the Tatar children, and organized a school which functioned until 1876. Much like Mardzhani, Kaium Nasyri maintained the independence of the Tatar language from the universal Turkic language and created several grammar books, books on lay subjects and dictionaries of Tatar [22, p. 63]. Mardzhani, Faizkhanov and Nasyri at the origins of the new-method (jadid) school in Kazan province.
Ismail bei Gasprinskii, the head of Bakhchisarai in Crimea and the editor of the newspaper Terdzhiman [Translator] that was printed from 1883 to 1918 in both Russian and Ottoman Turkish, was the founder of jadidism, or the use of the new, sound method in teaching. Qadimists, old-method teachers, used the system of syllables in teaching reading, when letters were made into syllables and syllables into words. The method of jadids was based on the approach that every letter corresponded to a sound. This not only simplified the process of learning to read, but generally shortened the time of studies, leaving thus enough time to study secular subjects at madrasah. Gasprinskii was greatly inspired by Mardzhani’s ideas and he himself published a number of philosophical works, which were often read by his Russian contemporaries as appeals to pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism [5; 6]. These texts are far more important than the newspaper in understanding of the rise of nationalism among the Russian Muslims.
A Turkish scholar A. Kanlidire argues that the jadid movement had two sources for national and political ideas of Muslims - Islamic one and the Russian one [10]. According to Kanlidere, jadids borrowed the idea of Pan-Islamism from a Sirian Abd ar-Rakhman Kawakibi, who protested against tyranny and called for the organization of a conference for the unification of Muslims. Gasprinskii from the Crimea, as well as Musa Bigiev from Kazan and Ziia Kamaev from Ufa, were quite familiar with these ideas.
In response to the civilizing attempt of the imperial centre, Gasprinskii wanted to create a united Muslim community. Some of his ideas can be found in his novel “Letters from France” where he used a literary trope, a dream, in which the main character found himself in an ideal country, where a high level of civilization was united with the perfect morals of Muslims who were very religious and consciously performed their devotional duties. The ideal country was, in fact, no other than the Russian empire, provided that the Turkic peoples were united and autonomous. Gasprinskii was dreaming of raising ‘a Russian national flag in the middle of which there would be a small green field with a white crescent,’ although he admitted that his ideas at that time were utopian [7, p. 38].
I believe, one cannot offer a single assessment of Gasprinskii’s idea of Orthodox-Muslim coexistence and of his idea of unification of the Russian Muslims. This, however progressive, was not going to happen and the reason for it was not only the suspicion and resistance coming from the imperial centre, but also the fact that Islamic peoples of Russia stayed at different levels of cultural and linguistic development and different groups had their own projects.
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2. Crews Robert. For Prophet and Tsar:Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. (Cambridge; London: Harvard University Press, 2006).
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8. Geraci Robert. Window on the East, National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).
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18. Schamiloglu Uli. “The Formation of a Tatar Historical Consciousness: Shihabuddin Maijani and the Image of the Golden Horde,” Central Asian Survey 9, no. 2 (1990): 39-49.
19. Tuna Mustafa Ozgur. “Imperial Russian Muslims: Inroads of Modernity” (PhD Diss., Princeton University, 2009).
20. Usmanov M. A. Zavetnaia mechta Kh. Faizkhanova. Povest ’ o zhizni i deiatel ’nosti (Kazan, 1980).
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The First Steps of Jadid Movement among Russian Muslims (Middle Volga region, Nineteenth century)
O. B. Zemtsova
Mari State University, Yoshkar-Ola, Russia
The article deals with the reforms in the milieu of Muslim ulama of the Middle Volga region in the nineteenth century. The reforms, concerning the relations with the state, the Muslim way of life and the Muslim education led to the appearance of what is called jadidism that is, new method system first used only in the sphere of education but later spread onto other spheres of life.
Keywords: jadidism, Muslim reforms, Muslim education.
Об авторе:
Земцова Оксана Борисовна, кандидат педагогических наук, PhDr, Марийский государственный университет, Йошкар-Ола, [email protected]
About the author:
Zemcova Oksana Borisovna, Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences, PhDr, Mari State University, Yoshkar-Ola, [email protected]
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