Brian Glyn WILLIAMS

Reinterpreting Ismail Gaspirali's Legacy. Crimean Ataturk,
Russian Collaborator or Pan-Turkist Threat to the Russian Empire?

While the identity of the Crimean Tatars of the 19th century was largely shaped by an inward-looking, traditionalist Islam, it was nationalism, a Western ‘Christian’ socio-political theory that was to shape this people’s identity in the succeeding century. In one of the most remarkable social transformations in East European history, the small, dying Tatar-Muslim ethnos of the Crimean Peninsula underwent a socio-political revival that was to completely alter their conceptualization of themselves as a community and, in the process, to reshape their connection to their native land. In the span of a lifetime this politically apathetic, religiously-defined people was to evolve into one of the most secular, politically mobilized nations in the world. With this transformation came a territorialization of the Crimean Tatar communal identity, as the Crimean Peninsula came to be constructed as a Fatherland by an indigenous Tatar intelligentsia.

In the case of the Crimean Tatars, the imagining of the Crimean Peninsula as a homeland and the Crimean Muslims as a nation was closely linked to a cultural reform movement begun by the great educator and writer Ismail Gaspirali (1851-1914). While Gaspirali was not himself a narrowly focused nationalist entrepreneur, his work laid the social foundation for the forging of a narrow Crimean Tatar national movement in the Russian Empire.

Ismail Gaspirali, ‘Russian Collaborator’ or ‘Father of a Nation’?

In dealing with a man of Gaspirali’s stature there are of course bound to be differing historical interpretations and, not surprisingly, these often pit Soviet accounts of Gaspirali’s life against Crimean Tatar accounts. Ismail Gaspirali (or Gaspirali, the Tatar version of his name), the first Crimean Tatar of any real historical significance in Crimean history since the reign of Shahin Giray Khan, was born into a lower class mirza family in the village of Avcikoy (Hunter’s Village), Bahchesaray district, in 1851. Growing up in this slightly privileged household enabled the young Gaspirali to attend the Zinjirli Medresse in Bahchesaray and the prestigious Voronezh academy in Moscow as a teenager. This, and later experiences, such as spending time learning under the Pan-Slavist Ivan Katkov and working for the great Russian author Ivan Turgenev in Paris, as well as travels to the modernizing Ottoman Empire of the late 19th century, exposed the young Gaspirali to a changing, modernizing world that most of his simple Crimean Tatar compatriots were unaware of. Most importantly, these experiences convinced Gaspirali that his moribund people, and indeed all Turkic-Muslim groups in the Russian Empire were in need of reform as a means to cultural rejuvenation and socio-economic salvation.

Gaspirali felt that ‘his people’ (a term which he gradually applied to all Turkic-Muslims in the Russian Empire) were dying in a cultural sense under the stifling stranglehold of reactionary, conservative Islam. Gaspirali made the “almost inevitable” comparison between the cultural progress of Western Christian nations and the decaying condition of Muslim life in Russia and concluded that some borrowing from, and accommodation with, Western ideas was necessary for the very survival of their community.¹

Gaspirali saw the Russian Muslims’ inward looking, traditionalist educational system as the main barrier to his people’s accommodation with Western progress and modernization. Gaspirali once commented that “it is an indisputable fact that the contemporary Muslims are the most backward peoples. They have been left behind in virtually every area of life by Armenians, Bulgarians, Jews and Hindus.”² With the aim of improving his people’s educational status and introducing them to modern culture, in 1884 Gaspirali embarked on an ambitious program of educational reform that was to completely reshape Muslim education in the Russian Empire and beyond. Gaspirali and a growing number of like minded associates opened a series of New Method (Usul-i Jadid) schools in the Crimean peninsula that were to spread throughout the Russian Empire and revolutionize the outdated educational system of the Islamic mektebs and medreses of Russia.

