Background: On the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution, three major and distinct formal educational authorities were functioning in Central Asia and Kazakhistan (Qazzaqqistan). These were the traditional Islamic education system, the Russian education system, and the education system advocated by the so-called Jadidists--persons who advocated new (Jadid) ways of doing things. Soviet education did not completely replace these educational systems until late in the 1920s.

The traditional Islamic education system in West Turkistan (the former Uzbek SSR, Tajik SSR, Kirghiz SSR, Turkman SSR, and parts of Kazakh SSR) at the time of the Russian conquest of Tashkent in the mid-nineteenth century had become thoroughly theological. Unlike the Samanid period in the tenth century when the makatib (plural of maktab, the elementary cycle of education) had unparalleled breadth and rigor and the madaris (plural of madrasah, educational organizations similar to modern-day secondary education and universities) were places of intellectual vigor and good scholarship, the education given in these organizations in the end of the nineteenth century was narrow and provincial. It was useless for economic development and useful only for the haphazard teachings of the basic Islamic rituals.¹

The tsarist authorities developed two types of schools between 1850 and 1917 in Turkistan: one for the children of the colonizers, and the other, the Russian native school (Russko-tuzemnaya shkola), for training the children of the local non-European population.²

The Russian colonizers, like all colonizers, aimed at the subjugation of the area by any means. Formal education was one of the important means (among other imported institutions) through which the first of many converted elites (who were subservient to the Russians) was created. Very few received even this education. Most of the students went to vocational-technical schools, and upon graduation they worked on the railroads, as translators, or in other occupations for the colonized. The low number of the local pupils enrolled in these schools also reflected people's suspicion that the Russian education was aimed at undermining their religion and culture. Central Asians were aware that Russians were missionary people and that their schooling was not to be trusted.³

The two tsarist educational systems are not of much importance except for their historical place in the lives of the people of Central Asia. Only the Soviet and the Jadid systems of education seem to be of importance albeit for different social and pedagogical reasons.

The Jadidist education was short lived. It was destroyed by the hostility of the local rulers and the Russian colonizers.⁴ The Jadidist education, as a private system, did not get the chance to replace the traditional Islamic education of makatib nor could it compete with the tsarist and later the Soviet education systems. The Jadidist education system, it seems, was the only education system that had its curricular roots in the culture of Central Asia and took its inspirations in the creation of a free and decent society (full of exuberance, hope, and creativity) from the Samanids of the tenth century and the science and technology of the twentieth.⁵ Some curricular aspects of the present-day education, the government's education, or the public education in many countries of the Near and the Middle East are similar to those of the Jadidists.⁶ The Jadidist education in Central Asia could not have a fully supportive environment because it was the product of the colonized. A supportive environment was also lacking for the Soviets' education (and before them for the tsarist education) because it was the product of the colonizers. The same can be said not only about the so-called Islamic countries (except maybe Iran) but also about most other developing countries. A supportive environment is the prerequisite for the survival and flourishing of any enterprise, including education. Jadidist education could have created commitment and competency (that can only develop in a free society) in those being educated had it been left alone by the colonizers, the authoritarian and ignorant "rulers," and the equally ignorant backers of the old maktab and madrasah, the so-called traditional Islamic education. This paper is devoted to a detailed description and analysis of the Jadidist and the Soviet education systems.

The Jadidist Educational System: The Jadidist movement in Turkistan,⁷ as in other parts of Russia, was influenced by all three educational streams already mentioned, as well as by several political and cultural, movements such as pan-Turanism (pan-Turkism) and pan-Islamism.⁸ Jadidism was a movement not particular only to Muslims of the Imperial Russia but to most of the Islamic countries of the Near and Middle East. It did not originate in any single country. It began spontaneously in most of the so-called Muslim world. It was not a revolution, but a movement for reform. The Jadidists firmly believed that changes in the education system, as well as other aspects of their societies, would have to take place for the Muslims to resist colonization and backwardness. Some have looked at these movements as reactions to the colonization of the Muslims' lands and their humiliation at the hands of the Western powers.⁹

