Untold Will / Невысказанное завещание (на английском языке)

It would be a new world underpinned and shaped by new methods (usûl-i jadid) that initially focused on language pedagogy and schooling for Muslim children but quickly expanded to include economic theory and development, gender relations, social organization, and cultural production, along with the many institutional paraphernalia that ultimately make up a society, its operative principles, behaviors and sensibilities, and its defining discourse. In sum, jadidism for Russia’s Tatar Muslims was modernity.

The short story that this Preface introduces is entitled «Beauty» (Матурлык, 1964), and is ostensibly composed by «an educated old man» who recalls it easily from his youth despite the ordinary setting, characters, and content. It is not a romance from the author’s life, yet is deeply biographical in spirit; it is not a tale of riotous joy, but one inspired nevertheless by a deep recognition of what beauty can truly mean. It has nothing to do with a bewitching woman, but with one who is quite elderly, disfigured, but simply beautiful in the most important motherly ways.

We only learn about this woman and her special beauty toward the end of the story, after three young male friends, one of whom is her son Badretdin, arrive at the latter’s home from the district medrese where they studied. Badretdin is described as a wonderful, thoughtful, and caring young man, «strange, mysterious, and nice,» whose extreme poverty, described in exquisite detail, worries him not for its immediate personal consequences but for the burdens it places upon his family.

The narrator, however, is nothing but astonished that his friend is not embarrassed by his life’s circumstances, and even more so by the unattractiveness of his mother, who tries to hide her disfigured face when Badretdin insists that she join him and his friends for tea.

The absence of external beauty, however, proves meaningless in face of the deep reservoir of internal beauty that overflows from mother to son.

Recognition of this truth leaves the narrator shaken and changed forever, and offers a lesson to all in keeping with the English idiom to never judge a book by its cover!

While these features of the story are central to its development and meaning, so too is the impact of jadidism in the lives of the three boys who are shakerts studying in a regional medrese.