Gaspirali’s followers who sought to modernize their atrophied Turkic Muslim society took their name, Jadids (Modernists), from the term Usul-i Jadid. By the time of Gaspirali’s death he would have the satisfaction of knowing that more than 5,000 of his New Method schools, with their revolutionary modern curriculums, had been established in the Russian Empire.

In addition to this remarkable achievement, in 1883 Gaspirali started the first newspaper in Crimean Tatar history known as Tercuman (the Translator), which became widely read by Muslims throughout the Russian Empire. In the pages of his paper Gaspirali patiently opened his simple readers’ minds to the greater world, subtly attacked religious obscurantism, fought for the liberation of women in Muslim society, and called for greater cross-cultural sharing and contacts between the Russians and the Empire’s large Turco-Muslim population.

In both of these endeavors Gaspirali and his Jadid supporters had to walk a fine line between offending the sensibilities of the conservative Islamic ulema (clergy), which still exerted considerable control over the Muslim peasantry of the Russian Empire, and, most importantly, the watchful eye of the Russian government’s censors. This second task was made easier by the fact that Gaspirali did in fact appear to have a genuine appreciation for Russia and its people’s culture. Throughout the pages of his newspaper Gaspirali called for rapprochement (sblizhenie) between the Muslims of the Russian Empire and the Russians and his work can hardly be described as anti-colonial (that is anti-Russian) or militantly nationalistic.

In a typical article, Gaspirali wrote “The Russian, thanks to his fortunately composed character lives as ‘his own’ and ‘as a native’, not only among us Crimeans, but also as we have the opportunity to observe, in both the Caucasus and Central Asia. Therefore, thank God, amongst our Muslim peoples there is no feeling towards the Russians other than good will.”³ Gaspirali’s admiration for things Russian (i.e. modern) went so far that, on one occasion, he claimed “There are those who say that I am more of a Russian than is a Muscovite.”⁴

Seen in this light, Gaspirali’s contemporary critics, most of whom were conservative mullahs defending the old order, considered this enlightener to be nothing more than a dangerous emissary of Russificiation. Gaspirali's revolutionary efforts were constantly bedeviled by those who saw in this Russified Tatar and his plans for rapprochement with the Russians a threat to their Islamic identity and he was called everything from a Russophile to a heretic by his critics. Interestingly enough Gaspirali was also rejected by the first generation of Turco-Muslim nationalists, who emerged in the Russian Empire on the eve of the Empire’s collapse for not being revolutionary enough. Gaspirali’s cautious stand against revolutionary political movements calling for autonomy and national independence resulted in his being labeled a “lackey of the autocracy” by those who disdained his desire to work within the Tsarist system for the betterment of his community.⁵

Gaspirali, who died in 1914, received a more favorable light during the first decade of the Soviet period. Gaspirali was pictured in early Soviet works as a modernist whose efforts to enlighten the backward Muslims of the Russian Empire coincided with the Soviets’ own objectives. The Soviet regime in fact turned Gaspirali’s residence in Bahchesaray into a museum and promoted this figure as a Socialist hero.

With Josef Stalin’s attack on ‘nationalist deviation’ among the Crimean Tatars and other Soviet nations in the 1930s, however, Gaspirali’s role as a socialist icon came to an abrupt end. Gaspirali was subsequently “repressed in death” and his house-museum was closed in 1930. By the mid 1930s Gaspirali began to appear in Soviet publications as a stooge of the Tsarist government and a representative of the exploitive bourgeois class. The Soviet Islamicist, Liutsian Klimovich, led the broadside against Gaspirali, whom he labeled “the most spectacular spokesman of the Tatar bourgeois exploiters” in his work Islam in Tsarist Russia (Islam v Tsarskoi Rossi).⁷ In this work, Klimovich wrote:

"Thus, in both the question of domestic and foreign policies of the Russian autocracy, the jadid Gaspirali was completely trusted (by the authorities). What were included in the ‘specifics’ of his teachings? What was the other face of Gaspirali, that minstrel of Russian war-feudal imperialism? Gaspirali appeared as the ideologue of the growing Tatar bourgeoisie, in particular expressing the interests of its liberal circles.⁸

