the nation that might not be: the role of iskhaqi's extinction after two hundred years in the...

The Nation That Might Not Be: The Role of Iskhaqi's ExtinctionAfter Two Hundred Years in the Popularization of Kazan TatarNational Identity Among the 'Ulama Sons and Shakirds of theVolga-Ural Region, 1904-1917

Danielle Ross

Ab Imperio, 3/2012, pp. 341-369 (Article)

Published by Ab ImperioDOI: 10.1353/imp.2012.0103

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Nazarbayev University (17 Jul 2013 05:00 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/imp/summary/v2012/2012.3.ross.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/imp/summary/v2012/2012.3.ross.html

341

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

Danielle ROSS

THE NATION THAT MIGHT NOT BE: thE rolE of iSkhaqi’S

Extinction AFtEr two HundrEd YEArs in thE popularization of kazan tatar national idEntity

among thE ‘ulama SonS and ShakirdS of thE volga-ural rEgion, 1904−1917*

How does national identity develop among a population that lacks clear political borders? In a world of multiple possible national identities, what fac-tors cause an individual to pick one over another? How does the acceptance of a particular narrative of national identity alter the way in which individuals view and interact with other members of their ethnic or confessional com-munity? In his study of the rise of national identity in British India, Partha Chatterjee challenges the assertion put forth by Benedict Anderson that the development of national consciousness in postcolonial contexts is dictated by the boundaries set by colonial powers. In place of the territorially driven model put forth by Anderson, Chatterjee proposes a division of the colonial society’s world into two domains: the material and the spiritual. Within * I would like to express gratitude to three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, and to the editors of AI as well for their support and patience.

342

Danielle Ross, The Nation That Might Not Be

this model, while the colonial rulers control the material sphere (borders, finances, political power), members of the colonized society retain control of the spiritual sphere, which includes their inner identity and culture.1

The Muslims of the Volga-Ural region not only lacked control over the material/political sphere of their society, but were scattered in enclaves across much of the Russian Empire. Studies of European nationalism have emphasized various factors that precede and lead to the rise of national identities. Hobsbawm emphasizes the role of administrative boundaries, institutions and relationships in creating among diverse communities a sense of belonging to the same political entity.2 Hroch points to economic relations as key in creating a sense of solidarity among populations that later became nations.3 Indeed, both of these forces can be seen to be at work on the Volga-Ural Muslims in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Ac-cording to Allen Frank, the growing relationship between the ‘ulama and the Russian state, culminating in the founding of the Orenburg Spiritual Assembly (which, after 1865, included all of the Muslim communities in western Russia, the Volga-Ural region, and Siberia) contributed to the spread of a uniform prenational Muslim-Bulghar identity and a shared culture of mystical folk traditions and Naqshbandi Sufism.4 Similarly, the develop-ment of ethnographic study and the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment’s intervention into inorodtsy education in Kazan between the 1860s and the

1 Partha Chatterjee. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, 1993. Pp. 5-6.2 Eric J. Hobsbawm. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge, 2010. Pp. 80-81.3 Miroslav Hroch. The Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. Cambridge, 1985. P. 6.4 Bulghar (or Volga Bulghar) was a state that existed in the Volga Basin between the eighth century CE and the Mongol invasions in the 1200s. Its rulers converted to Islam in the 900s CE. The ruins of its capital city of the state, also called Bulghar and inhab-ited until the fifteenth century, are located about eighty miles from Kazan. The origin of the city of Bulghar and its people attracted the interest of nineteenth-century Russian archaeologists and historians. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Volga-Ural Muslims identified Bulghar as the site of their ancestors’ conversion to Islam. They viewed the city’s ruins as a sacred site and made pilgrimages to it. Some eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Volga-Ural Muslim writers identified the region’s Muslims as the people of Bulghar. See: Allen Frank. Islamic Historiography and “Bulghar” Identity Among the Tatars and Bashkirs of Russia. Leiden, 1998. Pp, 197-198; T. Uyama. Ot “bulgarizma” cherez “marrizm” k natsionalisticheskim mifam: diskursy o tatarskom, chuvashskom, i bashkirskom etnogeneze // Novaia volna v izuchenii etnopoliticheskoi istorii Volgo-Ural’skogo regiona. Sapporo, 2003. Pp. 18-23; Aidar Khabutdinov. Ot obshchiny k natsii. Kazan, 2008. Pp. 4-87.

343

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

1880s conditioned a small group of Volga–Ural Muslim clergy to view their community in regional ethnic-national terms as Tatars.5 On the other hand, as transportation across the empire improved over the course of the nineteenth century, economic activities took Volga-Ural Muslims from one end of the empire to the other. Merchants and ‘ulama from Kazan traveled and traded in the Kirghiz Steppe, in Turkistan, and the Caucasus.6 When, in the 1880s, Crimean Muslim Isma’il Gasprinskii, lately returned from Europe, began to call for a Tatar-Russian Muslim identity that included all Muslim Turkic-speakers in Russia, his vision of cultural unity seemed plausible to people who traveled regularly from one Muslim region of the empire to another.7

Administrative and economic forces pulled emerging national identity (confined in the late nineteenth century to a very small circle of ‘ulama, merchants, and state servitors) in two different directions. The material preconditions existed for both narrowly regional national identities and broader national identities that would potentially unite Tatars-Russian Muslims of different regions in the same way that the German states and the Italian states had united into national states in the nineteenth century. Russian imperial policy toward Muslim national and reform movements in the late imperial period was not necessarily the decisive factor in deter-mining which form of nation carried the day. While the Russian state took measures to limit “Tatarization” of Muslim, Turkic-speaking peoples in the Kirghiz Steppe and Turkistan, it also attempted to halt what it interpreted as the separatist tendencies of the “Tatar kingdom” around Kazan.8 And, it did not pursue either of these goals consistently between the end of the nineteenth century and 1917.9 The answer to why various national identi-5 Robert Geraci. Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, 2001. 6 Mustafa Özgür Tuna. Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Inroads of Modernity / PhD Disserta-tion; Princeton University, 2009; James H. Meyer. Turkic Worlds: Community Represen-tation and Collective Identity in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, 1870−1914 / PhD Dissertation; Brown University, 2002.7 Christian Noack. Muslimscher Nationalismus im Russischen Reich. Stuttgard, 2000; Hakan Krimli. National Movements Among the Crimean Tatars (1883−1916). Leiden, 1996; Edward Lazzarini. Ismail Bey Gasprinskii and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878−1914 / PhD Dissertation; University of Washington, 1973.8 National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan (NART). F. 199, Kazan Provincial Gen-darme Administration. Op. 1. T. 771. Ed. khr. 237.9 Norihiro Naganawa. Islam and Empire Observed: Muslims in the Volga-Ural Region After the 1905 Revolution // Imperiology: From Empirical Knowledge to Discussing the Russian Empire. Sapporro, 2007; Robert Geraci. Russian Orientalism at an Impasse:

344


ties gained a foothold among Volga-Ural Muslim clergy and intellectuals must be sought elsewhere.

Chatterjee’s spiritual sphere provides a model for examining the develop-ment of a Kazan Tatar national identity between the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth century and the Russian Revolution. Between 1905 and 1917, ‘ulama sons and shakirds educated in the towns of the Volga-Ural region (Kazan, Orenburg, Astrakhan, Ufa, Troitsk) began to carve out a place for themselves within the spiritual sphere of the Volga-Ural community. They did so as a result of the growing range of cultural influences (Volga-Ural Muslim, Russian, Ottoman, western European) acting upon them, but also because of their dissatisfaction with their fathers’ and teachers’ narrative of reform, which also happened to be closely intertwined with the empire-wide vision of Russian-Muslim nation.10 In narratives of Kazan Tatar identity, they found a role for themselves as the builders of a modern Kazan Tatar national culture and the historically appointed saviors of the nation from an imagined class of national enemies.

The present article examines one of the works that provided the founda-tion for this Kazan Tatar national youth culture: Gaiaz Iskhaqi’s Extinction After Two Hundred Years, a futuristic novel that described the destruction of a nation called the Bulghar as a result of its failure to adapt to the mod-ern world. First published in 1904, this novel gained popularity among the ‘ulama sons and shakirds who came of age during and after the 1905 Revolution. For some readers, it became a program of action. For others, it provided a sacred geography of the nation and divided the world into national allies and national enemies. For some, it became the standard by which all other cultural production was measured.

