Contenu du sommaire

Michael Kemper, From Bukhara to the Middle Volga: the fight of Abd an-Naşîr al-Qûrşâwî (1 776-1812) against the traditionalist ulemas. For centuries after the conquest of Kazan by Ivan IV the Terrible, the great medresseh of Bukhara played a leading part in the transmission of Islam in the Volga-Ural region among the Tatar Muslim community that had been enduring incessant christianization campaigns launched by the Russian State. It is most likely from those Bukharan medresseh that, at the turn of the eighteenth-nineteenth century, were propagated the teachings of Ahmad Sirhindî, an Indian reformer of the Naqshbandtyah fraternal order claiming the return to strict obedience to the Qur'ân and sunnah, and opposing against ecstatic sufism its will to restore the Sharřah law. Those teachings had a major impact on the formation and activities of Abd an-Naşîr al-Qûrşâwî, first in Bukhara and then in the Tatar area. His works as a Kazan ulema were thoroughly aimed at restoring ijtihâd (the effort to comprehend the true terms of the Sharicah) and breaking-away from taqlid, i.e. literal imitation of the commentators. In the second part of the nineteenth century, Qûrsâwî 's views were widely circulated throughout Central-Asian Islam by Sihâb ad-Din al-Manani's works. A leading Tatar theologian, the latter remained influential until secularization gained grounds within the Tatar society in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Thierry Zarcone, Philosophy and theology according to the Jadids: the speculation on independent reasoning (ijtihàd). The return to direct interpretation of the fundamental texts of Islam, and the break-away from the commentators' traditional imitation as initiated in the tenth century were chief arguments in the general purpose of last century's great Bukharan reformers and, then, the Tatar ones, who were confronted with both pace-gaining colonialism and the want of renewal among Muslim societies. Prior to Jamâl ad-Din al-Afghani and his student Muhammad Abduh, the Tatar ulema of Kazan, Abd an-Naşîr al-Qûrsâwî, was the one who "reopened the doors to ijtihâd" (effort of personal inteiprctation) under the inspiration of Taymiyah and the Wahhabists. His disciples in the Tatar world and at Bukhara pursued in the same line and set up the practice of ijtihâd as one of the basic tenets of Muslim reformism. It was then in the Ottoman area that the Reform, under the guidance of al-Afghani, his Egyptian student Muhammad Abduh, and the latter 's own disciple, Rashid Rizâ, had its main flourishing center wherefrom it could permeate the Tatar area, namely through the medium of Mûsâ Jârallah Bîgî, a student of cAbduh's in Cairo, and 'Abdallah Bûbî, the disciple and translator of Rashid Rizâ. Nevertheless, in spite of the priority all of those reformists attached to the practice of ijtihâd, al-Afghânî and cAbduh differed from their predecessors in their straight break-away from taqlid (imitation of the commentators) and their concern with the question of the accordance of the commands of the Qur'ân with the requirements of reason. It is worth comparing, at a century's distance, the respective arguments of Qûrsâwî (see M. Kemper's article) and Bîgî, who, as soon as 1911, was held to be a Muslim Luther about such a meaningful issue — for Muslims living in European Russia and Siberia — as the evening prayer in boreal regions.

Yahya Abdoulline, History and contemporary interpretations of the Second Muslim Reformism (orjadidism) among Volga and Crimean Tatars. The second phase in the history of Muslim reformism in Central Asia was characterized, from the beginning of the 1880's until Sovietization, by the emergence of reformed Islamic teachings and an independent press promoting scholastic reform and, further, the modernization of Muslim society. The movement, started in the Tatar area (the Crimea, Volga- Ural, Siberia), had permeated all of the Muslim regions in the Russian Empire and beyond. It had been rapidly confronted with hostility from traditionalist mullahs and ulemas, as well as from the Imperial Administration who paid great heed to any display of "panislamism" or "panturkism." The latter 's suspiciousness was not thoroughly extraneous to the hectic lot that fell upon jadidism during most of the Soviet period. Indeed, Muslim reformism in its first phase (last third of eigthteenth-middle of nineteenth century) was disregarded as too "theological," and in its second phase, identified with the triumph of "bourgeois" nationalisms, i.e., as a consequence, judged to be necessarily "cut off from the masses" and imbued with some "panislamist" creed supposedly streaming from the Ottoman Empire or British India, both being enemies of Russia. Up to now, jadidism — although rehabilitated to various degrees after the Khruschevian thaw — is still a butt for some inner urge of Kazan historians to adopt the conceptual tenets of Soviet-Russian critics so far as that historical period of Islamic thought is concerned.

