Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 13 – An exhibit at
the Oriental Museum in Moscow designed to show that the great Crimean Tatar
enlightenment leader Ismail Gasprinski “did everything so that the Crimea would
become at least a little ours” ends by underscoring how much at odds what he
taught and what those who now change “Crime is Ours” remain.
In an article in the weekend edition
of “Kommersant,” Dmitry Butrin describes the small exhibit at the Moscow museum
now devoted to Gasprinski and reflects upon what his life and teachings have to
say about Russians and Crimea and Russia and Crimea to this day (kommersant.ru/doc/2580238).
Ismail bey Gasprinsky died exactly
century ago on September 23, 1914. Few noted that at the time because his
passing occurred just after World War I broke out. But to say that “’no one
took notice’” of his death is a Russian point of view.” People came from Kazan, St. Petersburg,
Orenburg and Istanbul to his grave at Bakhchisaray.
Gasprinsky’s birthplace Avdzhika was
renamed Okhotnichye when the Crimean Tatars were “resettled” to Central Asia,
and then it ceased to exist entirely in 1964 when Nikita Khrushchev ordered it
to be flooded as part of a reservoir project.
But in that village until 1926 there was a Muslim school Gasprinsky
founded in 1911 and that changed the Muslim world.
The son of a tsarist army officer,
Gasprinsky was trained at military schools in Voronezh and Moscow, but instead
of following in his father’s footsteps, Gasprinsky returned to his native
village and opened a school, subsequently studying in Paris and Constantinople
and developing his ideas on the modernization of Islam which he presented in
his newspaper, “Tercuman.”
His central idea, Butrin says was “jadidism,
the idea of the secular development of the Islamic world,” a world he did not
divide between Russia and the rest. He
served as a secular official and in 1905, he helped found the first Russian political
union of liberal Muslims, Ittifaq al-Muslimin.
That did not last very long thanks
to the efforts of reactionary Russian nationalists, and in 1907, Gasprinsky
became the editor in chief of the St. Petersburg newspaper, “Milliet,” “the
organ of the Muslim fraction of the State Duma.
And he promoted the idea of a World Congress of Muslims in Cairo to spread
his reformist ideas.
Gasprinsky is known among the Crimean
Tatars and among Muslims more generally as “the teacher of teachers.” But in Russian schools, Butrin says, no one
is told anything “about Tatar enlightenment figures, about the history of Kazan
after its conquest by Ivan the Terrible, about the history of Daghestan or
about the Young Bukharans” or about so much else.
Even as they shout “Crimea is ours,”
Russians now only a highly selective part of the history of the Crimean Tatars,
he writes. “We know only that they were resettled from Crimea in 1944. We do
not know what happened afterwards. And even more we do not know what was
before. We know that Crimea exists and that Crimea is now ours. But we do not
know what Crimea is because Crimea is also they and in the first instance they.”
“If we want to become finally real
Russians in a real Russia, we will inevitably have to convert ourselves into a
Tatar and a Daghestani and a German and a Jew and a Ukrainian and a German and,
given Dostoyevsky … a Georgian and a Japanese and a Frenchman, and an American.”
Unless that happens, Butrin
reflects, the Russian world will remain divided and incomplete, but his own
reflections on Gasprinsky are an indication that while some Russians understand
that reality, many are now engaged in denying it – and still worse are trying
to deprive those who are part of that broader tradition their memories and
hence the possibility of trust.
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