This article examines a particular aspect and set of historical subjects that have received attention as part of the Jadid movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 By focusing a particular strain

Tsarist Education Policy and the 1910 Conference on Islam // Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and People, 1700−1917. Bloomington, 1997. Pp. 138-161.10 This phenomenon is comparable to the experience of Orthodox clergy sons described in Laurie Manchester. Holy Father, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia. De Kalb, 2008.11 Adeeb Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia. Berkeley, 1998; Ahmet Kanlidere. Reform within Islam: The Tajdid and Jadid Movement Among the Kazan Tatars (1809−1917): Conciliation or Conflict? Istanbul, 1997; Mustafa Tuna. Madrasa Reform as a Secularizing Process: A View from the Late Russian Empire // Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2011. Vol. 53. No. 3. Pp. 540-570; Rafik Mukhametshin. Islam v obshchestvennoi i politicheskoi zhizni tatar i Tatarstana v XX

345

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

of thought within this broader movement or tendency, it will explore the intellectual diversity among Russian Muslims who identified as reformers of their society. It will also emphasize the ways in which visions of reform, nation, and personal identity changed over the decades-long lifespan of the Jadid education reform project. This article focuses on Tatar-language novels, poems, and articles published in the period 1885 to 1914. Based on this material, it analyzes how various shakirds and ‘ulama sons responded to, borrowed from, and reinterpreted Iskhaqi’s novel over the decade after its initial publication. Extinction was not, of course, the only publication to shape these young people’s vision of their nation, but was read and re-sponded to by many of the better-known young writers of the period and thus serves as a good case study in the exchange and transformation of ideas and symbols in Volga-Ural Muslim literature.12 Finally, this article is concerned primarily with the development of narratives of national identity among the ‘ulama sons and other shakirds who graduated from the new method madrasas in the early 1900s. It does not attempt to undertake an assessment of the dissemination of Kazan Tatar national identity among other groups in Volga-Ural Muslim society.

The Author

Gaiaz Iskhaqi was born in 1878 in Yaushirma village outside of Chis-topol in Kazan province. His father, Giliazetdin, was imam of Yaushirma and a respected legal scholar in Chistopol. His mother also came from a well-known ‘ulama family.13 Iskhaqi was the only child in this household to survive to adulthood.14 From an early age, he began to study Arabic and Persian in his father’s madrasa. At the age of twelve, he attended Chistopol Madrasa.15 Here, through his fellow shakirds, Iskhaqi had his first encounter

veke. Kazan, 2005. Pp. 80-86; Ocherki istorii tatarskoi obshchestvennoi mysli. Kazan, 2000. Pp. 128-159; Khabutdinov. Ot obshchiny k natsii. Pp. 88-115; Azade-Ayşe Rorlich. The Volga Tatars: A Profile in National Resilience. Stanford, 1986; Serge A. Zenkovsky. Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism in Russia. Cambridge, 1960.12 A. Sakhapov. Gaiaz Iskhaqi: Nachal’nyi etap tvorchestva: monografiia. Kazan, 2003 and Idem. Iskhaqi i tatarskaia literatura XX veka. Kazan, 2003; Alsu Kamalieva. Ro-mantik milliyetci Ayaz Ishaki. Ankara, 2009; L. Gainanova. Gaiaz Iskhaqi. Kazan, 1998.13 M. Zaripov and M. Amirkhanov. Gaiaz Iskhaqi // Tatarskie intellektualy: istoricheskie portrety. Kazan, 2005. P. 236; M. Rakhimkulova. Medrese “Khusainiia” v Orenburge. Orenburg, 1997. P. 52; Gaiaz Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. Kazan, 1904. P. 3.14 Rakhimkulova. Medrese “Khusainiia” v Orenburge. P. 52.15 I. Nurullin. Gaiaz Iskhaqi // Zindan. Kazan, 1991. P. 5

346


with Russian radical politics.16 After three years of study, however, he had failed to make progress in his studies and, in 1893, he left Chistopol and went to Kazan where he entered Kul Buye Madrasa and studied under new-method teacher Hadi Maqsudi until the latter left Kazan for Bakchisarai and Istanbul in 1894.17 Under his new teacher, Iskhaqi excelled, and became well-known in the city’s madrasas for his oratory skills. He also read Gasprinskii’s Terju-man and Turkish novels borrowed from Maqsudi, and he began to apply his rhetorical talents to argue the benefits of new-method education.18

In 1898, he enrolled in the Kazan Tatar Teachers’ School in order to learn Russian, possibly following the example of his former teacher, Hadi Maq-sudi, who had returned from the Ottoman Empire and enrolled in the same institution in 1896. There, he befriended Sadri Maqsudi, his former teacher’s younger brother and future State Duma deputy, and Hussain Yamashev, a merchant’s son who later turned to Social Democracy and became a role model for other Muslim radical youth in Kazan. These three men formed a private reading circle.19 At the same time, Iskhaqi became involved in the Kazan sharkird organization Shakirdlek and began to publish literary works in shakird journals.20 After his graduation from the Teachers’ School in 1902, Iskhaqi taught for a year at the new-method madrasa Hussainiyya in Orenburg, where he completed his third novel, Extinction After Two Hundred Years.21 He hoped to apply to Kazan University, but at his parents’ request, he returned to his native village, where he took up his father’s post of imam and opened a new school.22 The life of an imam-teacher appears not to have suited him, however. In 1904, he returned to Kazan, where he began a Social Revolutionary organization for Muslims by 1906.23

Together with a small number of other ‘ulama sons born in the 1870s (including Fatikh Kärimi and Sadri Maqsudi), Iskhaqi represented a transi-tional phase in the development of Volga-Ural Muslim intellectual life. He 16 Rakhimkulova. Medrese “Khusainiia” v Orenburge. P. 53.17 Ibid.; Nurullin. Gaiaz Iskhaqi. P. 5; F. Gaffarova. A. Maksudi // Tatarskie intellektualy: istoricheskie portrety. Kazan, 2005. P. 189.18 Nurullin. Gaiaz Iskhaqi. P. 5; Rakhimkulova. Medrese “Khusainiia” v Orenburge. Pp. 53-54.19 Yamashev Khösäyen Minhajetdin-ulı, (1882−1912) // Khalıq bäkhete öchen köräshülär. Kazan, 1970. Vol. 1. P. 509; Nurullin. Gaiaz Iskhaqi. P. 5.20 M. Zaripov and M. Amirkhanov. Gaiaz Iskhaqi. P. 237; Rakhimkulova. Medrese “Khusainiia” v Orenburge. P. 54.21 Rakhimkulova. Medrese “Khusainiia” v Orenburge. P. 54; Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 90.22 M. Zaripov and M. Amirkhanov. Gaiaz Iskhaqi. P. 239.23 Ibid.

347

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

was among the first generation of Muslims to encounter Gasprinskii’s new method as a shakird/student rather than as a teacher. He was also among the first generation of shakirds to encounter Russian radical political ideologies and to re-create aspects of Russian radical student culture (reading circles, hectograph-printed newspapers, student organizations) among Muslim youth. Finally, he was among the first ‘ulama sons who learned Russian language as part of their education, put off traditional clothing in favor of Russian/European-style suits, and chose to become writers, editors, or pedagogues rather than follow their fathers into the Muslim clergy.

At the turn of the century, ‘ulama sons such as Iskhaqi found themselves in an awkward position. Their ‘ulama fathers and/or teachers had encour-aged them to learn Russian language, study secular subjects, pursue higher education in Russian or Ottoman schools, and return home to take part in the modernization of their society. But in the process of receiving their new education, these young men adopted not only new modes of dress, but new perspectives. ‘Ulama sons’ lived experience of education and educational reform set them apart from their fathers and teachers. First, ‘ulama sons studying in the 1890s often had a much more varied educational background than their fathers had. Their education took them beyond regional madrasas to Russian and Ottoman educational institutions, and, sometimes, even into Europe.24 When placed beside state-funded institutions in Russia or Istanbul, the privately funded education reform projects in the Volga-Ural region looked small, provincial, and not especially ambitious. Indeed, a recurring theme in Extinction is the underdeveloped, ephemeral nature of Muslim educational reform in Russia.25 Tuna has pointed to secularization of education as driving this dissatisfaction, but the phenomenon of sons disenchanted with their fathers’ modernization programs was not unique to Volga-Ural Muslims. Similar responses could be found among the two groups with whom Volga-Ural Muslim shakirds and students were most likely to interact outside of their ethnic community: the successive generations of the Russian intelligentsia and the young Ottoman intellectuals coming of age in the wake of Tanzimat and the failure of Ottomanism.26 Literature and

24 Tuna offers an examination of the impact of Ottoman educational institutions on Volga-Ural Muslim perceptions of education reform (Tuna. Madrasa Reform as a Secularizing Process. Pp. 544-549); On the influence of Russian educational institutions and enlightenment projects, see Geraci. Window on the East. Pp. 116-157. 25 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. Pp. 16, 18, 21.26 Şükrü Hanioglu. The Young Turks in Opposition. New York, 1995. The rejection of Ottomanism by young intellectuals at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries comes

348


individuals from both of these cultures informed Volga-Ural Muslims that “alienation” from one’s society and disillusion with one’s elders was more than a possibility; it was an inevitable result of becoming fully conscious of the true condition of one’s society.

