Problèmes de nationalités en Russie et en URSS

THOMAS KUTTNER

RUSSIAN JADIDISM AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD ISMAIL GASPRINSKII IN CAIRO - 1908

A call to the Arabs for the rejuvenation of the Islamic world

I. Introduction

In a brief seven-day period covering the final days of February and the initial days of March 1908, an unpretentious yet remarkable Arabic language newspaper styling itself as "sociological, political, progressive- reformist, and literary" in content appeared in Cairo: al-Nahdah /La Renaissance.1 Certainly, the radiantly shining rising sun boldly emblazoned across its masthead and serving as a visual image of its message suffered an abrupt eclipse, for some sixteen issues had been envisioned of which only three saw the presses: those of Friday February 28th, Tuesday March 3rd and Friday March 30th.2 Ephemeral as its existence may have been, al-Nahdah proves to have been a periodical worthy of note by virtue both of the particulars of its publication and of the materials which it contained.

What distinguished al-Nahdah above all else was the person of its editor-publisher and chief contributor, Ismail Bey Gasprinskii, Crimean Tatar educator, journalist, and crusading politician — an acknowledged leader of the Islamic modernist /reform movement (Jadïdism) in Muslim Russia.3 To be sure, Gasprinskii's was not the first journal in Cairo to be edited by a non-Arab Muslim — already for several years Turk, a controversial periodical of high quality, had been published there by a group of Ottoman Turk political exiles who, like many of their co-religionists of radical persuasion elsewhere in the Islamic body politic, found

Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, XVI (3-4), juil.-déc. 1975, pp. 383-424.