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It was a Dark and Stagnant Night (‘til the Jadids Brought the Light): Clichés, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia

Devin DeWeese Indiana University

[email protected]

Abstract

This essay presents a broad critique of prevailing approaches to and assumptions about Jadidism, arguing that much earlier scholarship on the Jadids has misconstrued key aspects of their ‘program’ and has exaggerated their originality, impact, and importance. Following introductory discussions of the recurrent motifs and claims found in ‘Jadidocentric’ scholarship, the essay considers five issues in particular: (1) the academic bias through which scholars have taken the Jadids’ critique as reliably descriptive rather than polemical; (2) the neglect of earlier Central Asian manifestations of critiques simi- lar to the Jadids’; (3) the analytical drawbacks of the notion of ‘modernity’ as used to characterize the Jadids; (4) neglect or denial of the religious character of the Jadids’ program; and (5) inattention to the wider intellectual history of Central Asia before and during the era of the Jadids.

Keywords

Jadidism – Central Asia – modernity – Muslim ‘reformism’ – secularism

This essay is based on the keynote address I was invited to present at the conference that prompted the papers published in the present volume; the conference, organized by Paolo Sartori and Jeff Eden, was intended to question the widely accepted narratives about the role of the Jadids—a task I believed was long overdue—and the conference brochure, already, framed

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four basic revisions to that narrative, as outlined in the introduction to this volume. My own remarks began by acknowledging this brief encapsulization of the theses underlying the gathering, and how well they signaled where scholarship needs to go, even if it is not yet going there; I also noted, not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that despite my endorsement of the fourth revision- ist theme—calling into question the heuristic value of terms such as ‘Islamic modernism’ and Jadidism—I was not quite ready to discard them, insofar as they provide a convenient ‘shorthand’ label for the targets I believe we must keep in our sights. In other words, I suggested that we should be careful not to complete the deconstruction of Jadidism until we are finished beating up on Jadidism—as a phenomenon, as a name for a phenomenon, and above all as a focus for scholarly attention that I believe has been as excessive as it has been misguided.

I note the conference venue, and the specific role I was asked to play—setting a tone, perhaps, staking some rhetorical ground, and voicing some no-doubt challenging and provocative views, as opposed to undertaking the substantive ‘heavy lifting’ achieved by the research papers presented at the gathering—by way of begging the reader’s indulgence for outlining a rather personal trajec- tory, and for adopting a personal tone, in offering some thoughts about the study of the Jadids.1

Introduction

In 2013, a large volume was published by a veteran representative of the ‘inter- face’ between academia and Washington policy circles that has come to be so highly valued by many university administrators (including those at my own institution), but is quite often injurious to the development of good scholar- ship on particular regions—especially those that remain the most unfamil- iar, the most poorly understood, and the most severely ‘underpopulated’ in terms of scholars attuned to the contemporary situation in those regions on the basis of some familiarity with their historical and cultural heritages. The book I have in mind is entitled Lost Enlightenment, and is the work of Frederick Starr. Given the unfortunate premise of the book as a whole—it purports to be a sort of intellectual history of Central Asia, arguing that the region was home to a flourishing of learning and science, despite the coming of Islam, that endured even past the Mongol conquest, to the end of the Timurid era,

1  I would like to express my gratitude to Shahzad Bashir, Jeff Eden, Paolo Sartori, Eren Tasar, and the anonymous reviewers for JESHO for their helpful comments and suggestions on various drafts of this essay.

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before being squandered (and thus “lost”) in subsequent centuries, and thus takes its place among books, common as late as the 1950s, that highlight the ancient achievements of certain peoples by way of pointing out the failings of their contemporary representatives—it is not surprising that the author has little to say about the Jadids; his focus remains squarely on the period roughly from the 3rd century CE to the end of the 15th, which he explores not through the primary sources or cultural products of Central Asia, in their original languages, but through studies and translations in English, Russian, French, and German. But he does make one reference to the subject of our gathering. Sandwiched between Starr’s denunciation of al-Ghazālī (whom he labels “the Dark Genius”—seriously) for “marginalizing” all the good guys— “philosophers, cosmologists, epistemologists, mathematicians, and theoretical scientists,” as he writes, evincing an alarming cluelessness even with regard to the structures of the Islamic sciences he wants to admire—and his reminder that the “decline in scientific thinking” is to be linked with “the rise of Sufi mysticism,” we find the following remark:

In Central Asia, it was not until the so-called Jadid reformers of the late nineteenth century, with their enthusiastic embrace of modern science and education, that the old spirit of inquiry began to revive. It is the more tragic, then, that the new Soviet rulers suppressed or killed these true Islamic reformers.2

Perhaps we should avoid reading this passage as an open lament about the failure of those new Soviet rulers to suppress or kill enough Sufi mystics; but more seriously, Starr’s comment offers a good encapsulization of the kind of silly rhetoric that has been wielded on behalf of the Jadids for more than half a century. Despite its brevity, it combines many of the elements that have made the study of the Jadids so problematical, and have kept them and their ‘-ism’ so poorly understood. There is the terminology of ‘reform,’ and of revival as well, to remind us that these are the good guys; there is the ‘enthusiasm’ of the Jadids, not only for science and education and the “spirit of inquiry,” link- ing them with ‘secularism,’ but specifically for the ‘modern’ variety of learning, inquiry, and secularism; there is the element of tragedy, in their martyrdom to Soviet oppression; there is the historical gap in attention that has typically been entailed by admiration of the Jadids, who come along after so many centuries marked, we are to believe, by nothing but darkness, ignorance, intel- lectual and cultural stagnation, and a refusal to engage with the world outside

2  S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013): 534.

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the pages of religious texts or, worse, the navel-gazing of the mystical mind—a ludicrous ‘historical’ proposition, to be sure, but one that is rarely questioned in such constructions of Central Asia’s past; and there is, finally, in the author himself, a close link between such risible formulations and the policy com- munity that promises, or threatens, to employ those formulations in shaping global relations.

I must acknowledge at the outset that I am not a close student of Jadidism or those labeled Jadids. It appeared to me early on that, within the scholarly community interested in Central Asia, or in the Muslims of the Russian empire or of the Soviet Union, there were plenty of academics focused on the Jadids and convinced of their importance (and of their basic ‘correctness’), and that it would be no great loss to Jadid studies if I concentrated on other aspects of Central Asia’s religious, cultural, social, and political history. Indeed, my under- standing of Jadidism and the Jadids has been shaped, since the early days when I too was reading the works of Bennigsen and his followers, by a steadily grow- ing sense of un-ease, tending toward skepticism and outright dismissal, with regard to the standard narratives and assessments about ‘Muslim modernism’ and ‘reform’ in the Central Asian environment. I became dissatisfied long ago with the standard narrative on the Jadids: I quickly tired of reading the same thing, and hearing the same thing in the Jadidism panels at MESA meetings, at Central Asian conferences, at Turkological conferences. I grew irritated at what that narrative ignored, missed, or misconstrued; and I was shocked by the blatant partiality that was so deeply ingrained in the narrative.

I came to conclude, generally, that the narratives and assessments of Jadidocentric scholarship entail, as my title is meant to suggest,3 a series of constantly restated stock characterizations, repeated to the point of becom- ing clichés, evincing an unflinching admiration for the Jadids and their -ism that casts any pretense of scholarly objectivity to the wind, and presuming a litany of binary oppositions, with the Jadids on one side, that similarly dis- cards any pretense of reflecting the complexity of a real world, a real historical environment.

My growing irritation with these clichéed characterizations and assess- ments led me to dismiss most of them as at best unsubstantiated and at worst wholly misleading. Nevertheless, for a quarter-century, I have remained

3  It may be worth clarifying that my title also alludes to the opening line (“It was a dark and stormy night”) of a novel published in 1830 by Edward Bullwer-Lytton, which has become emblematic of hackneyed, melodramatic writing (as reflected in the annual Bullwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for the worst opening sentence of a never-to-be-written novel, sponsored by San Jose State University).

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perched atop the horns of a dilemma—it seems that dealing with clichés can be contagious—regarding the Jadids, a dilemma that reflected the particular faults I found in Jadid studies, as I will outline below. The dilemma was this. On the one hand, I felt strongly that study of the time in which the Jadids were active could best be improved by suspending study of the Jadids for a time. Jadid studies needed a vacation. The scholarly community interested in the Muslims of Russia, or in Tsarist Central Asia, should stop talking about the Jadids. The Jadid narrative was available, it was repeated in a host of semi-specialist works, and surveys of the Jadids and their program had been produced and circulated; now what was needed was a hiatus during which the Jadids’ story could gel, its contradictions could crystallize, and—most importantly—alternative issues that had not been addressed nearly as much, or as often, as the Jadids could be examined.

Needless to say, none of this happened. The Jadid story not only continued to attract attention; it continued to be virtually the only aspect of Central Asian history during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that received any attention at all. Through the 1990s and well into the 21st century, graduate students in Russian and Soviet studies or in ‘nationality studies’ were still steered toward the study of the Jadids as the key issue to address in assessing the encounter of Central Asia with Tsarist and early Soviet rule. In short, the scholarly com- munity kept talking about the Jadids—in mostly the same ways—and other perspectives on, and developments of, the era of the Jadids continued to be ignored.

On the other hand, it also occurred to me from time to time—though evi- dently not often enough to spur me to action—that the Jadids did not so much deserve inattention as they deserved a different kind of attention—more criti- cal, to be sure, but also simply more in depth. It seemed likely, for instance, that the occasional quotations from Jadid writings were selectively chosen to highlight this or that historian’s pet view of the salient trends in a given period, and did not accurately reflect a thorough or balanced assessment even of a particular Jadid’s thought, or of the Jadid ‘movement’ as a whole (or in particular regions). Perhaps instead of ignoring the Jadids, or suspending the fixation on them for awhile, what was needed was in fact more attention, to turn them from caricatures or icons into real individuals shaped by complex relationships with their own society and culture, and possessed of genuine, if perhaps limited, agency in their time. If that also entailed shaving off some individuals who were lumped into the Jadid category, and developing a better and more finely differentiated use of various labels, all the better; and if that greater attention happened to jump the boundaries of the Jadid label, to entail explorations in the lives and thought of contemporaries of the Jadids who

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remained unimpressed by their agenda—and thereby helped to place the Jadids on a spectrum of thought and of cultural and social orientation that might restore some balance to our understanding of the era—better still.

I think it is safe to say, however, that this too did not happen, at least on a large scale; this assessment holds true, I believe, even though Ingeborg Baldauf provided the beginnings of a better contextualization for the Jadids’ activities,4 even though Adeeb Khalid’s narrative largely replaced that of Bennigsen and marked a kind of step forward,5 even though Robert Crews proposed to broaden the study of the Muslims of Russia beyond the “narrow stratum of reformist elites,”6 and even though Allen Frank has been steadily chipping away at Jadidocentric scholarship for twenty years already.7 In addition, there are clearly exceptions to the general rule proposed here, in the serious and substantive treatments of various religious currents, including those we might label Jadid, by scholars such as Michael Kemper8 and Stéphane Dudoignon.9

4  I. Baldauf, “Jadidism in Central Asia within Reformism and Modernism in the Muslim World.” Die Welt des Islams 41 (2001): 72-88.

5  A. Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); see also id., Islam after Communism: Religion and Politics in Central Asia (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2007): 34-49 (a chapter entitled “Empire and the Challenge of Modernity”), and id., “What Jadidism Was, and What It Wasn’t: The Historiographical Adventures of a Term.” Central Eurasian Studies Review 5/2 (2006): 3-7.

6  R. D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2006): 297.

7  A. J. Frank, Islamic Historiography and ‘Bulghar’ Identity among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia (Leiden: Brill, 1998); id., Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde, 1780‑1910 (Leiden: Brill, 2001); id., “Islamic Transformation on the Kazakh Steppe, 1742-1917: Toward an Islamic History of Kazakhstan under Russian Rule.” In The Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia, ed. Tadayuki Hayashi (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, 2003): 261-289; id., Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education, and the Paradox of Islamic Prestige (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Allen J. Frank and Mirkasyim A. Usmanov, eds., An Islamic Biographical Dictionary of the Eastern Kazakh Steppe, 1770‑1912: Qurbān‑ʿAlī Khālidī (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

8  E.g., M. Kemper, Sufis und Gelehrte in Tatarien und Baschkirien, 1789‑1889: Der islamische Diskurs unter russischer Herrschaft (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 1998); id., “Entre Boukhara et la Moyenne-Volga: ʻAbd an-Naṣīr al-Qūrṣāwī (1776-1812) en conflit avec les oulémas traditionalistes.” Cahiers du monde russe 37/1-2 (1996): 41-51.

9  E.g., S. A. Dudoignon, “La question scolaire à Boukhara et au Turkestan russe, du ‘premier renouveau’ à la soviétisation (fin du XVIIIe siècle-1937).” Cahiers du monde russe 37/1-2 (1996): 133-210; id., “Faction Struggles among the Bukharan ulama during the Colonial, the Revolutionary and the Early Soviet Periods (1868-1929): A Paradigm for History Writing?” In Muslim Societies: Historical and Comparative Aspects, ed. S. Tsugitaka (London/New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004): 62-96.

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Even in the face of such work—not all of which explicitly challenges the stan- dard Jadid-focused narrative—the ‘same old story’ about the Jadids continues to prevail in much of the scholarly literature on the Muslims of the Russian empire, and indeed in most of the derivative work, based on more specialized scholarship, summarizing the period for ‘background’ to contemporary issues. That the standard narrative is still very much with us is evident, after all, in Starr’s work, but some younger scholars as well continue to be attracted to the Jadidocentric stance,10 and the Jadidophilic conference circuit seems to be a permanent feature of the field, occasionally lying dormant, but periodically reactivated.11

At this point, it may be useful to summarize that standard narrative about the Jadids, emphasizing the elements in it that are especially problematical; the narrative is ‘standard,’ I would add, not because of effective argumentation or documentation, but because of constant repetition. Reviewing the standard narrative will allow some preliminary comments on the problems with it, but for reasons of space I have omitted two sections from the original ‘plan’ of the paper, namely the review of multiple examples of the standard narrative—in a litany of the clichés to which my title alludes (some of them are now found in the introduction)—and a discussion of some of the ‘foundational’ works of

10  The Jadidocentric stance remains especially persistent in the study of Volga-Ural Muslim communities (where it has deep roots). See, for example, J. H. Meyer, “The Economics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Money, Power and Muslim Communities in Late Imperial Russia.” In Asiatic Russia: Imperial Power in Regional and International Contexts, ed. T. Uyama (London/New York: Routledge, 2012): 252-270, and the same author’s “Speaking Sharia to the State: Muslim Protesters, Tsarist Officials, and the Islamic Discourses of Late Imperial Russia.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 14/3 (2013): 485-505; D. Ross, “Reform and Youth Rebellion in Russia’s Madrasas, 1900-10.” Kritika, 16/1 (2015): 57-89; and M. Tuna, Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788‑1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

11  Lest it be supposed that the clichés of Jadidocentric studies are far in the past, just as the final version of this essay was being completed, a call for papers for a conference to be held at the University of Utah in the spring of 2016, under the rubric “Jadidism: Islam, Modernity and National Identity in Russia and Central Asia,” featured the basic outlines of the ‘standard narrative’ noted here. The conference announcement heralded the Jadids’ movement as one of reform, their motives as “reform and change,” and their challenge as against the “traditional teachings of the madrasa,” stressing their centrality to the emergence of “modern forms of identity,” and their manifestation of a “range of approaches”—to Islam, to education, and to “new modern identities”—that was nothing short of “dazzling;” the suggested topics for papers invited presenters to consider “what problem” the Jadid movement responded to, and to gauge the impact upon Muslims of “exposure to modernity” (it is left unclear whether modernity is thus imagined as something akin to sunlight, radioactive fallout, or a contagion).

