The Jadid's Quest for Reform
On the Jadid movement’s struggle for Islamic renewal in the Russian Empire.
Unity in Language, Thought, and Action
“May God grant that Terciman be the servant of truth and the mirror of the age.
Let it proclaim truth and honesty, be a labour of enlightenment and justice.
May we finally come to know our sacred homeland; let the pages of Terciman reveal it to us.”
- From a letter to the editor of Terciman
So read a prayer printed in the first issue of Terciman, a Muslim weekly newspaper published by Crimean Tatar educator Ismail Gasprinsky on the morning of April 10, 1883. Modest in appearance and form, the paper featured just four pages: two in Crimean Tatar and two in Russian. Its motto was “Dilde, fikirde, işte birlik”—“Unity in language, thought, and action.”
The timing of Terciman was no coincidence. Russian authorities were tightening their control over newly acquired territories in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Just one hundred years earlier, the Russian Empire had annexed the Crimean Peninsula, leading to the mass exodus of its Muslim population to Ottoman lands. By the end of the 19th century, there were nearly 14 million Muslims in Imperial Russia, representing 11% of its total population across territories stretching from the Black Sea to the Tien Shan Mountains, and from the Volga to Persia's frontier. With old Crimean Tatar elites dislocated, traditions of knowledge weakened, and institutional orthodoxy shaken, the region entered a period of intellectual stagnation.
From his home in Bakhchysarai, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate, Terciman’s publisher Gasprinsky observed firsthand the rapid reconfiguration of the social, educational, and epistemic terrain around him. The civilisational structure of his forefathers was crumbling. Beyond the Peninsula’s shores, the light of a new era was gleaming on the horizon.
But Gasprinsky recognised in the unfolding events not only a threat, but also a historic opportunity. Between the two extreme ends of rejection and submission to the new order, he charted a middle path, one of revival and reimagining. Drawing on his travels in the Ottoman Empire, where local elites were actively renegotiating their place in the new age, he envisioned a similar awakening taking place among the Turkic Muslim peoples.
Istanbul at the time served as a melting pot of intellectual activity, drawing émigrés and exiles from across the Muslim world. It was there that Gasprinsky understood that Muslim modernisation was not just possible but plausible. He saw the printing press, modern pedagogy, and new forms of art and public discourse as civilisational tools capable of ushering in a new era of intellectual production, enabling the Muslims of Russia to reassert their place in the world on their own terms.
Gasprinsky took on the challenge. The first Crimean Tatar publication of its kind, Terciman quickly rose to be the most influential voice for Muslims across the Russian Empire and beyond. Its editorial team engaged with Russian-language publications of all genres and ideological leanings, while drawing on a network of correspondents from Kazan, Ufa, Makhachkala, Samarkand, Bukhara, and other key Muslim cities. Gasprinsky’s command of Crimean Tatar, Russian, French, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian gave him access to a wide range of intellectual currents. Over the following decades, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic periodicals regularly cited and reprinted Terciman’s articles. The newspaper had even found its way into the pages of European and Russian Orientalist journals, where its insights were mined by scholars of the Muslim world.
But Gasprinsky’s efforts did not end at literary activity.
In January 1884, he founded the first experimental school in Bakhchysarai. Known as the Usul-i-Jadid, or New Method schools, they developed new phonetic methods for teaching Arabic to replace traditional syllabic rote memorisation, and incorporated ‘secular’ subjects like history, geography, and mathematics taught in vernacular Turkic tongues within European-style classrooms. The emphasis on education was instrumental to Gasprinsky’s aim of promoting functional literacy and forming a comprehensive knowledge ecosystem. The proponents of this new reform movement, referred to as Jadids, sought to integrate the intellectual, scientific, and educational advancements of the modern age with Islamic teachings.
Jadids emerged at a time when ideas could traverse continents at unprecedented speed and scope, bypassing authorities and elite networks. Broadly described as ‘the short 19th century’, this period—stretching roughly from the 1830s to the 1910s—represents a forgotten chapter in history in which Muslim elites developed a culture of letters and constructed social institutions befitting the industrial age. By the 1880s, the reformist discourse animating the salons and chaikhanas of Istanbul and Cairo was flourishing in Bakhchysarai and would soon spread to the farthest regions of the Russian mainland.
