Paper long abstract:

As the fifth pillar of Islam, Muslims perform hajj pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime during the month of Ramadan. The hajj pilgrimage was also an important meeting point of Muslims of various regions of the world and exchange of ideas and experiences. The route to the pilgrimage journey itself was a lifetime experience for most Central Asian Muslims as it went through other countries and regions which they have never seen before. Mulla Mahmud Alim Mahdum, a chief editor of 'Turkistan Viloyatining Gazeti' was among the pilgrims of Central Asia who traveled to Mecca in 1909. Mulla Mahmud was not an ordinary pilgrim, as a representative of Russian Administration of Turkistan, he wrote memoirs on his journey describing the social and economic difference between the Muslim societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Mulla Mahmud astonished by the economic advancement of Odessa, Istanbul and Mecca, technological development and convenience of travel on a steamship. He especially described the new style schools of Istanbul by comparing them with the ones recently introduced by jadids in Central Asia. As the representative of Russian Administration of Turkestan, Mulla Mahmud also had meetings of rulers of Istanbul, Mecca, and Medina. Throughout his journey, he wrote his memoirs back to Tashkent routinely which were published in his newspaper. His memoirs are an important historical source as it was written not as laymen or travelogue but written as comparative analyses of two different societies by a journal editor. Furthermore, he also was a proponent of the modernity of Central Asia under the Russian influence, however, his travel experience in advanced Muslim cities gave him an opportunity to compare Central Asian modernity with those cities. The paper analyzes the memoirs of Mulla Mahmud and compares it with other travelogues written during that period of time in order to examine how Muslims of Central Asia understood the modernity and how it changed by experience and time.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the manner in which the Chinese-language Xinjiang Daily’s (新疆日报) articulation of the experience, utilization, and understanding of snow by Urumchi's government bureaus and Han Chinese community reveals the development of a suite of 'official modernities' in Republican-era Urumchi. The Daily's various snow-related articles during this period include coverage of everything from government snow removal campaigns and student snowball fights to military ski training programs, snow-related literature and poetry, and even a late 1940s "coal through the snow" government-sponsored heating campaign on behalf of the city's poorer residents. These articles form a 'discourse of snow' through which a disparate yet connected tangle of developing modernities can be explored, including those shaped by Soviet influence (including mass society and the 'civic citizen'), 'Inner China' (including patriotism, nationalism, and expanded state powers), and those rooted in Urumchi itself (most notably a claiming of Xinjiang as 'home' by the Urumchi Han Chinese community). Through the thematic categories of 'control,' 'mobilization,' and 'home,' I argue that while the sources of such modernities were thus varied, and while alternative visions of modernity persisted outside the Daily’s official discourse, taken together they demonstrate the ascendancy of a 'Chinese modernity' similar in important ways to both that developing in inner China at the same time and to that which would emerge throughout the PRC after 1949—this was a vision of modernity that placed particular emphasis on expanded state powers, a civically engaged citizenry, and control and utilization of the environment for the achievement of political and ideological goals, even as it also encouraged the growth of local forms of identity and place attachment. This paper thus adds to (and links) the separate but important literatures examining modernity, the relationship between environmental control and the modern Chinese state, and the history of Republican-era Xinjiang.

Paper long abstract:

The Young Turks opened up the doors of intense activities for Turkish nationalists in the Ottoman context. While Ziya Gokalp approached Turkish nationalism as a sociological phenomenon, his protégés, such as Halim Sabit, justified nationalism and secularism from an Islamic legal perspective. This research aims to study the reflections of these debates on Islamic law in the Tatar context. How did the reformist Tatar intellectuals respond to and contribute to the reformist interpretation of Islamic law? This research looks into the Tatar journals of early twentieth century to explore the utilization of Islamic law for reformist purposes. It investigates the connections between the reformist debates on Islamic law in the Ottoman and Central Asian contexts. Reviewing journals such as Islam Mecmuasi, Shura, and Ulfet it aims to identify how Islamic law was interpreted in different ways to accommodate reformist arguments on issues such as education and the role of women.