The method of educating the young was called usuli Jadid or usuli Nau (the new method) in contrast to the usuli Qadim (the old method) of the maktab (usually conducted in a mosque) and madrasah that was prevalent among the Muslims of Russia and other Muslim countries at the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Moreover, some Jadidists believed that only through education was it possible to preserve the Islamic community (the Ummah) and at the same time to usher in an Islamic renaissance.¹¹

Others, using pan-Islamism and pan-Turanism (or pan-Turkism), synonymously published books, journals, and newspapers from Baghchasarai in the Crimea to Tashkent in Uzbekistan. In the Russian empire both pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism were used to combat the Russian Orthodox church's programs for the conversion of the Muslims and the general Russian's bigotry and racism toward the Muslims of Tataria, of the Caucasus, and of Turkistan.¹² The resistance to colonization and racism brought together people from various backgrounds. Even some non-Muslims saw in pan-Islamic Jadidism a more tolerant system and a brighter future than under either the Russian colonizers or the local Muslim rulers.¹³

The Jadidists sent many young men to study in Turkey and other countries. Some Jadidists were exiled from the Amaret of Bakhara by the amir or one of his functionaries. One of these students was Abdura'uf Fitrat, who went to Istanbul in 1908 and returned home at the outbreak of the war in 1914. His works correctly depict the aims of the Jadidists and the outline of their programs. Munazirah, for example, is a discussion between the followers of the usuli Jadid and usuli Qadim educational systems. Almost all of his works articulate a pan-Islamic view. He explained that the reason Muslims were in a pitiful political and economic condition was not due to Islam but to the Muslims' poor practice of the religion. He, like most other Jadidists, believed that Islam as a religion was dynamic, flexible, and more worldly than other great Middle Eastern religions.¹⁴

The Russians at this time encouraged the Jadidists' movement in the Amaret of Bukhara. They thought, correctly, that the Jadid education ultimately would undermine the corrupt and authoritarian regime of the amir and other ruling elites of the Amaret and elsewhere in Central Asia. This attitude of the Russians was temporary, however. The Russians feared the spread of science and technology among the Muslims and the even more dangerous spread of ideas that questioned the legitimacy of colonization. Soon the Russians and the amir allied themselves against the Jadidists because of a Jadidist faction's more vocal nationalism and self-determination for Turkistan.¹⁵ Regardless of whether the Jadidist were pan-Islamists (those who wanted the unity of the Ummah based on a living and breathing Shari'ah), communists (who followed the Marxist-Leninist doctrine), or nationalists (the pan-Turanists who advocated the Turkic people's unity and their superiority over all others), they all wanted the emergence of their lands from the decay that was enveloping them at the time.¹⁶

The Jadidists existed in almost all of the Islamic countries. The aim of most was to develop in the context of Islam. Regardless of who they were, they all agreed on independence from colonization and development of the Ummah through education and other forms of economic growth. They did not see these goals being achieved through the traditional Islamic education, which by this time had become thoroughly theological. It prepared the children to know only the basic rituals of the faith.¹⁷ Children, for example, were asked to memorize Arabic words (in prayers) without understanding them, and as a rule, they could not even write, although the word maktab means the place to write. In contrast the Jadidists' major effort was on formal education and literature. The latter was used as a means to critique the various aspects of their own cultures and social systems.¹⁸ Simply put, they wanted to face the detractors of Islam with modern means. What this meant was mass borrowing from Western countries.¹⁹ In education the so-called Western subjects were added to the content of their curriculum (see Table 1).

Source: Sophy Bobrovnikoff, "Moslems in Russia," The Moslem World 1, no. 1, (1911): 17.

A close look at the syllabus for the new method school shows not many differences between this curriculum and the curricula of most parochial schools in most developed countries, including the United States. Also, it is very difficult to find many differences between the Jadidists' curriculum and the curriculum that exists in all of Islamic countries.

The Jadidists also published numerous articles on education in their specialized journals and periodicals all over Russia, as table 2 illustrates.²⁰ Almost all of these ceased to exist when the Soviets took over the area and imposed their own monolithic education system.