Shaped by this lived experience, ‘ulama sons such as Iskhaqi felt that they no longer fit into the society into which they had been born. Like their fathers, they rejected the traditional prereform discursive tradition of Volga-Ural Muslim society. They found aspects of their parents’ and teachers’ reform discourse compelling, but also saw their elders’ strategies as too small-scale and too conservative. Moreover, the new values and perspec-tives that they had acquired in the course of their education meshed poorly with their parents’ expectations for them. This sense of not belonging is very evident, as Fatikh Kärimi noted in a letter to his kinsman Rizaeddin Fäkhreddinov in 1901:

They [Kärimi’s parents] want me to get married before too long. I’m not opposed to it, but I never get around to because I always worry. The first reason for this [worry] is our having come into the world at the wrong time. I was born either a little too early or a little too late. I am now neither a European nor an Asian. I remain caught in-between the two. And, honestly, an educated girl who has studied the secular sciences won’t want me. She’ll want to marry a doctor, or an engineer, or an officer.27

One important factor differentiating Volga-Ural Muslim ‘ulama sons such as Kärimi or Iskhaqi from their Russian and Ottoman age-mates, however, was that once they identified as alienated or “caught in-between,” they had no indigenous alternative discourse to which to turn. Returning to their fathers meant reembracing a reform project that they had already determined to be flawed. Immersing themselves in Russian or Ottoman youth political life meant cutting ties with the culture in which they had grown up.

In addition to belonging to a transitional generation, Iskhaqi himself was at a transitional moment in his intellectual development when he penned Extinction After Two Hundred Years. He had only just graduated from the

across clearly in Yusuf Akchura-oglı. Uç tarz-i siyasat. Istanbul, 1909. Pp. 4-5. From Russian intellectual culture, the construct of the animosity between the “men of the ’40s” and the “men of the ’60s” identified by 1860s intelligenty such as Nikolai Dobroliubov and immortalized in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, became a particularly popular point of reference for post-1905 Volga-Ural Muslim writers.27 Gil’man Kärimov. Shäkheslärebez. Fatikh Kärimi. Fänni-biografik jıentıq. Kazan, 2000. P. 89.

349

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

Teachers’ School in 1902, and the impressions left by the school were still strong in his mind.28 Moreover, in 1902−1904, Iskhaqi’s political views were still in flux. His turn to the party of socialist revolutionaries (SRs), his arrest in 1906, and the closing of his newspaper, Taŋ Yoldızı, all served to embitter him against the Russian government in the years after Extinction’s publication.29 Similarly, his engagement in Russian Muslim politics from 1905 to 1907 and his long sojourn in the Ottoman Empire from 1908 to 1911 inspired him to advocate for broader definitions of Turkic and Tatar nation than those he had defined in Extinction.30 In the context of Iskhaqi’s career as a writer and political activist, Extinction can be seen as the vision of a young man attempting to make sense of the myriad, sometimes contradic-tory influences acting upon him, and trying to craft a narrative of reform in which there was a role for him and other ‘ulama sons like him.

The Novel

The foreword of Extinction lays out Iskhaqi’s basic thesis that a com-bination of backward thinking among the Volga-Ural ‘ulama, the poverty of would-be reformers and national servants, and the lack of “progressive” educational institutions had set the Tatar nation on the path to eventual extinction. With intervention by those who truly understand the nation’s needs and have adequate material resources at their disposal, the Tatar nation might still find the road to progress. Without such intervention, the Tatar would die out within the next two hundred years.31 Iskhaqi directed particular criticism at two groups, one of which he termed the “‘ulama class” (‘ulama sinifi) and the other, which he called the “ishans.”32 In nineteenth-century Volga-Ural Muslim society, the term ‘ulama, a plural of the Arabic ‘alim (scholar), designated anyone recognized as a specialist in Islamic law and theology. “Ishan” was a term used to refer to the Volga-Ural region’s Naqshbandi Sufi spiritual leaders (shaykhs). Most of the education reformers of the 1870s–1900 period were licensed imam-mudarrises and, therefore, ‘ulama. Likewise, some ishans had played a proactive role in educational reform, including Troitsk’s Zainulla Rasulev, who introduced Gasprinskii’s new method into his madrasa in the 1890s, and Tukaev shaykhs of Sterlebash,

28 Sakhapov. Nachal’nyi etap tvorchestva. P. 36.29 Nurullin. Gaiaz Iskhaqi. P. 9.30 Ibid. P. 12.31 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. Pp. 2-4.32 Ibid. Pp. 2, 25, 26.

350


who distributed Terjuman among their shakirds.33 But in his characterization of both the ‘ulama and ishans in Extinction, Iskhaqi focused on the most conservative fractions of the Volga-Ural ‘ulama and used his impressions of these elements to characterize ‘ulama and ishans in general as “the most harmful, most constant opponents of progress.”34

In the first episode of the novel itself, Iskhaqi takes the reader back to the turn of the seventeenth–eighteenth century and to the household of Shahi Muhammad Ishmuqaif, a wealthy merchant (bai) of Kazan. Shahi Muham-mad hosts a wedding feast to which he invites many other wealthy Muslims and prominent clergymen. A total of 80,000 rubles is spent by the families of the bride and groom in the process.35 Iskhaqi used the fictional Shahi Muhammad and his wedding feast as a case study of the Bulghar mentality (tabigat) and its flaws. Shahi Muhammad and his companions place great importance on impressing their fellow Bulghars with lavish displays of wealth and they slavishly follow the prevailing fashions of his day. He sur-rounds himself with clergymen (‘ulama) and looks to them for guidance.36 Shahi Muhammad is unable to differentiate between useful work that would yield permanent change and wasteful displays of wealth and energy.

The second portion of the novel presents to readers the debates and controversies of nineteenth-century Bulghar society: debates over Islamic doctrine and legal practice, the introduction of Russian-language instruction, and the spread of Terjuman and the new method. Like Shahi Muhammad, Bulghar society’s leaders, the ‘ulama and the bais, are unable to differentiate between genuine service to the nation and self-aggrandizing, but worthless public displays. They are drawn to build schools and establish journals not out of love for their nation or understanding of progress, but because fashion dictates that they should take part in certain activities.37 This feverish activ-ity of the ‘ulama creates the illusion that the Bulghars possess the markers of progressive nation: newspapers, modern schools, and a modern literary culture.38 This illusion masks dangerous failures, among them, the small number schools and the inability of the would-be servants of the nation to 33 Hamid Algar. Shaykh Zaynulla Rasulev: The Last Great Naqshbandi Shaykh of the Volga-Urals Region // Muslims in Central Asia: Expressions of Identity and Change. Durham, 1992. P. 122; Islam na evropeiskom vostoke: entsiklopedicheskii slovar’. Kazan, 2004. Pp. 322-324.34 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 2.35 Ibid. P. 8.36 Ibid. Pp. 6-7.37 Ibid. P. 21.38 Ibid. P. 28.

351

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

engage and educate the masses of Bulghar peasants, who, out of ignorance and under the guidance of their ‘ulama, are prone to reject progress and make choices harmful to themselves and to the longevity of their nation.39

In the fourth section of the novel, Iskhaqi turned from interpreting past events to presenting an imagined future. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the consequences of the Bulghar ‘ulama and bais’ ephemeral nation-building efforts slowly unfold. The “backward” views of the ‘ulama permit the development of some elements of national culture (such as litera-ture), but forbid others. They declare music un-Islamic and drive the Bulghar musical tradition out of existence.40 The national arts of painting and drawing are similarly suppressed.41 This spiritual and cultural self-destruction of the nation is accompanied by the physical destruction of the Bulghar people. Ignorance and lack of marketable skills make the Bulghars vulnerable to poverty, crime, and disease. By the end of the twenty-first century, all but a handful of Bulghars have perished.

The fifth section of the novel documents the life of Jagfar, a Bulghar historian of the twenty-second century and one of the last living Bulghars. Jagfar has dedicated his life to traveling among major centers of Bulghar culture and cataloging and preserving the cultural accomplishments of his people. Upon his return from a meeting of the St. Petersburg Historical Society, Jagfar finds that his wife has died giving birth to their stillborn son. Cast into despair, he travels to the ruined city of Bulghar, climbs the city’s last surviving minaret, and sitting inside, he falls into a dream state. The armies of ancient Bulghar and the Bulghar writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear among the ruins below him. As Jagfar watches this display, the wind shakes the tower and causes it to fall. Jagfar, the last Bulghar, is crushed beneath its stones.42 Iskhaqi ends the novel with an af-terword explaining that such a grim fate need not come to pass, but it will if readers do not adopt his recommendations for change.

