[EARLY TATAR PUBLISHING IN JAPAN / EXILE - MIGRATION / DIASPORA PRINTING] Rûze, zakât ve hac: Ibâdât-i Islamiye mecmuasinin besinci cüzü. [i.e. Fast, alms and hajj]

MAKSÛDÎ, AHMED HADI (1868-1941).

Matbaa-yi Islâmiye, Tokyo, 1931.

Original greenish wrappers. Roy. 8vo. (23 x 16 cm). Tatar in Arabic letters with Japanese text on the colophon. 10 p. Chippings on the extremities of corners, loose front wrapper, slight foxing on pages. Overall, a good copy.

The first and only edition of this extremely rare book was printed in Tokyo by a Muslim minority settled in Japan in the early 20th century, who had escaped after the Russian Revolution. The book was published to preserve religious knowledge and traditions among the Volga-Ural Tatars in the Japanese diaspora, introducing the obligations of fasting, almsgiving, and going to Hajj in Islam.

Maksudi (28 September 1868, Vysokogorsky District – 28 June 1941, Kazan, aged 72) was a Tatar pedagogue, linguist, and publisher. Hadi Maksudi, a well-known Tatar nationalist, published the newspaper "Yuldiz" in Kazan and authored several textbooks. He was the elder brother of Sadri Maksudi Arsal (1878-1957). Born in 1868 into a mullah family in Tashsu village, Kazan, he studied at Kulboyu Madrasa in Kazan. In 1894, he went to Istanbul and continued his education for another six years. Upon his return, he stayed in Crimea for a while, teaching Arabic literature at the Zincirli Madrasa in Bahçesaray. There, he took Russian lessons from Ismail Limanov (1871-1942) and taught Limanov Ottoman (Turkish). In 1902, he returned to Kazan and published the newspaper "Yuldiz" from 1906 to 1918, continuing his editorial writing. He prepared textbooks for teaching Russian, French, and Arabic. Between 1927 and 1928, he published a 500-page book titled "Fenni Kâmus," a Russian-Arabic-Tatar dictionary.

In the early 20th century, groups of Tatars immigrated from Kazan, Russia, to Japan. The community was led by the Bashkir émigré imam Muhammed-Gabdulkhay Kurbangaliev, who had fought on the side of the White movement in the Russian Civil War and arrived in Japan in 1924. He then set up an organization to unite the Tatars living in Tokyo. The Tatars in Japan founded their first mosque and school in 1935 in Kobe and another in Tokyo in 1938, with support from Kurbangaliev's organization. Another Tatar organization, the Mohammedan Printing Office in Tokyo, printed the first Qur'an in Japan and a Tatar-language magazine in Arabic script, the Japan Intelligencer; it continued publication until the 1940s. Most of the Tatars emigrated after World War II, and those remaining took up Turkish citizenship in the 1950s.

As of April 2024, we couldn’t trace any copies in OCLC, it shows only the 'Helsinki Edition' published in 1952, not this early first edition: (58113447).