In addition, Klimovich claimed that Gaspirali made “a considerable effort in order to reinforce Russian Tsarism, which had appeared as a nightmare for all peoples.”⁹

After the 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tatars, Gaspirali’s name disappeared from Soviet history books and it is only since 1989 that the Crimean Tatars have begun to rediscover their most famous native son.¹⁰ The Crimean Tatars who are currently rebuilding their society in the Crimean peninsula have, interestingly enough, constructed an image of Gaspirali that portrays him as the founder of Crimean Tatar nationalism and the father of the Crimean Tatar nation. The Crimean Tatars of the diaspora also see Gaspirali in this light as can be seen from Arin Engin’s description of his contributions. Engin claims:

He began to spread the first light through his magazines and the newspaper Tercuman and started to show the Turks the road to nationalism and civilization. Thanks to the signaling of this great leader as well as the freedom movements beginning in Russia, the Crimean Turkish youth found its nationalistic conscience and began to organize political organizations.¹¹

Signs of Gaspirali’s new found importance to Crimean Tatar nationalism appear everywhere in the Crimea today: Gaspirali’s house in Bahchesaray has once again been turned into a museum; a memorial stone (with a plaque announcing that a larger monument will be built on the location) has been placed on his grave site in Bahchesaray; one of the largest Crimean Tatar settlements in the Crimea (located in the suburbs of Evpatoriia) has been named Ismail Bey; a Crimean Tatar library, known as the Gaspirali library, has been opened up in Simferopol with international support; an international symposium on Gaspirali was held in Simferopol in March of 1991 (the 140th anniversary of Gaspirali's birth) and a generation of Crimean Tatar children are being taught that Gaspirali forged their nation through his reform programs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.¹² In his struggle against the Muslim obscurantism and his attempts to unite and secularize his nation, Gaspirali has in fact been cast in the guise of a Crimean Ataturk.

The truth concerning Gaspirali’s views of the Russians and his role in forging the Crimean Tatar nation lies somewhere in-between the interpretations of this leader as a ‘Russifier’ and the ‘founding father of the Crimean Tatar nation’.

Gaspirali’s New Method Schools as a Challenge to Traditional
Bases of Crimean Muslim Identity

In order to fully appreciate Gaspirali’s role in forging a modern Crimean Tatar identity a background assessment of the world he began his work in is a prerequisite. By changing this world, Gaspirali laid the seeds for an ethnic-based movement among a new generation of Crimean Tatar intellectuals that would gradually lead to the formation of the Crimean Tatar nation.

As should be apparent from the previous chapters, one must take into consideration the role that conservative Islam played in shaping the communal identity of the late 19th century Crimean Muslims. Most importantly, the role of traditionalist Islam in preventing modernization among the Crimean Muslims should be mentioned. Few Crimean Tatars at this time were willing to learn from the Russians, even fewer were willing to send their children to schools established by the Russian government to educate Muslim children. Borrowing from the Russian unbelievers in any way was in fact considered bid'at (religiously forbidden innovation).

When Gaspirali was young he could hardly have failed to have witnessed an outward manifestation of the Crimean Muslims’ traditional religious identity. In 1874, thirteen years after Gaspirali’s birth, thousands of Crimean Tatars had demonstrated their religious devotion by emigrating from the Russian Empire to preserve their religious identity from the contamination of serving in the Tsar's Christian army. Any perceived threat to this religious foundation of the Crimean Muslims’ identity was feared in the Crimea of Gaspirali’s youth. It can of course be argued that it was in fact this religiously-based, defensive communal reaction to the Russian presence that had kept the Crimean Tatars from losing their customs and being assimilated as the Russians in the 19th century.¹³

There was, however, a negative side to this inward looking tradition of defensive Islam among the Crimean Tatars (and among all Muslims living under Russian rule) in the 19th century. The massive migrations to the Ottoman Empire, which brought this people’s unique culture and identity close to extinction had, in part, been caused by the Crimean Muslims’ traditional Islamic world view.¹⁴ To make matters worse, the conservative mullahs, the self-appointed guardians of the ancient regime, refused to countenance changes or improvements that might benefit the lot of those who remained in the Russian Empire if these innovations came from the Russian infidels. In doing so, these gatekeepers of the Crimean Muslim morality stifled their people’s educational development in particular.

