DISSEMINATION OF JADIDISM IDEAS THROUGH MASS MEDIA IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

This article examines how Jadidism ideas were disseminated through mass media in Central Asia – especially in Turkestan – during the early twentieth century. The study argues that newspapers and journals functioned not only as channels of information but as deliberate instruments of cultural reform, pedagogical persuasion, and political imagination. Relying on qualitative historical analysis of scholarly literature and documented descriptions of key periodicals, the article reconstructs the communicative infrastructure of Jadid reform: editorial networks, genre choices, rhetorical strategies, and the constraints imposed by censorship, finances, and limited readership. The findings indicate that Jadid media operated as a “school outside the school,” normalizing new-method education, promoting literacy and secular knowledge, and linking local reform agendas to wider Muslim intellectual debates. At the same time, the press’s influence was structurally restricted by colonial regulation and small subscriber bases, meaning that Jadid media impact was often indirect: it shaped intellectual publics, trained writers, and prepared organizational language later used in political mobilization. The article concludes that early twentieth-century Jadid media should be understood as a socio-educational technology: a hybrid of journalism, civic pedagogy, and cultural entrepreneurship that accelerated reformist idea circulation despite severe institutional limits