Mother Tongue

08 Chapter 07 T (Eng):13 Chapter OJ 8/9/06 14:00 Page 132 CHAPTER 7 MOTHER TONGUE My mother tongue! Your kind support Has helped my life to run its course; And since my childhood you have borne My hopes, my joys and my remorse. My mother tongue! In you I prayed Beseeching God to save my soul. Forgiveness for my parents too I sought through you. You made me whole. Gabdullah Tukai (1886–1913) he president of Tatarstan is a Tatar, as will be his successor, unless the Tsuccessor, of any other ethnicity, is equally fluent in the Tatar and Russian languages. This emphatic provision in the republic’s constitution has less to do with the nature of Tatar national feeling, than with the fact that the common mother tongue of the Tatar nation scattered throughout Russia and the rest of the world is fundamental to its national unity and is its main hope for the future as a nation and people. The history of the Tatar language and its development is also one of the best kept secrets of Russian inter-ethnic history. Belonging to the Turco-Altaic family of languages, Tatar originated thousands of years ago, but only became known to the world with the rise of Turkic ethnicities during the period of the Arab caliphate (eighth to the tenth centuries) and subsequently during the time of the famous Golden Horde (thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries), when it effectively became the language of choice of the entire region of Eurasia, on a par with the Arabic and Persian languages. The rise and progress of this language of state management, trade and crafts, highly developed agriculture and a significant corpus of literature in the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries did not stop after the collapse of the Golden Horde as a single state and became a lasting legacy not only of the Kazan, Astrakhan and the Crimean khanates, which appeared in its place, but also the diplomatic language of a rising unified Russia. The Russian princes, the great dukes of Muscovy and the tsars of Russia from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, all spoke this tongue, the vocabulary of which substantially enriched dictionaries of politics, economics, education, military architecture and civic bureaucracy of the Russian state. After the fall of the Kazan khanate this 600-year-old language did not die out, 08 Chapter 07 T (Eng):13 Chapter OJ 8/9/06 14:00 Page 133 MOTHER TONGUE 133 but, in fact, survived in the Tatar ‘village culture’ and was carried by emigrating and enterprising Tatars to the borders of China and Japan. It never completely lost its urban character due to the fact that it was the only tongue in the emerging Russian empire which served the needs of both economic and polit- ical communication with the Muslim East and the South of Russia. It thereby retained its value as a language of international trade and diplomacy well into the nineteenth century, prompting Professor K. Fuks, for example, to note that ‘this nation [of Tatars], conquered two hundred years ago and now scattered among the Russians, was able to preserve its customs, morals and national pride in a most surprising way, just as if they lived separately’. Interestingly, the survival and progress of the Tatar tongue had less to do with the Tatar system of education, because in the Tatar madrassas, or schools, some of which became veritable beacons of learning throughout Russia, the language was not taught specifically on a par with Arabic, Farsi and later Russian, since it was considered the natural one (mother tongue). Yet, its history is intricately linked to the busi- ness of book publishing, which started in Kazan with the opening of Kazan University in 1804, the second oldest university in Russia, whose foundations were the First Kazan Gymnasium. In this centre of education, which in November 2004 celebrated its bicentenary marked by significant state invest- ment for refurbishment and new building, the teaching of the Tatar language began in 1769 – a tradition that later grew into the university’s world-famous Oriental School. In 1855, the Faculty of Oriental Languages was transferred from Kazan to St Petersburg, but Oriental studies, which exist in Kazan even today, were continued by scholars from the Faculties of History and Philology. The history of Kazan University forever remembers the names of its famous orientalists, including W. Radloff, I. Berezin, V. Grigoriev, N. Katanov, H. Frehn, A. Kazembek and I. Gottwald, let alone the names of the Tatar scholars I. Halfin, S. Mardzhani and K. Nasyri who taught at the university, or partici- pated in the work of its famous Society for Archaeology, History and Ethnography. In 1853, the Arabic, Tatar and Turkish languages were taught at the university by the Society’s outstanding pedagogue and orientalist H. Faezkhanov who in 1862, after his transfer to St Petersburg University, wrote his ‘Brief Grammar of the Tatar Language’. His untimely death in 1866 was a huge loss not only for Tatar, but for all-Russia culture. With the opening of Kazan University Press in 1804, the Tatar written literature and scholarship spanning over 800 years1 received a new impetus. The Emperor Paul I was the first to permit the publication of Tatar secular books in the Arabic script, but only the committed efforts of Tatar educators with the assistance of some university scholars managed to turn this permission into reality. The university press, in fact, could make ends meet only because of the Tatar commissions that were paid. As the outstanding Tatar scholar A. Karimullin wrote in his book ‘The Tatar Book in Post-Reform Russia’: As early as in 1845, the professor of Kazan University as well as the censor of Tatar books, A. K. Kazembek, wrote that ‘the publishing of the Quran and other Asian books brought in constant revenue to the university press, without which it could hardly have existed’. The number of Tatar books published by the university press in the second half of the nineteenth century totals some 1415 volumes, and the combined.

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