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Jadidocentric scholarship,12 from the 1950s through the 1990s, which set the tone and developed the stock themes that still shape, even now, the study of Jadidism; instead, we will turn to a closer consideration of several selected problems with that scholarship.

1 The Standard Narrative and Some Preliminary Correctives

The standard narrative of Jadidocentric scholarship may be summarized as follows:

• Central Asia, or the Muslims of the Russian empire, lay in undifferentiated and age-old backwardness and darkness, marked by illiteracy, education by rote, excessive religiosity (to the point of fanaticism, except among the nomads, where religiously-induced ignorance prevailed, despite their essen- tial religious indifference), hostility toward technology in general and toward technological innovation, political repression, and a general lack of that key commodity in which lay the seeds of improvement: modernity.

12  For example, S.A. Zenkovsky, “Kulturkampf in Pre-revolutionary Central Asia.” American Slavic and East European Review, 14 (1955): 15-41; id., Pan‑Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); H. Carrère d’Encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia, tr. Quintin Hoare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), first published in French in 1966; A. Bennigsen and C. Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union (New York: Praeger, 1967); A.-A. Rorlich, “ ‘Which Way will Tatar Culture Go?’ A Controversial Essay by Galimdzhan Ibragimov.” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 15 (1974): 363-371; T. Kuttner, “Russian Jadidism in the Islamic World. Ismail Gasprinskii in Cairo - 1908. A Call to the Arabs for the Rejuvenation of the Islamic World.” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 16 (1975): 383-424; C. Lemercier-Quelquejay, “Abdul Kayum al-Nasyri: A Tatar Reformer of the 19th Century.” Central Asian Survey 1/4 (1983): 109-132; E.J. Lazzerini, “Ǧadidism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A View from Within.” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 16 (1975): 245-277; id., “Beyond Renewal: The Jadīd Response to Pressure for Change in the Modern Age.” In Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change, ed. J.-A. Gross (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1992): 151-166; id., “The Revival of Islamic Culture in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Or, Why a Prosopography of the Tatar ulama?” Turko‑Tatar Past, Soviet Present (Studies Presented to Alexandre Bennigsen, ed. Ch. Lemercier-Quelquejay, G. Veinstein, S. E. Wimbush, Paris: Éditions Peeters, 1986): 367-372. These works may be regarded as ‘foundational’ insofar as they reflected the prevailing views on Jadidism before the appearance, in 1998, of Adeeb Khalid’s seminal, and partly revisionist, work, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (aspects of the latter work’s arguments will be addressed below).

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• This situation continued, essentially unchanged, until, late in the 19th century, a group of brave upstarts, the Jadids, pointed out the detrimental effects of ignorance and backwardness, introducing new ideas, a new outlook, new ways of thinking, and, in general, that key commodity, modernity.

• Those bold, intrepid, forward-thinking visionaries were especially unbur- dened by any connection to religious thought and expression; their critique of their societies was motivated by their concern for the betterment of their societies (not by their own interests, whether based on class or social stand- ing); they voiced the resentments of Central Asian peoples toward their Russian overlords, and paid for this with persecution and repression by the Tsarist authorities; yet even the authorities could not stop the historical necessity for the fresh air, light, and freethinking championed by the Jadids, or the inevitable onslaught of that key commodity, modernity.

• The specific developments that may be credited to these Jadids include educational reform; printing; the improvement of local languages and of the scripts used to write them; new literary genres; new modes of expres- sion, including humor, satire, and irreverence, hitherto unseen and unheard in the region; the awakening of political aspirations; the awakening of national consciousness; the creation of religion-free zones and the further- ing of secularism; and the development of new ways of thinking and orga- nizing knowledge marked by that key commodity, modernity.

• However, despairing of any recognition for the program they advocated, or for their people’s rights, by the Tsarist regime or the local khans or the igno- rant Muslim clergy, many Jadids were driven into the ranks of the Bolsheviks, and cooperated with them, in some cases for as long as two decades, until the Stalinist aberration of Bolshevik principles led to their imprisonment and/or execution; other Jadids resisted the Bolshevik program early on, and were forced to flee the Soviet state, the net result being that the Jadids in general became exiles and/or martyrs for their defense of a non-Soviet brand of that key commodity, modernity.

• Nevertheless, Jadid ideas remained influential, shaping not only the national consciousness of Soviet Muslim peoples, but, ironically, both the secular national culture of each republic and the religious outlook characteristic of ‘official’ Islam in the Soviet Union, the representatives of which champi- oned, as had the Jadids, the necessity of adapting Islam to that key commod- ity, modernity.

The narrative focused on the Jadids thus stressed them as a breath of fresh air, sweeping away the stagnation of old traditions; it stressed the educational

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‘improvements’ and language development they espoused, and their role in the emergence of nationalism. Even the briefest reflection should make clear the admiration for the Jadids that inspires the narrative, and the ten- dentiousness of the narrative itself (in which, after all, the Jadids are credited with producing ‘pure’ or ‘native’ or ‘early’ versions of developments actually known from the Soviet era); the Jadids, furthermore, are less ‘another country,’ more like us, and they appeal to those comfortable with ‘modern’ language and ‘modern’ media, and to those trained in Russian and Soviet studies (and hence less familiar or comfortable with the Muslim ‘other’).

One noteworthy, and recurring, feature of the body of scholarship on Jadidism is the distinctly biographical approach that predominates in it; it is not much of an exaggeration to say that short capsule biographies have sub- stituted for actual historical or even literary and intellectual analysis in most Jadid-focused scholarship.13 Indeed, in all the studies of Jadidism and of indi- vidual Jadids, it is remarkable how little we find in the way of actual transla- tions or analyses of their writings;14 what we more often find, beyond snippets of quotations, is the biographical sketch, building, cumulatively, the trajectory of Jadid career paths—noting membership in various organizations, then the issue of whether, and how long, following the pivotal moment of choice after 1917, the individual participated in the early Soviet project, and finally their fate in execution, imprisonment, or exile—as a substitute for actually giving voice to them at any particular moment along that familiar trajectory.

The admiration for the Jadids that permeates the scholarship on them, moreover, has gone hand in hand with willfully ignoring some less salutary aspects of their program. Educational reform, for instance, sounds laudable, but perhaps less so when we situate it in the context of Salafist-type assaults on modes and structures of transmitting and ‘authorizing’ knowledge. The ‘reform’ of indigenous languages and scripts must naturally be viewed through the lens of the Soviet language project, well after the heyday of the Jadids, and through the long-term implications of cutting off masses of Central Asians

13  See, for instance, the brief biographies of leading figures identified as central to the Jadid movement in the notes to Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union: 238-242 (and afterwards as well); in A. Bennigsen and S. Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979): 191-211; and in Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: 94-100.

14  To date the most extensive excerpts from Jadid writers in translation are presented in Modernist Islam, 1840‑1940: A Sourcebook, ed. C. Kurzmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 223-269; see also the same editor’s Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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from ready access to their literary heritage without specialized study; but it must also be challenged when discussed, as it is so often in scholarship on the Jadids, as a linguistic, rather than political, necessity,15 i.e., on the basis of an assumption (supported also by Kemalist rhetoric from Turkey about the ‘necessity’ of script reform) that Chaghatay orthography, for instance, posed insurmountable difficulties for Central Asian Turks, and that script changes were demanded by the nature of the languages rather than by imperatives of politics or cultural orientation. Similar correctives or ‘contrary’ perspectives are needed with regard to the basic religious orientation represented by many Jadids, their relationship to earlier ‘reform’ movements, their relationship to Russian society (not only officials, but merchants, settlers, and others), and the irony of their elevation to the role of strugglers for ‘their peoples’ liberation.

The Jadid-dominated narrative also promises, more broadly, a kind of con- venient scholarly shortcut: the serious study of Muslim religious and intel- lectual thought in Central Asia has hardly begun, but we need not distract ourselves by beginning it, since, fortunately, the important conclusions have already been reached: the region’s intellectual culture was hopelessly stagnant, mired in the backwardness of obscurantist Muslim dogma and perpetuated in its dismal state by an educational system that was not just different, but defective (for involving rote memorization, a pedagogical method still widely in use), and by languages desperately in need of updating (and of being writ- ten in a less-foreign script, and preferably in printed form), until the Jadids ushered their backward fellows into modernity, or at least prepared them for meeting modernity in the form of the Soviet state.

The set of binary oppositions on which the narrative rests should have offered an obvious tip-off to its simplistic character, but shortcuts and over- simplifications have their appeal (especially in the era of the sound-bite): the narrative reeks of the rhetoric of the new vs. the old, the light vs. the darkness, forwardness vs. backwardness, secular rationalism vs. religious obscurantism, and having fun vs. having none.

To be sure, as noted, aspects of this standard narrative have begun to be challenged by some scholars, who have undermined particular parts of the story, and have called attention to some of the hidden implications of scholar- ship that repeats it. Some have noted the small numbers involved in the ‘Jadid’ project, and the limited impact of, and audience for, the Jadids’ thought (and their newspapers); a few have seen in the inordinate attention the Jadids have

15  Even Khalid appears to accept the ‘linguistic’ (rather than political) necessity for ‘reforming’ local languages and ‘simplifying’ orthography (Islam after Communism: 59-60).

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received a red flag for the entire narrative focused on them, assuming that attention so disproportionate to their actual impact and influence in their own time, and within their own societies, can only stand as evidence in itself of a clear bias. Others have begun to point out the diversity of the Jadids’ religious and social views, and the implications of the religious foundations of much of their discourse; the inadequacy of the ‘Jadīdist’ vs. Qadīmist juxtaposition has been pointed out, and the oversimplification involved in portraying the Jadids as victims of the Tsarist administration and its policies (instead of appealing to them as well) has also been noted. Still others have questioned the implica- tions of the social and class origins of the Jadids, their ‘distance’ from the social and cultural world of most Central Asians, and their attitudes toward politi- cal engagement, as well as the role of their ties to, and affinities for, Western, Russian civilization in shaping their views.

Some have rightly noted, moreover, that our labels risk creating a movement that was perhaps not there, or perhaps did not have the shape implied by the actual life or thought of those to whom the label is attached; that is, do we really know what a Jadid looks like, as distinct from what the bearer of some other label looks like? Does that label effectively cover all of an individual’s life, or were there parts of it that were not affected by the Jadid outlook? One may rightly question the extent to which the label ‘Jadid’ was even used; the equivalent of the term appears in sources of the Jadids’ era, to be sure, and was used by self-styled Jadids and their opponents alike, but it has come to be applied to other individuals and currents as well, swelling the ranks of the ‘reformists’ after their time had passed. So instead of reifying that label, or reifying an ‘Islamic Modernism,’ should we be deconstructing it, or ignoring it, or loading it with caveats? No doubt a thorough re-examination of the basic terminology, and of the basic categories employed in discussing and assessing the Jadids, is overdue; and it will not hurt, in this process, to dispense with the binary oppositions, the false dichotomies, and to begin to fill in a spectrum of ideas and positions, to ask whether there was indeed something worth calling Jadidism. Is it fatal, for instance, in terms of the usefulness of the label, that its ‘fundamental’ connotation—the ‘newness’ of these individuals’ thought and outlook—is itself ultimately unsustainable?

After all, much of the Jadid critique was not new at all; in their complaints about corruption and abuses of power, they were preceded by poets and writ- ers centuries before them, and in their critique of religious practices and insti- tutions, they had direct precedents in the late 18th century and early 19th, still earlier, at the beginning of the 18th century, and earlier still (see below). What was new about them, or at least some of them, was their engagement with, and their inspiration by, Western civilization, in the form of Russian power and

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Russian culture. Given their social origins in the thin layer of local society most shaped and affected by Russian power, their intellectual debt to Western cul- ture (and to currents in Muslim religious thought decidedly outside the main- stream of Central Asian Muslim thought), and their alienation from their own society, why should the Jadids hold our attention as representatives or articula- tors of an indigenous vision, much less as spokesmen for ‘national’ aspirations?

2 Selected Problems in Jadidocentric Scholarship: Some Extended Reflections

It should be clear by now that we cannot dwell here on each and every misstep in Jadidocentric scholarship, but I would like to address a few of the broader problems in such scholarship in somewhat more depth. My original comments included among these broader issues the supposed contribution of the Jadids to the development of ‘national’ consciousness and identity; aside from stress- ing that the question of national identities sorely needs to be pulled out of its Sovietological context, I will defer this discussion to a later time, both for reasons of space and because that issue can more readily stand alone, apart from the comments here. In what follows, then, I will consider (1) the problem of bias and the irony of the Jadids’ ‘familiarity;’ (2) the question of the ‘new- ness’ and originality of the Jadid program; (3) the problem of ‘modernity’ as an analytical category; (4) the connection of ‘modernity’ with ‘secularism,’ and the religious character of the Jadid program; and (5) the neglect of history in Jadidocentric scholarship.

2.1 Bias and the Irony of the Jadids’ ‘Familiarity’ Let me begin with the issue of bias; I mentioned ‘bias’ in my title because I believe it has a good deal to do with the shape of Jadidocentric scholarship, and with many of its clichés as well. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that most scholars who have been interested in the Jadids so far have found it impossible to conceal their admiration for their subjects, and this admiration leads not merely to crediting them with more impact (and originality) than is warranted, but also to turning a kind of willful blind-eye toward the social, cultural, and intellectual bedfellows of the Jadid program (to which we will return shortly).

Simply put, many recently active scholars of the Soviet world and the Russian empire, steeped in theories of nationalism and unfamiliar with the structures and sources of pre-Soviet and pre-Russian history in Central Asia, have been fascinated by the Jadids, seeing in them the hinges on which Central Asia’s transition, from a dimly understood (by these scholars) ‘medieval’ past of

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religious obscurantism and backwardness, to an engagement with and embrace of the coveted ‘modernity,’ turned. They admired the Jadids, and they admired them because they thought they understood them; they and the Jadids spoke the same language, as it were. These scholars were on the same page with the Jadids in ways they could not be—literally—with the vastly larger body of Central Asians who were utterly uninterested in, unacquainted with, or opposed to the Jadid program. Such scholars saw something familiar in the Jadids, something they could relate to, and instead of stretching to understand the ‘majority’ world the Jadids opposed, they ignored it or, more often, adopted wholesale the Jadids’ critique of that world.16

Bias inevitably flourishes in a field when scholars resist exploring multiple ‘sides’ in historical debates, or are simply unaware of them, due, perhaps, to linguistically- or culturally-based selection. Bias likewise flourishes in fields marked by substantial academic imbalances, as when a large body of schol- ars, who adopt similar approaches, use the same kinds of sources, and ignore other kinds of sources (largely on the basis of script, language, medium, or ‘modernity’-quotient) is able to create and disseminate a sufficiently large body of literature so as to sustain a ‘closed circle’ of academic attention and referencing. Participants in the large group read and cite each other’s work, thereby reinforcing each other’s approaches and minimizing the ‘incentive’ to look beyond the perspectives and sources used by the large group; in this way they exclude, consciously or unconsciously, the perspectives and approaches adopted by a smaller body of scholars engaged with other kinds of sources, thereby sustaining and indeed enlarging the academic imbalance. This is cer- tainly the situation with the study of Central Asia, and of the Muslims of Russia and the Soviet Union, in which the larger group of scholars feels no need, or pressure, to consider approaches or sources beyond those familiar to it.