The Turco-Islamic Belt
At the advent of Russian colonisation in the 1850s, sedentary areas of Central Asia—encompassing much of present-day Uzbekistan, parts of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan—consisted of myriad polities ruled by khans, emirs, and clerics, each of whose authority generally relied on personal agreements and tribal allegiances rather than formal institutions.
Shortly after the fall of the Timurids in the 16th century, global trade routes shifted from overland to maritime pathways, leading to a prolonged socioeconomic decline in the region. Cut off from global intellectual currents, Samarkand and Bukhara, the crown jewels of medieval Islamic civilisation, had fallen into decay. Over the following centuries, madrasas devolved from institutions of higher learning into rigid systems that reproduced a clerical class trained only in Islamic jurisprudence and unconcerned with other domains of knowledge. Instruction relied almost solely on oral transmission, leaving many graduates unable to read or write.
Institutional weakness had made the region both an easy target for imperial powers and ill-equipped to handle regional problems. Russian colonial rule introduced sweeping socioeconomic changes across what became known as Russian Turkestan. Before long, settler communities, equipped with their own schools, churches, newspapers, and markets, and designed following European urban planning, began proliferating across the region. Though nominally independent, protectorate states such as the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva were also coming under Russian influence. It was within this context of widespread sociocultural decline among the native population and mounting instability that the Turkestani Jadid movement began to take form.
One of the main Jadid architects of reform was Mahmudkhodja Behbudiy. Born into the old Samarkand elite, he received traditional madrasa education and worked as a clerk before advancing to the position of qazi. Like Gasprinsky, he travelled through Istanbul, Cairo, and Mecca, where he made personal acquaintances with leading reformers. Upon his return, Behbudiy embraced Gasprinsky’s pedagogical approach, initiating a comprehensive modernisation program in schools and launching his own publishing enterprise. Revenue from publishing allowed him to pursue and fund his projects without relying on traditional patronage or state funding.
In the capital, Tashkent, Munawwar Qari opened a New Method school, which became the largest and most organised in all of Russian Turkestan. He wrote numerous textbooks, ran a bookselling and publishing business, and ran a discussion circle which included “practically everybody involved in reform in Central Asia”. After 1914, Qari shifted focus to theatre, as was fitting for a committed Jadid—many reformers regarded drama as amongst the most effective mediums for conveying modernist ideas.
In Kazan, Volga Tatar intellectual Gabdulla Bubi developed a framework built around four core concepts: millät (people), hörriät (freedom), mäğrifät (education), and täräqqiyat (progress). Like many visionaries of his time, Bubi harboured designs that extended beyond the short-term horizon, encompassing places like Kulja (modern Xinjiang), which he planned to turn into a civilisational centre for scientific and intellectual discourse in Greater Turkestan. In the Caucasus, Russian administrators remarked on the emergence of an educated cohort of Muslims who aspired “to represent the local intelligentsia and exert direct influence on the very governance of the region.” By the century's close, even Siberian Tatar communities in the remote Tobolsk district had established Jadid schools that admitted both male and female students.
The influence of Gasprinsky's reforms began to spread like waves, inspiring an extensive network of Jadid-led initiatives throughout the ‘Turco-Islamic belt’ of the Russian Empire, stretching from the Crimean Peninsula through the Volga-Ural region, then south to Azerbaijan and eastward into Turkestan and Western Siberia. Russian Muslims now had regular access to books and periodicals from across the country, as well as from Turkiye, Iran, and other distant regions. To facilitate communication via the press, Jadids advocated for a Chagatai-based literary standard intended to supplant Persian as the region’s primary language.
Within a remarkably short period, Jadids managed to lay the foundations for a new plausibility structure: a social-cultural framework that determines what knowledge, beliefs, and expressions can be conceived of as legitimate and reasonable within a community. Leveraging educational reform, print media, theatre, and discussion circles as novel civilisational tools, the Jadids sought to redefine the limits of the plausible—and, in doing so, transformed how Russian Muslim elites understood and engaged with the world. Seeing educated mothers as essential for cultivating a capable next generation, Jadids launched a series of reforms aimed at elevating the status of Muslim women and granting them access to education and voting rights. Publications like Âlem-i nisvan, edited by Gasprinsky's daughter Shafika Hanim, and Volga Tatar-led Suyumbike, gave women a separate platform in the discourse. The Jadids contended that the Quran did not exempt women from the duty to seek knowledge, and that included disciplines both religious and worldly.
