The Impact of Jadidist Ideas on the Press and Cultural Life of Turkestan

The article looks at how Jadidism, the Muslim reform movement of the late Russian Empire, changed the press and cultural life of Turkestan between the 1900s and the early 1920s. It relies on existing scholarship and on the programmatic writings of the Jadids themselves. The main argument is that the periodical press became the movement's chief tool for building a modern public sphere. Newspapers and journals worked alongside new-method schools, theatre, literature and charitable societies, and together they brought into circulation a new vocabulary of progress, education, nation and civic duty. The article also discusses the limits set by colonial censorship and the Soviet repressions that put an end to the movement.