Before the Russian Revolution

Fitrat was born to a prosperous merchant family in Bukhara in 1886, where he received an education in a madrasa before traveling to Istanbul to further his education. He spent four years in Istanbul and was heavily influenced and inspired by various Turkic thinkers and the works of the Young Turks. Several of his pieces were printed in the newspaper Hikmet and some of his earlier works such as A Debate Between a Bukharan Professor and a European on the Subject of New Schools and tales of an Indian Traveler involved an outsider looking in on Bukharan society and commenting on its many failures. In these works, Fitrat would argue for the need of an emir who actually cared for his subjects and the importance of modern education, public healthcare, and the neutralization of the ulama, who he called were “the reason for the extinction of your nation” (Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 226).

World War I forced Fitrat to return to Bukhara where he continued to push for the recreation of Bukharan society and pressuring the Emir to listen to the Jadids and other modernizers before it was too late. The emir, however, was content with maintaining the status quo, even after the Russian Empire fell. For his part, Fitrat was distraught when the Bolsheviks took over, claiming, “Russia has seen disaster upon disaster since the [February] transformation and now a new calamity has raised its head, that of the Bolsheviks!”

He may have hated the Bolsheviks, but he and other Bukharan Jadids were more than willing to take advantage of the disintegration of Tsarist Russia to implement changes in Bukhara.

In 1917, Fitrat still believed in the Emir with the caveat that Emir was a servant to the nation, not the other way around. He, along with other Bukharan Jadids, provided the emir with a list of reforms they believed was needed to modernize Bukhara. The Emir strung them along before eventually siding with the ulama and conservative merchants, ultimately chasing Fitrat and his fellow Jadids out of Bukhara. After the failure to implement reforms in Bukhara, Fitrat’s took his anger out on the Emir and the ulama. He claimed that the emir a traitor to his own people and

“that the cause of the descent of the Muslim world into such dark days are the tyrannical kings, our poets who heaped false praise on them, and our eshons and mullahs who sold our faith.”

Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 227

He was most frustrated by the lack of urgency in reforming Bukharan society and the contentment with the status quo amongst the Bukharan political, religious, and economic leaders. Looking back in 1920, Fitrat would write:

“Many among us say ‘Rapid change in methods of education, in language and orthography, or in the position of women, is against public opinion and creates discord among Muslims…. We need to enter into [such reforms] gradually.’ [The problem is that] the thing called “public opinion” does not exist among us. We have a “general” majority, but it has no opinion…. There is not a thought, not a word that emerges from their own minds. The thoughts that our majority has today are not its own, but are only the thoughts of some imam or akhund. [Given all this,] no good can come from the gradualness.”

Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 179

The Fall of the Bukharan Emir

When Fitrat fled to Samarkand in August 1917, he became the editor for the newspaper Hurriyat, joined the Young Bukharans (which were Bukharan Jadids repackaging themselves), switched from writing in Persian to Uzbek, and began to embrace revolutionary change instead of gradual social change the Jadids once championed. His thinking about Uzbek’s future and the influences it should pull from also changed. Before 1917, he was a champion for Turkish and British influence in the Jadid’s efforts to modernize Bukhara. However, after the Ottoman Empire shattered and the British carved up the Ottoman’s empire amongst themselves and the French and Tsarist Russia, Fitrat violently turned against any admiration he had for England. Between 1919 and 1920, he wrote that driving England out of India was

“as great [a duty] as saving the pages of the Qur’an from being trampled by an animal…a worry as great as that of driving a pig out of the mosque.”

Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 103

He also wrote two anti-colonial plays Chin Sevish (True Love) and Hind ixtilolchilari (Indian Revolutionaries). In True Love Nuruddin, an Indian Revolutionary poet, and Zulaikha, his beloved, who are murdered by the British police and a jealous rival for Zulaikha’s affections. In Indian Revolutionaries, Dilnavaz who loves Rahim Bakhsh is arrested by the police and Rahim joins a revolutionary group in the Afghan frontier to rescue her. Things end tragically. He believed that England, who were solidifying their whole on India and struggling to prevent Afghanistan’s own independence was the true enemy external enemy while the ulama and emir remained the true internal enemy.

This evolution in his thinking pushed him towards finding common cause with the Bolsheviks and he left for Tashkent in 1918. When he arrived, he styled himself as a representative of the Bukharan people and worked closely with the Soviets in Tashkent. However, the Young Bukharans had to compete with the newly created Bukharan Communist Party for the Soviet’s attention and support. Eventually, Red Army Genera Mikhail Frunze would force the two groups to merge into one communist party and they focused their efforts on generating support for his invasion of Bukhara. The merger did little to make the two groups like each other and the Young Bukharans remained disconnected from Communist thinking.