Reactions to Jadid societal and educational reforms were divided. Muslim conservative factions, known as Qadimists, or proponents of the old method, responded to the Jadids with escalating opposition. In particular, the Qadimists criticized the Jadids’ rejection of ulema commentaries in favor of direct interpretation and advocacy for ijtihad (independent reasoning); their infusion of Western ideas into Islamic tradition and calls for admitting Muslim women into madrasas and public roles; and their dismissal of Sufism as a ritualised folk practice incompatible with Islamic orthodoxy. What began as two competing visions for the optimal societal structure eventually evolved into a political struggle that outlasted the Russian Empire itself.
The Jadids and the Qadimists
In today’s public consciousness in Russia and elsewhere, Jadids are often cast as the socially progressive faction championing quintessentially liberal values, while their opponents are depicted as backward obscurantists resistant to progress. However, reality was much more nuanced, and the boundaries between the Jadids and the Qadimists were considerably more porous. Many Jadids, coming from elite backgrounds, remained entrenched in the traditional madrasa milieu; some others combined reformist activism and madrasa teaching. The Qadimists, far from being an uneducated, déclassé mass, held considerable social influence rooted in the established traditions of knowledge, chains of religious authority and, among Sufi adherents, an unbroken spiritual lineage. In many respects, the Qadimists formed a residual category, comprising people with diverse views, united by a shared unease over the Jadids’ attacks on clerical authority.
Jadids’ commitment to anti-ulema and anti-Sufi polemics went so far as to declare both groups as purveyors of ‘unorthodox’ and popular versions of Islam that had departed from the authentic tradition. This situated the Jadids within a broader pattern of Islamic reform movements emerging across the 19th century, particularly evident in the overlaps between Salafi and Jadid thought and methodology, all despite their different historical contexts and ultimate goals. Viewed from such an angle, both Salafism and Jadidism reveal an intrinsically modernist character, even when their conclusions appear to advocate for a return to pre-modern forms of religious practice. The very impulse to return to ‘pristine’ traditional sources and purge the religion of later accretions is itself a mark of a modern mentality, as it requires a type of historical consciousness that could only emerge in the modern period.
Jadid-Qadimist interactions and their engagement with the Russian state varied across regions. In Russian Turkestan, the Qadimists successfully worked out compromises with the administration and soon became dependent on them for social status. Many ulema accepted awards from the state, learned the language, and sometimes sent their sons to Russian schools. By the advent of the 1917 Russian Revolution, both the Jadids and the Qadimists were shaped by the realities of colonial rule and made abundant use of the opportunities the Russian regime provided to pursue their objectives. Each side sought to outmanoeuvre the other by cultivating ties with imperial officials and manipulating imperial laws and institutions to their advantage.
Jadid criticism had also extended to colonial rule, although it had to be coded and circumscribed. Initially supportive of the reforms, the officials grew wary as the Jadids gained influence, fearing that they might challenge the status quo. Colonial authorities had complex relationships with both groups: on one hand, they saw the promotion of ‘secular’ activities as an antidote to “Islamic fanaticism”; on the other hand, these activities had to be carefully vetted and monitored by authorities. The censorship of Jadid publications was systematic and far-reaching, ranging from direct censorship of the reformist press to closure of newspapers at the slightest provocation and denial of permissions for new publications, schools, and bookstores. Despite these restrictions, the Jadids succeeded in forming the first Muslim political organisation and party, Ittifaq al-Muslimin, in 1905.
Both the Jadids and the Qadimists frequently appealed to the Tsarist state for assistance in their disputes. Muslims quickly learned to frame and address their communal tensions in language that resonated with Russian officials; laypeople, in particular, found that they could challenge the authority of clerics by triggering state intervention. This overreliance on the Russian state as an arbiter led to increased state intrusion into the everyday life of Muslims, which has persisted well into the Soviet and post-Soviet period.
The Quest for Reform
In 2020, the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, delivered a speech honouring the Jadids as “outstanding educators who could have carried out the country’s Third Renaissance in the twentieth century”. In post-Soviet Central Asia, the legacy of the Jadids, once consigned to oblivion, is now being restored to prominence in national discourse.