Extinction in the Context of the Early 1900s

Extinction brought together numerous elements from existing discourses in circulation in the Volga-Ural region at the end of the 1800s. It promoted both Gasprinskii’s new method and Russian-language education.43 It bor-39 Ibid. Pp. 28-29.40 Ibid. Pp. 30-32.41 Ibid. P. 33.42 Ibid. P. 90.43 Ibid. Pp. 15-17, 85, 86.

352


rowed the construct of servant or lover of the nation from earlier Volga-Ural Muslim literary works, including Musa Ak’eget’s Khisamatdin Menla, and from Terjuman.44 The vision of the Muslims of the Volga region as constitut-ing a nation (millät) distinct from the Muslims of Crimea, the Caucasus, and Turkistan could be found in Märjani’s Mustafad al-Akhbar.45 Ulug Muham-mad Khan, who appeared before Jagfar in his dream in St. Petersburg, also appeared as an important figure in the history of the Golden Horde and the Kazan Khanate as portrayed in Märjani’s Mustafad al-Akhbar, as did Tok-tamysh, last khan of a unified Golden Horde and the namesake of Jagfar’s stillborn son.46 Kazan, Jagfar’s native city, with its Teachers’ School, uni-versity, and growing number of madrasas, was becoming, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, a destination for shakirds seeking a progressive education. It was also one of the locations examined in Märjani’s narrative of Tatar history.47 Bulghar, the site of Jagfar’s death, was central to the pre-Märjani Islamic historiography of the Volga-Ural region. Believed to be the site of the first Islamic conversion in the region, it represented the point of origin for the Volga-Ural Islamic community.48 While Märjani ridiculed this historiography as being based in legend rather than historical evidence, he retained Bulghar in Mustafad al-Akbar as the earliest state in the region, but also as a society embodying the ideals of knowledge and progress that had since been lost.

The people of Bulghar traveled and expanded their commerce. They called the ignorant tribes to the faith of Islam in order to guide them to the path of truth and lead them away from the delusion of untruth and the path of error.49

Even the overall theme of national extinction was drawn from a variety of sources. The vision of history in which the fate of people could be altered by the proper action of conscious individuals was mostly likely inspired by Russian Populism (narodnichestvo).50 (Though Iskhaqi borrowed Extinc-

44 Musa Ak’eget. Khisametdin menla // Karurmannı chıqqan chaqta. Kazan, 2001. P. 11.45 Uli Schamiloglu. The Formation of a Tatar Historical Consciousness: Şihabäddin Märcani and the Image of the Golden Horde // Central Asian Survey. 1990. Vol. 9. No. 2. Pp. 39-49.46 Shihabeddin Märjani. Mustafad al-akhbar fi akhval Qazan wa Bulghar. Kazan, 1897. Pp. 114-117, 122.47 Ibid. Pp. 117-133.48 Ibid. Pp. 4-5.49 Ibid. P. 5.50 Gaziz Gobeidullin. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz // Miras. 1993. No. 9. P. 22.

353

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

tion’s title and framework of an imagined future from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards (published in Russian as Cherez sto let), he did not adopt Bellamy’s depiction of social progress as an inevitable process.51) Iskhaqi’s depiction of the death of the Bulghar nation, however, borrowed from Volga-Ural popular Islamic mystical literature. For example, at the point in the novel when Jagfar appears at a gathering of the Historical So-ciety in St. Petersburg, Iskhaqi uses an allusion to Qissa-i Yusuf (The Book of Joseph) to describe the audience’s reaction:

To the women, Jagfar’s black hair and dark eyes and round beard were wondrous. They looked upon them as if they were among the seven wonders of the world. His countenance was very beautiful, and it struck everyone present with wonder, as though they beheld Joseph.52

But Iskhaqi borrowed even more extensively from the Muslim apoca-lyptic traditions. One of the signs of the impending doom of the Bulghars was the disappearance of men and the predominance of women in public life, a theme also common in narratives of apocalypse throughout the Is-lamic world.53 Widespread drunkenness and adultery (zina), signs of the disappearance of proper Islamic belief in the popular Volga-Ural Muslim poem Akhyrzaman kitabı (The Book of the End Time), became in Extinc-tion precursors of the decline of the Bulghar nation.54 The disappearance of true Muslim spiritual leaders and their replacement with “iniquitous” or “tyrannical” ‘ulama (‘ulama zulm buldı) and “devilish Sufis” (sufilar Shaitan buldı) in the description of the apocalypse in another popular poem, Bädäväm, is not dissimilar to Iskhaqi’s portrayal of the role of the ‘ulama in the destruction of the Bulghar nation.55 In both works, the individuals

51 Sakhapov. Nachal’nyi etap tvorchestva. Pp. 32-33; Gobeidullin. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 21.52 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 61. This scene closely resembles a scene from Qissa-i Yusuf in which the heroine, Zulaykha, presents the slave Joseph to a gathering of noblewomen of Egypt: “When they looked at Joseph / his beauty left them in awe.” Kitab-i Khäzrät Yusuf ‘aleihi as-Salaam. Kazan, 1901. P. 37. For a fuller treatment of the prominent role of Qissa-i Yusuf or Yusuf kitabı in Volga-Ural Muslim popular literature, the reimagining of elements of this work in jadid and nationalist literature, and Iskhaqi’s use of the Volga-Ural mystical tradition, see Agnès Kefeli. The Tale of Joseph and Zulaykha on the Volga Frontier: The Struggle for Gender, Religion and National Identity in Imperial and Post-Revolutionary Russia // Slavic Review. 2011. Vol. 70. No. 2. Pp. 373-398.53 David Cook. Studies in Muslim Apocalypse. Princeton, 2002. Pp. 13-14; Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. Pp. 36-37.54 Akhyrzaman kitabı. Kazan, 2000. P. 6; Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. Pp. 20, 36, 41.55 Bädäväm. Kazan, 1907. P. 9.

354


who should be protectors of their community become instrumental in that community’s destruction by giving false guidance and misleading the people who place trust in them.56

Extinction reiterated symbols and ideas that had already been presented in earlier works, but it presented them in new ways. It took elements of Märjani’s two-volume history and condensed them in the form of a novel. This genre had grown in popularity among young people at the new-method madrasas and the Teachers’ School since their first encounters with Russian and Ottoman novels during the last decades of the nineteenth century.57 Extinction took Gasprinskii’s discourse on education reform and recast it in class terms not unlike those found in Russian-left political discourses. In Extinction, the “servants of the nation” struggled not only against the forces of darkness and ignorance, but against a concrete “class” of ‘ulama. Finally, Extinction offered would-be servants of the nation a range of services that they could perform for their nation, among them, teaching, textbook publish-ing, and the development of national literature, music, and art.

These approaches made Iskhaqi’s narrative of nation and national extinc-tion particularly compelling to shakirds and students (many of them ‘ulama sons) coming of age on the eve of the 1905 Revolution or shortly afterward. Its Populist-like view of human progress and its language of class appealed to young Muslims already drawn to radical politics. The novel’s repeated praise of Russian education offered positive reenforcement to those Muslims who had attended Russian-language courses, gymnasia, or teachers’ schools. It offered to readers a range of potential careers outside of the clergy. Finally, Extinction offered ‘ulama sons a new role. Rather than people born into the wrong historical epoch, they were now enlighteners and guardians of a Kazan Tatar-Bulghar nation. The very existence of that nation hinged upon their immediate and decisive action.

Extinction as a Program of Action: Gabdulla Tukai’s Quest to Create a Tatar National Literature

By 1906, Extinction had circulated as far as Ural’sk. There, it came into the hands of twenty-year-old Gabdulla Tukai, a village imam’s son and former shakird, who had dropped out of the madrasa and turned to printing

56 Ibid.57 Tatar ädäbiyatı tarikhı: Ikenche tom, XIX yöz tatar ädäbiyatı. Kazan, 1985. Pp. 274-290; R. Amirkhanov. Tatarskaia dorevoliutsionnaia pressa v kontekste “vostok-zapad” (na primere razvitiia russkoi kul’tury). Kazan, 2002. Pp. 80-114.

