ABSTRACT
Several stories and a short play by Abdurra’ûf 2 have plots determined by motifs taken from a religious context. They form part of a literature that burgeoned in Turkestan from 1910 on. Obstacles to publication-not only the obligatory censorship exercised from Petersburg or Tifl is in Tsarist Russia, but also the frequent banning of newspapers and periodicals-failed to halt this development. The literature in question was meant to be different from Divan poetry and from popular literature. Its distinctiveness was due to the intentions of the authors, who strove to modernize life in Turkestan, so as to surmount the backwardness that some of them had become aware of both in everyday life and in politics and intellectual life, by comparison with the situation in parts of the Near East and Russia. They also hoped that modernization would enable Turkestan to become independent of Russia. In their view both aims could be achieved only if broad sections of society became aware of their own identity as representatives of a culture with deep roots in the past and capable of shaping the present just as masterfully as other peoples were doing. They had acquired their name of Jadid from their fi rst steps towards changing the situation: founding schools with a new teaching method ( -i jadîd) and writing textbooks for various types of school.3
