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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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210 A history of Inner Asia<br />

newspapers, and make demands.Thus on 4–8 April 1 the first congress<br />

of Turkestanian Muslims was held in Tashkent.It created the Türkistan<br />

Müslüman Merkezi Shurasi (Central Council of Turkestanian Muslims)<br />

and elected Mustafa Chokay as its president.On 8 April 1917 it passed<br />

the following resolution:<br />

We, the Muslims of Turkestan, who after a subjugation of many years by Tsarist<br />

Russia find for the first time, thanks to the Revolution and to our struggle against<br />

Tsarist rule, the opportunity to present our demands: We consider it right to<br />

form an organization that will bring out our national voice and solve our main<br />

problems.This organization has the following goals:<br />

1.To represent the interests of the Turkestanians before the Revolutionary<br />

authorities.<br />

2.To prepare the ground for the autonomy of Turkestan.<br />

3.To defend religious rights (the shariat courts, a central administration for<br />

religious affairs).<br />

4.To solve the problem of land tenure.<br />

5.To further the cultural development of Turkestan.<br />

6.To examine all the laws that affect the Muslims of Turkestan.<br />

The organization is called The Central Islamic Council of Turkestan.We<br />

want to emphasize that it does not have the function of a political party but has<br />

as its aim the unification of all the patriots of Turkestan concerned about the<br />

welfare of their fatherland.<br />

The organization consisted of two wings: a conservative one led by<br />

Shir Ali Lapin, and a reformist one led by Münevver Qari.The conservatives<br />

then formed an organization of their own, the Ulema Jemiyeti<br />

(Association of the Ulema), and the reformists the Shura-yi Islam (Islamic<br />

Council).The statements and demands of the Central Islamic Council,<br />

addressed to no one in particular but implicitly to the Russian authorities<br />

in Tashkent and Petrograd, received little practical response from<br />

those quarters.The new contest for Turkestan between Muslims and<br />

Russians was only beginning.<br />

It was the second Russian revolution of 1917, the Bolshevik one of<br />

October/November, that seemed to promise true liberation, for selfdetermination<br />

of all the subject peoples of the former Tsarist empire<br />

was one of its professed goals.This was explicitly stated in two proclamations<br />

which the new government, the Council of People’s<br />

1 The question of exact dates for this period is troublesome because the Russian empire still used<br />

the Julian calendar, and a switch to the Gregorian system occurred only after the<br />

October/November Revolution.This has produced occasional inconsistencies in secondary<br />

sources, and I have made no attempt to ascertain whether specific dates had been “converted”<br />

or not.

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