Jadid - The Press and Print Media

The Press and Print Media

Many Jadids were heavily involved in printing and publishing, a relatively new enterprise for Muslim Russians. Early print matter created and distributed by Muslims in Turkestan were generally lithographic copies of canonical manuscripts from traditional genres. Turkestani Jadids, however, used print media to produce new-method textbooks, newspapers and magazines in addition to new plays and literature in a distinctly innovative idiom. Private (i.e., not state-run) newspapers in local languages were available to Tatar Muslims earlier and Gasprinski's newspaper Tercüman (Interpreter) was a major organ of Jadid opinion that was widely read in Central Asia. The first appearance of a Turkic-language newspaper produced in Turkestan, however, dates to after the 1905 revolution.

Adeeb Khalid describes a bookstore in Samarqand that in 1914 sold "books in Tatar, Ottoman, Arabic, and Persian on topics such as history, geography, general science, medicine, and religion, in addition to dictionaries, atlases, charts, maps, and globes." He explains that books from the Arab world and translations of European works influenced Central Asian Jadids. Newspapers advocated modernization and reform of institutions such as the school system. Tatars who lived in Central Asia (like the socialist Ismail Abidiy) published some of these newspapers. Central Asians, however, published many of their own papers from 1905 until the Russian authorities forbade their publication again in 1908.

The content of these papers varied – some were extremely critical of the traditional religious hierarchy, while others sought to win over more conservative clergy. Some explained the importance of Central Asian participation in Russian politics through the Duma, while others sought to connect Central Asian intellectuals to those in cities like Cairo and Istanbul. The Jadids also used fiction to communicate the same ideas, drawing on Central Asian as well as Western forms of literature (poetry and plays, respectively). For example, the Bukharan author Abdurrauf Fitrat criticized the clergy for discouraging the modernization he believed was necessary to protect Central Asia from Russian incursions.

Central Asian Jadids used such mass-media as an opportunity to mobilize support for their projects, present critiques of local cultural practices, and generally advocate and advance their platform of modernist reform as a cure for the societal ills plaguing the Muslims of Turkestan. Despite the dedication of their producers, Jadidist papers in Central Asia usually had very small circulations and print runs that made it difficult for publications to maintain their existence without significant patronage. Jadids publishing in Turkestan also sometimes ran afoul of their Russian censors, who viewed them as potentially subversive elements. Despite official fears of their sympathies with Pan-Turkic and Pan-Islamic movements, Turkestani Jadids generally couched their arguments and criticisms firmly within the realm of culture, not politics, and it was not until after 1917 that Jadids became actively involved in political organizing.