Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 22 – The Soviet
government did everything it could to extirpate the legacy of the Islamic
modernists of Tatarstan who wrote most of their works in the late 19th
and early 20th century in Arabic script, viewing such people as its
chief ideological competitors in the Muslim world.
Moscow changed the alphabet of Tatar
from Arabic to Latin and then Cyrillic script to cut the Tatars off from this
remarkable past. It executed the followers of this trend. It destroyed as many
copies of their works as it could and made the possession of copies of their
works a criminal offense.
But it was almost singlehandedly
defeated in this effort by Zainap Maksudova (1897-1980), a Russian-language
teacher in Kazan’s only Tatar school in the 1930s and 1940s who was the child
of prominent Tatar reformers and who surreptitiously collected and saved the Arabic-script
texts of the jadids.
She is not unknown among specialists
on Tatarstan and the jadids. (See, for example, Alfrid Bustanov’s “Muslim
Literature in the Atheist State: Zainap Maksudova between Soviet Modernity and
Tradition,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 9 (2018): 1-31 at academia.edu/36578312/Muslim_Literature_in_the_Atheist_State_Zainap_Maksudova_between_Soviet_Modernity_and_Tradition.)
But she and her collection deserve
to be better known, not only because of the role she played in keeping the jaded
tradition alive but also because of the window her life and career provides
into the small but remarkable cohort of people who did the same thing for other
intellectual and political trends the Soviets thought they could stamp out.
That is now possible thanks to a new
book by Bustanov, The Library of Zainap
Maksudova (in Tatar, Kazan, 2019) that has just been presented in the capital
of Tatarstan (dspace.kpfu.ru/xmlui/handle/net/111113,
rt-online.ru/podvig-uchitelnitsy/
and business-gazeta.ru/article/454818).
Born
into the nobility of educated Tatars in Vyatka gubernia at the end of the
imperial period, Maksudova received her education at the Izh-Bubi medrassah, a
rare but not unique case of a woman getting training there. She learned Arabic
and Russian and became a Russian-language teacher in a Kazan school where she
acquired notoriety as “a Russifier.”
But
that was her day job. At night, she set as her life’s task the compilation of a
bibliography of Islamic literature and especially of the jadids and despite the
dangers of doing so, she assembled a remarkable library of such materials and
kept them in her home. And she also kept
up Tatar in Arabic script by using it at every opportunity in her own life.
Her
bibliography of approximately 378 Arabic-script Tatar books from the 15th
to the 20th century and a large part of the originals or manuscript
copies of these books are now held in the National Library of Tatarstan. They
were placed there by her daughter after Maksudova’s death in 1980.
Bustanov,
a Tatar professor at the University of Amsterdam, says in his description of
Maksudova’s role that she represented “a bridge” between the past and the
present and between the scholarly community and the Muslims at a time when that
was almost impossible and that today she is part of “the pantheon” of those who
have made the Tatar rebirth possible.
Unfortunately,
he adds, her contribution was not matched by personal happiness: “One of her
sons married a Rusisan girl, moved to Moscow and did not stay in contact with
his mother, and another son suffered from alcoholism.” Only her daughter cared
for her mother and the fate of her colleague.
A
year before her death, Maksudova asked in her diary in despair “Where are the
11 children I raised?” Her most important
“child,” her bibliography on the Arabic script books of Tatar enlighteners, however,
ensures that her name will not be forgotten ever again. Many thanks to Professor Bustanov for making
that a certainty.
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