Yet it is worth noting the anomaly reflected in this particular bias. Again and again, scholarship on Islam in the Russian and Soviet context seemed to

16  ‘Familiarity’ may also be at work in the fascination with the Jadids that still prevails in the writings of many Turkish scholars, sure that they have found, in Jadidism, a parallel—and perhaps a precursor—to Kemalism, and one that more or less overlaps with an imagined common ‘Turkic’ historical progression of moving beyond attachments to Islam; see, for instance, M. H. Yavuz, “Nationalism and Islam: Yusuf Akçura and Üç Tarz‑ı Siyaset.” Journal of Islamic Studies, 4/2 (1993): 175-207; H. Kırımlı, National Movements and National Identity among the Crimean Tatars (1905‑1916) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); and A. Kanlidere, Reform within Islam: The Tajdid and Jadid Movement among the Kazan Tatars (1809‑1917): Conciliation or Conflict? (Istanbul: Eren, 1997).

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operate with no acknowledgement of some key developments in European and American scholarship on other parts of the non-Western world.

Whether it reflected the spirit of the 1960s, the post-war collapse of European empires and de-colonization, or something deeper, western schol- arship on the non-Western world had begun to change in important ways by the time Central Asia, or the Muslims of the Soviet Union, began to attract any attention at all. A generation of scholars from multiple disciplines set about focusing attention on peoples and places long ignored or regarded as so hope- lessly mired in changeless tradition and backwardness that they had nothing to offer discussion of the modern world and were not yet truly part of it. Such scholars began to pay attention to these peoples and places without the pre- scriptive assumptions that typified their predecessors, whose remedy for such peoples’ backwardness was to force them to engage with the ‘modern’ world they supposedly had not met (here the examples of assimilationist policies toward Native Americans or Australian “Aboriginals” come to mind, though attitudes toward the demands of ‘cultural progress’ for the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, or Africa were not substantially different). This new generation of scholars began to shed the arrogant assumptions of cultural superiority and paternalism, acknowledging the possibility, and even the likelihood, that peo- ple quite unlike us might have something to teach us, that their cultures and heritage deserved respect, and that there was, in any case, merit in understand- ing the diversity of human responses to history and environment, and fault in supposing that a particular cultural tradition was intrinsically superior to others. This then-new outlook extended not only to traditionally recognized bearers of literate culture, from the Muslim world to India and East Asia, but to the most ‘other’ others, peoples labeled primitive for being non-literate; scholars began to study and appreciate the complexity and sophistication of the languages, symbol-systems, and worldviews of peoples regarded by their grandparents as savages. The antecedents for this shift may be found, to be sure, in some ethnographic and historical scholarship from the 1930s and ’40s, but within a generation it was escaping the bounds of academia; not only scholars, but polite society, learned to speak respectfully of ‘alien’ cultural systems and their bearers, and to suppress, or at least hide, their assumptions about the superiority of their own culture.

I am tracking here, of course, a narrative of a change in worldview not unlike what is imputed to the Jadids, though in a different direction; but how- ever much a cliché it may have been itself, it was the intellectual world a sub- urban teenager of the mid-1970s could expect to encounter when entering even a state university. It was a hallmark of a liberal education, and simply of critical thinking, to resist being culture-bound, to learn about and from human

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communities other than one’s own, to valorize different perspectives on being human, beyond those familiar to oneself and dominant in one’s own parochial culture. If something in a different culture seemed strange or beyond under- standing, it signaled a fault, or an undeveloped ability, in the observer, not in the observed culture.

Some will no doubt decry this development as the beginnings of the era of ‘political correctness’ (a phrase that most often signals its user’s assumption that a particular group is being taken too seriously and is being accorded unde- served respect); more seriously, it must be readily acknowledged that there was no small measure of a crude exoticisim in much of the openness to other worlds, and that in some cases a kind of nostalgic romanticism could easily undermine intellectual rigor. However, there can be little doubt that challeng- ing the prevailing narratives of Euro-American cultural superiority was a key intellectual step of that time, and few would advocate a reversion to the cul- tural arrogance and paternalistic certainties that prevailed earlier; as for exoti- cism and romanticism, these impulses mostly passed, or matured, and became the foundations for more serious engagement with ‘the other.’

And yet to move from this perspective into the study of the Muslims of the Russian Empire involved stepping back into a world in which scholars seemed to engage only with what was familiar to them, and to disparage the ‘other’ and his ‘backward’ culture. In specific terms relevant here, scholars of Central Asia or ‘Islam in Russia’ perhaps felt that in dealing with the Russian or Soviet world, they were going far enough outside their comfort zones, and should not be expected to venture into the more alien world of the Muslim ‘other;’ and if they did take that extra step, it should at least be limited to those elements of the Muslim world who sought to be most like Westerners, and modern as well. So, instead of seeking out the more alien, even the exotic, in local cul- ture, the elements most unlike the modern Western world, Western scholars became fixated on the elements of Muslim and Central Asian society most like themselves—those who were speaking a new language, in effect, uti- lizing new media, addressing ‘modern’ issues, and otherwise imitating the trappings of modern Western culture. An insistence upon ‘common ground’ replaced any taste for the unknown, any respect for the ‘other,’ in this scholarly community, but the Central Asian ‘objects’ of study were expected to do the ‘heavy lifting’ of cultural baggage, and to come well more than halfway toward the Western scholars whose feet were firmly and self-confidently planted in the modern, and in the West. Instead of considering, or even noting, those who sought to preserve their traditional ways, or those who were in fact responding to changed circumstances by applying ‘traditional’ (read: ‘pre- modern’) intellectual or cultural patterns to them, Western scholars directed

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their admiration to those who sought to abandon those traditions and adap- tive patterns in order to become more like . . . well, Western scholars.

So one of our central questions regarding scholarship on the Jadids has to be this: what sort of historical scholarship would stake its development on the premise that in studying the ‘other country’ that is the past, we should pay attention first and foremost (and indeed exclusively) to the small minority of that ‘country’s’ population that seems most like us? Needless to say, those same admirers of the Jadids were disinclined to search for, or recognize, any intimations in the writings, or cultural legacy, of the ‘modernist’ natives they admired and latched onto that their ‘modernity’ was selective, or ridden with elements rooted in indigenous cultural patterns that Western scholars would have labeled ‘pre-modern.’

It remains baffling to me to this day why such a ‘disconnect’ persisted between scholarly trends in other areas and those in the study of ‘Russian and Soviet Islam;’ part of it, perhaps, can be laid at the doorstep of the policy imperatives that drove post-war scholarship on Central Asia and Soviet Islam (though in this regard, one might argue that the mixture of embarrassment and triumphalist rhetoric—rooted in the self-confidence afforded by ‘scien- tific’ superiority—that was displayed by the Soviet system itself in connection with the persistence of those ‘backward’ elements might have spurred Western analysts to foreground them instead of the sweet reason of the Jadids; to some extent this did happen, with the brief flurry of misinformed attention to Sufi groups, but in general most Western specialists simply accepted the analytical stance of Soviet academic, and even antireligious, writers). Another major rea- son for the disconnect may lie in the ‘religious’ character of the hypothetical alternative to the Jadids (which explains also the frequent effort to distance the Jadids from any sort of religious discourse, discussed below); many schol- ars, in multiple disciplines, continue to ‘have a problem’ with religion, and to manifest that problem both in open denunciations of what they understand religion to be, and in a less explicit cluelessness about religious matters.

Yet policy concerns and the role of ‘religion’ figure in other parts of the world, without similar effects on scholarship, suggesting that the peculiarities of the Soviet context might have been at work. On the one hand, there was no substantial legacy of scholarship focused on Muslim Central Asia before it became Soviet, and hence no significant academic constituency to point out the problems in the Jadidocentric narrative. On the other hand, I would argue that scholarship on Islam in the Soviet and Russian spheres developed a cer- tain ‘skepticism fatigue,’ as a result of which specialists seeking to understand the Soviet world often wielded their critical skills selectively, doubting Soviet analysis and interpretation on some fronts but accepting them wholesale on

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others. In post-Soviet times, moreover, some scholarship on Central Asia in the time of the Jadids has tended to align itself with approaches to ‘imperial’ history that emphasize a primarily reactive role for native elites—old and new—and thereby adopt the cultural perspective of the imperial power and the indigenous elements most closely attuned to it.

Whatever the reasons for the disconnect, the glorification of the Jadids has continued unabated, despite being out of step with some basic develop- ments in the study of religion and culture; it is as if Jadid studies continued to exist in an island of 1950s- and ‘60s-era promotion of American-style progress and unswerving hope in all things ‘modern.’ To be sure, despite the studied cynicism and affectations of disillusionment popular in some academic cir- cles, many cling to the basic dichotomy of the backward vs. the modern, and religion is still a favorite target of its ‘cultured despisers,’ who readily identify any and all religion as incompatible with ‘modernity;’ but few outside com- mitted missionary circles or ‘political’ partisans of stamping out ‘backward’ customs and ideas will speak casually of the value of helping along the dis- appearance of the cultures, religions, languages, and lifeways of non-western, non-European peoples.

Still more baffling is the ongoing resistance against the obvious antidote to adopting the Jadids’ positions in scholarship on them. It seems never to have occurred to most students of the Jadids to question their critique of their soci- ety and its intellectual stagnation, to check it, or to balance it on the basis of looking at the social and intellectual history of Central Asia prior to the Jadids, or during their era but through other perspectives. Jadidocentric scholarship tends to take the Jadids’ critiques as straightforward, objective descriptions, without recognizing or acknowledging their polemical character. I will return to this issue below, but the disconnect is all the more remarkable insofar as the Jadid critique so closely mirrors the ‘orientalist’ rhetoric of cultural condescen- sion wielded in 19th-century Europe to justify and explain the need for colonial domination of backward ‘oriental’ societies.

2.2 All-New and Original One of the clearest signs of the scholarly myopia affecting studies on the Jadids is the assumption, rarely questioned, that they represented an entirely fresh and original approach to cultural and political issues in Central Asia; they were, in this view, an utterly new phenomenon in the region, which had never witnessed the sort of intellectual and social critique they advanced. This assumption is obviously linked to the question of ‘modernity,’ addressed below, insofar as the very dichotomy of ‘modern’ vs. ‘pre-modern’ depends upon lumping together cultural and intellectual attitudes presumed to be

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current, and essentially unchanged, before the advent of ‘modernity’ (and another set of attitudes, lumped together on the presumption of a comparable degree of homogeneity, but fundamentally different from the ‘pre-modern,’ after its arrival); and it is also clearly linked to the question of the Jadids’ intel- lectual ‘familiarity,’ insofar as they did indeed bear the imprint of the colonial context in which they emerged, and ‘pitched’ some aspects of their ‘reformist’ program in the language of ‘catching up’ with the achievements of the colonial power. It should certainly be of direct relevance to understanding the Jadids and their ‘reformist’ intellectual stance, and to evaluating their contribution, to situate them in the context of previous waves, or wavelets, of ‘reform’ in Central Asia; and yet most of those who have written on the Jadids have not only been unaware, seemingly, of such earlier examples of ‘reformist’ tenden- cies, but have been actively certain that no such tendencies preceded the Jadids.

The general lack of awareness of earlier reform movements is rooted, of course, in the broader failure, discussed below, to assess the intellectual history of Central Asia outside the tendentious framework offered by the Jadids them- selves; but ultimately this is no excuse for ignoring the periods and contexts in which various voices were making arguments that should be understood as the direct antecedents of many of the Jadids’ positions. The importance of these antecedents for contextualizing the Jadids, furthermore, lies not only in the intellectual stances or argumentational patterns they reveal, paralleling those of the Jadids, but above all in the political frameworks within which the earlier ‘reform’ efforts were advanced; in every case, as should in fact be expected, the voices calling for ‘reform’ were not doing so in a vacuum, but were insisting that a political, social, or religious problem existed that needed urgent atten- tion, and the problem they identified just happened to be laid at the doorstep of specific political opponents of those calling for change, or of convenient targets whose disparagement served to advance those opponents’ political iso- lation. These earlier movements were perhaps more explicit in linking their ‘reforms’ with a return to a vision of religious purity or rigor than some Jadids would be, but in any case the rhetoric of reform could readily be deployed by rulers and their supporters against their actual or potential opponents, under- cutting the religious legitimacy the latter could claim; understanding this in fact helps us contextualize the ‘secular’ spirit often ascribed—though, as dis- cussed below, with considerable exaggeration—to the Jadids, whose potential political allies were precisely the Russian colonial officials who would applaud the critique of a backward and stagnant society, but would not be impressed by arguments rooted in the intellectual traditions and religious educations of the Jadids themselves. It should be no surprise that the Jadids were able to

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‘speak religion’ to their compatriots while ‘speaking secular’ to the Russians; that many of them did more of the latter than the former is likewise telling about the Jadids’ orientation.

What is now the best known ‘wave’ of politically-motivated religious reform came just a century before the Jadids’ era, in the late 18th and early 19th centu- ries; the political context for it was the emergence, after five centuries during which the political structure of Central Asia was dominated by the Chinggisid principle—i.e., the assumption that wielding sovereign power was restricted to blood descendants of Chingīz Khān—of ruling dynasties drawn from among the class of warlord chieftains of the Uzbek tribes, who lacked Chinggisid legit- imacy, and needed to stake their claims on other foundations; chief among them was adherence to Islamic norms of rulership, and claiming such adher- ence was also convenient for de-legitimizing other social groups with a claim to legitimacy equal to that of these dynasties, through displays of enforcing aspects of the sharīʻa that those other circles could be blamed for violating or treating with laxity. This development has been analyzed extensively by Anke von Kügelgen and Bakhtiyar Babajanov for the case of the Manghït dynasty that ruled Bukhārā from 1747 to 1920;17 Babajanov has more recently explored similar processes of legitimation within the more complex social and intel- lectual environment of the khanate of Khoqand, dominated by the Ming tribal dynasty,18 and in fact similar processes were underway also in the khanate of Khiva, ruled by the Qonghrat tribal dynasty.

