The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform

The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform Preferred Citation: Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8g5008rv/ The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform Jadidism in Central Asia Adeeb Khalid UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1999 The Regents of the University of California for my parents Preferred Citation: Khalid, Adeeb. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1998 1998. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft8g5008rv/ for my parents Preface Whether it is in the obsession with multiculturalism in American academe or in 1 facile visions of an impending, perhaps inevitable "clash of civilizations" in the mainstream public, it is culture that defines the essence of difference in the post-Cold War world. The Muslim world occupies a special place in this cultural geography, more closely identified with culture than any other part of the world. The cultural determinism implicit in such thinking can exist only by leaving unasked the question of the origins of culture. Although a substantial scholarly literature has argued at some length (but perhaps not very successfully, if one were to judge from how little its insights seem to illuminate mainstream debate), cultures are not immutable givens but themselves subject to change and flux. This applies to Muslim culture as much as to any other, although given the place Islam and Muslims occupy in the imagination of the "West," we are left constantly to reaffirm this basic fact. I have tried in this book to argue this basic point: that Islam, and Muslim culture, and the sense of being Muslim are far from immutable characteristics; rather, they change and evolve and do so through debate and the struggles of different groups in Muslim society. The advent of new means of communication and new forms of sociability from the nineteenth century on introduced new ways in which debates over culture could take place, while the political and military imperatives represented by the rise of European power lent a special intensity to these debates. Modern historians have paid too little attention ― xiv ― to what Muslims were debating in these new media. A few studies of major figures and their thought have provided us an overview of the trajectory of intellectual history of the period, but the emphasis in such studies remains either explicitly religious or explicitly political. The sea change that the Muslim intellectuals' view of the world, and of their place in it, underwent in the half-century before the Great War has never been evoked. Yet this change underlay the new directions in intellectual and political history that have appeared in the Muslim world in the twentieth century. The foregoing applies with even greater force to Central Asia, an area largely forgotten by the outside world. When I began graduate work over a decade ago, I usually had to explain to inquisitive friends where Central Asia was. Then came perestroika, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the "emergence of Central Asia." These events have heightened interest in the region in a way that would have been inconceivable just a decade earlier. But while the amount of publishing on the region has increased manifold, the new literature is dominated by matters of geopolitics and prognostications about the future of the new countries, with remarkably little attention paid to topics of cultural or historical import, even as the literature of prognostication freely makes explanatory use of both culture and history. This neglect stems from certain fundamental institutional factors: the passing of the old order in Russia in 1917 coincided, broadly, with a massive redefinition of the Muslim world in Western academe. The Muslim world came to be reconfigured in an Arab-centered manner, in which the Turks occupied only a marginal place. No fate was worse than that of Central Asia, which was consigned 2 to oblivion by scholars of Muslim societies and left to the tender mercies of émigré scholars and experts on Soviet nationalities studies. (Mainstream Soviet studies, notoriously Moscow-centered in any case, saw little more than incomprehensible oriental exotica in Central Asia.) Much of the slim literature that was produced on Central Asia outside the Soviet Union during the Soviet period was marked by a heavy emphasis on politics and what might be called "national martyrology." A sensitivity to the Muslim cultural background of pre-Soviet Central Asia and the consequences of its transformation in the postrevolutionary period was seldom evident, for it was often beyond the competence of nationalities scholars and anathema to émigré nationalists. The result was a general absence of a comparative framework for thinking about Central Asian history. This book has been a prolonged attempt at righting the balance. It pro- ― xv ― ceeds from a recognition of the fact that the experience of Central Asians under colonialism was hardly unique in the Muslim world. The debates that this book examines were parallel to those capturing the attention of Muslim intellectuals the world over. Indeed, the Muslim elites of Central Asia in the tsarist period were part of a much broader, cosmopolitan community of the world's Muslims. One of my aims in writing this book is to reclaim Central Asia for the study of Muslim societies, for only by understanding this context may we understand the cultural politics in pre-Soviet Central Asia, and only by understanding pre-Soviet Central Asia may we understand Soviet Central Asia. And conversely, only by understanding how Central Asian Muslims debated issues common to their age may we acquire a comprehensive picture of the myriad forms modernity has taken in the Muslim world. This is more than an exercise in "academic" history, for it allows us challenge facile explanations of the contemporary world in terms of an inevitable "clash of civilizations" and to remember that the more intransigent visions of the utter incompatibility of Islam and modernity that capture the headlines today are but one of the many answers Muslim intellectuals have produced to the most crucial questions of the previous century. Attention to debates within Central Asian society also permits a more nuanced view of Russian imperialism. The demise of the Soviet Union has created considerable interest in the imperial dimension of Russian history, which has already resulted in the publication of a number of works of commendable sensitivity. Yet, much of this work remains in the domain of Russian colonial history, i.e., the history of how imperial officials made sense (or tried to make sense) of the borderland; of empire. As long as scholars look solely (or largely) at imperial debates over policy in the borderlands, natives will remain natives, as mysterious to the historian of today as they were to the administrator of yore. But for all the attention to these broader dimensions, I have tried throughout to keep Central Asia itself at the focus of my inquiry (a courtesy not usually extended to it), for ultimately this book is an attempt to comprehend the making of modern Central Asia. I have not mentioned Soviet historiography earlier. It had its achievements, but shedding light on the cultural transformations of the 3 tsarist period was not one of them. As far as the Jadids were concerned, Soviet historiography obfuscated far more than it revealed. Many names (Behbudi, Cholpan, Fitrat) were simply written out of the history books, while others (Hamza, Awlani, Qadiri) were given highly tendentious biographies. Many of the most basic outlines of modern Central Asian history have to be delineated anew. ― xvi ― This has been a major goal in writing this book, as has been the sense that the tumultuous history of Soviet Central Asia may only be understood against the background of the tsarist period. For Central Asia might have been largely forgotten by the world of scholarship after 1917, but it experienced all the excesses of the twentieth century: revolution, "development," genocide, ecological disaster, social engineering, and virulent nationalism. There are many stories to be told here; this book is perhaps a first step. I have been with this project longer than I care to remember and in the process have accumulated many debts of gratitude to people and institutions. An earlier version of this book was completed as a dissertation under Kemal Karpat at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Madison, Michael Chamberlain introduced me to the works of Pierre Bourdieu, while his own work on medieval Damascus provided an elegant example of how historians appropriate the work of social thinkers. David McDonald kept me honest about the Russian dimension of my work. Many thanks to Uli Schamiloglu for friendship, advice, and those microfilms. Since then, I have benefited greatly from the advice and insights of a number of colleagues. Ed Lazzerini has for years been a font of searching questions; he has also generously shared copies of scarce materials with me. Hisao Komatsu also provided me copies of invaluable and impossible to find works fundamental to my work. Marianne Kamp shared her excellent judgment with me on several parts of the manuscript; she also gave permission to quote from her unpublished work. Dale Eickelman has given encouragement for several years and by inviting me to a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on "Imagining Societies: The Middle East and Central Asia" at Dartmouth College, provided a captive audience for earlier versions of this book. John Perry invited me to a workshop on "Language, Literature, and Empire" at the University of Chicago in 1994, which produced valuable insights. Colleagues at the history department at Carleton College provided excellent comments on Chapter 2.

Load more