Rafiq Mouhammetchine, The contribution of Russian official source material to the historiography of jadidism among the Volga Tatars (Turkestan Central State Archives). The author, a disciple of the aforementioned one, attempts at analysing the perception Russian observers had of Tatar jadidism, mainly on the basis of a report laid down in 191 1 by A. V. Goriachkin at the request of an examining magistrate in Kazan. The sources under scrutiny reveal the conceptual and terminological looseness of that official literature, which testifies to the paucity of information in Russian ministries — concerned as they were with fighting agaiast Ottoman influence — on the social and cultural processes then developing among the Muslim community on their own territories. It was only due to the outburst of the World War and the revival of an autonomous nationalist Muslim press that observers in St. Petersburg became aware of the deep ideological changes that had been taking place among the Muslims of Russia from the start of the century; the latter were progressively forsaking Islamic communitarism in favour of ethnic nationalism.

François Georgeon. On modernism in Azerbaijan at the turn of the century. The paper deals with Azeri involvement in the jadid movement. After pointing out the main components of the condition of the Azeri community towards the end of the nineteenth century — impact of shicism, Ottoman influences, rivalries with the Armenians, and aftereffects of the petrol boom in Baku — , it lays stress on the cultural and scholastic revival instigated by a handful of writers, journalists, and pedagogues with the support of a few Azeri manufacturers. The revival was confirmed by the circulation of Gasprinskii's works through Transcaucasia. At the turn of the century, a person of figure, a young Azeri intellectual by name Agaev, raised the issue of woman's emancipation and the question of the individual role. Thus was sketched the frame of some modernist, enlightened, and liberal Islam, as the full expression of the ideology prevailing among Azeri bourgeoisie.

Begali Qosimov, Literary sources and specific traits of jadidism in Turkestan in the beginning of the twentieth century. In Russian Turkestan as in the Tatar area, the emergence of jadidism is related to the school matter. Indeed, political ties within the Muslim community were bred and woven in the many charitable institutions which, at the turn of the century, were set afoot in the region so as to found and finance the first reformed mekteb and medresseh on the model of the Tatar ones. Those connections were particularly effective on the morrow of the 1905 Russian Revolution and then in wartime. There is no doubt that authors and actors of Turkestan jadidism happened to notably differ in speech and tactics on several matters, namely on the national problem and the stand to adopt facing the Russian power. Nevertheless, literary sources which did not fall under colonial ceasorship, and could be traasmitted, do testify to their attachment to common ideals of modernization and independence. Besides, in June- July of 1916, the violent "riot of the seasonal workers" — triggered by the mobilization of autochthonous workers in Russian industry and agriculture — and the ranking echo it was granted with in Turkestan press organs and literature one year later, evidenced that Muslim elites meant to take advantage of mass mobilization to triumph with the idea of independence for Turkestan.

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.

Sherali Turdiev, Russian Security Police, Tatar schoolmasters, and the jadid movement in Turkestan. For several years Tashkent searchers had free access to Okhrana and KGB Turkestan Archives, which contributed to the change induced in the memory of Muslim reformism in Uzbekistan as well as in the way the Russian political police is perceived through its successive phases, from colonization until the Stalin purges. The new source material thus provided made it a duty to rectify the image of some of the modernist literate and intellectual figures in Turkestan and the Protectorates. Depicted by Marxist critics as Europeanized bourgeois not so long ago, they appear, unveiled, as Muslim scholars descended from ulemas' families endowed with landed properties. Such "new" sources enable us to better estimate the influence exerted on local reformism — through schools, newspapers, literature, theater or the Opera...— by the main centers of modern Muslim culture, i.e. Tatar towns in Central Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. But it goes without saying that documents of that sort provide information on the way security forces in the Empire and, generally, Russians in Turkestan gauged the social and cultural development of the Muslim community in the region. It is noteworthy that great continuity of views and methods passed from the tsarist administration to the Soviet-Russian apparatus which was set up throughout the southern part of Central Asia from 1922-1923 onwards.

Etienne Copeaux, A Turkish memory of jadidism? Official history of the Republic of Turkey hardly evocates the true origins of Kemalism: it partly takes root among the reformist Turkish-speaking intellectual circles of the Russian Empire (Kazan, the Crimea, Baku). In Turkish schoolbooks, the wide movement of linguistic, religious and educational reform known under the name ofjadidism is hushed up. Nevertheless, memory was transmitted due to close ties between the Turkish nationalist circles and the Tatar and Azeri jadids; it was perpetuated along the 1930 's by the Tatar-Turkish Crimean exiles who had settled in Romanian Dobruja and Turkey. Granting to the collapse of the USSR, a rediscovery of jadidism was the deed of the "Islamic-Turkish Synthesis," a movement advocating an ideology according to which Turkish nationalism is legitimized by Islam, and seeking its predecessors among the nineteenth-century renovators. From the 1980's, there appeared a bunch of studies on Gasprinskii by sympathizers with the "Islamic-Turkish Synthesis," and the subject was popularized in the columns of the daily Tiirkiye. It all ended up in sheer nationalistic views on jadidism.