The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform

party would be highly intrusive of Muslim society, its cultural practices and
its solidarities, and, in the process, would jeopardize the Jadids' claim to
lead reform. Of course, the predominance of Russians in the industrial work
force in Turkestan, and the complete unwillingness of Russian socialist parties
to attract their "native" co-workers to their cause, meant that Behbudi's fears
remained largely groundless. Meanwhile, the older solidarities of craft guilds
had been severely disrupted by the advent of capitalism. By the turn of the
century, guild lodges (takiya ) were reported to be in disuse.[15] Caught in
this transformation, Muslim artisans and craftsmen could not formulate a voice
of their own.
Although the Jadids spoke of "the 10 million Muslims of Turkestan," and although
the settlement of Russian and Ukrainian peasants in the Qazaq lands of
Semirech'e and the Steppe krai had become a political issue of sorts, the rural
population remained virtually invisible in their writings. The silence is
revealing enough, but the one piece in the Jadid repertoire to address the issue
is even more so. The first issue of the Bukharan newspaper Turan carried "An
Address to Our Peasant Brothers," in which the anonymous author wrote: "O
peasant brothers, o children of the land [watan ], you are a pure and sincere
people who, unaware of the world, spend your time in hard labor .... If you did
not exist, our affairs would be in ruin. May God give you power and abundance.
Amen. But our duty is to teach you and to open schools for you and to give you
all possible help. . .. It is an obligation for us city dwellers to ensure that
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you are not oppressed."[16] On a less positive note, many writers criticized
"shameless lazybones," such as storytellers and Sufi adepts (qalandars ), who
lived off the gullibility of others.[17] Even more telling is a discussion of
the fruits of knowledge in Hamza's New Happiness : "All unskilled peoples, such
as drivers, tea shop owners, bakers, gamblers, thieves, sweepers, cobblers,
watchmen, water carriers, doormen, and others like them, are uneducated.
Educated people, even if young, are teachers, owners of large shops, clerks in
good places, well dressed and
[15] V.P. Nalivkin et al., "Kratkir obzor sovremennogo sostoianiia i
deiatel'nosti musul'manskogo dukhovenstva, raznogo roda dukhovnykh uchrezhdenii
i uchebnykh zavedenii tuzemnogo naseleniia Samarkandskoi oblasti s nekotorymi
ukazaniiami na ikh istoricheskoe proshloe," in Materialy po musul'manstvu , vyp.
1 (Tashkent, 1898), 33.
[16] "Dehqan qardashlarimizgha khitab," Turan , 11 July 1912.
[17] Abdulhakim Sarimsaqov, "Qalandarlar yakhud tanballar," ST , 4 April 1914;
anon. (Sarimsaqov?), "Qalandar, maddah (wa'iz), luli, wa gadaylarimiz, yaki
musulmanlik namini bolghatguchi be-'ar tanballarimiz," Ayina , 14 June 1914,
805.
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respected everywhere."[18] This was a far cry from Narodnik-style populism. The
nation included the peasants, but they had little to contribute to it. Only
urban folk (and then, of course, only a few of them) were qualified to lead the
nation in the battlefield of modern life.
The Jadid nation was coexistent with the reading (and hearing) public described
in Chapter 4. Within that public, the Jadids were engaged in a struggle of
elites for the right to lead the nation. As such, the Jadid vision of the nation
was elitist, although this elitism was never fully articulated as a doctrine
(as, for instance, was the case with the Young Turks)[19] but rather the logical
conclusion of the Jadids' position in their own society and the political
constraints in which they operated. The same political constraints softened that
elitism, for new-method schools (in many of which tuition was waived for poor
children) were a far more egalitarian instrument of elite formation than the
creation of universities (as in Muslim India with the Aligarh movement of Sayyid
Ahmad Khan). Such struggles were an integral part of the establishment of the
hegemony of the nation. Partha Chatterjee has argued that in colonial
situations, nationalist elites have to declare the sovereignty of nationalism in
native society before engaging the colonial state in a political struggle for
independence.[20] In Central Asia, that first struggle for sovereignty had not
been resolved by 1917.
Women and the Nation 
A critique of the position of women in Central Asian society formed an integral