by Orel Beilinson, PhD Candidate, Yale University
I
Even a brief glance at the memoirs of Sadriddin Ayni reveals what historians of education have known for a long time: a school is never merely a school. In Bukhara, the madrasa was also an apartment building. In fact, some of their owners were more landlords than teachers, who took in students while being nearly illiterate. Some of these students, in turn, were actually professionals who used the potemkin madrasa as their home, sometimes for years. Some teachers did not run a madrasa, so they worked from home.[1] A school is an institution, a building, an experience.
Ayni’s writing makes schooling seem like a technical affair. He treats madrasas as buildings before diving into their curriculum and prefered textbooks. Historians of education have written many monographs on the topics he covers across time and space. Consider, for example, the paragraph that opens a chapter on “The Academic Year and School Days in Bukhara’s Madrasas”:
The academic year at a Bukharan madrasa lasted for six months, from September 22 to March 22. Only students who could support themselves for six months, or who could endure starvation and discomfort, could study for such a period of time. But most of the poor students from the countryside could not study for even half of that period.[2]
There is ample scholarship on the social origins of students, peasant resistance to education or hopes to advance socially through it, and the organization of time in schools.[3] Many questions emerge from this paragraph: Whom did the madrasa serve? If some of these students worked in the fields while studying, what did they hope to become? If some of these students already worked in their village’s mosque as imams, why go to school? How did such students, poor or not, cope with learning from textbooks that sometimes used one foreign language (Persian/Tajik) to teach another (Arabic)? How did it feel to navigate your way through the town, sometimes walking for two kilometers waiting for a 30-minute lesson that an “irrational discussion” (Ayni’s words) turned into a three-hour session?[4]
Even a brief glance at the memoirs of Sadriddin Ayni reveals what historians of education have known for a long time: a school is never merely a school. In Bukhara, the madrasa was also an apartment building. In fact, some of their owners were more landlords than teachers, who took in students while being nearly illiterate. Some of these students, in turn, were actually professionals who used the potemkin madrasa as their home, sometimes for years. Some teachers did not run a madrasa, so they worked from home.[1] A school is an institution, a building, an experience.
Ayni’s writing makes schooling seem like a technical affair. He treats madrasas as buildings before diving into their curriculum and prefered textbooks. Historians of education have written many monographs on the topics he covers across time and space. Consider, for example, the paragraph that opens a chapter on “The Academic Year and School Days in Bukhara’s Madrasas”:
The academic year at a Bukharan madrasa lasted for six months, from September 22 to March 22. Only students who could support themselves for six months, or who could endure starvation and discomfort, could study for such a period of time. But most of the poor students from the countryside could not study for even half of that period.[2]
There is ample scholarship on the social origins of students, peasant resistance to education or hopes to advance socially through it, and the organization of time in schools.[3] Many questions emerge from this paragraph: Whom did the madrasa serve? If some of these students worked in the fields while studying, what did they hope to become? If some of these students already worked in their village’s mosque as imams, why go to school? How did such students, poor or not, cope with learning from textbooks that sometimes used one foreign language (Persian/Tajik) to teach another (Arabic)? How did it feel to navigate your way through the town, sometimes walking for two kilometers waiting for a 30-minute lesson that an “irrational discussion” (Ayni’s words) turned into a three-hour session?[4]
[1] Садриддин Айний, Асарлар, vol. 5 (Тошкент, 1965), 163-164. Suhareva estimates that only one fifth of the madrasas operating in late nineteenth-century Bukhara actually offered instruction. See О. А. Сухарева, К истории городов бухарского ханства (Ташкент, 1958), 97.
[2] Айний, Асарлар, 168.
[3] To provide a few examples from outside Central Asia, Gary B. Cohen, Education and Middle-Class Society in Imperial Austria, 1848-1918 (West Lafayette, 1996); Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861-1914 (Berkeley, 1990), chapter 10; Sarah B. Lynch, “Marking Time, Making Community in Medieval Schools,” History of Education Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2021): 158-180.
[4] Айний, Асарлар, 170.
II
Ayni was not a chronicler of Bukhara’s Islamic education: he was an acrid critic of what he saw as the madrasa’s futility and its graduate’s ignorance. Going to the big city to waste your time without reaping any intellectual fruit must have been heartbreaking for young boys like Oybek (1905-1968). A child of artisanal origins, he was cultivated by his grandfather to become a scholar by reading and reciting the Qur’an. Such families often saw education as unreachable, as it required money that often remained beyond reach.[1] Other critics of Bukhara’s prestigious institutions abounded and new educational institutions proliferated. The success of these institutions, as inferred from Russian officials and the reformers themselves, was probably exaggerated.[2] Nonetheless, the struggle between traditional and reformed education attracted much scholarly attention, perhaps more than any other topic in the history of education in Central Asia.