17  See A. von Kügelgen, Die Legitimierung der mittelasiatischen Mangitendynastie in den Werken ihrer Historiker (18.‑19. Jahrhundert) (Istanbul: Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft/Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2002; Beiruter Texte und Studien, Band 86), and the Russian translation, A. fon Kiugel’gen, Legitimatsiia sredneaziatskoi dinastii mangitov v proizvedeniiakh ikh istorikov (XVIII‑XIX vv.) (Almaty: Daik-Press, 2004); see also von Kügelgen’s “Die Entfaltung der Naqšbandīya Muǧaddidīya im mittleren Transoxanien vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ein Stück Detektivarbeit.” In Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, vol. 2: Inter‑Regional and Inter‑Ethnic Relations, ed. A. von Kügelgen, M. Kemper, and A. J. Frank (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1998; Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, Bd. 216): 101-151, and B. M. Babadžanov, “On the History of the Naqšbandīya Muǧaddidīya in Central Māwarāʻannahr in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries.” In Muslim Culture in Russia and Central Asia from the 18th to the Early 20th Centuries, ed. M. Kemper, A. von Kügelgen, and D. Yermakov (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1996; Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, Bd. 200): 385-413.

18  B. M. Babadzhanov, Kokandskoe khanstvo: Vlast’, politika, religiia (Tokyo/Tashkent: NIHU Program Islamic Area Studies Center at the University of Tokyo/Institut vostokovedeniia Akademii nauk Respubliki Uzbekistan, 2010).

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In each case, the new ruling elite championed what must be recognized as minority voices within their realms, employing the religious critique they wielded as a means of undercutting their political opponents; one of the tar- gets was the complex of activities at shrines—thus challenging entrenched religious elites—that the ‘reformers’ could label as harmful innovations, but the centerpiece of the ‘reform’ movements was the assault on the practice of the vocal form of the Sufi dhikr, and on the groups who engaged in it in multiple ritual, devotional, and social contexts. Practicing the vocal dhikr thus became a sign of defiance against the ruler, and was actively suppressed; practitioners were in some cases sent into exile. Challenges to the vocal dhikr prompted responses aimed at demonstrating its legitimacy, and the issue of the vocal dhikr, or jahr, formerly the concern of narrower circles of Sufi teach- ers and their disciples, thus became a significant social and political issue.19 In the khanate of Khoqand, likewise, the vocal dhikr came under attack, rul- ers took upon themselves the exposure of fraudulent claims to Sufi shaykh- hood, as well as of fraudulent claims to the status of sayyid (descendant of the Prophet) or khwāja (descendants of various saints or Islamizers), and shrine- based practices deemed un-Islamic were curtailed as well. The rhetoric of such denunciations was not unlike the rhetoric deployed in Soviet-era anti-religious campaigns.

Perhaps more instructive, as a parallel to the Jadids (and perhaps to Soviet anti-religious measures as well), is the short-lived nature of this reform effort in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; in all the khanates, the flurry of activity aimed at shrine practices and the vocal dhikr died down, and public religious practice remained dominated by the same ritual complex that the ‘reformers,’ in the service of the new dynasties, had attacked. In short, things went back to the way they had been, more or less unchanged, though new discursive patterns had been introduced (e.g., the ‘public’ debates over the dhikr), and the potential usefulness of attacking ‘charlatan’ dervishes and shrine-focused ‘superstitions’ and ‘innovations’ had been highlighted in some circles. Yet this short-lived era of ‘reform’ was itself not ‘original;’ in the case of Bukhārā, at least, it is clear that another challenge to entrenched religious and political interests was mounted, in the time of the profound weakening of the Ashtarkhānid dynasty, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The catalyst at this juncture was the introduc- tion, in Central Asia, of the Mujaddidī current of the Naqshbandī Sufi order, which took a ‘reformist’ stance in opposition to entrenched local Naqshbandī

19  See B. M. Babadzhanov and S. A. Mukhammadaminov, ed., Sobranie fetv po obosnovaniiu zikra dzhakhr i samaʽ (A Collection of Fatwas Legitimizing the Vocal Dhikr and Sama’) (Almaty: Daik-Press, 2009).

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groups (including, again, those groups’ tolerance of the vocal dhikr), and allied itself with the khān ʻUbaydullāh (r. 1702-1711), who sought unsuccessfully to re- strengthen his position vis-à-vis that of the tribal chieftains and urban elites whose power had risen at the expense of that of the khāns.20

This challenge, too, was short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful; but it reminds us that specific aspects of the Jadids’ program were not original with them, or with the colonial era, but had been championed much earlier, with particular motives that must be understood as rooted not in the inherent ‘backwardness’ or ‘stagnation’ of what they attacked, but in the specific politi- cal circumstances of the times, which made what they attacked convenient, and useful, targets.

If we combine some attention to these earlier movements of ‘reform’ with the growing recognition—reflected, for example, in Paolo Sartori’s contribu- tion to the present volume—that educated Muslims in the early 20th cen- tury, in grappling with the realities of life in Russian-ruled Central Asia, might easily shift from ‘Jadid-speak’ to other idioms, and back again, based on their ‘audience’ (or based on the needs of ‘jurisdiction shopping’), we may begin to develop a more balanced approach to the era of the Jadids, understanding not only the altered political and social circumstances, under Russian rule, that they sought to exploit, opportunistically, but also the ways in which some aspects of the Jadids’ program (and some aspects of that program’s failure) did have roots, or precedents, in their own societies. Acknowledging these prec- edents, however, requires us to question two other related assumptions deeply embedded in Jadidocentric scholarship: that the Jadid enterprise can best be assessed as representing ‘modernity,’ and that it marked a sharp turn toward ‘secularism.’21 Both are worth reviewing in more depth.

20  See the discussion in D. DeWeese, “ ‘Dis-ordering’ Sufism in Early Modern Central Asia: Suggestions for Rethinking the Sources and Social Structures of Sufi History in the 18th and 19th Centuries.” In History and Culture of Central Asia/Istoriia i kul’tura Tsentral’noi Azii, ed. Bakhtiyar Babadjanov and Kawahara Yayoi (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo, 2012): 259-279.

21  Emphasis upon the ‘newness’ of the Jadids typically trumps the emphasis upon their secularism; adjusting his arguments about the non-religious character of the Jadid critique (see below) in a later work, for instance, Khalid concluded that “Jadidism represented, in essence, a new way of knowing Islam” (Islam after Communism: 42), acknowledging parallels between the Jadid critique and Wahhābī positions (45-46), but finding none in Central Asia itself.

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2.3 Modernity Identifying the Jadids as modernists, or as engaging with ‘modernity’ in a posi- tive way, i.e., to promote ‘the modern,’ is, I would argue, both fraught with a particular evaluative stance, and analytically content-less. To be sure, there are those who insist that ‘modernity’ does have content and speaks to a dis- tinct, identifiable complex of ideas or habits of thought; and though there may be something to this, at least in certain spheres of discourse—as discussed below—‘modernity’ is self-evidently a term referring to a moving target, as it has been for perhaps 200 years, or, if we credit the Oxford English Dictionary, for over 400 years.22 So, when we say that the Jadids advocated adjustments to the ‘modern world’ or ‘modern life’ or ‘modern times’ or ‘modernity,’ we do not mean to the world or life of 2015, or of 1615, but to something else, to something we suppose that ‘our’ time—or theirs, outside the world they grew up in— has in common with the world of today, of a century ago, or of four centuries ago. Faced with such a large chronological span, it might go without saying that a historically rigorous discussion, and a historically objective approach, would attempt to use terminology that was more specific; but however much ‘modernity’ may be framed in more substantive terms in some scholarship, the rhetoric of ‘modernity’ is in fact part and parcel of the affective appeal implicit in Jadidocentric scholarship, reflecting the bias at its core.

One problem with trumpeting ‘modernity,’ whether as something to which particular Muslims aspired or as something that shaped and contributed to pre-existing tendencies in Islamic thought and action, is that the values and assumptions and processes typically combined under the name ‘modernity’ tend to be simply those favored by the users of the word; the term thus becomes difficult to separate—if it may indeed refer to a complex that is separable— from the value-laden judgments and opinions and assumptions of those who use the term as a code-word. Moreover, even when explicit value judgments are not apparent, the language of ‘modernity’ rests on failing to ‘correct’ for the foreshortening effect of a presentist perspective, which makes the more recent past loom larger and appear more full of detail, and makes the more distant past seem to shrink into long stretches of sameness, lacking complexity and definition.

The irony of the focus on ‘modernity’ as the hallmark of the Jadid enterprise is perhaps sharpened by one of its counterparts; as Adeeb Khalid reminds us, youth was one of the key distinguishing characteristics of the Jadids in Central Asia, and they were as likely to be referred to by others as “the youth” (yoshlar)

22  The OED dates the first use of the term ‘modern’ in English to 1585.

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as by any other designation.23 But the young grow old, and the New becomes old-hat, and the modern becomes yesterday’s news. Even the simplest reflec- tion reminds us of the uselessness of these terms as analytical categories, and dressing up ‘the modern’ in the garb of an objectified ‘modernity’ does not enhance the meaning of either term; precisely because the terms are used constantly in everyday language and popular culture—in which contexts we readily see the differences between, for instance, the ‘modernity’ depicted in Mad Men and the ‘modernity’ of just a half-century later—it behooves histo- rians to be more cautious in deploying them—more cautious, at least, than is the case in Jadidocentric scholarship.

I would argue, indeed, that students of the Jadids would do well to find some other way of referring to the chronological, and cultural, parameters of the Jadid program, instead of continuing to rely upon the thoroughly imprecise notion of ‘modernity;’ there are grounds for doubting that the Jadids are best categorized in terms of ‘modernity’—as explored below—but there are also grounds for doubting that the notion of ‘modernity’ itself is a helpful analyti- cal tool. The primary usefulness of a phrase such as ‘the modern’ is political and economic (in marketing), but depends on the calculated (if not precisely ‘planned’) obselescence of its referents to have value even in those spheres. To essentialize a ‘modernity’ outside those spheres is a fool’s errand.

Some may object, understandably, that in questioning the analytical useful- ness of the notion of ‘modernity,’ and especially in highlighting the affective appeal of the notion, I am focusing only on the everyday, ‘lay’ use of the term, rather than on the more carefully defined and modulated use found in the scholarly literature that has developed around ‘modernity’ (to be sure, mostly around Western ‘modernity’). That literature has attempted to define ‘moder- nity’ more rigorously, as a supposedly coherent, and mutually interdependent, set of social, institutional, political, intellectual, and even psychological devel- opments, often untethered from a particular chronological framework, and thus actualizable, or exportable, in a variety of historical periods and places.

The first response to such an objection is to note that this more technical use of the term ‘modernity’ is decidedly not what the literature praising the Jadids has intended; the coolly analytical stance of the theorists regarding ‘modernity’ is rarely to be found among students of the Jadids, and the idea that the body of scholarship on Jadidism would look better if we accepted a different understanding of ‘modernity,’ in line with its theorists, is simply not serious. The admirers of the Jadids are with rare exception unreserved admirers of modernity, which they understand not as a phase of history with positive

23  Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: 93, 105.

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and negative features, or as a phase perhaps past, but as a wholly positive and necessary advance toward the world of today, which all peoples must eventu- ally embrace; to pretend that scholarship on the Jadidists has been as thought- ful and nuanced regarding ‘modernity’ as its ardent theorists is not to be acquainted with it.

More to the point, however, there is no doubt some justification for segregat- ing the ‘public’ use of a term from its use by academics intent on appropriating it in a more refined or technical sense; but it is also somewhat disingenuous to suggest that such appropriations do not inevitably trade on the ‘commonplace’ meaning of the term—moreso even than the mode of jargon that makes slight adjustments in commonplace words to yield, for example, terms such as ‘struc- turation’ or ‘distanciation.’ It is, indeed, itself an aesthetic question, of taste perhaps, between those who find such a technical hijacking of a term to be a useful tool, and those who find it an assault on language and thought; and in the end, even allowing that the academic use of the term ‘modernity’ might be undertaken without the intent of trading on its commonplace connotations, we can hardly pretend that the practitioners of ‘modernity’—including our Jadids—resisted trading on them, or indeed did not have every intention of promoting their program through the affective appeal, to some, of ‘the mod- ern,’ with no nuanced technical meaning intended.

In the end, the project of the theorists of modernity amounts to extracting, from the aggregate of phenomena current, or visible, in a given period—and regarding precisely what period, admittedly, the theorists differ—a set of phe- nomena they argue are definitively and exclusively ‘modern;’ it actively seeks, that is—or rather, depends upon—a positive essentialization of ‘modernity,’ and although it is usually claimed that ‘modernity’ is not a purely Western phenomenon (and hence, in this view, ‘globalization’ is the expansion of ‘modernity’ and not merely of the West), the scholarship on modernity tends to be nearly as culture-bound, and as ‘presentist,’ as the commonplace, ‘lay’ discourse of modernity.24

Most of the scholarly literature attentive to framing ‘modernity’ as a coher- ent analytical concept, indeed, is rooted in social theory, and reflects not only sociology’s agility in straddling the descriptive and the prescriptive, but the

24  Not unexpectedly, it is the persistent evocation of ‘modernity’ in the colonial context, and the Euro-American venue for most formulations of ‘modernity,’ that have summoned one of the most sweeping critiques of “the misleading coherence implied by the notion of a modern era;” see the chapter on “Modernity” in F. Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005): 113-149 (124). I am indebted to Paolo Sartori for bringing this work to my attention.

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field’s often limited historical perspective as well. When sociologists seek his- torical comparanda, that is, they mostly seek and find them in the recent past, and the field practically demands the discovery, or formulation, of a set of fea- tures supposedly shared through the era of modernity, and distinctive to it; data are rarely sought from earlier times, as a ‘control’ on just how distinctive those features are to modernity, not so much because of the profound ‘rup- ture’ with the past posited as one hallmark of modernity, but because sources and methods other than those typically employed by sociologists would be required to find and explore such data. In this way, the field creates a closed system, of modernity as the subject of sociology, and of sociology as the science of modernity.25

It is thus true, no doubt, that the sociological theorists of ‘modernity’ have filled that term with specific content that goes well beyond the ‘lay’ use of the term, and have likewise adopted an analytical stance allowing them to acknowledge that their ‘modernity’ is not all sunshine and roses, but has darker aspects ranging from totalitarianism to ‘total’ war to environmental degrada- tion; they have also thereby put some emotional distance between themselves and the affective appeal of ‘the modern’—ceding the ‘revolutionary’ fervor and rhetorical sloganeering of the sort once evoked by ‘modernity,’ for our Jadids, to a younger generation of social theorists whose dialectical rebuke to their elders demanded that they frame their critique in terms of the ‘post-modern.’26

Yet the sociological defenders of ‘modernity’ have for some time strained to formulate some terminological refinements in their jargon, not merely to meet the challenge of the postmodernists, but in response to the uneasy feeling that ‘modernity’ may have come, or may be coming, to an end; as a result, the semantic certainty and coherence once conveyed—for its ‘practitioners,’ to be sure, but also for its theorists—by ‘modernity’ (in no small measure because of the overlap between ‘scholarly’ and ‘lay’ usages of the term) has given way to a host of qualifications whereby ‘modernity’ is preceded by ‘high’ or ‘late’ or ‘radicalized’ or ‘reflexive’ or, of course, simply ‘post-’ (with ‘modernity’ itself occasionally equated with—seriously—the ‘pre-postmodern’). What this

25  This much is acknowledged in A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990): 13, 15, 40-43 (without reference to the formation of a closed system).

26  See the discussion of S. Best and D. Kellner, The Postmodern Turn (New York/London: The Guilford Press, 1997): 11-12, including the observation—reminiscent of Khalid’s comment, noted above, about the youth of the Jadids—that “perhaps only the young could really be postmodern.”

