Une mémoire turque du djadidisme ?

Etienne Copeaux, A Turkish memory of jadidism? Official history of the Republic of Turkey hardly evocates the true origins of Kemalism: it partly takes root among the reformist Turkish-speaking intellectual circles of the Russian Empire (Kazan, the Crimea, Baku). In Turkish schoolbooks, the wide movement of linguistic, religious and educational reform known under the name ofjadidism is hushed up. Nevertheless, memory was transmitted due to close ties between the Turkish nationalist circles and the Tatar and Azeri jadids; it was perpetuated along the 1930 's by the Tatar-Turkish Crimean exiles who had settled in Romanian Dobruja and Turkey. Granting to the collapse of the USSR, a rediscovery of jadidism was the deed of the "Islamic-Turkish Synthesis," a movement advocating an ideology according to which Turkish nationalism is legitimized by Islam, and seeking its predecessors among the nineteenth-century renovators. From the 1980's, there appeared a bunch of studies on Gasprinskii by sympathizers with the "Islamic-Turkish Synthesis," and the subject was popularized in the columns of the daily Tiirkiye. It all ended up in sheer nationalistic views on jadidism.