A 19th century account of the Crimean Tatars’ literature, for example, pointed out the Crimean Muslims’ lack of acceptance of any book other that the Qur'an. This source stated “There is scarcely anything among them worthy of the name of literature. There is not one living Mohamedan author in the Krimea, and when I have mentioned this to the effendis (religious scholars) they give as their excuse that everything worthy of being written is contained in books already in their hand.”¹⁵

The Crimean Muslims’ mekteb and medrese educational system was extremely calcified and produced students who, after years of schooling, could recite the Qur'an and Hadiths in Arabic (without having actually learned Arabic!) but were capable of doing little else.¹⁶ A Westerner who visited the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire noticed the lack of national identity among these Muslims which resulted from this atrophied Islamic education and claimed “locked in on all sides by Russians, the Russian Turks are no longer a people; religion has, for them, necessarily stepped into the place of nationality.”¹⁷

It should come as no surprise that a Crimean Tatar such as Gaspirali, who had studied in a modern Russian lycee, lived in Paris and the reforming Ottoman Empire, and traveled in the literary circles of Russia, should be horrified by the state of affairs extant among his Turkic-Muslim kin in the Russian Empire. Having himself accessed Western civilization via a Russian education and the Russian language, (while carefully maintaining his Islamic-Tatar identity), it is also not surprising that Gaspirali saw the introduction of modern Russian culture as a panacea to cure the ills of Russian Muslim culture. Gaspirali appears to have felt that, in the long run, allowing the conservative mullahs to maintain a monopoly over the Russian Muslims’ education would lead to a breakdown of their society. As the Russians continued to progress he felt the backward Tatars and other members of his imagined Turco-Islamic nation would be left even further behind on every level.¹⁸

This awareness put Gaspirali in the unenviable position of confronting many of the Crimean Muslims’ traditional ways of looking at the world. As the popularity of Gaspirali’s modernist schools spread after 1884 (based on the simple fact that his students learned how to read and write in months, whereas graduates from 8 years of study in a traditional medrese usually could not), he found himself perpetually battling with the conservative mullahs who considered his schools to be a heretical threat to the Crimean Muslim community’s identity. One mullah who represented the Kadimist (traditionalists) viewpoint, went so far as to declare “whoever believes in God and Muhammed must be an enemy of the modernists. For them the shar'iah demands the death penalty.”¹⁹

It was these critics of Gaspirali who were to begin a campaign to paint him as a Russian agent bent on Russifying the Crimean Muslim people. Ironically enough, while he was feared by Islamic traditionalists on the one hand as a Russifier, many in Russian officialdom also considered Gaspirali a threat because he might be one of those Muslims who would “strive to use all the advantages of Russian culture to defend their own nationality.”²⁰ Russian officials, who worked closely with the traditional Muslim clergy appear to have had tremendous distrust of Gaspirali and his reforms which they felt had the potential to threaten the status quo among the Empire’s politically apathetic Muslim groups. Seen in this light, Gaspirali’s efforts to reform and modernize his own people through the vehicle of Russian culture hardly make him the “minstrel of Tsarism.” Rather, Gaspirali appears as a modernist who sought to preserve his people by utilizing that which was contained in the comparatively advanced culture of Russia, which might benefit his own Turco-Muslim people.

In spite of resistance from both the conservative clergy and the suspicious Russian authorities, scores of young Crimean Tatars enrolled in Gaspirali’s schools and a whole generation grew up on the eve of the Russian Revolution exposed to modern classroom subjects such as geography, history, science, literature etc. Education became so important to this new generation that the saying “To see a school is the joy of man” is still a popular Crimean Tatar proverb.