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word-play signals, however, is once again the limited historical (not to men- tion cultural) perspective that typically characterizes the defense of ‘moder- nity’ as a decisive and pervasive rupture with all that went before it, and here again lies the problem shared with the ‘commonplace’ use of the term: it sig- nals a recognition of granular detail even in the relatively short recent span of modernity’s sway, alongside an ongoing failure (born of indifference or willful denial) to acknowledge the possibility of similar granular detail, in earlier eras, that might undermine the coherence of ‘modernity’ and the starkness of the rupture its advent supposedly entailed.27

What is perhaps most striking about the literature touting ‘modernity’ as a coherent and distinctive set of features or developments that mark a spe- cific historical period is not so much the construction of ‘modernity’ from a set of possibly disparate developments—that is the point of this literature, after all—but the easy and un-self-conscious use of the term ‘tradition’ to serve as the counter to, and predecessor, of ‘modernity’—again denying (or perhaps simply expressing a lack of interest in) the complexities of earlier times.28 This uncritical juxtaposition of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ inevitably reflects the foreshortening of historical vision characteristic of much sociological theory, in part, as noted, because the tools employed in such theory are limited and cannot reach back very far; with better tools, or with methodological experi- ence in using other kinds of tools, the theorists might see more continuity than rupture, or might at least see greater complexity in the directionality, pace, or contours of historical change. But it is also no doubt telling that the nearest parallels to the simple dichotomy of modern and pre-modern, or ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition,’ accepted in the sociological literature are found among advo- cates for one or the other ‘side,’ who need a clearly-defined opponent; many other examples of the partisan ‘practitioners’ of modernity, beyond the Jadids, with their need to create a monolithic and backward ‘tradition,’ might be noted, but ‘modernity’ has its opponents too, of various sorts, some of whom

27  Even critics of ‘monolithic’ constructions of modernity, who in arguing the need to acknowledge multiple modernities are naturally more attentive to the granular detail of recent times, are typically uninterested in multiple pre-modernities, or in exploring possible continuities, and trajectories of change, across time that might undermine the conceptual coherence, and usefulness, of ‘modernity,’ whether one or many; see, for instance, B. Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self‑Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

28  See Giddens, Consequences: 100-111; here too we find a discussion of religion that draws upon many of the problematical approaches I have noted elsewhere.

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readily adopt the ‘traditionalist’ label and articulate a specific philosophical, and religious, stance.29

In short, both pro-modernists and anti-modernists depend on a construc- tion of modernity, as a coherent analytical category, to promote or attack; neither side allows complexity or subtlety into its formulation of the ‘moder- nity’ that they defend or attack, or acknowledge that ‘modernity’ is marked by components that are not integrally related to one another by virtue of being ‘modern,’ components that might be separable from the complex and might even include some toward which a different reaction might be possible if not taken as an essential element of the glorious or sinister, but in any case mono- lithic, modernity. The theorists of ‘modernity’ may define the notion more rig- orously, may eschew taking sides, and may even include among their ranks some who acknowledge multiple modernities; but their analytical stance is not substantially different from the partisans when it comes to framing either ‘modernity’ or, especially, ‘tradition.’

With respect specifically to the notion of ‘Islamic modernism,’ Wilfred Cantwell Smith reminded us nearly 40 years ago of the overly simplistic charac- ter of contrasting ‘the modern’ with everything else. “Some analysts,” he wrote,

still affect a hoary polarity, to describe this era, between traditional and modern, as if that characterized what is happening; but that has been true ever since the beginning: all Muslims from the year one hijrī, like all human beings since the year one on any scale, have waked up every morning to live between what was then traditional and what was that day new.

Continuing with a list of particular developments in Islamic history, Smith con- cluded, “all were innovations presenting the Muslim world with a moderniza- tion problem much as have recent technological or economic developments.”30

We might suppose that Smith was merely stating the obvious, but his com- ments appear more insightful, and instructive, when we consider how deeply embedded the constructed opposition between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ has become in scholarship on the Jadids. Khalid, for instance, insists that in the

29  See, for example, the study of M. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

30  W. Cantwell Smith, “Islamic History as a Concept.” In Smith, On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies (The Hague/Paris/New York: Mouton Publishers, 1981): 3-25 [13]; the article was written in 1975.

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“Islamic tradition,” “the past was a sacralized record of divine intervention in the affairs of men,” and was thus not seen as the venue in which ‘progress’ unfolded;31 but this is overly simplistic. The essentialization of an undiffer- entiated “Islamic tradition” aside, we may note in the first place that basic Muslim teaching holds that the ‘best’ of mankind, and the best Prophet sent by God, came to mankind relatively recently, and that the revelation of Islam thus marked a significant ‘progressive’ advance over the Jāhilīya and all of previous human history; moreover, the very notion of centennial (and millen- nial) renewal envisions what we might term periodic ‘upticks’ in the course of human and Muslim history, and even if in ‘theory’ the general trend was arguably downward, at least among those who thought in the extreme longue- durée and envisioned a cosmic decline from pristine Creation to the feeble humanity of the present age, the rhetoric of regular renewal obviously pro- vided a platform for what we can clearly recognize as ‘reformers’ intent on ‘progress.’ In addition, even what some might call the ‘secular’ historiography of the Muslim world regularly advanced a historical vision involving not so much ‘divine intervention’ as cycles of dynastic rise and fall; it is silly to pretend that Muslim writers and their audiences did not entertain a sense of ‘progress’ when recalling the ʻAbbāsid replacement of the Umayyads, or the conversion to Islam of Mongol dynasts, or other political and cultural changes that were articulated for centuries in Muslim literature without need for Jadid standards.

And yet, ignoring Smith’s reminder, Jadidocentric scholarship—and here we can expand from the latter to encompass much of the scholarship trumpet- ing Islamic ‘modernism’—posits just one of these developments as essentially and definitively ‘new’ and ‘modern,’ one that looms so large in their perspec- tive, because it is more recent than others; as a result, one of these incoherent concepts—modernity—is offered as defining a true watershed, and one that benefits, moreover, from historical ‘necessity.’ We are reminded, that is, that adapting to the ‘modern’ was ‘necessary,’ that turning away from backwardness and obscurantism was ‘necessary,’ that the cultural, educational, linguistic, and religious program of the Jadids was a response to ‘necessity;’ it is a ‘grocery- shelf ’ approach, in which merely labeling an idea or way of life as ‘outdated’ or past its ‘use-by’ date will ensure that shoppers pass it by in favor of fresher fare that is in fact of the same sort as what was to be discarded. What such empty language amounts to, in effect, is a declaration that time indeed did move forward, and since certain changes occurred, they were, after all, ‘necessary.’ The language of ‘modernity,’ like that of ‘necessity,’ is self-celebration, pure and simple, a declaration of the self-evident superiority of the place where we

31  Khalid, Politics: 108.

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(now) stand; it is decidedly not the language of any serious historical analysis, but instead depends on reading history solely from a presentist perspective.

In short, ‘modernity’ may be recognized as an attempt to impute coherence to a set of features that are in fact unrelated outside the framework of tempo- ral and cultural coincidence; it is an essentialization proposed by contempo- rary scholarship, but it most often serves as a mask for ‘what we recognize and approve of or are familiar with on the basis of our experience.’ ‘Modernity’ should be recognized as masking value judgements that may well have their place in religious, political, and perhaps even critical aesthetic discourse, but ought to be out of place in historical discussion; ‘modernity’ may be seen as yet another ‘Western’ (European, Euro-American) ideological construct use- ful as a tool for asserting the superiority of the West and the ‘backwardness’ of other regions, peoples, and cultures deemed to be ‘behind the times’ and insufficiently attuned to ‘modernity.’ And in any case, once the complex of various currents that supposedly constitute ‘modernity’ is recognized to be neither homogeneous nor unique, it will be incumbent upon historians to do a better job of analyzing, and conceptualizing, the era in which the Jadids were active—as well as eras before and after them—than can be achieved by trot- ting out the false dichotomy of the ‘modern’ vs. the ‘pre-modern.’

I would stress, in this connection, that the notion of modernity not only paints the ‘pre-modern’ with too broad a brush; it also distorts our understand- ing of more recent history. Without pretending that some parts of Central Asia were somehow unaffected by the political and social upheavals of the Soviet era, we can rightly question whether ‘modernity’ has had the impact upon the region’s peoples that is often proposed for it; to collapse the changes brought by that era, or some of them, into the category of ‘modernity’ is to sidestep the analytical work of gauging the differential impact of the various forces lumped into ‘modernity,’ and it is to misleadingly pose an alternative, with an essential- ized ‘modernity’ acting upon, albeit in different degrees, a kind of static, pre- modern reality, framed simply as hostile to or unschooled in the whole vague assemblage of ‘modernity.’

In the end, ‘modernity’ should be recognized as entailing a rejection, denial, or willful neglect of history, by pretending to base itself within a ‘modern’ age opposed to the ‘pre-modern,’ ignoring change within those two wrongly-framed eras, and indeed denying the relevance of such change. Neither the ‘modern’ age, in which the triumph of ‘modernity’ is proclaimed, nor the ‘pre-modern’ age is allowed any further texture, or any historical change; indeed, many of the clichés of Jadidocentric scholarship stress the sameness, the changeless- ness, of the era of backwardness prior to the Jadids. All is lumped together,

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with all that came before the advent of ‘modernity’ framed as an undifferenti- ated continuum whose singular characteristic is its opposition to—or simply its inadequacy in the face of—‘modernity.’ The rhetoric of ‘modernity’ thus posits its opposite as an equally coherent reality, when in fact neither is.

I realize that in questioning the usefulness and coherence of the notion of ‘modernity’—whether as ordinary people understand it or as a more technical term in sociological and some historical jargon—I will be going a step too far for many colleagues, including even some who may prefer to retain the term by way of constructing a critique of Jadidocentric scholarship. With the latter view, I can certainly sympathise; and in fact, in questioning the use of the term, I am more interested in undermining its use as the key tool for ‘explaining’ (and yes, praising) the Jadids than in dissolving it altogether. I will also freely admit to a certain opportunistic stance in this regard (i.e., if that argument failed to convince, try this one). I cannot pretend to be entirely immune, more- over, to the sense of unease that accompanies the step of unmooring historical analysis from the certainty and solidity and familiarity seemingly promised by the term, and I readily acknowledge the occasional ‘shorthand’ convenience— and habit—of referring to this or that historical phenomenon as ‘modern.’

Yet at the same time, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the very notion of ‘modernity’ has negatively affected our understanding of, and approach to, the Jadids. Framing ‘modernity’ as a coherent and distinctive set of features carries with it the implication, in the case of the Jadids, that they were only doing the responsible thing in ‘responding’ to modernity and embracing it; it was ‘modernity,’ that is, that shaped the Jadids, not the encoun- ter with Western/Russian culture, and decidedly not any internal dynamic in Central Asian Muslim thought, and it is thus ‘modernity’ that should anchor any assessment and analysis of the Jadid enterprise. Perhaps there is, after all, an identifiable and coherent complex comprising ‘modernity’ traceable from 17th-century Europe through the contemporary (post-) modern Western world; but I would argue that where it has affected non-European cultures, it is as a Western phenomenon, not as an objectified ‘modernity,’ however much the latter has been invoked as a slogan—rather than as an analytical category—by those in non-Western societies who have sought to imitate, or compete with, the West; it is here that we should put the Jadids, understanding that they inevitably drew both from their own cultural and intellectual heri- tage and upbringing—finding in it elements that some have mistaken for parts of ‘modernity’—and from the Western culture they admired.

After all it may prove to be more convenient, for now, to retain the notion of ‘modernity’ as a coherent category, by way of better analyzing its imagined

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alternatives, and providing its doubters with a target (as intimated at the outset). It must be stressed, however, that a better understanding of the com- plexity and diversity of cultural systems at any given time, and of the range of permutations of outlook, discursive modes, and (indeed) subjectivities, available at any stage of a community’s development, will be ill-served by continued resort to the implicit oppositional polarity between the modern (or even multiple ‘modernities’) and the pre-modern.32 I suspect, indeed, that both the integrity or coherence, and the functionality of the term ‘modernity,’ as a useful and meaningful concept for historical analysis, will increasingly be called into question, to the point of its abandonment, though it remains unclear how many more decades worth of ‘modernity’ (or post-modernity) will pass before the term is generally recognized as hopelessly vague.

2.4 Modernity and Secularism: The Problem of Jadidism and Religion The ultimate hollowness of the concept of ‘modernity’ inevitably bears the potential to leach meaning and functionality from the closely-linked notion of secularization as well. An attachment to ‘the secular,’ and indeed the creation of a secular space in Muslim societies, is typically noted as a hallmark and key contribution of the Jadids; but again, on multiple fronts, the relationship of the Jadids’ programs with religion and religiosity is, I believe, one of the most persistently misconstrued issues in Jadid-focused scholarship, and needs to be faced front-and-center.

Taking stock of the religious language, and religious reasoning, used by the Jadids will be an essential aspect of engaging with this issue; here I will limit myself to some broader ‘corrective’ reminders to the pro-Jadid narrative, sug- gesting that religion has a ‘modern’ face as well, that one of religion’s ‘modern’ faces is what may be usefully labeled ‘fundamentalism,’ and that many aspects of the Jadid program had a great deal more in common with ‘fundamentalism’ than is often admitted.

(1) In the same brief article of Wilfred Cantwell Smith cited above, written in 1975, he could refer to the error of “the ruthless insistence of modern secu- larism upon seeing current developments, self-triumphantly, as indisputably Westernizing secularist.”33 Given just a few of the “current developments” that were then to follow in the not-so distant future—from the Iranian revolution

32  For an insightful and provocative exploration of the heuristic value of rethinking homogeneous and unilinear conceptions of temporality and chronology, see S. Bashir, “On Islamic Time: Rethinking Chronology in the Historiography of Muslim Societies.” History and Theory 53 (2014): 519-44.

33  Smith, “Islamic History as a Concept”: 15.

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to the 1990s ‘religious wars’ of the Balkans that were typically framed only as ‘nationalist’ conflicts, to the spread of Salafist-inspired visions of Islam—his reminder of the continued relevance and impact of ‘religious life’ seems pre- scient; yet it also reminds us (as does the case of the Balkans) that scholarly language has not kept pace with the unfolding of history. That is, if the inno- cent certainty of the 1970s, still, about the “Westernizing secularist” direction of history has been educated by the real world (outside Starr’s world, at least), scholarly language still uses both ‘western’—or its self-congratulatory syn- onym, ‘modern’—and ‘secular’ as if they (1) were meaningful terms in their own right, (2) stand for standards against which other, lesser ways, should be measured, and, for these two reasons, (3) serve fruitfully as terms reflecting the direction in which they believe, or wish, history has actually moved.