The call to modernize education was bundled with the demand to expand access to schooling beyond the narrow confines of the wealthier classes. Both Ayni and Oybek saw education as a social good. Their contemporaries, who tended to belong to reformist (‘jadidist’) circles, tended to leave behind mostly unflattering and hostile descriptions of the emirate’s schools.[3] Their work carried over seamlessly to the new Soviet regime, which carried the banner of education reform. Polat Usmon Khodzhayev, the first chairman of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the short-lived Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic, embodied this bundled modernization in his own biography by choosing a modern school over a prolonged stay in the madrasa and later establishing a school of his own.
Figures like Ayni helped craft the transition from the struggle over Islamic education to the new Soviet regime. In his post-revolutionary novels, Ayni provided the burgeoning regime with a way to narrate the transition from oppressive darkness to socialist light. Gulomon/Qullar (‘Slaves’), perhaps the first novel written in Tajik, shows how an oppressive and individualistic world gives way to the harmonious and collective economy of mature Stalinism. Such narratives proved popular among socialist realists, putting Ayni in a wide-ranging literary network that encapsulated both Turkic authors like the Turkmen Berdi Kerbabayev (“The Decisive Step,” 1947) to the distant Mongolian Tsendiin Damdinsüren (“The Rejected Girl,” 1929) and the Georgian Babilina Khositashvili (“From the Village to the Capital,” a memoir, 1964). Ayni’s reminiscences of Bukhara also spread by translation, with publications throughout the emergent Eastern Bloc flourishing during the 1950s.[4]
Two historiographical lenses converge in this story. Islamic reform is one well-trodden path that unites scholars working on a wide range of territories from Egypt to China, from the Volga to Indonesia. The forging of communist modernity has also proved stimulating to scholars of a somewhat different set of places and an often later period of time. Both fields intersect in Central Eurasia, where major cultural and political figures also bridge these two separate yet linked scholarly pursuits. By focusing less on Ayni’s later chapter (about the curriculum and its inefficacy) and returning to his earlier chapters (on the madrasa’s social environment), we can enlarge this transnational and comparative project even further.
[1] Ойбек, Болалик хотираларим (Тошкент, 1995), 48-49.
[2] Allen J. Frank, Bukhara and the Muslims of Russia: Sufism, Education, and the Paradox of Islamic Prestige (Leiden, 2012), 180.
[3] Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Berkeley, 1988), 21-22.
[4] V. G. Belan, “Sadriddin Ayni’s Works in the Socialist Countries,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 67, no. 9 (1972): 439-442.
III
The strand that helps cross the revolutionary threshold in the history of Central Asian education is modernization. Modernization is a word fraught with ambiguities, but it remains a useful shorthand for a series of tightly connected processes in the history of education. Reforms aimed at expanding access to schooling, asserting governmental control over schools, secularizing their curriculum, instilling social and political agendas through education – all of these themes occurred over a vast territory that opens up comparisons across imperial and even continental lines. This historical process begins with inefficacious primary schools and a thin layer of elitist schools sponsored by religious institutions and the aristocracy and ends with the emergence of a “modern” education system.
Education featured prominently in communist modernization schemes. Schooling was promised to the masses, a promise the communists shared with the jadidists. Consider, for example, Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziy’s short novel Yangi Saodat (1915), in which schooling opens a road that leads the novel’s protagonists away from their unfortunate family circumstances. Intellectuals and reformers often conceptualized this mobility rather loosely. Knowledge was power, enlightenment, the key to progress. For a skeptical social historian like myself, such slogans are way too vague: “knowledge is power” demands historicization. How does one take school attendance and use it to improve their social position? Many families would be interested in the answer to this question today, but historians must ask these questions about the past. Could a young boy’s family in Russian-ruled Bukhara expect any gain – social or material – from sending their son to school?
Staying on the narrative level opens enough room for comparison. The Mongolian writer Sodnombalzhiryn Byannemekh, who was purged in 1937, offered a similar allegory of reform/enlightenment through education in a short story from 1925. A story “replete with Buddhist imagery and sympathetic to the old man's faith,” ‘An Astonishing Event’ is actually concerned with transforming the world “from a Buddhist paradise” “into a socialist paradise.”[1] While there are no schools in this story, there is a literate old man and two young boys. In a play by the same author published three years later, the father of the 15-year-old protagonist insists that she stays in school:
My girl needs to study. It’s essential. Nowadays, it’s best for men and women alike to study, is it not a good time when everyone has the possibility to be somebody? Where can you find such a great opportunity? I’m old, but I still want to study.[2]
The Mongolian case leads us one step further towards the concrete. The alternative to staying in school is embodied by the other protagonist, a “dissolute” older woman. A particularly salient theme was the fear of turning to prostitution, which schooling could help avoid. While more concrete in goal, it is still abstract in mechanism. Compare these narratives with a classic of the Western canon, Stendhal’s The Black and the Red (1820). Julien Sorel, its protagonist, is well aware of the mechanisms at work: he plans as if connives his own social mobility, first through the clergy and the military, then through education. Education is not a path for social improvement, but for his own mobility; doing so entails not enlightenment, but attaining a job as a tutor.
