Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Islam in Contemporary Central Asia 1 3 7group in society. These differences have had important consequences duringthe modern period.Reform and ModernismPractices associated with the transmission of Islam survived the Russian conquest.Painfully aware of the thinness of Russian rule in the area and of its distancefrom Saint Petersburg and supremely confident of the superiority of theEuropean civilization they brought to Central Asia, Russian administrators embarkedon a policy of disregarding or ignoring Islam, assuming that withoutstate support, it would simply decay. M a d r a s as continued to exist and eventhrived; indeed, they extended their influence to the steppe, where morescripturalist forms of religiosity began to spread by the late nineteenth centu ry. The Kazakh elites, however, early began sending their sons to Russianschools in substantial numbers, so that by the turn of the twentieth century, asizable secular Kazakh intelligentsia existed. This group, fluent in Russian andcomfortable in the political ideas of the Russian intelligentsia, began to formulatea Kazakh national identity that had little place in it for Islam as anythingbut a marker of cultural identity.The Russian conquest also brought in its wake printing, the telegraph, andthe railway, which together began to change patterns of intellectual authorityand cultural transmission. One result of this was the emergence of a movementfor cultural reform built around the advocacy of the usul-i jadid, the new(that is, phonetic) method of teaching the Arabic alphabet. Called Jadidism,this movement shared a great deal in common with other modernist movementsin the Muslim world at that time (Khalid 1998). Faced with the challengeposed by the loss of sovereignty to Russian rule and with the perceivedthreat of cultural and economic marginalization, proponents of reform calledupon their compatriots to acquire modern knowledge. Not only was suchknowledge completely congruent with the “true” teachings of Islam, it alonecould allow Muslims to meet the demands of the age and thus ensure their survival.However the Jadids believed that the “true” teachings of Islam had beenobfuscated by centuries of interpretations that had led Muslims astray. Althoughmany of the most prominent Jadids (as the proponents of reformcame to be called) came from learned families, Jadidism rejected the authorityof traditional u l a m a to interpret Islam. Instead, the Jadids argued for a returnto the textual sources of Islam.This was a radically new way of understanding Islam, since it pulled Islamaway from its moorings in local customs and traditions. Indeed, the Jadids denouncedmany local customs as un-Islamic. However, the Jadids’ emphasis onmeeting the “demands of the age” and on progress and enlightenment shifted