By the mid-1990s, the prominent sociologist of religion José Casanova would refer to the “deprivatization of religion in the modern world,” referring to the ‘refusal’ of “religious traditions throughout the world” “to accept the mar- ginal and privatized role which theories of modernity as well as theories of secularization had reserved for them.”34 Although Casanova highlighted the extent to which secularization theory had merely been assumed rather than argued, he was in fact attempting to ‘save’ secularization theory, by redefin- ing it, and in so doing he hardened a new dichotomy, of ‘private’ vs. ‘public,’ stopped short of a better ‘working’ definition of religion itself, and left ‘moder- nity’ likewise essentially unchallenged. Yet if we may combine his arguments about the “deprivatization” of religion with the recognition, beginning already in the 1960s, that what was called ‘modernity’—which we would better understand as the specific conditions of, say, the mid-20th century—could in fact generate new forms of religiosity (as Casanova discussed), we may first acknowledge that a cornerstone of most conceptions of ‘modernity,’ and cer- tainly of the conceptions prevailing in the study of our corner of the world— secularism—has been effectively removed; we may then take a step back and realize that much of the standard narrative’s characterization of the Jadids’ own era was rooted in assumptions derived from secularization theory, i.e., based on the presumption that secularism and modernity were on the march, together. Once again scholarship on ‘our’ part of the world lags significantly behind other fields; but more to the point, how could our field have been so certain of the ‘secularizing’ inclinations of the Jadids, when the effort, ascribed to them, to create a non-religious space was implemented only by the Bolsheviks, and arguably failed to create a non-religious mental space outside

34  J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): 5.

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the educated and career-minded Soviet elites? Perhaps Soviet policy was more effective than suggested here in creating that non-religious mental space, in a world beyond the reach of Casanova or other theorists of ‘modern’ religion; but to find out if it was, and where it was, will require a much more subtle process of research and inquiry than has ever been undertaken in the blunt- instrument world of Soviet and Sovietological studies and policies.

Here we must acknowledge, without taking time to address the issue, that the uncritical use of the terms ‘modernity’ and ‘secularism’ continues to plague not only discussions of Jadidism, but ‘analysis’ of contemporary developments in post-Soviet Central Asia as well.35 Indeed, it is only fair to observe that the academic attachment to ‘secularism’—not as an ideal of impartiality toward religious traditions, but as a vision of the direction in which human history is moving, and should move—is in many respects stronger even than con- fidence in ‘modernity;’ to some extent, ironically, that attachment has been strengthened by the same recent developments that suggested problems with secularization theory. Yet even if we argue that ‘secularism’ is a reality in the contemporary world—against considerable evidence, outside the wishful thinking of multiple elites—it must still be recognized that looking for ‘the secular’ in the past, using it as a meaningful term in historical analysis, is akin to the search to find ‘progressive’ elements in the past in Soviet historiogra- phy; both involve assignments of value, not scholarly analysis, and both base the value they assign on a retrospective evaluation of what, exactly, could be applauded in the dark and dismal past for moving things in the direction of what we now want.

(2) A second point to note in connection with the Jadids and religion stems from those theorists of ‘modern’ religion: if our constructions of ‘modernity’ must be expanded beyond an exclusive focus on secularism, then what, after all, is ‘modern’ in religion?

Among the false dichotomies that ought to be highlighted in connection with Jadidisim, and with ‘Islamic modernism’ more broadly, is the opposition often posed between ‘modernity’ and ‘fundamentalism;’ it has been some 30 years since Martin Marty’s ‘Fundamentalism Project’ underscored the realization that the quintessentially ‘modern’ form of religion is fundamentalism, with its

35  The trap of Jadidophilia also inevitably affects our understanding of contemporary Islamist movements in Central Asia. For instance, what is missing from Khalid’s discussion of the appeal of post-Soviet Islamist groups (Islam after Communism: 163-4) is acknowledgment of the role of both the Soviet state and Jadid-style reformist thought in creating a thirst for non-local forms and interpreters of ‘real’ Islam that have now borne fruit in local Islamist circles.

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textuality, its call for individual engagement with textuality, its quantification of commitment, and its rejection of cumulative tradition sanctioned by com- munal endorsement rather than by scriptural literalism. Fundamentalisms, in short, far from being throwbacks to a ‘medieval’ past or relics of old-fashioned ‘tradition,’ reflect the actualization, in religious spheres, of many of the fea- tures said to be characteristic of ‘modernity.’36 Whether we accept, that is, the coherence and historical force of ‘modernity,’ or question the substantiality or usefulness of that category, we must acknowledge that religious fundamental- isms overlap significantly with what is usually said to define ‘modernity;’ this overlap in itself may highlight the problems with that concept, which even in its ‘academic’ definitions is typically framed in terms of a diminishing role for religion—a phenomenon relegated to the ‘pre-modern’ or ‘traditional’ world prior to the advent of modernity.37

The term ‘fundamentalism,’ of course, is used promiscuously today, but its ‘original’ religious sense, in Protestant Christianity, of stressing a reliance on literally-interpreted foundational scriptures and a rejection of interven- ing cumulative tradition, fits the Wahhābīs and Salafists as well; as discussed further below, it also fits the religious profile of the Jadid critique.

To be sure, the Wahhābī version of the fundamentalist emphasis on “sola scriptura” (as in the Reformation slogan) had roots in a long tradition rep- resented by Ḥanbalī jurisprudence and by such figures as Ibn Taymīya, and in this regard one may object with some reason that it hardly belongs to

36  It is largely within the tiresome terminological battle over ‘modernity’ vs. ‘postmodernity’ that we may situate Zygmunt Bauman’s insistence that fundamentalism is “a specifically postmodern form of religion,” “born of the internal contradictions of postmodern life” (Postmodernity and its Discontents [New York: New York University Press, 1997]: 182). “Fundamentalism,” he writes further, “is a thoroughly contemporary postmodern phenomenon, embracing fully the ‘rationalizing’ reforms and technological developments of modernity, and attempting not so much to ‘roll back’ modern departures, as to ‘have one’s cake and eat it’—make possible a full enjoyment of modern attractions without paying the price they demand” (italics mine). Bauman’s phrasing suggests a recognition of the ‘modern’ character of fundamentalism, but seems to imply that the “postmodern” component lies in ‘enjoying’ modernity in a somehow illicit, or irresponsible, fashion; this, however, misses the point, in my view, of fundamentalism as a reflection of many of the elements that are typically said to constitute ‘modernity.’

37  For a different perspective on the relationship of religion to ‘modernity’—dismissing the view that ‘modernity’ goes hand-in-hand with ‘secularism,’ framing 19th-century “empires of religion” marked by centralizing authority and growing bureaucracies, but not directly addressing the issue of ‘fundamentalism’—see C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780‑1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), esp. 325-65.

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‘modernity,’ however that fuzzy concept might be plausibly defined; never- theless, it is not accidental that the growing appeal of Salafist thought coin- cided with the Muslim world’s encounter with the West and with 20th-century ‘modernity,’ and in terms of attitudes toward the sources of religious authority, Muslim currents that are variously labeled ‘reformist,’ ‘fundamentalist,’ ‘mod- ernist,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘rigorist,’ or ‘puritanical’ should be recognized as having much more in common than is sometimes acknowledged. We may with reason dis- tinguish the goals of Muslim ‘modernists’ from those of Wahhābīs, Salafists, and others, but they share, among other things, a rhetorical dismissal of com- munal tradition, an emphasis upon the individual as the vehicle for change, and the conviction that ‘real’ Islam can be based solely on a ‘minimalist’ scrip- tural foundation.

With regard to the Jadids in particular, what is counted as their ‘modernity’ has been mostly framed in terms of a critique of the preceding ‘system,’ and is again a circularity; but where specific issues have been highlighted as key to the Jadids’ ‘modernity,’ these tend to overlap substantially with hallmarks of ‘modern’ fundamentalisms. The openness to individuality ascribed to ‘the modern’ parallels the individual interpretation of scripture promised by Salafist (and Protestant) modernity, as well as the expanded ‘individual’ sphere of particular religious obligations, formerly reserved for the umma as a whole; the much-vaunted emphasis of ‘modernity’ upon rationality is a counterpart of literalism in religious terms,38 as is ‘modernity’s’ purported focus on empirical evidence (i.e., in the religious context, scripture), which flows from the claim that the pre-modern is based on rote learning and tradition, i.e., upon what is handed down (rather than reflecting a method of engaging with what is handed down). Religious ‘modernity thus heightens the primary, and in some cases exclusive, authority of texts and the written word, undermining various non-literate modes for the transmission of knowledge, and likewise challenges, in social terms, the educational system, by way of developing a new elite not bound to the institutional taqlīd of the traditional madrasas; in both ways it overlaps considerably with the Jadids’ program.

I would argue, then, that the Jadidists drew upon views and programs we would recognize as ‘fundamentalist’ in shaping their critique of their societies, and insofar as these views can be found in Muslim thought well before any- one would mark the beginning of ‘the modern’ anywhere, it would be better to

38  ‘Rationality’ and the discourse of those who fetishize it overlap strongly with textual and scriptural fetishes in multiple arenas, and both the promotion of ‘textualism’ and the championing of the autonomous ‘authority’ of individuals in engaging with and interpreting such texts are again shared by the old Jadids and the new Salafists.

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consider them in their own cultural and intellectual trajectory, and not insist that they be identified as ‘modern.’ In other words, the elements of the Jadids’ program with antecedents (and not merely parallels) in the Muslim thought with which they were familiar belonged to that cultural and intellectual world, not to an abstracted ‘modernity;’ other elements, to be sure, they took straight from the ‘modern’ West, but the key factor is not that they belonged to a ‘modernity’ meaningful in a Muslim context, but that they were inspired by the West. When considered from a different perspective, after all, a key component of what was deemed ‘modern’ in the Jadids’ program begins to dissolve into something else (a current of Muslim thought, or Western influence).

(3) How, then, should we understand and contextualize the Jadids’ specific religious orientation? On this issue, Jadidocentric scholarship has offered dif- ferent responses. In the 1960s, Carrère d’Encausse acknowledged the Jadids’ religious stance and their closeness to Wahhābism; but hers was a minority view. Bennigsen linked the Jadids chiefly with nationalism, as if to distance them from Islam; another prominent admirer of the Jadids, Edward Lazzerini, insisted on their intellectual and epistemological break from Islamic norms; and in his study of Jadidism, Khalid argued that they were essentially secu- lar, and sought to frame them as part of a current wholly distinct from rig- orist Islam. In a later work (Islam after Communism), Khalid did acknowledge the religious dimensions of the Jadid program, and even drew some parallels between Jadid and Wahhābī critiques, but continued to insist that drinking the elixir of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ distinguished the Jadids from earlier Muslim ‘reform’ movements.

In considering this question, it is important to keep in mind the vital ana- lytical parallels between the Jadid critique of ‘traditional Islam’ and currents of rigorist, fundamentalist Muslim thought both before and after them. Indeed, the Jadid impulse, insofar as it relates to religion, was not at all ‘new’ or origi- nal, as noted above. It reflected currents in Islamic juridical and religious inter- pretation that, while never strong in Central Asia, occasionally emerged there, and were well-known in parts of the Middle East; indeed, it should be recog- nized as a ‘minority’ viewpoint forming part of the general Muslim heritage.

What was new with the Jadids was, of course, their specific historical con- text, and above all the impact of European thought, heightened by the eco- nomic, technological, and military superiority of the Russian empire over Central Asian societies;39 many of the Jadids thus advocated specific measures

39  Ironically, the ‘reformist’ rejection of ‘superstition’ often rested in part upon a sense of cultural embarrassment, as ‘modernist’ critics were ashamed of their gullible coreligionists in the face of European disdain, and, given their religious orientation,

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(e.g., linguistic modernization, script ‘simplification,’ the broader educational reform that gave the ‘movement’ its name, and eventually specific political goals as well) that played no part in earlier Muslim reform movements, but with regard to religious matters, narrowly speaking, their arguments and positions were quite familiar, and were not without precedent in Central Asia (where programs of religious ‘reforms’ had been advocated in specific political con- texts as recently as the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as discussed above).

So, how should we understand the relationship between Jadid thought and programs and what we might rightfully call ‘fundamentalist’ Muslim thought? On the one hand, it is not so easy to find Jadids calling for purely scriptural approaches to religious life, or for ‘fundamentalist’ approaches to interpret- ing scripture; but on the other hand, most Jadids readily measured what they regarded as harmful accretions onto Muslim religious practice against limited scriptural authority, narrowly interpreted, and this puts them squarely in the Salafist camp, even if some of them would have stopped short of actively call- ing for the goals of some contemporary Salafists (their political environment would have stopped them, of course). The very framework of ‘reform’ likewise links the Jadids with Salafist programs.

There is no question that the Jadids of the Russian empire and the Wahhābīs (whether the 18th-century variety or those of the 20th century who came to adopt the label attached to them at first by their opponents) represent differ- ent historical contexts; but both shared common assumptions and analyses, and recognition of this should be kept in mind when evaluating the Jadids and their program. However much their goals may have differed, they share many of the same intellectual foundations as the historical Wahhābīs and other reformists. These foundations, moreover, were arguably the chief ‘indigenous’ feature of the Jadids’ program, less affected by Russian and western influence, though we should not lose sight of the larger framework of the rise of Salafist interpretations in the eras of European colonial domination and ‘globalism.’

With this in mind, I believe it will become increasingly clear that Adeeb Khalid’s sweeping dismissal of ‘religious’ discourse on the part of the Jadids, in The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, cannot be sustained; he sought to distance the Jadids, keen on ‘change,’ from the purely ‘religious’ reformers who spoke of purification using the language of taqlīd,40 while elsewhere he

would hardly defend their devotion to such practices, which drew outside criticism as obstacles to ‘civilization,’ on the grounds of ‘national’ cultural autonomy. Whether such factors shape contemporary Salafist impulses is for others to determine.

40  Khalid, Politics: 102.

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explicitly tried to distance the Jadids from the Wahhābīs by insisting that the former linked the ‘return to the roots’ they advocated with ‘progress’ rather than with the ‘puritanical’ religion of the Wahhābīs;41 here, of course, ‘progress’ is another of the valorizing labels (such as ‘liberal,’ as opposed to ‘conserva- tive,’ in religious terms, and even ‘modernity’ itself ) that obscures more than it illuminates in historical terms. More broadly, Khalid did not take stock of the allusions to such reformist language in the writings of the Jadids, or the implicit religiosity of much of the basic linguistic and conceptual repertoire at their disposal in discussing what was ‘beneficial’ or ‘useful’ or ‘good,’ and his argument depended from the start upon a restricted definition of what con- stituted ‘religious’ issues (a definition rooted, circularly, in the restricted reli- gious sphere he says the Jadids sought to create). He comes close to having to acknowledge the appeal of ‘religious’ discourse to the Jadids when noting that as they followed debate and discussion in the Ottoman world after the revolu- tion of 1908, they “sympathised primarily with the Islamists rather than the Turkists;”42 he adds a note explaining that the Ottoman Islamists “were mod- ernists” strongly influenced by the likes of Muḥammad ʻAbduh, but despite— or rather because of—the label ‘modernist,’ this quite nicely makes the point of Jadid sympathy with Muslim ‘reformists’ of Salafist leanings.43

Elsewhere Khalid offers a brief encapsulation of the Jadids’ attitudes toward Islam, which overlap—though he does not mention this—on nearly every count with standard Salafist positions:

41  Khalid, Islam after Communism: 46. In all fairness, Khalid’s efforts to distance Jadid-style reformism, concerned with “yoking Islam to progress and modernity” (45), from Wahhābī- style “puritanical” reformism are made in the context of mentioning other ‘reformist’ movements in the Muslim world as parallels to Jadidism (though not, as noted above, earlier currents in Central Asia itself ), reflecting, already, a step back from his insistence, in his earlier study, on the non-religious character of the Jadid program.