In the process of breaking out of their traditional confines through education, many young Crimean Tatars had, like their master, come to the conclusion that “The traditional means of societal self-preservation, i.e. mass emigration or desperate isolation in a shell of obscurantism, had actually accelerated the process of dissolution.”²¹ This realization was an important first step in breaking down defensive Islam as the defining marker of Crimean Tatar identity for this new generation that was to begin to see itself in modern, secularist terms.

Gaspirali's Tercuman as a Vehicle for Creating a 'Turkic Nation'

Gaspirali’s ground breaking work in educational reform was matched only by his original work in publishing the Crimean Tatars' first newspaper, Tercuman. The impact of this innovative step for a people that had, in most cases, only been exposed to the Qur'an cannot be overestimated. The novelty of the idea of printing a publication for the Crimean Tatars can be seen in Gaspirali’s claim in 1888 that “even a short time ago there were very few Muslims who could tell you what a newspaper was, and if they were aware of the periodical press, the odds were that they would regard it as the work of the devil, to be avoided by all true believers.”²²

Crimean Muslim peasants who gathered before the village mosque to hear young students read aloud from the pages of Tercuman were, for the first time, exposed to events taking place beyond their immediate world. In the pages of Tercuman Gaspirali wrote of technical inventions in the United States of America, wars in the Balkans, the modernization of Japan, reform in the Ottoman Empire, the spread of European colonialism in Asia and Africa, the growing movement for women’s rights in the West, etc. While much of Tercuman's coverage was thus international, the majority of his paper's articles were actually devoted to Gaspirali’s own widely defined nation, the Turks of the Russian Empire.

Herein lies an important distinction between Gaspirali and later Crimean Tatar nationalists. Gaspirali believed that his nation was not restricted to the small community of approximately 200,000 Turkic Crimean Tatars living in the Crimea at the end of the 19th century, but the greater Turkic nation of millions.²³ Gaspirali’s program was by nature Pan-Turkists and he aimed to unite the scattered Turkic-Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire through his paper. Gaspirali was certainly inspired in this endeavor by Pan-Slavism and nation building in countries such as Germany or France that, over time, coalesced around a chosen central dialect and united to form a nation.

Gaspirali actively promoted his motto “Unity in Language, Thought and Deed” by means of a Turkic language that he created for his paper known as Turki. Gaspirali's language, known as the Middle Turkish Language, was based on a simplified Oghuz Turkic dialect (basically Oghuz Ottoman without its complex Arabic, Persian and court Turkish grammar) with a large component of Kipchak Turkic vocabulary. This hybrid language, which combined the two great Turkic languages, was designed to unite the Kipchak speaking Nogais, Volga Tatars, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Kazakhs, with the Oghuz speaking Turkmens, Azerbaijanis, Crimean Tats and Ottoman Turks.²⁴ Gaspirali’s ambitious objective was to unite “the boatman of the Bosphorus with the cameleer of Kashgar.”²⁵ On a narrower basis, this language would also unite, for the first time, the Nogai-speaking Tatars of the Crimean steppe with the Oghuz-speaking Tat Tatars of the Crimea’s southern coast.

It should be stated here that Gaspirali’s calls for linguistic and cultural unity among the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire did not have an overtly political tone. Had they done so there is little doubt that Gaspirali’s newspaper, the longest running Muslim periodical in the Empire’s history (1883-1918), would have been shut down by Russian censors. Even without this threat, however, it can hardly be doubted that Gaspirali, who felt that the Empire’s Muslims benefited from the modernizing influences of Russian rule, was adamantly opposed to confrontation with the Tsarist regime.