355

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

on the eve of the 1905 Revolution.58 Through his teenage years, Tukai had lived the experience of a young Muslim in a Russian city. Parallel to his enrollment in the madrasa, he had studied for three years in a school designed to teach Muslim children to speak, read, and write in Russian.59 He had read Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Lermontov in addition to Kisekbash, Qissas al-Anbiya, and the other Turki-language mystical works popular among the Muslims of the Volga-Ural region. The director of his madrasa had introduced him (and the other shakirds) to the writings of Gasprinskii and to the Ottoman periodical press.60 He knew Arabic and Persian as well as Turki and Rus-sian. His work as a typesetter for the Russian-language newspaper Uralets had brought him together with politically active Russians and Muslims of his own age group.61 They, in turn, had inducted him into the underground world of radical socialism, secret circles, and handwritten pamphlets, as far as that world existed in provincial Ural’sk, though the arrest of a close friend eventually frightened him away from illegal politics.62

From 1904, Tukai had begun to write his own poetry and publish it in Ural’sk’s local newspapers.63 He and his friends attempted to launch a newspaper and journal of their own during 1906, though both projects had failed in a matter of months due to lack of funding and poor management.64 But Extinction moved him as no book had before.

I did not know that the ishan was the destroyer of our nationI did not know that the ishan was the enemy of the nation [. . .]A work called Extinction taught us a lesson,Ah, I did not know what a true human being the writer [of that

book] was.65

A resident of Ural’sk since his sister had brought him from the countryside in 1898, he decided that he had outgrown the city and the political views of its “benighted” citizens.66 He began to talk incessantly to his friends of 58 Aleksandr Gladyshev. G. Tukai turında istälek // Tukai Turında Khatirälär / Ed. I. Nu-rullin and R. Iakupov. Kazan, 1976. P. 29.59 Yarulla Moradi. Tukaev Uralskida // Tukai Turında Khatirälär. Pp. 33-34.60 Gabdulla Kariev. Gabdulla Tukaevnıŋ Ural’skidagı tormıshı // Tukai Turında Khat-irälär. Pp. 43-44.61 Gladyshev. G. Tukai turında istälek. Pp. 29-30.62 Kariev. Gabdulla Tukaevnıŋ. P. 48.63 Kamaletdin Khisametdinov. Bergä bulgan chaklar // Tukai Turında Khatirälär. P. 28.64 Kamil Motyigyi. Mäshhür shagyir’ Gabdulla äfände Tukaev khaqqında khatirälärem // Tukai Turında Khatirälär. Pp. 56-57.65 Gabdulla Tukai. Möridlär kaberstanındin ber avaz // Äl-gasr äl-jädid. 1906. No. 4.66 Gabdulla Karievkä. 1907 30 dekabr // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 5. Kazan, 1986. P. 81.

356


leaving Ural’sk. By the end of 1907, he set out for Kazan. In addition to continuing his career as a writer, he hoped to find Gaiaz Iskhaqi, his new hero and mentor.

Tukai did not meet Iskhaqi in 1907. By the time he reached Kazan, Iskhaqi had been arrested, tried, and exiled from the city for his political activities.67 But even in his absence, Iskhaqi continued to exercise a powerful influence over Tukai, primarily through Extinction. In Extinction, Iskhaqi had emphasized the importance of both literature and music to the health of the nation, naming these two art forms as “the nation’s father and mother.”68 Later in the novel, Jagfar says to the historical society:

I thank you for taking on the task of preserving that which is the most sacred, a great mirror upon Bulghar-ness: our literature. Preserve the literature that we cannot. Write appraisals of our literature that we will never be able to analyze. Take our literature that was trampled underfoot and lift it above your heads! Make the spirit of our Bulghar literature thankful!69

From the time of his move to Kazan in 1907 to his death in 1913, Tu-kai took upon himself the task of creating a modern literature and literary language for the Tatars, analyzing the regional Muslim literary traditions, offering critiques of fellow writers, and creating a modern Tatar literature himself. He eventually came to imagine himself a Tatar Alexander Pushkin, destined to write the Tatar Eugene Onegin, a work that would simultane-ously be socially relevant, composed in pure Tatar language, and serve as the foundation a new Tatar national literature.70

Tukai also expanded upon Iskhaqi’s depiction of the city of Kazan as a spiritual axis of the Tatar nation. In Extinction, Kazan plays a central role in Jagfar’s tragic last days. It is Jagfar’s native town. Moreover, Iskhaqi uses Jagfar’s journey through the abandoned mosques, madrasas, and other sites in Kazan once frequented by Bulghars to offer the reader a sobering depiction of the nation’s extinction:

He made it to the Haymarket Mosque. In front of the mosque a gold-lettered sign rose up before his eyes: “Bulghar Museum.” […] He walked along the Kaban Lake. On the shore of the lake stood Apanaev

67 Sägıyt Rämiev. Ikenche aprel’ köne // Idem. Uylasam uy. sızlıy küŋlem. sızlıy jan. Sägıyt Rämievneŋ tormısh yulı häm ijatına qarata yaŋa mäg’lümatlar. Kazan, 2005. P. 24.68 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 31.69 Ibid. P. 82.70 Tukai. Sägyit Sünchäläigä // Gabdulla Tukai. Vol. 4. P. 103; Tukai. Pushkinga // Gab-dulla Tukai. Vol. 1. P. 70.

357

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

Madrasa, with the word “Shelter” written on its wall. He walked on until he found himself on what was now Ekaterina Street. He began to hear a ringing sound. He wondered where it came from and then he came out across the street from Apanaev Mosque. It was now one o’clock. In the minaret, someone had hung the kind of bells that were rung in times of fire.71

Finally, in the dream that Jagfar sees during his visit to St. Petersburg near the novel’s end, Jagfar finds himself on a boat full of ‘ulama and writers drifting past Kazan. When Suyumbika’s Tower came into sight, he debarked. It is there that Uzbek Khan and Ulug Muhammad Khan appear before him.72 In this scene, Iskhaqi makes Kazan a location that ties Jagfar to his people’s past, a common geographic point that connected successive generations of Tatars across time.73

Tukai expanded on this vision of Kazan as the spiritual center of the Tatar nation. “A Team of Horses,” written on the occasion of his journey from Ural’sk to Kazan, glorified the latter city:

Oh, Kazan! Pitiful Kazan! Melancholy Kazan! Bright Kazan!Here are the places of our ancestors,Here are the longing soul’s houris, its heaven,Here there is wisdom, here there is enlightenment,Here there is knowledge, here there is light.74

Kazan likewise served as the setting for Tukai’s satiric poem, “The Haymarket, or the New Severed Head,” in which Kazan’s residents send a Tatar wrestler from the city’s circus to vanquish a demon living beneath the waters of the Kaban Lake and rescue its victims.75

71 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 47.72 Suyumbika (1516−1554?) was a wife of Safagarai, Khan of Kazan. In 1549, after Safagarai’s death, Suyumbika’s infant son Utamesh was raised to the throne. Suyumbika ruled as his regent until 1551, when her political rivals raised Moscow-allied Shah ‘Ali to the throne and sent Suyumbika and her son to Moscow. In contrast to account of events given in written sources, legends in circulation among Muslims in the region of Kazan claim that Ivan IV tried to marry Suyumbika. In response, she asked him to build the tower in Kazan that now bears her name. When it was completed, she climbed to the top and jumped to her death. Uzbek Khan (1282−1341) was a ruler of the Golden Horde credited with converting the Golden Horde to Islam. Ulug Muhammad Khan (1405−1454) is considered to be the founder of the Kazan Khanate.73 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 88.74 Gabdulla Tukai. Par at // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 1. P. 159.75 Gabdulla Tukai. Pechän bazarı. yakhud yaŋa Kisekbash // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 1. Pp. 260-274.

358


Another of Tukai’s borrowings from Extinction was Iskhaqi’s rhetoric against the ‘ulama and ishan “class” and the Volga-Ural ishans as the enemies of national progress. The Sufi mystical leaders of the Volga-Ural region (and Sufism in general) had previously attracted criticism from within the regional ‘ulama. In the 1830s, Volga-Ural Muslim poet Utız-Imäni had written a poem accusing Bukhara’s ishans of ignorance, thievery, and pederasty.76 In the 1860s, Faizkhanov, in one of his letters to his former teacher, Märjani described the often irrational actions that the ishans of Russia inspired from Muslim laypeople:

The men upon whom the Mishars bestowed the name of ishans were considered very pure. People used to kiss the ground on which the late Khabibulla Ishan walked, and when they went to Ory [where he was buried], they would eat the dirt from his grave.77

Ak’eget’s Mullah Khisametdin, Zahir Bigiev’s Great Sins, and Kärimi’s A Student and a Shakird feature individual clerical characters who opposed reform. But at the time when Iskhaqi wrote Extinction, ‘ulama and reform were not contradictory terms, nor were ishan and reform. In 1904, the same year that Extinction appeared in print, another young writer, Mäjit Gafuri published his first collection of poems, The Siberian Railroad, or the State of the Nation. He published under the name of “Gäbdelmäjit bin Nurgani al-Gafuri al-Kazani and, then, al-Troitski of the students of Shaykh Zainulla al-Naqshbandi.”78

It was Iskhaqi who began to systematize young Muslim intellectuals’ criticisms of religious and mystical leaders and to transform the criticism of individual shaykhs and ‘ulama into the indiscriminate criticism of shaykhs in general. Extinction gave the diffuse enemy a name: ishanliq (ishanism). Ishanism encompassed everything from the lavish banquets spiritual leaders threw on holidays to the Muslim clergy’s control over Muslim education. Their behavior, in Iskhaqi’s mind was exploitative, extravagant, and utterly illogical.

