Who Were the Kazakh Jadids?

Located between the Volga-Ural region and Central Asia, where jadidism has been scrupulously studied over the past half century, the Kazakh steppe was nevertheless also an arena for the development of jadid thought, here, as elsewhere, characterized by the coexistence of modernist and Islamic reformist ideas. During the later imperial period figures identifying themselves, or subsequently identified as jadids were numerous. Jadids were active in urban commercial settlements, including Troitsk, Petropavlovsk, and Omsk, as well as in nomadic encampments on the steppe, and included Tatars, Bashkirs, and Kazakhs. The Kazakh case brings into question problems in defining jadidism itself. This is because figures identified in Kazakh Soviet, post-Soviet and in Western historiography as “intellectuals” or supposedly secular reformers also fit the definition of jadidism.