It is not surprising then that, by the 20th century, Gaspirali had also come out against the rise of narrowly focused nationalist movements among the various Turkic peoples of the Empire. Gaspirali felt that these narrowly-defined nationalist movements threatened the unity the greater Turkic nation. On many occasions, in fact, Gaspirali spoke out against the danger of ‘narrow nationalism’ and ‘particularism’ which he felt was unnecessarily antagonistic towards the Tsarist regime and detrimental to the Turkic nation’s unity. In a typical comment Gaspirali opined "Although the Turks who were subjects of Russia are called by the name ‘Tatar’, this is an error and an imputation...Those peoples who are called by the Russians as ‘Tatar’ and by the Bukharans as ‘Nogay’ are in reality, Turks.”²⁶

As the Russian Empire began to descend into chaos on the eve of the Russian Revolution, Gaspirali’s notion of a Turkic nation, however, began to appear utopian. The Kazakh shepherd on the Chinese border had very little in common with the Crimean Tatar farmer on the south Crimean shore and few but a dedicated coterie of Pan-Turkist intellectuals ever imagined themselves as belonging to a larger ‘Turkic nation’. In addition, most Russian Turks would have had difficulty in imagining a Turkic homeland of such a large and amorphous nature and there was little territorial identification with a widely-defined Turkic homeland known as Turan or Turkestan among the Turkic masses of the late 19th century in Russia. As revolutionary movements for change swept through the Russian Empire after 1905, the idea of a broadly-defined, Turkic nation had little appeal to a new generation of Russian Muslims that saw their fate linked to their more immediate territories which would be constructed in the common imagination as national ‘homelands’. In this respect, Gaspirali can hardly be considered the ‘founding father’ of a narrowly-defined Tatar nation of the Crimea, he was on the contrary opposed to such a development.

The importance of Gaspirali’s ideas in shaping later nationalist identity formation among the Crimean Tatars, and other Turkic subjects of the Tsar, should not however, be underestimated. While Gaspirali’s nation was Islamic (the Gagauz or Kryshans, non-Muslim Turkic ethnies in the Russian Empire, were not, for example, imagined as part of this nation) this community was, for the first time, to be based primarily on Turkic ethnicity and language, not religion. With the gradual loss of Islam as the sole marker of group identity by the Turkic peoples of the Russian Empire (in part a direct result of Gaspirali’s challenge to the Islamic old order through his New Method schools and newspaper), it was language and ethnicity that came to play the defining role as markers of group identity for Russian Muslims. By 1917 the Tsar’s Muslim subjects (especially the elite) increasingly began to define themselves as ethnic Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs, Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars etc. first, and Muslims secondly.

In the narrower Crimean context, Gaspirali's newspaper (which is described by Lazzerini as a “revolution in communication”) played the important role that Karl Deutch ascribes to print press in his classic work Nationalism and Social Communication. Namely, it enabled members of the Crimean Tatar ethnic group to identify with other members of their community they would never meet (i.e. the nation) and to see themselves in relation to other groups on the basis of ethnicity.²⁷ Gaspirali’s reforms also had the effect of de-legitimizing the old order which was based on conservative Islam, as can be seen from this report from the Russian police chief of Bahchesaray in the early 20th century:

Over the previous period, the police-meister was persuaded that an essential, radical change in the customs and communal way of life of the inhabitants of Bahchesaray had taken place. The influence of the clergy had gradually weakened. The youth were already critical of the old customs, mullahs attended theater performances, they took photographs, they were able to sit at one table with the Christians when they would not have done so earlier. They even sought to send their children after the mekteb to Russo-Turkish schools...The customs of the city-dwellers had changed so much that, in the coffee houses, they began to read Russian newspapers in order to attract customers.²⁸

In essence, Gaspriali’s works laid the foundation and the intellectual climate for the later ethnicization of the Crimea’s Muslim population and enabled the Young Tatars, Vatan Society and Milli Firka to begin the process of transforming a group of politically passive Muslims living in the Russian province of the Tauride into a Crimean Tatar nation. It was his successful challenge to the old Islamic order and his emphasis on Turkic ethnicity that provided a platform for a new elite to imagine their community of Muslim peasants as an ethno-linguistic nation with rights to a land that was now constructed as an ethnic homeland.