It was written that that ishanism had entered Islam from the pa-gans of Hindustan, and from whatever century it appeared among the Bulghars, what harm it has done. . . Did God grant the ishans the power

76 Gabderäkhim Utız-Imäni al-Bughari. Töfät-el-g’örabae vä lätaif-el-g’äzae // Idem. Shigır’lär, poemalar. Kazan, 1986. Pp. 55-69.77 Khösäsen Fäezkhanov. Khat 20. 27 dekabr’ 1863 // Idem. tarikhi-dokumental’ jıentıq. P. 368.78 Gabdulmajit Gafuri. Sibir timer yulı yaki akhval-i millät. Orenburg, 1904. P. 1.

359

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

of hypnotism? Whatever the case, no one ever did more harm to the Bulghars than this class.79

In Tukai’s hands, ishanism transformed from a reference in one novel to a recurring theme that figured prominently in a number of his works from 1907 to his death in 1913. In two poems of 1907, “A Voice from the Graveyard of the Murids” and “The Evening Call to Prayer,” Tukai blamed the ishans for destroying all that was good in Tatar society and entrapping that society in a state of perpetual, self-destructive ignorance. In another poem he went still further, exhorting his readers:

Friends, let us set out on the straight road, Let us attack the ishans,Let us break their traps,So that they cannot rebuild them!80

As Tukai developed as a poet and publicist, the abstract ishan of his early works became much more corporeal, taking on the visage of the elderly, fat, unwashed, ignorant, lustful clergyman who came to populate the works of many of Tukai’s friends, protégés, and imitators:

His eyes are closed, his neck is bent, he has a turban wrapped around his head,

He has a huge turban on his head: this animal is called an ishan!81

As Iskhaqi had done before him, Tukai presented powerful ‘ulama and Sufi leaders as a class of national enemies. This rhetoric won him admirers among the young Muslim men (and, by the 1910s, women) studying in Rus-sian schools or new-method madrasas. By 1910, Kazan, Suyumbika, and ishanism were becoming permanent fixtures of what was an increasingly Kazan-centered Tatar nationalist literature. Most of the contributors to this nationalist literature were younger than Iskhaqi himself. In his 1907 poetic cycle, Love of the Nation, Mäjit Gafuri lamented the fallen glory of Kazan and Bulghar, as did Vaqif Jälal in The Voice of Culture, and Sägit Sünchäläi in “A Letter to a Poet.”82 The novelist Fatikh Amirkhan confessed in his autobiography that Extinction’s harsh criticism of Tatar society had “made a strong impression” upon him.83 Thus inspired, he wrote his own futuristic

79 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 51.80 Gabdulla Tukai. Khatirä-i Bakırgan // Idem. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 1. P. 89. 81 Gabdulla Tukai. Ishan // Idem. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 2. P. 19.82 Mäjit Gafuri. Tatarlarnıng ütkän zamannarı // Idem. Millät Mäkhäbbäte. Kazan, 1907. Pp. 30-33; Vaqıf Jälal. Süz bashı // Idem. Säda-i mädäniyyät. Astrakhan, 1908. Pp. 4-5; Sägıyt Sünchäläi. Shagıyrgä mäktüb // Bäyanelkhaq. 1910. No. 686.83 Quoted in Sakhapov. Nachal’nyi etap tvorchestva. P. 41.

360


novel, Reverend Fatkhulla (Fatkhulla Khäzrät) in 1909. Though much more optimistic in his predictions of the Tatar nation’s future, Amirkhan retained critical features of Iskhaqi’s work, including the centrality of Kazan and the national enemy, the gluttonous, willfully ignorant, conservative Muslim cleric, who served as a foil to all that was progressive in Tatar society.84 Through these sources, the twin cults of Kazan and the enemy ‘ulama/mullah/ishan diffused into popular youth culture, finding expression in anonymous shakird songs and poems.85

At the same time, the harsh anticlerical rhetoric of the nationalist youth earned them the enmity of some members of the ‘ulama themselves. As Iskhaqi and Tukai had transformed ‘ulama and ishan from neutral professional labels and designations of respect into terms of abuse, by the 1910s, the ‘ulama contributors to Din va Maghishat tried to recast the word nationalist (mil-lätche) into a negative term in their own publications. In 1911, for example, one writer lamented the popularity of “nationalists” and the youth culture they promoted. Decrying theater performances and mixed-gender dances, he accused these nationalists of casting aside Islamic morality and winning con-verts by pandering to the lowest human appetites. He suggested that someone should write a new novel about what would happen if the nationalists were to gain control of Muslim life in the Volga-Ural region. He recommended titling this proposed novel The Extinction of Islam (Inqiraz-i Islam).86

From Paper to Reality: The National Enemies of Extinction and the Case of Ishmi Ishan

For the most part, the discourses on tragic, doomed Kazan and ishans remained in what Chatterjee has termed the “domain of the spiritual.”87 These tropes thrived in the artistic world created and maintained through the interactions of educated Muslims who published in the press and participated in the fledging Tatar-Muslim theater and youth cultural events. They worked their way into wider debates over Muslim education and social reform in the Russian Empire. But, by 1908, this situation began to change.

In 1908, the Young Turks staged a revolution in Istanbul. For the next months, Turkic-speaking Muslims throughout Russia watched with great

84 Fatikh Amirkhan. Fätkhulla khäzrät // Fatikh Ämirkhan. Äsärlär dürt tomda. Kazan, 1980; Sakhapov. Nachal’nyi etap tvorchestva. P. 43.85 NART. F. 41, Kazan District Court. Op. 11. D. 2. Ll. 99-99ob. 86 Reformatorlar khaqqında // Din vä Mäghyishät. 1912. 1 January. P. 11.87 Chatterjee. The Nation and Its Fragments. P. 6.

361

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

interest as events unfolded on the other side of the Russian–Ottoman border. Faced with an increasingly reactionary post-1905 regime, some Russian Muslim intellectuals hoped that the Turks would succeed where both the Russian and Iranian revolutions seemed to have failed, in installing a last-ing liberal-democratic government.88 Russian Muslim interest in the Young Turks could not have come at a worse moment. In St. Petersburg, the Russian prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, wrestled with real and imagined threats of national separatism in Russia. Though his first concern lay with Finland, he soon took note of the new trends among the empire’s Muslims.89

The new official interest in Russian Muslim politics set off a chain of investigations, arrests, and trials that sent shockwaves through Russian Muslim society in the Middle Volga region. Traditionalist and conservative ‘ulama, who felt themselves under attack by liberal and socialist factions in Muslim society, petitioned the Spiritual Assembly, the MVD, and the gendarmerie.90 Liberals and socialists responded by making their own peti-tions to the same government organs, but they also turned to the growing Tatar-language press to make appeals to the reading public, calling upon readers to defend young writers and new-method schools against the attacks of “national enemies” who had allied themselves with the Russian police.

By 1909, a particular cleric found himself at the center of this maelstrom. He was Ishmökhämmät Dinmökhämmätov, director of Tüntär Madrasa. His school had once been among the most prestigious in the Middle Volga Region, but faced increasing competition from the new-method schools in the region.91 Dinmökhämmätov had long opposed the introduction of secu-lar subjects into the madrasa on the grounds that this diluted the quality of Islamic legal education that future clergy received. Like other traditionalists and conservatives, he was also deeply disturbed by the turn toward antigov-ernment politics and atheism that young people seemed to take once they

88 Bertugan Rämievlär. Tarikhi-dokumental’ jıentıq. Kazan, 2002. Pp. 325-326.89 Pyotr Stolypin. Rech’ o Finlandii, proiznesennaia v vechernem zasedanii gosudarst-vennoi dumy 5 maiia 1908 goda // Pyotr Arkad’evich Stolypin: Nam nuzhna velikaia Rossiia. Polnoe sobranie rechei v Gosudarstvennoi Dume i Gosudarstvennom Sovete. 1906−1911. Moscow, 2001. P. 130.90 R. Mukhametshin. Problemy tatarskogo traditsionalizma na stranitsakh zhurnala “Din va Magishat” (1906−1918). Kazan, 2004.91 On Dinmökhämmätov’s attitudes toward education reform and his activities in 1909−1912, see R. G. Mukhametshin. Tatarskii traditsionalizm: Osobennosti i formy proiavleniia. Kazan, 2005; R. Sh. Zaripov. Gali ishan, Ishmi ishan ham Tuntar madrasase. Kazan, 2002; Mökhämmät Mähdiev. Tarikhtan ber Tarmagı // Ädäbiyat häm Chınbarlıq. Kazan, 1987. Pp. 155-163.

