Between Cairo and the Volga-Urals: al-Manar and Islamic Modernism, 1905-1917

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In 1905, a student protest erupted in the Islamic seminary (madrasa) of the Muhammediye (est. 1881), one of the most important institutions of Islamic learning in the Volga-Urals city of Kazan. The protest was led by the Reform Society (Islâh Cem’iyeti; est. 1904), which advocated reform of the madrasa’s curriculum and further instruction in modern subjects. The demonstrations ended in the resignation of 82 students following the expulsion of 4 of their schoolmates.1 Observing these events from Cairo, the Syrian-born Islamic scholar (‘alim) Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935) published several letters by and articles in support of the protesters in al-Manar (The Lighthouse; 1898–1935), a renowned Arabic journal circulated throughout Muslim communities worldwide. [End Page 525]

Al-Manar’s articles on the Muhammediye events signaled more than passing interest in a piece of news; they marked increasing interactions between Islamic scholars in Cairo and the Volga-Urals during the revolutionary turmoil of 1905–17 in Russia. In particular, al-Manar’s publications on the Volga-Urals demonstrate not only how proponents of “jadidism,” the multifaceted modernist movement of Islamic reform across the Russian Empire, became a subject of significance for enterprises of Islamic reform in Cairo, but also how jadids utilized Arabic journals to display and project their views and experiences to readership beyond the Russian Empire.2