Source: Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, La Presse et le Mouvement National Ches les Musulmans de Russie Avant 1920 (Paris-The Hague: Mouton, 1964), passim.

Some Jadidists of Russia were not Turks, but were forced to learn Turkish (the Osmanli version) under the pretense of belonging to the unitary Ummah. Many Jadidists were also pan-Turkists, and in this ideology they saw "modernization" and through it the "modernization" of Islam. This was the pretense of the Kemalist policy in Turkey.²¹

The Muslim Ummah at that time, as in the present, were almost all ignorant about Islam. Most could not read at all. The literacy rate (in the most rudimentary definition of literacy, the ability to read and write in any language or the equivalent of a first grade education) was between 3 and 5 percent. For women it was even lower. These shameful statistics profiled an Ummah for whom the acquisition of knowledge was neither a right nor a privilege but an obligatory Islamic duty.²² There are also many ahadith (Mohammed's sayings) on the subject.²³

In sum, aspects of the Jadid education are being implemented at the present time in many of the so-called Islamic countries as well as elsewhere. The fact that it has not worked as well as the Soviet education (for what it was worth) or the Western education has a lot to do with the various school and nonschool variables (similar to those which have always existed in education throughout history) than it has to do with the curricular mix, the script, or the ideology. As any organization, schools have to have a highly supportive environment for them to succeed.

Soviet Education: The Soviet education system came to Central Asia (like tsarist education before it) from Moscow several years after its introduction there. It had too many ambitious aims. It not only wanted to create the needed human resources for economic development of the country, but also wanted to change many aspects of human behavior drastically. All of the society's resources were to be used for the development of the Soviet Person who was supposed to be omnicompetent, an internationalist, a good communist, and a humanitarian. The literature on the subject of the Soviet Person is too enormous to list. Suffice to say that dozens of journals in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) were devoted to various aspects of this person. There are also many works by the Westerners and Easterners in major languages of the world. Many states and political parties were founded on the belief that the FSU was the model to mold the country and the world. In theory, in this Soviet mode of economic development, efficiency and equity as values reigned, and questions of justice and freedom never rose. Hence the Soviets' absurd arguments that those citizens who complained about the system had to be out of their mind and were treated accordingly.

Among the non-Russians, especially among the Muslim Central Asians, Soviet education became a major source of recruitment and development of the local elites in the colony.²⁴ Education also was the major factor, it was thought, through which conversion from the traditional and Islamic ways of life (the two are not always synonyms) to the "modern" party discipline and communism was possible. "Sovietism" was a major vehicle through which the redefinition of Central Asians could take place. It was new, as Islam was to their ancestors more than a millennium before. They found the Soviet system, however, conflict-ridden, intolerant, and unnatural, unlike Islam into which they have grown for centuries, and they in turn have been contributors to Islam's internationalization and intellectual vigor.²⁵ The Soviets used formal education in tandem with other media to certify and credentialize the colonized and, simultaneously to declare those with other forms of education not only incompetent but also enemies of the state.

The reward system that hitherto was attached to the traditional Islamic educational and cultural institutions was now put on the Soviet school. The Islamic institutions and the Islamic way of life were declared illegal, and the more a Muslim became converted to the Soviet beliefs (the more he or she became part of the group for the development of communism), the more the person became the outcast of his or her own community. Those who did not fit, either through their competencies or commitments in the Soviet system, were rejected or eliminated with violence. Many of the Jadidists, religious or not, for example, were executed or were sent to the gulags in being accused by someone of holding views in variation from those advocated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In general, the threat of violence kept the colonized people in check. The party monopolized all sources of power (including access to means of violence); it concentrated almost all of the power in the hands of the Russians or the "russified" local elite. The concentration of these resources was not so much for the sake of economic efficiency and equity but as means of keeping an illegitimate group of men and women (CPSU) in power. Education was to legitimize the party and the government, including the local bureaucrats, and to rationalize this new form of colonization and totalitarianism.