362


entered the world of secular sciences, theater, and newspapers. He saw the only hope for the survival of Russia’s Muslims in halting the progress of new-method education, secularism, nationalism, and radical politics into Muslim society. 92

Many young writers saw the Russian government’s investigation of what became known as “Pan-Islamism” and “Pan-Turkism” as a direct threat to the future of their “national” community. As Tukai wrote to fellow poet Sägıyt Rämiev:

I am full of rage at Ishmi [Dinmökhämmätov] and his lot. If they close down all of the libraries, presses and newspapers, from that day forward, I will rend my new clothes and walk through the streets barefoot. National life has gone dark before my eyes. I have given up all hope for national life and for my own dreams.93

Iskhaqi’s construct of a class of corrupt, self-serving ‘ulama and ishans informed the way in which young writers responded to the willingness of some members of Muslim society to testify against their fellow Muslims to the police and the courts. Tukai envisioned himself as one of the progressive young people (like those described in Extinction) who had emerged for the purpose of leading Tatar society into the future. Having assigned himself that role, he began to use his poems to depict the conservative Dinmökhäm-mätov as an ishan, a national enemy determined to pursue his own interests regardless of the damage he caused to his nation’s future.

From late 1910 through the summer of 1911, Tukai published a series of poems attacking Dinmökhämmätov for denouncing fellow Muslims to the police. One poem identified Dinmökhämmätov as “that old woman in a turban.”94 (Tukai had already pointed to the turban in earlier poems as an identifying marker of the backward, antimodern ishan.) In his next poems, he was even more explicit in his identification of Dinmökhämmätov as an ishan, calling him “Kushmyi ishan.”95 Yet another poem, Tukai mocked Dinmökhämmätov as “Kushmyi the donkey,” but in the text of the poem, he returned to the theme of Dinmökhämmätov as an ishan.96

92 Ishmmökhämmät Dinmökhämmätov. Isharat al-maram ila fi ikamat al-burkhan // NART. F. 41. Op. 11. D. 9. Ll. 217-218.93 Sägıyt Rämievkä. 1911. 4 March // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 5. P. 105.94 Gabdulla Tukai. Kaida? Kem? // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 2. P. 151.95 Gabdulla Tukai. [untitled] // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 2. P. 157; Avıl jırları. Bishenche kötlä // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 2. P. 186.96 Gabdulla Tukai. Kushmyi ishäk jırlıy // Gabdulla Tukai. Äsärlär bish tomda. Vol. 2. P. 159.

363

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

Tukai’s identification of Dinmökhämmätov as an ishan quickly caught on among other young writers angered by Dinmökhämmätov’s reporting of reformist teachers and radical youth to the police. They fused it with a diminutive form of Dinmökhämmätov’s first name, Ishmi, for a final al-literative result of “Ishmi Ishan.” The name spread through the liberal and radical Muslim press and then, apparently, into common knowledge in the region, at least among ‘ulama, merchants and radical youth.97 One of the main prosecution witnesses at the 1912 trial of the Bubi Madrasa teachers on charges of Pan-Islamism, “Ishmi Ishan” Dinmökhämmätov received so many death threats that he felt it necessary to request a police escort when he came to testify. Though a devout Muslim, he abstained from attending mosque during the time he was in Sarapul for the trial, for fear of being attacked in the street.98 Supporters of the Bubi Madrasa teachers wrote to the MVD and the Spiritual Assembly, denouncing Dinmökhämmätov as a harmful moral and intellectual influence upon his village and upon Russian Muslims in general.99

Dinmökhämmätov was not without his defenders. Fellow clerics and residents of his village submitted complaints of their own to the governor-general of Kazan province. They argued that Dinmökhämmätov was an educated, intelligent man, a devout Muslim, and a good teacher. He had done much for his community. Moreover, he was not an ishan and had never claimed to be one. His enemies in Muslim society had merely branded him ishan in order to embarrass and ridicule him.100

The response in defense of Dinmökhämmätov suggests that the mean-ing of the title ishan become ambiguous and contentious by 1912. If, in the mid- to late 1800s, the title denoted a Sufi mystical leader who held great prestige, by the 1910s, it had acquired a second, pejorative meaning, the one suggested by Iskhaqi: a cleric who was backward, ignorant, exploitative, self-centered, and irreligious. The association between these qualities and the title ishan had become so strong that just as Dinmökhämmätov’s enemies had associated his enmity toward reformist schools and radical politics with the activities of an ishan, Dinmökhämmätov’s defenders felt it necessary to

97 Shäekhzadä Babich. Hatif vä Tatar // Idem. Zänggär Jırlar. Kazan, 1990. Pp. 49-50; Äminä Tökhfätullina. Khatın-qız diq’qatenä // Ömet ioldızları. Kazan, 1988. Pp. 192-193; and Fatikh Ämirkhan. Fätkhulla Khäzrät // Fatikh Ämirkhan. Vol. 2. Pp. 72-75.98 Bubi eshläre khaqqında // Yoldız. 1912. No. 839. P. 1.99 NART. F. 199. Op. 1. D. 771. Ll. 301-302 ob.100 NART F. 1370. Karimov Mukhamet-Fatikh Gilmanovich (Fatikh Karimi). Op. 1. D. 3. Ll. 184; R. G. Mukhametshin. Tatarskii Traditsionalizm.

364


disassociate Dinmökhämmätov from the title. The conflict within the Volga-Ural Muslim community over the fate of Bubi Madrasa also highlighted another development: the polarizing nature of the framework of “national servants” versus ‘ulama-ishans that developed as part of the narrative of the Kazan Tatar nation as it was emerging among the youth who read the works of Iskhaqi and Tukai. While the literary abuse of the ‘ulama and ishans may have won Tukai and other post-1905 writers support among the shakirds of the post-1905 madrasas, it alienated the nationalist youth not only from the most conservative ‘ulama, but also from some moderate ‘ulama and lay-people, who were shocked by the writers’ blatant lack of respect for older, influential members of their community.

Extinction as a Step in the Process of Nation-building

In the first decade of the twentieth century, ‘ulama sons such as Gab-dulla Tukai turned to Extinction After Two Hundred Years as an alternative to the reform programs of their teachers and fathers. This novel described a world in which they, graduates of Russian or Ottoman schools or new-method madrasas, aspiring writers, artists and actors, intellectuals versed in Russian, French, and German thought, could envision themselves as the ordained saviors of their Tatar nation. By the 1910s, the amount of “national” literature was much increased from what it had been in 1902. At the same time, Volga-Ural Muslim intellectuals had become familiar with a widening variety of European theoretical literature on politics, sociology, and nation. The 1910s saw the appearance of “national” literature and history textbooks as well as a growing body of literary criticism and work on national identity. Extinction and the works it inspired appeared again in these new realms as textbook compilers and intellectuals attempted to codify Kazan Tatar national literature and national history.

In 1913, Tukai published A Textbook of Tatar National Literature. Among the entries he included was the concluding chapter of Extinction After 200 Years, which included Jagfar’s encounter with Suyumbika, Uzbek Khan, and Ulug Muhammad Khan and his death at the Bulghar ruins. The piece was retitled “Jagfar Äfände’s Dream and Suyumbika’s Death.”101 This same textbook included an excerpt from Amirkhan’s Daughters of the Tatars, which consisted of a retelling of the last days of Suyumbika and ended with Suyumbika throwing herself from the tower in Kazan that bore her name.102

101 Gabdulla Tukai. Mäktäptä milli ädäbiyat däresläre. Kazan, 1911. Pp. 134-137.102 Ibid. Pp. 138-139.

365

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

Another textbook of the period, distributed in Orenburg, offered Tukai’s “A Pair of Horses” together with a brief explanation:

The City of KazanThis city four hundred and fifty years ago was the main city of our

khanate. In this city, five hundred years ago, the queen Suyumbika built a mosque, the minaret of which has been preserved to this day.103

The story of the origin of Suyumbika’s Tower in the above text was, in fact, historically inaccurate. However, the brief narrative suggests how the vision of Kazan’s Muslims as the physical and spiritual descendants of the Kazan khanate was moving from the sphere of radical urban youth culture into the maktab and madrasa classroom. Another textbook offered student readers biographies of Tukai and Märjani, as well as Tukai’s poem “Rev-erend Shihab,” which praise Märjani as “the person who had lit the light of knowledge and held it up for the Tatars” and a man “priceless to his nation.”104 By the 1910s, the role of Märjani as national father and enlightener was a recurring theme in Volga-Ural Muslim literature, and, in 1915, an entire collection of essays published on the hundredth anniversary of his birth de-bated his significance for competing visions of nation and community.105 In Extinction, however, Iskhaqi had laid claim to Märjani as two of the founders of Bulghar (Tatar) literature. (The other founder was Kayum Nasyri, whom Iskhaqi dubbed “the first Bulghar writer.”)106 This view was shared by Jamal Välidi, who, in his 1912 The Development of Tatar Literature devoted an entire chapter to Märjani as a founder of Kazan Tatar literature.107

