| Titre | La question scolaire à Boukhara et au Turkestan russe, du « premier renouveau » à la soviétisation (fin du XVIIIe siècle-1937)* | |
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| Auteur | Stéphane A. Dudoignon | |
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Revue | Cahiers du monde russe |
| Numéro | volume 37, no 1-2, janvier-juin 1996 | |
| Page | 133-210 | |
| Résumé anglais |
Stéphane A. Dudoignon, The school matter at Bukhara and in the Russian Turkestan, from the "First Renewal" to Sovietization (end of eighteenth century-1937).
Muslim schools in pre-modern Central Asia (mekteb and medresseh) were for a long time held to be mere relics of an order the triumph of colonial modernism doomed to disappearance. Nevertheless, it was within the great Bukharan theology and law schools that, from the end of the eighteenth century, a deep renewal was worked up of teaching methods based on return to direct study and interpretation of the sacred texts, and therefore inducing to some real revolution in ethics. The first Bukharan renewal had a determining influence on the reformist movement which emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in the northern part of Central Asia, in the main Muslim towns of the Volga-Ural region. The renewal of Tatar Islam, propped up by the 1905 Revolution in Russia, was then to have a return effect on school reform in the southern part of Central Asia. Its influence was combined with several external ones. India and the Ottoman Empire did not assume the lesser role, and in the first decade of the century, constitutionalist Iranian organizations managed to assert themselves in Turkestan and at Bukhara. Whilst the reform arguments of kalâm (dogmatic theology) and fiqh (Muslim law) were drawn from authors pertaining to the renewal trend of Bukharan medresseh in the first half of the nineteenth century, the school reform was directly inspired from experiments that had been systematized in the Tatar area (Volga-Ural and the Crimea) from the 1890's onward. It consisted — instead of a mechanical recital of Qur'ân — in a new method of learning how to read and write in the child's mother tongue. Such a promising change did bring about the delivery of teachings of moral and scientific subjects in national tongues and the coming to light of the first Muslim schooling in ethnic languages in all parts of Central Asia.
The Russian observers were not long in understanding that behind the educational problem, several political issues were at stake in Central Asia. In Turkestan under tsarist rule, the mekteb reform was seen as a means of access to equal rights with the Europeans in the Empire, as a preliminary to autochthonous control over the regional wealth preluding to political autonomy. But in the Bukhara protectorate, a formally independent Muslim State under the law of SharFah, any attempt at a reform of theological and juridical teachings was interpreted as criticism against the emirs' regime. The traditionalist ulemas' hostility as well as the undecided policy of the sovereigns and their viziers compelled the pioneers of school reform to clandestine action. The secret orders which were successively founded so as to promote modernization in mekteb and medresseh were — until the Soviet era — the very ground on which political cores could take shape and develop. At the same time, the divergent standpoints of the parties engaged in the educational issue did square with lasting social and political rifts in Bukharia, out of which rivalries of factions, whether in regional terms — the Bukhara people against those of Kulyâb — or communal terms — the stand of the Jewish or Shicit minority — , did apparently play a leading part. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/cmr_1252-6576_1996_num_37_1_2456 |