The literature on the FSU, especially that written on Soviet education, seldom looked at its multiregional and multiethnic character. Worse, it did not detail investigations on the relationships between learning and fear or education and freedom in the Soviet context. This literature stressed the Soviets' ventures into many aspects of the traditional societies, ostensibly to increase equity, and excused sloppiness in education and the violation of the basic human rights in the FSU. Violence was excused as the necessary excess needed in a revolution. Other clichés such as "the omelet of 'modernization' could not be cooked without breaking some traditional eggs" came into wide spread usage. The eggs turned out to be hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings. Hundreds of thousands of Central Asians perished for the sake of the modernization that Sovietization was assumed to represent, especially during the needless five-year plans of the Stalin and later eras.

Most of these writers, from John Dewey to the present, only looked at the Russians and called the education system they saw Soviet, hence modern.²⁶ They seldom bothered to note that a huge non-Russian minority did not have some of the basic educational variables that the Western educators and other visitors saw in the before-the-visit-spruced-up-schools in the major cities. The visitors who wrote about the various indexes of economic development of the USSR seldom wrote about colonies like Central Asia and when they did they missed the point.²⁷ Since most could not speak the languages, and fewer still knew the culture, the assumption was that everyone wanted to "modernize" the Russian way.²⁸ The non-Russians' modernity and civility were measured by how much they mimicked the Russians.²⁹ The Russians in turn were also victims of the Soviet fraud.

Few visitors ever measured achievement or had the skill to ask questions from teachers to see if they agreed with the curriculum with which they were saddled; or from parents of children to find out if they were happy with what their children were learning. The fear of the government kept teachers', students' and parents' mouths shut. When they opened their mouth it was to gush out a rush of clichés in praise of Sovietism, of its notables, and even the long discredited apparatchniki on the local levels.

Modernization became synonymous with Sovietization. To many wide-eyed outsiders writing on the FSU, it has not become clear (even now) that Sovietization meant the destruction of everyone's culture, including that of the Russians and that effective education did not take place in a cultural vacuum. All of these plans and programs apparently were set up to preserve the privileges of the very few in the party and the government.

Since Sovietization came from Moscow, to the Central Asians it meant the russification of their culture. Also, since modernization was looked upon by almost all writers on the FSU to be good, terrible excesses in the implementation of the policy were perceived to be progressive and developmental. The state's interests were often articulated in the vacuum of moral and ethical principles. The drives for fulfilling the wishes of the state were cloaked by obstreperous concepts such as modernization, development, progress, and national security. The destruction of nature and people happened simply as means to the fulfillment of these state interests. Schools were to became places for the development of workers. Instead of educating the youth to develop a sense of responsibility and to inculcate in them attitudes like mercy and compassion, they were taught to become competitive learners of the party doctrines and to acquire the types of knowledge that the party advocated. This was one of the many contradictions of the Soviet education that idealized the Soviet Person.

Soviet schools, like schools in most other countries, taught children not only to be competitive with each other (despite the textbooks and the officials' pronouncements to the contrary) but also to look at nature as each child's enemy. It was to be subjugated and exploited. There were really not many differences between many of the visitors visiting the FSU and their counterparts there. Both were graduates of like curricula, both aimed at the maximization of production by any means.³⁰ The message was that through production one not only realized self-worth but also became a better human being. The irony was probably not lost on the Central Asians who labored in the cotton fields without ever becoming the "humans" that the Soviet ideals outlined in the schools and other state-controlled media. "Soviets" as organizations were vacuous in theory and practice. Also, Russian racism could not implement these and most other ideological window dressings.

The Soviet Person was schooled to maximize production. This person was manipulated by the state through its numerous formal organizations and institutions. Since the extended family and the tribe that protected its members were destroyed as obstacles in the path of modernization, the individual in the Soviet system became alone. The school certification made him or her a part of the formal and the bureaucratic society: soulless, heartless, and cold. The Soviet Person was trained to see fulfillment only in the progress of the community. However, the CPSU's programs executed by the Soviets discussed only the theoretical possibilities of the Soviet Person. At the end, the unenlightened state used him or her as a work horse or canon fodder to keep in power members of the party. The Soviet Person was in reality not well educated.