The Jadid movement across the Russian Empire represents a fascinating yet understudied chapter in the intellectual history of Muslims at large. For us, their story raises important questions: what lessons can we extract from their successes and failures? How does one balance religion with modern education? And how can Muslim communities engage with secular state power without compromising on their faith?
In the years preceding the momentous 1917 Russian Revolution, Jadid criticism was directed primarily toward their conservative adversaries. The nascent public sphere they had worked so hard to create was still fragile, while the Qadimists, though weakened, continued to wield considerable influence across the Muslim social sphere. State-wide censorship rendered any meaningful criticism of the Russian state impossible. In the chaos that followed the Revolution, the Jadids saw in the ostensibly anti-imperial Soviet order an ally in their struggle for sovereignty. It was in those years that the Jadid movement transformed into an active political force, now positioned against both Qadimist traditionalism and Russian colonial designs with reinvigorated radicalism.
But the energy did not translate into electoral success. Time and again, the ulema emerged triumphant at the ballot box. Their victory, however, was soon rendered meaningless by the collapse of constitutional governance itself, which relegated all power to Russian settler communities. The turbulent period spanning 1917-1920 brought about a total reconfiguration of socio-political structures across the former empire. Once again, the Jadids found themselves caught between the dissolution of the old order and the birth pangs of a new one, but this time, they emerged victorious. When the exclusionary policies of the Tashkent Soviet finally yielded to pressure from Moscow, an extraordinary confluence of circumstances allowed Jadids to briefly take over the new institutions of power.
A standard narrative portraying all Jadids as sudden converts to communism obscures a more complex reality. The Jadids integrated themselves into the Soviet apparatus, convinced they could collaborate with revolutionary authority to deliver the blow to the opposition, in hopes that the new order might prove amenable to their aspirations. But their grandiose visions remained unrealised, colliding with the unforgiving constraints of political reality.
The Soviet hierarchy, for the most part, remained dominated by non-indigenous cadres. These leaders needed native recruits to disseminate the Soviet ideology, but harboured suspicions about their true loyalties. In the 1930s, party discipline demanded the expulsion of the Jadids and local communists, replacing them with a new generation of ideologically aligned and largely non-religious Central Asian party members. Stalin’s consolidation of power and the following purges obliterated Islamic institutions through a systematic campaign of executions, deportations, and resettlements, mosque and madrasa closures, and the abolition of courts. Most Jadids and Qadimists were tortured or executed, or perished in labour camps.
Gasprinsky passed away in 1914, never to witness the aftermath of the Russian revolution or to learn of the fates that befell his intellectual heirs. A century after his death, all across the Turco-Islamic belt of the former Russian Empire, the works of the assiduous Muslim reformers are being brought into the spotlight, if only to support nationalist agendas.
Today, we are still seeking to formulate answers to questions that have occupied the minds of Muslims since the dawn of the industrial age. Throughout the short 19th century, Muslims responded to the needs of the time, but for various reasons were defeated. The lessons from these reforms have faded from historical memory, leaving Muslims today trapped in an endless loop, recycling the concepts and ideas debated generations ago, unable to escape this forgotten legacy.
How do we navigate both mainstream secular culture and traditional Islamic authority structures that may not fully address our particular circumstances? How do we chart a middle path, one of revival and reimagining? And how do we build a new plausibility structure befitting the 21st century? The final lines of the inaugural prayer in Terciman remain as relevant today as they were a century and a half ago:
“This age is strange, foreign; we must understand it.
Let it (the newspaper) follow the right path.
And may the young Terciman (Interpreter) thrive.”
Author: Yana Zuray(eva) is a Buryat-Mongolian visual artist and 3D designer from Ulan-Ude, Russia. She writes at Waterfalls of Qaf and can be found on X as @yiihya. She lives between Toronto and London.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
Socials: Follow Kasurian on social media via Substack Notes, Instagram, and Twitter/X for the latest updates.
Further reading:
The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform, Khalid Adeeb
Clichés, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia, Devin DeWeese
Jadidism as a Paradigm for Studying Islam in the Russian Empire, Alfrid Bustanov
For Prophet and Tsar, Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia, Robert Crews
The Enlightener of the East, Ismail Gasprinsky, Yuri Bekirovich Osmanov