While Gaspirali imagined as his people’s homeland the wider Turan, a new generation was to come along on the eve of World War I that saw the Crimean Peninsula as the sacred vatan, Vaterland, Patrie or Homeland. By 1913 a Young Tatar, Shamil Toktargazi, was to write a poem entitled “On the Eulogy of the Crimea” which was daringly nationalist in its content:

Love of the Fatherland is part of the Faith’ is hadith, only a scoundrel would not love his Fatherland. Only the son of a Tatar is the inheritor of this Land, The Others cannot claim the Crimea.

There is no Land like the Crimea in the world, there is no glory like Tatarness in the world.²⁹

This marked a radical transformation in Crimean Tatar thinking. The Crimea was no longer a place to be abandoned by Crimean muhacirs seeking to live in the ak toprak of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. It was the unique patrimony of the entire Crimean Tatar people. A people with a rich heritage that went back to the time of the Crimean Khanate, which was to provide them with their national symbols. In this respect Gaspirali can be seen as the father of the generation of Crimean Tatar nationalist who took his ideas to their natural progression and applied his grandiose dream of constructing a Turkic ethnic nation stretching from Singkiang to Rumelia to constructing a more viable nation in the Crimean homeland. In this respect Gaspirali can indeed be seen as an inadvertent father of the Crimean Tatar nation.

Notes

¹For a wider analysis of the nationalization of the Crimean Tatars see. Brian Williams. The Crimean Tatars. The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation. Leiden; EJ Brill. 2001. Edward Lazzerini. “Gadidism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique. vol. 15. no. 2. p. 246. Zeki Togan. “Gaspirali, Ismail. Encyclopaedia of Islam. vol. 2. Leiden; EJ Brill. 1965. pp.979-981. [Online version of Lazzerini’s article, revised: http://www.iccrimea.org/gaspirali/modernism.html].

²Alan Fisher. “A Model Leader for Asia. Ismail Gaspirali.” The Tatars of the Crimea. Return to the Homeland. Durham; Duke University Press. 1998. p. 34. [Online version: http://www.iccrimea.org/gaspirali/fisher.html].

³“Blizost Russkikh.” Tercuman. no. 29 July 28, 1903. p. 124.

⁴Edward Lazzerini. Ismail Bey Gasprinskii and Muslim Modernism in Russia, 1878-1914. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Dept. of History. University of Washington. 1973. p. 36.

⁵Hakan Kirimli. National Movements and National Identity Among the Crimean Tatars. Leiden; E.J. Brill. 1996. p. 92.

⁶I.A.Zaatov. “Rasskazhite ob Ismaile Gasprinskom” Krymskaia ASSR 1921-1945. Simferopol; Tavria. 1990. p. 23.

⁷Liutsian Klimovich. Islam v Tsarskoi Rossii. Moscow; State Antireligious Press. 1936. p. 181.

⁸Ibid. pp. 185-186.

⁹Ibid. p. 183. and p. 287.

¹⁰The erroneous depiction of Gaspirali as a Russian pawn has, however, continued to this very day. In a 1998 article entitled “Unknown Aspects of the Jadidists” (Cedidcilerin Bilinmiyen Yonleri), which appeared in the conservative Turkish journal History and Civilization (Tarih ve Medeniyet), Alaeddin Yalcinkaya, for example, attacked Gaspirali as a Russian agent. This author claimed that Gaspirali represented a more subtle threat to the Muslims of Russia than the Russian government itself. Alaeddin Yalcinkaya. “Cedidcilerin Bilinmiyen Yonleri.” Tarih ve Medeniyet. Oct. 1998. pp. 22-27.

¹¹ Arin Engin. The Voice of Turkism. Istanbul; Ataturkist Cultural Publications. no. 18. 1964. p. 35.

