Abstract:

The Russian conquest of Central Asia brought face to face two very different worlds: very traditional local culture and technologically much more advanced European one. Greatly diverging reactions emerged all along the line of the contact. By default, those who were able to collate the traditional religious and ethnic identities of Central Asia with new technological and economic realities gained most out of this historical collision. With the problem posed this way, the first thing that comes to mind is Jadid movement. Yet before this broad political and cultural stream formed in Central Asia, there were multiple individuals who tried to solve the very same problem of collating two different tendencies in their lives. Some of them quite early found solutions that were to became norm in the later Jadid movement. These historical figures can be considered the first “enlighteners” of Central Asia.

According to the figurative expression of Devin DeWeese, "It was a Dark and Stagnant Night (‘til the Jadids Brought the Light)", and I mostly agree, with a little modification - 'til the Enlighteners Brought the Light. Here we will enter the little-known period of pre-Jadids Enlighteners and try to clarify the situation by using the example of Muslim judge Sattarkhan.

Sattarkhan (known in literature mostly as Sattarkhan Abdulgafarov) was a significant figure already before the Russian conquest. He completed his religious education in Tashkent and eventually became the mufti of Chimkent. After the Russian conquest of Kokand Khanate, he was made the Qazi of Kokand. Subsequently, he taught at a Russian-language school for indigenous Central Asians (Russko-tuzemnaia shkola). After years of service, Sattarkhan retired with an administrative rank of Governor Secretary (Gubernsky sekretar). It would be, however, a grave mistake to describe Sattarkhan's career as a simple transition from the position of Muslim spiritual leader to that of Russian bureaucrat.

Contradictory opinions about Sattarkhan expressed in literature are often based on isolated documents and ignore cultural and political discourse of the 19th century Central Asia. I propose revisiting all available documents authored by Sattarkhan and his contemporaries. The documents cover a broad spectrum of Sattarkhan's opinions and career, which themselves reflect the number of changes that occurred in Central Asia during the end of the 19th century. Most importantly, the documents reveal not only what changes occurred, but how the population of Central Asia thought of and reacted to them.