The Study of Jadidism in Soviet and Russian Historiography

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the history of the study of Muslim reformism, known in the scientific literature as Jadidism, in the works of Soviet and Russian researchers. At first, it included only the reform of Islamic education, and later it began to be understood as a broader movement of “Muslim enlightenment” aimed at reforming the entire Muslim society. The study of the history of Jadidism in Russia began in the 1920s. Soviet scientists through the prism of the Marxist theory of the development of socio- economic formations. In the post-war years, Soviet historians and social scientists wrote critically about Jadidism. During the years of Khrushchev’s “thaw”, scholars tried to reconsider the essence of Jadidism in the socialist context of historical research through the reinterpretation of Islam as a specific Tatar national cultural heritage, called “mirasism”. A new stage of Russian historiography in matters of Jadidism began in the post- Soviet period, when Jadidism began to be seen as a social movement of Russian Muslims aimed at forming a nation of the European type. In general, it can be said that studies in Russian and Soviet historiography on the history of Jadidism in the Crimea, the Volga-Ural region, Central Asia and the Caucasus are distinguished by different methodologies and conceptual approaches, while works on the history of the Jadid movement in the Volga-Ural region are more complete. Despite the fact that there is no common understanding of the phenomenon of Jadidism in the Volga-Ural region, nevertheless, scientists of different directions (historians, philologists, Islamic scholars) have done a lot of work in studying this issue. In this regard, the history of Muslim reformism in the North Caucasus, in particular in Dagestan, is practically not studied. As well as there is no special work on this region.