¹²For a synopsis of talks given at this symposium see. S. M. Chervonnaia. “Ismail Gasprinskii-Vydaiushchiicia Krymskotatarskii Prosvetitel’ i Gumanist.” Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie. Jan.- Feb. no. 1. 1992. pp. 158-165.

¹³Berthold Spuler, for example, argues that “There are grounds for accepting the theory that the religious cleavage was the only obstacle which prevented the complete disappearance of the Tatars as a nation through assimilation with the Russians.” Bertold Spuler. The Muslim World. A Historical Survey. Pt. II. The Mongol Period. Leiden; E.J. Brill. 1969. p. 52.

¹⁴ Brian Glyn Williams. “Hijra and Forced Migration from Nineteenth Century Russia to the Ottoman Empire. Cahiers du Monde Russe. vol. 41. no. 1. Jan-Mar. 2000. pp. 63-92.

¹⁵Robert Lyall. Travels in Russia, the Krimea, the Caucasus and Georgia. London; Routledge. 1812. p. 349.

¹⁶Hakan Kirimli. National Identity and National Movements Among the Crimean Tatars. Leiden; E. J. Brill. 1997. p. 26.

¹⁷Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu. The Empire of the Tsars and Russians. London; G. Putnam and Sons. 1893. p. 93.

¹⁸Alan Fisher. The Crimean Tatars. Stanford; Hoover Institution Press. 1978. p. 101.

¹⁹Edward Lazzerini. “Ismail Gasprinskii (Gaspirali): The Discourse of Modernism and the Russians.” The Crimean Tatars. Return to the Homeland. ed. Edward Allworth. Durham; Duke University Press. 1998. p. 53.

²⁰Edward Lazzerini. op. cit. no. 4. p. 31.

²¹Hakan Kirimli. op. cit. no. 16. p. 37.

²²Edward Lazzerini. cit. no. 4. p. 23.

²³V.D. Iaremchuk and V.B. Bezverkhii. “Tatari v Ukraini (Istoriko-Politologichii Aspekt).” Ukrainskyi Istorychnyi Zhurnal. vol. 5. 1994. p. 21.

²⁴Yahya Abdoulline. “Histoire et Interpretations Contemporaines du Second Reformise Musulman (ou Djadidisme) Chez les Tatars de la Volga et de Crimee.” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique. vol. 27. (1-2). January-June. 1996. p. 79. n. 1.

²⁵Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay. La Presse et Le Mouvement National Chez les Musulmans de Russie Avant 1920. Paris; Mouton. 1964. p. 41.

²⁶Hakan Kirimli. op. cit. no. 16. p. 41.

²⁷Lazzerini, Edward. “Ismail Bey Gasprinskii’s Perevodchik/Tercuman: A Clarion of Modernism.” Central Asian Monuments. ed. Hasan Paksoy. Istanbul; Isis Press. 1992. p. 154. Karl Deutsch. Nationalism and Social Communication. Boston; MIT Press. 1962. pp. 86-105. [Online version of E. Lazzerini’s article: http://www.iccrimea.org/gaspirali/clarion.html].

²⁸V. Iu. Gankevich. Ocherk Istorii Krymskotatarskogo Narodnogo Obrazovaniia. Simferopol; Tavria. 1997. p. 115.

²⁹Ibid. p. 97. It was at this time that the Young Turks began to construct the Ottoman Anatolia as a Turkish homeland. Writing in 1900, for example, Mehmed Emin wrote: A man is the slave of his fatherland...These lands are the home of my fathers, this is the homeland, this is the arm of God, A son will never destroy the home of his fathers.

Mehmed Emin. “Anadoludan bir Ses yahut Cenge Giderken.” Turkce Siirler. Istanbul; 1900. p. 37. Prior to this the Young Ottoman writer, Namik Kemal, had begun to popularize the dictum attributed to the Prophet Hubb al-Watan, min al-Iman (Love of the Homeland is Love of the Faith).