Caught in the Middle: Reform and Youth Rebellion in Russia’s Madrasas, 1900–10

Abstract

Caught in the MiddleReform and Youth Rebellion in Russia’s Madrasas, 1900–10 Danielle Ross (bio) Becoming a scholar was a common aspiration among Muslims in late imperial Russia. In 1909, a young Muslim poet published a lullaby as part of a reader for young children: One day he’ll go to the madrasa,After studying and working hard,He’ll become a scholar.1 On the surface, the song’s sentiment was straightforward: one day the infant would grow up and go to school. In return for the effort he invested in his education, he would become a scholar. But what did it mean to “become a scholar”? In the Volga–Ural region at the beginning of the 20th century, this was a controversial question. Battles over what it meant to be educated and what role educated people should play in the Muslim community created a new generation of leaders but also spawned lasting hostilities among educated Muslims and undermined the relationships that had once provided continuity across generations of Volga–Ural clergy. Educational reform in the Muslim communities of late imperial Russia has received considerable scholarly attention.2 In the case of the Volga–Ural region, however, the conceptualization and implementation of educational [End Page 57] reform have usually been discussed as components of modernization or identity creation. Given this focus, such studies have tended to concentrate on how education reform contributed to broader changes in self-identity (i.e., the emergence of national identity) and relations between the state and a religious minority rather than on how the same reforms transformed the culture of education itself.3 An exception to this trend is an article by Norihiro Naganawa, “Maktab or School?” which examines how Muslims perceived the differences between Islamic and non-Islamic education from 1906 to the eve of World War I, and how zemstvo funding altered the balance of power among the clerics, teachers, merchant sponsors, and community members who sought to shape educational institutions.4 Naganawa suggests that complex financial and ideological conflicts evolved around Volga–Ural Muslim education and engaged many participants beyond the clergy and the intelligentsia. A second exception is an article by Mustafa Tuna, which considers Volga–Ural Muslim education reform in the framework of a shift from a religious to a secular discursive tradition, a process to which the author attributes the political radicalization of Volga–Ural youth.5 His exploration of the link between changing curriculum and changing student worldviews points to the potential for educational reform to generate conflict inside reformist circles. Like Naganawa, Tuna suggests that rather than sparking a confrontation between reformers and conservatives, educational reform inspired multiple simultaneous conflicts among Muslims of different generational, regional, and social groups. The present article extends this line of investigation that construes educational reform as a force for conflict and destabilization in Volga–Ural Muslim society. It builds on Naganawa’s examination of conflicts over education that engaged parents and community members in addition to clerics and teachers but shifts its attention from state–community interactions to perceptions and social dynamics within the Muslim community. This approach [End Page 58] makes it possible to map out a different but parallel set of conflicts among teachers, parents, and students over the mission of the madrasa.6 While I agree with Tuna’s assertion about the secularization of the madrasa curriculum during the early 1900s, I propose that the secularization of the curriculum represents an inadequate explanation for the intergenerational conflicts that unfolded within and around the madrasas. At least as important were the changing demographics of the student population, the urban environment in which many reformed schools were located, and disagreements over the purpose of the madrasa as an institution. Adeeb Khalid’s interpretation of madrasas as sites of socialization and acquisition of cultural capital provides a starting point for making sense of the student–teacher conflicts that erupted in urban madrasas of the Volga–Ural region between 1900 and 1908. In his study of educational reform in Central Asia, he identifies the madrasa as “the site of social reproduction of Islamic legal knowledge and its carriers.”7 This transmission was achieved through relationships between teachers and their...