What about Bukhara? From Ayni’s memoirs we know that some worked as rural clerics without (or, at least, before attaining) madrasa education and that others planned to become scholars themselves. But the amount of madrasas grew significantly throughout the nineteenth century. Where did they all think they’d work? The increasing Russian involvement in Turkestan’s economic life and the influx of peasants as well as urbanites from the metropol must have spurred families to rethink their strategies. If we agree that the number of madrasa students around 1900 was 75,000 in Turkestan alone, one we have to ask who sent their child to a madrasa. Such a question will be entangled with accounting for the very late and partial success of the Russian school system in Turkestan, but it must be based in a clear understanding of the changing socioeconomic opportunities families seized or at least imagined.[3]
[1] Simon Wickhamsmith, Politics and Literature in Mongolia (1921-1948) (Amsterdam, 2020), 206-209
[2] Cited in Wickhamsmith, Politics and Literature in Mongolia, 241.
[3] Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917: A Study in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, 1960), chapter XIII.
IV
Such questions are easier to ask in Western Europe than in many other historiographical terrains. The expansion of educational opportunities in countries like Germany and France coincided with a burgeoning interest in “the social question.” Scholarly associations like the German Verein für Socialpolitik produced masses of data and studies on workers, their desired careers (Berufswunsch), and professional destinies (Berufsschicksal). European states increasingly supported employment agencies and their scholars developed the task of bringing workers and employers together into the discipline of labor mediation (Arbeitsnachweis). The further one gets from Berlin, Vienna, Paris, or New York, the less readily available are the sources on what the nineteenth century began to call the “labor market.”
Putting economic life at the top of our historiographical priorities opens new avenues for comparison. Modernization processes were debilitating, as they opened life trajectories to choice. In the end of this process, the human life course looked rather similar throughout an increasingly large territory.[1] Children went to school, entered the labor market afterward, and got married rather universally around that time. They had children, who would go to school, enter the labor market afterward, and get married around that time. While perhaps five generations earlier these children were likely to follow their parents’ occupation, this was no longer the case by the mid-twentieth century. No one promised you could become a herder like your father, and you might believe that you were promised an improvement: you could become a professor. Modernization, in all forms, entails promises and recalculations.
Following these promises and recalculations, I suggest, opens new avenues for comparison. Once we leave Berlin and Paris, we could end up in Buenos Aires, Bukhara, Ulaanbaatar, Ulaan Ude, Lusaka, or Lugano. In all these places (which were chosen semi-randomly) humans had to navigate new circumstances, which debilitated their centuries-old trajectories. There was regional specificity, to be sure, but it was one of the most global processes of the twentieth century as well. Many millions of children grew into worlds that promised them new opportunities, which they then set to follow. More children could aspire to become Julien Sorel, a novel they might have read in the many translations published throughout the twentieth century. Below the cultural politics of socialist internationalism, thus, there were other forms of similarity between children from Mongolia and Hungary, Egypt and Bulgaria.
Ayni’s litanies about the absurdity of the madrasa would have rung familiar to these children. European children were tormented by Latin and Greek, and fierce debates unfolded in Europe about the role of ancient languages in the forging of modern nations. My work focuses on the implications education, including curricular choices, had on the individual and not only on society. Latinate education was an obstacle to prestigious institutions and jobs that non-nobles believed they could attain. Curricular irrelevance and general backwardness, two key points in global struggles over education and elitism in the nineteenth century, were also grounded in career concerns. Opportunity and risk were both sides of the modern coin.
Returning to Ayni allows us to take a different historiographical road. Instead of dwelling on the curriculum and the civilization, we can examine the function of schooling and the life of the individual. The first path invited us to compare narratives of reform through education as well as narratives of modernity versus tradition. Borderlands and colonies are particularly relevant to these comparisons. Almost every society, however, is relevant to the second path, which is terrifyingly open. The second path asks us to reflect on how ordinary people interacted with “modernization”. How did families and individuals expect socioeconomic changes to impact their lives? How did these changes create new potential futures and how did families act to secure their social position in face of such challenges? How did parents navigate their children into new waters?
To embark on the second path, we must go back to Ayni. We must return to every absurdity: the inefficient study, the unprepared students, the rooms to let masquerading as a madrasa. How did this alleged charade play within the life courses of Muslims in Turkestan? How did economic change under Russian rule change attitudes towards schooling? How did the madrasas interact with the labor markets that surrounded them? Why were there more madrasas by 1900? How does it compare to regions nearby and distant? We may begin by searching for the Bukharan Julien Sorel.
] See, for example, Ross Macmillan (ed.), The Structure of the Life Course: Standardized? Individualized? Differentiated? (Amsterdam, 2005).