Ismail Gasprinskij, or in the Turkic name-form Gaspıralı (Bahčysarai 1851 – Bahčysarai 1914), was born as the son of a Crimean-Tatar officer in the Russian army and initially schooled at a Muslim madrasa in his home town, then at Russian gymnasiums in Simferopol and Moscow, and in a military school in Voronež; here he was reportedly provoked into a heightened Muslim and ethnic consciousness by the Russophilia that prevailed in those establishments. Following an unsuccessful attempt to join the Ottoman army in 1866, he taught the Russian language at a madrasa in Bahčysarai, and in 1871 at the Sorbonne where he worked as translator and assisted Turgenev. Back again in the Crimea he worked as a journalist for Russian newspapers; from 1878 to 1882 he served as mayor of Bahčysarai. Starting with his booklet “Russian Muslimhood” (Russkoe musul’manstvo, 1881), he called upon Russia to support its Muslims on their way to European-style enlightenment, progress, and justice, while urging his fellow-Muslims to abandon their self-isolation and to identify positively with the Russian Empire. The cultural backwardness of Russia’s Muslims was, in his view, not linked to Islam; but with his efforts to modernize the traditional Muslim school system, he antagonized Tatar Islamic scholars.

In the 1880s Gasprinskij was allowed to start the first Muslim newspaper in Russia,  Perevodčik’ / Tercüman, (“The translator” – the title was possibly inspired by the Young-Ottoman Tercüman-ı Ahvâl, published by Şinasi in Istanbul 1860-66). Until 1905 it carried all Tatar articles (in Arabic script) also in parallel Russian. Following canvassing tours to gain subscriptions from as far afield as Kazan and Baku, the paper reached a circulation of 300-400; it ran until 1918 with a steadily climbing print run and publication frequency.

In 1884 Gasprinskij set up a first reformed Tatar madrasa in Bahčysarai, with a curriculum that contained Russian language and secular subjects; as the Arabic alphabet was taught according to a “new” (Arabic: jadid) method, this type of school was henceforth called jadid; Gasprinskij was thus instrumental in triggering the Jadid reform movement, and his models were soon copied by Volga Tatars and Bashkirs (in cities like Kazan and Orenburg) as well as in the North Caucasus (Daghestan) and in Central Asia. Gasprinskij also published primers for women and for children.

Gasprinskij attempted to write in a style accessible to representatives of all Turkic peoples in Russia, also in his influential school primer Hoca-i Sibyan, but in fact the “Turkic” language of his journal was simplified Ottoman with Tatar interferences. Tercüman’s motto, “unity in language, thinking, and action”, was (given Gasprinskij’s loyalty to, and standing in, the Russian Empire) probably intended as a call for Muslim (Turkic) interaction, primarily within the Russian framework, and secondly with the Ottoman Empire; but it came to be frequently interpreted as a call for Pan-Turkism, especially in post-1914 Turkey, and as a reaction to Pan-Slavism.

Gasprinskij participated in the congresses of Russian Muslims that took place in the period of liberalization after 1905. Together with Yusef Akçura (Gasprinskij contributed to his periodical Türk Yurdu), Gasprinskij was involved in the foundation of  Ittifaq al-Muslimin (“Unity of Muslims”),  a political party gathering activists and cultural practitioners of Tatar and Azeri backgrounds. In 1908 he failed at setting up another journal, with a broader Islamic agenda, in Cairo. Towards the end of his life, he was no longer central to a new generation of Tatar educational and religious reformers and a new cohort of Tatar politicians; in Istanbul, his reputation (amplified by the mediation of Akçura) was associated with the growing Turkist ideology.