Frunze would overthrow the Bukharan Emir in the fall of 1920 and created the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic. Several Jadids, including Fitrat, would serve in its government.

Running a new Soviet Republic

Fitrat served in several cabinet positions including minister for foreign affairs, education, waqf management, and chairmen of the national economic council with his signature appearing on the banknotes of the republic. He also oversaw the collection and survey of manuscript collections that could be found in the city. His goal was to create a cultural legacy for Bukhara.

Fitrat and the other Jadids used their new power to attack old enemies such as ulama. They had some killed, put others to work, and took their property and wealth when they could. The most complicated problem for Fitrat and the Bukharan Soviet Republic was the issue of waqf property, which is land endowed by wealthy Muslims for religious purposes and were a key source of power for the ulama. Under Fitrat’s reign the waqf remained exempt from taxation and all benefits remained with the mosque, but the distribution and spending of those benefits fell under the directorate’s supervision. A lot of this wealth was used to rebuild new-method schools, madrasas, orphanages, and funded the publication of newspapers, magazines, and useful books. This allowed the government to control who taught at the new-method schools and madrasas and push through Jadid type education reform they had been championing for at least a decade.

However, Fitrat’s greatest contribution while as minister was his language and cultural reform.

Recreating a Language and State Identity

As we mentioned, Fitrat stopped writing in Persian in 1917 and wrote in Uzbek instead. When he became a cabinet minister, he also made Uzbek the state language for the Bukharan Soviet Republic. The reason he chose Uzbek instead of Persian is because he was a proponent of Chaghatayism. Chaghatayism argues that Central Asia was the cradle of the Turkic peoples and its people were Turkic people and the only way to make progress was to reclamation this national authenticity. This also meant elevating the likes of Oghuz, Genghis, Temur, and Ulughbek as Turkic heroes. This left no room for people who claimed a Persianate heritage, like the Tajiks, or the Kazakh and Kyrgyz histories and national heroes. Clearly, a recipe for disaster if one was considered about uniting the region. Poor Risqulov put together an alliance of Kazakh and Uzbek intellectual leaders to avoid a schism, but it fell apart when he was forced out of the region, and the intellectuals went their own ways. This nationalization of local identity would contribute to the eventual creation of the modern Central Asian states which we’ll talk about in our next episode.

Coming from a Chaghatay perspective, Fitrat worked hard to modernize the Uzbek language, basically recreating it from scratch. His goal was to

• Create an Uzbek language who’s literary quality wasn’t determined by its degree of Arabicness
• Create an Uzbek language that had its own rules and didn’t borrow from other languages
• Create an Uzbek language that had more indigenous terms than Persian or Arabic words (although that seems like one trying to purge English of French influences…)
  • He even created a cultural organization called Chig’atoy Gurungi (Chaghatay Conversation) which focused on collecting Turkic works used in Turkestan to rejuvenate the Turkic language and enrich its vocabulary and literature.

When he wasn’t busy rewriting an entire language and updating spelling conventions, he was reforming poetry to better utilize the Turkic language. Cho’lpon would pick up this task and completely revolutionize poetry.

Fitrat was trying to prove that the Uzbeks had a language and history of their own, that they weren’t a mismatched people who needs other influences to be creative or contribute to society. The war and revolution had stripped the region of Tsarist and Emirate power. This created a vortex that the Basmachi, Bolsheviks, Jadids, and others were trying to fill. Fitrat believed a Turkic identity was the solution, even if it meant other peoples of the region were left out in the cold.

Nationalism vs Communism

Fitrat’s creation of a national identity was supported by other leaders of the Bukharan Republic who had little interest in the Bolshevik concept of communism or a federated state. The indigenous leaders of the Bukharan Republic wanted to create a centralized, modern state with full sovereignty and membership in the world order. They wanted to keep local control of the region’s resources so they could grow their own internal economy (as opposed to contributing to the bigger Soviet economy). They wanted to fight ignorance “championed” by the ulama by bringing Muslim institutions and Islamic activity under state control – not to destroy it but to regulate it-, and create a bureaucratic system similar to one championed by the Young Turks. They also wanted to have freedom to control their own foreign policy and even sent overtures to the new state of Turkey and Afghanistan.

This contradicted all of the Soviet’s goals and since the Soviets had the Red Army on their side, it was easy to bring the Bukharan Republic to heel. Flexing their muscles, they demanded the dismissal of four ministers, including Fitrat, and exiled them from Bukhara for the abuse of power, corruption and incompetence, and public drunkenness. This shattered the republic’s attempts to exert its independence and began a very dark period in Fitrat’s life.