Many writers saw in Sovietization also Westernization. They took at face value whatever came out of the Soviet and the Russian press about education and the "development" of other nationalities. Thus they often ignored the plight of the colonized non-Europeans and even went so far as to tell them to be thankful for the little "favors" that the Russians had done to them.³¹ Most forgot that effective education could not (and does not) take place in the absence of freedom. Education without freedom becomes training at best and brain-washing at worst. Both of these took place in the FSU.

Western writers in particular could not empathize with the colonized in the FSU because of the minorities' non-Westernness. In many instances the improper education of the researchers made them insensitive to the colonized plight. The violence of the Soviet modernization was looked upon as civil compared with the violence of the despotic Middle Eastern, Central Asian, African, and Latin American rulers.³² Very few wrote about the destruction of human beings by the Stalinists and some even told this writer that the invasion of Afghanistan by the Russians would bring modernization to the country.³³

Learning happens more effectively if children are taught in their mother tongues, but the politics of language and other political factors overshadowed this pedagogical logic in the FSU.³⁴ All the officially decreed social, economic, and political rewards hung on the acquisition of the Russian language in Central Asia and Khazakhistan. Local children were further punished by going to bad schools and taught by bad teachers of the Russian language. Then they were asked to compete with the Russian children living in the same republic for places in the higher educational establishments. Naturally, the Russians and other Slavs who did not face the language difficulty not only increased their frequency in these organizations but also scored higher in many Russian-only subjects. Thus the Russian language was used to eliminate many young Central Asians who could not pass the requirements for entrance to the higher educational establishments. Its effect was to create different self-perceptions among the colonized and the colonizers: that the Central Asians were not smart enough and that the colonizers were a somewhat super race who deserved to rule with impunity backed by the test scores, the Soviet Army, and the KGB.³⁵

The change in the script from Arabic to Latin to Cyrillic in less than twenty years (all under the guise of improving literacy in the area) tried to undermine the Central Asians' historical and cultural continuity. This policy separated the curriculum from its cultural context. Today, most people in Central Asia cannot read the work of their ancestors, such as Farabi, Biruni, Avicenna (ibn Sina), Khwarazmi, Bukhari, Termizi, Rudaki, Nawai, and Jami among hundreds of others. Only a few of these works have been transliterated to Cyrillic script and those are still difficult for many to read because of the added diacritical marks and the addition of several letters to the Central Asians were forced to keep from the Russian alphabet that they do not need.³⁶ The policy of forced acceptance of the Russian alphabet was not so much to increase the literacy rate (the official Soviet reason) but to erode the history and culture of these ancient people, and eventually to make some of them ashamed of their own common cultural heritage.

Soviet education (like other Soviet institutions) from its inception was faced with major problems. One problem that eventually contributed to the unraveling of the FSU was how to create the Soviet Person and rule the multiethnic country. The ideological imperative that gave legitimacy to the state was that the Soviet system would create the Soviet Person. The political factors, however, dictated the adage of divide and rule. Thus ethnic nationalism was fostered under the Soviet slogan of "nationalism in form and socialism in content." For the Central Asians, who not only feared their russification and colonization by the Russians but also feared the imperialism of their own neighbors, the "form" became more important than the "content." Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmans, Kazakhs, and the Kirghiz (and the national minorities within each of these FSU republics) began to lash out at each other and at their masters, the Russians, in their poetry and prose written in their own languages.³⁷ In the FSU linguistic nationalism (and other forms of nationalism) was sanctioned as long as it did not challenge the Soviet state and insult the Russians. Many individuals perished for exceeding the permitted range of nationalism.

The Russians were frightened by the apparent success of Sovietism and began to stress their own nationalism. Nationalism of the Russians and the nationalism of other nationalities eventually undermined the Soviet programs that aimed in theory to destroy all forms of nationalism and ethnicity for the development of one monolithic Soviet culture. In reality, these programs were not so much designed for economic development and the creation of the Soviet Person, as they were designed to keep the Communist Party in power. Nationalism eventually led, as it always does, to provencialization, ethnicalization, and racism. Soviet nationality policies, among others, undid the Sovietization of the USSR.

