Ismail Gasprinski (Gaspıralı), (20 March 1851 – 24 September 1914), was a Crimean Tatar thinker, educator, and writer-publisher. Gasprinski was a Turkist intellectual who articulated the need of the Turkic peoples and Muslims in the Russian Empire for education, cultural reform, and modernization. His surname derives from the town of Gaspra in Crimea.
Life
He was born in Avcıköy near the city of Bahçesaray in Crimea. Gaspra is the name of the place where Ismail Bey's father was born. Ismail Bey's father was Mustafa Alioğlu, a lieutenant retired from the Tsarist army, and his mother was Fatma Hanım, daughter of İlyas Mirza Kaytazov, one of the Crimean nobles. After receiving his first education at a Muslim school in Bahçesaray, Ismail Bey began at the Akmescid (Simferopol) Boys' Secondary School when he was around ten years old. After studying there for two years, he entered first a military school in Voronezh and then the Military Academy in Moscow. In 1867, while in the sixth grade, he came to Crimea in order to travel to Istanbul with his friend Mustafa Mirza Davidoviç and join the Ottoman forces fighting against the Greek rebels in the Cretan Revolt. When they secretly crossed to Odessa from there, they were caught before they could reach Istanbul. This event brought Gasprinski's career as a military student to an end. He was unable to return to Moscow.
In 1868, when he was only 17, he began teaching Russian at the Zincirli Madrasa in Bahçesaray. During his teaching he read Russian literary and philosophical works. In 1872 he left Crimea and traveled to Paris via Istanbul, Vienna, Munich, and Stuttgart. During the two years he spent in Paris, he worked as an assistant to the famous Russian literary figure Ivan Turgenev, as well as doing translation work.
Later, with the aim of becoming an Ottoman officer, a goal he had long dreamed of, he went to Istanbul in 1874. During the roughly one year he stayed in Istanbul, he was unable to realize his cherished ambition of becoming an officer and returned to Crimea.
Elected deputy mayor of the Bahçesaray municipality in 1878, Ismail Bey was appointed mayor a year later and held this post for five years, until 1884. In 1881, in the Tavrida newspaper published in Akmescid, he published, under the pen name Genç Molla (Young Mullah), his writings entitled "The Islam of Russia" (Russkoye Musulmanstvo), which were later collected into a book, as a serial. His official attempts to publish a Turkish periodical were rejected, but he obtained permission to publish a Turkish newspaper on the condition that all of its content be published together with its Russian translation. This newspaper, whose first issue appeared on 22 April 1883 in Bahçesaray and which was published once a week, was named Tercümân-ı Ahvâl-i Zaman, inspired by Şinasi Efendi's Tercüman-ı Ahvâl. Later, the newspaper began appearing twice a week in 1903 and started to be published daily from 1912. On one hand Gasprinski strove to publish the newspaper, and on the other he worked on the "usul-i cedid" (new method) schools. For this purpose he made many visits both at home and abroad. He died on 24 September 1914 in Bahçesaray.
Views and works
He was among the ideologues of the Turkist-Turanist outlook. Gasprinski spread his ideas through the newspaper Tercüman, which he founded in 1883 and which continued to exist until 1918. In his publications he called the Turkic peoples to unity and solidarity. With the words "Unity in language, thought, and work!" he formulated the fundamental principles of togetherness among the Turkic peoples, and today this saying still points to the goal of this struggle for unity.
In the Tercüman newspaper, Gasprinski sought to develop a common literary language that all the Turks of the world could understand, and he wished this literary language to be Ottoman Turkish. However, the fact that Ottoman Turkish was full of Arabic and Persian compounds and expressions made it difficult for the other Turkic branches to understand this Turkish. Gasprinski discarded these compounds and expressions and, in their place, made borrowings from the dialects of Crimea and other regions.
Gasprinski also pioneered the education of Muslim Turkish girls. He had the first usul-i cedid girls' school opened by his elder sister Pembe Hanım Bolatukova in Bahçesaray in 1893. Âlem-i Nisvân (The World of Women), which entered publishing life in Bahçesaray at the end of 1905, became the first women's magazine in the history not only of the Crimean Tatars but of all the Turks of Russia, and it was published for about a year under Gasprinski's ownership and the management of his daughter Şefika Gaspıralı. Âlem-i Sıbyân, the first children's magazine of the Turks in Russia, also began to be offered to readers for the first time in March 1906 as a supplement to Tercüman. The magazine's publication continued at irregular intervals until 1915. The humor magazine Ha Ha Ha, whose first issue was published in April 1906, could not be long-lived despite its interesting content and probably managed to appear for five issues.
In a piece dated 1881, Gasprinski wrote:
Newspapers and magazines
Tercüman (Bahçesaray, 1883–1918)
Alem-i Nisvan (Bahçesaray, 1906–1910)
Alem-i Sıbyan (Bahçesaray, 1906–1912?)
Al-Nahdah/The Renaissance (Cairo, 1908)
Ha! Ha! Ha! (Bahçesaray, 1906)
Books
Russkoye Musulmanstvo (Russian Islam) (Simferopol, 1881)
Salname-i Türki (Bahçesaray, 1882)
Mirat-ı Cedid (Bahçesaray, 1882)
Hace-i Sıbyan (Bahçesaray, 1884; 3rd ed. 1892; 7th ed. 1898)
Avrupa Medeniyetine Bir Nazar-ı Muvazene (Bahçesaray, 1885)
İslamlara dair Nizamlar ve İmtiyazlar (Bahçesaray, 1885)
Rusya Coğrafyası (Bahçesaray, 1885)
İki Bahadır (Bahçesaray, 1886)
Kıraat-i Türki (Bahçesaray, 1886; 2nd ed. 1894)
Maişet Muharebesi (Bahçesaray, 1886)
Kolera Vebası ve Onun Deva ve Darusu (Bahçesaray, 1887)
Bahtiyar Nazım (Bahçesaray, 1889)
Atlaslı Cihanname (Bahçesaray, 1889)
Medeniyet-i İslamiye (Bahçesaray, 1889)
Garaib-i Adat-i Akvam (Bahçesaray, 1890)
Arslan Kız (Bahçesaray, 1894)
Mektep ve Usul-i Cedid Nedir? (Bahçesaray, 1894)
Risale-i Terkib (Bahçesaray, 1894)
Russko-vostochnoe Soglashenie (Bahçesaray, 1896)
Hesab. Muhtasar Ilm-i Hesab ve Mesa'il-i Hesabiye (Bahçesaray, 1897)
Her Gün Gerek Zakonlar (Bahçesaray, 1897)
Rehber-i İslamiye (Bahçesaray, 1898)
Şara'it al-Islam (Bahçesaray, 1897)
Rehber-i Mu'allimin (Mu'allimlere Yoldaş) (Bahçesaray, 1898)
Türkistan Uleması (Bahçesaray, 1901)
Mevlud-i Cenâb-ı Hazret-i Ali (Bahçesaray, 1900)
Beden-i İnsan (Bahçesaray, 1901)
Iran. Resimli Mecmua (Bahçesaray, 1901)
Mebadi-yi Temeddün-i İslamiyan-i Rus (Bahçesaray, 1901)
Sources
- Turkish Wikipedia: tr.wikipedia.org
- English Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org