Life In Exile

After being exiled in 1923, Fitrat traveled to Moscow where he seemingly had a crisis of faith. Since I am not a Muslim myself, I won’t be arrogant enough to try and analyze his relationship with Islam. I will just not that from 1923 onward, Fitrat wrote several pieces that dealt with core Islamic principles. Some of these publications include: Qiyomat (the Day of Judgment), in which a druggie experiences the Islamic version of Judgment Day and returns to Earth because Paradise is boring. Shayton-nin tangriga isyoni (Satan’s Revolt Against God) which is Milton-esque take on Shayton’s fall from grace and something I desperately want to read, and a rather unflattering story about Mohammed’s marriage to his son’s recently divorced wife. In terms of his own believes, Fitrat would claim:

“I was a proponent of religious reform, given over to the idea of separating religion from superstition. Precisely this path from religious reform brought me to irreligion. I saw that nothing remained of religion once it was separated from superstition. I came to believe that religion and science could never coexist and therefore I left religion and [began to] spread ideas against religion. My irreligion is well known to all Uzbeks and Tajiks. This fact cannot be denied”

Adeeb Khalid, Making Uzbekistan, pg. 253

However, that statement was made during the height of his persecution, when Communists and fellow Jadids were attacking him for being anti-Communist in order to bolster their own communist credentials, so this could have been a statement made to save his own life.

In 1924, Cho’lpon would travel to Moscow to study at the newly created Uzbek drama studio and Qodiriy would attend the Briusov Institute of Journalism. For his part, Fitrat taught where he could and forced on writing literature and literary criticism. He would be allowed to return to Bukhara a year later where he could face several attacks on himself, his Communist credentials, and his life’s work.

Attacked from All Sides

The balance of power was shifting in Bukhara in 1924 with the Jadids growing increasingly isolated and unwanted, replaced by indigenous actors who had stronger Communist credentials, (although this didn’t always protect them during Stalin’s purges). He returned just as the internal divides were heating up and he became a lightning rod for anyone who wanted to discredit Fayzulla Xo’jayev’s government and prove their own Communist credentials. First, Fitrat was attacked for being a Chaghatayist. His main accuser was Jalil Boybo’latov who was a Chekist assigned to tracking Fitrat since the early days of the Bukharan Soviet Republic. Boybo’latov claimed that Chaghatayism was a thin veil for Pan-Turkism, Pan-Islamism, and local nationalism and that Fitrat was a Sufi, Pan-Islamist, and pro-Emirate. Fitrat defended himself in the party’s newspaper (he was still the Soviet’s literary darling) but his Chagatay project was stripped from the Sovietization of the Central Asians states by the 1930s.

Fayzulla Xo’jayev used his political power to protect Fitrat from these attacks, allowing him to publish and work in academia. Fitrat continued to step away from political work and taught at several schools, but that didn’t save him from being labeled a political subversive amongst Communist circles. By 1937, the Communists felt strong enough in Central Asia to go after the Jadids, Alash Orda, and old politicians in Central Asia. Fayzulla Xo’jayev fell first, arrested in July 1937. Cho’lpon was arrested on July 13^th, 1937, and Fitrat was arrested on July 21^st, 1937. They were all accused of belonging to a secret society, Milliy Ittihod (which we’ll discuss in our next episode). The society’s goal was to break away from the Soviet Union and undermining Communism. During his interrogation, Fitrat “confessed” to be the leader and being “recruited” to organization by Fayzulla. He also confessed to helping organize the Basmachi to fight the Soviets and establish an independent bourgeois nationalist state.

Fitrat, Cho’lpon, Qodiriy, and other Jadids were executed on October 4^th, 1938, the same day the Supreme Military Court of the USSR in Tashkent convene to announce their sentence. Fitrat’s work was banned by the Soviet Union and was not allowed to be discussed until glasnost. He wasn’t rehabilitated until after the Soviet Union fell.

References

Making Uzbekistan: Nation, Empire, and Revolution in the Early USSR by Adeeb Khalid

Reviewed Work(s): Evading Reality: The Devices of Abdulrauf Fitrat, Modern Central Asian Reformist by Edward A. Allworth

Reclaiming National Literary Heritage: The Rehabilitation of Abdurauf Fitrat and Abdulhamid Sulaymon Cho’lpon in Uzbekistan by Halim Kara

The Jadids in Bukhara: The Juxtaposition of the Reforms if Aini and Fitrat by Candice Mixon