Apparently, for any education system to be successful in inculcating the cognitive and affective skills in children, the message of the schools has to be reinforced positively by other socializing agencies. Children of Central Asia, like most other children in the FSU, could not find reinforcement for some of the major Soviet values taught at school in their homes, in their places of worship, and later even in some important places of work. Against some of these agencies the state of the USSR had long declared war and planned their destruction. Because of this absence of congruity between Soviet values and because of the conflict that existed between values such as atheism and religious values taught in most homes in Central Asia, children had to compartmentalize to please the competing and often hostile agents of influence in their lives. So learning, especially of the concepts in the social studies, did not happen effectively. The Central Asian child had to learn to survive in two different worlds, the real Soviet world of power and prejudice and the world of his or her own powerlessness as exemplified by unemployment in the urban areas and among the "cotton caste" in the countryside. Some Central Asians, like many minorities in other oppressed societies, became culturally amphibious.³⁸ Many perished physically or culturally in this cruel game of the Soviets.The logical refuge from this state of affair would have been the tribe, the village, and the local Islamic organizations; but, forced settlement of the nomads and collectivization had destroyed many of the functional components of the tribe and the village. And some of the Islamic organizations had been destroyed by the Russians and almost all of the Islamic values and their attendant institutions were declared illegal.

New Soviet organizations kept the Turkistanis mobile socially and spatially up to a point. Few could move to their own cities because these places had become culturally and linguistically hostile to them. In urban areas the Russians and other Europeans were dominant culturally and demographically. Rarely were Central Asians permitted to move to the Russian cities such as Moscow. Very few ever became the real power in the political bureau of the FSU's Communist Party. The few who managed to rise above their regions and become nationally known in some instances had managed to damn their own tradition and heritage. These were the real successes of the Soviet system. There were few of them. Still, there were enough of them to act as wardens in this prison of nations, to paraphrase Lenin, that made up the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, it was this incongruity between the socializing agencies that, among other things, led to the collapse of the USSR. The Soviet schools, for example, taught children to think of themselves as part of the Soviet people and to glorify the Soviet homeland. They were also taught that they belonged to different nations that have cultures and traditions far superior to the Russians and indeed the USSR itself. One set of instruction was forced by the ideological imperatives that aimed at the creation of the raceless, sexless, and nationless Soviet Person, the other set of instruction was forced by the political imperatives that aimed at the enhancement of the child's nationalism.

The Soviet persons in Central Asia came from both the Russian and the non-Russian families. Education being a process of conversion one can assume that the Europeans rate of conversion to Sovietism was higher than that of the Central Asians. Some differences in the conversion rate can be attributed to the real differences in terms of the availability of educational resources to the colonizers and the colonized. The Russians, in both Europe and Asia, had a higher allocation of almost all of the school variables than the Central Asians. The traditional inequitable distribution of goods and services of center-periphery and of urban-rural persisted in the FSU as it did elsewhere in the world. Major urban centers have been dominated demographically by the Slavs. The Central Asians, are on the average, poorer than the Russians, and they predominate in the rural areas of the region.³⁹

Since the beginning of the Soviet era and the conversion of Central Asia to the cotton monoculture, almost half of the school year of the Central Asians children was spent in the cultivation and the harvest of cotton. Even nursery school children were to fill a toppa (tupi in places south as in Afghanistan's Herat Province), the traditional Central Asian skull cap, with cotton. This was one way to acculturate them to cotton-picking skills in their early lives. The Russian children had no such obligation. They instead had recommended summer readings while their Central Asian classmates had none.⁴⁰ The authorities knew that Central Asian children could not read much because of the demand for their labor in the cotton fields.⁴¹

The educational reform of 1984 did not address these problems, and the reform itself was shelved because of the emergence of important issues of sovereignty and cessation in the FSU. These issues surfaced when the FSU could no longer keep a costly war going in Afghanistan, no longer sustain buildup of weaponry with the NATO and no longer ignore the unprecedented civil unrest due to internal contradictions in political, ideological, educational, and economic spheres.

