Iran’s lack of cultural and political influence within Central Asia was further exacerbated by the immense social and political changes which were taking place in the region throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Bukhara and the Central Asian territories under Russian control were buffeted by a rising sense of Pan-Turkic national consciousness and increased claims for political and cultural reform from the region’s intelligentsia. This process was encouraged by the large number of Tatar Tsarist administrators and interpreters, who had boosted the use of the Chaghatay Turkic language in everyday government communication, and had encouraged the use of the Turkic language in schools and other Central Asian cultural and social institutions at the expense of the Persian language.50 The presence and influence of Tatars involved in the administration of Central Asia was by no means the only factor behind the rising tide of Pan-Turkic self-awareness. Other influences not indigenous to the Central Asian region were also making their presence felt. In particular, the shock and humiliation felt by Muslim populations throughout the world in the face of European conquest and colonisation had according to Bergne:
[S]timulated a wave of soul searching amongst the intelligentsia of those countries most affected. Muslim thinkers tried to analyse the reasons for the weakness and lack of development of those governments whether Moghul, Ottoman, Egyptian, or North African, which had been defeated by British, French, or in the Caucasus and
49 Ibid.
117 Central Asia, Russian arms, or, like Iran had remained independent but fallen victim to Western influence and manipulation.51
It was in this atmosphere that many Central Asian thinkers turned to the weakened but still powerful Sunni Ottoman empire and the Pan-Turkic ideas that flowed from this empire as a source of inspiration for their reforms, not the perennially weak Persian empire under the rule of the Qajar Shahs.
Turkic intellectuals sought to apply principals of modern education within Russian- controlled areas of Central Asia, and in the politically and culturally conservative territories still under the rule of the emir of Bukhara. These intellectuals promoted an educational reform movement known as Usul-e Jadid, or “new principles”. A Tatar writer, Ismail Gaspirali, stood at the forefront of this movement, promoting the need for a simplified Turkic language to be introduced which would be understandable to all Turkic peoples based on a version of Ottoman Turkish written in the Arabic script.52 Furthermore, Gaspirali advocated new methods of teaching in schools to replace the memorisation of the Koran and the Shariat, which had formed the backbone of the region’s Islamic educational system.53 The Jadid movement had a major impact in Central Asia, where Tajiks and other Persian-speakers increasingly absorbed the Pan-Turkic ideas this new movement espoused. The Pan-Turkic movement and the Turkic language reforms encouraged by the Jadids were deemed progressive and modern in contrast to that of Persian, the de-facto official language of Bukhara, which embodied the feudal, traditional, and despotic roots the Jadids sought to challenge.54 The characterisation of the Persian
51 Ibid.
52 In the middle of the nineteenth century there were four different written languages in the Muslim
lands of Central Asia and Russia, these were Persian, Arabic, and two forms of Turkic. According to Manz, these two Turkic languages were both “distinct from everyday speech and strongly influenced by Persian and Arabic. One Turkic language was Ottoman, used outside the Ottoman Empire primarily in Azerbaijan and the Crimea, and the other was eastern literary Turkic—Turki or Chaghatay—used by most other regions of the Russian Empire, Central Asia and East Turkestan,” Manz, “Historical Background,” 14.
53 Rakowska-Harmstone, Russia and Nationalism, 16. 54 Bergne, The Birth of Tajikistan, 18.
118 language and culture as a despotic link to Central Asia’s feudal past effectively relegated the Persian-speakingTajiks to a politically inferior position, and further alienated Iranian culture during the early twentieth century.55 Pan-Turkic groups and political movements sought to encourage Tajiks to give up their language and culture, furthermore an anti- Iranian subtext often adjoined the Pan-Turkic discourse, which looked on with animosity at the complicated symbiosis which had occurred between Turkic and Iranian peoples throughout Central Asia’s long history of civilisation.56 In the Pan-Turkic discourse, the Tajiks of Central Asia were in fact Turkic peoples who had been forced to adopt the Persian language by the region’s rulers, and were not ethnically different from the wider Turkic-speaking population. In the words of the Pan-Turkists,
The Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz people inhabiting Turkistan are not separate nationalities; they all belong to one great Turkic nation. As for the Tajiks, they basically originate from the Turks and became Tajik only as a result of Iranian influence. This is why the Tajiks are Turks.57
Interestingly many Tajik and other Persian-speaking intellectuals agreed with such characterisations and enthusiastically wrapped themselves in this progressive new movement, seeking to distance themselves and their culture from its historical Iranian roots.58