By the 1910s, in addition to appearing in textbooks, Extinction also became an object of analysis for a new generation of Volga-Ural Muslim writers on literature and nationalism. Among these was Gaziz Gobeidullin, who published a study of Extinction in 1911. Gobeidullin identified Iskhaqi as a “Tatar [Martin] Luther,” who took up his pen to attack the “opponents of progress” and “the destroyers of Islam.”108 But Iskhaqi’s fight to save true Islam from “those who did not understand it” was not divisible from

103 Qazan shahare [front page missing, title and publishing date unavailable]. P. 54. Origi-nal document held at the Suliemaniyya Mosque in Arenda District, Orenburg.104 Gabdulla Tukai. Shihab Khäzrät // [front page missing, title and publishing date un-available]. Pp. 106-108, 111-112. Original document held at the Suliemaniyya Mosque in Arenda District, Orenburg.105 Märjani. Kazan, 1915.106 Iskhaqi. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 81.107 Jamal Välidi. Tatar ädäbiyatı barıshı. Kazan, 1912. Pp. 42-52.108 Gobeidullin. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 25.

366


his battle to save his nation. Gobeidullin identified Extinction as “a novel written in a national spirit” and he devoted an entire section of his article to examining the novel’s portrayal of nation.109 After comparing the novel against definitions of nation in Eugene Richard’s Etudes sur les national-ites, he determined that Extinction was clearly a national novel. Through its treatment of language, literature, and music, it made the argument for the existence of a Kazan Tatar nation.110

Jamal Välidi, in The Development of Tatar Literature, used Extinction as a measure of the cultural literacy and consciousness of Kazan Tatar readers.

True, we have a lot of literate people [. . .] We put out literature for them but they don’t read it or they don’t understand it or they don’t pay attention to it. I know a lot of people who have heard of some Tatar book called Extinction, but they don’t know who wrote it or what kind of book it is. Among these people are average shakirds and even a few teachers.111

Välidi also used Extinction as a rubric for determining the quality of na-tional works. While he acknowledged that the works of nineteenth-century writer Kayum Nasyri were important for the history of Tatar literature, he added that they could not be counted in the same class with Extinction After Two Hundred Years or Reverend Fatkhulla.112

Not all Volga-Ural Muslim writers of the 1910s embraced Extinction as an ideal foundational work of Tatar national culture. Though Gobeidullin was generally very admiring of the novel, he criticized Iskhaqi for being unjustly harsh in accusing the reformers of the nineteenth century of talking too much and accomplishing too little.

Before there will be reform, we see much talking and much writing. Before the French Revolution, Voltaire, Rousseau and others filled the world with books and notes. In Russian, though the men of the forties couldn’t scream, did they ever stop speaking the truth to one another? Society must first learn to speak and write.113

He further criticized Iskhaqi for making light of peasants’ fears of forced Christianization, which he saw to be a genuine concern given Russia’s his-torical treatment of its non-Christian subjects.114 Novelist Galimjan Ibrahim, 109 Ibid. Pp. 21, 24.110 Ibid. Pp. 28-30.111 Validi. P. 30.112 Ibid. P. 59.113 Gobeidullin. Ike yöz yeldan soŋ inqiraz. P. 26.114 Ibid. P. 26.

367

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

going further in his critique, pointed out Iskhaqi’s failure to use the ethnonym Tatar rather than Bulghar. He saw this as a case of Tatar intellectuals using ethnonyms and national names that were inaccurate and confusing, and, as such, ultimately harmful to the process of spreading Kazan Tatar national consciousness.115

Conclusion

For the space of a decade, Iskhaqi’s Extinction After Two Hundred Years played a key role in the construction of a Kazan Tatar national identity within the “spiritual domain” of Volga-Ural Muslim society. In 1904, it had brought together a wide variety of elements from regional historiog-raphy, the educational reform movements, Russian political thought, and Volga-Ural Muslim folk culture to create a narrative of national history and national future. By 1912, Extinction itself had been integrated into the new generation’s canon of Kazan Tatar national literature. In the eight years between the novel’s publication and the appearance of Välidi’s The Development of Tatar Literature, it had been read and dissected by other writers, who integrated those elements that appealed to them into their own works. As the more popular elements were reproduced in successive poems, textbooks, and newspaper articles and became part of the Tatar-Muslim youth culture emerging in the new-method madrasas and Muslim urban quarters, it became possible for one to proclaim: “I am a Tatar. . . Chingiz Khan and Suyumbika are my forbearers” without, perhaps, ever having read Extinction, much less the older works, such as Mustafad al-Akhbar, upon which it drew.116 The career of Extinction suggests the degree to which the construction of national identities in the Volga-Ural Muslim community was both a collective process and a decades-long one. The publication of Märjani’s Mustafad al-Akhbar offered the raw material and the potential for the emergence of some form of Kazan Tatar national identity. However, it was the engagement of ensuing generations of intel-lectuals with Märjani’s history, often through works derived from it by way of Extinction, and their successive winnowing and reinterpretation of its material that turned this potential to reality (at least among certain circles of urban youth) and gave the Kazan Tatar national narrative the form that it possessed by 1917.

115 Galimjan Ibrahimov. Bez – Tatarlarbız! // Galimjan Ibrahimov. Äsärlär. sigez tomda. Vol. 7. P. 5.116 Milliiatne nichek angliysyz? // Aŋ. 1913. No. 12. P. 368.

368


The rise of Extinction also demonstrates some of the ways in which the problem of national identity interacted with other cultural elements in Volga-Ural Muslim society, including Russian radical politics and regional Islamic culture. The former provided the structure of historical process around which Iskhaqi constructed his tale of national apocalypse. This, in turn, made Extinction compelling to early twentieth-century shakirds, who were already familiar with Russian leftist notions of stages of historical progress, class struggle, alienation, and service to society. The latter provided a ready source of symbols (folk music, mystical poems, clothing, sacred locations) to serve as trappings for Iskhaqi’s proposed nation. Deep familiarity with these symbols united Volga-Ural Muslims from the cities and villages of the Volga Basin and the Urals, while simultaneously excluding Crimean, Caucasian, and Turkestani Muslims, for whom many of the symbols such as Bulghar and Bädäväm were unknown. With its unique blend of radical political language and allusions to Volga-Ural Islamic culture, Extinction contributed to the rise of a discourse on reform and modernity that was ex-clusively Volga-Ural in its orientation; Muslims of other regions lacked the knowledge of the traditional Volga-Ural discursive framework necessary to make the new discourse comprehensible, much less meaningful.

Finally, the case of Extinction illustrates the divisive nature of nation construction in the Volga-Ural region. In Extinction, Iskhaqi professed to be opposed to conflict. On multiple occasions, he highlighted conflict as a potential cause of the disappearance of the nation. Yet the stance that he took toward the conservative ‘ulama was so uncompromising that it is difficult to imagine how conflict could not have ensued. In this instance, Iskhaqi became a victim of the logic of his own leftist political views, which divided society into classes engaged in life-and-death struggles. This militant at-titude impressed other leftist young people, but made the Tatar nationalists abhorrent to more conservative members of society and limited the appeal of their national vision.

SUMMARY

The article examines the role of early twentieth-century Tatar-language fiction in creating and popularizing national symbols and in redefining the categories into which intellectuals divided the members of their society. This article focuses, in particular, on the works of a number of post-1905 writers who have received relatively little attention in English-language scholar-

369

Ab Imperio, 3/2012

ship. While not neglecting the imperial context, it takes an intellectual rather than social historical approach. It draws on Tatar-language poems, novels, memoirs, letters, and archival documents from the early 1900s.

Резюме

В статье рассматривается роль татарской литературы начала ХХ века в создании и популяризации национальных символов и переопределе-нии категорий, с помощью которых интеллектуалы стратифицировали членов общества. В центре внимания Даниэль Росс работы нескольких татарских писателей, активность которых выпала на период после Первой русской революции (1905–1907) (поэзия, проза, воспоминания, письма и архивные документы). Имперский контекст играет важную роль в интерпретации их творчества, однако автор определяет свой подход не как социально-исторический, а как “интеллектуальный”, сформированный под влиянием постколониальной методологии.

the nation that might not be: the role of iskhaqi's extinction after two hundred years in the...

Documents