Since the Soviet model has failed the Central Asians, they have been searching for models of development. The search is going with more rigor in the light of the collapse of the FSU and the Central Asian's relative underdevelopment. Central Asia has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. It also has a devastated environment with one of the highest amounts of pesticide usage and residue per person in the world. Soviet environmental policies have destroyed the Aral Sea and have created catastrophic health conditions for the people of the area, especially among the Qaraqalpaqs south of the Aral Sea.⁴² The results of the many years of Russian occupation and the hundreds of thousands of unnatural deaths have left the Central Asians searching for a way out of the Soviet-Russian model of modernization for economic development. They have already taken steps to create different relationships between their region and Russia as well as among themselves and the rest of the world.⁴³

To this effect, laws have been enacted on the sovereignty of the republics. An already old Uzbek Law of Sovereignty, for example, states that the Supreme Soviet of the FSU cannot change the boundaries of the Uzbekistan and that of the Qaraqalpaq (Karakalpak) region without the consent of Uzbekistan.⁴⁴ Similarly, Uzbekistan's relationships with the Qaraqalpaq region and with other states within and without the FSU should be through treaties.⁴⁵

Following the passage of laws on religious freedom in the FSU, similar laws were enacted in the Central Asian republics in 1991. Few republics are yet ready to provide their people with permission to organize and to compete with the communists. However, other evidences suggest the broadening of religious freedom. For the first time an Islamic bimonthly journal, Islam Nuri, has been published in Uzbekistan.⁴⁶ There has not been much resistance by the authorities to having the Qur'an available in Arabic and in the vernaculars. The authorities now encourage parents and others to have more family involvement in the upbringing of children.⁴⁷

People sometimes have shown their displeasure toward the Soviet system through violent demonstrations. There were, for example, demonstration against the mufti of Central Asia and Kazakhistan. (The new mufti is now at work and seems to be freer than the previous ones.) Apparently, a free group of Muslims at a conference elected the new mufti for Kazakhistan, Ratbek-Haji Nysanbai-uly.⁴⁸ One month before, the official mufti of Central Asia and Kazakhistan, Mufti Mohammed Yusuf, was permitted on national television to clear some of misrepresentation of Islam by the authorities.⁴⁹ Some of these muftis are still official muftis (i.e., appointed by the organs of the former USSR) and it will take a while to have real religious freedom in Central Asia.⁵⁰

Another sign of the development of new relationships between Turkistan and Russia is the enactment of laws on the status of language in the five former Soviet republics. Kazakh SSR (now Kazakhistan) Law is an example. This law asks the citizens of Kazakhistan to learn both Russian and Kazakh.⁵¹ In places where several nationalities live, the language of the major nationality should also be learned.⁵² Language reform also means going from the Cyrillic to Latin and even back to Arabic scripts. It also means purging of Russian words and re-admission of the Arabic and Farsi words in the local languages. The teaching of Arabic as a foreign language has already started in the grade schools of Uzbekistan. The republic's minister of education was severely criticized for removing the Uzbek language from the ninth grade curriculum.⁵³

According to some officials, the Tajik script will be Arabic by 1995, if not sooner.⁵⁴ Azerbaijan, which was the first to abandon Arabic script for Latin in the 1920s, may be setting the course for the Central Asians. The Azeris have moved now to the creation of the Unified Latin Turkic Alphabet.⁵⁵ This may remove some problems present in the Cyrillic alphabet, but since the most significant past of the Azeris has been recorded in Arabic-Farsi script, the need for its learning becomes clear for communication with the Azeris in Iran and the rest of the Muslims of the Middle East. It would be hard to understand the present and harder to construct a clear future without knowing the past. The shift in the script (as in language) is clearly one of those events in which factors other than economics and pedagogy play a major role.

