Jadidism

(Arabic, usul-i-jadida, new method), bourgeois-liberal nationalist movement that emerged in the 1880’s among the Tatar bourgeoisie in the Crimea, the Volga Region, and Azerbaijan and began to spread to Middle Asia in the 1890’s.

At first, Jadidism was a narrow cultural movement for reform of the old Muslim system of education, in which pupils were taught to read and write by learning individual suras of the Koran by rote. The Jadidists favored the introduction of European education among the Muslims. In the new-method schools children were taught by the phonetic method, which was new to the Muslims.

In Middle Asia at the time of the Revolution of 1905-07 and during the postrevolutionary years, Jadidism outgrew its original cultural framework and took on the clearly expressed tone of a bourgeois-liberal counterrevolutionary political movement and ideological tendency. The bourgeois strata of the population of Middle Asia and part of the national intelligentsia were the primary components of the social basis of Jadidism. The Jadidists were oriented toward the Turkish adherents of Pan-Turkism and maintained close relations with Tatar and Azerbaijani supporters of the Pan-Turkish ideology. At the same time, they were de facto supporters of the tsarist regime and tried to restrain the masses from revolutionary action.

Before 1917, Middle Asian Jadidism failed to assume definite organizational forms. Among those who were considered Jadidists were individuals who advocated the abolition of certain feudal vestiges that hampered the rise of the embryonic bourgeoisie, limited reform of Islam and the religious schools, and the accommodation of Islam to the bourgeois development of the national frontier regions of Russia and the needs of the national bourgeoisie. The Jadidists lacked both a guiding center and rules and a definite program. They formed groups around individual publishing operations, newspapers, and journals, which were published legally in Turkestan and Bukhara, and around new-method schools and charitable societies. Individual representatives of the democratic intelligentsia, including Khamza Khakim-zade and Sadriddin Aini, were temporarily aligned with the Jadidists; however, they had nothing in common with Jadidism as a political tendency. The bourgeois Young Turk Revolution of 1908 had a powerful influence on the development of Jadidism in Middle Asia.

After the February-Revolution of 1917 the Jadidists created their own nationalist parties, including Shuro-i-Islam in Turkestan, and the Young Bukharan and Young Khivan parties in Bukhara and Khiva. The Jadidists were among the organizers of the Civil War against Soviet power after the victory of the October Revolution of 1917, and they instigated the reactionary so-called Kokand Autonomy. They concluded agreements with the Russian White Guards, including A. I. Dutov, and the emir of Bukhara, and they participated actively in the Basmachi movement. With the establishment of Soviet power in Middle Asia, Jadidism was eliminated.