Ismail Gasprali (1851-1914) was a Crimean Tartar intellectual and Pan-Turkish politician who laid out the foundations for the modernisation of Muslim culture in Russia and for the emergence of Crimean Tartar as a national identity. He published a bilingual newspaper in Turkish and Russian between 1883 and 1914, which was used as an education tool to help a national consciousness and modern way of thinking emerge amongst the entire Turkic-speaking population of the Russian Empire. He was also an advocate for educational reforms and believed that education was the best form of modernisation – he often criticised the traditional education system in Muslim schools for focusing too much on religion and then devised a new method of teaching children how to read in the first languages. He generally thought that the Muslim community in Russia was far too isolated from the rest of Russia and from Europe beyond.
Our ignorance is the main reason for our backward condition. We have no access at all to what has been discovered and to what is going on in Europe. We must be able to read in order to overcome our isolation; we must learn European ideas from European sources.
Ismail Gaspirali, 1881
He also inspired the Jadidist movement throughout Central Asia, who were Muslim modernists within the Russian empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They believed that the Muslims within the Russian Empire had stopped progressing and that this could only be rectified by the acquisition of new knowldge and a European-modelled cultural reform. Although there was a lot of disagreement within the movement, they all generally recognised by a widespread promotion of new kinds of teachings.