Another step testifying to the failure of the Soviet model has been the profusion of political parties. Rastakhiz (Renaissance) was founded in October 1990 in Tajikistan. Because some members of this party advocated the development of Islamic institutions (many of which were outlawed by the Soviets), apparently it was later opposed by the official qazi (judge) of the republic and eventually outlawed by the order of Tajik Supreme Soviet on 15 December 1990.⁵⁶ It is very interesting that by September 1992 this party and other opposition groups were successful in ushering in changes in the republic that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.⁵⁷ Another party, called the Democrats, planned to stage a hunger strike in front of a government building in Dushanbe. All of the would-be strikers were arrested under a hastily passed law.⁵⁸ In Kazakhistan, Alash was established to articulate the Islamic views of the Muslims there. These aims clearly differ from those of the FSU, the Russians, and the present authorities of the Kazakh republic.⁵⁹ Many Central Asians are also changing their names from the russified version to their original Turkic, Arabic, or Farsi. For example, Rahimov becomes either Rahim or Rahimi. The republics also are changing their names. Kirghiz SSR now has become The Republic of Kirghizia, or Kyrgyzia, from it's Russian transliteration.⁶⁰ These are a few of many steps that will have to be taken toward disengagement from the FSU and the Russian cultural and political domination.

This distancing of the Central Asians from the Russians has helped the Turkic and the Iranian people in the area to come together. This is clearly in their common interest. They signed an agreement to cooperate with each other for the rehabilitation of the Aral Sea and the detoxification of the rest of Turkistan, including Kazakhistan, where almost all of the Soviet nuclear testing occurred since the late 1940s.⁶¹

Moscow has also decided to let these minorities fend for themselves in the resolution of some local conflicts, some of which were put there by the Russians in the first place. Clashes have occurred between the Russians and the local people, among the local people and the immigrants (between the Meskhetians and the Uzbeks in the Ferghana valley) to the area, and among the local people themselves in places like Osh, Kirghizia.⁶² These conflicts all have their causes in the relationships between the colonized and the colonizers. Most of the Central Asian elites have not yet changed. The few changes in their behavior have often been created by political winds instead of by new visions for development and freedom. Some, like most other politicians, want to hold on to power instead of trying to test their popularity in free elections.⁶³ These men and women, products of the Soviet system, now look like so many desperate persons who see themselves caught between totalitarianism and dictatorship on the one hand and freedom on the other. It is possible that the former Central Asian communist officials want to hold on to power for as long as possible. They are used to attaching themselves as so many barnacles to the Russians. They knew that those who controlled the means of violence were the Russians. They could always assert their "authority" through terror as the recent history of the area bears witness.⁶⁴ But what now that they are independent nations?⁶⁵

Ironically, some of these people see the realization of their dreams of independence in the context of a democratic federation with the Russians and other nationalities (the Commonwealth of Independent States). However, their model for educational development most probably will resemble the old Jadidist model of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This system of education did not have a chance to develop because of colonization, first by the Russians and later by the Soviets. Some of the arrangements between the Central Asians and their neighbors to the south, especially Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan, are pointing to this direction. The educational systems in these countries are variations on the Jadidist educational theme. The Black Sea Economic Cooperation that apparently includes some former Soviet republics, plus Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan brings together an economic region of great viability, once the local conflicts are solved. The recent conference in Tehran, the Economic Cooperation Organization that included the representatives from the six FSU republics east of the Caspian Sea--Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and some factions of the Afghan Mujahidin--highlighted the historical, economic, and cultural commonality of the region. There are already scores of contracts between these former Soviet Central Asian republics and their neighbors, as well as with many countries in the West and elsewhere.

Schools fail not so much because of the ideology or the content of their curricula but because of the absence of a supportive environment.⁶⁶ In Central Asia schools will flourish again, not so much because of the overriding ideologies (whatever they may develop to be) or the changes in the scripts, but because there is a relatively supportive environment in place for education. Central Asians already have relatively well developed human resources that could not effectively be utilized in the FSU for some of the reasons that I have already mentioned.

Some of the Jadidists helped usher in the Russian system of education, but most were excluded from it for cultural and political reasons. Some Jadidists later helped establish Soviet education in Central Asia, but most were not committed to it. The present Central Asian Soviet-trained educators of the FSU have no choice but to be like the Jadidists in educating their own children in a new (jadid) way rather than in the former Soviet education system.