42  Khalid, Politics: 110-111. 43  ʿAbduh, of course, is typically regarded as a “nationalist” and “modernist,” but he opposed

taqlīd and multiple madhhabs, called for restoring ijtihād, and demanded a new ijmāʿ (that is, one not rooted in cumulative tradition), based on the Qurʼān and “the true sunna;” he also opposed the veneration of saints, and in other ways as well reflected the assumptions shared by both the Salafists and the Jadids. He was distinctly ‘modern’ chiefly by placing reason above the literal interpretation of scripture, but he did so by arguing that the demands of the public good and of the times must take precedence; the public good, of course, echoes quite traditional Muslim juridical argumentation, while “the times” simply present the arena for ijtihād.

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 . . . the Jadids believed that the ‘true’ teachings of Islam had been obfus- cated for centuries of interpretations that had led Muslims astray . . . Jadidism rejected the authority of traditional ulama to interpret Islam. Instead, the Jadids argued for a return to the textual sources of Islam. This was a radically new way of understanding Islam, since it pulled Islam way from its moorings in local customs and traditions. Indeed, the Jadids denounced many local customs as un-Islamic.44

This brief summary in fact nicely encapsulates two of the serious flaws in Jadidocentric scholarship regarding their religious orientation: it stresses the radicality of the Jadids’ approach to Islam, ignoring the longstanding currents they were tapping into (including even some ‘minority’ currents in Central Asia), and it overlooks the nature of those longstanding currents, missing their broader links with fundamentalist, scripturalist, and Salafist interpretations of Islam.

A further hallmark of Jadid-centered scholarship is the insistence, or the conviction, that the Jadid program was fundamentally and radically different from ‘traditional’ Muslim modes of ‘reform’ and ‘renewal,’ as countenanced in the ḥadīth promising tajdīd with every new century of Islam; the difference lay, we are reminded, in both social experience and epistemological assump- tions, and the Jadid enterprise was thus different from—and, yes, lest we for- get, superior to—the potentialities of tajdīd at the basic level of knowing and seeing the universe.

This, indeed, is the basic argument of one of Lazzerini’s articles, from 1992,45 the subtitle of which—“The Jadīd Response to Pressure for Change in the Modern Age”—leaves unanswered the question of precisely who or what was pressing. Here he uses al-Qūrṣāvī and Gasprinskii as models for the two types, the mujaddid, as he calls the former, and the Jadid, and he lays out what the new type entailed: (1) a new medium (the periodical press), and the new, reformed language in which to publish; (2) a new approach to history, aban- doning the notion of the Golden Age, promoting change as an ideal, justifying cultural borrowing, and adopting the analytical methodology and critical use of sources characteristic of western historical study; (3) an elevation of ratio- nality in Muslim thought, as a counter or complement to “the Sharīʻa,” with an emphasis upon ethics and social justice, and an insistence upon “the kind of

44  A. Khalid, “Islam in Contemporary Central Asia.” In R. Michael Feener, ed., Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2004): 133-59 [137].

45  Lazzerini, “Beyond Renewal.”

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toleration that ijtihad implies;”46 (4) a reform of educational structures and methods, expanding beyond the ‘traditional’ Muslim subjects, and recognizing the value of “non-Islamic institutions;” (5) an empowerment of women and greater inclusiveness for women in society; (6) an expansion of the adoption of technology and means of production. Lazzerini concludes that Jadidism represented “a way of organizing thinking” that differed fundamentally from “the prevailing dominant discourse that was Islam for many centuries,”47 thus invoking, as in so much of Jadidocentric scholarship, the untested assumption of changeless tradition in the pre-Jadid, pre-modern past.

To some extent this effort to distance the Jadids from Muslim ‘religious’ thought reflects the narrow, Protestant-style understanding of what ‘religion’ is that prevails in Jadidocentric scholarship (and in much other scholarship on Islam in the Russian and Soviet contexts); in any event, the ‘genealogy’ of this effort goes back still further, all the way to Alexandre Bennigsen. In Islam in the Soviet Union (1967), by Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, the authors insist that the initial phase of the Jadid program, which they call ‘religious reform,’ “sought to break with conservative traditionalism and, without repudi- ating what was fundamental, to render Islam capable of surviving in a modern world dominated by reason and the spirit of criticism.”48 The key word here, by the way, is not “conservative” or “traditionalism,” but “fundamental;” it reminds us that there is much to religion that is not really important or even essential to it, and it thus reminds us that ‘reform’ will—indeed, must—entail a process of stripping things away from religion, leaving only what is “fundamental.” The specifics of what must be stripped away—and in the ‘developmental’ sequence proposed by the authors, this stripping away is necessary so that script reform, school reform, and political nationalism can follow—become clear as the authors continue: “narrow dogmatism;” “obscurantism;” “traditional theology;” “blind obedience to traditional authorities (taqlid);” and obstruction of “the right of every man to find in the Quran and the Hadith a reply to all religious questions.” The latter point, of course, sounds vaguely democratic, even revo- lutionary: mufassirs of the world, unite! It is Ibn Taymīya’s program, of course, and contemporary Salafists’, and, for that matter, Luther’s as well; but what is

46  Ibid.: 162; for a more serious discussion of ijtihād in Jadid thought, see T. Zarcone, “Philosophie et théologie chez les Djadids: La question du raisonnement indépendant (iǧtihâd).” Cahiers du monde russe 37/1-2 (1996): 53-64.

47  Lazzerini, “Beyond Renewal”: 163; elsewhere (165, n. 1), after insisting on the radical power of the epistemological shift he links with ‘modernism,’ he objects to the suggestion that modernism is just Westernization.

48  Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union: 35.

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most telling is the absence of any explanation that the important ‘innovation’ here lay not in talking of “the right of every man,” but in talking only about “the Quran and the Hadith” as the sources to be mined in seeking answers to those “religious questions.” Portraying what was, and is, a restriction of religious authority (to the Ḥanbalī minimum) as an expansion of it, to “every man,” is only one small example of the misconstrued context, or the partisan bias, in such discussions, but it is worth noting nonetheless. It is perhaps doubly ironic that Bennigsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay credit Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī as the first to take a stand “against the old but still powerful conservative religious educational system of Central Asia,” and claim that in so doing, Marjānī was “invoking the authority of the Imam Ghazali” (the authors refrain from calling him the “Dark Genius”).

To some extent the impulse to distinguish the lovable Jadids from a ‘tradi- tional’ rigorist reformer such as Ibn Taymīya or Muḥammad b. ʻAbd al-Wahhāb is understandable, but it is ultimately misleading on historical, intellectual, and social grounds. The problem, above all, with regard to the litany of fea- tures connected by Lazzerini with Jadidism,49 is that much of it is also char- acteristic of many, and certainly of the most recent, movements cast in terms of tajdīd, and indeed of the entire 20th-century Salafist platform; with the pos- sible exception of the ‘empowerment’ of women—though here too contem- porary Salafist discourse casts its prescriptions for female propriety as tools of empowerment—and with only minimal tweaking here and there, the Jadid program looks very much like that of techno-savvy Salafists. And, to invoke a central analytical principle of rational, Western historical scholarship— namely, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, then

49  With regard to the litany of features, it may be noted that stressing the periodical press and the ‘reformed’ language overstates the reach of both, and overlooks the occasional use of both by non-Jadids. The supposed break in the understanding of history was discussed above, in connection with Khalid’s argument, while the ‘change’ promoted by the Jadids was discrete and rhetorically useful, but hardly an ‘ideal;’ and borrowing western historical methods was also undertaken by non-Jadids, who often evinced a more critical approach to those methods than the Jadids. Rationalist thought has a long history in Muslim thought, as do emphases upon ethics and social justice; as for linking ijtihād with ‘toleration,’ this reflects the same sort of misinterpretation noted briefly above in the case of Bennigsen. Educational reform was, of course, the hallmark of the Jadid program, but in fact links them with Salafist-style assaults on ‘traditional’ madhhab- bound education, and in any case arguably had little reach, and little appeal. As for new technology, this was coming with or without the Jadids (and, given their small numbers, if they had been the only ones who adopted it, it would have had much more limited reach than was in fact the case).

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consider it a duck—we may readily argue that the effort of Jadidocentric schol- arship to set apart the Jadids as something wholly other than Muslim propo- nents of tajdīd, of purifying Muslim life of extrinsic accretions, and of returning to the pristine days of the Salaf has a steep hill to climb. That some individuals whom we now call Jadids moved into the ranks of wholly irreligious or ‘secular’ movements can hardly obscure the considerable overlap between the typical Jadid program and what we now call ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘Islamist’ movements; indeed, the post-Soviet environment has revealed a close affinity between the profile of the most secularized and ‘Sovietized’ elements of the Central Asian population and that of the elements most drawn to Islamist agendas.50

In this connection it is worth noting the frequent overreach involved in try- ing to insulate the Jadids from their clear affinities with ‘reformist,’ scripturalist Islam. In outlining the impact of the print media utilized by the Jadids, Khalid hails the “desacralization of writing itself ” entailed by what he calls the “ubiq- uity of print” and “the spread of functional literacy,” and then goes seriously astray in his discussion of “the commodification of the written word,” seeming to suggest that ‘religious’ texts were not part of the new world of printing, and that only printed books involved the market (“unlike manuscripts,” he writes, “printed books had to be sold, much like any other commodity”). In between, however, he claims that “The Jadids’ denigration of the medieval commentar- ies and glosses used in the madrasa, and their call for a ‘return’ to the textual

50  After all, when religiosity, or ‘faith,’ is defined in the toggle-switch mode of ‘belief ’ being either on or off, it becomes almost incidental to the broader intellectual vision shared by the secularized Soviet man and the Salafist; yet when the switch moves from off to on, and the secularized individual of ‘modernity’ turns to religion, he is predisposed by training and intellectual culture to appreciate the ‘scientific’ and scriptural certainties of the Salafist program. It is true, of course, that the present-day Islamists of Central Asia have virtually no direct connection with the historical Jadids, whose memory has indeed been cultivated more in the nationalist camp than elsewhere in the post-Soviet era (as was the case in the Soviet era as well, in dissident circles); in religious matters, however, the Jadids reflected the same attitudes and ‘sources’ that predominate among contemporary Islamists, and they all, in turn, held notions of religious life closely akin to those that shaped Soviet religious policy and practice. This confluence of attitudes regarding what religion is and ought to be—regardless of differences about the value of religion—is shared further with nationalists, leaving a heavy majority of those Central Asians who self-consciously responded to and engaged with ‘modernity’ on the same page regarding religiosity; it is important, for an understanding of why and where the latest generation of ‘reformers’ and ‘purifiers’ of Islam hold some appeal, to remember these common intellectual threads.

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sources of Islam were rooted in this new attitude toward writing.”51 Are we really to believe that the Jadids’ dedication to printing shaped their attitude toward “medieval commentaries and glosses” (the immunity of such texts to printing would come as a surprise to the patrons of Bulaq editions)? The critique of the established madhhabs for relying on “medieval commentaries and glosses,” and thereby neglecting the narrower scriptural bases of religious authority (the Qurʼān and a limited corpus of ḥadīths), is again precisely the hallmark of the Salafist critique of taqlīd; could it not be that in denigrating such commentaries and glosses, the Jadids were in fact signalling their reli- gious orientation in a way that links them with the world of what would now be called Salafist thought?

Similarly, Khalid acknowledges, in connection with Fitrat’s critique of what pilgrims were doing at the shrine of Bahāʼ al-Dīn Naqshband (earlier Central Asian critiques, of course, are ignored), that “Criticism of customary practices for being not ‘truly Islamic’ and hence connected to ignorance was a common feature of Jadid discourse,”52 but stops short of linking this common feature with critiques of shrine-centered practices that may be found in Ibn Taymīya, in the Wahhābī program, in the systematic Islamist program of shrine- destruction in Timbuktu, or in Salafist literature (not to mention in the writings of some earlier Central Asian ‘reformers’). The further critiques of customary practices, as Khalid outlines,53 moreover, are mostly focused on immoral- ity and extravagant feasts, sounding more like a Baptist temperance sermon, summoning the will to abstinence, than a sweeping call for social or cultural innovation; more to the point, perhaps, it is difficult not to think, upon read- ing about the Jadids’ calls for moral reform, and their criticism of the state’s dereliction of duty in failing to legislate morality,54 of the religious imperatives of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong,” in the Muslim context,55

51  Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: 136. The theoreticians of ‘modernity’ make much of the ‘reflexivity’ said to characterize it (see Giddens, Consequences: 36-45; Bauman, Postmodernity: 71, insisting that “modernity is incurably self-critical”); those who insist that this sort of ‘reflexivity’ is uniquely ‘modern’ might do well to consider, for instance, the juridical commentaries and glosses decried by the Jadids, or the Sufi discipline of muḥāsaba.

52  Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: 143. 53  Ibid.: 144-7. 54  Ibid.: 141. 55  See M. Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially 509-530, for some examples of the ‘modern’ evocations of the principle, as “the old concepts are being deployed in a new setting” (509).

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or, for that matter, of church-based reform movements of the same era in the US (or, still further, of the lessons of Prohibition). And in any case, with regard to the Jadids’ criticism of ‘socially harmful’ religious practices such as the expenses entailed by wedding feasts or other toys, the language employed, or at least some of it, may be that of social utility or waste of resources, but it cannot be accidental that such practices have been targeted by the Jadids, by contemporary Salafists and other reformists, and by Soviet antireligious propaganda.

Likewise, as Khalid discusses a Jadid play decrying narcotic addicts, we may be left wondering whether its tone more closely resembled that of A Hatful of Rain or that of Reefer Madness; but we are assured that the play’s message is not ‘religious,’ since, as Khalid writes, the addicts were “immoral not so much because Islamic law forbade the use of narcotics but because they wasted time, money, and human resources.”56 It might be noted, of course, that the depic- tion of religious strictures as ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ is especially common pre- cisely in the ‘rationalized’ and scripturalized versions of religion promoted by religious ‘modernists,’ i.e., fundamentalists. In any case, when the basic prob- lem diagnosed by the Jadids is identified as ‘ignorance,’ using the terminology ( jāhilīya) that equates also with the time before Islam, it becomes difficult to extract the Jadids from their Muslim religious world.

In the end, whether we acknowledge that the Jadid ‘reform’ program criti- cized ‘innovations’ and ‘superstitious accretions’ to the pristine core of ‘real’ Islam as part of their engagement with essentially religious issues, or insist that they did so merely as an opportunistic evocation of religious rhetoric in the service of a ‘secularizing’ mission, may be secondary to the broader prob- lem entailed by either stance, which brings us back to the problem of bias: to point out the Jadids’ critique of ‘innovations’ and ‘accretions’ is one thing, but to take their side in that critique, explicitly or implicitly, is utterly irresponsible in scholarly terms. Where the admirers of the Jadids go astray—and indeed, where they do a serious disservice to scholarly understanding—is in failing to explain to their readers that substantial currents in Muslim religious thought, both in the past and at present, understand those ‘accretions’ as perfectly legitimate and indeed laudable facets of Muslim religiosity, or that the rhetoric of ‘purifying’ Islam of harmful ‘additions’ may equally be seen as ‘subtracting’ those legitimate facets from Muslim practice—indeed, from a viable religious vision with a rich intellectual tradition and deep social roots.

