The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia

Some thirty years ago, there was a burst of scholarship on the history of what was then Soviet Central Asia, which yielded a number of works on the Russian conquest, imperial administration, and Soviet development of the region that are still widely-used classics.1Since then, it seems that the bulk of publication on Central Asia has concerned contemporary politics and economics, leaving these books increasingly dated as subaltern and post-colonial theories and new archival discoveries sweep the discipline.Fortunately, we are in the midst of a new burst of scholarship, which not only utilizes new tools but, thanks to the fall of Cold War barriers, approaches Central Asia from perspectives other than that of Russian administrators.Adeeb Khalid's book is a welcome addition to this growing literature.2 The Jadids, or "New-Method" men, flourished in Turkestan in the last decades of the tsarist regime.They advocated renewing Islamic culture through Western educational methods and adapted Western forms of "print capitalism," such as newspapers and theater, to carry out what Khalid calls "the politics of admonition."3The Jadids ex-