Instead of offering such an explanation and properly contextualizing the Jadid critique, however, Jadidocentric scholarship has simply assumed that

56  Khalid, Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: 147.

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their critique was in defense of Islamic legitimacy (if not of ‘modernity’), that what they criticized was self-evidently a departure from ‘true’ Islam, that in their time only the Jadids had the proper sense of Islamic rectitude, and that outside their circles all was innovation and corruption. These stances are utterly indefensible, historically and culturally; if Jadidocentric scholars have adopted them out of ignorance of ‘the other side,’ or through unfamiliarity with the body of sources that could articulate that other side, we might simply explain the biases of Jadidocentric scholarship as the unfortunate byproducts of the failure to bridge gaps in disciplinary or linguistic or ‘area’ training—though explaining them in this way does not amount to excusing them. Whatever the reasons, however, the unavoidable conclusion—namely that wittingly or unwittingly, Jadidocentric scholars have blithely adopted one side in a religious debate—is reason enough to seriously question their scholarship.

The point, after all, is not to argue that the Jadids were the same sort of ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘Salafists’ as may be found in other times and places, but to show their intellectual overlap with the groups those labels may fairly rep- resent (however much they have now become laden with misleading or irrel- evant associations through careless and polemical use). Whether individual Jadids were consciously basing their arguments on what we might now call Salafist principles, or were even unconsciously influenced by the puritani- cal stances of earlier spokesmen for ‘reforming’ Islam, might be possible to determine on an individual basis; but this is ultimately less important than the undeniable affinity, on many fronts, between the programs of the Jadids and those of latter-day Salafists. To argue that a Jadid writer arrived at conclu- sions similar to those of the Salafists without being directly shaped by Salafist thought is one thing; but to argue that that Jadid writer would not have known quite well that his conclusion overlapped considerably with the positions of ‘reformist’ currents represented by Salafism or Wahhābism simply defies credulity. The Jadids knew well who their bedfellows were, even if we pretend not to.

2.5 Essentializing Tradition: Jadidocentric Scholarship and the Neglect of History

I noted at the outset my admiration for the four conference themes framed in our program. To them, however, I would venture to add a fifth, which might be crudely framed as follows: Interest in, and the study of, the misconstrued, sporadic, wrongly evaluated, and terminologically-challenged phenomenon of ‘Jadidism’ has tended to suck the oxygen out of the already confined spaces in which Central Asia, or the Muslims of Russia, are studied, thereby hindering a more balanced understanding of religious, cultural, social, and political devel- opments during the period in which those labeled Jadids lived.

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My point in stressing this imbalance is to draw attention to yet another unfortunate feature of Jadidocentric scholarship—one that is perhaps the best indicator of just how irresponsible that scholarship has been. In sum- marizing or detailing the Jadids’ critique of their societies, virtually no one— with a few exceptions already noted—has questioned it or seriously sought to construct an independent assessment of Central Asian (or ‘Russian Muslim’) intellectual history in the period leading up to the emergence of the Jadids’ critique. The admirers of the Jadids do not merely accept their arguments as ‘correct’ and legitimate; they often seem to forget that they were arguments in the first place, part of a polemic that depended upon offering up a caricatured depiction of their opponents and their positions—and, more to the point, of a pervasive intellectual stagnation that only the fresh wind of the Jadids could dispel. In accepting the Jadids’ arguments—whether by naively assuming that they presented accurate descriptions of the past, or by insisting that their argu- ments were historically ‘necessary’ as a response to a pressing ‘modernity’— the admirers of the Jadids try to relieve themselves of the need to take seriously anything but the Jadids. One can imagine a ‘history of the field’ in which the wish to establish a baseline, a ‘control’ for the Jadids’ arguments, spurred schol- arship on what came before them; but this would be expecting too much, it seems. Instead, the uninvestigated past was to serve only as a foil, and needed no granular detail.

In reality, of course, the past—“tradition” or the “qadīmist” world or the backward days of obscurantism—turns out to be much more complex, multi- valent, and ‘experimental’ than either the Jadids themselves or their scholarly admirers acknowledge or realize. Critiques of the pre-Jadid past use a cari- catured representation of that past to make the point of the Jadids’ powerful innovation, or simply their self-evident correctness as harbingers of the future, willing and able to leave the benighted past behind; that benighted past ends with the coming of the Jadids, but, depending on the presentation, it begins an unspecified number of centuries earlier, or with the end of the Timurid era (as with Starr), or with the Mongol conquest, or perhaps even with the Arab conquest.57

57  For example, before discussing the Jadids, one analyst of contemporary affairs writes thus of the long, dark centuries before they appeared (italics mine): “Probably the word used most often by historians to describe Central Asia after Tamerlane’s rule in the fourteenth century is ‘isolation.’ It is difficult, in fact, to find another region that became so unknown to the outside world, that literally dropped off the map for centuries, as did Central Asia . . . for the sedentary population, the society and economy were essentially feudal, with few changes even over a period of several hundred years . . . the political, social, and economic state was buttressed by an extremely obscurantist clergy . . .” (P. M. Carley, “The

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It should be obvious that such a blanket characterization of such extended periods of social, cultural, and intellectual history cannot have any serious meaning; and indeed what it really signifies is that those who make such a characterization choose not to engage with that past, or are unable to do so, but in any case do not have any interest in acknowledging that it might be necessary, or that it might lead them to alter part of their narrative, to rethink their admiration, and to tweak, at least, their blatant bias.

Perhaps more problematically, the Jadid-centered narrative obscures and generalizes about not just the periods prior to their emergence, but the period in which the Jadids themselves lived. Any fair evaluation of the history of Tsarist-era Central Asia would have to begin with the understanding that the real story of this era—despite the examples of adaptation and dynamic, if selective, engagement with various sorts of intellectual and technologi- cal change—is the continuation of what we might guardedly call traditional Muslim life in Central Asia, unaffected by the Jadid project (that traditional patterns themselves changed should go without saying, though understanding how they changed requires a kind of scholarship the Jadidocentric narrative itself discourages); yet most discussions of this era stress the emergence of the Jadids as the key development of the period, again skewing our understanding of the times. They go further astray by pretending that only the Jadids saw, or recognized, or responded to the changes underway in their times, ignoring the extensive evidence on groups and individuals with much to say about such changes, but without much interest in the Jadid project.

To some extent this willful neglect of the pre-Jadid past, and of the wider society around the Jadids outside their narrow circles, is part of a larger arc of historical scholarship that is peculiar to Central Asia; the region’s ancient history gets considerable attention, and the early, pre-Mongol period of the Islamic era is treated as part of the wider history of the Muslim world, but after the Mongol conquest, and especially after the Timurid era, historical study of

Legacy of the Soviet Political System and the Prospects for Developing Civil Society in Central Asia.” In Political Culture and Civil Society in Russia and the New States of Eurasia, ed. V. Tismaneanu [Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1995]: 294). The ‘sourcing’ is especially noteworthy in the following ‘description’ by another such analyst, leading into an account of the Jadids: “The intellectual life of the region began to decline. Bukhara, once a renowned center of Islamic learning, became enmeshed in sterile pettifoggery. The accounts of foreign visitors as well as of reformist Bukharan Muslims such as Donish and Fitrat indicate that by this time corruption, ignorance, and religious hypocrisy were endemic” (S. Akiner, “Social and Political Reorganisation in Central Asia: Transition from Pre-Colonial to Post-Colonial Society.” In Post‑Soviet Central Asia, ed. T. Atabaki and J. O’Kane [London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1998]: 7).

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Central Asia falls off dramatically. As for intellectual history in any part of the period from 1500 to the Russian conquest, there is practically nothing to point to—except, that is, for the mountains of unstudied sources. With the renewed interest of historians in Russian-era Central Asia (roughly from 1865 to 1917), however, it is not the history of most Central Asians that draws attention, but the history of the small layer of local elites drawn to Russian culture; ordinary Central Asians, and the ongoing cultural production, in manuscript form, of ‘traditional’ circles, are again overlooked and left out of the picture, because of the inordinate attention to the Jadids, cast simplistically as the ‘enlightened’ reformist and modernist elements of an otherwise backward, and unappeal- ing, society. The ‘traditional’ madrasa education of many Jadids is often noted, but what they are celebrated for is having ‘risen above’ that education, or even supposedly repudiating it, again undermining any interest in exploring what that education was actually about.

This is the vicious circle reflected, after all, in Starr’s book, where we began: the Jadid critique tells us that nothing of value, and certainly nothing that meets ‘modern’ criteria, was produced in earlier times, except perhaps for products of the freethinking ‘scientific’ spirit of a golden age; the selective endorsement of ‘national’ cultures during parts of the Soviet era reinforces this claim; scholars may study certain types of cultural production—‘scientific’ literature—from the ‘golden age,’ but are reminded by various narratives not to waste their time on Central Asian material from the last several centuries prior to the Russian conquest; and so the cultural and intellectual legacy of that period remains unstudied and unknown, leaving the impression that the Jadid critique was correct, and in any case leaving a derivative historian such as Starr no original scholarship to derive from. Better to ignore that period, and skip straight to those who tried to recover that ‘lost enlightenment.’

It is a sham historical narrative, but it is still fueling articles, books, and scholarly agendas well beyond the confines of Starr’s book.

And this is one of the reasons why my own inclination is to resolve that earlier dilemma on the side of ignoring the Jadids. Simply the fact that the Jadids have continued to be interpreted in isolation from the study of earlier reformist impulses, and of broader trends in Central Asian religious history, should remind us of the urgent need to fill out our understanding of these earlier and broader trends; similarly, the failure to recognize that if the Jadid critique paved the way for anything, it was for the heightened appeal, in some circles, of puritanical and exclusivist approaches to Islam should remind us of the contemporary importance of a better and more balanced understanding of the Jadids and their time. The only way to achieve this balance is to turn attention to the still-blank pages where the lives and thought of the non-Jadids

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are yet to be written—on the basis of written sources that are far from blank but remain seldom read.

Yet in calling for this shift of attention, it is equally important to avoid the worst legacy of Jadidocentric scholarship by essentializing what came before the Jadids into an unchanging, timeless ‘tradition;’ and this, in turn, leads to yet another dilemma. On the one hand, when we ignore the world outside the Jadids, we miss above all the various representatives of multiple modes of Muslim religiosity that were prevalent before the Jadids, were prevalent still during the time of the Jadids, were alternately assaulted and, in some ways, ironically, fostered during the Soviet period, and are still to be found in Central Asia; certainly it is important to better acquaint ourselves with them. On the other hand, it is equally important to recognize the adaptability of Muslim religiosity not only in the Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet eras, but in earlier times as well, by way of framing Muslim religiosity as a subject for historical inquiry and acknowledging that it does have a history. Doing so is essential in order to counter the rhetoric of the static timelessness of ‘tradition,’ presumed to be impervious to ‘modernity,’ meaning just change; this rhetoric rests in part upon Jadid rhetoric, designed to critique and attack and undermine their opponents, but despite its reinforcement in Soviet and post-Soviet times, it can and must be corrected on the basis of the pervasive evidence of both continu- ity and adaptability in Muslim ‘tradition.’58

Even without the extensive work that is needed, the outlines, at least, of a replacement of Jadidocentric scholarship on the specific question of what they criticized are relatively easy to trace. It may begin with the earlier currents of ‘reform’ in Central Asia, presaging elements of the Jadid social and religious critique, briefly reviewed above, but there is much more to be found. We may find material on ongoing patterns of ‘traditional’ religious life that reminds us of the dynamism and adaptation that was part of that ‘tradition,’ despite the narrative of stagnation; we may examine the evidence on ongoing juridi- cal development, and application, looking past the dichotomies offered by Jadidocentric scholarship unversed in these issues; we may look more closely

58  The Jadid claim to be oriented toward the future rather than the past was moderated by the idealization of a particular distant past—i.e., the age of the earliest generations of Muslims—an idealization shared, again, with ‘religious modernism,’ i.e., fundamentalist, Salafist visions of Islam; these two currents also share an aversion to history, by ultimately rejecting the legitimacy of Muslim experience in the intervening eras, between the constructed and idealized ‘foundational’ time and the cusp of the future at which the Jadids and Salafists alike claim to stand. It is that Muslim experience itself that can and must be recovered.

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at the colonial impact on law and legal proceedings, beyond the trope of sharīʻa vs. ʻādat, and beyond the conceptual segregation of native and Russian worlds; we could explore the impact of Tsarist rule upon local negotiations of sanctity involving family traditions and shrines; we could look more deeply into the sacralization of labor through the discourse and practice of various occupational traditions;59 and we could re-think the Sovietologically-fraught world of Sufi communities and their historical development. We could thereby gain some better idea of the substance of religious life that continued, despite the Jadid critique, and continued to shape religious life in the Soviet and post- Soviet periods, despite official legal strictures.

We must also argue the need to “listen” to the voices expressed only in tradi- tional forms and genres, in manuscripts; otherwise everything is skewed in favor of those writing in media, and with discursive styles, close to our own, rather than in the ‘alien’ world of traditional Islamic religious discourse, in manu- scripts. And we could underscore, by drawing upon different types of sources, the self-limiting impact of the sources and media utilized in Jadidocentric scholarship: its practitioners pay attention only to the relatively small number of Central Asian Muslims writing in non-traditional genres, in non-traditional media, e.g., plays and novels and journals, rather than those still writing by hand and producing manuscripts and describing a religious universe in the full range of religious ‘language,’ from juridical to ethical to hagiographical to mythical.

In the end, then, we may rightly argue that the chief negative legacy of Jadidocentric scholarship is simply the neglect or essentialization of what the Jadids claimed to be critiquing. But what is needed is not simply a response to the Jadid critique, or a response to Jadidocentric scholarship; either sort of response accords to the Jadids, and to scholars fixated on them, a role in defining the terms and focus of scholarly inquiry that they do not deserve and have not earned. What is needed, rather, is a concerted effort to examine the intellectual history of Central Asia, in its social and political contexts, as it should have been studied in the first place, before the Jadid narrative was placed front and center and began to crowd out other perspectives; that his- tory could not have been studied as it should have been, to be sure, with the tools provided by Sovietological training, or by training solely in the perspec- tives and issues of Russian imperial history. But it should be obvious that such

59  For this the stage has been set by J. E. Dağyeli, ‘Gott liebt das Handwerk:’ Moral, Identität und religiöse Legitimierung in der mittelasiatischen Handwerks‑risāla (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2011).

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study is essential if we are to understand those labeled Jadids themselves, and—more significantly—their society, in their historical complexity.

I would also emphasize, finally, that any attempt to better balance and con- textualize the ‘intellectual’ history of Central Asia must honestly seek to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and cannot confine itself within the madrasa walls; it will have to make sense of the ʿulamā and the jurists as well as the druggists and physicians, the amulet-makers as well as the genealogists, and the Sufis of various stripes; it will have to read juridical commentaries, craft risālas, sacred histories of towns and tribes, books of logic and geography, and in general the cultural production of the wide circles of Central Asian society that remained immune to the Jadids’ charms.

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